Rep. Chris Smith, right, and a fellow Republican House member from Virginia, Frank Wolf, display a list of Chinese political prisoners at a press conference in Beijing.
Photo courtesy Office of Rep. Frank Wolf
July 10, 2008
He arrived in Beijing on June 29, anxious to speak with political activists and confront the Chinese government over its support for a Sudanese government carrying out genocide in Darfur.
But within three days, Rep. Chris Smith (R-Dist. 4) and a fellow Republican, Frank Wolf of Virginia, were back in the United States, rejected in their direct appeals for improving human rights in China.
Treated coolly by the Chinese, Smith remains eager to talk about Darfur, the fate of Chinese dissidents, and why he thinks President George W. Bush should boycott the opening ceremonies of the Summer Olympics.
“We raised the issue of Darfur with Ambassador Li Zhaoxing, who chairs the Chinese government’s foreign affairs committee,” Smith told NJ Jewish News in a cell phone interview July 7, three days after his return.
“I told him, ‘I have been to Sudan. I have been to the refugee camps, and without Chinese munitions and enabling there would have been no genocide in Darfur, nor would there have been the killing in southern Sudan, where some two million people lost their lives. The high estimate is that 450,000 have been killed in Darfur, but nobody knows for sure.’”
Smith said Li took “great exception” to his remarks.
“He said, ‘The United States is an arms exporter.’ I said, ‘Not to Sudan.’ We had a real give-and-take,” said Smith. “We laid some of the blame on Beijing’s doorstep for Darfur and the ‘Genocide Olympics,’ as we call them.”
Smith has been urging Bush to follow the lead of other Western heads of state by boycotting the Olympics’ opening ceremonies.
But the president has refused to do so, declaring July 5 that his absence from the festivities “would be an affront to the Chinese people” that might make it “more difficult to be able to speak frankly with the Chinese leadership.”
Smith, normally supportive of the Bush administration, disagreed.
“I would have preferred and have publicly called on the president not to go to the opening ceremony,” Smith said. “The games themselves are arguably a lot less political than the opening ceremonies, which will be one big showcase of Chinese dictatorship. Our hope continues to be that he will see clear enough not to go. The venue should not have been Beijing. I love the Olympics, but don’t have them there.”
Hoping the Chinese would seek to improve their public image one month before the games begin, the congressman said, “We wanted the government to allow us to meet with some of the leading dissidents, but they disallowed our meeting.”
Instead, the American lawmakers held a press conference in Beijing and displayed a list of 734 political prisoners in China.
“These people are suffering precisely because they want human rights and democratization and many of them have gotten five-to-10-year prison sentences because of it,” Smith said.
He said Chinese officials were “very inhospitable” to them, even before the two men set off on their brief trip to Beijing.
“The ambassador from China to the United States actually came out to the airport before we left and tried to lecture us. He told us ‘not to have any surprises’ is the way he put it. He only gave us a three-day visa, no more than that,” said Smith.
And yet, the lawmaker insisted, “we did not go over there harshly. We were very measured in what we conveyed to the Chinese government.”
He said both the Bush and Clinton administrations have done little to protest human rights problems in China.
“I really believe in principled engagement where the human rights issue is center stage and not a sidebar,” he said. “In our embassy in Beijing there is one officer junior grade, a likable person, who has the human rights portfolio.”
Smith said U.S. personnel dealing with commerce issues outnumber human rights personnel by a ratio of 20-1.
“Where your personnel are is an indicator of what your priorities are. If human rights are so low on our totem pole, why are we surprised that the Chinese read that and say, ‘The United States cares more about profits than we do about human rights?’”
The congressman said, “One of the leading Chinese dissidents told me, ‘This may be counterintuitive, but when you are strong, they beat us less. When you coddle the dictatorship and treat the government in a way that is kowtowish, they beat the prisoners more.’ It is a lesson I’ve never forgotten.”
A member of the House since 1981, his district represents parts of Burlington, Mercer, Monmouth, and Ocean counties.
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