Like his recent Presidential predecessors, Ronald Reagan has joined the game called “playing the China card.” 1It’s a no-win game for Americé, unprofitable by economic standards, futile in the pursuit of military goals, and a moral embarrassment.
Current U.S. policy is to recognize Red China and to pretend that Taiwan doesn’t exist. We have an Ambassador and an Embassy in Peking, but in Taipei, we indulge in the fiction of a non-embassy called the American Institute in Taiwan, which does not have any official connection with the government.
The reality is that the 18 million people on Taiwan do exist and are a showcase of successful private enterprise. The one billion people in Red China are a showcase of Communist economic failure.
U.S. trade with Taiwan exceeds U.S. trade with Red China. Taiwan is as profitable a place for U.S. investment, whereas Red China is as unreliable a target for U.S. investment as Poland (which is really in default on its debts to the West and enjoys a fictitious solvency only because the bankruptcy law has been bent 1like a pretzel).
Red China cannot be considered a U.S. customer because it has no cash with which to buy U.S. goods and no products in any significant quantity to exchangé for ours.
If it is a military partner we seek in the Orient, it makes no sense to try to develop Ked China into an ally rather than Japan. Japan has immense wealth and technology and could be a tremendous military asset to America, whereas Red China, by comparison, is a military nothing in the foreseeable future.
The economic and military follies of trying to curry favor with Red China are exceeded only by its lack of ethics. Taiwan and Japan are civilized countries whose governments respect human dignity, private property, and elections. Red China is a moral leper’s house ruling regime that permits none of the above and has murdered 50 million of its own people in cruel and merciless ways.
Those who labor under the illusion that such smashing of human rights went out of style with the death of Mao Tse-tung, should reflect on the current inhumane treatment of women in Red China.
How can the Reagan Administration pretend that Red China is entitled to diplomatic courtesies as accorded a member of the “family of nations” when it is so lacking in human rights that women are murdered, beaten, and induced to commit suicide for the crime of bearing a female child! Or when women are subject to heavy economic penalties for the crime of bearing more than one child?
The official Red China government policy is to permit a woman to bear only one child. If a woman becomes pregnant a second time, she is forced to have an abortion. If she conceals her pregnancy, she is usually forced to have the abortion even in the seventh month when her secret is exposed.
If a second child is actually born, she is punished by severe economic penalties, such as loss of employment or housing benefits or ration allotments. These economic penalties punish not only the second child but the entire family.
Most couples want a son, and there is a 50-50 chance that the first (and only allowable) child will be a daughter. The Red Chinese society blames the mother (unjustly, of course) for the gender of the child.
More and more tests are taking place to determine the sex of the child before birth so that female fetuses can be aborted. The birth of female babies is followed in an increasing number of cases not only by infanticide but by horrible mistreatment of the mother.
Since this kind of news is now a frequent item in the controlled Communist press in Red China, it is obvious that the problem is major and not just isolated cases. The newspapers tell of mothers who were punished, put on a year’s probation, savagely beaten, or induced to commit suicide by drinking DDT, for the crimes of bearing either a second baby or a female baby.
Where are all those loud leftists who love to sound so sanctimonious in proclaiming that America should have nothing to do with a country that violates human rights? Somehow, there is a deafening silence coming from those liberals who were so upset about El Salvador.
Is it that the Liberal definition of “human rights violations” doesn’t include the mistreatment of mothers and babies? Or is it that, in the liberal scale of values, human rights violations by Communist countries are acceptable?
