Home - Yahoo! - My Yahoo! - News Alerts - Help

Home | Top Stories | Business | Tech | Politics | World | Local | Entertainment | Sports | Science | Health 

World Headlines

Wednesday September 20 5:53 AM ET
Rights Advocates Debate China Bill

By MARTIN FACKLER, Associated Press Writer

BEIJING (AP) - The U.S. vote to normalize trade with China divided human rights campaigners Wednesday, with Chinese dissidents heralding it as a sign of change and overseas rights groups worrying about lost leverage over Beijing.

The Senate's approval of permanent low-tariff trade ties with China, virtually guaranteed to become law, ends the contentious annual reviews used as forum to criticize Beijing ever since the military quelled the Tiananmen Square democracy movement 11 years ago.

The permanent normal trade relations - or, so-called PNTR - will ease China's entry to the World Trade Organization and open barriers to U.S. goods and services. Along the way, proponents argued, foreign ideas and a vital private sector will propel China toward democratic change.

Rights groups, however, fretted that the loss of the annual reviews will leave Beijing impervious to Washington's criticisms. While the trade bill sets up a special commission to monitor China's observance of human and labor rights, the groups criticized the panel as toothless.

``Congress and the administration should have used the PNTR leverage to get some human rights improvements first, before giving up the annual review process,'' said Human Rights Watch's Washington lobbyist Mike Jendrzejczyk.

Senate approval, after a closely fought May vote in the House of Representatives, followed 10 months of often heated debate that pitted the business lobby against rights, labor and environmental groups. The bill goes to President Clinton, who made PNTR a goal of his final year in office.

China's foreign and trade ministries welcomed approval of the trade bill as boosting U.S.-China trade and smoothing political ties. But they angrily objected to the human rights commission as a meddlesome attempt to inject politics into trade.

``For those who want to interfere in our internal affairs, that would be totally unacceptable to us,'' Foreign Ministry spokesman Sun Yuxi told reporters.

While anxious for more foreign investment and secure access to overseas markets, China's communist government is worried about losing control in global trade's unforgiving competition. It has intensified suppression of political and religious dissenters and tightened surveillance of the disgruntled unemployed.

Dissidents cautioned that improved trading relations won't bring democracy to China overnight and urged Washington to keep up the pressure on Beijing. Still, they said, China's greater exposure to the outside world will erode the Communist Party's grip on political debate.

``The more interaction the better,'' said Ren Wanding, a seminal figure in the dissident community who spent 11 of the past 21 years in prison. ``The Chinese government will have to give democracy groups more freedom to speak out. Otherwise, it will lose face in front of the world.''

As if to defy such expectations, a court in Cangzhou, south of Beijing, on Tuesday sentenced Qi Yanchen to four years in prison four months after convicting him of subversion for writing critical political articles. Cangzhou police last week reportedly charged another dissident, Quo Qinghai, with subversion for much the same thing.