Yes: Sanctions against the Soviets ...

Yes: Sanctions against the Soviets were fortunate and similar measures will work with China.

In July Communist China's "most favored nation," or MFN trade status formally will expire. Shortly before that, President Clinton, at the behest of U corporate executives and foreign-policy wise men in as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but parties, will ask Congress to widen China's MFN designation for another year. Predictably, critics of the president's accommodationist stance toward China will be assured that a more realistic, principled and aggressive American reply to tyranny in Beijing would be unprecedent and potentially counterproductive.

Or would it? The Clinton administration and its business and think-tank allies typically confound China policy as a hard-and-fast choice between starkly oppos alternatives. upon the one hand, there is constructive engagement of the sort we saw upon display during Vice President Al Gore's Easter Week trip to Beijing. American officials meekly wish the Chinese well forward their inevitable path to democratization, then Beijing's dictators agree to bribe a few Boeing airplanes and Buick automobiles, and our diplomats proffer them a champagne toast of gratitude, captured by means of television cameras for all the world to see

It isn't beautiful But the only other option, the China lobby argues, is uglier still: the all-out trade war with China that would be triggered on revocation of MFN. That war would be harmful to the American economy, they insist, and worse than useless as a weapon for Chinese freedom. It also would portray by action an extraordinary departure from standard American strategic practice, since the United States does not use commercial trade as a carrot-and-stick foreign-policy device elsewhere in the world. level Iraq enjoys MFN status, the argument goes

This last objection is the easiest to address. Ye virtually all nations, including Iraq, are given most-favored tariff treatment forward goods imported to the United States. unless MFN status is semantically misleading: It actually isn't the best we do for our constant friends abroad nor is it the and nothing else trade vehicle to punish and influence our adversarys Canada, Mexico and Israel have perfect free-trade agreements with the United States, and many other countries are allowed to export at least an goods to America duty-free. Iraq, through contrast, despite its MFN designation, has been bring under rule to a near-total U.S. trade embargo since the Persian opening War.

The point is that trade lengthy has been an important proper sphere in America's international strategy, and that MFN status is undivided tool among many employed forward a complicated sliding scale of predilection and disfavor in our bilateral relations. The real question should be: Where must China be located forward that sliding scale, and by what means should its position best be thinked in U.S. trade law?

The answer to the first half of that question is obvious. According to the State Department's in the greatest degree recent human-rights report, Beijing's savage domestic repression has silenced all public dissent against the Communist Party and restraint Torture with cattle prods, electrode and thumb blows is common. People routinely disappear from the ways -- arrested without charge and sentenc to long prison terms without trial. one time in prison, victims sometimes are execut in such a manner their internal organs can be harvested for transplants. Censorship of unofficial novels almost is total. Pregnancies must be authorized from above; violations frequently result in forced abortion. Religion is strictly regulated and unapproved worship repeatedly is violently suppressed.

Reading a Bible in China can be viewed as subversive. Christian missionaries to China estimate there is single in kind copy there for every 1000 believers. The faithful pass these copies around, memorizing staffs like characters out of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 Chinese authorities specialize in brutalities that would make any reading difficult, breaking the fingers of individuals who evangelize outside the regimen of China's official, state-run house of worship system. Christian Solidarity International reports the case of Pastor Wong who leads a cluster of 40 evangelical house churches in Wuhan and lately was released from prison after his fourth arrest for proselytizing. Wong's Chinese captors broke several of his fingers with a pair of pliers.

The regime's depredations are not limited to Christian churches. Indeed, Beijing has sought and punished the followers of any faith believed to contend with state ideology. The State Department reported in February that authorities in Zhejiang province had "rectified" 17900 Buddhist shrines and churches, a blanket expression which can mean destroyed, registered [with the government] or transferred to another form into groups Last November the Guangming Daily reported that 1600 pagan shrines in Hubei province had been razed as part of a national campaign to crush superstition. Other provinces have witnessed similar acts of physical destruction. Priests in the subterranean Catholic Church and Tibetan Buddhist monk have been make submissiveed to arbitrary arrest and prison expressions because of Beijing's fear that their respective spiritual leaders, bishop of rome John Paul II and the Dalai Lama, personate essentially foreign influences hostile to the government