Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) arrived in Washington on Tuesday to find demonstrators outside his bedroom window and a stream of condemnation flowing from Capitol Hill.
At the same time, the mainstream media was full of criticism.
The Washington Post condemned China for continuing to “deny its citizens freedom and the rule of law.” The New York Times said that China would never be a great nation if it continued censoring and imprisoning its people. And the Wall Street Journal said that if China wanted to be treated as an equal it had to act like one.
Hu barely had time to unpack before he was whisked across Pennsylvania Avenue to attend a private dinner in the White House with US President Barack Obama, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and US National Security Adviser Tom Donilon.
It was a low-key affair at which both sides agreed in advance to discuss the tone and the tenor of US-China relations while avoiding contentious issues like human rights and Taiwan.
Those issues were being kept for yesterday, when Hu was to be given a 21-gun salute, a state dinner and two more closed-door sessions with Obama.
TAIWAN DISCUSSION
Analysts believe that Taiwan would be raised in the first of these sessions — to be held in the Oval Office — and that Obama would reiterate US policy to sell arms to Taiwan. Some analysts also say he would urge Hu to cut back on the number of missiles now threatening Taiwan.
What is not known is how Obama would react to any new proposals concerning Taiwan that Hu might make.
The Chinese delegation is staying in Blair House, a government mansion just across the street from the White House and next door to the 2.8 hectare Lafayette Park where Taiwanese, Tibetan and Uyghur demonstrations were in full swing with participants shouting slogans and waving flags.
Meanwhile, about the same time as Hu’s plane was touching down, Republican Representative Chris Smith opened a conference in a congressional hearing room on “Human Rights in Hu Jintao’s China.”
Smith said that it was “inconceivable” that the security and media campaign unleashed in China against Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波), his family and his supporters, wasn’t approved by Hu.
He said that Obama, as the 2009 Nobel Peace laureate, had an obligation to call for Liu’s release “publicly and vigorously.”
“Beyond this, I urge President Obama to join us in speaking out for all those in China whose basic human rights are violated. I particularly want to mention Chinese women. The Chinese government’s one-child-per-couple policy, with its attendant horrors of forced abortion campaigns and rampant sex-selective abortion, is, in scope and seriousness, the worst human rights abuse — the worst gender crime — in the world today,” Smith said.
“Unfortunately, for two years the Obama administration has made nothing but weak, pro forma responses to human rights abuses in China,” he said. “Our country can’t afford to continue doing this. We need to challenge human rights abuses publicly and in language that shows we mean business. We need to show that a major factor in estimating the Chinese government’s threat to other countries is its abuse of its own people.”
However, such demands come as the US is pushing China to buy tens of billions of dollars in Boeing Co aircraft, auto parts, agricultural goods and beef.
And leaders from both sides say that they want to demonstrate that the relationship is back on track.
Meanwhile, the mood in Congress is not sweet.
Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer unveiled legislation this week to punish China for suppressing the value of its currency.
“Both Democrats and Republicans in the Senate and the House, and the American people are just fed up when, up and down the line, China doesn’t play by the rules and seeks unfair economic advantage,” Schumer said.
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