Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
and its allies in the West were out to “contain” or “restrain” China and
deny it its rightful place among the major nations of the world. Con-
cern over human rights was, in the estimation of the Chinese
government and many ordinary Chinese citizens, simply a fig leaf to
mask American animosity toward China. How could the United
States, with its astronomically high murder rates, race riots, homeless-
ness, urban blight, drug abuse, spectacular mass murders, gang war-
fare, racism, and gun proliferation seriously expect its preachy
pronouncements on human rights to be taken seriously? Something
more sinister lurked behind America's insistence on respecting human
rights, they concluded.
In the West, on the other hand, there was increasing concern about
China's growing swagger and its increasingly defiant attitude toward
the outside world. China, after all, supplied harsh dictatorships with
nuclear technology and utilized slave labor in prisons to manufacture
cheap toys for sale in the West. Would the rest of the democratic and
industrialized world be able to convince China to comply with
internationally accepted human rights standards and behavioral
norms? Right-wing elements in the U.S. Congress and in private
American think tanks began in the mid-1990s to characterize China
as a potential threat to American security and global dominance,
and the publication in 1997 of the influential topic The Coming Conflict
with China by Richard Bernstein and Ross H. Munro fed these fears to
a wider American reading public. Concern that Chinese spies had
stolen American technology for miniaturizing nuclear warheads,
which would greatly boost any nuclear missile program, emerged
during the late 1990s and further muddied the already troubled
waters of Sino-American relations. Even though he was an immigrant
from Taiwan, Chinese-American nuclear physicist Wen-ho Lee was
arrested and charged with divulging nuclear secrets from the Los
Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to the Chinese Commu-
nists. (He was later cleared of the most serious of these charges in
September 2000.)
The United States was not the only Western nation whose relations
with China were strained in the 1990s. The Chinese government
expressed continual irritation with Western censure of China's human
rights abuses, and its response was always the same old tired, predict-
able song: China as a sovereign nation was free to abuse its citizens in
any way it saw fit, and any criticism from the West of how China gov-
erned itself constituted gross interference in China's internal affairs.
The Chinese government turned a deaf ear to the explanation that
human rights belonged to human beings regardless of their citizenship
