September 23, 1997
ON MY MIND / By A.M. ROSENTHAL
Getting to Know Him
Jiang Zemin is a very important man and gets more important all the time. Next month he will visit President Clinton in Washington. So we really ought to do a little boning up on the man.
True, the press and TV have been reporting about Mr. Jiang recently. They told us that at the recent Communist Party Congress he strengthened his position as President of China and leader of the party.
But there's lots more interesting material about Mr. Jiang that would help us kind of get to know him better. For instance, he is a killer.
That is not new or surprising. Maybe that is why Mr. Clinton never mentions it. Or maybe he forgot.
After all, Mao Zedong killed off millions in his time. And Deng Xiaoping was responsible for the massacre at Tiananmen Square and for the deaths of so many Tibetans that their number will never be known.
Still, it is interesting to know that after Tiananmen, Mr. Jiang, as Mr. Deng's chosen heir, carried on in his tradition. He began and supervised a human rights crackdown that lasts to this day. A State Department report says it has wiped out the dissident movement.
On Tibet, Mr. Jiang in his eight years of power before and after Mr. Deng's death showed himself at least as murderous as his mentor and master. He added a touch of his own -- promoting and enriching Chinese officers and officials particularly effective in the Tibetan genocide.
William C. Triplett 2d, a former chief Republican counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, reminds us of that in an op-ed column in The Washington Times of Sept. 12. Mr. Triplett is one of the small tribe that has not been stricken with the amnesia that has gripped the White House, American politicians, business executives and much of American journalism about Mr. Jiang.
Last year, according to Amnesty International, President Jiang's police and kangaroo courts ordered a record number of death sentences and executions. And the Committee to Protect Journalists has named Mr. Jiang one of the world's 10 top enemies of the press. He came in second, beaten out by Antar Zouabri, head of the Armed Islamic Group, which hunts down and murders Algerian journalists.
Mr. Jiang is an enormously busy man. As President and head of the party he is involved in every major government endeavor. Perhaps the largest is the Laogai, which is built into the Communist system, as an important source of state income and an instrument of national rule and control.
The Laogai, which stands for "Reform Through Labor," is a vast national network of more than 1,000 prisons, forced-labor factories and detention centers.
Harry Wu spent 19 years in the Laogai for expressing "rightist" opinions. After making his way to America, he has spent his life trying to awaken the West to the existence of this Chinese super-gulag, and its importance to the Communist leadership to which Mr. Jiang has been so important so long. He told The Weekly Standard that the present Laogai prisoner population was six to eight million and that in the 50 years Mr. Jiang and his predecessors have run it 50 million Chinese have suffered in its cells.
But most American bureaucrats, C.E.O.'s and officeholders are not interested in all that human rights stuff, not even when the persecution is directed at their fellow Christians. The only human rights policy they respect is Mr. Jiang's warning to foreigners doing business with China: Open your mouth and we will shut your cash registers.
Would Congress and the White House be interested in this item: Under Mr. Jiang the Chinese military has been enormously strengthened in military high-tech weaponry?
No, I suppose not; they know it already and don't seem to mind. They even know, because the Chinese admit it, that under Mr. Jiang the Communist Government lied when it denied to America that China had supplied special ring magnets to Pakistan's nuclear-weapon program, lied when it denied diverting American aircraft machinery and a special supercomputer from their supposed civilian-factory destinations straight to military plants.
This brief bio of Jiang-in-power might come in handy when he visits the White House or if, as he has asked, the President and Speaker Newt Gingrich invite him to address a joint session of Congress, just like Lafayette and Churchill.
Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company
