Thursday, March 8, 2001

Most nations avoid directly contradicting the president of the United States, especially in the opening weeks of a new administration. But China is treating its first argument with George W. Bush as a golden opportunity to test the new occupant of the White House.

China's response of bluster, denial and deception over being caught with its hand in the cookie jar of international misbehavior is business as usual.

Control of the truth, or more precisely of the untruth, is too important for China's [party's name omitted] leaders to leave to others. Lying is not a convenience but a basic political weapon, at home and abroad.

What sets China's government apart is not that it lies -- what government does not? -- but that it demands that its lies be actively accepted, first by its public and then by governments that want its "friendship."

The gerontocrats who run China find safety in their ability to impose their version of history on others. They know the crimes they would have to answer for if China's history books were not cooked. This is the totalitarian urge, which still dominates Chinese politics even as the Middle Kingdom's economic and social spheres slip beyond the Politburo's control.

There can still be no accounting of, much less apology for, the military massacres that occurred on the streets of Beijing in 1989. Today's Falun Gong movement must be vilified with monstrous distortions of its aims and practices. All blame for problems in the U.S.-China relationship must lie with Washington. And so on.

Politburo politics have become extremely unstable as the true Leninist survivors of the 1948 revolution dwindle, and as the pace of economic and social change accelerates to bypass the dying [party's name omitted]. A struggle for power within that body drives the excesses of the brutal crackdown on the Falun Gong, just as it drove the massacres around Tiananmen Square nearly 12 years ago.

With no ideology to guide or rank them, the claimants for power bid against each other for the chance to put down any dissent against the system, with brutality as the coin of their realm.

Bush and the leaders of other democratic nations can help speed that day of change by not treating the truth as something to be set aside for the convenience of the Beijing leadership.

President Bush has identified in public a serious breach of U.N. sanctions by China -- one that threatened the lives of American pilots. That breach should be publicly referred to the United Nations for investigation. China should not be allowed to wield its latest lie as a shield for wrongdoing.