Human rights and business as usual.

President Clinton is good at saying the right thing. He used his platform well in China when he spoke out about human rights. But doing the right thing is another matter.

Why should the Chinese government take Clinton seriously? His Administration has shown it is willing and eager to do business, no matter how Chinese leaders repress religious expression and free speech, round up protesters, jail human-rights workers who have the temerity to document the dead at Tiananmen Square, persecute labor organizers, force women to have abortions against their will, torture Prisoners behind bars, subjugate Tibet--the list goes on and on.

Clinton made it clear, rhetorically at least, that the United States opposes such crude behavior. He scolded the Chinese leaders for the 1989 massacre of peaceful, pro-democracy demonstrators at Tiananmen and for rounding up protesters during his visit.

All this was to the good. But the main purpose of Clinton's trip was clear: promote U.S. business. Last year, U.S. companies did $75 billion worth of trade with China. They now have $20 billion invested in the country--eight times as much as they had in 1989, before Tiananmen Square. China is our second biggest trading partner in Asia, after Japan. It is highly convenient for U.S. companies to argue that expanding business is good for human rights. This is the line Clinton took when he told an audience of Chinese students that "freedom is indivisible"--that economic liberalization and individual political freedom go hand in hand. In fact, however, just the opposite is true in China, where Stalinism meets capitalism, combining the worst of both worlds. Businesses that rely on prison labor and a brutally repressed work force hold hands with an all-powerful police state. And no matter how repressive the regime gets, business with the United States is booming. In the name of free trade, the United States has shown it is willing to put up with almost any grotesquery.

But what leverage does the United States have? As Andrew Nathan of Human Rights Watch-Asia suggests, "We're no longer in a position of forcing them to make changes because they're afraid they'll lose trade privileges."

By separating trade from human rights when it reaffirmed Most Favored Nation trading status for China in 1994, the United States gave up all its chips. "The Most Favored Nation threat has fallen through because it was a bluff all along, and business interest in it is so great we can't afford to rescind it," Nathan says.

Beijing has also deftly avoided international censure.

Human Rights in China, a New York City-based advocacy and monitoring group founded in 1989 by a group of Chinese scholars, points out that Beijing masterfully engineered a shift at the United Nations from confrontation to conciliation on human rights. For years, China thwarted efforts by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights to pass a resolution condemning the crackdown on Chinese dissidents. With little resistance from Washington, Beijing managed to get members of the United Nations to agree to human-rights "dialogues" with individual foreign governments, instead of multilateral pressure. So there is no U.N. monitoring of human rights, and no threat of multilateral sanctions on China. Instead, there has been a series of cordial and disconnected discussions with Norway, Sweden, Canada, and the United States. Clinton's visit marks the culmination of this engagement strategy.

"Beijing hasn't made sufficient progress to justify dropping multilateral measures," says Human Rights in China. "Reducing human rights to `differences' between countries serves to undermine the authority of international standards."

So where do we go from here? Both the left and the right in this country are divided on U.S.-China pol icy. The most outspoken defenders of Chinese human rights were the Republican members of Congress who railed against Clinton's trip (this, despite their silence on equally brutal U.S. trading partners, including the military regimes of Indonesia and Burma).

Other Republicans, including Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, suggest that the United States ought to do business with China, but only behind closed doors. Hatch and his pro-business colleagues regarded the arrest of Chinese dissidents as a mere public relations problem, and said the President was right to go to China, but ought not to stand in Tiananmen Square. Arguing over P.R. tactics is not exactly inspiring.

Progressives were also of two minds on China. The anti-corporate folks, like Ralph Nader, see U.S. policy as simply that of Boeing, Mobil, and Disney. But others argue that it's better to have diplomatic relations with Beijing than to isolate the regime.

James Nolt of the World Policy Institute raises the point that the United States must resist pressure to fight a new Cold War with China, fueled by rightwing alarmism about the "Red Chinese." Indeed, pursuing disarmament talks, including the preliminary agreement Clinton reached with China to stop targeting U.S. cities with nuclear missiles, is far better than initiating a new arms race.

"The U.S.-China rivalry has replaced U.S.-Soviet competition as the world's most stress-filled and harrowing," writes Michael Klare, a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Klare and others fear a military conflict between the United States and China over Taiwan, and believe the United States must take steps to prevent a possible nuclear war.

In 1996, China tested advanced missiles off the coast of Taiwan as a scare tactic to influence elections on the island. In response, the United States dispatched two nuclear-armed aircraft carriers to the waters off the coast of China. "The potential for nuclear war was clear to all," writes Maurice Meisner, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin and author of The Deng Xiaoping Era. "Both China and the United States hastily retreated, with Clinton and President Jiang Zemin agreeing to exchange state visits by 1998. Clinton is now making good on his half of the bargain. The trip should be welcomed by people of good will everywhere--much as they welcomed detente between the United States and the Soviet Union."

As for the most effective strategy on human rights, "I don't think it's immoral to trade or invest in China," says Nathan, speaking only for himself, although he says most of the staff at Human Rights Watch-Asia agrees with him. Clinton could have been more forceful about objecting when the Chinese government did not allow reporters from Radio Free Asia to come on his trip, and he could have refused to appear in the province where the government swept up protesters as if they were refuse, as Sandy Berger put it in an angry speech to reporters. But all in all, "I thought that generally Clinton's speaking out on the human-rights issue has been successful," Nathan says. "It may have a significant effect in the long run on public opinion in China."

Xiao Qiang, executive director of Human Rights in China, also praises Clinton for "saying the right things."

"It was particularly significant that this message was broadcast live in China," says Qiang. "It's a new thing in China. I wouldn't call it the beginning of a new era, but certainly it is the first time those issues of Tiananmen and Tibet were ever raised on Chinese television."

But Qiang would not call Clinton's mission "a human-rights success." The main problem is that the Administration continues to avoid any timetables or yardsticks to measure progress on human rights. Nor did Clinton demand the release of well known political prisoners. In the past, the Chinese have released prisoners and made other gestures at reform when pressed, Qiang notes.

Human-rights advocates know that the United States is not going to cut off relations with China for violating human rights. The most we can hope for is that labor, human-rights, and democracy advocates can force the issue onto the table when the United States cuts its deal.

There are various ways to do that. The United States can insist that protection of labor rights be a condition of China's membership in the World Trade Organization. It can demand the release of prisoners of conscience and press for timetables on improving human rights. And it can renew the call for a U.N. resolution demanding that China improve its record, and meet international standards of human rights.

Meanwhile, the larger problem of protecting individual lives in the global marketplace remains. For progressives, labor unions, and others concerned about democracy and human rights, this is a crucial, continuing fight.

Clinton's mission to build a better business relationship between the United States and China is mainly in the interest of wealthy investors from both countries. For the vast majority of wage laborers, it is not good news.

As Robert Weil, author of Red Cat, White Cat: China and the Contradictions of `Market Socialism,' points out, "The real story in China is what's happening on the ground, in terms of the massive displacement of labor. The official number of surplus rural laborers is an extraordinary 130 million .... Meanwhile, in cities, there are at least nine million unemployed ... with millions more losing wages and pensions. That is what the policy of opening to global market forces and investment, as advocated by both Clinton and Jiang Zemin, means for China."

According to the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, wages for the bottom 80 percent of workers in the United States have been falling since 1976. During the era of global trade, job insecurity and economic inequality have become a national plague. Isolationists like Pat Buchanan are right when they say that American workers have been betrayed by global business practices. The answer is not to turn our backs on the rest of the world, but to insist on international agreements that honor labor and human rights.

Robert Scott, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, proposes a progressive international trade policy based on three basic principles: 1) pushing labor rights in trade negotiations; 2) making deals that offer debt relief or foreign aid in exchange for promises to allow collective bargaining and higher wages; and 3) insisting on balanced trade.

The $60 billion trade deficit between the United States and China has cost U.S. workers about 382,000 jobs since 1989, according to the Economic Policy Institute publication "The Cost of Trade with China." The movement of jobs to China has put strong downward pressure on U.S. wages in two ways. It gives employers a ready excuse that higher wages would make their products uncompetitive. And the threat to move to China can frighten workers and keep them from demanding their fair share.

Higher wages and better living standards in China are thus in the interest of U.S. workers. "Labor rights are a key element of human rights," says Scott. "The United States can encourage China to open itself to a more liberal labor and human-rights environment."

As the main market for Chinese exports, the United States has the leverage to insist on progressive change. All we need is the will.