WASHINGTON -- America's favorite Christmas toymaker, the People's Republic of China, is getting back to basics, doing the thing it truly does best.
And in case you haven't been able to tear yourself away from the weirdness that passes for politics in Washington these days, that thing China does best -- even better than sending us boatloads of holiday toys -- is locking up anybody who seems the least bit suspicious and stamping out any organization that isn't specifically approved by the government.Considering that the United States and China are supposed to have an understanding about this -- and considering that Beijing recently signed a major human rights convention -- the pace of arrests lately has been truly staggering.
Six months ago, the estimate was that China had more than 2,000 political dissidents in jail. These days, the tally is anybody's guess.
There was a pause in the crackdown when President Clinton visited Beijing this past summer, but it didn't last long. Within days of Clinton's departure, agents from China's Public Security Bureau were picking up anybody whose thinking or choice of friends was deemed out of line.
In the latest round of the arrests this week, police hauled in 10 members of the Chinese Democratic Party, a group of free thinkers who have tried to register themselves as the first political organization independent of the Communist Party.
Late last month, police arrested more than 140 Chinese Protestants who dared to join church groups not set up and controlled by the authorities. And earlier this year, security agents picked up a Catholic priest who had just been elevated by the Vatican to the rank of bishop.
The point in all this is that China's Communist Party, which has been running the country unchallenged since 1949, doesn't want any competition. Not from political dissidents, not from free thinkers, not even from small, unofficial church groups. You might call it a "zero tolerance" policy.
Li Peng, the official who ordered up the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, made this clear enough the other day when he told a reporter that anybody or anything threatening the role of the Communist Party "will not be allowed to exist."
And even though the hard-line Li Peng does the talking on this issue, President Jiang Zemin is no doubt on board as well.
These are the people, you'll recall, whom Clinton anointed last summer as "the right leadership at the right time" for China, the people Washington is relying on to provide economic and political stability in east Asia.
The tool they're using to shut down any unwanted ideas is an article of China's criminal code titled Threatening State Security. Among the many loosely defined crimes it enumerates are any "activities designed to change the basic nature of the state."
That, it seems, covers a lot of territory. In addition to subversive Christians, assorted dissidents and the China Democratic Party, it includes a book of essays by mainstream political writers and the China Development Union, a relatively innocuous think tank and debating club.
And even though he hasn't been charged with a crime yet, the think tank's founder, former government official Peng Ming, has been banned from leaving the country. Peng had plans to give speeches at Harvard and Columbia universities this month, but police stopped him on the way to Hong Kong the other day and confiscated his passport.
And what does the Clinton administration think about all this, coming, as it does, so soon after the president went to Beijing and talked up human rights? On Wednesday, a State Department spokesman described the arrests as "a serious step in the wrong direction" and left it at that.
This, it seems clear, probably won't keep the Chinese up nights worrying about what we might or might not do.
Much more worrisome, from their point of view, is the news that Washington and China's bitter rival, Taiwan, are negotiating a new round of military sales. Among other things, Taiwan wants four Aegis destroyers, probably the most sophisticated ships in the U.S. Navy.
Such a sale, if it comes off, would indeed get China's attention -- maybe make it mad enough to cut off our Christmas toys, including all those talking Furby things the kids have to have this year.
And that really would be a disaster.
Scripps Howard News Service