◎ Moral, political and diplomatic pressure on human rights will go a long way toward encouraging the emergence of the normal China the world and the Chinese people long have been promised.
By Joseph Bosco
When I testified against allowing China into the World Trade Organization in 2000, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms asked this question: Would WTO accession change China, as many experts predicted? I said I was more worried about how it would change us.
There was already reason for concern. In the 1970s, Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter accommodated the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) by throwing Taiwan under the bus. Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act mandating defensive arms sales to Taiwan.
In 1982, Ronald Reagan, under Chinese pressure, accepted the Third Communique pledging to drastically limit those arms transfers (embarrassed by that mistake, he agreed to Taipei’s request for the Six Assurances).
Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the Secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He is a nonresident fellow at the Institute for Corean-American Studies and the Institute for Taiwan-American Studies, and has held nonresident appointments in the Asia-Pacific program at the Atlantic Council and the Southeast Asia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
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