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Now leading US Democrats, the anti-China
left
By Tim Shorrock
WASHINGTON - When Hu Jintao takes the helm as
China's new president, he will have to reckon with not
only US President George W Bush and a Congress dominated
by Bush's fellow Republicans. The newly elected
Democratic minority leader of the House of
Representatives, despite her liberal credentials, is no
pal of communist China - indeed, she and Hu have a less
than friendly history already.
From every side
of the US political spectrum, Thursday's election of San
Francisco liberal Nancy Pelosi as House minority leader
is being hailed as a victory for the left wing of a
fractured and demoralized Democratic Party. There is one
area, however, where Pelosi is far more conservative
than most of her colleagues in Congress: US relations
with China.
Throughout her career, Pelosi has
aligned herself with the far right of the Republican
Party on dealing with the communist government in
Beijing. Her steadfast opposition to normal trade with
China, her adamant support for Taiwan and the hostility
she has displayed toward visiting Chinese leaders seem
more in tune with the Cold War atmosphere of the 1950s
than the complex world of the 21st century.
Ironically, Pelosi's support for expanded US
arms sales to Taiwan place her in the same camp on China
as Representative Tom DeLay, the arch-conservative from
Texas who will be the Republican's majority leader in
the House. DeLay, unlike most of his Republican
colleagues, is highly distrustful of China and, like
Pelosi, has been critical of US-Chinese military
cooperation. Unlike Pelosi, however, DeLay has supported
trade with China and Beijing's entry into the World
Trade Organization.
Some commentators believe
Pelosi's views on China could complicate US diplomacy in
Asia, particularly if she decides to use the issue to
show how Democrats differ from the White House in
foreign policy.
"Democrats will be looking for a
place or two in the world to be more hawkish than the
president, and given the ties of several leading
Republicans to the regime, and China's role in
supporting nuclear and missile proliferation in the
world, Beijing will be one logical place to do it,"
Gregory Fossedal, the chief investment officer of a US
hedge fund that invests in emerging markets, wrote in a
recent commentary for United Press International.
Pelosi herself says that she can't be placed in
a certain political camp - even though most other
political commentators would certainly place her in the
party's left wing. "Pelosi is one of the most
progressive members of the House, with a voting record
that frequently displays 100 percent support for the
positions advanced by organized labor, environmental and
consumer groups," the liberal weekly The Nation noted in
a rapturous column published before Thursday's action by
the House Democratic Caucus.
A few days before,
the conservative National Review gloated over the
possible damage Pelosi could cause the Democrats by her
positions, particularly her vocal opposition to a US war
with Iraq. "Minority Leader Pelosi will move her party
to the left," the Review declared. "In the wake of [the
November 5] defeats, the left will demand it - but
she'll want to take it there on her own accord."
That may not necessarily be so. "Politics is
like a tennis game," she told the Washington Post on
Wednesday. "You can move to the right or to the left,
but you always have to come back to the middle." She was
elected minority leader on Thursday by a 177-29 vote,
becoming the first woman to lead a political party in
Congress.
As if to display her bipartisan
political stripes, on Wednesday Pelosi bucked her
support in organized labor and cast one of the few
Democratic votes in favor of legislation creating a
Department of Homeland Security. That bill has been held
up for months over complaints by US unions that the
"flexibility" called for by the White House would
undermine labor rights of federal workers.
Democrats, explained Pelosi, "stand shoulder to
shoulder with the president in support of our young men
and women in uniform, and in the fight against
terrorism. Where we can find common ground on the
economy, and on other domestic issues, we shall seek
it."
In the November 5 elections, Republicans
regained control of the Senate and expanded their
majority in the House. As a result, House Democratic
leader Richard Gephardt resigned his position as party
leader, clearing the way for Pelosi, who held the No 2
position as minority whip. She quickly rounded up enough
votes to declare herself the winner, forcing her closest
rival, Texas Representative Martin Frost, to withdraw.
Before Frost threw in the towel, he warned that
a Pelosi victory could further erode the party's base.
"I think that her politics are to the left, and I think
that the party, to be successful, must speak to the
broad center of the country," he said.
Indeed,
Pelosi's record on foreign affairs, economics and
cultural issues places her on the progressive end of the
Democratic Party and US politics in general. Last month,
she broke with her party's leadership on Iraq and voted
against the congressional resolution authorizing Bush to
launch a unilateral attack on Iraq - taking 126 other
Democrats with her. She is an outspoken critic of
corporate-led globalization and has taken a strong stand
in support of abortion rights throughout her career.
But when it comes to Beijing, Pelosi portrays
China as an enemy nation. She is also a leading advocate
of expanded arms sales to Taiwan. In March 2001, just
after Bush took office, she was one of a handful of
Democratic lawmakers who signed a letter to the White
House recommending the sale to Taiwan of the US Aegis
combat system - a decision that infuriated Beijing.
During the fierce battles in Congress over
renewing normal trade relations with China, Pelosi
worked closely with a coalition of liberal and
conservative groups that ranged from organized labor -
which provides her heaviest political donations - to the
far-right Family Research Council and the Veterans of
Foreign Wars.
In July 2001, she joined with
conservative Republicans Frank Wolf of Virginia and Dana
Rohrabacher of California to call for a vote against
open trade with China in an appearance before the House
Ways and Means Committee. She cited continued
human-rights violations and China's alleged
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
"China has continued to proliferate dangerous
weapons of mass destruction to unsafeguarded nations,
countries of concern and rogue states, including
Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Libya," she
said. "We are having this debate again this year because
what we have seen for the past year is a continuation of
China's pattern in bilateral and multilateral
agreements, and then, in the issue of trade, signing
trade agreements and not abiding by them or removing one
set of barriers while erecting another one. Either way,
the results are the same - no good news."
Pelosi
is so skeptical of China that, after the terrorist
attacks of September 11, 2001, in the United States, she
questioned the motives of Chinese diplomats who offered
to work within the United Nations to support "any
proposals" from Washington that would help eliminate
terrorism. "Any cooperation by any country on terrorism
is worth exploring, but the Chinese government has
violated international agreements on the proliferation
of weapons of mass destruction in the past, and that
would certainly be an important component of a fight
against terrorism," a Pelosi spokesperson told
Congressional Quarterly at the time.
Her
contempt for China's leadership was displayed last May,
when Vice President Hu Jintao, who was confirmed by the
16th Communist Party Congress on Friday as the man who
will succeed Jiang Zemin as president, made his first
visit to Washington. After being cordially received at
the White House, Hu had a tense meeting with several
congressional leaders, including Pelosi, about
human-rights issues.
But Hu rebuffed Pelosi when
she attempted to pass him four letters from members of
Congress complaining about specific human-rights cases.
"It was kind of startling," Pelosi told reporters. She
speculated that Hu refused to accept the missives
because his performance was being closely watched by
hardliners in Beijing. "Anything he runs into could be a
land mine for him," she said.
A Chinese
government spokesperson said Hu refused Pelosi's letters
because he didn't know what was in them and added that a
dialogue on human rights must be based on "mutual
respect and equality".
Few disagree with Pelosi
that China's record on human rights is anything but
abysmal. But her treatment of Hu is hardly useful in
pushing discussions about sensitive issues like human
rights forward. Many Chinese prefer the European
approach, which is less dogmatic and confrontational.
"The US is a superpower trying to impose its
values on China," Yan Xuetong, the director of the
Institute of International Studies at Tsinghua
University and a member of the China Committee of the
Council of Security Cooperation of Asia-Pacific, said in
a recent speech in Washington. "So there's a kind of
different feel that makes it easier for the Chinese to
accept European pressure."
(©2002 Asia Times
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