When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went to China last year, she chose to remain silent about human rights abuses by the world’s remaining Communist giant. Apparently more worried about not curtailing China’s financial services to the US, Mrs. Clinton and her boss in the White House sent a clear signal: The Obama Administration would give China a “bye” on religious and political persecution.

The hint was not lost on the Chinese leaders, who on February 8, 2009 arrested Gao Zhisheng.  He has been imprisoned, and unheard from, ever since.

Gao Zhisheng was once a darling of the Chinese Communists. A distinguished lawyer, he had a bright future ahead of him. He was named in 2001 as one of China’s sharpest legal talents. But Gao made a bad career move: He spoke out in defense of persecuted Christians in China.

That was enough to arouse Beijing’s party cadres against him. What made matters worse for Gao was the attention his extraordinary moral courage garnered for him in the West.  The New York Times even gave his story front-page coverage in 2005.

Last year, he was seized by authorities and is undergoing horrible torture, if he is even still alive. The New Yorker Magazine, to its great credit, has published stories by their Beijing correspondent, Evan Osnos, on Gao Zhisheng. Osnos related the stories coming out on Gao’s treament by the brutal guo bao, China’s euphemistically titled “Public Security Bureau.”  George Orwell’s “ministry of truth” couldn’t have said it better.  Here is part of what Osnos has written:

(One) account not only accused his captors of holding burning cigarettes to his eyes, beating and starving him, and applying electric shocks to his genitals, but it also revealed their warning that he would die if he told anyone about the ordeal. …It is time for the court of world opinion to insist: “Show us the prisoner and justify his detention.”

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Wednesday night, the Empire State Building in Manhattan shone red and yellow as a tribute to the sixtieth anniversary of the Communist takeover of China.

When lit, the Empire State is a lovely sight.  Yet last night’s display cast a rather ugly glow.  Why?  Because given the nation it is honoring, we must ask the sponsors of this celebration which highlights of China’s history during those sixty years they especially want to honor.

Might it be the murder of Christian missionaries in the late 40s and 50s?  How about the killing of millions of Chinese during Chairman Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” campaign of the mid-fifties? During those years, Communist authorities pressed rural Chinese to modernize, demanding such insanities as backyard steel mills.

China enveloped Tibet in the late 50s. That ancient Buddhist land is still being suppressed and its unique culture eradicated fifty years later. The Dalai Lama and many other Tibetans still live in exile.

In the mid-60s, Chairman Mao initiated the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution which left more millions dead. Fanatical Red Guards beat and brutalized anyone who had exposure to Western Culture—and even trashed China’s revered cultural heritage.

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The Wall Street Journal is running an interesting piece on the problems facing China’s surplus of young bachelors.  The background is that 30 years of the “one child policy” coupled with Chinese “son preference” has yielded “a surplus of 32 million males under the age of 20″ by the most recent count.  These men are now reaching a marriageable age and, lo and behold, there simply aren’t enough women to go around as brides.

The result is that “bride prices” are increasing dramatically.  To compensate, the article notes, “A study by Columbia University economist Shang-Jin Wei found that some areas in China with a high proportion of males have an above-average savings rate, even after accounting for factors such as education levels, income and life-expectancy rates. Areas with more men than women, the study notes, also have low spending rates — suggesting that many rural Chinese may be saving up for bride prices.”  Unsurprisingly, these increasingly lucrative bride prices are causing increasingly common bride graft by means of “runaway brides” pocketing the money and leaving their new husbands.

This is just the beginning of the myriad problems China will face in the coming generation due to its one-child policy and the resulting sex imbalance.  For more, see my article on the subject some years ago.

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Today marks the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen square massacre in Beijing. When BBC reporter James Reynolds tried to enter the square to cover any memorials that might be taking place, he was met with resistance and a bizarre display of what can only be described as umbrella censorship:

The earpiece-umbrella guys are indeed weird, but it’s a sign of the times that apparatchiki would be wearing shorts and alien T-shirts.

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On Friday government officials from the regime of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela raided the offices of Globovision, the only remaining television broadcaster in the country that openly criticizes Chavez.  The pretext for the raid has something to do with the station’s news reporting on an earthquake in Venezuela in early May, which asserted that the government had been slow to report on the incident.   According to press reports and comments from worried United Nations officials, Globovision stands to lose its license, which would mean the end of the last media outlet that dares to disagree with Chavez or his increasingly oligarchic powers.  Interestingly, Venezuelan government officials characterized the Globovision report as “hate speech” that risked alarming the country and “destabilizing” the populace. Government’s facile use of such expressions is reason for alarm.

As The Washington Post notes this morning, Latin American caudillos are no novelty, but the silence of the United States (i.e., the Obama administration) in the face of such repression is a first.  Not a first, but similarly worrisome, is the news that Nancy Pelosi, fresh from accusing the C.I.A. of lying to Congress in private briefings, is off to Beijing with nary a word prior to her trip of criticism of China’s abusive human rights practices.  Time was, U.S. Democrats like former Rep. Dick Gephardt (Mo.) were among the leaders of efforts to hold the Chinese accountable for their abuses of workers, and other Democrats spoke of Chinese denial of religious freedom and its record of forced abortion and sterilization.  Pelosi instead wants to engage the oligarchs in Beijing only on climate change.   But it is the climate for political freedom that is turning adverse.

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