Since President Bush has made the decision to attend the Beijing Games, he should plan to deliver a major speech on human rights while in China, similar to what President Ronald Reagan during his historic visit to Moscow in 1988. During the trip, Reagan visited the restored Danilov Monastery, where he delivered a brief, but powerful speech calling on the Soviets to reopen thousands of boarded-up churches, to end the oppression of banned religious groups and to revoke Soviet law banning religious instruction. The speech dramatically raised the issue of human rights in the Soviet Union because it was done in such a high profile and public way.

President Bush should do the same thing in China. The people of China, and the dissidents who sit in their jail cells day-after-day, week-after-week, year-after-year, should know that the president of the United States of America and leader of the free world stands with them in their quest for freedom, and not with the repressive communist regime of China.

Additionally, President Bush, Secretary Rice and U.S. Ambassador to China Clark Randt should publicly raise cases involving human rights and religious persecution with the leaders of the Chinese government. It is not enough to just raise these cases in private. Ambassador Randt and his staff should push to visit as many of the prisoners as possible and forcefully advocate for their release. Taking another page from President Reagan’s 1988 trip to Moscow, where he met with 96 dissidents and dissident family members, President Bush should meet with Chinese dissidents and their families when he is in Beijing.

Finally, President Bush, Secretary Rice and Ambassador Randt must continue to push China to help end the genocide in Darfur. The Chinese government can and should do more, including ending its practice of selling weapons to the Sudanese government, which, in turn, are being used to kill and maim innocent civilians in Darfur.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 17th, 2008 at 3:26 pm and is filed under Politics .