Ten years ago the democratic international community shunned communist-ruled China as a pariah state. The abhorrent spectre of fully armed PLA tanks mowing down totally unarmed and peacefully, albeit vociferously, protesting students made the ostracisation of the communist regime inevitable. The military onslaught, the like of which one can only expect against an invading enemy army, was totally uncalled for by any standard of conduct by a government claiming to embody the will of the people. After all, the protesters’ demand was not that the communists abdicate power but merely that they be more democratic and transparent in their governance, including the guarantee of a free press. They also strongly demanded an end to the rampant corruption that was siphoning off the benefits of the economic liberalisation into the pockets of few with power and connections. After all, the communist revolution succeeded with its 1st October 1949 triumph precisely because it promised to usher in an egalitarian society where no one would be allowed to accumulate wealth at the exploitative expense of others or by abuse of power.

It was also thought that the conferment in 1989 of the Nobel Peace Prize on His Holiness the Dalai Lama, a worthy and deserving awardee under any circumstance in our time, was a measure of the international community's expression of revulsion at the depth of the communists' capacity for savagery.

The communist regime has taken no steps since then to atone for its misdeeds to earn a place of respect in the community of civilised nations. In fact, it still swears that the fratricidal blood bath was appropriate and necessary. No one knows how many were killed or wounded. Crude estimates of the dead ranged from 'hundreds' to 'thousands'. Such is the extent of the communist authorities' repressive measures to prevent all attempts to find out the truth in terms of facts and figures.

The Tiananmen Massacre took place only ten years ago. But while the communists still demand amends for atrocities allegedly committed against China by what they call 'imperialist powers' more than 50 years ago, the democratic nations of the West are already jostling to be listed as high above the others as possible in the dictatorial regime's good book. If Britain's Queen Elizabeth invited the Chinese President, Mr Jiang Zemin, to spend a night at the Buckingham Palace as a gesture of special friendship, French President Jacque Chirac had the visiting dictator spend a quite private weekend at his country chapeau, thereby shelving him from the one nettlesome cause for annoyance that bedevils him in all his trips to the West: demonstrations, often riotous, of calls for democracy, human rights, independence, etc, for his oppressed subjects.

Supervening national economic interests are reportedly the reason why democratic leaders relegate human rights issues to the backburner. The prospect of exporting commodities and services to an over a billion-strong consumer market is said to be an opportunity not to be allowed to be torpedoed by patently fruitless human rights preconditions. In fact human rights issues, especially concerning China, have become a veritable nuisance to a lot of leaders of the democratic free world especially when it comes to confronting China. And that is mainly because the communists would not want to do China-business with countries that would call it what it really is: a human rights rascal.

Unfortunately, there does not appear to be one free democratic country of the West that has a favourable, or even fairly equitable trade balance with China. In fact, all of them have heavy deficit trade balance. So, in real terms, the existing Sino-Western relationship translates into dual benefit for the communist regime: legitimisation of the communist dictatorship's human rights record through lack of any effective coercive action and a highly enviable trade surplus that makes the communist regime flush with dollar, franc, pound, etc, funds, not an insignificant portion of which is on account of unpaid prison labour. It is the prospect of big contracts for big industries, such as those dealing in gas, aeroplane and defence and scientific equipments and the patently unrealisable hope of China opening up its mammoth markets which keeps the West go on courting China, and quite unabashedly at that.

Of course, the western leaders won't say these things. They all say China is too important a country to be ignored, that human rights should not be the sole criterion for judging the country and that policies of dialogue and constructive engagement, rather than condemnation and confrontation, have led to definite improvements in China's human rights practice.

The fact that the communist regime is synonymous with China the state and all its institutions—such as the PLA which is first and foremost the private army of the communist party—is too obvious to be subjected to argument. Dealing with the regime is the only way to deal with China. That's true. But heavy handed repression of attempts to show in democratically accepted peaceful demonstrations the people's disapproval of the visitors' cruelties against their own human subjects back home brings into question the human rights sanity of some of the western political leaders. After all, such demonstrations are being staged against other visiting leaders quite frequently and tolerated. If the United States could get China to agree to disagree on human rights and allow the demonstrations, there is no reason why UK, New Zealand and Australia cannot follow suit. Or was it the case that the US is too big for China whereas UK, France, New Zealand, etc, are fair game for the Chinese communists?