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Friday, Oct. 20, 2006

Wedded to free trade in China

When Sen. Mitch McConnell married Elaine Chao in 1993, he got more than a wife — he got a river of campaign donations from her family and friends in the Chinese-American business community.

Some people think that might affect his views on China, the world’s other superpower.

Eight days after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, where China’s communist regime crushed a nascent democracy movement, McConnell collected his first $8,000 from the Taiwanese-born Chao, then just a friend, and her family.

The Chao family is headed by James Chao, founder of Foremost Maritime Corp., a shipping company in New York that benefits from Chinese trade. It buys cargo vessels from China.

As others in Washington reacted with outrage to the bloodshed in Tiananmen Square, it fell to McConnell to defend normal trade relations with China and help kill a bill that would have granted amnesty to 40,000 Chinese students in the United States, which Beijing opposed.

Since then, McConnell, R-Ky., has received more than $200,000 from Chinese-Americans outside Kentucky, not all of it legal, most of it originating with Chao’s connections. After their wedding, McConnell joked about his campaign donors: “Get used to difficult names.”

“Obviously, Elaine — with the possible exception of (broadcaster) Connie Chung — is the most prominent Chinese-American in the country, and a lot of her friends and acquaintances want to help her husband,” McConnell said recently. “I don’t find that in any way unusual.”

Some conservatives find China an awkward dance, a target of scorn for its brutal communist regime, but also a target of capitalist opportunity for its booming economy and cheap labor.

But few shuffle quite like McConnell, who as a Senate leader calls for freedom in Asia and warns about the menace of “Red China” in fund-raising letters, while consistently defending Chinese business ties treasured by the Chao family and other China-interested donors.

Ideological contradiction

Nowhere is this contradiction more glaring than McConnell’s vocal opposition to the military dictatorship in Burma, in Southeast Asia, which persecutes its citizens and has Nobel Peace Prize recipient Daw Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest. McConnell frequently calls for economic sanctions against Burma to isolate its regime.

“The Burmese people want these sanctions because they want democracy, justice and freedom, and we stand with them,” McConnell said on the Senate floor in July.

McConnell’s rhetoric rings hollow to Chinese human-rights activists. Like Burma, they said, China is run by a dictatorship that has butchered its own people; that denies citizens the freedom to speak, read, publish, pray or travel; and that jails political dissidents without trial.

Yet McConnell pushes for more lucrative trade relations with China. He and Chao meet privately with Chinese officials, including Jiang Zemin in 1997, then general secretary of the Communist Party of China. (Chao’s father and Jiang were schoolmates in China.)

Chao and her father declined to be interviewed for this story. McConnell helped block attempts to link U.S. trade with China to human rights, religious freedom or a ban on prison labor, even splitting with fellow Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., who warned about “putting profits ahead of people.”

McConnell is no idealist, said John Stempel, senior professor at the University of Kentucky’s Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce.

“He’s not terribly sensitive to things like human rights. He looks at things like politics and business,” Stempel said. “He’s very pragmatic that way.”

In 1999, McConnell invited Li Zhaoxing, the Chinese ambassador to the U.S., to speak at the McConnell Center for Political Leadership at the University of Louisville. Li used his speech to blast Congress for what he called its “malicious attacks” in demanding that China allow its people religious freedom.

A few years later, as China’s foreign affairs minister, Li traveled to McConnell’s loathed Burma to promote stronger ties between his regime and theirs.