Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!aplcen!haven!udel!mmdf From: postmaster@att-in.att.com Newsgroups: comp.os.minix Subject: (none) Message-ID: <8412@nigel.udel.EDU> Date: 16 Jan 90 20:45:31 GMT Sender: mmdf@udel.EDU Lines: 89 Mail to `att.att.com!attmail!mhs!envoy!ics.test/pn=_test_group' alias `att!attmail!mhs!envoy!ics.test/pn=_test_group' from 'VM1.NoDak.EDU!INFO-MINIX%UDEL.EDU' failed. The error message was: destination unknown or forwarding disallowed The message began: Received: from NDSUVM1.BITNET by VM1.NoDak.EDU (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.1MX) with BSMTP id 7812; Tue, 16 Jan 90 05:30:00 CST Received: from NDSUVM1.BITNET by NDSUVM1.BITNET (Mailer R2.03B) with BSMTP id 7798; Tue, 16 Jan 90 05:29:59 CST Date: Tue, 16 Jan 90 09:50:21 GMT Reply-To: INFO-MINIX%UDEL.EDU@VM1.NoDak.EDU Sender: Minix operating system Comments: Warning -- original Sender: tag was info-minix-request@UDEL.EDU From: Jacob Baltuch Subject: RE: is Minix portable? Comments: To: info-minix@udel.edu To: Multiple recipients of list MINIX-L Time for a New China Lobby By Lynn Chung [ the Wall Street Journal ] [ Monday, January 15, 1990 ] The director of a service program for Chinese students in America at a major Chinese-American cultural orgranization gets phone calls about stranded Chinese; a woman with a six-month-old baby who is going blind from an illness for which she is unable to afford medication because her husband has died and her fellowship has run out; a young Chinese tenor, a recipient of major international prizes, now living on potatoes in Queens. To find help, the director does not call some Chinese-American charity fund established nationwide on June 5. Nor does she call the Organization of Chinese-Americans, or the Chinese American Planning Council, or the China Institute. Instead, she calls the American Jewish Committee. Within weeks after Tiananmen, the AJC had set up an "Adopt a Chinese" program for emergency grants. Today, more than six months later, Chinese- Americans have yet to mount any significant humanitarian, intellectual or political effort in support of the exiled pro-democracy movement. This silence carries a message of Chinese-American apathy and impotence. And the message has evidently not been lost on President Bush: the administration has been left freee to play geo-politics, unconstrained by human rights considerations, because it doesn't have to worry about domestic realpolitik. Chinese-Americans should take a lesson from Jewish-Americans, who have campaigned tirelessly against human rights abuses in the Soviet Union for decades and achieved great things. Only large, vocal constituencies have the power to make Chinese human rights into an issue that Washington cannot afford to ignore. But after an initial flurry of rallies, in the wake of the Tiananmen massacre, Chinese-Americans have utterly and shamefully failed to speak out for freedom in China. A few prominent Chinese-Americans do get together every now and then, to tsk-tsk at the president's latest appalling gesture of appeasement, or to exchange the newest horror story of repression in China. But no Chinese-American lobbyist yet combs the halls of Congress, or plagues State Department aides with phone calls, or waves lists of imprisoned Chinese dissidents under the noses of Brent Snowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger. No significant Chinese-American group has emerged to think through the complex issues of U.S. China policy, or to provide fellowships for the exiled Chinese intelligentsia adrift in America, or to assemble emergency funds for stranded Chinese. It is ironic the there should be such a startling difference between the political maturity and social responsibility of Jewish-Americans and Chinese-Americans. Chinese-Americans have pretty much stayed out of politics in American, with one unfortunate exception: The "old China lobby", whose charismatic spokeswoman, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, charmed the U.S. media and U.S. politicians from the '30s through the McCarthy era with her silken cheongsams and open-toed butterfly shoes. But her dulcet promises of democracy soon turned into an unpalatably authoritarian anti-communism, and the Chiangs themselves into parasites on American largesse. Many Chinese-Americans never recovered from the embarrass- ment of Nationalist affiliation. Now they are shy of politics, still fearful of any criticism of the People's Republic that might be unpleasantly reminiscent of the Chiangs. One might have thought that the events in Tiananmen would have wakened Chinese-Americans out of their long hibernation. Taiwan has largely redeemed itself with a greatly improved human rights record: In recent elections, the opposition party made impressive gains against the Nationalists. Today, Chinese- Americans should have the courage to reject the outdated politics that handled the People's Republic with kid gloves and treated Taiwan as a sinister pariah, just as Mr.Bush needs to reject to outdated "China card" politics that were such a trump against the Sovient Union in 1972. It's time for Chinese-Americans to find their own, new, American politics.