• Slave labor.
• Forced abortions.
• Threatening neighbors.
• Aiming nuclear weapons at U.S.

• Forcing down U.S. planes and holding them for ransom.

• Supplying the Taliban.
• Organ harvesting.
• Oppressing Tibet.

• Persecuting Christians and other religious minorities.

• Selling weapons to terrorist regimes.

What do you do with a bellicose, totalitarian police state repressing 1.3 billion people and participating in all of the above practices?

If you are President Bush, you grant it unconditional permanent normal trade status – the new euphemism for "most-favored nation trading status."

That's what the president did with a stroke of the pen last week while most Americans were distracted by holiday revelry – he gave China the gift it has been waiting for, normal trade relations with the U.S.

There were no strings attached. There were no demands for better conduct by China. There were no quid pro quos. China got everything it wanted and was asked to give nothing in return – not to the U.S., not to its own oppressed people.

In addition, Bush ended the 1974 Jackson-Vanik law that had for a quarter century linked trade policies and the abysmal human rights records of totalitarian nations like China and Vietnam.

Why?

It's about money, as usual.

It's about big businesses looking for new markets overseas. It's about the lobbying efforts of people like Henry Kissinger and Al Haig, who long ago sold their souls to tyrants in Beijing for lofty consulting contracts. It's about elitists such as Sen. Dianne Feinstein who have personal interests at stake in China. And it's about the New World Order foreseen by Bush's father – a global order in which the interests and wishes of ordinary Americans are subordinated to the desires of international bodies with no accountability to the rule of law nor the Constitution of the United States.

The "free-traders" will tell you this is a good thing for average Americans. It's not. This is not about free trade at all. Free trade is a simple concept. It involves the elimination of tariffs to facilitate greater commerce between nations. The thousands of pages of rigid rules and regulations governing trade under the supra-national World Trade Organization is the very antithesis of free trade.

It's about time we call the "free-traders" what they really are – traitors to the U.S. Constitution.

Harry Wu, a man who suffered years of mistreatment in Chinese concentration camps (yes, Virginia, there are concentration camps still in China), sees Bush's near-secret yet monumental decision clearly.

He points out that many of those arguing for free trade with China were the same people who previously argued for the imposition of economic sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa. How can they argue, on one hand, that trade can free people oppressed by a totalitarian regime and, on the other hand, say that trade represents approval of those oppressive policies.

"If money can indeed change totalitarian societies, then we should re-examine our policies towards Cuba and Iraq," he says.

Now this is Jan. 1, 2002, and we ought to be looking forward – not backward.

So let's project where this policy is leading us.

Wu and other Chinese experts point out that the military government in Beijing is using the money our big corporate interests are providing it to buy weapons – massive amounts of weapons. They are buying submarines, nuclear ICBMs, the latest fighter jets and bombers and the best technology to spy on their own people and keep them oppressed.

In other words, the U.S. is supporting the buildup of a Chinese military machine. It's comparable to what the U.S. did in the 1930s with Germany. We're not freeing the Chinese people … we're ensuring that we will be forced to fight them some day in the future.

No wonder Bush took the sneaky way out with this action. No wonder he quietly signed off on this new policy without a press conference. No wonder the corporate interests that control the establishment press didn't even bother to let the American people know their government had reversed a 25-year policy of holding tyrants accountable for their actions.

Happy New Year, America. Enjoy your freedom while you can.

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Harry Wu slams U.S. trade policy