When it comes to making nice with the butchers of Beijing, there's plenty of competition. With his interview in the Aug. 17 New York Times Magazine, Philip Murray Condit, chairman and CEO of Boeing, gives our earlier appeasement laureates -- California Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Georgetown professor James Feinerman -- a run for the money. Feinstein, you may recall, proposed a U.S.-Chinese commission to study human-rights failures in the two countries -- "both Tiananmen Square and Kent State," as she memorably put it. Feinerman, for his part, was quoted in the Washington Post as being much impressed with the similarities of U.S. and Chinese prisons. He maintained that we are hypocrites to criticize the Chinese gulag while American prisoners stamp out license plates.
Comes now Boeing honcho Condit, who is asked by the Times interviewer Claudia Dreifus whether he has any "feelings about human rights violations in China." Says Condit: "Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I'm going to put it in context: they are the same ones that I have about human rights violations in the United States." Dreifus is so taken aback that she asks a followup question not often seen in the Times:
"Q: Wait a second. Americans do live in a democracy. We get to vote for our political leaders, and we aren't shot down in the streets, as the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square were.
"A: Well, not in the same way. But . . . some of the struggles we've had with civil rights don't look all that shiny. People have been shot. People have been beaten. I happened to be in China during the Rodney King beating. . . ."
Quick -- somebody get this man some new talking points.
Then again, Condit is a piker compared to his peaceable northern neighbors at British Columbia's University of Victoria, who decided last month to award an honorary degree to Jiang Zemin, president of China and, famously, killer of university students. Showing better judgment than his appeasers, Jiang turned it down.