Column: A voice for human rights

WASHINGTON -- The big debate over China had a "show me the money!" quality.

Big business played Daddy Warbucks. "Grab your sales books, boys. This is the big one. There are 1.3 billion human beings who haven't bought their first toaster! What a territory."

The Entity Formerly Known as Big Labor argued the flip side. "It's the economy, stupid!" it reminded China hands Clinton and Gore. The more work we give those worker bees in Beijing and Shanghai, it chided its once and future presidential candidates, the more drones we create in Motown and the Bronx.

One voice spoke of the missing element of the China trade story: the country itself. Will trade with the United States under prevailing conditions help or hurt the people of that grand and ancient society, a people once so rooted in the American romance by the writings of Pearl Buck and the heroics of our own wartime Flying Tigers?

The voice was that of Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco, a Democrat who represents many Chinese Americans in Congress and is now poised to assume her party's third-ranking position in Congress.

Pelosi spoke against giving permanent normal trade relations with China for the powerful reason that it forfeits any positive U.S. role in the fight for human rights in that country. Why should Beijing's gerontocracy care what we say about its renowned repressions once we've made it clear, as we did this week on the floor of Congress, they will not reduce our readiness to do business?

"I'm a free trader," she explained in her dramatic late-afternoon speech Wednesday in the moments before the trade bill passed. She pushed for human rights conditions on previous one-year trade deals with China, not to kill the deal, but to get China to make good on its deal.

"The goal was to get China to honor the commitment. The goal was not to lift most-favored-nation status, but to improve our trade relationship. But China has never complied with our trade agreements. If they did, that would make all the difference in the world."

If those pushing the deal are so confident the old men in Beijing will loosen up, why not trust but verify like Ronald Reagan? "If everybody thinks they will comply," she said in an interview after the 237 to 197 vote, "why not wait a year?"

Pelosi, the front-runner to be elected Majority Whip if the Democrats win control of the House this November, predicts that sponsors of the historic deal, a group that includes a third of her own party caucus, will now defend it no matter what happens to the Chinese people.

"In terms of the trade issue, Congress has spoken very clearly that China will do whatever it wishes with impunity. I predict that the trade deficit will soar, the human rights violations will intensify, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction will continue uncurbed. The only lever we had was permanent free trade.

"I hope I will be proven wrong."

(Chris Matthews, chief of the San Francisco Examiner's Washington Bureau, is host of "Hardball" on CNBC and MSNBC cable channels. The 1999 edition of "Hardball" has been recently published by Touchstone Books.)