Hao Wu and the Upcoming US-China Summit: Why Bush is Unfit to Speak for the Wrongfully Imprisoned

China Daily reported on March 23rd that China and the United States have set April 20 as a summit date at the White House between George Bush and Chinese president Hu Jintao, last seen together laughing it up at the United Nations in September. Will Hao Wu be on Bush’s mind? From Rebecca McKinnon at Global Voices, one of the treasures of the blog world: “Hao Wu (Chinese name: 吴皓 ), a Chinese documentary filmmaker who lived in the U.S. between 1992 and 2004, was detained by the Beijing division of China’s State Security Bureau on the afternoon of Wednesday, February 22, 2006. On that afternoon, Hao had met in Beijing with a congregation of a Christian church not recognized by the Chinese government, as part of the filming of his next documentary.” (Read the rest of Hao’s story here…)
It’s been heartening to see a minor swell of voices on Hao’s behalf here and there, but it seems such a brazen arrest should garner more than 50-odd daily hits, on average, on the barometer of bloggers’ attention since news of his arrest finally got out. The hits are diminishing. Meanwhile China and the United States have been busy bashing each other in preparation for that summit. Condoleezza Rice, a reincarnated Kissinger with a penchant for Brahms, couldn’t pass up a chance on her Australian hop earlier this month to give Robert Kaplan (who looks at China the way, say, Israel looks at Hamas), orgasmic joys: “ I think all of us in the region,” Rice said, “particularly those of us who are longstanding allies, have a joint responsibility and obligation to try and produce conditions in which the rise of China will be a positive force in international politics, not a negative force.” The assumption, of course, and official American national policy according to the latest version of the National Security Strategy, which warns China against “old ways of thinking and acting,” while the Chinese president promised, in Reaganesque tones, a military buildup and sent his propagandizing troops bashing back at the United States with a human rights “report” of its own about America. Read the rest...