Hillary's shameful silence

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has just returned from her first trip abroad. She said she chose to visit Asia because of its rising importance to the United States. China, after all, buys U.S. Treasury bonds. President Obama would have a hard time paying the government's bills without those purchases.

Mrs. Clinton frequently made the pitch that the bonds were safe, and that Asia needs a healthy American economy, making her, as one commentator said, the nation's leading "merchant of debt." But what she did not say was important, too.

She did not complain openly about China's human rights abuses, even though the State Department issued its annual human rights assessment just after she returned from Asia. The department's statement said, "The government of China's human rights record remained poor and worsened in some areas."

Mrs. Clinton must have known what was in the report before she went to Asia, but she remained mum in public, although the State Department said she raised the issue in private meetings with Chinese leaders.

As she explained to reporters on the eve of her visit to China, taking up human rights abuses like the recent jailing of Liu Xiaobo, organizer of a manifesto favoring democratic change known as Charter 08, "can't interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis, and the security crisis."

China's Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi purred that China's relations with the new U.S. government were "off to a good start."

But as Sophie Richardson of Human Rights Watch wrote in the magazine Foreign Policy, a "long-standing" theme of U.S. foreign policy has been "support for the brave individuals who are working within China to improve their country's rights environment." She noted that the Chinese government suppressed prominent government critics to keep them silent during Mrs. Clinton's visit. It will be a blow to the morale of democracy activists in China, she wrote, to hear "that the United States now considers them an impediment to progress on other issues."

That is sad — and unnecessary. China will continue to finance U.S. debt as it has in the past even though the United States speaks up for human rights, so long as U.S. Treasury bonds remain good investments. And no longer.

"I'm very proud that President Obama has made a total U-turn away from the policies of the last eight years," Mrs. Clinton told an audience at Ewha University in South Korea.

If that means keeping a closed mouth on human rights abuses, she and the president have regrettably chosen the wrong direction.