If we think back again to 1949, we recall that this was the year when, with the Communist revolution, China shut the doors it had once tentatively opened to the world. Among its new leaders' first steps were to expel foreign businesses from China, and to bar direct economic contact between Chinese private citizens and the outside world. In essence, our postwar commitment to collective security, open markets and human rights made up a coherent vision of a peaceful and open world. And China's rejection of these concepts in the Maoist era made up an equally coherent and consistent policy. Its economic isolation in the 1950s and 1960s can be separated neither from its diminishing space for individual life and freedom at home, nor its revolutionary role in the Pacific region.
China today remains a repressive and authoritarian country.
The union members protesting today are raising real and very important issues. The State Department's Human Rights Report documents a lamentable record of restrictions on freedom of speech and religion, suppression of labor rights and punishment of those who attempt to assert their rights in these areas. But China is also not today the same country it was thirty years ago. Its domestic reforms since the 1970s have helped undo its economic isolation, integrating China into the Pacific regional economy as they opened opportunities for Chinese at home. Reform has reversed the most damaging policies of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution era, abolishing rural communes and enabling private business to revive in villages and cities.