CHAPTER THREE-FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS AND DUTIES OF CITIZENS

Article 85

Citizens of the People's Republic of China are equal before the law.

Article 86

Citizens of the People's Republic of China who have reached the age of eighteen have the right to vote and stand for election whatever their nationality, race, sex, occupation, social origin, religious belief, education, property status, or length of residence, except insane persons and persons deprived by law of the right to vote and stand for election.

Women have equal rights with men to vote and stand for election.

Article 87

Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, freedom of procession and freedom of demonstration. The state guarantees to citizens enjoyment of these freedoms by providing the necessary material facilities.

Article 88

Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of religious belief.

Article 89

Freedom of the person of citizens of the People's Republic of China is inviolable. No citizen may be arrested except by decision of a people's court or with the sanction of a people's procuratorate.

Article 90

The homes of citizens of the People's Republic of China are inviolable, and privacy of correspondence is protected by law.

Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of residence and freedom to change their residence.

Article 91

Citizens of the People's Republic of China have the right to work. To guarantee enjoyment of this right, the state, by planned development of the national economy, gradually creates more employment, and better working conditions and wages.

Article 92

Working people in the People's Republic of China have the right to rest and leisure. To guarantee enjoyment of this right, the state prescribes working hours and holidays for workers and office employees; at the same time it gradually expands material facilities to enable working people to rest and build up their health.

Article 93

Working people in the People's Republic of China have the right to material assistance in old age, and in case of illness or disability. To guarantee enjoyment of this right, the state provides social insurance, social assistance and public health services and gradually expands these facilities.

Article 94

Citizens of the People's Republic of China have the right to education. To guarantee enjoyment of this right, the state establishes and gradually extends the various types of schools and other cultural and educational institutions.

The state pays special attention to the physical and mental development of young people.

Article 95

The People's Republic of China safeguards the freedom of citizens to engage in scientific research, literary and artistic creation and other cultural pursuits. The

state encourages and assists creative work in science, education, literature, art and other cultural pursuits.

Article 96

Women in the People's Republic of China enjoy equal rights with men in all spheres of political, economic, cultural, social and domestic life.

The state protects marriage, the family, and the mother and child.

Article 97

Citizens of the People's Republic of China have the right to bring complaints against any person working in organs of state for transgression of law or neglect of duty by making a written or verbal statement to any organ or state at any level. People suffering loss by reason of infringement by persons working in organs of state of their rights as citizens have the right to compensation.

Article 98

The People's Republic of China protects the proper rights and interests of Chinese resident abroad.

Article 99

The People's Republic of China grants the right of asylum to any foreign national persecuted for supporting a just cause, for taking part in the peace movement or for engaging in scientific activity.

Article 100

Citizens of the People's Republic of China must abide by the Constitution and the law, uphold discipline at work, keep public order and respect social ethics.

Article 101

The public property of the People's Republic of China is sacred and inviolable. It is the duty of every citizen to respect and protect public property.

Article 102

It is the duty of citizens of the People's Republic of China to pay taxes according to law. Article 103

It is the sacred duty of every citizen of the People's Republic of China to defend the homeland.

It is an honourable duty of citizens of the People's Republic of China to perform military service according to law.

CHAPTER FOUR-NATIONAL FLAG, NATIONAL EMBLEM, CAPITAL

Article 104

The national flag of the People's Republic of China is a red flag with five stars.

Article 105

The national emblem of the People's Republic of China is: in the centre, Tien An Men under the light of five stars, framed with ears of grain, and with a cogwheel at the base.

Article 106

The capital of the People's Republic of China is Peking.

"THE REALITY OF THE CHOICE-U.S. CHINA RELATIONS,"-STATEMENT BY CONGRESSMAN PARREN J. MITCHELL, 7TH DISTRICT OF MARYLAND

I wish to address myself to the future of relations between two of the great countries of the world, China and the United States. That future is bound up

with our past and present relations, and there is no way-however one might wish there were to intelligently consider the future in isolation from the past. The impact of recent events, namely the trips by the U.S. ping-pong team and others may have obscured the nature of that past in the American mind, a past from which we already had been cutoff by layers of self-serving myths concerning American policy and behavior toward China in the Twentieth Century. We were, of course, most of us delighted by the Chinese invitations and by the warm welcome our countrymen received in China. But this satisfaction verging at times on euphoria, may mislead us if we fail to understand these events in the context of Sino-American relations over the last several decades or so.

Already we see official U.S. government explanations and trial balloons that attempt to place the latest Chinese initiatives in a light most favorable to the Nixon Administration's policies. Thus we learn, for example, that the Chinese invitation is a "response" to a series of positive, if restrained, steps the Nixon Administration had previously taken regarding China in the areas of travel and trade. More than that, we learn that the Chinese today are in a more open frame of mind, more pragmatic, more compromising. If this official line of reasoning continues to be developed, it seems predictable that the next stage in our collective enlightenment by our government may well be the Administration's suggestion that, given the "proven success" of the Nixon initiatives toward China, the evolving U.S. position of one-China and one-Taiwan on the United Nations issue also is likely to be acceptable to China.

The Administration's argument appears to have two prongs. First, if China indeed is more pragmatic then will she not respond favorably to what we see as a reasonable compromise on the Taiwan issue, one that simultaneously offers us the virtue of "honoring our commitments to the people of Taiwan," while furthering our interest in bettering relations with the People's Republic? And second, if, on the other hand, as increasing numbers of China experts predict, China will not respond positively to a one-China, one-Taiwan proposal, then will we not have done all that reasonable and honorable men can do? The answer to both of these questions is no. The answer is no, in part because the question itself appears to be the wrong question. China's national interest in the future status of Taiwan is much greater and more direct than America's, and China has made her position regarding Taiwan abundantly clear. The issue for Peking is whether the United Sttaes will respond positively to China's position, a position that she sees as reasonable in terms of her own history, and one on which in more than twenty years she has given no evidence of compromising the substance.

It is important, therefore, to recognize that beneath today's surface of events, which gives some signs of new openness on both sides, beneath that surface all the same problems still fester. And it is vitally important also to recognize that an attempt is likely to be made by the Nixon Administration to cover up the grievous failures of a quarter-century of America's China policy in a series of moves that tries to make our policy appear to be vindicated rather than bankrupted. We must not allow this to happen. We must not allow it to happen, because if we wish to significantly improve our relations with China we must directly confront these problems and our role in creating them. We must not allow further obfuscation of the truth of what we have done if we are ever to understand ourselves and to avoid repeating similar patterns of behavior in the future. Our record in China is not the glorious one we have been led to believe, and we must learn to face forthrightly the shames as well as the glories of our past, if we are to grow as people.

Ah, some may say, that is all well and good, but now is not the time for such breast-beating. Surely we recognize that America is not wholly without fault in the worsening of relations between China and the United States that followed the beginning of the Korean War. Surely we recognize that we have made mistakes, but just as surely we know that we have fundamentally supported the Twentieth Century struggle of the Chinese people for national self-respect. And we know, too, that raking up the dead ashes of the past will only lead to unproductive recriminations against those who were responsible for formulating and maintaining our China policy. Now is the time, so the argument goes, to focus on the hard, practical problems at hand, to put the mistakes and ill will of the past out of our minds, and to deal with each other in a pragmatic manner that will contribute to building bridges between China and the United States.

Would that that were possible-that men could resolve their problems while ignoring the causes of those problems and without considering the question of responsibility for the creation and perpetuation of such problems. But it is not possible, because men are human, because they have memories and because problems have histories and cannot be understood or resolved without attending to their background.

America's generation-old China policy today is in crisis. We can no longer isolate China. We can no longer exclude her from the international community of nations. And that crisis, epitomized in its immediacy by our forthcoming, predictable loss in the United Nations, has created the incentive and set the tone for most discussions of our China policy. But crises, as Chinese ideographs for the word "crisis" make clear, incorporate both dangers and opportunities. We should utilize this crisis in America's China policy as an opportunity to fully re-examine our past dealings with China and, based on a fundamentally new evaluation, to formulate policy responses that go beyond those tailored primarily to the Administration's perception of the immediate crisis concerning Peking's seating in the U.N.

II

In beginning to de-mystify our understanding of Sino-American relations there is no better place to start than with the differing conceptions of the history of our relations held by the Chinese and American peoples. A sage of some race, color or creed once said, "If you wish to understand a country, learn what its people remember." Americans remember an altruistic, long-suffering, righteous America that fought side by side with Chinese for China's independence and selfdetermination, only to be rejected in 1949, by an irrational, hostile China. Ironically, we continue today to embrace this image of our conduct that strikingly resembles the image we held only five or six years ago of our behavior in Vietnam.

But the Chinese remember that history so differently. They remember the history of relations between the U.S. and China during the last seventy years in terms of a series of principled statements made by the U.S. that all too frequently were followed by a series of betrayals of those very principles through the actions of inactions of the United States. From the declaration of the Open Door through our defense of the Chiang K'ai-shek government, America, in Chinese eyes, has been pursuing its own global interests at the expense of the people of China. And, sad to say, the Chinese vision of history is closer to the facts than ours.

What, for example, does the Open Door Doctrine mean to most of us? It means, of course, the declaration of U.S. respect for the territorial and administrative integrity of China and for the right of these Chinese people to self-determination as against the imperialist incursions of the major European powers and Japan. But did it really mean that? Why did America at the turn of the Twentieth Century adopt the Open Door Doctrine? And what did it mean in practice?

To dispel the first and most common illusion, the Open Door is not an example of U.S. generosity toward China. Rather, it is an example of a U.S. policy that was primarily and narrowly based on American self-interest and subsequently sold to the general American public under the guise of altruism. America favored an open door in China because America was, in the early 1900s, far behind the traditional colonial powers in the development of spheres of interest in China. We favored an Open Door Policy because, with our rapidly expanding economy, we believed such a policy was the most effective way to assure for ourselves the access to markets and raw materials in China. It was not in our interests, nor was it in China's interests, for China to become the exclusive colony of one of the imperial powers. Nor was it in our own or China's interest for China to be divided up among the imperial competitors into a number of mutually exclusive, closed-door spheres of interest. It was, rather, in our interest, if not China's to keep the door to China open to all comers, who would compete under ground rules formulated and acceptable to the great powers and accepted by the foreigndominated government of China.

If our own people have not understood the hard-nosed, self-serving reality of the Open Door Doctrine, our allies and enemies certainly have. None of the great powers such as Great Britain and Japan, who had developed their entrenched position in China more effectively than we, accepted the Open Door principle. They rejected it, not because they were less altruistic or less generous than we, but because they say that their self-interest would not be well served

by our policies. The Open Door Doctrine, for all its high-flown moral tone, was an attempt to assure that the United States get the fruits of Western imperialism in China without having to bear the main burdens.

Throughout the first forty-odd years of the Twentieth Century we continued to mouth pieties about China that were aimed primarily at limiting the development of other powers' interests there. And when the Chinese, for example, during the Versailles Conference following World War I, or in 1931 when Japan invaded Manchuria, took our declarations of respect for China's sovereignty seriously, they repeatedly were disillusioned by our failure to support our principles and by our ultimate accommodation to the power plays in China by Japan. Not that we were happy to see other powers expanding their role in China at our expense, but until the 1940s we felt neither the will nor the power to physically deny that expansion to them.

All that began to change during and after World War II. During the War the rhetoric of Open Door was transformed into the rhetoric of the U.S. helping China to build a strong and independent nation. Once again our people saw themselves as the defenders of all that is good in the world. And once again our policy makers deceived themselves and us into believing that generosity and high moral principles, rather than narrow self-interest, provided the basis of our policies toward China.

But our role in the Chinese civil war of 1946-49 and our actions thereafter pierced the veil of rhetoric. When we spoke of a strong and independent China, we did not mean a China that was independent of the United States, nor one strong enough to resist our dominant influence. When we spoke of a strong and independent China, rather, we meant a grateful, friendly China, strong enough to maintain the balance of power in Asia in our favor, a China independent of the Soviet Union and independent of Japan.

The test of the pudding was in the eating. The first really strong and independent government that emerged in China in the Twentieth Century, the first government to have the active support of the vast majority of the Chinese people, that government--the People's Republic-we fought tooth and nail both during the Chinese civil war that led up to its founding and, with the possible exception of a few months in late 1949 and early 1950, on into the 1950s and 1960s.

The extent of America's involvement in the Chinese Civil War during the 1940s has been obscured--much as has the extent until relatively recently of our involvement throughout Indo China-by our understandable desire to believe the best of America, by our own self-interest, and by the propagandists of America's war machine. Our exposure to the Vietnam war, however, may finally have opened our minds to the reality of an ugly America in Asia to the point that we can reconsider today America's role in China after World War II.

It has been generally assumed that the United States was not very deeply involved in the Chinese civil war between the Communists and the so-called Nationalists. It is assumed, further, that although we did give some limited support to Chiang's Nationalist government, we also tried to mediate the conflict and that, in any event, we moved expeditiously to extricate ourselves from our limited involvement when Marshall's mediation effort failed in 1946. That is the myth of U.S. restraint, but the reality is far less pleasant.

If the complex circumstances of the last half of the 1940s-including our primary commitment to Europe, the domestic demand in America to demobilize after World War II, and the then only limited development of our super power and of our anti-communist ideology-if these circumstances were not conducive to massively involving the U.S. in a Vietnam-style commitment in China, the extent of our peacetime involvement in the Chinese civil war was, nevertheless, truly fantastic. For example:

1. We arranged the terms of the Japanese surrender in World War II so that, although the Chinese Communist forces had fought the Japanese at least as hard and as successfully as the Nationalist forces, the Nationalists were to be the exclusive recipients of the Japanese surrender in China proper. This meant that one side in the temporarily abated civil war was to get all the prestige, arms and the strategic ground formerly occupied by the Japanese.

2. We employed U.S. marines to hold cities and lines of transportation either for Nationalist forces or for the puppet forces who during the war had collaborated with the Japanese and after the war cooperated with the Nationalists. In so physically interposing our troops into key areas on the side of the Nationalists, we once again denied to the Chinese Communists what they thought was rightfully theirs.