Adrift in the China Sea

WASHINGTON, President Bush is getting it from all sides now. A few days after he lobbed the tax grenade into the hands of his supporters here, he set off to London to patch up the differences among America’s allies in NATO. During the following press conference, however, a reporter threw in a little bomb of his own by bringing up the case of Fang Lizhi, the Chinese astrophysicist who had arrived in Britain a week earlier after almost a year in America’s Peking embassy. What did the President think, the reporter asked, of Fang’s comments to NBC criticizing Washington for its “double standard” on human rights in China? Fang also suggested that Bush owed him a dinner, a reference to the one he had missed in April 1989 when the Chinese authorities prevented him from going.

“I thought he wanted to stay out of the public eye,” said the President, obviously taken aback. “I thought he himself said so, so you’ve got a little different information than that . . .”

WM

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William McGurn

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WASHINGTON, President Bush is getting it from all sides now. A few days after he lobbed the tax grenade into the hands of his supporters here, he set off to London to patch up the differences among America’s allies in NATO. During the following press conference, however, a reporter threw in a little bomb of his own by bringing up the case of Fang Lizhi, the Chinese astrophysicist who had arrived in Britain a week earlier after almost a year in America’s Peking embassy. What did the President think, the reporter asked, of Fang’s comments to NBC criticizing Washington for its “double standard” on human rights in China? Fang also suggested that Bush owed him a dinner, a reference to the one he had missed in April 1989 when the Chinese authorities prevented him from going.

“I thought he wanted to stay out of the public eye,” said the President, obviously taken aback. “I thought he himself said so, so you’ve got a little different information than that . . .”