Beijing owes reform

This week, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has been holding meetings in Asia with, among others, China's foreign minister -- the first high-level contact since the (Clinton-Jiang Zemin) summit. She has the opportunity to remind her counterpart that, although Mr. Clinton's trip generally was regarded in America as a success, that evaluation will not long endure if things in China move backward.

Mr. Clinton returned with no concrete accomplishments in exchange for the praise he lavished on China's dictators; the only payment was the hope of future change. China fed that hope, Secretary Albright can remind the foreign minister, by promising to sign a United Nations charter on human rights that guarantees, among other things, freedom of political expression. Yet China's government, like the Soviet regime before it, continues to demean all dissidents as nothing but common criminals. The president and Mrs. Albright can try to repair some of that damage by pressing China to fulfill its promise to accept universal standards of human rights -- and then to live by that commitment.

-- The Washington Post