Bush, trying to appease stateside critics of his decision to attend the 2008 Olympics despite China’s still-poor human rights record, gave a speech in Bangkok today criticizing China:

Change in China will arrive on its own terms and in keeping with its own history and its own traditions. Yet change will arrive. And it will be clear for all to see that those who aspire to speak their conscience and worship their God are no threat to the future of China.

The first two sentences are, obviously, platitudes–of course China will change and that it will do so in a “Chinese way”. Duh.

The other part is more interesting, as it’s obviously a shot at China’s protest-fearing leadership. China has been letting out one big sigh of relief at Bush’s apparent eagerness to attend the Olympics despite many potential political reasons not to, so this will probably come off a more serious rebuke than it otherwise would have. And, to an extent, it’s an admirable one–unlike Joey Cheek, Bush isn’t likely to get his visa revoked anytime soon, putting him in a unique position to support and be friendly the Olympics and China while also using that positive energy to massage change into the country. It’s hard to tell whether Bush or anybody on his staff actually gets this point (according to reports Bush just really, really wants to attend the Olympics, which may the underlying logic of his entire strategy), but this is precisely the way encourage change in the Chinese leadership: give them face and stoke their egos but, at the same time, apply constant, light pressure on key issues. This is certainly better than the “media attack” approach popular in the West right now, which revolves around embarrassing China and does get some results, but often ends up creating a huge backlash of nationalism that knocks the country even further back than it was before (as happened with the torch protests in Paris and London, for example).

But notice, too, what Bush is advocating in this speech. On the one hand he’s pushing for freedom of speech–obviously a noble cause. But then he advocates freedom to “worship [one's] God”? It sounds very much here like Bush (a born-again Christian) has a particular god in mind.

Freedom of belief, of course, is a noble thing and seems to be the bigger idea that Bush is advocating here. But the devil (or, in this case, God) is in the details. Of the major religious affiliations existing in China right now, after all, only two of them recognize a single god. It sounds like Bush is only supporting one of these monotheistic religions in China, and I doubt that it’s Islam.

The hidden evangelistic hopes behind Bush’s (and many Americans’) push to liberalism in China are problematic. If you tell somebody that you want to bring them greater freedom, awesome, but if they think (in this case, correctly) that your motivation for doing is to have more freedom to push your own thinking, culture, and values on them and their children–then resistance to the change is likely to crop up. And that resistance is more reasonable than it sounds–missionaries are chomping at the bit to have free reign in China again and, though the point is certainly up for debate, it seems that there has never been a documented historical case of sudden missionary fervor in some part of the world that didn’t cause as much or more harm to the local people as it did benefit to them.

If Americans really want liberalism and democracy in China, then, they’d stand a better chance of selling the Chinese on these ideas if they stopped trying to force-feed them Christianity at the same time.

You don’t have to know English to see what’s behind Bush’s speech.