Other voices: China chief benefactor of world's thugs

Thousands of protesters have mobbed the Olympic torch as it makes it way around the world to protest China's violent repression of demonstrators in Tibet — turning the 21-city torch tour into a public relations fiasco for Beijing.

Despicable as China's actions in Tibet may be, protesters should take a larger view. They should realize that China has become the chief patron of the vilest regimes in the world — undercutting at most every turn, and every place, the West's efforts to promote human rights.

How can the United States, Europe and the United Nations effectively isolate rogue states when China is more than willing to lend them money, buy their oil, sell arms and offer warm relations to most anyone who asks, no matter how murderous or corrupt.

China manages all of this with a foreign-policy trope that at first seems perfectly benign. As Jiang Yu, spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, put it recently, "China always adopts a policy of non-interference."

This policy has proved to be perfectly pernicious. China chooses not to pass judgment on other nations' behavior. No matter how dangerous a state may be, China stands ready to make a deal. The non-interference policy also offers a side benefit: China says no one has any right to judge how it behaves — even when it shoots demonstrators in Tibet.

Nowhere is this more visible than in Sudan. China is the chief benefactor for Sudan's genocidal leaders. In violation of a U.N. arms embargo, Beijing provides the weapons and ammunition that President Omar al-Bashir uses to arm militias that have slaughtered more than 200,000 people in Darfur.

China buys 90 percent of Sudan's oil exports and has given the regime more than $1 billion in so-called "concessional" loans. They come with low interest — or none at all, and China has been quick to forgive them altogether. All of this for a state that the rest of the world regards as a pariah.

Sudan is hardly the only questionable benefactor of Chinese largess. China remains Burma's most important ally. You may recall that Burma's military rulers ordered troops to shoot and kill dozens of Buddhist monks during pro-democracy demonstrations last fall. Once again, China buys oil and natural gas from Burma and sells weaponry to the junta.

And then there's Iran. In 2004, a few months after the United Nations found that Iran was secretly processing nuclear fuel that could, eventually, be enriched for use in nuclear weapons, China signed a $100 billion deal to import natural gas from Iran over the next 25 years. What is more, China provided much of the equipment Iran first used to process nuclear fuel — and trained Iran's nuclear technicians.

In recent years, China has struck energy deals with Hugh Chavez in Venezuela. The Chinese have begun oil exploration in Cuba. They made a mineral-exploration deal with Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbawe, who now appears to be stealing the presidential election there.

Meantime, China remains North Korea's closest friend and protector. China provides about 70 percent of the renegade state's food and nearly 80 percent of its fuel.

What has all of this gained China? Short-term energy security. But in many of these states, when the dictators fall from power, the governments that replace them are likely to regard China with distrust, resentment, anger — or worse.

Joel Brinkley is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for The New York Times and now a professor of journalism at Stanford University.