Bush tweaks China ahead of games

President Bush’s actions and words in the past week promoting religious and political freedom inside China have angered the communist government, increasing tensions for his visit to China this week for the 29th Summer Olympics.

Mr. Bush leaves Washington on Monday for his ninth presidential trip to Asia, a weeklong visit that he had hoped could be built around a simple celebration of sport and national pride, free of geopolitical tension.

Before he even gets to China, Mr. Bush will make stops in South Korea and Thailand that bring their own diplomatic challenges.

But the president’s thorniest task will be handling China, which reacted with fury to his Tuesday meeting with several Chinese dissidents, including Harry Wu and Wei Jingsheng, who tried to persuade him not to go.

In a statement after the meeting, Mr. Bush said he will “carry the message of freedom as he travels to Beijing for the games, just as he has regularly made this a priority in all of his meetings with Chinese officials.”

Starting Friday, Mr. Bush will spend four days in Beijing attending the Olympics’ opening ceremony and several events, including a men’s basketball game between the U.S. and China. The visit will be the first by an American president to an Olympics outside the U.S.

In an interview with The Washington Times, Mr. Wei said he told the president that going to the Olympics “is a mistake” and urged him to cancel the visit. “Regardless [of] how you explain it, the Chinese government would say that it supports the communist dictatorial government,” Mr. Wei said.

Mr. Wei said Mr. Bush responded that he sees the Olympics merely as a sporting event, echoing words that the president has said publicly.

“I’m coming as a sportsman,” he said in an interview with a Chinese journalist. He said in a separate session with a group of Asian journalists that the American “objective is to get more medals than anybody.”

But Mr. Bush also will spend part of his time pushing for human rights, including greater religious and political freedom in China, though he insists he is not traveling to Beijing to politicize the Olympics. As he did the last time he visited China, the two-term president will go to church Sunday morning, though it will be an officially sanctioned state church, and then make a statement about religious freedom afterward to reporters.

Bob Fu, president of the Christian group China Aid and one of the five dissidents with whom Mr. Bush met Tuesday, said he asked the president to attend a nongovernmental “house” church.

Mr. Fu said the president replied that during an earlier visit he asked the Chinese government about visiting such a church and was told Beijing could not find any. Mr. Fu said he then handed the president a list of house churches with addresses and directions and told him those religious believers “are willing and welcoming him to worship with him.”

China’s underground or nonofficial churches include between 55 million and 90 million adherents who often face severe persecution from communist authorities.

Mr. Bush will attend a church that trains pastors of underground Christian churches.

“The church operates as a learning center for many of these house church pastors. And so the president is eager to go and hear about their efforts to work with those other pastors,” Dennis Wilder, the president’s top Asia adviser at the National Security Council, said in a briefing with reporters at the White House last week.

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