He who pays the piper calls the tune.

Particularly when your plan for a grand transition to socialism is dependent on keeping the Chinese lending you money rather than trying to drill your own oil and produce your own goods.

Kirsten Power has some harsh words about the Chen Guangcheng situation, although she doesn't actually blame any particular president:

Human-rights activists around the world rejoiced when Chen—blind since birth—managed to escape house arrest and reach the perceived safety of the embassy. That relief turned to shock six days later, when the United States pressured Chen to leave, promising that they would stay with him in the hospital as he received treatment for injuries sustained during his escape.

Yet, Chen told CNN that once he reached the hospital the U.S. officials disappeared. Remember: he’s blind. The U.S. Embassy staff left an injured blind man who is an enemy of the state in the custody of his totalitarian oppressors. The State Department said today that the U.S. government has been in contact with Chen by phone and hopes to have a face-to-face meeting with him. So, they went from having him on American soil (the embassy) to not able to see him.

If only this was just incompetence. It seems so much worse.

And:

Now, Clinton and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner are in China with this cloud of shame hanging over them. Every statement from the U.S. government has attempted to sell the implausible story that Chen chose to return to his captors. In a briefing from Beijing today, a Senior State Department spokesperson said that, “it was our agreement with the Chinese that they would do a full battery of physical tests today given concerns about the mistreatment and abuse he had had for months and years, and the need to do a full workup on him."

Who was responsible for the “mistreatment and abuse”? That would be the very government to which the U.S. Embassy handed Chen over. “Not only does the Chinese government have an appalling track record on human rights,” said Human Rights Watch Director Sophie Richardson in a statement, “but Chen himself has also already reported receiving threats to his family’s safety by government officials and fearing for his and their security.”

“Chen is revered and so loved in China,” Reggie Littlejohn, founder of the China-focused human-rights group Women Without Frontiers, told me. “When he got into embassy, so many people felt he was safe and they really felt it was the safest place in China. So now the embassy has done this and it has really shaken people's trust in the U.S. We really completely botched it.”

The Chinese people had a reason to expect the United States would offer a safe haven, because that’s exactly what they did in 1989 with Tiananmen Square leader Fang Li Zhi. The U.S. embassy protected Feng and his wife for a year and also negotiated for him to be re-united with his children. U.S. negotiations conducted by Henry Kissinger eventually meant that Fang and his family were able to leave China and finally settle in Arizona. So involved in the case was the U.S that, according to the Washington Post, Fang chose to go to the embassy “in the middle of the night after U.S. diplomats sent word that President George H.W. Bush had personally approved giving him, his wife and son, Fang De, sanctuary.”

President George H.W. Bush was a mensch, and had room to manuever.

Besides Democrats don't have any particular problem with turning defenseless people over to Communists.