Bush dad: China's too important to us

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BEIJING, Aug. 7 (UPI) -- Former U.S. President George H.W. Bush said it would have been a mistake for his son to skip the Beijing Summer Olympics to protest China's human rights policy.

In an interview broadcast Thursday on NBC's "The Today Show," the elder Bush said he thinks China has been judged unfairly in recent weeks. His remarks came just hours after his son took China to task for human rights violations in a speech in Thailand. They also followed months of protests in and about Tibet.

"We've got a lot of things in common with China," said the former president, who was a former U.S. envoy to China during the Ford administration. "We view them as a very important country who's making an imprint and will make a bigger one as time goes by. The U.S.-China relationship, in my viewpoint, is about the most important bilateral relationship we have. And for the president to insult China by not coming here would have been far worse."