Published by: World Tibet Network News, Thursday, July 11,1996

Policy Flip-Flops Roil Mercurial Relationship

By Michael Dobbs

Washington Post Staff Writer

July 9th 1996 -- Ask Clinton administration officials to state their number one geopolitical concern over the next few years, and the answer is usually the same. Not Russia, not Bosnia, not the Middle East. The consensus is growing in Washington that all these foreign policy headaches pale by comparison with the challenge of encouraging China to become a responsible member of the world community.

Last weekend, President Clinton dispatched his national security adviser to Beijing with the goal of repairing relations with the most populous nation on Earth. The four-day trip by Anthony Lake follows a high-level review of U.S. policy toward China earlier this year, triggered by a series of clashes with Beijing. The review concluded that the United States needed to place its relationship on what White House officials describe as "a firmer, more strategic footing."

"By the end of last year, the White House had recognized that it was going to have to manage China policy very carefully in order to prevent it from falling off the cliff," said Stanley Roth, a former director of Asian affairs at the National Security Council. "We were faced with a very unpleasant reality. This is a country that is at least a regional superpower and could be a global one. We cannot make progress unless we have a cooperative relationship with it."

There is widespread agreement, both inside and outside the administration, that the United States needs the cooperation of Beijing to achieve key security objectives in Asia, including dealing with the nuclear threat from North Korea and preserving peace in the western Pacific. As one of five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, China has the ability to facilitate or thwart U.S. foreign policy initiatives. It is also the focal point of the world's most dynamic economic region, with annual growth rates of 9 percent over the last 15 years.

There is sharp disagreement, however, over the responsibility for the deterioration in relations between Washington and Beijing over the past few years. The two have had a series of battles over human rights, trade policy, arms proliferation and the status of Taiwan.

Clinton administration officials put most of most of the blame on the succession struggle in Beijing, as a new generation of leaders takes over from the aged and ailing patriarch Deng Xiaoping. They depict the present Chinese leadership as prickly and xenophobic, and point to the legacy of mistrust left from the June 1989 massacre of hundreds of pro-democracy activists near Tiananmen Square.

The critics, who include many of America's leading China experts, concede that China is going through a difficult period. But they also fault the Clinton administration for a series of policy flip-flops, on issues such as China's trading status and visas for senior Taiwanese officials. According to this view, the administration's penchant for making threats against Beijing only to back down at the last moment has severely undermined U.S. credibility in Beijing.

"I do not think there is any respect for the American government in Beijing," said Warren I. Cohen, head of China Studies at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. "Each one of these incidents reinforces two negative views that the Chinese have of America: first, that we are constantly picking on them; and second, that we do not hold them to account on anything."

The Clinton administration's handling of relations with China could become an issue in the presidential campaign this fall. Republican candidate Robert J. Dole has accused Clinton of "weakness and indecision, double-talk and incoherence" in his approach to Beijing. But he has also made clear that he shares the strategic goal of bringing China into the international community and is opposed to attempts by the anti-Beijing lobby in Congress to deny China most-favored-nation (MFN) trading status.

Senior administration officials insist they are laying the basis for a more stable relationship with a country of 1.3 billion people that is just beginning to flex its muscles on the world stage. As evidence, they point to several positive developments over the past few months, including settlement of a long-running dispute on intellectual property rights and the defusing of a war of nerves between China and Taiwan.

During his stay in Beijing, Lake is to meet with a wide spectrum of Chinese officials, including President Jiang Zemin and Prime Minister Li Peng.

"China is a very important country to us," said Winston Lord, the State Department's senior policymaker on Asia. "Inevitably, there are going to be problems in certain areas, such as human rights. In order to cope with these problems, we need to construct as broad an agenda as we can," as the administration is seeking to do, Lord said.

At the same time, Lord acknowledges that the administration "needs to do a better job of articulating its overall approach to China."

Trade and Human Rights

Under Clinton, two major shifts in U.S. policy have roiled U.S.-Chinese relations. The first was the administration's decision in 1994 to back down on using trade as a weapon to punish Beijing for human rights abuses. The second was last year's granting of a U.S. visa to the president of Taiwan, which Beijing regards as a renegade province.

The ups and downs in U.S. relations with China are hardly new. What is new, in the opinion of many China experts, is that the differences between Beijing and Washington have threatened to dominate ties, pushing the need for a steady, long-term strategic relationship into the background.

The Clinton administration came into office just as the rationale for a two-decades-old, U.S.-Chinese strategic alliance was crumbling. The geopolitical logic for cooperation between the United States and China was expressed most succinctly by Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong a few months after President Richard M. Nixon's landmark visit to Beijing in 1972. In his typically earthy fashion, Mao told then-Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger that America and China could overcome their vast ideological differences by working together "against a common bastard" -- the Soviet Union.

Fear of Moscow was the strategic glue that held the U.S.-China relationship together during six Republican and Democratic administrations. But Clinton remarked during the 1992 presidential campaign that it "no longer made any sense to play the China card" and show "forbearance" toward Beijing, because America's Soviet opponents had "thrown in their hand."

Clinton then went on to accuse his rival, President George Bush, of "coddling aging rulers with undisguised contempt for democracy, for human rights." If he came to power, Clinton said, he would withdraw all trading privileges from China as "long as they're locking people up."

Four months after taking office, Clinton signed an executive order giving China one year in which to "significantly improve" its human rights record. Otherwise, it would lose its valuable MFN trading status, which allows Chinese goods the same access to U.S. markets as that enjoyed by the vast majority of America's trading partners.

China experts inside and outside the administration are now virtually unanimous in saying that Clinton's attempt to link MFN to improvements in China's human rights record was doomed. Chinese leaders have a long tradition of digging in their heels when subjected to outside pressure.

Moreover, the threat of American retaliation was immediately undercut by the administration's inability to speak with one voice on China. While the State Department fulminated about human rights, the Commerce Department insisted that one of the world's fastest-growing markets be made safe for U.S. exports. Moreover, the Pentagon was in favor of renewing Sino-American military exchanges, as a way of promoting more openness in Chinese national security institutions.

"The Chinese began to get the idea that the Americans did not mean business," said Cohen, echoing the private complaint of many China specialists in the administration.

The low point in the administration's efforts to develop a coherent China policy came in March 1994, with a visit to Beijing by Secretary of State Warren Christopher. A few days earlier, without informing Christopher, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights John Shattuck held a meeting in a Beijing hotel with China's most prominent dissident, Wei Jingsheng. The Chinese were furious, and they took it out on Christopher, rounding up human rights activists while the secretary was still in Beijing.

Despite some token concessions, it was clear that China had failed to make "significant improvements" in its human rights record. But studies showed that as many as 140,000 U.S. jobs could be lost if the administration revoked MFN and the Chinese took counter-measures. The loss of jobs would be particularly serious in the Pacific seaboard -- a major center of trade with Asia -- including California, whose 54 electoral votes make it the richest prize in presidential politics.

The agonizing within the Clinton administration came against the background of exploding trade between the United States and China, which shot up from around $6 billion in 1980 to nearly $40 billion in 1993. Faced with an intensive lobbying campaign by American businessmen, Clinton decided to back down. On May 26, 1994, he announced that the policy of linking MFN to China's observance of human rights had reached the end of its useful life.

Trouble Over Taiwan

The next big challenge to the administration's China policy came from Taiwan, whose leaders had been conducting a skillful campaign for greater international recognition. Successive U.S. administrations had refused to grant visas to senior Taiwanese officials on the grounds that doing so could undermine the "one-China policy" worked out by Nixon and Mao. In late 1994, however, the Taiwanese began pressing the administration to permit President Lee Teng-hui to pay a visit to Cornell University, his American alma mater.

When the administration stood firm, Taiwanese lobbyists took their campaign to the Republican-controlled Capitol, where they found a sympathetic audience. Unlike mainland China, Taiwan had made rapid strides toward multi-party democracy by early 1995 and boasted a flourishing free market economy.

Most China experts in the administration were adamantly opposed to granting a visa to Lee. They understood that such a step would produce a neuralgic reaction in Beijing, which was hypersensitive to any issue affecting Chinese sovereignty. Several of these experts, including Roth and Robert Suettinger of the National Security Council, Don Keyser of the State Department, and the CIA's Ezra F. Vogel, wrote memos accurately predicting the counter-measures that China was likely to take, from cutting off military contacts with the United States to ratcheting up tensions in the Taiwan straits.

After Congress voted virtually unanimously to grant a visa to Lee, State Department officials began taking informal bets among themselves over the timing of the administration cave-in. But senior U.S. officials continued to assure the Chinese that permitting a Lee visit would be inconsistent with the one-China policy. The administration's position was reiterated in early April by Christopher at a meeting in New York with Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qichen.

According to State Department officials, Christopher also told Qian that the administration had so far been unsuccessful in arguing its case to Congress. His remark was intended as a veiled hint that a policy reversal was in the offing. Christopher aides now acknowledge, however, that the hint was probably lost on the Chinese foreign minister.

Later that month, Christopher attended a regular breakfast meeting at the White House with Lake and Defense Secretary William J. Perry, at which Taiwan was the main subject under discussion. Despite some soul-searching about the likely damage to Sino-U.S. relations, the three officials decided to recommend a change in policy to the president. Clinton, who had visited Taiwan four times as governor of Arkansas, was predisposed to granting Lee a visa, according to aides.

Subsequent events unfolded almost exactly as the China experts predicted, from the almost immediate cancellation of bilateral military visits to the war games in the Taiwan straits last February.