By Jim Hoagland

December 1 1996 - The Washington Post

Mickey Mouse emerges as statesman of the week on China, with Bill Clinton a distant second. The mouse knows something that the president's advisers on Asia seem to ignore.

Executives at the Walt Disney Co., who make fortunes out of reading American likes and dislikes, have decided not to cave in to China. They said they would honor Disney's contract to distribute in the United States a film about the Dali Lama of Tibet despite Beijing's warnings of retaliation.

The Disney execs may have been reacting to legal advice or to their strong commitment to artistic freedom. But the decision also certainly reflects Disney's concern about its corporate image with the American public, which has a decidedly mixed view of China and the crude intimidation it uses against dissidents, foreign business and other governments.

That is the central reality Clinton failed to acknowledge when he so easily embraced China's decaying communist regime on his recent Asian trip: America today lacks a consensus on China. Americans lack a shared perspective strong enough and deep enough to support a consistent policy, either of hostility or of cooperation.

I always have agreed more with the 1992 Clinton and his attacks on George Bush for coddling the dictators in Beijing than with the 1996 Clinton, who used the economic conference in Manila to advance a China trip for Vice President Gore and a visit to the White House for Chinese President Jiang Zemin.

But Clinton's Manila performance mandates a turning point in the war of words over China policy between the president and his critics. The urgent point now is the widening gulf between the president and his critics, who predictably greeted Clinton's words of comfort for Beijing with a fusillade of attacks.

Neither side is listening to the other. Until they do, America will continue to have an erratic, unbalanced and in the long run dangerous relationship with Asia's emerging economic and military giant.

Official relations swing wildly: Last spring Washington and Beijing stood on the brink of military confrontation over Taiwan. Last week Clinton and the Chinese president showered warm words, sweet smiles and promises of future state visits on each other.

And between those two extreme moments, the American public saw no change on the ground that would explain such a dramatic turnabout. During that time China continued to persecute dissidents, lie about its arms exports, pressure America not to support Taiwan and fight aggressively to keep its trade surplus with the United States constantly expanding.

Even attentive Americans can be forgiven for feeling they are caught in a strange time warp. Vote for George Bush, the Clinton campaign warned back in 1992, and bloodstained Chinese leaders will be feted at the White House. Sure enough, everybody who voted for George Bush soon will be able to say that Clinton's prediction came true.

Clinton seems convinced that his powers of persuasion will overpower carping from columnists and the human rights crowd, already relegated to the attic of his diplomacy. But the lines of division in America over China are deep and certain to grow deeper because of Tibet and the impending takeover of Hong Kong by the communists.

These divisions are described clearly and compellingly in a recent private policy paper written by Morton I. Abramowitz, a former senior State Department official and now president of a major think tank here.

Classing himself among the "strategists" who "are nostalgic" for the Cold War days when playing the China card was a useful balance to the Soviet Union, Abramowitz acknowledges that other big thinkers disagree: They "have declared China inevitably expansionist." The human rights crowd sees China "as a vast despotism, while our businessmen eye it as a tempting, immense market."

A Sinologist by training, Abramowitz goes on to lay out a comprehensive strategy for identifying and adopting the fundamental points for a new American consensus on China.

I disagree with some of the emphasis and direction suggested by Abramowitz -- he too quickly dismisses the significance of the Tiananmen protests of May-June, 1989, for example. But I think he is dead right in warning that until the president and his critics go back to the drawing board and try to forge a manageable consensus, neither side will have a workable policy.

Clinton needs new strategists on China who have a sense of how to end the stalemate of nonconsensus. Who's got Mickey's phone number?