Published by: World Tibet Network News Sunday, October 19, 1997

By Ivo Dawnay in Washington

The Daily Telegraph, Sunday, 19 October 1997

CAN alliance of showbiz liberals, Christian activists and conservative Congressmen plans to make the imminent state visit of Jiang Zemin, China's leader, one of the most controversial in US history.

From the moment he sets foot on American soil in Honolulu, a week today, President Jiang must brace himself for protests and demonstrations that will continue through Washington, Philadelphia, New York and Los Angeles.

Tensions will be fuelled by three Hollywood films - two on Tibet and one on human rights abuses in Beijing. When the $70 million epic Seven Years in Tibet starring Brad Pitt opened last week, cinemagoers were given briefing kits on how to protest about Chinese treatment of the kingdom, annexed in 1949. Buddhism is religious flavour of the month in the canyons of Los Angeles and the lofts of New York. It was the cover story in Time and China-hating is chic on campus. A more restrained version has long been respectable in churches and synagogues where prayers are offered weekly for victims of religious intolerance.

Last week, the actor Richard Gere was flying back from a meditating session with the Dalai Lama in northern India to co-ordinate protests. They will include a "stateless banquet", timed to coincide with the official state banquet at the White House, where stars like Harrison Ford, Uma Thurman and Sharon Stone will urge diners to give generously to Tibetan and other charities. Elsewhere in Washington as many as five bills are being submitted for debating time on the floor of the House of Representatives. While largely symbolic, each intends to demonstrate Congress's readiness to penalise China's growing US trade if there is no rapid improvement in the communist regime's treatment of religious groups and dissidents.

There is a growing clamour for retaliatory action against China for its burgeoning and indiscriminate arms trading. Anger towards China has united the black civil rights campaigner Jesse Jackson on the far Left and Jesse Helms, the crusty Senate foreign relations committee chairman, on the conservative Right.

President Bill Clinton, faced by growing protests at home over his desire to develop closer relations with China, must negotiate a week full of potential diplomatic and political challenges.

In the shuttle diplomacy that precedes all such state visits, US envoys have quietly urged the Chinese to offer symbolic gestures. Instead, they have been reminded of the notorious sensitivities of Chinese leaders and their obsession with appearances and "face".

Beijing objected to a plan to hold the state dinner in a vast marquee on the White House lawn, insisting on the smaller but more formal state dining room.

The Chinese were also upset by a decision not to offer Mr Jiang a speech to a joint session of Congress, an option that might merely have offered a new protest-opportunity for Congressmen considering elections next year. The state visit comes 18 months after the Straits of Taiwan incident in which aggressive Chinese military manoeuvres prompted America to send two carrier groups to the region, plunging Sino-US relations to a 25-year low.

The Chinese authorities want to use the tour to show their people that China is again respectable and that political repercussions of the Tiananmen Square massacre have been consigned to history.

Some gestures have come from both sides. America has given assurances that it will make no arms transfers to Taiwan and that it is faithful to the principle that there should eventually be one China, the policy shift that launched the Nixon-Kissinger detente with China of the Seventies. China has assured Newt Gingrich, Speaker of the House of Representatives, that it will halt sales of its C802 missile to Iran and introduce regulations on exporting nuclear materials.

Most experienced China experts, however, remain sceptical. Douglas Paal, head of the Asia Pacific Policy Centre and a former adviser to Presidents Bush and Reagan, blames the Clinton administration for lack of coherence in its dealings with Beijing.

By mixing up different issues like trade and human rights, he says, the administration is squandering behind-the-scenes gains that brought improvements in China's behaviour.

Whatever the outcome of the visit, the censors' pencils and photograph retouchers in Beijing will deliver a diplomatic triumph. President Clinton's "spin doctors" may have a tougher task.