World Tibet Network News Monday, June 22, 1998

By Jim Hoagland

Sunday, June 21, 1998; Page C07

Washington Post

In their most extreme rhetoric, some Republicans skirt close to

charging Bill Clinton with treason in dealing with China, putting the president on the defensive as he prepares for a nine-day trip to the Middle Kingdom. Such partisan overstatement obscures the real problems, and the real politics, of the coming voyage.

The diplomatic strategy behind the presidential journey is flawed, not fatal or felonious. The United States is strong enough to survive the Clinton China policy (which greatly resembles those of his Republican predecessors) and Beijing's relatively feeble attempts to buy influence and advanced, militarily useful technology in the American marketplace.

It is the contribution this trip could make to the continuing erosion of Clinton's credibility that should be the primary concern of presidential critics and friends alike.

Clinton, who leaves for China on Tuesday, already has shown himself to have scant concern for the truth on a wide variety of subjects. He does not need to go to Tiananmen Square to remind the world of his extraordinary talent to deceive others and, arguably worse in a politician, to deceive himself when that is convenient.

But that is the situation he is setting up. His China trip is being scripted around a set of fictions. Clinton joins the Chinese in manipulating himself for their purposes, which he mistakes as identical to his own.

The most important fiction coming from the Clinton camp is that this trip is about changing the values and politics of China. It is in fact a trip dedicated to changing American perceptions and politics. The idea is to get the American public at large to accept the anodyne, uncritical view of China now firmly entrenched in the ranks of American business leaders and academic specialists.

Clinton's trip is being preceded not only by routine spin sessions by White House aides but also by extraordinary advertising campaigns sponsored by Boeing, Mobil and other U.S. corporations pleading for understanding and political support for the Chinese Communist government's efforts to secure a special place in the world trading system.

These ads are no doubt placed in gratitude, which Winston Churchill once defined as the expression of thanks for favors still to come.

The White House suggests that the strong words Clinton will utter on the trip about America's commitment to human rights will eclipse the images of his warm embraces of China's leaders. He intends these words to negate the symbolism of his participating in an arrival ceremony on June 27 at the edge of Tiananmen Square, where Chinese troops slaughtered hundreds of peaceful pro-democracy demonstrators on June 4, 1989.

But as the visit comes closer, how he would accomplish this becomes less clear. The ceremony at the square will be "a five-minute deal," with Clinton making no public statement there, Samuel R. (Sandy) Berger, the president's national security adviser, said on a visit to The Washington Post the other day. Those pictures will be worth a million words to China's Leninist oligarchy.

This is a visit on which little of strategic substance will be

accomplished. Berger has instead been deeply involved in negotiating ceremonial details with Beijing. "This is where every leader who goes to China arrives. . . . This is a location that has 600 years of history for the Chinese people. Doing this does not absolve the Chinese from what happened in 1989," he said.

But in China, the site of the arrival ceremony is now about politics, not protocol. The last foreign dignitary to visit China before the massacre of the students was Mikhail Gorbachev, who was greeted at the Beijing airport to keep him away from the students, gathered in Tiananmen to endorse Gorbachev's perestroika reforms. Douglas Paal, president of the Asia-Pacific Policy Center and George Bush's national security adviser on Asia, takes this view: "The Chinese began absolutely insisting that the arrival ceremony be held in the square after 1989, to make a political point. Before that there were ceremonies at the airport. Look at the photograph of Zhou Enlai greeting President Nixon" in 1972.

A small detail? Berger seems to think so. "We can achieve more in advancing the cause of political freedom by not making the trip for the Chinese totally about Tiananmen, which it certainly would have been if we had declined to go there, but by making human rights the centerpiece of our concerns." Of the welcoming ceremony, he added: "They made it very clear. This is where they do it."

But there is a disturbing consistency in the administration's

avoidance of inconvenient facts and in its refusal to acknowledge the enormous importance that such details of form possess in Chinese society. Much of what Clinton and his aides don't know about China from the history of Tiananmen welcoming ceremonies to evidence of shipments of nuclear technology to Pakistan after Beijing promised to stop that help-exists because they determinedly don't want to know.

Fringe Republicans look at this trip and cry treason. They lack

perspective. But so does Clinton, as he turns his eyes from the

corporate greed, political ego and strategic miscalculation that have shaped the trip's hidden agenda.

That agenda is to change the way the United States thinks about a Chinese leadership that still refuses to change the way it thinks about the United States and democracy. The president errs in being a political stage prop for this regime.