Who Misjudged China?

The recent events in China have caught the U.S. government and many American experts on China by surprise, just as has happened on many occasions in the past.

Some of the same China specialists and former U.S. officials now appearing on American television to analyze the massive demonstrations against the Chinese regime were until very recently insisting with confidence that all was well in China.

For years, accounts of popular dissatisfaction with the regime headed by Deng Xiaoping were minimized. Reports of serious divisions within the leadership of the Communist Party were dismissed as exaggerations.

For example, Winston Lord, the U.S. ambassador to Beijing from 1985 until this spring, has in recent days been telling TV audiences that the Chinese demonstrations show the need for political change in the world’s most populous country.

But for years, as ambassador, Lord told listeners that China’s reforms and its political leadership were on the right track. Last December, in one typical speech to the Commonwealth Club of California, Lord said: “We do not see a fractious Chinese leadership engaged in an intense struggle for power.” China and its leaders are “tired of bloody, factional infighting,” Lord said, and he did not see any “hard-liners waiting in the wings.”

Lord’s comments reflected the official American line on China, proclaimed by the State Department, by former President Reagan--and now by President Bush--and apparently, until the past year or so, by the analyses of the CIA.

During 1986-87 when an earlier round of student demonstrations led to the forced resignation of Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang, U.S. Embassy officials repeatedly suggested that Hu had been essentially a flaky personality and that his ouster had been precipitated not by policy disagreements but by unhappiness with Hu’s own personal style.

Only a few weeks later, when then-Secretary of State George P. Shultz paid a visit to China, a senior State Department official told the American media that Hu’s ouster had been just “a bump on the road.”

Much later, in its annual report to Congress on China in April, 1988, the CIA publicly acknowledged that Hu’s downfall had been connected to his role as a powerful advocate of liberalization.

These U.S. efforts to minimize China’s political problems called to mind the way President Franklin D. Roosevelt and other leading American officials glossed over the popular dissatisfaction with Chiang Kai-shek’s regime in the 1930s and ‘40s.

What led to the miscalculations this time? The U.S. government underemphasized the need for political change in China’s Communist Party to accompany economic change. U.S. officials underestimated the strength of a hard-line faction within the party determined to hold as close as possible to conventional Leninist ideology. They misread Deng Xiaoping’s own close links to the hard-liners.

U.S. officials also badly misjudged the feelings of the people--and there is a possibility that they may continue to do so.

Earlier this month, President Bush said that Chinese society is different today from what it was when he served in Beijing as head of the U.S. liaison office in 1974-75. And yet, there are quite a few Chinese who would say that China is not completely different from the society Bush knew in 1975--and that it is not different enough.

There are still no official channels for dissent. The power of party officials and their families persists. The press is still censored. The lack of social mobility and of job advancement remains serious.

Two years ago, a 40-year-old Chinese artist studying in the United States returned briefly to Beijing. She told this correspondent that she had seized the opportunity to come home in order to show “them” how well she was doing.

When asked who “they” were, she replied, “The children of the high cadres, the ones I went to school with. They were the first ones to be Red Guards in 1966, the first ones to return from the countryside after the Cultural Revolution, the first ones to go to college in the late 1970s, the first ones to go into private business in the 1980s and the ones making arms deals overseas now.”

Those resentments are widespread in China, and as long as they persist, China cannot be called an entirely different society.

The U.S. government had an interest in minimizing the problems of the Chinese Communist Party because of the importance of its military and strategic ties with the Chinese regime. Since the days of the Nixon Administration, China has been viewed as a partner in cooperation against the Soviet Union.

Such views persist. In a recent television interview, former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger said he felt political instability in China might be bad for the United States because it could free up the Soviet Union to make trouble elsewhere in the world.

In the light of the current demonstrations, American officials seem to be quietly re-examining their policy toward China. This time, the U.S. government finally seems to have taken notice that all is not well with the regime of Deng Xiaoping.