Bush’s Cynical China Syndrome

The adjectives cynical and dishonorable already have been used to describe the Bush Administration’s conduct of Sino-American relations. The word deceitful can now be added to the list.

In the immediate aftermath of the bloody suppression of pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing’s Tien An Men Square last June, the President publicly ordered a suspension of all high-level contacts between U.S. and Chinese diplomats. He also halted sales of military supplies to Beijing, and announced that Washington would seek a halt to consideration of additional international financial loans to China. These steps, Bush then argued, would be sufficient to persuade Beijing that as long as it persisted in murderous repression, it could not expect to do “business as usual” with the West.

The ban on U.S. military sales was the first of the sanctions to be discarded by the Administration. Tuesday, the President abandoned the purely economic reprisals when he approved the sale of three civilian communication satellites to China and lifted prohibitions on U.S. export-import financing of business activities with China.

As it turns out, the President never had any intention of abiding by his own ban on high-level diplomatic contacts. Barely a month after the killings in Tien An Men Square Bush dispatched National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger on a secret mission to Beijing. Now that they have been found out, the Administration’s spokesmen claim the envoys were sent “to underscore the U.S. shock and concern about the violence.”

Perhaps, but if the Chinese government, which at that very moment was rounding up dissidents and conducting secret executions, read something else into the contradiction between Washington’s public statements and private conduct, who would be surprised? The leaders of China’s power elite may be physically feeble, but they have a keen appreciation of hypocrisy born of a lifetime’s practice. The Bush Administration, after all, was talking their language.