Keep the Door Open and Hope Alive : China: To encourage the forces of democracy, the Bush Administration must keep pushing Beijing while ignoring calls for a return to a policy of isolation and blockade.

Since Richard Nixon’s historic opening of the 1970s, a major change has occurred in Chinese politics. Forces demanding economic and political reform have arisen. Although they have suffered a temporary setback, these forces ultimately will prevail. The United States must fashion a China policy that acknowledges this reality.

Although a consensus in the United States favors these political and economic reforms, the current debate on China policy has become mired in criticism of the Bush Administration’s dispatch of two senior officials to meet with the leadership in Beijing. This is misdirected. The debate should concentrate on this issue: How can the United States best assist the process of reform?

We call for an active China policy that seeks to retain contact with the leaders and people of China, and offers strong moral support and fosters contact with the democratic forces on the mainland and abroad.

President Bush made a mistake when, on June 20, he suspended high-level official contacts as a sanction against Beijing’s suppression of the student movement. Rather than punishing the Chinese government, that policy constrained the American government. It limited the President’s diplomatic flexibility. Conservative forces in China would like to see China’s door shut and they have taken measures to cut off the communication with the outside world. Bush’s suspension of high-level contacts served these people’s wishes.

Now the Administration finds itself in an embarrassing position, having broken its own promise while misleading Congress and the American people. Bush should have the courage to admit publicly that his June 20 decision was a mistake and that to correct it, he had to violate his own guidelines.

The Administration has made other mistakes. The deference that National Security Adviser Brent Scowcraft and Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger demonstrated toward China’s leaders--emphasizing personal warmth and clinking glasses at a banquet--was inappropriate. And their failure to allude to the Chinese government’s suppression of the democracy movement and to refer to the world’s revulsion of its deeds--as Nixon did during his October trip--is regrettable. Further, the secrecy was unnecessary, risking the bipartisanship so essential to the successful conduct of American policy on China.

The fundamental issue, however, still is whether Washington should politically isolate and economically blockade China. Here we part with the Administration’s critics. In the 1950s, the United States pursued a similar policy, hoping to push China onto the path of freedom. Instead, it drove Beijing into the Soviet embrace and contributed to its evolution into a Stalinist totalitarian system.

In 1944-45, Mao Tse-tung wanted to follow a very different domestic course. Mao believed that cooperation with the United States would not only help him defeat the Japanese invaders, but also allow him to compete with the despotic Chiang Kai-shek while resisting Josef Stalin’s pressures. But the American response gave Mao little choice but to lean toward the Soviets once Washington let it be known that it saw Chinese communism as a threat to its interests.

Nixon ended this fruitless policy by opening Sino-American relations in the 1970s. The Carter Administration’s decision to establish full diplomatic relations in 1979, and the economic reform program China initiated the same year, led to the rapid proliferation of exchanges between China and the West. These contacts have had a decisive impact on China’s political and economic reforms and have been an important condition for the growth of democratic forces in China.

But the anti-reform and anti-democratic forces in China immediately saw the implications of these exchanges. As early as 1982, they were trying to shut China’s door to the outside. On the eve of the 12th National Party Congress in 1982, some senior party officials proposed to stop sending Chinese students to Western countries and to withdraw all those already there. (They preferred to hire foreign scholars to teach in China.)

With Sino-American relations in trouble in the early years of the Reagan Administration, these same people also proposed downgrading the level of Sino-American relations to that of liaison office--the level before 1979--as a part of the process of normalizing relations with the Soviet Union. And they let it be known to Moscow that China would be willing to modify the three conditions it had set for normalization if the Soviet Union would acknowledge just one of them. However, Leonid Brezhnev refused the overture. The subsequent success of the Sino-American negotiations over Taiwan arms sales thwarted this attempt to change Chinese foreign policy.

Now the anti-reform forces have resurrected a slogan--”fear neither isolation nor blockade”--to justify and conceal their real intention of resisting the worldwide trend of democratization. If the United States repeats its policy of the 1950s and ‘60s, isolating and blockading China, the outcome will be no different. The die-hard forces in China will be the beneficiaries of the new blockade. In a country as large as China, totalitarian rule cannot be ended through externally imposed isolation. Sanctions only strengthen the forces of totalitarianism. This is the unambiguous lesson of history.

In short, the basic objective for America’s China policy should be to promote China’s further reform, openness and democratization and to break the self-isolation favored by the conservative forces in China. This calls for a three-pronged policy:

--Promotion of Sino-American political, commercial, educational, scientific, artistic and cultural exchanges. In all these areas, the preference for self-isolation of Chinese conservatives should be challenged.

--Contacts should be pursued in ways that directly or indirectly help to eliminate the violation of human rights in China. This includes constant and forthright American criticism, issued both in Beijing and in Washington, of any inhumane treatment of the Chinese people.

--Washington should contact and support various democratic forces of China so long as they adhere to the principles of peacefulness, rationality and nonviolence as set forth in the Charter of the United Nations and the Declaration of Human Rights. A major deficiency in American policy since June 4 has been the insufficient support of Chinese democratic and reformist forces.

Democratization is the fundamental solution to the human-rights problem in China. The road leading to democratization with the minimum cost is through a compromise between the existing Chinese government and various democratic forces. The progressive forces throughout the world should support and promote rather than hinder the realization of this process.

The dramatic developments in Eastern Europe forcefully demonstrated that democratization is an irresistible historical trend. While China differs from Eastern Europe both historically and culturally, the democratic movements in Eastern Europe and China nevertheless have close intellectual and popular connections. There is no reason to believe that China is destined to always be a totalitarian country.

American policy toward China can be influential. Instead of treating China as a card to be played in partisan American politics, or resurrecting the bankrupt policy of isolating the country, we advocate a policy that takes realistic account of the complexity in promoting reform and progress in China.