Don’t Disturb China’s Pace of Reform : Diplomacy: Deng still seeks to modernize the economy, Kissinger says, a transition bound to lead to some form of democratic constitutionalism.

Question: You were very silent about your visit to China last November. Can you reveal anything of what happened?

Answer: I tried to encourage the Chinese to take those measures that would convince Americans that the Chinese leadership was fundamentally eager to return to the road of reform, one has to say, that created the conditions that made the eight-week period before Tian An Men Square even conceivable.

Q: Looking back on the events of a year ago, in what ways have your perceptions of them changed? What do you see as the salient facts of the entire episode? Not just Tian An Men.

A: I believe that the turmoil in China was, in a way, an accident and a tragedy. I start from the premise that, in the field of economics, Deng Xiaoping is a reformer. He paid a high price throughout his life for attempting to reform Chinese society. I knew (the former Communist Party chief) Zhao Ziyang very well. I respect greatly what he was trying to do. All communist societies face the problem of how you go from a central-planning to a market economy. It has an economic side and a political side.

The economic side is that the society has been so corrupted by central planning that to get people to work in an incentive-based economy becomes extremely difficult, because they don’t want to face unemployment or higher prices. They prefer subsidies, even at the price of inefficiencies. I believe that the Chinese handled economic reform better than any other communist society, and that they made greater progress in going from central planning to market economics than any other communist society.

In doing so, however, they were bound to create groups to whom the previous, highly stratified political system was anathema. And other groups who found the price to be paid for the transition from central planning highly unacceptable.

What seems to have happened last year was a coalescence of these two groups. You had the university students who were motivated by exposure to Western values, and probably inadequate job opportunities. And there were the workers who were not all that interested in political institutions but were restless because of inflation, which resulted from the removal of subsidies, and unemployment, which resulted from the attempt to achieve efficiency. The vast majority of casualties was not among students but among workers. It does not change the principle; it just changes the composition of the victims and their motives.

And there are many reasons for it. In retrospect, it was probably a mistake when Hu Yaobang was removed to make Zhao Ziyang general secretary of the Communist Party and Li Peng prime minister, because the change gave the biggest reformer the instrument that was most resistant to reform and gave the instrument that was most ready to reform--namely the government--to the leader least eager for reform. So that was sort of an accident. So was the visit of Mikhail S. Gorbachev, which produced a long period of hesitation in reacting to the students.

I think the demonstrators also did not know what they wanted. It is one thing to ask for specific reforms; it’s another to ask for the overthrow of the whole structure, which is where they were heading at the end.

Q: Surely, one aspect of the tragedy was that, in a very real sense, all the groups were giving the Communist Party of China a great vote of confidence, saying we just want China to change a little bit.

A: There are many turning points in that period where I wish the Chinese government had acted differently. Part of the time it was simply paralyzed, and part of the problem was that various factions within the Communist Party were trying to use the students to advance their own ends. In a way, the students were not only driving the upheaval; they were, in part, being used.

Q: You think there was manipulation of the students by factions within the Communist Party?

A: Not that the students knew. But there appear to have been factions within the party that seemed to have thought that if the chaos got bad enough, reform would be advanced, or maybe their opponents would fall.

Q: Wasn’t one of the deepest tragedies the fact that conciliation could have been tried and could have worked?

A: That was true at the beginning, but then in the middle of it, when Zhao Ziyang did meet with the students--and even Li Peng met with the students--some of the student leaders also behaved with extreme lack of restraint. I think either early resistance or early conciliation would probably have worked; I think conciliation probably was possible.

Q: Then why wasn’t it tried?

A: Because the leadership was divided. And paralyzed. And remained divided for many weeks.

Q: Are you satisfied it is reasonably united now?

A: It’s reasonably united. I believe Deng is trying to steer it toward reform via (Communist Party chief) Jaing Zemin, and the conservatives he had removed once and had to bring back are dragging their feet, and he’s trying to reduce their influence. I’m talking about economic reform.

He has never favored democratic reform in the Western sense. But I believe that if the economic reforms with which Deng has been identified continue, inevitably they will lead to a kind of pluralism and a kind of constitutionalism that may not be Western democracy but that will also not be the one-party rigidities of the old model. In the long run, it is not possible to run a modern economy without predictability and, therefore, some form of constitutionalism.

The Chinese culture is more receptive to entrepreneurship than the Russian culture. It is regionally more diverse while remaining part of the same culture. A normal economic system that is market-oriented must produce a kind of regional initiative and individual initiative, which leads to much greater freedom.

Q: What would your prognosis be for China in the short and medium term? Do you see the current period as a kind of interregnum before the issues are sorted out?

A: I do look at it as an interregnum. I hope Deng continues on his path of economic reform. I think the political issues will be sorted out when the present generation of leaders disappears and new political arrangements have to be made. How smoothly they go depends on the length of this interregnum.

Q: Do you think it strategically significant in what order the gerontocrats die?

A: Certainly. But I think it would be highly inappropriate for me to specify my order of preference.

Q: You sound as if you think that Deng still has a leading role.

A: I think Deng has a leading role and that he uses his influence for reform. I also think that Jaing Zemin wants to move in that direction but with much less authority at this point than his predecessors had. I think the ideology chief, Li Ruihuan, is a reformer. Others are more hard-line.

Q: Do you think that the course of Sino-American relations in the last year has complicated the reality in a way that is actually adverse for American interests?

A: First, President Bush has done the best that can be done under the domestic circumstances he faces. I think our domestic situation has complicated the evolution that I would like to see. Because, after all, what do we want the Chinese leaders to do? However much we may deplore Tian An Men, what do we want them to do now?

There is a limit to what the United States can accept, no matter what geopolitics might dictate. But my basic conviction is that Deng wants to move in the direction of reform and so do the people to whom he is closest.

Second, there is now, after Tian An Men, no visible alternative within the current structure to that course.

Third, economic reform is what most opens the possibility to a more humane and liberal political reform.

Fourth, we need China to remain a major factor in Asia because of its influence in northeast and southeast Asia, because nobody knows what will happen in the Soviet Union, and because our relations with Japan, in an intangible way, will be affected by our relations with China.

China is the country taken most seriously in Japan. One of the assets the United States has had in its relations with Japan is the Japanese assumption that we have some sort of special relationship with China. If one considers that Japanese respect for our economic performance is declining, to put it kindly, that Japan’s need for our military protection is diminishing, if now, for whatever reason, we lose our special relationship with China, it will affect Japanese attitudes toward our relevance in many significant ways.

I have fought against jeopardizing our relations with a very proud people whose experience of foreign intervention in its domestic affairs has not been so glorious that we can preclude a xenophobic reaction to U.S. pressures. Nor do I think it is so easy to reverse it. Nor do I think that there is an opposition group out there in China that we will antagonize by saying what I have just said. After all, I am not advocating any particular leadership group or any particular system. I am saying: Keep in mind there is an eternal China that will move at its own pace and do not foreclose its options.