U.S. Places Overtures to China on the Back Burner : Diplomacy: End of the Cold War, politics at home and instability in Beijing cool U.S. ardor for closer ties.

Over the past year, President Bush and his top aides have shelved their campaign to patch up the once-cozy U.S. relationship with China, reluctantly conceding that China’s political upheavals of 1989 have caused lasting damage to ties between the two countries.

Twelve months ago, China ranked as one of the main preoccupations of the Bush Administration. Last Dec. 9, National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger flew off on a secret mission to Beijing in which they offered friendly toasts to some of the same Chinese leaders who had called in troops six months earlier to clear protesters from Tian An Men Square with brute force.

Now, by contrast, the Administration is maintaining a cool distance from Beijing. Administration officials no longer treat China as so important to the United States as it was a year ago, and some of them remain miffed over what they see as a failure of the Chinese leadership to respond to Bush’s overtures.

“Their (Chinese leaders’) failure to continue to be responsive to the President has changed the political landscape,” one Administration official acknowledged recently.

This fall, Japan and European governments have moved to lift many of their sanctions against China, unblocking frozen loans and restoring diplomatic exchanges. While the Bush Administration may take some small steps in the same direction, another senior Administration official said that “I wouldn’t look for anything dramatic” in new U.S. overtures to China.

“All of our allies have decided to move ahead with China, leaving us increasingly isolated,” observed Harry E. Harding, a China scholar at the Brookings Institution.

There are a several reasons underlying the Bush Administration’s pronounced change of attitude:

Domestic politics. Bush’s efforts last year to mend fences with the leadership in Beijing proved extremely unpopular and were attacked both by Democrats and conservative Republicans. In Congress and in the American business community, there has been a marked decline in support for close U.S. ties with China.

* Instability in China. Many U.S. policy-makers believe that China’s current leadership is deeply divided and won’t last long. Indeed, some officials and analysts now foresee the possibility of dramatic political changes or even a coup d’etat in the struggle for power that may follow the death of paramount leader Deng Xiaoping.

* Geopolitical strategy. The end of the Cold War has reduced the importance to the United States of close relations with China, which since the early 1970s had been based upon a shared perception in both Washington and Beijing that the Soviet Union was a formidable military adversary.

* Bitterness over the failed Scowcroft trip. Last December and January, Bush Administration officials believed the Chinese regime would quickly allow dissident Fang Lizhi to leave his confinement inside the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and would end its ideological attacks on the United States. Instead, Fang was not released for another six months, and the ideological diatribes continue even now.

“They (Chinese leaders) don’t understand what’s happened to this relationship,” says one Administration official. “They don’t understand the political costs of what they did last January and February.”

Those political costs were demonstrated Oct. 18, when the U.S. House of Representatives cast a series of votes against China that would have been unimaginable even a year earlier. The House voted 247 to 174 to strip China of its most-favored-nation trade status, the privilege that permits foreign producers to sell their goods in the United States under the lowest available tariffs. And the House voted 383 to 30 to attach a series of tough human rights conditions that China must meet before it gets the trade benefits next year.

Neither of these measures became law. They died in the Senate during the final, hectic days before Congress adjourned. But the congressional efforts to place human rights conditions on the renewal of trade benefits for China will almost certainly be revived next year.

Even within the U.S. business community, which lobbied Congress for a continuation of the benefits, enthusiasm for China is clearly on the wane.

“Foreign investment in China is entering a new phase that may offer fewer opportunities for American firms,” the U.S.-China Business Council declared last month. “Although official Chinese statistics show foreign investment on the rise in 1990, recent changes in the investment climate are working to the detriment of many American, European and Japanese investors.”

Last year, after the crackdown on the democracy protests in Tian An Men Square, China accused the United States of seeking to undermine and overthrow communism in China through a long-term strategy of subversion. The regime called this strategy “peaceful evolution.”

In retrospect, Bush Administration officials now believe the President’s repeated efforts at reconciliation with China have failed because hard-line elements within the leadership in Beijing killed them. The hard-liners feared that a thaw with the United States would give a political edge to more moderate forces in the Chinese leadership, these U.S. officials say.

China’s campaign against “peaceful evolution” began soon after Scowcroft and Eagleburger’s first top-secret mission to China in July, 1989. A similar anti-American campaign was launched soon after their second trip to Beijing in December, 1989, and there were echoes of the campaign once again after the release of dissident Fang last June.

“When we have done things and the moderates (in China) have tried to do things to improve the relationship, a very strong reaction has set in and stymied efforts to get things moving in a consistent manner,” one Administration policy-maker says.

Within the U.S. intelligence community and among American academic experts on China, the belief is growing that over the next few years, China will face further political upheavals.

Deng, who took the reins of power in China in late 1978, is 86 years old. He has not been seen in public since July.

“We don’t dismiss the reports about him being in ill health,” says one U.S. intelligence specialist. “But we’ve got nothing firm.”

“I think there is latent instability there (in China) that we ignore at our own peril,” observes Jonathan D. Pollack of the RAND Corp. “I think we ought to be looking at a whole range of options, in which a seizure of power by the military is one possibility.”

Furthermore, Pollack adds, “I don’t see stability in the military ranks. These are very anxious, frightened people.”

Last September, officials of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA sat down at a conference with U.S. China scholars to swap ideas about the future of China’s People’s Liberation Army.

“One of the big questions was, ‘When Deng dies, what will the PLA do?’ ” says Paul H. B. Godwin, a China scholar at the National War College, who took part in the conference. “Everyone agreed there are deep fissures in Chinese society. There were divergent views on whether the PLA could fracture or not.”

Some U.S. experts at the conference contended that China’s army could split up along regional lines or that there could be disputes among competing factions within the military. Other participants argued that the PLA will remain a unified force and will try to refrain from intervening in politics.

In 1976, a month after the death of Mao Tse-tung, senior leaders in China’s army and security apparatus engineered the sudden arrest and imprisonment of Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, and other top Chinese leaders who had propelled the Cultural Revolution. Some U.S. officials and scholars suggest such a scenario could be played out once again after the death of Deng.

“The military is going to be all-important in determining the succession,” says a Bush Administration official. “China has a long tradition going back many dynasties of the praetorian guard overseeing the succession and sometimes changing the dynasties. . . . There’s a good chance it’s going to happen again when the current leadership array, the elder generation, passes away or becomes incapacitated.”

The unpredictability of the political situation in Beijing reduces the incentives for the Bush Administration to renew a close relationship with China. In any event, experts say, the need for close U.S. ties with China has been dramatically undercut by the changes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

In mid-1989, at the time of the Tian An Men Square upheavals, some Administration officials still believed that the changes in the Soviet Union under President Mikhail S. Gorbachev might not be permanent. One senior Administration official privately warned that a new hard-line Soviet leadership could emerge and link up with hard-liners in China in a way that would threaten the United States.

Now, by contrast, even the doubters within the Bush Administration see the Soviet Union more as an ally than as an enemy. The unprecedented changes in U.S.-Soviet relations have given the Administration new freedom to ignore China in its global strategic calculations.

Administration officials still view China as significant to American foreign policy in some lesser ways. China is a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council. Its cooperation is important for the Administration’s current efforts to obtain U.N. resolutions against Iraq and for efforts to bring peace to Cambodia.

For these reasons, the Administration may clear the way for more frequent high-level contacts with Chinese officials, such as the two meetings this fall between Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qichen.

“We need to stay in touch with them,” one Administration official says.

But U.S. officials make clear they will make no new attempt at reconciliation with the Chinese leadership such as the missions by Scowcroft last year.

“In the absence of any evidence that the (political) situation has been resolved in China, it’s not very fruitful to try to make a new effort on our part to reach out to the Chinese,” an Administration policy-maker said.