James Baker Runs Into the Diplomatic Great Wall of Resistance : China: Thought to have the upper hand, the secretary of state ends up enduring a series of humiliations and calculated rebuffs on his visit to Beijing.

Nothing could have better illustrated Secretary of State James A. Baker III’s frustration in China last weekend--and the low regard with which China now holds the United States--than the letter Baker was carrying from President George Bush to China’s now-retired leader Deng Xiaoping.

The letter appealed to Deng to use his personal influence in healing the rift between the two countries. The U.S. delegation to China had been hoping the secretary of state might deliver the letter to Deng himself. But Baker never managed to see Deng. Instead, he was forced to keep the letter for most of the two days he spent in Beijing. Finally, in the last hours of negotiations, Baker pulled out the letter and read it aloud to officials of the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

Baker’s inability to deliver the President’s letter was one of a series of humiliations and calculated rebuffs he and his party suffered in China. When U.S. officials explored the possibility of having Baker or Assistant Secretary for Human Rights Richard Schifter meet with several Chinese dissidents who are not in jail or out of the country, security police in Beijing grabbed the dissidents and whisked them away until he had left town. While the Americans sought detailed discussions of human rights, Chinese officials countered with platitudes. “Climb higher if you want to see farther,” Communist Party General Secretary Jiang Zemin told Baker, addressing Baker as if he were some fourth-grade student in need of some Confucian wisdom.

In many respects, China’s icy treatment of Baker was remarkable. He had gone to Beijing fresh from the greatest diplomatic achievement of his tenure as secretary of state--the Middle East peace conference. In addition, before Baker’s trip, it had appeared as though, with the end of the Cold War, China was in a weak bargaining position vis-a-vis the United States.

“The Chinese are desperate,” James R. Lilley, who recently served as Bush’s ambassador to China, said just days before Baker’s departure. “They’re scared to death of losing everything they’ve got going with the United States.”

But after the meetings, Baker emerged with no prison releases, no promises of international access to prisons and no other dramatic breakthroughs on human rights. The Chinese regime gave away little if anything more than what Chinese officials had been privately offering for months as they lobbied for Baker to come. Though, on Friday, in an apparent gesture to Baker, China announced it was granting improved treatment toward four specific, high-profile Chinese dissidents.

Baker’s visit conferred new legitimacy upon the Chinese regime. At the same time, Beijing extracted some new concessions. China promised Baker it would abide by the Missile Technology Control Regime limiting the export of ballistic missiles, and it agreed that these guidelines apply to its new M-9 and M-11 missiles. But China agreed to do so only if the United States lifts its sanctions on computer and satellite sales to China. And Chinese officials won in exchange some potentially important new language from Baker suggesting that Taiwan won’t get into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the group governing world trade, until China is admitted as well.

How did this happen? Several factors appeared to be at work.

First and foremost, the Administration seemed to persuade itself that its main adversary in the Beijing negotiations was not China itself, but Congress--or, more generally, the domestic critics of Bush’s policy of reconciliation with Beijing. “If Baker had come away from Beijing and said the Chinese stiffed us, we would have completely lost China policy to Capitol Hill,” one Administration official privately acknowledged. “That meant Baker’s flexibility to walk away from the talks was a lot tougher. In other circumstances, he might have started to walk away.” Chinese officials realized this and exploited the lack of unity within the United States over China policy.

Second, the United States made crucial giveaways to China before Baker’s trip. During the months of negotiations leading up to the visit, and despite its seemingly weak position, Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qichen and Chinese Ambassador to the United States Zhu Qizhen won the concession from the Administration that Baker would visit China without any preconditions. This allowed China to dig in its heels during Baker’s stay and resist formally giving away, until the final hours and after adding new conditions, the modest concessions the United States might have obtained in advance of Baker’s trip.

Third, Baker and his team failed to heed two decades of U.S. experience about Chinese negotiating stratagems. “A major Chinese negotiating tactic is the effort to play time pressures against an interlocutor,” explained Richard H. Solomon, then of RAND and now an assistant secretary of state, in a 1985 study of China’s negotiating style.

The Baker team arrived in China tired and eager to return home. In the two weeks before Beijing, the secretary of state and his aides had been at the Mideast peace conference in Madrid and in Washington, Rome, the Hague, Tokyo and Seoul. They landed on a Friday planning and seemingly eager to leave on a Sunday. By midday last Sunday, just before Baker’s plane was supposed to depart, the U.S. delegation found Chinese officials just beginning to make some modest last-minute offers on human rights. Baker and his aides asked to go outside a Chinese guest house to discuss the Chinese offer among themselves, because, as one senior State Department official later admitted, “that was the one place we figured we could talk without being overheard.” Once outside, they found that they were in full view of the U.S. press corps, which had a rare look at top State Department officials arguing strategy with one another.

Baker can take comfort in the fact that he joins the ranks of countless other Western emissaries who have been dispatched to China only to run up against a Great Wall of resistance. More than 150 years ago, the British government sent an envoy carrying a letter to the Qing Dynasty’s viceroy in Guangdong. “If the Barbarian headman throws in private letters, I, the Viceroy, will not receive them or even look at them,” the Viceroy wrote. Bush’s letter met the same fate.