Clinton Can’t Count on Beijing’s Old Men Dying : China: In formulating policy, the President must recognize that its leaders are more prosperous and entrenched than ever.

For three years after China’s deadly crackdown on democracy protests at Tian An Men Square, opponents of former President George Bush com plained that the United States was too eager to do business with Deng Xiaoping and the other aging leaders of Beijing. The critics, including President Bill Clinton and Winston Lord, his new assistant secretary of state for East Asia, contended that the United States should keep its distance from the old men and concentrate instead on cultivating a younger generation of more moderate, humane leaders who would eventually take power in Beijing.

Now, the critics have taken office and must decide what U.S. policy toward China should be. How hard should Washington press for democracy and human rights in China? What, if anything, should it do to counteract Beijing’s growing military power and its recently assertive behavior toward Hong Kong and Southeast Asia? Should China be viewed as friend or foe, as a partner for U.S. policy in Asia, or as a rival and potential threat to U.S. interests?

The fundamental problem confronting the Clinton Administration is that China’s leaders have showed considerably greater staying power than many American experts expected after the 1989 upheavals. For a year or two afterward, the assumption was that China’s Tian An Men leadership would eventually crumble for loss of popular support, as in Eastern Europe; or that, after some internal power struggle, there would be a Chinese-style “reversal of verdicts”--as happened after the 1976 death of Mao Tse Tung, when people previously condemned as counterrevolutionary, including Deng, were suddenly redefined as representing the will of the masses.

Such expectations of impending political change in China cut across the spectrum of the nasty post-Tian An Men debate in Washington. They included not only critics of the policy of reconciliation but some supporters of it as well. In seeking to minimize the importance of Bush’s actions in the months after 1989, one senior Administration official privately confided, “It really doesn’t matter. You know, the current crowd in Beijing isn’t going to last very long.”

But in addition to Deng holding onto power, Li Peng remains China’s premier, onetime Communist Party leader Zhao Ziyang has not been rehabilitated and there has been no reversal of the party’s official “verdict” that the Tian An Men Square demonstrations were counterrevolutionary.

To be sure, there have been some changes in leadership, such as the marked decline in influence of military strongman Yang Shangkun and his family. But these political changes have been more gradual than dramatic. Meanwhile, the new, young Chinese leadership for which Lord and other Americans once hoped is not yet in sight. At 46, Clinton is younger than any member of China’s Politburo and, if he were in China, would be about the right age to head the Communist Youth League.

How did the Chinese regime survive while other communist regimes crumbled? The first reason, of course, was a greater capacity for violence and repression during a crisis. Chinese leaders were willing and able to order troops to shoot demonstrators, unlike the former East German regime of 1989 and the leaders of the abortive Soviet coup of 1991. For more than two years after the Tian An Men crackdown, Chinese security forces succeeded in eradicating virtually all vestiges of dissent. That repression appears to have eased somewhat in the past year or so; the recent release from prison of Chinese student leader Wang Dan symbolizes the Chinese leadership’s growing sense of confidence.

Repression is only half the story. The regime has also survived because of the recent success of China’s economy, which in the past two years has been among the fastest-growing in the world. This growth enabled the leadership to argue that political change could jeopardize Chinese prosperity: Just look across the border, Chinese leaders say, at what the collapse of communism has brought in the former Soviet Union.

Still, it would be a mistake for U.S. policy-makers to overestimate China’s political stability, based merely on its past two years of success. China’s economy has long been cyclical, and an upturn in inflation, unemployment or a large migration of peasants into Chinese cities could lead to new political turmoil. China’s democracy movement was written off as extinct after the collapse of the 1979-80 Democracy Wall movement, only to reappear even more strongly in 1986 and 1989.

Deng and his colleagues have done virtually nothing to institutionalize Chinese politics or to establish an orderly process of succession; these remain as dependent on personalities and factions as they ever were. The Chinese Communist Party has little remaining ideology or legitimacy. Andrew Nathan, a China scholar at Columbia University, trenchantly observes that ordinary Chinese people “might not dare to rise up (against the regime), but wouldn’t lift a finger to support it if it gets in trouble.” Even China’s prosperity could, in the long run, lead to political instability; corruption is a recurrent issue in China, and at some point, during an economic or political crisis, various personalities or factions could wind up battling for control over wealth and spoils.

The challenge now facing the Clinton Administration will be to figure out a new policy for dealing with a regime that is more entrenched, more prosperous and, in some ways, more problematic for long-term U.S. interests in Asia than was expected in June, 1989. The new U.S. policy will have to look beyond the Tian An Men crackdown, without forgetting what that bloody episode showed about the underlying nature of the Chinese regime.

Any U.S. policy that seeks to ignore Tian An Men would justify Deng’s observation that the West always forgets, sooner or later. It would also run the risk of flouting American values and, thus, touching off another four years of acrimony in Washington over China policy. Yet an approach that remained stuck at Tian An Men, treating the Beijing leadership as though it is about to collapse or be overthrown by popular revolt, would overlook how the situation has changed since 1989.

During his presidential campaign, Clinton accused Bush of “coddling the tyrants of Beijing and Baghdad.” Now, he will have to work out a non-coddling policy that must reckon with the unpleasant prospect that there may be no big political changes in Beijing for some time. Just as Saddam Hussein outlasted Bush, at least some of China’s tyrants may remain on the job for quite a while.