CHINA: THE GIANT AWAKENS : View From America : U.S. Wrestles With Familiar Questions : Forget day-to-day worries. Put aside brouhahas that make headlines. The real Washington-Beijing policy issues are hardy perennials.

What are the big questions facing America as it seeks to come to grips with China’s growing economic and military power? What are the choices for the long term?

Forget about the day-to-day worries. Put aside the brouhahas that have dominated the headlines and consumed much of the time of policy-makers in Washington over the past few years--such as what to do about China’s most-favored-nation trade benefits or about Beijing’s continuing export of dangerous missiles and nuclear technology.

Here are the main issues that an increasingly powerful China raises for the United States in the future. Call them the Four Big Questions. Each one is a modern-day version of questions that have been raised again and again in the history of America’s relations with China and with the rest of Asia.

Friend or Enemy?

Is China an American ally, an adversary or something else?

“We’re at a point where we have some ability to make either possibility come true,” says Richard H. Solomon of the RAND Corp., who was assistant secretary of state for Asia in the George Bush Administration.

“The way the policy has been formulated over the past couple of years is driving us inexorably toward confrontation. We tell China, ‘You’ve got to change your ways, because otherwise you’re a pariah.’ If we continue down this track, it’s self-fulfilling.”

Throughout much of the 20th Century, the answer to this question could not have been clearer. China was America’s ally under the Nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek. After the 1949 victory of the Communist revolution, Mao Tse-tung’s government became, for two decades, a bitter adversary; indeed, for a time, China ranked even above the Soviet Union on Washington’s enemies list.

Attitudes changed once again with the Richard Nixon Administration’s opening to Beijing, and from 1972 to 1989, China was deemed, if not a formal ally, then at least an unofficial partner of the United States in a form of strategic cooperation against the Soviet Union.

Now, uncertainty reigns. The Soviet Union no longer exists. China is ostensibly the only nation in the world with intercontinental missiles targeted on the United States, since Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin announced last year that the missiles of the former Soviet Union were no longer aimed at American soil. China’s growing military power and its expansive territorial claims in the South China Sea are viewed by some American strategists as a threat to American interests in Asia.

When President Bush cleared the way for the sale of advanced American F-16 warplanes to Taiwan last year, his action was written off by many as merely an election-year ploy, aimed at winning votes from Texas workers at the General Dynamics plant that manufactures the planes.

But in fact, the sale also reflected the Pentagon’s belief that the United States needs to do something to confront and rein in China’s growing military power. U.S. defense sources say that over the past two years, since the breakup of the Soviet Union, there has been a growing tendency among some Pentagon officials to treat China as a potential enemy, both in private conversations and in some war-games contingency planning.

Of course, whether a nation is treated as a friend or a foe of the United States is a decision rarely made in isolation. It is almost impossible to predict the future course of U.S. policy toward China without knowing what American relations will be with China’s neighbors Japan and Russia. Any serious and protracted dispute between Washington and either Tokyo or Moscow could quickly thaw whatever frost might exist in the ties between Washington and Beijing.

And that brings us to Big Question No. 2:

Japan or China?

Is the United States doomed to choose between China or Japan as a future ally in Asia?

Throughout most of the past century, UC Berkeley professor Robert A. Scalapino has observed, “America has had good relations with one (China or Japan) while it confronted the other.”

The aberration was during the 1970s and 1980s, when the United States had reasonably good ties with both Asian powers. But that was during an era when all three nations worried about Soviet military power, and now the common glue of the Soviet threat no longer exists.

Three years ago, when seeking to justify the importance of maintaining close ties with Beijing after the 1989 Tian An Men Square crackdown, both former President Nixon and his secretary of state, Henry A. Kissinger, suggested that China could serve in the future as a counterweight to the growing power of Japan.

The mere mention of such an idea raised the hackles of other American policy-makers, who argue that Japan, unlike China, is an ally of the United States and a functioning democracy. Indeed, one senior official of the Bush Administration observed recently that America’s policy, for now, amounts to “cooperating with Japan to restrain China”--although he quickly added that the United States could quickly shift course in the future, if necessary, and work closely with China to contain some future Japanese military threat.

Some of America’s Asia experts contend that the United States ought to go to great lengths to avoid having to choose sides between China and Japan. “The challenge before us is to make sure that we maintain simultaneously constructive relations with both China and Japan, or else we will be in real trouble,” says Michel Oksenberg, head of the East-West Center in Honolulu.

In particular, both Oksenberg and Scalapino say, the United States ought to do something about the drift of the past couple of years, in which the United States seems to have acrimonious relations with both China and Japan.

“We can’t begin to look upon Japan as a rival, and look upon China as a rival, and seek to cut our defense budget by 40%,” Oksenberg contends. “That’s not what I would call a rational national security policy.”

South China or Beijing?

Should America’s China policy stick to the standard government-to-government relations between Washington and Beijing? Or should the United States be in some way directed toward South China, looking for ways to increase the power of local and regional authorities who are far more attuned to market economics, free trade and interdependence between China and the rest of Asia?

This is the subtlest but, potentially, the most explosive of all the long-range China issues confronting Washington these days. It has been obscured by the continuing short-term debate over China’s MFN status, since both the region of South China and Beijing’s central government benefit from a continuation of the trade benefits.

Consider, for example, some of the awkward policy choices the United States faces in dealing with Hong Kong Gov. Chris Patten’s plan for greater democracy in the British colony.

China’s central government in Beijing furiously opposes Patten’s plan. If American policy is based on forging strong ties with authorities in Beijing, then Washington ought to avoid at all costs getting entangled in this dispute.

If, on the other hand, American policy is aimed at encouraging the economic and political development of the areas of South China near Hong Kong, then it is in America’s interest to make sure that Hong Kong has as much political independence and freedom as possible after it returns to Chinese sovereignty in 1997.

Ever since the days of John Hay’s Open Door policy a century ago, American diplomacy has been opposed to the breakup of China as a nation, and so it would be an all-but-unthinkable departure for the United States to promote outright independence for South China.

On the other hand, there is nothing written in stone or Chinese history that says that Beijing must be both the nation’s capital and the sole focus of all foreign governments’ dealings with China.

“You don’t have to deal exclusively with the old crowd in Beijing. You can deal more and more with the provinces, to get things done. That simply reflects the existing realities of decentralization and autonomy,” observes James R. Lilley, former U.S. ambassador to China, who is now director of the Asia Studies program at the American Enterprise Institute.

Some China hands warn that promoting South China is a tricky business and that the United States could overdo it. “Don’t make the mistake of treating South China as a separate country,” warns Douglas Paal of the Asia-Pacific Policy Center. “Because that could just buy you trouble with the rest of China.”

Challenge Communism?

That is, should American policy try actively to promote democracy in China and to challenge the dogma of the ruling Chinese Communist Party? Or should the United States set aside its ideological differences and accept the Communist regime as China’s legitimate government?

In ordinary times, this issue is usually submerged by other more mundane problems. But in times of crisis, such as in the Tian An Men upheavals of 1989, it quickly becomes the dominant issue in American relations with China.

Any renewed campaign of repression by Chinese authorities would bring this issue to the fore once again. So could President Clinton’s proposal to create a new Radio Free Asia, along the lines of the old Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe. Chinese authorities have made it plain they would be extremely unhappy to have American broadcasts supporting the values of liberty and democracy beamed into China.

In the days after the Tian An Men crackdown, China’s hard-liners accused the United States of carrying out a long-range plot--inspired, they said, in the 1950s by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles--to undermine Chinese communism, not by force but through a more gradual strategy they called “peaceful evolution.” And some U.S. diplomats acknowledged privately that the phrase “peaceful evolution” was not a bad description of their goal.

American defenders of China’s Communist regime have sometimes suggested that it is a better and more stable government for China than anything that might immediately take its place. “Would student success in Beijing have brought democracy or civil war?” asked Kissinger after the Tian An Men Square crackdown. “France’s 1989 anniversary (of the beginning of the French Revolution) is a reminder that the course of revolution cannot be deduced from the proclamations of its creators.”

But in a formal policy statement last spring, Winston Lord, the Clinton Administration’s assistant secretary of state for Asia, declared that “promoting democracy must be one of the central pillars of our foreign policy. . . . The end of our global rivalry with the Soviet Union reduces the pressure to muffle concerns about unsavory governments for the sake of security.”

Chinese in America

The 1990 census found 1.6 million people in the United States who label themselves Chinese. Immigration from China nearly tripled during the 1980s. In addition to the 30,000 legal Chinese entries per year, some experts estimate that as many as 100,000 Chinese are being smuggled into the country each year.

MORE THAN HALF LIVE IN WEST WEST: 52% MIDWEST: 8% SOUTH: 12% NORTHEAST: 27%

THE ASYLUM-SEEKERS

Immigration officals say immigrants seeking asylum in the United States often cite Chinese population control practices, which can include sterilizing a couple after a first child is born. The officials said that a plea on those grounds usually is accepted. Here is the number of Chinese seeking asylum over the last nine years: 1984: 56 1992 3,440

AN INFLUX OF STUDENTS

The total number of Chinese students in the United States in 1991-92 was 42,940, an 8.4% increase over the previous academic year. Here are the percentages of Chinese students enrolled in various programs:(compared with percentage enrolled in the various programs a decade earlier)

1980 1990 Agriculture 7% 2% Business/Management 11 8 Education 5 3 Engineering 13 20 Fine Arts 3 3 Health Science 4 4 Humanities 6 3 Math/Computer Science 9 13 Physical science 17 29 Social science 7 7 English 9 1 Other/Not declared 10 7

WHEN THEY ARRIVED

Number of immigrants admitted to the United States by decade: 1840s: 35 1850s and 1860s: Taiping Rebellion: Million of Chinese die in bloody warfare 1880s: U.S. restricts Chinese immigration 1900s: Boxer Rebellion: Secret societies, opposed to Western influences, attack Chinese Christians and Westerners 1960s: Cultural Revolution distrupts government, daily life 1970s: Normal diplomatic relations established with U.S. 1980s: 346,747

Sources: Institute of International Education census “Open Doors 1991/92,” Immigration and Naturalization Service, U.S. Census