U.S. Relations With China: Push but Don’t Shove : Washington must calibrate national interests carefully, not emotionally

The temperature in Seattle last weekend was in the 40s. But the temperature when President Clinton met with President Jiang Zemin of China to press U.S. concerns over Beijing’s policies on human rights apparently hovered around freezing.

Clinton hoped going into the meeting that he might find some give in China’s hard line and even dismissive positions on questions Washington regards as being of key importance. What he heard instead was a lecture that seems to have simply recapitulated the arguments Jiang and other Chinese officials have been making in every public forum open to them: Western values on human rights are not the values traditional to China and other historically authoritarian Asian societies. More bluntly, what goes on within its borders is China’s affair alone, and of no concern to outsiders.

All of which leaves the problems between the Pacific rim’s two biggest countries pretty much where they were before the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meetings offered the chance for personal diplomacy.

China’s no-budge attitude should not have come as a surprise. For one thing, when Beijing does choose to make concessions it does so quietly, not in such conspicuous contexts as the APEC meetings. For another, China now teeters on the edge of a new power struggle, one likely to explode into the open as soon as the aging and ill “paramount leader,” Deng Xiaoping, dies. No aspirant for future leadership, least of all Jiang, Deng’s designated heir, could risk inviting an accusation from his political rivals that he had caved in to U.S. pressures. For that reason it seems unrealistic to expect any significant concessions from China, either now or perhaps for some time to come.

This leaves the Clinton Administration with a major foreign policy dilemma.

The President has already indicated that he won’t extend to China the trade preferences known as most favored nation unless he sees by next June that progress has been made in improving human rights. Congress, as Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell reminded the White House over the weekend, has already made extension of MFN conditional on improvements in human rights and trade policy, as well as on China’s adherence to the international pact banning transfers of missile technology. So China faces the possibility that in about seven months much of its lucrative trade with the United States will be subject to tariffs that at a minimum would cost it some market share. Should that happen, Beijing has been quick to suggest, American firms that are in or seeking to enter the huge Chinese market would feel the lash of reciprocity. American businesses have already begun to sound alarms to the White House.

Is there a path to be charted through this minefield of conflicting interests?

Certainly the United States cannot abandon its historic championship of human rights. Where repression occurs--and China is by no means alone among present or past U.S. trading partners in denying its citizens basic rights--Washington has a moral responsibility to press steadily for change. At the same time it should honestly face the question of whether linking human rights with MFN is the most effective way to bring about the changes America seeks. On the evidence so far--and given the political climate in China--linkage cannot be regarded as effective. What then is the alternative? Using quiet diplomacy to continue seeking greater political tolerance and greater international responsibility, while treating such issues as trade in the same way as virtually every other country does, on its own merits and in terms of pragmatic self-interest.

It seems inevitable that China, as its economy continues to develop and expand, must in time adopt a more open if still less than fully liberal political system. The United States should do all that it can to influence that trend. It can do so best by taking care to preserve its political and economic standing with Beijing.