NEWS ANALYSIS : China Trip Underscores U.S. Policy Contradictions

Secretary of State Warren Christopher’s just-completed human rights mission to Beijing was aimed at making China a less sensitive issue on the Clinton Administration’s foreign policy agenda.

Instead, Christopher’s lack of results and the avalanche of vitriol that the trip inspired from both sides have done the reverse: They have catapulted China to the top of the list of America’s problems overseas, creating dilemmas for which there will be no easy solutions. And they have underlined seeming contradictions in the Administration policy toward China.

“This (trip) now raises the amount of political capital that an already weakened President will have to spend to keep this China issue from spilling over,” Douglas Paal, an Asia specialist and former George Bush Administration official, said Tuesday. Clinton “is eventually going to have to go to Congress to hold the China policy together.”

With China, the Administration’s foreign policy team does not face the sort of problems that have plagued it elsewhere--in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Somalia and Haiti. The question in those disputes has been to what extent, and for what sorts of missions, America should commit its troops abroad in an era of limited resources at home.

Yet for American foreign policy and the Administration’s own future, China is likely to be more important than any of those trouble spots. The issues confronting the Administration in China are broader than the use of force. China is, after all, Asia’s emerging superpower and one of the most important countries in the world.

How, then, and to what extent, should America confront China over human rights abuses that violate what Christopher calls America’s “core values”? What tactics best achieve this goal? Should the Administration encourage or cool the ardor of an American business community that, rightly or wrongly, views the China market as its version of nirvana?

Should the United States accommodate a regime that, less than five years ago, used live ammunition against citizens on the streets of its capital? Beijing has voiced no regrets for doing so and has changed few of its top personnel since then. It still imprisons some democracy advocates and during Christopher’s trip continued to detain more of them.

Eleven days and more than 20,000 miles ago, when Christopher was leaving Washington for Asia, reporters asked him why he was traveling to Beijing. Only hours before, Chinese officials had initiated a series of roundups, detentions and interrogations of dissidents that would continue up to and during the secretary’s visit to China last weekend.

Yet Christopher’s schedule had been fixed, and he showed no interest in changing it to adapt to changing circumstances. “These events only underscore the importance of being able to make human rights points at the highest level,” he explained.

Now, in the wake of Christopher’s trip, the question has to be asked: What went wrong? And why did he go in the first place?

Christopher and his aides argued that, while in Beijing, the secretary delivered a tough message to the Chinese regime, one that Premier Li Peng and President Jiang Zemin needed to hear. China, he said, must do more to retain its low-tariff trade benefits in the United States.

Yet whatever Christopher said, the Chinese leaders probably got a different message. They saw that Christopher had come talking about the need for a broader relationship between Washington and Beijing--even as the Chinese regime was showing its people and the rest of Asia that it has the power to do whatever it wants to suppress peaceful opposition.

If the Clinton Administration wanted only to deliver a tough message to Beijing about its human rights policies, which the Chinese leadership would have understood without ambiguity, in retrospect canceling the trip might been a more effective way of making the point.

But there were other purposes for Christopher’s visit that could not have been achieved that way. The truth is the Administration also wanted, through this trip, to improve its ties to Beijing.

The American business community--fearing losing out to such foreign competitors as the French and Japanese, whose prime ministers will soon visit Beijing--wants to smooth over the human rights disputes to ensure there will be continued trade with China. And the Pentagon wants to work more closely with China on important issues, including North Korea and non-proliferation.

These factors help explain why Christopher chose not to cancel his visit. But they also underscore the mixed message the Administration is sending to Beijing.

The Chinese have a favorite concept that can be applied to the American policy: It is a maodun , or contradiction.

In Chinese terms, it is a maodun for the Administration to want to confront China head-on over human rights abuses while improving ties with it to benefit the business community and the Pentagon.

To Chinese Marxists, in particular, a maodun is something to be exploited. And Beijing is certainly showing it knows how to exploit underlying contradictions of American policy.

The American business community, for example, has been so well courted that it is leading the charge in criticizing Clinton’s policy toward China.

How did the Administration get into this mess? To understand America’s China policy, one must look to the common factor in the personalities of the three men who serve as its principal architects--President Clinton, Christopher and Winston Lord, assistant secretary of state for East Asia. All three have records of strongly supporting human rights. Yet all are instinctive balancers, better at trying to accommodate all points of view than at making hard choices.

Clinton, the politician, has made a career out of appealing to different factions within the Democratic Party without alienating any of them. It has worked often in the White House, most recently in his successful campaign on behalf of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Christopher, the lawyer, had his most memorable success when, as deputy secretary of state, he patiently negotiated the deal with Iran that allowed the release of American hostages.

Lord, a foreign policy specialist who began his career as a Republican appointee but now works for the Democrats, is a cautious man who likes to borrow from both sides of any argument. That worked well on Vietnam policy, when he led the way in taking seriously the issue of missing U.S. servicemen while slowly building political support for a lifting of the trade embargo.

But can the Administration mediate, balance or accommodate all the competing interests on China?

For a short time, the problem might be fudged. If China follows past patterns, it may soon release a few dissidents from jail or let families of dissidents leave the country.

In the wake of Christopher’s trip, Clinton is now in a situation where he may be forced to inflate the significance of cosmetic gestures if he is to extend China’s trading benefits after they expire in July. Ultimately, the President may find that he must impose discipline on his Administration’s China policy, making hard choices among the separate, conflicting agendas of human rights, commerce and military strategy.

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