NEWS ANALYSIS : Clinton Caves In on Trade vs. Human Rights

President Clinton’s abandonment of the idea of linking trade with China to human rights improvements represents a stunning reversal of the policies he espoused during both his 1992 presidential campaign and his first year in office.

As recently as the last few weeks, in fact, Clinton Administration officials were insisting that, without some further and meaningful steps in human rights by the Beijing regime, there was no way the President could renew China’s most-favored-nation trade privileges.

In the end, Clinton simply caved in. And, in the process, the debacle gave China a chance to demonstrate the limits of U.S. power and the hollowness of U.S. fantasies of omnipotence. The United States found that it could not force China to change its human rights policies, at least not without imposing costs that U.S. businesses were unwilling to bear.

“A great society, so large and with such built-in habits, does not change overnight,” Clinton acknowledged Thursday, using words very similar to those used over the last year by the many critics of his policy.

In the view of some China scholars and experts, Clinton’s blending of threat and retreat left the United States in a worse position than if he had never threatened at all.

For the message to the world, to China’s Asian neighbors and to the Chinese people themselves, is that Beijing can defy the United States virtually at will.

“This is being handled in a way that is eroding our credibility with the Chinese,” Kenneth Lieberthal, a University of Michigan China specialist, observed recently. “The Chinese can see that, with this Administration, when it’s time to decide whether to hold ‘em or fold ‘em, it will fold. This Administration will take a fig leaf and give away the store.”

The Administration is left hoping now that what it calls “a new policy” toward China will produce more results than the old one.

That new policy is based on what Administration officials Thursday vaguely called a “strategic relationship” with China--a phrase that sounds somewhat like the words former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger once employed.

Over the last year, the Administration has made a series of concessions to China in hopes of winning its cooperation for some changes in its human rights policies.

Clinton met with Chinese President Jiang Zemin in Seattle. On the eve of that meeting, the Administration cleared the way for the sale of a Cray supercomputer to China. The Administration approved the sale of several U.S.-made satellites to China. And it ended a ban on high-level military contacts that had been imposed by the George Bush Administration.

“They decided to give everything away,” one U.S. official observed. “Somehow, there is still this view that if we just give them enough, they will do what we want. It just doesn’t work.”

Throughout the last year, while making these concessions, the Administration held up on the one thing it believed, rightly, was the thing China wanted and needed most: most-favored-nation trade status, which allows tens of billions of dollars in Chinese exports to be sold in this country with low duties.

But in the end, China called Clinton’s bluff.

It turned out that Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) was right when he called the threat to withdraw trade benefits “the economic equivalent of a nuclear bomb”--that is, a weapon too powerful to use.

What did the United States get in exchange for its threat to withdraw most-favored-nation status? What human rights progress has there been?

Remarkably little. Over the last year, there have been no new Tian An Men Squares. China did not open fire on civilians on the streets of Beijing. Chinese authorities have also taken the first steps toward allowing the International Committee of the Red Cross into China’s prisons. And they released three prominent dissidents from prison.

Yet no one could have envisioned a year ago just how many steps China would take to show its disregard for the Clinton Administration and its policies.

In March, Chinese security officials rounded up a series of prominent dissidents while Secretary of State Warren Christopher was in Beijing. In April, they locked up Wei Jingsheng, China’s most prominent advocate of democracy, who had been freed last September after more than 14 years in jail. Wei is still in detention.

China has refused to make even some of those human rights concessions that the Clinton Administration considered relatively easy to achieve.

Early this year, U.S. officials believed that China was ready to stop its jamming of the Voice of America and other foreign broadcasts. That action might come at the time of Christopher’s mission in March, they believed.

But China has not even done that yet.

What went wrong?

Some officials, including veterans of the Bush Administration, question the entire style and underpinnings of Clinton’s approach. They argue that it was counterproductive to confront China head-on.

“Once you put your fist in the face of the Chinese and tell them they have to do something, they tend to go rigid,” said Douglas Paal, who served as director of Asian affairs for the Bush Administration.

The Clinton Administration misjudged a year ago how far China would be willing to go. Administration officials sincerely believed that the conditions they were imposing on China would be relatively easy to meet.

But the Chinese regime--facing both the threat of new social unrest inside China and a looming struggle to see who will succeed the ailing Deng Xiaoping as China’s paramount leader--was unwilling to do even the things the Administration considered modest.

The Administration misread the strength of sentiment in the U.S. business community, which did not like the idea of tying renewal of the trade benefits to human rights in the first place and which grew increasingly threatened and nervous at the prospect of a cutoff in trade.

Clinton himself bears the ultimate responsibility for being either unwilling or unable to impose discipline on top Administration officials.

A year ago, at the time Clinton first announced his executive order on China’s trade benefits, he told the nation: “Starting today, the United States will speak with one voice on China policy.”

But the behavior of his Administration over the last year has made that claim seem ironic and empty.

As Christopher was in Beijing pushing Chinese leaders for human rights concessions, top policy-makers in economic agencies such as the Commerce Department were undercutting the State Department by calling for an extension of China’s most-favored-nation status and a break in the linkage between trade and human rights.

When Christopher returned from the trip, Clinton remained largely silent. He made no statement supporting Christopher’s effort to enforce the policy of pressing hard for human rights improvements--the policy the President himself had adopted a year ago. But Clinton did not disavow the Christopher approach and support the economic team, either.

“How can you have constructive engagement and be giving everything away and also be threatening to take away China’s MFN benefits?” one U.S. official asked. “Talk about mixed signals.”

But not all of the blame for the U.S. retreat should be placed on Clinton. It must also be shared with Congress, an institution that Clinton Administration officials also misjudged.

Over a period of three years, from 1990 to 1992, Congress repeatedly passed laws tying renewal of China’s trade benefits to improvements in human rights. It was what is known as a “free vote.” Each time, President Bush vetoed the legislation, just as Congress knew he would.

This year, for the first time, Congress has been forced to deal with the real-life consequences of its legislation. China failed to make significant human rights improvements, and that meant that the cutoff in trade benefits that Congress originally threatened might actually be imposed.

In droves, Congress members retreated.

It turned out that members of Congress were willing to vote for a linkage between human rights and trade with China only at a time when they knew their legislation would be vetoed. Under the circumstances, it seems fair to conclude that many congressional Democrats were not serious about linking trade and human rights but rather were using China as a partisan issue against Bush.