China Is Having Its Way with U.S.--Business Before Human Rights
It may seem paradoxical, but China is now getting more from the Clinton Administration than it ever obtained from George Bush. With Secretary of Commerce Ronald H. Brown’s trip to Beijing last week, Bill Clinton has made it plainer than ever before that his 1992 campaign dictum--”It’s the economy, stupid”--has overridden and washed out his campaign attacks on Bush for “coddling dictators” in Beijing.
Accompanied by more than 20 U.S. business leaders, Brown said the Clinton Administration is giving much higher priority to U.S. commercial interests in China and avoided any public criticism of China’s human-rights policies. In exchange for his deference, China announced the signing of nearly $5 billion in business deals, of which more than an estimated $2 billion in work will be done in the United States. Many of these deals had been in the works, and would likely have been signed anyway. And some supposed agreements are probably letters of understanding, not binding contracts.
Brown did announce that China will resume its human-rights dialogue with Washington. But that was merely a giveback by Beijing, since China suspended talks earlier this year; the United States had been seeking to resume the talks for months.
Brown’s trip was not unprecedented. For years, China has selectively welcomed trade missions from various countries as a reward for their good behavior in other areas of diplomacy. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was granted the right to send a high-level trade delegation to Beijing after she signed the agreement to return Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. Awarding contracts for political reasons would seem to run contrary to principles of free trade, but Beijing is not a place for purists of the Adam Smith school.
During 1989-92, after the Tian An Men Square crackdown, the Democratic Party, with Brown as its chairman, repeatedly criticized Bush for seeking a reconciliation with the Chinese regime. Now, under the banner of what it calls “constructive engagement,” the Administration is seeking just such a reconciliation. The out-of-office Democrats attacked Bush for sending then-National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft to Beijing. Now, the Clinton Administration is set to dispatch a series of high-level emissaries to China. Brown will be followed later this fall by Defense Secretary William J. Perry and Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary. China hopes all these trips will serve as a buildup for a visit by Clinton in 1995.
Indeed, in some respects, the Clinton Administration has gone further toward upgrading relations with China than Bush dared. It restored the U.S. military ties with China’s People’s Liberation Army that Bush cut in June, 1989, an act Bush was unprepared to take. During his last year in office, Bush risked Chinese ire by selling F-16s to Taiwan and dispatching a Cabinet secretary, U.S. Trade Representative Carla A. Hills, to Taipei; Clinton has been much more cautious in his dealings with Taiwan for fear of offending Beijing.
Most significant, the Chinese regime has more openly taunted and defied the Clinton Administration on human rights than it ever did the Bush Administration. On the eve of Brown’s trip, Chinese authorities detained a leading dissident, Wang Dan, in what seemed to be a test of how much the Administration would stomach. Brown said nothing publicly.
Imagine what would have happened in the 1970s or 1980s if the Soviet Union had thrown the country’s leading dissident, Andrei D. Sakharov, into jail because he had committed the alleged offense of meeting with a senior U.S. official. Undoubtedly, Presidents Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan would have expressed outrage and treated the incident as a serious breach in the relationship. Yet, this spring, China did virtually the same thing: It detained China’s leading dissident, Wei Jingsheng, for more than four months because he met with John H. Shattuck, Clinton’s assistant secretary of state for human rights. At least in public, Clinton has said or done nothing about the incident.
On several occasions during 1990-92, the Bush Administration extracted concessions from China, such as the release of a few dissidents, that go beyond anything Clinton has yet achieved. That is not to say Bush deserved all the credit for winning the concessions. Rather, he was able to get as far as he did because the former President could point to the Democratic Congress and say to the Chinese, “You better give us something, because otherwise, the Democratic Congress is going to punish you.”
That is the important, underlying change in U.S.-China policy from Bush to Clinton: Largely because he is a Democrat, Clinton has succeeded in overcoming the congressional proponents of human-rights and democratic reforms in China in a way no Republican could have managed. It is often said that it took Richard M. Nixon, a Republican and longtime anti-communist, to lead America’s historic opening to China in 1972. Similarly, it took Clinton, a Democrat and self-proclaimed human-rights advocate, to restore relations with Beijing after the Tian An Men Square upheaval.
The Administration worked for a year with Democratic members of Congress who favored strong human-rights policies, including Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) and House Majority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.). Then it broke with them on China policy last May, after their support had been eroded and their intensity defused. “We were just fooled,” admitted Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) in a recent interview. “They (Clinton Administration officials) asked us to give them time. We held off from criticism while the Chinese were doing all sorts of nasty things.”
The Administration’s principal justification for its new policy, aired repeatedly by Brown before and during the trip, is that greater trade will help reformers within the Chinese leadership and thus promote human rights. That is, however, only an assumption, and so far there is little evidence to support it. In fact, at a time when China faces a major political struggle for succession to Deng Xiaoping, Clinton’s conciliatory policies could unintentionally lend greater legitimacy to hard-liners like Premier Li Peng--leaders who say that they know how to handle the United States and that there is no penalty to be paid for China’s repeated crackdowns on human rights.
