Legacy of Tian An Men Crackdown Keeps China, U.S. at Arm’s Length

To the Clinton Administration, Chinese President Jiang Zemin is “the man who can’t come to dinner.” President Clinton decided to hold a brief summit with Jiang while both are in New York next week for the United Nations’ 50th birthday celebration. He would not go along with persistent Chinese requests for Jiang to make a state visit to Washington, which would have included a formal White House banquet in Jiang’s honor.

To the U.S. intelligence community, Jiang is “the man who will lead China.” In recent months, U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that the question of what will happen in China after the death of Deng Xiaoping has become increasingly meaningless. With Deng, 91, having been essentially out of action for well over a year now, Jiang and the other leaders around him have had sufficient time to run China on their own and to get a grip, albeit shaky, on the levers of power. In other words, China’s post-Deng era has already begun.

The juxtaposition of these two central facts--that the leadership of the world’s most populous nation cannot be welcomed with open arms in Washington, and that this same leadership is going to be around for some time--shows why relations between the United States and China are going to remain fairly cool. Sure, there have been some improvements over the past month, and there may be a few modest agreements touted after the summit. But the two countries are still far apart.

Saying that Jiang is going to hold on to power in China for a while does not mean he will be a strong and daring leader in the fashion of Deng or Mao Tse-tung. Jiang, who now holds the titles of president, Communist Party general secretary and chairman of the Central Military Commission, is a cautious bureaucrat whose main talent seems to be that he doesn’t offend others in the Chinese hierarchy. In meetings, outsiders often find him affable but unimposing. In an interview eight years ago when he was mayor of Shanghai, he rambled on at some length about how hard it was for his workers to collect watermelon rinds off the city’s streets.

“He is not amassing a tremendous amount of power to be able to tell other people what to do,” observed one U.S. intelligence official. “There’s nothing to indicate that he can do what Deng did.”

Among other things, Deng installed his military comrades, men from the 2nd Field Army in his native Sichuan province, into the top jobs in the People’s Liberation Army. U.S. officials believe that the post-Deng leadership in the PLA will be composed of professional soldiers, men appointed more on the basis of merit and experience than on personal connections and political credentials.

To understand the extraordinary significance of a relatively quiet transition of power after Deng’s death, you have to go back for comparisons to China’s last political succession in 1976. After Mao died, it took scarcely a month before the long-simmering power struggle within the leadership burst into the open. With the help of army and security officials, Mao’s wife and her allies in the “Gang of Four,” who had been among China’s top leaders, were thrown into jail, in most cases for the rest of their lives.

Over the next three years, Mao’s handpicked successor, Hua Guofeng, fell from power like a Chinese Humpty Dumpty, giving way to Deng. And that opened the way for what Chinese call a “reversal of verdicts.” Under Deng, a round of demonstrations in Beijing’s Tian An Men Square in 1976, which had been suppressed and deemed “counterrevolutionary,” were eventually judged to have been patriotic.

If U.S. intelligence officials are correct, there will be no intense power struggle in the months after Deng’s death. Jiang and other top leaders, including Premier Li Peng and National People’s Congress Chairman Qiao Shi, will stay on the job, functioning sometimes as tactical allies, sometimes as rivals. The next big political change in China will not come at least until the next Communist Party Congress a couple of years from now.

But that suggests there may be no “reversal of verdicts” in China after Deng’s death either. For years, U.S. officials have been suggesting and hoping that some day a new Chinese leadership would acknowledge it had been wrong to have the PLA shoot its way into Tian An Men Square in 1989, killing hundreds of demonstrators in the process.

George Bush Administration officials whispered that it didn’t matter whether they dealt with China’s leaders after the Tian An Men crackdown because those leaders wouldn’t last more than two or three years anyway. And on that last point, Winston Lord, then the Bush Administration’s severest critic and now Clinton’s assistant secretary of state, agreed.

“The current discredited regime is clearly a transitional one,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine six years ago. “. . . We can be confident that, however grim the interlude, a more enlightened leadership will emerge within a few years [and] the official Chinese line will manage to rewrite history once again.”

It hasn’t worked out that way. Perhaps some people in Beijing are quietly rewriting history but, if so, their work remains unpublished. There has been strikingly little change in the leadership since 1989. Jiang himself wasn’t involved in the Tian An Men decisions, but he was appointed by Deng a month afterward and ran the Communist Party during the ensuing repression.

More important, Li, one of the main architects of the Tian An Men crackdown, remains a powerful premier. In his new memoir, “The Politics of Diplomacy,” former Secretary of State James A. Baker III recalls how Li told him during a Beijing meeting that China’s repression of the Tian An Men demonstrations was not a tragedy but “a good thing.” Baker, not a man given to shock, writes, “I was appalled.”

Clinton’s dilemma, as he prepares for the summit with Jiang, is that he knows by now he is dealing with the man who is already leading China into the post-Deng era. Clinton needs to find some way of doing business with Jiang. Yet the continuing legacy of the 1989 upheavals also deters Clinton from giving Jiang the full welcome to which a Chinese leader would otherwise be entitled.

Moreover, Jiang and his allies have declined to give Clinton the sort of political cover he would need for any dramatic upgrade in relations with Beijing. China has not yet made even the sort of modest concessions on human rights that would help Clinton win congressional backing for his China policy.

Two years ago, for example, on the eve of Jiang’s first meeting with Clinton in Seattle, Chinese officials sought to ease the climate by indicating they might be prepared to let the International Committee of the Red Cross into Chinese prisons. It was a front-page story--but two years later, it hasn’t happened. The Red Cross is still waiting. Also, two years ago Beijing suggested it might be willing to negotiate an end to the jamming of Voice of America broadcasts in China. That hasn’t happened either.

If Jiang had come to Washington for a full state visit, Republicans on Capitol Hill would have been lining up to denounce him, sparking a new furor over China policy and, perhaps, new efforts to pass restrictive legislation punishing the Beijing leadership. It could have immediately turned China into a hot-button issue in the 1996 presidential campaign. Clinton knows the political dynamic well: He was on the other side in 1992, attacking Bush for “coddling dictators.”

In fact, last month Clinton made what seemed like a fairly generous offer to Jiang: that the Chinese leader come to Washington for a “working session,” one without the banquet and 21-gun salute of a state visit. That offer went further than human rights groups had wanted; it would have been the Chinese leader’s first visit to the White House since 1989.

But China held out for the full red-carpet treatment. Even with Jiang emerging as the first leader of a post-Deng China, Clinton wasn’t ready for that.