Good Cop, Bad Cop: a China Policy

California’s two U.S. senators were in different PacRim capitals last week, working the China issue. One of them was in Beijing, praising China; the other was in Los Angeles, knocking it. So there you had, between the two of these remarkable women, the yin and yang, as it were, for dealing with China. Is this some new kind of “two-China” policy?

Maybe. But perhaps this dissonance is the best approach for a difficult future superpower: Play the good cop/bad cop routine and hope something works.

First the good cop: In Beijing, Dianne Feinstein was publicly stroking the Chinese leadership, praising President Jiang Zemin and urging that President Clinton invite him to Washington for a full-dress state visit. “I think people in the Western world have dismissed him without understanding his full potential as a leader,” she told Times correspondent Rone Tempest.

Then the bad cop: At the same time, in Los Angeles, California’s other U.S. senator was publicly hammering Beijing for permitting its factories to manufacture and then dump pirated American CDs and CD-ROMs on the world market. “We should do much more than we ever did before to protect U.S. intellectual property,” Boxer declared to a UCLA workshop of entertainment executives, government officials, faculty and students. The issue is salient for California, where much of the stolen material originates. And later last week, word came from Washington that the Clinton administration is contemplating economic sanctions against China because of the persistent pirating.

Boxer’s pugnaciousness contrasted with Feinstein’s dovishness, but in fact the differing approaches couldn’t be more complementary if they had been choreographed in advance. (They weren’t.) For if you fused Boxer and Feinstein together, what you’d have--besides one devastatingly articulate politician-- would be a reasonably accurate reflection of the American people’s own hopes and fears about the world’s biggest nation. And maybe, too, in the least worst of all possible worlds, a reasonable China policy.

The Nixon-Kissinger effort that inspired the secret trips to China in the 1970s resulted in what was then artfully described as a normalization of relations. But of course even today relations are far from normal. For starters, China has made tremendous economic strides but comparatively meager political and human rights progress. Its biggest problem isn’t Taiwan, but itself: Its human rights violations are eating at everyone in the West, and the latest revelations of abuse of orphaned children and last week’s putsch to monopolize the news services there revived all the doubt. In this and other respects, Beijing has to get with it or it is going to pay dearly in international diplomacy.

Even if the China-U.S. relationship improves over time, as I do think it will, China will long prove a high-maintenance item for everyone involved. America’s responsibility is to offer consistency--keep tilting toward Beijing while respecting Taipei. In this respect, America has not done badly. Beijing must understand that the U.S. is not a monolith. As U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher has said of this relationship, “It’s hard for dictatorships to understand democracies.”

Congress nowadays is very Republican and the American people do get unnerved when they see the dark side of China. Under these conditions abandonment of the island of Taiwan is politically inconceivable. “For the Chinese,” emphasized Feinstein, telephoning me from Hong Kong after her brief Beijing sojourn, “Taiwan is a visceral, large and potentially explosive issue. If we mishandle it, it will rally the leadership and the Chinese people.” But don’t the Chinese have to learn to understand our system better? “Yes, they know that,” she said. “They’re establishing an institute to study Congress.” (Hey, Newt--big lecture fee potential there!)

Maybe the Chinese are in fact getting over the Taiwan issue. “This problem is never going to go away; we know it,” a top Chinese embassy official in Washington told me a few months ago. “We’re just going to have to live with it, get irritated with you over and over again, but don’t, as you Americans would say, lose the cool.”

What should American policy be? Probably something close to yin and yang. “This is not a country,” insists Feinstein the Friendly, “that you can bully into submission.” She is right--besides, if flattery will work with China’s leaders, why not try it?

“My goal,” asserts Boxer the Basher, referring to China’s pirating factories that undersell American goods, “is to do whatever I can to help you create [U.S.] jobs.” And she is right, too. America and California would reap great benefits if China would honor trade agreements.

So, I hope this clears up any confusion inside the State Department. Sure, China policy is complicated--but try it the California way. Let our two senators, yin and yang, work Beijing over. Why not?

Tom Plate’s column runs Tuesdays. His e-mail address is <tplate@ucla.edu>. Pullquote:

‘So there you had, between the two of these remarkable women, the yin and yang, as it were, for dealing with China. Is this some new kind of “two-China” policy?’