Defense Chief Takes Hard Line Toward Beijing

In a strongly worded speech, Defense Secretary William J. Perry on Tuesday called on China to live up to its claim that it is a responsible world power, maintaining that Beijing “sends quite the opposite message” when it threatens Taiwan and exports nuclear technology.

While defending the Clinton administration’s policy of constructive engagement toward China, the defense secretary warned that “we are not committed to engagement at any price.”

His speech to a symposium on U.S.-China-Japan relations at Ft. McNair here was the most important in a series of efforts by the administration to warn Beijing about the consequences of its recent military threats against Taiwan.

The administration’s warning to Beijing was especially striking because it was delivered by Perry, the senior U.S. official most respected in Beijing and, at least in the past, the most sympathetic to China’s long-term problems.

“It takes two to tango,” the defense secretary said. “It takes two to engage.” The suggestion was that the administration has been trying to be restrained and conciliatory in its policy toward China but that the leadership in Beijing has not reciprocated.

Perry’s speech echoed a series of tough private messages that administration officials gave China last week, when Deputy Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing visited Washington. And it came on a day when top-level administration officials were huddling at the White House to decide whether to impose economic sanctions against China for selling to Pakistan some technology that is used in making nuclear weapons.

Under the policy called constructive engagement, the administration has sought repeatedly to persuade China to begin formal, high-level dialogues with the United States on arms control, human rights and other issues dividing the two countries.

Often, China has insisted that the United States make concessions in exchange for these dialogues. In some instances, it has entered into talks, then stopped them and asked for new U.S. concessions to start them up again.

On human rights, for example, China has said repeatedly that it will begin a dialogue with the United States, but only if the administration gives up its support of a U.N. resolution condemning China’s human rights practices. On arms control, Beijing has said it will talk, but only if the United States justifies its 1992 sale of F-16 warplanes to Taiwan.

“They seem to have the idea that you have to pay at the door just to have a relationship,” one senior U.S. official said Tuesday. “It has to be a two-way street. That’s what a relationship is all about. And that’s the message we have been trying to convey.”

The driving factor behind the changes in the administration’s China policy has been a series of military exercises conducted by the People’s Liberation Army in southern China, in and near the Taiwan Strait. Those exercises were timed to rattle the population of Taiwan as the island is preparing for the first direct presidential election in its history.

Top Chinese officials were outraged when Taiwan’s current president, Lee Teng-hui, was permitted to make an unprecedented trip to the United States last year for a reunion at Cornell University in upstate New York. China considers Taiwan to be a part of its own territory.

Senior administration officials testified in Congress last week that they do not believe China poses any imminent military threat to Taiwan. Yet Pentagon officials seem concerned that by carrying out these maneuvers, China might be able to intimidate Taiwan--and perhaps other Asian governments.

Perry’s speech Tuesday contained one vaguely worded reference to the American role as a military power in the Pacific. “Engagement also does not preclude us from pursuing our interests with all appropriate instruments of national power,” the defense secretary declared.

The Clinton administration, like past administrations, has left open the possibility that it might intervene militarily to defend Taiwan if the island were attacked by China.

According to U.S. and Chinese sources, during the talks here last week the administration warned that the landmark agreements that make up America’s “one China” policy were based on the assumption that China would act peacefully toward Taiwan. In particular, U.S. officials served notice that they might abandon a 1982 agreement limiting U.S. arms sales to Taiwan if the Chinese military threats continue.

“We again conveyed the seriousness with which we would take any resort to non-peaceful means [used by China in dealing with Taiwan],” said one U.S. participant in the talks.

A source familiar with Beijing’s point of view said China viewed the warnings as a threat. In the past, the official said, the United States has always phrased its commitment to a “one China” policy in positive rather than negative terms.

Under the policy, which dates to the Nixon administration, the United States refuses to recognize Taiwan as an independent country.