China Bedevils Clinton Anew With Donation Controversy

The Clinton administration’s latest political headache is linked to a familiar foreign power but it comes with a new twist.

The country is China, long dreaded as a Marxist menace but now accused of playing an old capitalist trick--trying to influence U.S. policy with illegal campaign contributions. And the controversy sparked by this accusation threatens to turn President Clinton’s China policy, never the high point of his diplomatic record, into a major political liability.

“The fund-raising scandal has left many in Congress unwilling to defend China. And it’s left Clinton gunshy about being seen as getting favors for China,” said Greg Mastel, trade specialist for the Economic Strategy Institute, a Washington think tank. “The combined result is no one in U.S. government really wants to be seen as being nice to China.”

At the moment, challenges to Clinton’s approach are coming thick and fast across the political spectrum, from conservative leader Patrick J. Buchanan on the right to House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) on the left.

To be sure, Clinton’s policy of helping China find a respectable niche in the international community in hopes that the Asian power will reform itself still has powerful boosters, notably among the business community. Recently, the Business Coalition for U.S.-China trade, made up of about 1,000 multinational corporations and trade associations, gave every member of Congress a position paper arguing that U.S. strategic interests are linked to China’s emergence “as a force for stability and prosperity” on the Pacific Rim.

Defenders of China are used to dealing with a variety of charges--from unfair trade practices to human rights abuses to trafficking in nuclear materials. But the allegation now under FBI investigation, that Chinese officials tried to funnel campaign contributions through foreign corporations to members of Congress, may be the gravest political accusation yet, in terms of their impact on U.S. sensibilities.

These accusations go beyond “old-fashioned bribery,” said John Bolton, head of international research at the American Enterprise Institute think tank and a former Bush administration State Department official. “Now you are talking about subversion.”

During China’s half century as a potent presence on the U.S. political scene, the nature of its impact has varied dramatically. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the world’s most populous country was a damaging negative for Democrats who had to bear the stigma of “losing China” to the Communists in the wake of World War II. A generation later, President Nixon converted “Red China,” as it was then known, into a huge plus for himself when he paid his historic 1972 visit to Mao Tse-tung, establishing links to the country that gave the United States leverage in its dealings with the Soviet Union.

The U.S. capacity to influence China remains problematic. Clinton discovered this at the start of his presidency when he tried to use the threat of withdrawing most-favored-nation trading status for China as a stick to prod Beijing into easing political repression. He ended up abandoning that policy after a year.

For all its negatives, China exercises a powerful attraction for U.S. business people and politicians.

“The big pull . . . is the infatuation of American big business with the great myth of the China market,” said Buchanan. “Americans have believed in this for a century and it has never come to fruition.”

Last week, Buchanan announced a campaign to push for rejection of China’s most-favored-nation status, which is expected to come up for renewal in Congress this year. One of his unlikely allies may be Gephardt, who said that he “probably” would oppose the designation’s renewal. Gephardt last week also introduced legislation requiring congressional approval for U.S. support of China’s admittance to the World Trade Organization, another Clinton objective.

In addition to trade, a range of Chinese policies rub many Americans the wrong way, accounting for the unlikely assortment of political bedfellows who take issue with Clinton’s cooperative approach to China. The country’s disregard of civil liberties outrages champions of human rights forces and its missile-rattling rankles arms-control advocates.

Then, too, said Bolton of the American Enterprise Institute, some Americans yearn for the stark symmetry of the Cold War as they survey the global front. They “think it would be nice to have a clear new enemy. And China fits the bill, to some extent,” he said.