Beijing Steps Toward Middle Ground

May the journey of a thousand dissidents begin with the first spectacular release: Unless the weekend flight to America of Wei Jingsheng, China’s most famous dissident, is nothing more than a cynical gesture by Beijing to throw a bone the West’s way, mark the timing carefully. The dramatic move comes right after the Jiang- Clinton summit. In its own inimitable way, Beijing, it seems, is trying to send a message.

Let’s not misunderstand that message. Beijing is neither so naive nor so misinformed as to believe that the release of one dissident will secure snuggly Sino-U.S. synergy forevermore. It knows that human rights groups will not lay down their fax machines overnight. Nor does Beijing fool itself into believing that ambitious American politicians will suddenly place China off-limits as a target of demagoguery, or that the Pentagon will stop churning out those worst-case scenarios about the “Chinese military buildup.” Certainly, China will not now blossom overnight into a branch of the American Civil Liberties Union.

As “The Chinese Future,” the just-issued report from the West Coast-based Pacific Council on International Policy, makes clear, it’s nothing short of delusional to believe that China will remake itself in our image. Organized political dissent is not likely to be tolerated until the Chinese state has reached a level of economic and social development that suffuses it with the self-confidence necessary to be comfortable with the prospect of 1.2 billion people mouthing off. The report’s principal authors Michel C. Oksenberg, Michael D. Swaine and Daniel C. Lynch write: “Although China’s human rights record is improving, it is still unsatisfactory by most standards, including those held by most Chinese . . . American policy should not be rooted in the expectation that China can or will soon become a democracy.”

Nor will the release of one dissident or the achievement of one successful summit lead inexorably to the promised land of happy alliance-ville. To the contrary, said former CIA Director Robert M. Gates last week in a penetrating speech at a Sanwa Bank of California symposium in Los Angeles: “As economic relations between the United States and China grow, political relations are headed in the opposite direction. China’s leaders believe that the United States intends to maintain its global, military and economic dominance by keeping China in its place: down.” Consider, from Beijing’s perspective, that obnoxious raft of anti-China bills ginned up by Congress scarcely before Jiang had boarded the return plane home.

America as a nation and a people must face this truth about Sino-U.S. tension: The United States is the problem as well as the solution to China’s self-interested desire to avoid confrontation with the West. As Princeton professor Minxin Pei put it this weekend at a Pacific Council presentation in Los Angeles, “The summit visit has not changed the basic public opinion about China in the U.S.” Alas, the American image of China remains frozen even as the reality of China is changing more rapidly than the U.S. seems capable of monitoring or its news media, generally, seem capable of reporting. As Gates put it, even though China’s system bears little resemblance to that of Mao’s time, “the dynamism and drama of what is going on there politically is simply not reflected in the American press or understood, in my view, by most American politicians.”

If Gates is right, that’s a damning indictment of America: For all our high-minded, holier-than-thou campaigns on behalf of human rights, whether in Tibet or China itself, we have failed to educate ourselves about the world’s most populous (and potentially most dangerous) power. It is indeed arguable that the greater threat to world peace, at the moment anyway, may not be from China’s poorly armed and technologically challenged People’s Liberation Army but from a poorly informed American public, its opinions delimited by a largely ignorant and unthinking news media that too often indulge in fear-mongering, half truth-telling and stereotype-perpetuating. Said Gates: “We need perspective on how much in fact is changing in China, and we need realism that a 4,000-year-old culture and polity in China will never look like late 20th century American mass democracy and society. And so if that is the case, at some point we Americans will have to ask ourselves: How much change in China will satisfy us? How much is enough?”

If it is our view that China will not have changed enough until it changes into us, then Wei’s release this weekend means nothing, nothing at all. But if there is some middle ground for China in its relations with the West, then perhaps the freeing of a heroic opponent of Beijing potentially means a whole lot on the long road to reconciliation of East and West. At the very least, the dramatic denouement of the moving Wei Jingsheng saga means that the Chinese may very well be saying: For our part, we are trying. The question that remains now is, is the West trying, too?

Times columnist Tom Plate, a professor at UCLA, is also a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy. E-mail: tplate@ucla.edu Pullquote: