China Protests May Overshadow Pomp

Summits do not always help. After the first Kennedy-Khrushchev glower in Vienna in 1961, relations between America and the Soviet Union got worse and didn’t improve until the following year, after the terrifying Cuban missile crisis was resolved. Today’s Sino-U.S. relations are not that bad, but neither are they so cozy that Presidents Jiang Zemin or Bill Clinton expect great things from next week’s state visit, the first by a Chinese leader since 1979. It’s true that many Chinese on the mainland are hoping for the best, but many Americans are not. While the former view their president’s trip here as a major milestone on their nation’s road toward 21st century superpowerdom, Americans angry about China’s domestic rights policy and subjugation of Tibet wouldn’t mind it too much if this summit blew up in China’s face, sending its president back home with a proper respect for the power of American public opinion.

So Jiang should expect as much protest as pomp. All sorts of Americans--from environmentalists to Tibet activists to labor union members--would like to stuff Jiang, his repressive policies and cheap (if not slave) labor and forget about better relations until China behaves on certain issues more like a Western nation. This animosity will be on full display Oct. 29, when Clinton hosts Jiang at a White House state dinner. For at the same time, actor Richard Gere--Buddhist, Tibet activist and so-so actor--is host of a protest gathering, a so-called “stateless dinner,” a few blocks away. The timing is fortuitous for the release next week of “Red Corner,” Gere’s much-hyped new movie about a Westerner caught in China’s legal system.

From his perch at the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom in Washington, Peter W. Rodman, a former Reagan National Security Council aide, wonders if Jiang & Co. are really ready for America the Opinionated. On the basis of his talks with top Beijing officials in August, he fears they may have been insufficiently briefed by U.S. intelligence about the fractious mood of America and what they would face at summit time. “There are going to be demonstrations,” he says. “I would want them to come here expecting a mess. And I would hope, amid all the controversy, the Chinese can think positively and not be shaken by the noise level. But the anti-China lobby is waiting.”

Jiang, the 71-year-old former mayor of Shanghai, makes for an interesting target of American wrath about repression in China and Tibet. He’s no Jimmy Carter, of course, and has been painted by some U.S. East Coast columnists as little more than a murderer and a human rights monster. Unquestionably, Jiang is the head of a one- party state that brutally represses Western-style dissent and makes no bones about it. But he is certainly one of the least imperial of all Communist leaders, present and former; is perhaps in some ways the most similar to Western ones; and quite possibly could prove the most user-friendly of any China leader since the communist takeover in 1949.

He is a consensus builder by style and a Deng Xiaoping pragmatist by instinct. He might well be worth building bridges to, especially if predictions of some Western analysts that he may not have the political staying power for the long haul turn out to be wrong. Famed American political scientist and occasional CNN International commentator Richard Baum, who recently returned from eight months of monitoring China’s takeover of Hong Kong, suggests that the politically astute Jiang may be just what China needs. “With the death of Deng, the Hong Kong handover and the recently concluded party congress, Jiang was tested,” Baum said last week in a special briefing sponsored by the UCLA Center for International Relations. “He did well on all three occasions. So if you’re into buying political stock, he’s not at all a bad buy.”

Jiang appears to have a pretty good political ear for the big moments. On all three of the major Chinese events of 1997 ticked off by Baum, he delivered key addresses that were widely received as progressive and well attuned to the occasion. Jiang’s U.S. counterpart is no slouch in the finely tuned ear department, either. But the impending state visit, occurring at the behest of Clinton, may prove the trickiest summit of his presidency. And Clinton must take some responsibility for its overall tone and outcome.

His administration locked itself into this summit schedule last summer, after the unnerving Taiwan crisis but before the Asian campaign-cash scandal, which includes allegations of illicit Beijing giving. Now Clinton must welcome to Washington a man mainly portrayed by Western media as either the butcher from Beijing or a clandestine subverter of the 1996 presidential election.

Maybe Clinton will pull it off. But he will have to put on his leader-of-the-Western-world robe without the cushion of having prepared U.S. public opinion over the months, much less years, for the necessity of a relationship with China that emphasizes the positive and does not over-focus on the obvious and glaring negatives. This could turn out to be the mother of all summits. The one in 1961 led to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. What will this one lead to?