Entree at Jiang’s U.S. State Dinner: Respect

If you want to understand the larger underlying meaning of next week’s summit between President Clinton and Chinese President Jiang Zemin, consider for a moment the heretofore untold story of the White House tent.

When the administration began making plans for the state dinner that Clinton will host for Jiang next week, American officials suggested to their Chinese counterparts that a tent could be pitched on the White House’s South Lawn.

With such a tent, Clinton would have been able to invite a larger number of guests, thus more easily accommodating the hordes of American business executives eager to be seen at the dinner. The tent was not an entirely new idea: A year ago, when the president of Ireland came to Washington, her state dinner was held outdoors in this way.

But Chinese officials balked. Bu hao (no good) was the Chinese answer. They wanted the dinner to be inside the White House, even if it meant having fewer guests. The Chinese didn’t want there to be even the slightest suggestion Jiang was getting something less than full White House honors.

“They said a state dinner is a state dinner,” reports one administration official. And so Clinton, Jiang and the White House guests will dine indoors.

As this episode illustrates, the formal ceremonies next week will be, in many ways, the message of Jiang’s visit here.

Over the coming days, there will be plenty of talk about the specific business transacted between Washington and Beijing. Much will be said about nuclear deals, maritime agreements and strategic dialogue between the two countries. Some of this may indeed turn out to be important.

But from the broader historical perspective, nothing matters so much as the fact that eight years after the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown, the Chinese regime is being returned to full respectability at the White House, signified by the red carpet treatment of a state visit.

Over the last two years, ceremony has been the crux of some high-level diplomacy between Washington and Beijing. In the fall of 1995, when Jiang was preparing to visit New York City for a United Nations gathering, Clinton administration officials invited him to visit Washington afterward.

But at the time, Clinton would offer Jiang only a “working visit”--that is, top-level meetings, but no red-carpet treatment. Chinese officials insisted upon a state visit. And there the negotiations broke down. Jiang and Clinton decided instead to meet briefly in New York.

What has changed? Why is Clinton now offering the state visit he rejected two years ago? After all, the Chinese regime seems no more tolerant of political dissent than it was back then. Nor has it voiced any remorse for the crackdown of 1989, in which many hundreds of Chinese were killed.

One factor is simply American politics: 1995 was the year before Clinton was running for reelection, and a state visit for Jiang would have been more politically risky for him than it is now. Ironically, in the two decades before the Tiananmen crackdown, American presidents (Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan) used to sojourn to China at the beginning of their reelection campaigns.

The other factor was 1996’s brief military confrontation over Taiwan, in which China launched missiles into the waters near the island and the United States responded by sending two aircraft carrier battle groups into the area. That flare-up seems to have persuaded the Clinton administration it needed to find a better working accommodation with China.

Administration officials have worked out how they will try to explain to the American public their respectful treatment of the Chinese regime. One common line is to stress that Jiang’s state visit does not mean the United States endorses China’s policies.

“It [the state visit] doesn’t mean we accept everything they do,” National Security Advisor Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger told columnists earlier this month. “It means recognizing that they are one-quarter of the world.”

Those words may have blurred together China’s government and its people, but they were a fair reflection of the administration’s thinking.

According to Chinese sources, when Berger visited China last summer to lay the groundwork for the summit, he laid out several options for what could happen.

The visit could be strictly ceremonial, Berger told Chinese leaders, or the two governments could try to make progress on a number of areas (such as human rights, trade and arms proliferation) that have divided the two countries. We won’t know until next week which option China has decided to take. But it certainly wants the ceremony.

Whatever other business is transacted will be secondary to the honor Clinton will show to Jiang Zemin. It will signify that without the slightest apology or regret, the Chinese regime will have completed the transformation from an armed assault upon the civilians of Beijing to a 21-gun salute at the White House.

Jim Mann’s column appears in this space every Wednesday.