GOP Hits the Wall Over China Policy

When it comes to dealing with China, President Clinton has it relatively easy.

That can’t be right, can it? As Chinese President Jiang Zemin visits the White House today, protesters will be clamoring on the streets outside, congressional and Justice Department investigators will still be poring over documents in search of ties between China and fund-raising for the 1996 campaign, and members of Congress will be lining up to denounce the president.

But paradoxical as it may sound, China--Clinton’s biggest foreign-policy headache--also represents yet another opportunity for him to weaken and outmaneuver his opponents in Congress and the Republican Party.

This is the fundamental, little-recognized reality of China as a political issue in the United States these days: Republicans are so deeply divided over how to deal with the Chinese that they cannot mount any coherent, effective opposition to Clinton’s policies.

Indeed, to take this a step further, the more the president pushes his policy of engagement with China to the forefront of American politics, the more his GOP opponents find themselves bickering with one another.

“China has become a wedge issue for the president,” one Clinton administration official confided recently.

A wedge issue is one that will accentuate the divisions within the opposition party. In recent years, abortion has been an effective wedge issue for Democrats to use against Republicans; affirmative action has served a similar purpose for the GOP.

Sure, when it comes to China, Democrats have their own internal disagreements. The party is split between a pro-business wing, which wants better ties with China, and organized labor, which views trade with China as a threat to the jobs and wages of American workers.

These disputes are a source of some worry for Vice President Al Gore as he prepares to run for the White House in 2000. But they are not high on his boss’ list of worries.

Clinton doesn’t have to run for reelection. Moreover, he has been navigating the shoals of the divisions in his party between business and labor for more than four years, ever since he won passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993. China is just one example of the broader disagreements over trade that are, by now, old hat for the Democrats.

The disputes among the Republicans over China are far more intense.

On the one hand, the party has a corporate, pro-business wing that would like to promote American commercial interests in China. For the Republicans, this is a core constituency--one which may not be as strong as it used to be, but which has, nevertheless, served as the GOP’s bedrock of support for more than a century.

But other key groups within the Republican Party have, over the past year, seized upon China as an issue that embodies their deepest values. They would like the United States to take a much tougher, more confrontational approach in dealing with the Chinese regime.

The Christian Coalition and other religious activists want the United States to combat religious persecution in China. Meanwhile, the GOP’s neoconservatives--those who want the United States to keep on promoting freedom and opposing communism as it did against the Soviet Union--view China as the test case for U.S. foreign policy after the end of the Cold War.

For the Republicans, American policy toward China is not just one element in a broader dispute over free trade. Rather, China stands in a class by itself as the party’s single most divisive foreign-policy issue.

Although they have attracted little attention, these GOP splits on China have been evident on Capitol Hill in the last month.

In the House, several leading Republicans wanted to challenge Clinton with a series of bills aimed at punishing the Chinese regime for human rights abuses and proliferation of dangerous weapons.

These leaders, including Reps. Benjamin A. Gilman of New York, chairman of the International Relations Committee, and Christopher Cox of Newport Beach, chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, pushed the package of bills called up to the House floor in mid-October, just before the Chinese president’s visit here.

But it didn’t happen. In the end, House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.)--who seems to support Clinton’s China policy more than he ever admits in public--succeeded in having the bills kept off the floor so that they would not cast a cloud over this week’s summit. The bills will instead be called up next month.

It’s hard to see what could end the Republicans’ internecine skirmishing over China. One possibility might be if the Republicans decided Clinton were retreating from past U.S. policy toward Taiwan. Since 1979, the United States has not recognized Taiwan’s government, but has sold it the arms it needs to offer a credible deterrent to defend the island.

For now, however, there’s not much sign of change concerning Taiwan. Thus, despite all the tumult over China in this country, it is a political issue that works to the president’s advantage.

As Jiang strides into the White House, Clinton knows that with every step the Chinese president takes, the Republicans will be carefully watching--each other.

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