China Trip Seen Aiding Both Clinton and Jiang

President Clinton, concluding a trip that showcased his foreign policy credentials in the face of his continuing domestic travails, said Friday that he believes democracy will come to China.

“Not only do I believe there can be [democracy in China], I believe there will be,” the president declared in the final hours before leaving here for home.

He said he would like to see the current Chinese government “ride the wave of change and take China fully into the 21st century and basically dismantle the resistance to [democracy].”

At a news conference here, Clinton also voiced the strongest support any American president has ever expressed for Chinese dissidents.

The president did not meet with opponents or critics of the Communist regime during his visit to the mainland. But when asked what message he would have for them, Clinton declared Friday: “My message is that the United States is on your side.”

During his nine-day visit to China, Clinton walked a fine line by pressing for political freedom while, at the same time, forging a much stronger American relationship with the leadership headed by President Jiang Zemin.

Clinton’s groundbreaking trip had important foreign policy implications as well. Not only did it represent the closest alignment the United States has achieved with China in the past decade, but it may alter the balance of forces affecting Washington’s ties with other nations in Asia.

“This [impact] amounts to a second normalization of U.S. relations with China,” U.S. Ambassador to China James R. Sasser told reporters Friday.

Jiang cleared the way for Clinton to say on Chinese television a week ago that the American people disagree strongly with the way the Communist regime used force in 1989 to suppress the pro-democracy demonstrations at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

Clinton’s words were a milestone in China, where public criticism of the bloody Tiananmen crackdown has not been permitted.

On Friday, Clinton lavished praise on Jiang as a Chinese leader with vision.

“He can imagine a future that is different from the present,” Clinton said.

Over the past week, in a series of appearances in China and Hong Kong, Clinton repeatedly expressed support for the values of democracy and freedom of expression.

He argued at his news conference Friday that during the 21st century democracy “will be the right course practically as well as morally, yielding more stability and more progress.”

Clinton also suggested that opening the way for freedom of speech could moderate the chaotic, topsy-turvy pattern of China’s history over the past half a century.

“If you want to avoid these wild swings where society is like a pressure cooker that blows the top off, then there has to be some institutional way in which people who have grievances . . . can express dissent,” the president said.

At one point, Clinton was asked when he thought communism will end and democracy will come to China.

“That’s like saying . . . do I believe a woman will be elected president of the United States?” the president shot back. “I do. Do I think it will be a good thing? I do. Do I know when it will happen? I don’t.”

The Tiananmen massacre and the collapse of the Soviet Union led to a breakdown in the relationship between China and the United States that was forged by President Nixon.

Over the past nine years, Washington and Beijing have been locked in a seemingly unending series of disputes over China’s human rights practices, its sales of weapons to the Middle East and American arms sales to Taiwan.

However, two broad developments in recent months have helped propel the United States and China toward a new partnership.

The first was the Asian financial crisis.

The Clinton administration sought China’s help in dealing with the region’s slumping economy.

“I think that the Chinese have done a good thing by maintaining the stability of their currency and not engaging in currency devaluation,” Clinton said Friday.

At the same time, the region’s economic troubles brought about at least a temporary estrangement between the Clinton administration and Japan, which has balked at stimulating its economy as much as the United States wants. The president told the news conference that “we have a huge stake in getting Japanese growth going.”

The second new factor pushing the United States and China together once again was the recent series of nuclear tests conducted by India and then Pakistan. The United States has sought China’s help in dealing with this crisis too.

During his daylong visit to Hong Kong on Friday, Clinton met one-on-one with Martin Lee, the chairman of the Democratic Party, which won the greatest number of votes in elections here in May.

Lee afterward lauded the U.S. president.

“The entire China trip was successful,” Lee said. “President Clinton was able to push open a door I thought was not possible with his lively exchange with Jiang Zemin televised live to the entire nation. But now that that has happened, it is important to keep pressing. I don’t want to see the door open for Clinton and immediately close after he is gone.”

Clinton, who was elected in 1992 on a platform that focused on the domestic economy, was initially viewed as a babe in the woods when it came to foreign policy. He was treated almost condescendingly by senior foreign leaders. On his first trip to Europe as president, for a NATO summit in January 1994, he seemed lost among the other alliance leaders.

Ironically, he may be establishing an imprint in foreign affairs at a time when much of his domestic agenda seems to be stalled in Congress.

Clinton has attempted to strengthen ties with Latin America, for example, and played a leading role in the drive to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to embrace former Eastern Bloc nations--a policy whose wisdom may take a long time to evaluate.

His push to bail out Mexico against emphatic congressional opposition was an unqualified success. Mexico’s financial crisis quickly ebbed after it got the U.S. backing.

More ambiguously, the face-off with Iraq earlier this year, when Washington seemed prepared to launch punishing airstrikes on Baghdad, had the potential for diplomatic disaster, as the administration ventured far beyond any consensus of allies. In the end, however, a potentially serious problem was defused with a compromise negotiated by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

Yet in contrast to Iraq, in which Clinton was backed by a domestic constituency that supported attacking Saddam Hussein, his approach to engaging China has sparked criticism. A coalition of conservatives and liberals has sought a more aggressive approach to China’s restrictions on political and religious freedom.

Despite Clinton’s dramatic news conference with Jiang and hints of possibly increased openness on the part of China, some critics have continued to pound at the president for offering Beijing too much, in the form of U.S. support, while receiving too little in return.

Nonetheless, the members of Clinton’s team have been elated at what they view as a highly successful summit and what they regard as leadership by the president in the face of ongoing criticism.

In one respect, Clinton’s old credo--”It’s the economy, stupid”--may be germane to his growing success overseas.

The United States’ powerful economy, which in recent years has combined brisk growth with low inflation, high employment and increasingly competitive companies, has been widely commented on during his China trip.

The strong American economy has raised the stature of the U.S. from what it was in the 1980s, when a view of American decline gained widespread credence.

Clinton’s trip also appears to have boosted the aspirations of proponents of Chinese democracy.

“In the short term, there’s no hope at all,” Hong Kong legislator Lee said. “But if I asked you 10 years ago if Soviet Russia would have democracy, or that the president of Taiwan would be democratically elected, you would have thought I was crazy.”

Times staff writers Tyler Marshall and Maggie Farley contributed to this report. To hear Times correspondents’ audio reports from China, updated daily on The Times’ Web site, go to: https://www.latimes.com/china.