Clinton Shows Bravado With China Plan

When it comes to China, President Clinton is defying the conventional wisdom that, lacking core beliefs, he governs by following the polls, taking few political risks and retreating quickly when attacked.

First with his visit last summer to Tiananmen Square and now as he presses to conclude a deal for China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, Clinton has shown a willingness to take large political gambles.

Forging ahead in the teeth of withering criticism, he has shown that he indeed does stand for something: a belief that American trade and investment are good for both this country and the rest of the world.

On China, Clinton is a believer. Rejecting populist sentiments across America and siding instead with the business community and foreign-policy elites, he embraces the argument that U.S.-China trade is good for prosperity in America and democracy in China.

“I’ve got to hand it to him,” marveled Jeff Fiedler, one of organized labor’s leading activists on China and a determined opponent of the WTO deal now under consideration. “The political environment on China [in the United States] is terrible right now. He has a war going on. And yet he’s going ahead anyway. . . .

“He’s under enormous political pressure on China and he hasn’t done a lot of backing off.”

Formed a Reputation as Wavering

Clinton established a reputation as wavering and risk-averse immediately after his election in 1992. Even before he became president, he abandoned some of his early nominees after they came under fire, such as C. Lani Guinier, a law school friend he had chosen to head the Justice Department’s civil rights division.

That stereotype seemed to fit Clinton’s policies on China for most of his first term.

Soon after taking office, the president proposed requiring that China improve its human rights policies before its U.S. trade benefits would be renewed. He abandoned that requirement a year later in the face of intense opposition from the business community.

In 1995, his administration first refused to grant a visa to Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui, then reversed itself after Congress voted by overwhelming margins to support a visit by Lee.

Last spring, by contrast, when then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said that Clinton should cancel a planned visit to China and more than 160 Republicans signed a letter calling on him to scrub the trip, the president ignored them.

The House then voted, 305 to 116, to urge Clinton not to visit Tiananmen Square, the site of democracy protests in 1989. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) joined the chorus. The president visited Tiananmen Square anyway.

This week Clinton has shown an eagerness for a new trade deal with China at a time when new allegations about Chinese spying and political donations in the United States have brought a crescendo of new attacks on his policy of engagement.

Why does Clinton seem so much more determined in his China policy during his second term? One reason is that he no longer has to run for reelection. He feels less politically constrained than he was in 1992, when he attacked the George Bush administration for “coddling dictators” in Beijing.

“We’ll never know what the president was thinking in 1992. We know only what he was saying . . . ,” observed Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco). “While Bill Clinton has been said to follow the political winds, he’s a very stubborn man. He and George Bush both have made China policy an issue of their manhood.”

Another factor, advanced privately by those who have worked for the administration, is that Clinton has a different national security advisor in his second term.

In the first term that job was held by Anthony Lake, a cerebral idealist and admirer of Woodrow Wilson with a penchant for advancing American human rights policies around the world. In 1997, in a policy change masquerading as a personnel decision, Clinton replaced Lake with Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger, a former trade lawyer who is much more receptive to the views of the U.S. business community.

Clinton’s current effort to bring China into the World Trade Organization is part of a larger structure of agreements he has concluded or proposed, all of them advancing the idea that free trade is one of the highest goals of his administration.

As early as 1993, Clinton pressed ahead, despite considerable opposition from within the Democratic Party, with a successful effort to win approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement. He also won approval of a global trade deal under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.

Since then Clinton has also tried, so far without success, to persuade Congress to extend his “fast-track” trading authority.

Democracy in China Called ‘Inevitable’

The president regularly justifies these trade deals as beneficial not just for business but for the United States as a whole.

He espouses the belief that trade will lead to greater prosperity in other countries as well. “Open markets and technology are raising living standards on every continent,” he said in a speech this week.

And finally, when it comes to China, Clinton sometimes claims that greater prosperity, economic change and the freer flow of information will lead to democracy. Liberty cannot be held back forever in China, he told one press conference two years ago, “just as eventually the Berlin Wall fell. I just think it’s inevitable.”

Clinton may have concluded that, even if it is unpopular, his China policy may not be bad politics either, because the issue of American trade with China divides the Republican Party even more than it does Democrats. Pro-business Republicans strongly favor trade with China, while populist Republicans support restrictions on trade.

Lott, the Senate majority leader, announced Tuesday that he would oppose any deal to bring China into the World Trade Organization. What he did not say, however, was that Congress would not vote on the deal itself but rather on the permanent trading benefits that would be the consequence of such a deal. And Lott has regularly voted to extend China’s trade benefits.

When the Clinton administration finally concludes a WTO deal with China, Fiedler predicted, “it will shut up the Republicans.”