China Syndrome

You probably didn’t know that the CIA was briefly in the mule business in western China. Not many people do, because, as James Mann points out in “About Face,” much of U.S.-China relations has been conducted in the deepest secrecy. Early in the war against Soviet invaders in Afghanistan during the 1980s, the moujahedeen resistors ran into a terrible mule shortage. American spooks came to the rescue, buying up thousands of mules in China and driving them over the 14,000-foot Karakorum Pass into Pakistan, where they were loaded with weapons and sent on to Afghanistan. China supplied many of the weapons too: At one point, Mann estimates, Beijing was making as much as $100 million a year selling arms to the CIA for use in the Afghan war. Ten years later, of course, the U.S. government would profess shock and dismay at Chinese weapons sales to Pakistan.

This hypocrisy gets the scathing criticism it deserves in Mann’s fine new book. He reminds us that the crepuscular realm of arms sales and intelligence-sharing was always at the center of China-U.S. relations, especially in the first years after Nixon’s trip in 1972. But the logic of the Cold War, which originally brought the two countries together, evaporated after 1989, the year when the Cold War began drawing to a close and when hundreds of innocent people were killed around Tiananmen Square.

Mann, a Los Angeles Times columnist on foreign affairs and the paper’s Beijing correspondent from 1984 to ‘87, has written a cogent and authoritative study. He shows how the exigencies of the Cold War shaped an unlikely partnership--”cozy, secretive, elite-based”--that couldn’t withstand the pressure of American public opinion after Tiananmen. Every president starting with Nixon made diplomatic concessions to the Chinese government that weren’t really necessary, he argues.

Armed with his Freedom of Information Act probes into U.S. diplomatic history, Mann skewers Nixon, Kissinger and their schoolboy eagerness to make friends with China. Long vaunted for their insightful diplomacy, these two make some embarrassingly foolish observations about their Chinese counterparts. Kissinger compares Nixon to Mao because they both have “problems with intellectuals”--an extraordinary statement considering the thousands of intellectuals who died at Mao’s hands. Nixon, meanwhile, thinks that Mao’s evil and ambitious wife, Jiang Qing, is “humble” compared with the boastful Soviets he was used to negotiating with.

In covering the 25 years since Nixon’s trip, Mann produces some memorable portraits of the players, large and small. The book’s central figure is Winston Lord, a Kissinger aide who became ambassador to China under Ronald Reagan and the assistant secretary of State for East Asia under President Clinton. The quintessential elitist diplomat, always eager to minimize controversy and avoid criticism, Lord stepped out of character to become “the most improbable dissident in America,” in Mann’s pithy estimation, whenhe publicly castigated the U.S. government for failing to follow through on human rights after Tiananmen.

Perhaps the chief villain of the tale is Alexander Haig, secretary of State under Reagan, who cashed in his China contacts for private business and cravenly became the only American to stand on the podium during China’s national day celebrations four months after Tiananmen.

Mann is writing pretty straight diplomatic history. But several of his portraits are deft enough to reveal the essential weaknesses of successive presidencies, in more than just their China policies. We see the feebleness of Jimmy Carter, who talked a lot about human rights but neglected to apply them (the famous dissident Wei Jingsheng was arrested for the first time in 1979, and Carter never so much as peeped in protest). We see the hollowness of Reagan, who came in with fiery anti-Communist rhetoric but never put any of it into practice. Bush is the aristocrat who had an utterly tin ear for American public opinion after Tiananmen and thought he could quickly get back to business as usual with his old pals in Beijing. And Clinton soon demonstrated to the Chinese that he would roll over and give them what they wanted even before they’d asked. He was, of course, the president who criticized Bush for “coddling” the Chinese and then proceeded to drop the linkage between China’s human rights performance and its most-favored-nation trading status. He also double-crossed Democratic members of Congress with his China policy.

What has made American presidents so pusillanimous when China is concerned? Nixon and Kissinger set the tone, Mann suggests, with their willingness to conciliate China at great cost in order to gain an advantage over the Soviets. By the time the Soviet threat had disappeared, American business had an enormous stake in China--and an enormous influence over U.S. diplomacy in the Clinton years.

The one thing that “About Face” lacks is a similar set of insights into the Chinese leadership. Mann acknowledges this lacuna, and it isn’t his fault: Chinese politicians don’t write tell-all memoirs, and there certainly is no Freedom of Information Act for Chinese government archives. But the result is a rather lopsided portrait of an American government in turmoil--the executive branch fighting with Congress, the State Department fighting with the National Security Council and so forth--and a Chinese government that appears monochromatic, almost serene, manipulating American politicians “with consummate skill.” In fact, what little we know about the Chinese leadership suggests that nothing could be further from the truth; it is riven with bitter factionalism and deep policy disputes. Too bad that a reporter like Mann, careful and perspicacious as he is, can’t untangle that rat’s nest.

By the same token, Mann talks about Chinese exchange students only in the context of their influence over the U.S. Congress--even though their influence over the Chinese leadership, as they return to China and take up positions of some authority, will have far greater impact in the long run. Other phenomena also fall outside the purview of this diplomatic history. The undeniable fact of racism toward Asian people has no real place in Mann’s story.

Mann hesitates to predict the future of U.S.-China relations, but he does note an important and ominous new development in China policy. The old rationale for making friends with China had a positive, activist bent: We had to stand together to oppose the Soviet Union. The new rationale is more negative: It is based on American fears about the mischief China might do if the country isn’t roped into binding international agreements. “China was now important to the United States not because of the help it could provide [against the Soviet Union], but because of the potential harm it might do [by exporting missiles or nuclear technology].” Or by letting its environmental pollution incinerate the planet, or by locking up its own peaceable democrats in an affront to universal human rights, or by frustrating U.S. objectives in the U.N. Security Council, where Beijing holds a veto.

There are plenty of ways in which China can play the spoiler these days. And, according to this negative paradigm, China can strut its strategic stuff on the world stage only if it threatens to do something it shouldn’t. Mann writes: “If China stopped exporting missiles and other deadly weaponry, it would have less strategic importance to Washington. In other words, the [Bush] administration’s new rationale for its China policy gave Beijing an incentive if not to act in menacing ways, at least always to appear to be on the verge of doing so.”

This unfortunate pattern could have real staying power. One can imagine that a more enlightened Chinese leadership could put an end to the human rights abuses that have so irritated U.S.-China relations for the last 10 years. But as China expands economically and militarily, it’s harder to imagine any leadership in Beijing that will not challenge American influence around the world in many other ways. And if the next 25 years of U.S.-China relations are as full of misjudgments as the previous 25, some real trouble could lie ahead.