U.S.-China Rifts Must Be Faced

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s visit to Beijing this week served to emphasize rather than ease the differences between America’s interests and China’s. The Clinton administration calls its China policy “constructive engagement,” but the artful ambiguity of that label can’t hide the deepening rifts in the bilateral relationship. Washington must confront these differences unflinchingly. On the eve of Albright’s trip the State Department issued a strongly worded report detailing continued human rights abuses in China. Later this month, in Geneva, the United States will again have the chance to support a U.N. Human Rights Commission resolution condemning those abuses. Not to do so would be morally irresponsible.

China continues to give its patented response to American criticisms: How it treats its own people is not the business of outsiders. Besides, Chinese officials say, the current unsettled economic situation inherently threatens to fuel social unrest. Does the United States really want to encourage instability in China by making an issue of the regime’s intolerance of dissent?

Albright’s correct response was that “societies are more, not less, likely to be stable when citizens have an outlet to express their political views.” But China’s aging leaders aren’t interested in tolerating political diversity, only in retaining their monopoly on power.

Next month China’s Prime Minister Zhu Rongji is scheduled to visit Washington. Both sides would like to see negotiations on bringing China into the World Trade Organization wrapped up by then. The Clinton administration has chosen to uncouple trade issues--both the trade organization question and the troubling $58-billion U.S. deficit with China--from Beijing’s human rights policies. There is a case for separating these contentious matters. But there is nothing wrong with using any available leverage to support U.S. policy goals, like furthering human rights, and Congress seems ready to press for using that leverage.

Congressional concerns aren’t limited to rights abuses or China’s foot-dragging in opening its markets. Recent evidence of a missile buildup across the strait from Taiwan has again raised fears about China’s intentions, as have signs of Beijing’s eagerness to acquire--not always by honest means--advanced U.S. military technology. The Clinton administration says it would like to develop a “strategic partnership” with China. All such partnerships, to work, have to be based on shared goals and interests. There is precious little evidence of that in the current relationship.