A Habit of Distrust

The furor over alleged Chinese spying at U.S. nuclear facilities, detailed in the Cox committee report, is only the latest in a long succession of ruptures in the relationship between China and the United States. What makes the congressional investigation interesting is not what it reveals about Chinese spying, which those familiar with such matters long assumed to be the case on both sides of the Pacific, but rather the apparent vulnerability of U.S. nuclear facilities. That, of course, is a U.S. problem, not a Sino-American one.

Nonetheless, the publicity the report has generated, and the bitter charges and countercharges sure to follow, will severely test the two countries’ relationship. For it is already fragile, forged with great difficulty in the 1970s on the basis of little more than a mutual fear of the Soviet Union. The demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 made the ties even more tenuous.

The deterioration of Sino-U.S. relations in recent years has been accompanied by a revival of old racial stereotypes. The relatively positive and human images of Chinese encouraged by President Richard M. Nixon’s 1972 rapprochement with China, which then blossomed in the 1980s, have faded at an accelerating pace in the 1990s. With China no longer vital as a strategic partner in the post-Cold War era, U.S.-China relations have foundered over a host of real and manufactured issues: the future of Taiwan, trade imbalances, controversies over human rights, fears over deployment of Chinese ballistic missiles and murky tales of Chinese attempts to influence U.S. elections, as well as these current allegations about nuclear espionage.

From this ugly pottage--an indiscriminate mix of fact, fiction and conjecture--opportunistic American politicians now portray Chinese in stereotypical fashion. The increasingly dominant images are of 19th-century vintage: Chinese are crafty, deceitful, villainous and half-crazed automatons manipulated by evil rulers. It has become ever more difficult for Americans to see Chinese as fellow humans with genuine feelings about, say, matters of life and death. A recent case in point was the U.S. reaction to Chinese protests over the bombing of their embassy in Belgrade.

During the second week in May, Beijing witnessed the largest and most militant student demonstrations since the great democracy movement of 1989. But the 1999 marches were directed not against the Chinese Communist regime but rather the U.S. embassy in Beijing. Students and other citizens angrily, sometimes violently, protested the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. On May 7, three laser-guided missiles from a U.S. B-2 destroyed the embassy, killing three Chinese journalists and injuring 20 members of the diplomatic staff.

The anti-U.S. and anti-British demonstrations that erupted in China quickly spread from Beijing, where U.S. Ambassador James R. Sasser was besieged for three days, to at least a dozen other cities. Anti-American demonstrations broke out as well in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. All across Asia, including countries as politically distant from China as Japan and India, both official and popular opposition to the NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia grew dramatically after the embassy bombing. But leaders of the West, proclaiming they are bravely waging a “humanitarian war,” seem unaware of how isolated they have become in the world.

In China, the transformation of the image of the West, particularly the image of the United States, is striking, nowhere more so than among a new generation of students. In 1989, Chinese university students celebrated American-style democracy and idolized American popular culture. They erected a huge “goddess of democracy” in Tiananmen Square, modeled on the Statue of Liberty. Now, 10 years later, the celebrated “democracy plaza” in the center of Beijing University is plastered with hundreds of angry posters and letters written by students denouncing U.S. “neo-imperialism” and calling for boycotts of Coca-Cola and McDonald’s.

The anger of students and other citizens was hardly appeased by the official NATO explanation, which attributed the bombing error to the CIA’s reliance on an outdated 1992 map of Belgrade, made before the Chinese Embassy moved to its current building in 1996. The shortage of up-to-date maps, a former CIA director lamely suggested, was the result of budget cuts.

The “outdated map” explanation strained the credulity of even some of the most zealous supporters of NATO’s air war--”an almost unfathomable miscue,” said a Washington Post editorial. Other Western observers recalled that in the intensive seven-year bombing of North Vietnam, U.S. planes avoided damaging a single Chinese or Russian diplomatic mission or ship, in an era when bombs were far less “smart” than today. Many young Chinese, long in awe of the wonders of U.S. technology, simply cannot conceive of the gross incompetence the official explanation implies. They suspect the bombing was intentional and await Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright’s promised investigation and public report on how such an error occurred.

Almost as distressing as the embassy bombing has been the U.S. reaction to Chinese protests. The New York Times charged that the protests were a “violent, stage-managed reaction.” Other newspapers dwelt on latent Chinese xenophobic and nativist sentiments that, it was charged, the Beijing government cynically manipulated to foment anti-American hysteria. A senior official at the Carnegie Endowment told one journalist: “I was surprised by how angered Americans were by the Chinese reaction to the bombing.”

Yes, it is indeed surprising that Americans should be angry; after all, it was a Chinese embassy, not an American one, that was bombed, and Chinese, not U.S., citizens killed. But it is not surprising that there should be anger in China. It requires no deep probing of an allegedly xenophobic Chinese “psyche” (the modern hold-over of an old ethnocentric belief that China was the “Middle Kingdom,” we are told ) to understand why Chinese students would take to the streets to express outrage over Chinese casualties resulting from U.S. violation of the most elementary of international laws, namely, the inviolability of diplomatic missions. This, after all, is a crucial principle of Western international law, which, Western powers long complained, ethnocentric Chinese refused to accept. But these are modern times, and traditional antiforeignism has given way to modern nationalism in China and elsewhere. Now, under circumstances analogous to the embassy bombing, there would likely be angry nationalist demonstrations in many countries, not least the United States.

The arrogant and racist belief that nothing happens in China unless it is organized by the Communist regime should have been laid to rest with the democracy movement of 1989. But it persists. Western commentators repeatedly refer to the anti-American and anti-British protests in Beijing as government orchestrated. But by all eyewitness accounts, the student-led demonstrations were spontaneous expressions of genuine grief and anger. To be sure, the government finally gave its official approval, oddly claiming it supported all “lawful protests.” While the government certainly used the protests for propaganda purposes, as most any government would under the circumstances, the police formed human shields to prevent demonstrators from storming the embassies. Having gained control over the demonstrations, the government abruptly ended them after three days, so as not to unduly frighten foreign investors.

China’s leaders were less than comfortable with a student movement not under the firm control of the Communist Party. For they are aware, even if most Western observers are not, of modern China’s long history of student-led nationalist movements closely tied to powerful democratic strivings. That history goes back to the seminal May 4th Movement of 1919, an era that takes its name from the famous student demonstration on that date at the Gate of Heavenly Peace. The watchwords of the May 4 generation of young, Western-oriented intellectuals were “science” and “democracy.” But the movement was also a nationalistic protest against the cynical betrayal of China by Western democracies at the Versailles Peace Conference ending World War I, which transferred to Japan, as war booty, Chinese territories that had been the colonial conquests of defeated Germany.

The combination of nationalism and democracy so evident in the May 4 movement has been characteristic of Chinese students throughout the 20th century. It was a feature of the anti-Japanese “Dec. 9” movement of 1935, when student protesters did so much to undermine the legitimacy of Chiang Kai-shek’s dictatorship. Nationalist resentment against Japan and demands for democracy were at the heart of student protests that spread through central China in December 1986. They were suppressed because they challenged the political monopoly of the Communist Party and jeopardized loans from Japanese banks. But the student protests were a prelude to the heroic democracy movement of 1989, which was itself marked by powerful expressions of Chinese patriotism.

The powerful link between democracy and nationalism in modern Chinese student movements counsels against writing off the most recent student protests as an episode of reactionary xenophobia manipulated by the Communist regime. The proclivity of U.S. observers to do so, often with barely concealed racist imagery, does not augur any better for the future of Sino-U.S. relations, upon which will hinge the most important questions of war and peace in the 21st century, than the current controversy over spying.