National Perspective : China Is an Issue in Election--Again

There already are signs that China will be the main foreign-policy issue of the 2000 presidential campaign. And already commentators are painting inaccurate pictures of the role China has played in past American elections.

Increasingly, the foreign-policy establishment and the American business community are perpetuating a myth about China in U.S. politics. It’s worth probing, because we can’t understand the present without knowing the past.

The myth goes like this: Until recently, China wasn’t a political issue in American presidential campaigns. But then, after China’s Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton opened the door by making China a prominent issue in his 1992 drive for the White House.

And so, this skewed version of history goes, we ought to take China out of presidential politics once again (and leave it in the hands of the elites).

It is now sometimes argued that President Bush stayed loftily above the fray in the 1992 campaign by refusing to let politics intrude on his policy toward China. And many in this country now mistakenly assume that Clinton made China one of the central themes of his campaign, relentlessly attacking Bush day after day for his unwillingness to challenge China’s human-rights policies.

Wrong and wrong--on both sides of the 1992 campaign, and in the broader context too.

Then-President Bush did not keep the China issue out of his reelection campaign. In September 1992, he reversed a decade of American policy by approving the sale of advanced F-16 jet fighters to Taiwan--announcing the decision at the Fort Worth factory that manufactured the warplanes.

Bush’s action was a milestone. It marked the end of a decade of quiescent stability with China, Taiwan and the United States and opened the way for the tensions of the 1990s. There were foreign-policy reasons underlying the decision--but Bush’s top aides have since conceded that the campaign was an important factor too.

As for Clinton, the idea that he inveighed against China at virtually every other whistle stop in 1992 is sheer fiction. It didn’t happen. Clinton attacked Bush’s China policy in his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention and in one or two other speeches, not on a daily basis.

Clinton’s 1992 campaign theme (remember?) was the economy. Foreign policy was rarely highlighted. And when it was, China was merely one issue among many others; Iraq, Haiti, Bosnia and Russia had at least equal prominence.

Clinton’s line at the convention that Bush was “coddling dictators from Beijing to Baghdad” was remembered in later years, because of the subsequent battles over China policy in Congress.

Yet Clinton’s policy prescription in 1992--which called for linking the renewal of China’s trade benefits to improvements in human rights--merely adopted what the Democratic majority in Congress and Democratic Party leaders, including Ronald H. Brown, had been proposing since 1990. It would have been truly remarkable if the presidential nominee had done otherwise.

In short, Bush Senior wasn’t apolitical about China in 1992--and Clinton didn’t focus on the issue nearly to the extent that is now claimed.

In the larger sense, it’s wrong to suggest, as many now do, that China was kept out of presidential politics from the time of President Nixon’s opening to China until after the Tiananmen massacre.

Nixon, as an essential part of his opening to China, had Henry A. Kissinger secretly negotiate with the Chinese an agreement that no Democratic leaders, presidential candidates or leaders of the movement against the Vietnam War would be invited to China before Nixon.

Then, on his 1972 trip to Beijing, Nixon helped extend this deal by persuading Chou En-lai to invite only a bipartisan congressional delegation to Beijing, and not rival presidential candidates. “A candidate does not act sometimes with the same responsibility as someone who is not a candidate,” explained Nixon, who of course was himself a candidate for reelection at the time.

Nixon’s successors turned Beijing into a stop in their election campaigns. President Ford made the sojourn in December 1975, and Reagan in 1984. The message was not merely American friendship with China: It was also a way of showing U.S. voters that the candidate knew how to work with Beijing against the Soviet Union--and anti-Soviet politics was politically popular in this country.

In 1988, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping endorsed Bush’s campaign against Michael S. Dukakis for the White House. At the time, virtually no one in this country said: Let’s keep China out of American political campaigns.

So why say that now? China has been a staple of American presidential politics, both before and after 1989. And, contrary to all the current hand-wringing, that’s the way it should be. China is a worthy subject of discussion.

Let the current crop of presidential candidates talk, rail, fuss and reason about China as much as possible. We might, heaven forbid, end up in the year 2001 with a China policy that enjoys public support, one that reflects the ideals and the wisdom of the American people.