U.S., China Quietly Rekindle Key Discussions

Although China’s Communist regime continues to trot out its hard-line rhetoric over the NATO bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia last spring, Washington and Beijing have quietly resumed talks in some of the most sensitive areas of their troubled relationship.

In particular, dialogue has restarted in the key areas suspended by China after the attack May 8: human rights, control of nuclear weapons and military affairs.

With Sino-U.S. ties at their lowest point in a decade, much of the dialogue is conducted at low levels or through back channels, as in the case of human rights. But experts welcome the end to the deep freeze that had blanketed relations for months.

“It’s been a slow thaw,” said one analyst based here in the Chinese capital.

Of course, the transpacific relationship remains touchy and beset with serious and potentially explosive problems, such as the tension over Taiwan, which Beijing considers sovereign territory. And officially, the Chinese government still calls the U.S. explanation of the bombing in Belgrade, the Yugoslav capital, inadequate.

In fact, Beijing repeated that complaint after the CIA announced over the weekend that it had disciplined several officers involved in the attack, which the U.S. says was accidental. China continues to demand a full accounting of the bombing, which killed three people and which many here believe was a deliberate act to punish China for its opposition to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s air campaign against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

“Only in this way can Sino-U.S. relations maintain healthy and stable development,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Sun Yuxi said Tuesday.

But Beijing has in effect dropped its insistence on receiving a “satisfactory accounting” of the bombing before resuming full-scale exchanges with the U.S. in the areas in which it broke off talks.

China acknowledged Tuesday that it is working to formally reestablish talks on controlling the spread of nuclear weapons.

When National Security Advisor Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger came to Beijing last month, “he raised a request for the resumption of talks on nuclear nonproliferation,” Sun told reporters. “The Chinese side has already agreed to this. The two sides are currently making concrete arrangements through diplomatic channels.”

Just three months ago, China’s top arms negotiator, Sha Zukang, said in an interview with The Times that Beijing was “not in the mood” to talk about arms control issues with the U.S. side.

Last month, however, China accepted a visit by the State Department’s Norman Wulf, the first U.S. official to visit who is directly responsible for nonproliferation issues. The discussions centered on a U.N. nonproliferation conference scheduled for next month in New York rather than on specific arms control concerns involving Washington and Beijing.

Talks in this area remain limited to multilateral rather than bilateral issues, and only when the Chinese side sees talks to be in its interest, sources say. Some of the dialogue has occurred behind the scenes at international forums.

In the same way, talks on the prickly issue of human rights have mostly been confined to ad hoc discussions through back channels rather than a formal resumption of the dialogue set up after President Clinton’s visit to China in 1998.

Even before the embassy bombing, the dialogue had begun to hit the skids because Beijing was angry that Washington had decided to sponsor a U.N. resolution criticizing China’s human rights record. The bombing simply sealed the dialogue’s fate, analysts say.

In the aftermath, virtually all discussion between the two sides on human rights ceased. The Chinese Foreign Ministry refused to accept calls or requests for information from U.S. officials about specific human rights cases.

Now, although no one expects the formal dialogue to start up again--especially not after the U.S. decision this year to yet again sponsor a U.N. condemnation of China’s human rights record--informal contact has sprouted.

Beijing recently released information on a group of prisoners to a private rights group based in San Francisco, analysts note. The Communist government also accepted the representations made by the U.S. Embassy in behalf of Rebiya Kadeer, a businesswoman from restive Xinjiang province who was jailed for allegedly leaking “state secrets” to her husband in the U.S.

Analysts worry that Beijing’s recent firings or censure of several top liberal academics is a sign of a tightening in the political atmosphere, though no arrests have been made. The academics were accused of embracing Western political and economic ideals, which are still officially anathema in China despite the country’s vast changes of the past 20 years.

Although nobody on either side talks of a “strategic partnership” anymore but rather of strategic competition between the two powers, the Clinton administration and the Chinese government have resumed military contacts.

In January, Beijing sent Gen. Xiong Guangkai to Washington, the highest-ranking military official to visit since last May. Last month, Adm. Dennis Cutler Blair, the commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, came through Beijing. Defense Secretary William S. Cohen is expected to visit China this summer.

The exchanges led to no major breakthroughs. Officials have described sometimes tense meetings during which the Chinese lectured the Americans on U.S. support of Taiwan.

Still, the high-ranking contacts reaffirmed the importance the Communist regime attaches to its ties with Washington, especially when crucial issues such as China’s trade status with the U.S. and its entry into the World Trade Organization sit on the table.

Beijing “still puts Sino-U.S. relations as the cornerstone of our diplomacy,” said Jin Canrong of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Nonetheless, China will continue to cite the embassy bombing and repeat the demand for an acceptable explanation whenever Beijing wants or needs to take a harder line against Washington, analysts say. Such rhetoric remains a useful tool for the regime, if only because it enables Chinese authorities to look strong in the eyes of an increasingly nationalistic Chinese public or to express unhappiness with how the Sino-U.S. relationship is going.