U.S. Turns a Blind Eye to Beijing but a Jaundiced One to Moscow

If you want to see a questionable double standard at work, look at the widely disparate American attitudes toward Russia’s new president, Vladimir V. Putin, and Chinese President Jiang Zemin.

In the United States these days, and particularly among foreign policy elites, Putin is darkly portrayed as the vintage apparatchik, the mysterious ex-KGB man who threatens Russian liberties. Meanwhile, Jiang is often depicted as a closet reformer who may some day slowly move China in the right direction.

President Clinton has managed to capture this dichotomy perfectly. Before and during the Moscow summit that has just ended, he conveyed, politely but unmistakably, Washington’s considerable unease and suspicions about Putin.

People in the West “do not yet know if Russia’s hard-won democratic freedoms will endure,” observed Clinton on Friday. At a Sunday news conference, Clinton said he thought Putin was “fully capable” of preserving freedom and pluralism--a deft phraseology that left open the question of whether Putin would in fact do so.

That was quite a contrast to Clinton’s much warmer judgment after his visit to China two years ago, when he was effusive in his praise for Jiang. At a press conference in Hong Kong, the American president said he believed that China had “the right leadership at the right time.”

The issue here is not necessarily Clinton--who is, I believe, merely giving voice to the views widely held by the officials and experts who shape U.S. foreign policy.

Before the Moscow summit, America’s newspapers were full of op-ed pieces urging Clinton to be even more wary of Putin than he was last weekend. “Indulging Russia Is Risky Business” was the headline on an article Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in the New York Times.

Rather, the question is whether these hidden U.S. assumptions about the Russian and Chinese leaders make sense or whether they lack a broader perspective. Let’s look at the comparative records.

Leaders’ backgrounds. Yes, Putin was a KGB veteran, and, yes, that’s reason for suspicion. Yes, he rose to power only after former Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin plucked him from obscurity. But Putin was at least elected to office by the Russian people, and so was Yeltsin, who groomed him.

By contrast, Jiang has been a Communist Party official throughout his career. He has never faced any popular election at any level of government. He rose to power in 1989, in the immediate aftermath of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, when Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping and other unelected party elders needed to find a loyal Communist Party secretary, one who would not push for political change as Jiang’s two predecessors had.

Performance in office. Putin has been in power only for five months. During that time, a handful of incidents has touched off some jitters about the future of political, press and religious freedom in Russia.

The Russian tax police have raided the offices of Media-Most, the country’s largest independent media company. Russian Jewish leaders have said Putin’s government is trying to divide them. Such actions are indeed worrisome.

But again, consider the larger perspective. Jiang has been China’s most powerful leader since the mid-1990s. He has never shown the slightest willingness to tolerate even the tiniest sign of political dissent--much less the organized opposition and the legislative checks and balances that Putin faces every day.

Despite the Media-Most raid, Russian news outlets can and do regularly criticize the Russian government far more than any Chinese publication would dare. In the field of religion, whatever Putin has done is mild when compared with China’s continuing repression in the Jiang era of Tibetan Buddhism, underground churches and Falun Gong.

Why, in the face of these realities, are Americans so prematurely hostile to Putin and so vastly more tolerant in their judgments about Jiang?

One factor is certainly the leftover geopolitics of the last two decades of the Cold War.

During that period, China was a tacit ally and the Soviet Union the archenemy. American policymakers were always eager to denounce Moscow, while they tended to gloss over the darker aspects of the Chinese leadership. And one can detect a revival of such reflexive attitudes today.

Another factor is that Americans seem to judge Asian leaders by different standards from European leaders.

Putin is evaluated by the standards of Western democracies, as he should be. Yet with Jiang, the underlying assumption seems to be that Asians don’t care so much about freedom and democracy--even though the recent history of the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan and Indonesia shows that this stereotype isn’t true.

Earlier this year, Clinton was asked at a press conference whether he still believes that Jiang is the right leader at the right time for China. Clinton said yes, “given the available alternatives.”

Those words say volumes about America’s limited expectations, hopes and horizons for political change in China.

With Jiang, Washington often tends to conclude that no matter how bad things seem in China, they could always be worse. We don’t measure Putin by such an extravagantly lenient yardstick.

*

Jim Mann’s column appears in this space every Wednesday.