In Dance With China, Bush Must Take the Lead

America’s complex engagement with China defies flat conclusions and bright lines. The two nations connect and collide on so many different fronts that the relationship is never moving solely in one direction. Almost always, it is getting better and worse, simultaneously.

With so much at stake, the U.S. can’t afford the luxury of allowing any single issue to dominate its relations with China. That principle proved a good compass in the 1990s, when China critics repeatedly sought to end normal trading relations with Beijing because of its domestic repression. Though conflicted, Congress annually rejected the drive because it meant, in effect, sublimating all our other economic and political interests in China to our justifiable concern about human rights.

The same principle of balance ought to apply now. As President Bush prepares to visit China later this week, it may be tempting to elevate Chinese support for the war against terror--and tolerance of Bush’s harder line against North Korea--above all other goals. But that would be a mistake, as Bush and his team appear to recognize.

China’s support for the struggle against terror, though refreshing, is too peripheral to push off the table America’s legitimate and enduring problems with Chinese behavior, at home and abroad. That list of complaints starts with China’s repression of its own people. If China’s abuses shouldn’t define the relationship, neither can they be minimized.

As usual, China has taken some steps to reduce tension in the run-up to Bush’s visit. As always, though, that is a relative measure: Is it a signal of progress that China recently agreed to release a Hong Kong man accused of smuggling unapproved Bibles, or a testament to the problem that he was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment in the first place? And the overall trend line remains dispiriting.

In its latest annual report, the advocacy group Human Rights Watch said that in 2001, China “tightened controls on fundamental freedoms. The leadership turned to trusted tools, limiting free expression by arresting academics, closing newspapers and magazines, strictly controlling Internet content, and utilizing a refurbished [anti-crime] campaign to circumvent legal safeguards for criminal suspects and alleged separatists, terrorists and so-called religious extremists.”

It was in America’s interest for China to gain admission to the World Trade Organization last year. But China’s entry did make it more challenging to respond to Beijing’s human rights provocations. During the 1990s, the annual congressional debate on China’s trading status provided activists both a forum to publicize its record and a lever to push for change. The U.S., though, permanently granted China normal trading privileges when it entered the WTO, ending these annual debates.

That raises the importance of stressing human rights at meetings like Bush’s visit this week. Human rights advocates are hoping Bush will repeat his admirably blunt message at an Asian summit in Shanghai last fall that no nation should use the war against terror as an excuse to crack down on its ethnic minorities, as China has been doing with Islamic separatists in its remote Xinjiang region. And the activists are hoping for a strong defense of individual liberty when Bush speaks at a Chinese university Friday.

“There are opportunities for dialogue, for talks, but I don’t think any of it has a chance of making any real impact unless the political pressure is stepped up as well,” says Human Rights Watch’s Mike Jendrzejczyk.

Expanding freedom in China won’t ever be easy. Any progress will demand not only persistence but creativity. In a diplomatic jujitsu, Jendrzejczyk says the U.S. might find leverage in China’s entry into the WTO, the same development that’s eliminated the threat of unilateral U.S. trade sanctions.

To join the WTO club, China has agreed to build a sturdier legal structure for business transactions. That could provide an opening for Bush to push China to begin liberating its overall legal and judicial system from Communist Party control. “As you pursue a rule of law structure that China [needs] to live within a rule-based trading system, that is going to spill over into these questions of human rights and other legal issues,” agrees Rep. David Dreier (R-San Dimas), a congressional leader on China trade.

Bush needs to keep his eyes on security issues too. The United States is still concerned about China’s military buildup (though it’s tougher for an America engaging in its own gargantuan expansion to complain about anyone else’s military spending). And China, though excluded from Bush’s “axis of evil,” has its own long history of proliferating weapons of mass destruction; just last month the U.S. sanctioned China after two companies were caught selling to Iran equipment that could be used for chemical and biological weapons.

“They have given their word at least six times to restrain their proliferation behavior,” says John J. Tkacik, a China research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “They have signed on the bottom line; they have promised; they have said . . . they are setting up an export control regime. But they never do it.”

The picture, as always, isn’t entirely bleak. China played a constructive role in defusing the India-Pakistan standoff. Beijing has made some conciliatory noises lately toward Taiwan. A senior Bush administration official said last week that China has made “some small progress” on proliferation. And its leaders mostly bit their lip when listening devices were found in a U.S.-built plane delivered for Chinese President Jiang Zemin.

With China, though, progress always comes as the conjoined twin of frustration. No one is expecting many breakthroughs at this week’s meeting; the visit even seems like a bit of a sideshow as the central focus in U.S. foreign policy (and even more so in American reporting on foreign policy) has turned toward terrorism and the Middle East.

Maybe that’s for the best. Like an aging actor, America’s relationship with China doesn’t do well in the spotlight; there’s always a blemish to catch the glare. Less attention may actually give Bush more freedom to balance our interests and ideals in a relationship that constantly challenges both.

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Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at: https://www.latimes.com/brownstein.