ESSAY
By WAYNE E. YANG
As the United States rushes troops and equipment first to Somalia and now to Bosnia, isolationist policies in a "New World Order" must seem impossible.
Not to China. China goes against the wind, battening down its windows and throwing warning leaflets skyward, leaving only a crack in the diplomatic door as a concession to its pragmatists. China is angry over U.S. "meddling in its internal affairs," and angry over the U.S. sale of F-16 fighter planes to Taiwan.
The change of administrations in the United States has left Sino-U.S. policy doors on both sides ajar. Bill Clinton has said he will "stay the course" of his predecessor, but the rumblings from the just-inaugurated president about "human rights" has Chinese leaders feeling queasy, and angrily beating walls.
AT THE CROSSROAD
During its four years, the Bush Administration enjoyed largely warm ties with Beijing. George Bush kept cordial relations with many of Beijing's gerontocrats during his tenure as ambassador to China, and his personal contacts factored into his decision to maintain "constructive ties" with the Communist leadership, even in the wake of the Tiananmen Massacre. Such policy was difficult to justify when much of the world had witnessed--live on CNN--Chinese tanks running through crowds of civilians, and guns fired on unarmed students. Against such powerful imagery, U.S. analysts argued that in the past, diplomatic disengagement seemed to favor China's hardliners, who used isolationism to argue for ideological struggle rather than economic reform. "China against the world" posturing had strengthened radicals during the Cultural Revolution, who targeted reformers as "too western" or "bourgeois."
Bottomline diplomacy like this could not have been "good pictures." The American political leadership was shaking the bloodied hands of the very men who had ordered the massacre, some Chinese students here charged. They also argued that continued U.S. ties with China would prop up the regime's gerontocrats. In spite of these dire predictions, China's slow, steady march towards economic reform since the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre made the debate largely moot. Bush stuck to his guns, and remained loyal to his Chinese "friends."
THAT'S WHAT FRIENDS ARE FOR
Bush never wavered from his China policy until the waning days of his administration. In a losing campaign, doom-and-gloomers tolled every economic warning bell, and Bush slowly saw that most Americans felt that the economy was hurting. Under the weight of falling approval weightings, Bush began frantically handing out pork, promising new plants here and new factories there. Finally, in a bid to boost his popularity with the defense industry, he sold out his Chinese "friends" as well, announcing a plan to sell U.S. F-16 fighter jets to Taiwan. The outraged Chinese declared Bush's decision "seriously hurt" Sino-U.S. relations, and in a burst of moral indignation, they also declared: "The Chinese government has expressed its solemn and just stance on this."
The issue, of course, is Taiwan. It seems that the issue has always been Taiwan: during one stretch from fall 1990 to spring 1991, for instance, Beijing's official newspaper The People's Daily, carried at least one article or editorial every week declaring that the Taiwan problem remained one of China's most paramount crises. The campaign is more than a ploy to throw focus off more substantial problems like the nation's economic growing pains (inflation and price hikes on subsidized foods greatly contributed to the 1989 unrest). To both the governments in China and on Taiwan, Taiwan's exeistence and quixotic claim as the Republic of China symbolized the irresolution of the Chinese civil war of the mid-1900s.
China often criticizes arms deals to Taiwan as "clear evidence" of the "hegemonistic" intentions of the West to establish Taiwan as an "unsinkable aircraft carrier." The strong ties between the United States and Taiwan's Kuomintang government harken back to the days when they were stauch anti-Communist allies. Even when the KMT lost the civil war and retreated to the island of Taiwan to nurse its wounds, the United States continued to recognize the KMT as the legitimate government of all China.
In those days, the United States was willing to ignore the inept leadership of KMT generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, and in 1947, the United States even ignored the KMT's massacre of 20,000 dissidents on Taiwan. Anti-Communist feelings ran high in American administrations, but the United States could not long ignore the de facto control of one billion Chinese and all of the Chinese mainland, and the United States finally facilitated China's admission to the United Nations in the 1970s.
The KMT lost its official diplomatic status as it continued to declare itself the government of China. The United States transferred diplomatic recognition to the government in Beijing, but it also reiterated its commitment to the Kuomintang government, warning China that military action against Taiwan would be considered action against the strategic interests of the United States. The volume and quality of U.S. arms sales to Taiwan has risen and ebbed since then, according to the importance placed on U.S.-Sino relations by various American administrations.
STILL FRIENDS?
To achieve its past international policy goals, China could count on its diplomatic and strategic weight as the third military superpower. With the cold-warring United States and Soviet Union jockeying for world supremacy, China could picks sides as its whims and national needs dictated. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the United States is much more willing to brook China's anger and to aggressively pursue its own policy interests in the 1990s. China still has its nuclear weapons capability, however--a stern warning to anyone who thinks that China's diplomatic power has been completely emasculated.
Clinton has said that he wants to maintain friendly ties with the People's Republic of China. Just months into his administration, however, it is still unclear where Clinton stands on China. Clinton has hinted that he will tie Most Favored Nation Status and other trade issues to human rights conditions, a move that the People's Republic of China does not like at all. Beijing views such moves as "international meddling" in China's intrnal affairs, what it calls China's capability to maintain national "law and order."
Still, China has made recent peace offerings to the new American president. Beijing recrently freed student activist Wang Dan. Along with Quer Kaixi and Chai Ling, Wang was one of the three most visible leaders of the 1989 student movement, and Beijing declared with his release, all political prisoners associated with the student movement had been freed. (Both Wuer Kaixi and Chai Ling had earlier escaped to the United States.) The claim is inaccurate given that other dissidents remain imprisoned, including Chinese workers associated with the movement, but the release of Wang Dan is a rare concession from the Chinese government. After Clinton's election to the White House, China also announced that it would buy two million tons of American wheat.
China, like any of today's nations, needs its contacts with the outside world, since economic reform is impossible without foreign investment. Does that mean that China's more pragmatic reformers are in control of the nation's helm? Such diplomatic overtures would normally be convincing, but during the same time these overtures were made, Beijing also suspended talks on human rights with the United States. Conflicting signs like these show that Beijing itself is unsure how to proceed on U.S.-Sino relations. Clinton, focused on his new economic plan, still has not made his China policy clear. Any push, however, might turn into a shove.
"China now finds itself at a turning point in its relations with the West, and its actions in the next two or three months may determine the course of its relationship with the West for years to come," warns Nicholas Kristoff, the Beijing correspondent of The New York Times. "No one wants a deterioration in China's ties to the outside world, but this could come to pass through miscalculations on both sides--the kind of misjudgments that have been frequent during China's last 150 years of contacts with foreigners."
The foreign policy stance of the Reagan and Bush administrations was almost too expedient--a calculatedness that seemed devoid of any moral considerations. Clinton's stance on human rights is refreshing. We should not deal wholeheartedly with countries that commit unspeakable crimes against their own people: on the other had, neither should we isolate them. Countries on their own tend to think that they do not have a stake in the international community. But already faced with troubling domestic decisions, Clinton will eventually have to face this reality as well: that his tenure as President of the United States could influence the nature of U.S.-Sino relations for a long time to come.
This essay appeared in The Free Press.