July 9, 1998

ESSAY / By WILLIAM SAFIRE

The Eight Yeses

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ASHINGTON — To ingratiate himself with the Communist leadership in China, Bill Clinton became the first U.S. President to publicly embrace what Beijing calls "the three noes" -- no support for two Chinas, no independence for Taiwan, no membership of Taiwan in any international organization of sovereign nations.

Our former policy was brilliantly ambiguous: we acknowledged both sides' agreement that there was only one China, and called for a peaceful settlement -- which carried an implicit promise to help Taiwan if Beijing launched an invasion. The newly expressed Clinton policy dismays Taiwan because "the three noes" explicitly deny self-determination.

Beyond that, Clinton forked over The Eight Yeses.

1. Yes to the purification of Tiananmen Square. By his ceremonial presence, Clinton helped Jiang scrub away the memory without reversing the verdicts.

2. Yes to China's insistence on exclusivity in the Presidential itinerary. At a time when financially shaky Japan and South Korea were desperate for reassurance, China demanded that the Clinton pilgrimage not be diluted by side trips to U.S. allies. Clinton meekly agreed.

3. Yes to giving China a veto over the American President's visiting party. Three Radio Free Asia journalists were denied visas and in effect bumped off the press plane. When the U.S. press failed to show solidarity, Clinton caved, setting a demeaning precedent.

4. Yes to China's pretense of being an "emerging" country that deserves special treatment in entering the World Trade Organization. By publicly asserting on Shanghai radio that "China is still an emerging economy," Clinton paved the way for a concession that would push the W.T.O. into giving China's powerful economy a competitive edge on subsidized exports.

5. Yes to China's harsh treatment of dissidents. Clinton acceded to China's denial of access to dissidents and made no personal protest at the roundup of protesters. He hailed the "freeing" of Wei Jingsheng and Wang Dan -- as if their forced exile were not a victory for repression.

6. Yes to Jiang's need for superpower support of his new cult of personality. "He has a good imagination ... vision ... extraordinary intellect," gushed our President, which can be dismissed as the sort of hyperbole once lavished on Mikhail Gorbachev, but then Clinton blundered by giving America's political endorsement to an autocratic, Communist regime: "China has the right leadership at the right time."

7. Yes to China's decision to delay joining the Missile Technology Control Regime. Jiang wanted more time to sell missiles to countries developing nuclear weapons, and was willing only to "study" Clinton's plea; this was peddled to the traveling press corps as progress. 8. Yes to the "strategic partnership" desired by the Chinese leadership. This naïvely accepted formulation depresses our Asian allies, which fear China's growing military and economic power, and panics India, which responds to what sounds like Chinese-American hegemony by going nuclear.

China may be a lopsided trade partner of the U.S., but to pretend that our geopolitical rival is a "strategic partner" is to eviscerate the meaning of strategy.

In return for accepting the three noes and offering the eight yeses, Mr. Clinton was given the opportunity to tell the Chinese people that we consider the "loss of life" at Tiananmen to be wrong, but it's not for us to impose our views, etc.

In 1969, as Richard Nixon shared with Charles de Gaulle his idea of an opening to China, the French President told him: "Better to deal with the Chinese now, when they need you, than later, when you're forced to because of their strength."

In 1978, the former President recalled that de Gaulle advice, and added to me : "Today it's to our interest to make China strong. When they do become strong enough that they no longer need us, they will have other reasons, ties and so forth, which will enable us to cooperate."

That is what justified Nixon's opening, Carter's normalization, and even Clinton's campaign-style visit. Then he added this chilling caveat: "In the long haul, looking way down the line -- this is deep background -- 15 years from now, we may have created a Frankenstein."