On China (56 page)

The U.S. and Chinese governments—which had acted as de facto allies for much of the previous decade—were drifting apart, with resentment and recrimination building on both sides in the absence of high-level contacts. Determined to avoid an irreparable break, Bush appealed to his long-standing relationship with Deng. He drafted a long and personal letter on June 21, addressing Deng “as a friend” and bypassing the bureaucracy and his own ban on high-level exchanges.
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In a deft diplomatic performance, Bush expressed his “great reverence for Chinese history, culture and tradition” and avoided any terms that might suggest he was dictating to Deng how to govern China. At the same time, Bush urged China’s paramount leader to understand popular outrage in the United States as a natural outgrowth of American idealism:

Bush suggested that he himself was operating at the limits of his domestic political influence:

Bush appealed to Deng to exercise compassion because of the effect this would have on the American public—and, implicitly, on Bush’s own freedom of maneuver:

To explore these ideas, Bush proposed sending a high-level emissary to Beijing “in total confidence” to “speak with total candor to you representing my heartfelt convictions on these matters.” Though he had not shied from expressing the differences in perspectives between the two nations, Bush closed with an appeal for a continuation of the existing cooperation: “We must not let the aftermath of the tragic recent events undermine a vital relationship patiently built up over the past seventeen years.”
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Deng responded to Bush’s overture the next day, welcoming an American envoy to Beijing. It was a measure of the importance Bush attached to the relationship with China and his confidence in Deng that, on July 1, he sent National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger to Beijing three weeks after the violence in Tiananmen Square. The mission was a closely guarded secret, known only to a handful of high-level officials in Washington and Ambassador James Lilley, who was recalled from Beijing to be briefed in person about the impending visit.
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Scowcroft and Eagleburger flew into Beijing in an unmarked C-141 military transport plane; news of their arrival was so tightly held that Chinese air defense forces allegedly called President Yang Shangkun to inquire whether they should shoot down the mystery plane.
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The plane was equipped for refueling in midair to avoid the need for a stopover along the route and carried its own communications equipment so the party could communicate directly with the White House. No flags were displayed at the meetings or banquets, and the visit was not reported in the news.

Scowcroft and Eagleburger met with Deng, Premier Li Peng, and Foreign Minister Qian Qichen. Deng praised Bush and reciprocated his expressions of friendship but placed the blame for the strain in relations on the United States:

Did he mean civil war or war by disgruntled or revanche-seeking neighbors or both? “Sino-US relations,” Deng warned, “are in a very delicate state and you can even say that they are in a dangerous state.” Punitive American policies were “leading to the breakup of the relationship,” he argued, although he held out hope that it could be preserved.
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Then, falling back on the traditional stance of defiance, Deng spoke at length of China’s imperviousness to outside pressure and its leadership’s unique, battle-hardened determination. “We don’t care about the sanctions,” Deng told the American envoys. “We are not scared by them.”
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Americans, he said, “must understand history”:

It was up to the United States to improve relations, Deng stressed, quoting a Chinese proverb: “[I]t is up to the person who tied the knot to untie it.”
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For its part, Beijing would not waver in “punishing those instigators of the rebellion,” Deng vowed. “Otherwise how can the PRC continue to exist?”
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Scowcroft replied by stressing the themes that Bush had emphasized in his letters to Deng. Close ties between the United States and China reflected both countries’ strategic and economic interests. But they also brought into close contact societies with “two different cultures, backgrounds, and perceptions.” Now Beijing and Washington found themselves in a world in which Chinese domestic practices, broadcast on television, could have a profound effect on American public opinion.

This U.S. reaction, Scowcroft argued, reflected deeply held values. These American values “reflect our own beliefs and traditions,” which were just as much a part of the “diversity between our two societies” as Chinese sensitivities regarding foreign interference: “What the American people perceived in the demonstrations they saw—rightly or wrongly—[as] an expression of values which represent their most cherished beliefs, stemming from the American Revolution.”
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The Chinese government’s treatment of demonstrators was, Scowcroft conceded, a “wholly internal affair of China.” Yet it was “an obvious fact” that such treatment produced an American popular reaction, “which is real and with which the President must cope.” Bush believed in the importance of preserving the long-term relationship between the United States and China. But he was obliged to respect “the feelings of the American people,” which demanded some concrete expression of disapproval from its government. Sensitivity by both sides would be required to navigate the impasse.
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The difficulty was that both sides were right. Deng felt his regime under siege; Bush and Scowcroft considered America’s deepest values challenged.

Premier Li Peng and Qian Qichen stressed similar points, and the two sides parted without reaching any concrete agreement. Scowcroft explained the impasse, as diplomats often do to explain deadlock, as a successful enterprise in keeping open lines of communication: “Both sides had been frank and open. We had aired our differences and listened to each other, but we still had a distance to go before we bridged the gap.”
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Matters could not rest there. By the fall of 1989, relations between China and the United States were at their most fraught point since contact had been resumed in 1971. Neither government wanted a break, but neither seemed in a position to avoid it. A break, once it occurred, could develop its own momentum, much as the Sino-Soviet controversy evolved from a series of tactical disputes into a strategic confrontation. America would have lost diplomatic flexibility. China would have had to slow down its economic momentum or perhaps even abandon it for a substantial period with serious consequences for its domestic stability. Both would have lost the opportunity to build on the many areas of bilateral cooperation that had greatly increased in the late 1980s and to work together to overcome the upheavals threatening in different parts of the world.

Amidst these tensions, I accepted an invitation from China’s leaders to come to Beijing that November to form my own views. The President and General Scowcroft were told of the planned private visit. Before I left for Beijing, Scowcroft gave me a briefing on the status of our relations with China—a procedure that due to the long history of my involvement with China has been followed also by every other administration. Scowcroft informed me of the discussions with Deng. He gave me no specific message to convey, but if the occasion arose, he hoped I would reinforce the administration’s views. I would as usual report my impressions to Washington.

Like most Americans, I was shocked by the way the Tiananmen protest was ended. But unlike most Americans, I had had the opportunity to observe the Herculean task Deng had undertaken for a decade and a half to remold his country: moving Communists toward acceptance of decentralization and reform; traditional Chinese insularity toward modernity and a globalized world—a prospect China had often rejected. And I had witnessed his steady efforts to improve Sino-American ties.

The China I saw on this occasion had lost the self-assurance of my previous visits. In the Mao period, Chinese leaders represented by Zhou had acted with the self-confidence conferred by ideology and a judgment on international affairs seasoned by a historical memory extending over millennia. The China of the early Deng period exhibited an almost naive faith that overcoming the memory of the suffering of the Cultural Revolution would provide the guide toward economic and political progress based on individual initiative. But in the decade since Deng had first promulgated his reform program in 1978, China had experienced, together with the exhilaration of success, some of its penalties. The movement from central planning to more decentralized decision making turned out to be in constant jeopardy from two directions: the resistance of an entrenched bureaucracy with a vested interest in the status quo; and the pressures from impatient reformers for whom the process was taking too long. Economic decentralization led to demands for pluralism in political decision making. In that sense, the Chinese upheaval reflected the intractable dilemmas of reform Communism.

Over Tiananmen, the Chinese leaders had opted for political stability. They had done so hesitantly after nearly six weeks of internal controversy. I heard no emotional justification of the events of June 4; they were treated like an unfortunate accident that had descended as if from nowhere. The Chinese leaders, stunned by the reactions of the outside world and their own divisions, were concerned with reestablishing their international standing. Even allowing for China’s traditional skill in putting the foreigner on the defensive, my opposite numbers had a genuine difficulty; they could not understand why the United States took umbrage at an event that had injured no American material interests and for which China claimed no validity outside its own territory. Explanations of America’s historic commitment to human rights were dismissed, either as a form of Western “bullying” or as a sign of the unwarranted righteousness of a country that had its own human rights problems.

In our conversations, the Chinese leaders pursued their basic strategic objective, which was to restore a working relationship with the United States. In a sense, the conversation returned to the pattern of the early meetings with Zhou. Would the two societies find a way to cooperate? And, if so, on what basis? Roles were now reversed. In the early meetings Chinese leaders emphasized the distinctiveness of Communist ideology. Now they sought a rationale for compatible views.

Deng established the basic theme, which was that peace in the world depended to a considerable extent on order in China:

The interpretation of history expresses the memory of a nation. And for this generation of China’s leaders, the traumatic event of China’s history was the collapse of central authority in China in the nineteenth century, which tempted the outside world into invasion, quasicolonialism, or colonial competition and produced genocidal levels of casualties in civil wars, as in the Taiping Rebellion.

The purpose of a stable China, Deng said, was to contribute constructively to a new international order. Relations with the United States were central: “This is one thing,” Deng said to me,