On China (62 page)

Premier Li Peng delivered possibly the most frank assessment of the human rights issue. In reply to my delineation of three policy areas in need of improvement—human rights, weapons technology transfer, and trade—he stated in December 1992:

Coming from a representative of the conservative wing of the Chinese leadership, Li Peng’s affirmation of the need for progress toward democratic rights was unprecedented. But so was the frankness with which he delineated the limits of Chinese flexibility: “Naturally in issues like human rights, we can do some things. We can have discussions and without compromising our principles, we can take flexible measures. But we cannot reach a full agreement with the West. It would shake the basis of our society.”

A signature China initiative of Clinton’s first term brought matters to a head: the administration’s attempt to condition China’s Most Favored Nation trade status on improvements in China’s human rights record. “Most Favored Nation” is a somewhat misleading phrase: since a significant majority of countries enjoy the status, it is less a special mark of favor than an affirmation that a country enjoys normal trade privileges.
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The concept of MFN conditionality presented its moral purpose as a typically American pragmatic concept of rewards and penalties (or “carrots” and “sticks”). As Clinton’s National Security Advisor Anthony Lake explained it, the United States would withhold a benefit until it produced results, “providing penalties that raise the costs of repression and aggressive behavior” until the Chinese leadership made a rational interest-based calculation to liberalize its domestic institutions.
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In May 1993, Winston Lord, then Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, and in the 1970s my indispensable associate during the opening to China, visited Beijing to brief Chinese officials on the new administration’s thinking. At the close of his trip, Lord warned that “dramatic progress” on human rights, nonproliferation, and other issues was necessary if China were to avoid suspension of its MFN status.
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Caught between a Chinese government rejecting any conditionality as illegitimate and American politicians demanding ever more stringent conditions, he made no headway at all.

I visited Beijing shortly after Lord’s trip, where I encountered a Chinese leadership struggling to chart a course out of the MFN conditionality impasse. Jiang offered a “friendly suggestion”:

Jiang again attempted to dissuade the United States from thinking of China as a potential threat or competitor, thereby to reduce American incentives to try to hold China down:

Against the backdrop of Clinton’s tough rhetoric and the belligerent mood in Congress, Lord negotiated a compromise with Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell and Representative Nancy Pelosi that extended MFN for a year. It was expressed in a flexible executive order rather than binding legislation. It confined conditionality to human rights rather than including other areas of democratization that many in Congress urged. But to the Chinese, conditionality was a matter of principle—just as it had been for the Soviet Union when they rejected the Jackson-Vanik Amendment. Beijing objected to the fact of conditions, not their content.

On May 28, 1993, President Clinton signed the executive order extending China’s MFN status for twelve months, after which it would be either renewed or canceled based on China’s conduct in the interim Clinton stressed that the “core” of the administration’s China policy would be “a resolute insistence upon significant progress on human rights in China.”
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He explained MFN conditionality in principle as an expression of American outrage over Tiananmen and continuing “profound concerns” about the manner in which China was governed.
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The executive order was accompanied by a rhetoric more pejorative about China than that of any administration since the 1960s. In September 1993, National Security Advisor Lake suggested in a speech that unless China acceded to American demands, it would be counted among what he called “reactionary ‘backlash’ states” clinging to outmoded forms of governance by means of “military force, political imprisonment and torture,” as well as “the intolerant energies of racism, ethnic prejudice, religious persecution, xenophobia, and irredentism.”
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Other events combined to deepen the Chinese suspicions. Negotiations over China’s accession to GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (later subsumed into the World Trade Organization, or WTO), deadlocked over substantive issues. Beijing’s bid for the 2000 Olympics came under attack. Majorities in both houses of Congress voiced their disapproval of the bid; the U.S. government maintained a cautious silence.
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China’s application for hosting the Olympics was narrowly defeated. Tensions were further inflamed by an intrusive (and ultimately unsuccessful) American inspection of a Chinese ship suspected of carrying chemical weapons components to Iran. All of these incidents, each of which had its own rationale, were analyzed in China in terms of the Chinese style of Sun Tzu strategy, which knows no single events, only patterns reflecting an overall design.

Matters came to a head with the visit of Secretary of State Warren Christopher to Beijing in March 1994. The purpose of Christopher’s visit, he later recounted, was to achieve a resolution of the MFN issue by the time the deadline for the one-year extension of MFN would expire in June, and to “underscore to the Chinese that under the president’s policy they had only limited time to mend their human rights record. If they wanted to keep their low-tariff trading privileges, there had to be significant progress, and soon.”
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Chinese officials had suggested that the timing of the visit was inopportune. Christopher was scheduled to arrive the day of the opening of the annual session of China’s legislature, the National People’s Congress. The presence of an American Secretary of State challenging the Chinese government on human rights issues promised either to overshadow the body’s deliberations or to tempt Chinese officials to take the offensive to prove their imperviousness to outside pressure. It was, Christopher later conceded, “a perfect forum for them to demonstrate that they intended to stand up to America.”
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And so they did. The result was one of the most pointedly hostile diplomatic encounters since the U.S.-China rapprochement. Lord, who accompanied Christopher, described Christopher’s session with Li Peng as “the most brutal diplomatic meeting he’d ever attended”
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—and he had been at my side during all the negotiations with the North Vietnamese. Christopher related in his memoirs the reaction of Li Peng, who held that

These tensions, which seemed to undo two decades of creative China policy, led to a split in the administration between the economic departments and the political departments charged with pressing the human rights issues. Faced with Chinese resistance and American domestic pressures from companies doing business in China, the administration began to find itself in the demeaning position of pleading with Beijing in the final weeks before the MFN deadline to make enough modest concessions to justify extending MFN.

Shortly after Christopher’s return, and with the self-imposed deadline for MFN renewal at hand, the administration quietly abandoned its policy of conditionality. On May 26, 1994, Clinton announced that the policy’s usefulness had been exhausted and that China’s MFN status would be extended for another year essentially without conditions. He pledged to pursue human rights progress by other means, such as support for NGOs in China and encouraging best business practices.

Clinton, it must be repeated, throughout had every intention to support the policies that had sustained relations with China for five administrations of both parties. But as a recently elected President he was also sensitive to domestic American opinion, more so than to the intangibles of the Chinese approach to foreign policy. He put forward conditionality out of conviction and, above all, because he sought to protect China policy from the swelling congressional onslaught that was attempting to deny MFN to China altogether. Clinton believed that the Chinese “owed” the U.S. administration human rights concessions in return for restoring high-level contacts and putting forward MFN. But the Chinese considered that they were “entitled” to the same unconditional high-level contacts and trade terms extended to them by all other nations. They did not view the removal of a unilateral threat as a concession, and they were extraordinarily touchy regarding any hint of intervention in their domestic affairs. So long as human rights remained the principal subject of the Sino-American dialogue, deadlock was inevitable. This experience should be studied carefully by advocates of a confrontational policy in our day.

During the remainder of his first term, Clinton toned down the confrontational tactics and emphasized “constructive engagement.” Lord assembled America’s Asian ambassadors in Hawaii to discuss a comprehensive Asia policy balancing the administration’s human rights goals with its geopolitical imperatives. Beijing committed itself to renewed dialogue, essential for the success of China’s reform program and membership in the WTO.

Clinton, as George H. W. Bush had before him, sympathized with the concerns of the advocates for democratic change and human rights. But like all his predecessors and successors, he came to appreciate the strength of Chinese leaders’ convictions and their tenacity in the face of public challenge.

Relations between China and the United States rapidly mended. A long-sought visit by Jiang to Washington took place in 1997 and was reciprocated by an eight-day visit by Clinton to Beijing in 1998. Both Presidents performed ebulliently. Extended communiqués were published. They established consultative institutions, dealt with a host of technical issues, and ended the atmosphere of confrontation of nearly a decade.

What the relationship lacked was a defining shared purpose such as had united Beijing and Washington in resistance to Soviet “hegemonism.” American leaders could not remain oblivious to the various pressures regarding human rights that were generated by their own domestic politics and convictions. The Chinese leaders continued to see American policy as at least partially designed to keep China from reaching great power status. In a 1995 conversation Li Peng sounded a theme of reassurance, which amounted to calming presumed American fears over what objectives a resurgent China might seek: “[T]here is no need for some people to worry about the rapid development. China will take 30 years to catch up with the medium level countries. Our population is too big.” The United States, in turn, made regular pledges that it had not changed its policy to containment. The implication of both assurances was that each side had the capability of implementing what it reassured the other about and was in part restraining itself. Reassurance thus merged with threat.

The tensions surrounding the granting of Most Favored Nation status were in the process of being overcome when the issue of Taiwan reemerged. Within the framework of the tacit bargain undergirding the three communiqués on which the normalization of relations had been based, Taiwan had established a vibrant economy and democratic institutions. It had joined the Asian Development Bank and APEC (Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation) and participated in the Olympic Games with Beijing’s acquiescence. For its part, Beijing had put forward, beginning in the 1980s, proposals for unification in which Taiwan was to be given total internal autonomy. So long as Taiwan accepted its status as a “Special Administrative Region” of the People’s Republic (the same legal status that Hong Kong and Macao were to have), Beijing pledged, it would be permitted to retain its own distinct political institutions and even its own armed forces.
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Taipei’s reaction to these proposals was circumspect. But it benefitted from the People’s Republic’s economic transformation and became increasingly economically interdependent with it. Following the loosening of restrictions on bilateral trade and investment in the late 1980s, many Taiwanese companies shifted production to the mainland. By the end of 1993, Taiwan had surpassed Japan to become the second-largest source of overseas investment in China.
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While economic interdependence developed, the two sides’ political paths diverged significantly. In 1987, Taiwan’s aging leader, Chiang Ching-kuo, had lifted martial law. A dramatic liberalization of Taiwan’s domestic institutions followed: press restrictions were lifted; rival political parties were allowed to stand for legislative elections. In 1994, a constitutional amendment laid the groundwork for the direct election of the Taiwanese President by universal suffrage. New voices in Taiwan’s political arena that had had their activities circumscribed by the martial law–era restrictions now began advocating a distinct Taiwanese national identity and potentially formal independence. Chief among them was Lee Teng-hui, the mercurial agricultural economist who had worked his way up the ranks of the Nationalist Party and was appointed its chairman in 1988.