THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION, finally and completely converted from candidate Clinton’s 1992 attacks on President Bush’s China policy, now subscribes religiously to the notion that commercial engagement with the People’s Republic of China will leaven the militaristic impulses of nascent hard- liners and ipso facto lead to political liberalization and rectification of human rights abuses. As Robert Kagan has rightly pointed out in these pages, this naive view exhibits an almost Marxian economic determinism.
But there is an even more fundamental flaw in the thinking behind the ” engagement” approach. It is premised on the notion that there is a “free- market communism” with which we can engage. There is no such thing. Communist China is not a free market and shows no signs of becoming one.
