It wasn’t supposed to be this way. This was to have been the year when our political controversies over U.S. engagement with China were finally put to sleep. So, at least, was the hopeful orthodoxy in American business and diplomatic circles. As recently as a few weeks ago.
The pressure of U.S.-led, international free-marketry would continue to loosen Beijing’s authoritarian grip on the Chinese people. That process would rapidly accelerate with China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), and those itsy-bitsy human rights “problems” that might persist would no longer occasion embarrassing debates in Washington during annual consideration of China’s tariff status, since any such review would be forbidden under WTO rules. To close this happy deal, we had only to make it through another presidential election in Taiwan on March 18 — without a repeat of last time, when, in 1996, Beijing mounted that rather unfortunate missile assault on the island democracy it claims to own.
And here the signs were good, we were led to believe. All three of Taiwan’s major presidential candidates spent January and early February attempting to soothe the mainland — denying any interest in permanent, formal independence. Deputy U.S. Secretary of State Strobe Talbott then led a high-level American delegation intended to underscore the point: Nothing about the forthcoming Taiwanese vote need alarm or offend the Chinese, and no anticipatory Chinese military growling would be necessary or helpful. Talbott left Beijing February 18 all smiles and thumbs up. Things had gone “very well,” he said. “The tone has been excellent. Substantively, they’ve been very serious.”
The last conceivable hurdle was about to be jumped, in other words, and engagement’s grand-prize gift to the People’s Republic — WTO-mandated, permanently reduced U.S. trade barriers — could soon be delivered. At which point a grateful, democratizing, peace-loving China would surely invite American businessmen to make squillions of dollars there for the rest of time.
Yes, well: What fantastic nonsense all this always was. The fact that the entire project was supposed to be conducted with a China under extended Communist rule should alone have been enough — long, long ago — to reveal engagement as a fruitless, dangerous, and dishonorable dream.
There has remained the inescapable reality, for one thing, that China is the largest and most powerful despotism in the world. Ever since the Clinton administration reopened friendly relations with China in 1994 and made a fetish of bilateral trade, American corporations have been busy on the ground there, presumably evangelizing capitalist liberty all the while. And yet Beijing has not “democratized.” No, instead — engagement theory be damned — Beijing has cracked down on its democracy activists and other alleged “subversives” more savagely than at any time since the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989.
In late February, as quietly as it possibly could, the State Department released its required annual human rights report on China. In a typically matter-of-fact and deadpan tone, the document exhaustively establishes that Chinese communism’s “poor human rights record deteriorated markedly throughout the year” in 1999. An internal security assault on vocal critics of the regime “broadened and intensified” and “almost all dissident activity effectively was halted.” Censorship of the press and suppression of unauthorized religious worship increased. And government-engineered “extrajudicial killings,” “torture,” “forced confessions,” “arbitrary arrest,” “incommunicado detention,” and “denial of due process” were “widespread and well-documented.”
Communists, who cannot justify their dictatorial rule except by appeal to “stability,” must inevitably behave this way: constantly inventing new “instabilities” — and crushing them. And China’s Communists will inevitably continue to behave this way. Already this year, for example, Beijing has made permanent 1999’s “Strike Hard” campaign against the Falun Gong sect and swept up several thousand more practitioners. At least two of them are known to have been murdered last month. In Shandong province, police beat a 60-year-old woman to death with their bare hands. Also in Shandong, “hospital workers” forced a feeding tube down the throat of a hunger striker, rupturing his trachea and lungs — so that he drowned in his own blood.
Sad to say, the American pro-engagement elite, though it will ritually cluck a disapproving tongue when pressed, has never been much moved by abuses like these. Trade profits are more important than some old-lady religious weirdo in Shandong. However many thousands of police-state victims just like her there might be. Which attitude is what makes engagement so dishonorable.
What makes engagement positively dangerous, however, is the policy’s persistent inability to recognize its own complicity in a form of Chinese thuggery reluctantly conceded, even by the engagers, to be unignorable. The People’s Republic is not just a domestic despotism, after all. It is a militarily aggressive state. And Chinese military threats directed against Asian democracies allied with the United States are alarming, everyone must admit. Military threats against Taiwan, to cite the most recent and obvious example.
Washington is now suddenly concerned — even the Clinton administration and the U.S.-China Business Council — that on February 21, just after waving a poker-faced, chummy good-bye to Strobe Talbott, Beijing issued a “white paper” on Taiwan in which the mainland promised to invade and absorb that island if Taipei’s current “authorities” so much as drag their feet on negotiations for reunification. There was no reason for such nervous-making belligerence, our amazed diplomatic-industrial complex worries. It worries that China’s saber-rattling might prompt Senate passage of the largely symbolic Taiwan Security Enhancement Act — because that would annoy Beijing. Our engagement priesthood worries more that invasion talk might pressure the Pentagon into providing the badly outgunned Taiwanese with a modest few advanced defensive systems — because that would really annoy Beijing.
And the bipartisan Washington establishment worries most of all that China’s latest threat against Taiwan will produce sufficient congressional alarm to kill a pending bill on Beijing’s permanent most-favored-nation trade status — and thus destroy engagement’s principal object: the WTO. That would be awful. So to save its fondest commercial dreams, American Sinophilia’s shocked leadership is now desperate to calm China down. Somehow.
Yet we cannot actually calm China down. And we have no just cause to be surprised at its military provocations. And our urge to conciliate Beijing’s dictators is precisely what has emboldened them to issue those provocations in the first place.
Truth be told, to anyone who had been reading the Beijing and Hong Kong newspapers, there was nothing new — neither mood nor meaning — in China’s Taiwan white paper. Late last fall, China approved a multi-year military budget that targets more than half its spending on potential hostilities across the Straits of Taiwan. In early December, defense minister Chi Haotian told China’s Military Command College that “war is inevitable” with Taiwan; “we cannot avoid it.” A short time after that, president Jiang Zemin instructed the Communist party’s political bureau that “mobilizing the armed forces to settle the Taiwan issue” was the nation’s highest priority. Weeks before the “shocking” white paper was released, China’s navy practiced a submarine blockade of the straits; its air force engaged in large-scale “surprise-attack sea-crossing” exercises; and Jiang began giving speeches announcing his refusal to “wait” any longer for reunification diplomacy. China must — and will — “liberate” Taiwan, its president proclaimed. It’s right there in the public record.
The question whether this is all just bluster — and it might not be — is of more than passing significance, of course. But either way, the lesson of this crisis will be the same. China threatens Taiwan not in response to some international slight or challenge, but simply because it feels it needs to. It cannot cotton one of its “provinces” existing and flourishing as a democracy, which altogether explodes the notion that China and freedom are incompatible. Then, too, China needs regularly to unsettle Washington. Just as an insecure Communist regime must constantly battle imagined domestic instability, so it must constantly foment tension with equally imaginary regional and global enemies — the better to excuse, as necessary, its frozen hold on power. Sino-U.S. relations are periodically roiled because China wants them to be roiled. And for no other reason.
The Clinton administration, locked in the circular logic of engagement theory, does not see the game for what it is. To the president and his advisers, the Taiwan white paper will be cause to placate Beijing anew, to make nice, to talk the problem away. And do nothing else. Then things might temporarily return to “normal,” sure. But at some point in the not-too-distant future — guaranteed — Chinese communism, requiring yet another emergency of “national sovereignty” to justify its rule, will do it all again. Next time the “shock” will be more severe. Having met so little previous resistance, Beijing will be forced to up the ante in order to achieve the same effect.
If this cycle continues uninterrupted, Washington may one day wake up to a war in Asia which our undeniable security interests and commitment to democracy will oblige us to join. That shouldn’t and needn’t happen. But the Clinton administration is helpless to prevent it — by design. So it will fall to Congress to impose long-overdue, meaningful penalties on China for this latest in a long series of outrages. Passage of the Taiwan Security Enhancement Act and rejection of Beijing’s bid for permanent normal trade relations would be a good place to start.
David Tell, for the Editors
