It’s sort of like “the California goldfields in 1849,” reports the trade publication Restaurant Business: China has 1.2 billion hungry people, but only one fast-food joint for every 5 million of them. Better get a move on, the magazine advises; “the time to break into China is now.” PepsiCo made its own pioneering break in 1987, opening a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet in Beijing. It is determined to maintain that lead. “Hot Wings do big business in China,” a spokesman gushes, “and the Zinger spicy sandwich is doing extremely well.” So well that the company is on a crash construction project, building 300 KFCs across the mainland in the next two years. And “we still can’t keep up with demand.” Oh, Susannah!
The People’s Republic is already the world’s third largest economy, and it has been growing at better than 10 percent a year. There’s profit in them thar hills, no question about it. And American corporations large and small are lining up for the chance to extract it, lest the French and Germans beat us to the punch. U.S. annual investment commitments to China have grown more than twentyfold since 1990, for a cumulative total of roughly $ 25 billion. From this economic contact, and the bilateral trade it helps lubricate, there are lower U.S. consumer prices on things like toys, footwear, and textile goods — and American access to a potential export market worth hundreds of thousands of jobs. America “wins.”
And Beijing wins, too. It gets to use the hard currency it derives from such commerce to . . . ahem, sustain the sadistic regime it imposes on its citizens, modernize its gigantic army, and expand its malign influence throughout Asia. Which troubling little details, the more you think about them, raise a serious question whether there’s actually a prize worth winning in the race for ever-less-restricted U.S. trade with China.
Nonsense, say the business associations. Nonsense, says the “responsible” bipartisan foreign-policy fraternity in Washington — the Clinton White House loudest of all. The governing consensus holds that the call for aggressive U. S. resistance to Chinese communism is futile, counterproductive, an expression of infantile romanticism, and a vestige of Cold War thinking no grownup Western nation can (literally) afford. Ask a CEO or State Department official to express outrage over the latest Beijing show trial or arms sale or international security threat, and he looks at you as he would an impertinent teenager.
It’s a sophisticated attitude, this new anti-anti-communism about China. As is often true of sophisticated attitudes, it is constructed of faulty logic and gangrenous morality.
China is nicer now than it once was, we are reminded. If it is granted more frequent contact with friendly American capitalism and its liberating digital communications technology, China will osmotically become nicer still. A sweet idea, this — and one that may have some long-term force on the margins. But in short-term practice, it is a fantasy. China remains a horrible place, as every CIA and Amnesty International report makes clear. And China’s rulers regard modern capitalism not as a lesson in democracy, but simply as a tool for the preservation of their rule.
American businesses active in China know this full well. All too many of them seem not to care. A Massachusetts company called Bay Networks is investing in technology designed to allow Beijing to censor the Internet, whose Chinese users must already register with the police. “We are not making a judgment on the political appropriateness of their system,” a company executive has told Newsweek. “All our equipment knows is, there’s a packet of data that is here, and it needs to get there.” Globalstar of San Jose has just won a contract to provide satellite telephone service in China. Why did it win? Because its proposed design offered the best opportunity for Chinese security forces to wiretap transmissions and identify callers. Globalstar’s American competitors are magnanimous in defeat. “China’s ruling regime has whatever right to exert pressure on its people as it elects to exert,” one of them insists. “We as global citizens have to be able to honor those demands.”
Under pressure from such “global citizens,” U.S. diplomacy has lost its moorings. For decades after World War II, it was the gospel of leftist pseudorealpolitik that American anti-communism was a fancy disguise for American business interests — that the point was corporate lucre, not liberty. That criticism was libelous. The United States spent trillions of dollars and risked its national survival to contain the Soviet Union and defend Europe against Moscow’s expansionist ambitions. And we probably threw away a good number of juicy business contracts in the process. Not simply because we are a generous people, but because our national character required it. For America as an idea, business as usual with a totalitarian state is always too expensive.
But we have no leverage with China on human rights and such, comes the response; when we object to their behavior, they ignore us. They ignore us because we let them. We have no leverage because . . . well, we do have leverage, it turns out. The United States buys almost a third of China’s exports. But we choose to use that leverage only where software piracy and tariffs and intellectual property rights are concerned. Beijing doesn’t mind a pure money bargain, the thinking goes, but talk about democracy really drives them up the wall. So with the U.S.-China Business Council whispering in his ear, our president keeps his mouth shut. And happily welcomes China’s defense minister, Gen. Chi Haotian, architect of Tiananmen Square, into the Oval Office on December 9 for a pleasant chat.
The very next day, Wei-Blank Shanshan accepted the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for human rights. Western statesmen “allow themselves to be deluded by the mirage of the great Chinese “market of the future,'” she complained. Her brother, Wei Jingsheng, the European Parliament’s actual honoree, could not attend the ceremony. China’s most famous dissident, Wei has spent all but seven months since March 1979 in prison, and he is currently serving a sentence that will keep him there another 13 years. Wei first came to prominence for essays he posted on Beijing’s Democracy Wall. Democracy Wall has long since been demolished, of course. PepsiCo has erected a Pizza Hut on the site.
Surely the United States must stand for more than this. China will be much in the news these next few months. By treaty with Great Britain, it will assume control over Hong Kong and abolish its elected legislature. (A replacement provisional legislature will be “elected,” without popular vote, on December 21.) The annual Washington debate over China’s “most favored nation” trade status will begin early next summer. And in the meantime any number of lower-profile decisions about U.S. trade with China may get made. China’s accession to the World Trade Organization. Liberalized controls on exports of American technology that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army might well adapt to military use. An end to those American trade sanctions that remain from the aftermath of Tiananmen. Expanded U.S. government assistance to American companies operating in China.
Beijing wants it all. American business wants Beijing to have it, in the interests of profit and as a sign of U.S. respect. But Beijing does not deserve American respect. President Clinton should withhold it. And if he continues to prove himself hopeless on the subject, Congress — especially a Republican majority claiming the mantle of Ronald Reagan — should shake off the pro-China, “pro-business” establishmentarianism that now covers Washington like smog and do its best to restore honor to American foreign policy.
David Tell, for the Editors
