ONCE AGAIN, THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION has made known its unwillingness to get tough with Beijing. A few days after Chinese president Jiang Zemin left Washington in late October, the administration announced its opposition to six modest legislative proposals intended to stiffen U.S. policy toward China. They range from requiring cabinet agencies to publish a list of Chinese military companies operating on American soil to preventing entry into the United States by Chinese officials involved in forced abortions or sterilizations. Perhaps most revealing of the administration’s timidity is its opposition to a proposal by Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen to increase the number of U.S. embassy staffers in Beijing monitoring human rights. What could be wrong with that? According to the administration, it “would unnecessarily micromanage [State] Department activities and impair the Administration’s ability to manage resources effectively.”
The House believed otherwise. Only five members took the administration’s line and voted against the Ros-Lehtinen bill, while 416 voted for it. The story was the same with the forced-abortion bill, which passed 415-1. Two other bills opposed by the admimstration received more man 350 votes.
These votes marked the first time Congress has moved against China since the House passed legislation repealing most-favored-nation trading status for Beijing-owned enterprises in 1992. That bill was never enacted, and it’s too early to tell whether any of those that passed the House last week will become law. But even if they don’t, some progress will have been made. Going through the process of holding a debate, casting votes, and forcing the White House to oppose reasonable legislation sheds valuable light on U.S. policy toward China.
The background to the China votes is as follows: After last year’s annual renewal of MFN, Rep. Chris Cox, a California Republican, introduced a resolution declaring the MFN debate “inadequate to address the many policy and security issues” affecting U.S.-China relations and directing House committees to develop proposals covering matters such as trade, human rights, and nuclear proliferation. The resolution passed 411-7.
A vote was supposed to be held on the resulting proposals in 1996, but it never took place. Cox introduced his package last July, shortly after MFN was renewed It remained unclear, however, when the proposals would be considered by the House, as speaker Newt Gingrich, an MFN supporter, had little interest in pushing legislation viewed as hostile to Beijing.
Cox and Gingrich have often had frosty relations, but Cox’s stock soared when he was loyal at the time of the botched coup attempt against the speaker in July. Gingrich subsequently asked Cox and House majority leader Dick Armey to canvass House Republicans about their priorities for the rest of the year. They found interest in Cox’s China package, prompting Gingrich to announce in mid-September that it would be brought to the House floor this year.
Cox and his key GOP allies, International Relations Committee chairman Ben Gilman and Rules Committee chairman Gerry Solomon, hoped the legislation would be considered prior to President Jiang’s visit So did leading Democratic China critics Richard Gephardt, David Bonior, and Nancy Pelosi, who wrote Gingrich a letter to that effect. But Gingrich and Rep. Doug Bereuter, who chairs the International Relations Committee’s Asia subcommittee, felt a pre-visit vote would pollute the atmosphere for Jiang’s arrival, and the vote was put off.
A pre-visit vote would have attracted more media coverage, but all was not lost by the delay That so many House members, Democrat and Republican, voted to sanction China after all the fanfare of the summit stands as a stinging rebuke of the Clinton administration for its policy of engagement ” It’s only the extraordinary vacuum left by President Clinton’s non-policy toward Communist China,” says Cox, “that allowed us to muster this kind of bipartisan support.”
In the Senate, a version of the Cox package introduced by Republican Spencer Abraham of Michigan faces a chillier reception, though the climate has improved Majority leader Trent Lott has always supported renewing MFN for China and has not been sympathetic to the anti-China campaign waged by social conservatives. But asked at a Mississippi press conference last month what the Senate could do to sanction China, Lott pointed to the Abraham package. He wouldn’t promise to bring it up for a vote, but Republican senator Tim Hutchinson, a China critic, says he’s received “very positive signals” from Lott that Abraham’s proposals will be considered early next year.
If these bills pass the Senate with the same majorities they won in the House, the president will be under enormous pressure to refrain from wielding his veto pen. If he doesn’t refrain, his veto could prove almost as embarrassing as that of the partial-birth abortion ban. In the unlikely event he signs the bills, he will be tacitly acknowledging the shortcomings of his engagement policy. The president, in other words, will be in a box. Which is right where critics of his China policy want him.
Matthew Rees is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
