At an airport ceremony marking his arrival in Beijing last week, Vice President Gore made portentous use of an ancient T’ang Dynasty poem called ” On Stork Tower.” Bilateral relations between our “two great nations and civilizations,” the vice president said, are “filled with many rivers, some flowing together, others flowing apart.” In order “to see the currents of greatest confluence” — lest we be improperly distracted by dark, divergent streams — “we must continue climbing the steps of Stork Tower.” That “is why I am here.”
Aaah, soooo. The next day, Gore was still flying at stork altitude, where only pleasant sights are seen. He had a series of meetings with Chinese premier Li Peng. Human rights came up — sort of. The vice president was looking for “ways to communicate more effectively with China’s leaders on this topic,” he would later say, so he “repeated President Clinton’s message that we seek real progress on human rights, not confrontation.” Then Li and Gore had a long talk about China’s Potemkin-style village elections, in which local councils are chosen under the close watch of Communist party officials and then allowed to decide where to sell their rice and beans. Gore called this development “remarkable” and said it promised a “significant advance in the process of democracy.” Amazingly enough, no one laughed.
American reporters accompanying Gore did have one good laugh. Two “senior administration officials” (who, it turns out, were actually Gore’s top nationalsecurity aide, Leon Fuerth, and Gore himself) flatly contradicted one another when asked what the vice president had told Premier Li about the ” China money” scandal. It’s clear what Beijing heard Gore say about it. The official Xinhua news agency ran an English-language story reporting that Gore had assured Li the U.S. government would “unswervingly follow” its current China policy. Xinhua said Gore promised that friendly relations “will not be interrupted by individual events at any time” and cited his visit to China as “the best demonstration of this pledge.”
Xinhua was right. That’s what Gore’s visit demonstrates. His first day there, Beijing military officials leaked word that China was planning April war games off the coast of Taiwan and would soon complete construction of a new battery of missiles aimed at that island. Gore and Li did not discuss this problem — or anything else related to Taiwan. Nor was there “that much difference” between them on the question of Hong Kong, according to Fuerth — notwithstanding the fact that China plainly intends to disembowel that British colony’s democratic legal and political system when it regains sovereignty on July 1.
In fact, no single issue was allowed to spoil the prevailing mood of idiotic good cheer in the American delegation. Not China’s ongoing cooperation with Iran’s nuclear program, which went unmentioned in any official communique. Not China’s continuing defense buildup or exports of biological and chemical weapons components, which also went unmentioned. And not China’s determination to rub out domestic dissent — though authoritative sources in Hong Kong had recently reported that Chinese preparations for Gore’s visit included special, round-the-clock surveillance of suspected democracy advocates.
Instead, the vice president spent his time in the Middle Kingdom struggling for superlatives about his “Chinese friends and colleagues,” celebrating ” your many scientific discoveries” and “the majestic sweep of your history.” China and the United States have had our differences, Gore several times stipulated without elaboration. But we now have much in common. “We are the two largest sources of greenhouse gases,” for instance. And so, given unspecified bilateral “evidence” of a “genuine desire to do better in the future,” both countries’ leaders must “learn to forgive the sins of the past.” Some of which, Gore helpfully remarked, involve American guilt. In the nineteenth century, he told one Chinese audience, “we kept killing the buffalo, a magnificent animal that roved in the tens of millions across our continent, until it was almost extinct.”
His Chinese hosts thought all this was good. Very good. So they rewarded the vice president with the only gifts he truly sought: contracts for a Boeing airplane sale and for construction of a Buick factory in Shanghai. But not before inflicting one final humiliation designed to make obvious to the world how completely they had brought the United States to heel. The Chinese invited Western reporters to witness Li Peng, in Al Gore’s presence, issue a blanket criticism of America’s counterproductive role in international affairs. And then they cornered Gore into a champagne toast with Li — the man who sent the tanks into Tiananmen Square.
Nothing that happened during Al Gore’s big Beijing adventure last week was a surprise. In every important respect, the trip was designed to unfold this way, consistent with Clinton administration China policy. As State Department spokesman Nick Burns explains that policy, the United States embraces the Chinese politburo, no matter what, “because our longterm engagement with that country is so important to our national interest.” Which national interest, exactly? Burns responds: “I think one of the prominent features of President Clinton’s foreign policy has been this marriage of our national economic interests with our traditional — what one would characterize as traditional foreign policy interests.”
It’s a marriage in which U.S. corporations, salivating over the emerging China market, wear the pants. They want in. The Chinese are quite prepared to hold out the prospect of investment opportunities in the service of their own paramount objective: neutralizing the United States as a geopolitical competitor and critic. So the offered deal is this: access for appeasement. And the Clinton administration — in thrall to the business lobby and seconded by many Republicans — is willing and eager to take that deal. Al Gore’s Buick and Boeing achievement, the president himself proclaims, is “a real validation for our strategy of engagement. . . . I certainly am very pleased.” On this point, Beijing and Washington understand each other perfectly.
Having exhausted all the standard excuses, the president’s aides have lately adopted a novel and revealingly defeatist spin on their China policy. It’s not as bad as it could be, they say. “Engaging” with Chinese Communists, they insist, is not the same as “endorsing” Chinese communism. No, it’s not — and what of it? Neville Chamberlain, history’s most famous diplomatic doormat, never “endorsed” Nazi Germany, after all. He just got rolled by it.
As America is getting rolled by Beijing. To paraphrase Vice President Gore in another context, our China policy has no controlling moral authority at the moment. American foreign policies rarely survive for long in such a vacuum. A popular, bipartisan rebellion against “engagement” is brewing. Soon enough — before this summer’s congressional vote on China’s most-favored- nation trade status, we wager — that rebellion will reach a boil.
David Tell, for the Editors
