There are obvious dark ironies. Bill Clinton took office in 1993 vowing to deal more firmly with “the butchers of Beijing” than had his Republican predecessor. He hasn’t. In 1994, the president began an awkward reversal on the issue, abandoning the human rights conditions he had initially attached to China’s “most favored nation” status in American trade law. This year, Clinton has completed his about-face, concluding that “realism” about the U.S. national interests — above all else, the future of American corporate investment in a giant Asian economy — must trump our moral concern over the fate of the Chinese people. Beijing has spent 1996 systematically mopping up what remains of China’s pro-democracy movement. Washington has spent 1996 making nice to Beijing.
George Bush did something very much like this in 1989, of course. Responding to public disgust over the Tiananmen Square massacre, he engineered some limited economic sanctions on China at the Group of Seven summit in Paris that July. But at the same time, Americans soon learned, Bush was dispatching Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger to Beijing to reassure the Chinese that we really didn’t mean it. Which is what prompted then-candidate Bill Clinton to propose a more human-rights-oriented approach to China in the first place.
Plus ca change? Actually, no. Quite a lot has changed in China since 1989. And quite a lot has changed in U.S. policy toward China during the last few months, culminating in the just-concluded Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Manila.
Unsure of China’s future political course, the Clinton administration has for four years dealt with President Jiang Zemin as merely a transitional figure — and held off bilateral, summit-level contact with Beijing’s Communist party. No more. There will be two Clinton-Jiang summits in 1997 and 1998, it was confirmed in Manila on November 24. The U.S. government has apparently decided that it is useless to expect significant democratization in China in the near term.
The Clinton administration has also concluded that it can and should publicly forswear any interest in deterring China as a regional threat. Of late, the Chinese have rapidly expanded their military spending (and lied about it). They have baldly constructed a naval installation on the aptly named Mischief Reef — located inside the territorial waters of the Philippines. They have sold advanced weapons systems to pariah states like Iran. And, most infamously, they have landed missiles off the coast of newly democratic Taiwan. If the United States does not maintain a military presence in the Pacific as a counterweight to precisely this kind of saber rattling — and the Asian arms race it might otherwise inspire — there is no reason for us to be there at all. But President Clinton doesn’t see things that way, it seems. “The United States has no interest in containing China,” he announced in Australia on November 20. “That is negative strategy.”
Overseas succession struggles and regional strategic balance are “difficult issues.” Human rights — especially human rights in China — are not so difficult an issue. China makes promiscuous use of torture as an instrument of state policy. It targets a million people a year, without formal charge or trial, for labor-cap detention. It bulldozes the home of anyone suspected of ” illegal religious activity.” All of this has always been clearly understood in the West. So the human rights posture of the United States toward China has always been clearly discernible. At any given moment, an American president is either pressing the point on principle — or licking Beijing’s boots.
When George Bush licked Beijing’s boots, he at least had the good grace to be embarrassed about it. Scowcroft and Eagleburger went to China secretly. President Clinton’s new China initiative pays no such tribute to virtue. Hereinafter, his administration proclaims, we will kowtow in public — and derogate human rights in public too.
Clinton’s hour-and-25-minute Manila meeting with Jiang on November 24, an anonymous senior U.S. official later explained, was primarily designed to make clear to the Chinese that “they were engaged with a leader that has enormous respect for China. . . . There couldn’t be any doubt about that.” And did our enormously respectful president question Jiang about Wang Dan, the democracy activist whose 11-year prison sentence had been upheld just nine days earlier, after a 10-minute hearing at which Wang was not permitted to speak? Or about Shen Liangqing, Ma Lianggang, and Huang Xiuming, three more activists who just that day were being indicted on charges of “counter- revolutionary propaganda” and “incitement”? He did not. Clinton “made a general reference to the specificity with which we’ve addressed some of these issues before,” his aides pathetically claimed.
American must “try to avoid hectoring” China, secretary of state Warren Christopher says, with general reference to the specificity of human rights. ” I think what we need to do,” he suggested at Shanghai’s Fudan University on November 21, “is to once again have intensive dialogue so that we can come to understand and appreciate each other’s point of view on that subject.” Moral equivalence — at long last, again? Yes. “The United States is far from perfect” where human rights are concerned, according to America’s top diplomat. “Frequently when I talk to colleagues in other countries about the issue, I begin by talking about the human rights problems that we have in the United States and our own shortcomings. It tends to ease the situation somewhat if we recognize our own failures as we begin to talk then about shortcomings we see in other countries.”
Let’s see: On the one hand, we have a China that routinely applies electric riot batons to the genitals of its own citizens. And on the other hand, we have an America that . . . well, that what? Here’s what. We now have an America led by an administration eager to shovel the truth about the world’s greatest tyranny under the rug. For shame.
David Tell, for the Editors
