AS A CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT, Bill Clinton said America should stop ” coddling dictators.” He promised that U.S. trade relations would be driven by human rights policy, not vice versa. Many Americans believed him, but the Chinese dictators never did. On a visit to China in early 1994, I reminded Chinese officials of Clinton’s ultimatum that most-favored-nation status would be denied unless China showed “substantial progress” in a number of areas, including the release of political prisoners and the elimination of such practices as slave labor and torture. They told me they were not worried: Clinton would back down.
A few months later, Clinton announced that MFN would be “de-linked” from human rights. Instead, the United States would pursue a strategy Clinton called “comprehensive engagement.” This policy (since renamed “strategic engagement”) consists primarily in trying to have a diplomatic and economic relationship with Beijing that is as similar as possible to those we have with governments that do not kill, torture, and imprison innocent people. In theory, this relationship should give us frequent opportunities to remind Beijing firmly and politely that it should discontinue these practices.
