WHEN CHINA’S DEFENSE MINISTER, Chi Haotian, was granted an extraordinary meeting with President Clinton in the Oval Office on December 9, Chi’s role as the military leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre barely made a ripple in official Washington. Oh, a few get-tough-on-China Republicans, like Sen. Jesse Helms and Rep. Chris Smith, complained about it. But only one congressional Democrat dared criticize the White House for receiving the general with full military honors: Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California. “The Clinton administration has given great face to the hardliners of the Chinese regime,” Pelosi said last week.
The San Francisco Democrat has been a thorn in the administration’s side from the moment Clinton began backtracking from making human rights in China a top priority. Indeed, she has emerged as the most outspoken critic in Congress of U.S. policy toward China. Last year, she tried to get Hillary Clinton to stay home rather than attend the United Nations women’s conference in Beijing (the first lady went, of course), and Pelosi has attended demonstrations outside the Chinese embassy in Washington. Mike Jendrzejczyk of Human Rights Watch calls Pelosi “the conscience of the Congress on China and human rights.”
In part, that’s due to local politics — her district, 28.7 percent Asian American, is attentive to such issues — but the representative, recently elected to a sixth term, began to campaign for human rights in China after watching the Chinese military destroy the pro-democracy movement by murdering demonstrators in Tiananmen Square.
A few weeks later, she introduced legislation to extend the visas of Chinese students in the United States, many of whom had been critical of Beijing and feared reprisals. President Bush vetoed the bill, however, and an override attempt narrowly failed.
Pelosi continued to press for changes in U.S. policy, and in September 1991 she and two House colleagues traveled to Beijing. After meeting with an array of government officials, the group visited Tiananmen Square and unfurled a small banner in memory of those massacred. With television cameras rolling, and about 100 Chinese observing, local police intervened and a minor scuffle broke out. The Foreign Ministry denounced the affair as “a premeditated farce which could only arouse great indignation from the Chinese people.”
Pelosi, a lifelong Democrat whose father, Thomas d’Alesandro, was mayor of Baltimore, says Bill Clinton’s victory in 1992 made her “optimistic” there would be a change in U.S. China policy. “The president didn’t have to do much to signal to the Chinese that promoting democratic freedoms was a pillar of our foreign policy,” she told me. She has been sorely disappointed.
In April 1993, she and then-Senate majority leader George Mitchell introduced legislation setting strict conditions on the renewal of China’s most-favorednation trade status. This put Clinton, who had made Bush’s softness on China a campaign issue, in a difficult spot. He wriggled out of it by issuing an executive order that featured some links between U.S.-China trade and China’s human rights record.
At the time, Pelosi hailed the order as “a very bold and historic move.” But a year later, Clinton renewed China’s mostfavored-nation status and explained to Pelosi in a 50-minute telephone conversation that he was ” delinking” trade and human rights.
In other words, he was defying his own executive order, which prompted Pelosi to tell me that “there’s no reason for the Chinese to worry about any statement the president makes about promoting democratic freedoms, because they know it doesn’t apply to them.” She complains that China policy has been formulated not by the State Department, but by Commerce and Defense.
The Republican takeover of Congress hasn’t resulted m any major changes in China policy; the GOP leadership is in sync with the administration. But Pelosi does have allies across the aisle. She and Rep. Frank Wolf, a conservative Virginia Republican who has called the current regime “the evil empire of modern times,” are co-chairmen of a working group that pushes a more restrictive approach to China. The group regularly sends letters to Secretary of State Warren Christopher, and occasionally its labors bear fruit. When China sought to intimidate Taiwan in March by launching missile tests, pressure from Pelosi and GOP representative Chris Cox helped convince the administration it needed to deploy aircraft carriers to the region.
The bipartisanship will continue: Right now, Pelosi’s and Jesse Helms’s China aides are traveling together on a month-long mission in Asia.
Cooperation will become ever more important in the year ahead as Pelosi and her congressional allies wage their lonely fight. The debate over China has not been moving in their direction, and the new national security adviser, Sandy Berger, has a well-documented pro-China history — he lobbied for renewal of China’s most-favored-nation status while at the Washington law firm of Hogan & Hartson.
But therein lies an opening. If, as many expect, China tries to apply its totalitarian practices in Hong Kong after taking control in June, administration officials will find themselves under pressure to reassess their apologist approach. And that might mean more meetings in Pelosi’s Capitol Hill office, where a replica of the “Goddess of Democracy” statue put up in Tiananmen Square before the massacre stands as a reminder of one member’s passions.
by Matthew Rees
