Clinton's inscrutable China policy

Mr. Manning, formerly a State Department advisor on Asia policy (1989 - 93), is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Mr. Przystup, formerly a member of the policy-planning staffs of the State and Defense Departments (1986 - 94), is director of the Asian Studies Center at The Heritage Foundation.

WASHINGTON, D.C.

EVEN for Bill Clinton, it was a remarkable turnaround. Indeed, Americans could be forgiven for scratching their heads and wondering how he moved from campaigning against the "Butchers of Peking" to proclaiming, at the recent Summit with Jiang Zemin, a "strategic partnership" with China (not a mere alliance, as with Japan). All this in a span of five years, with a brief stop for the confrontation over Peking's saber-rattling in the Taiwan Strait in March 1996.

Actually, the "strategic partnership" is less a shift in policy than a "debasing of language," as one senior official conceded privately. Unfortunately, Congress was not in on the joke. Just days after the Chinese president returned to Peking, a package of legislation that is very tough on his regime passed in the House of Representatives. Rather than narrowing the gap between the Executive Branch's managers of our China policy on the one hand and the public and its congressional representatives on the other, the Summit seemed only to bring it into sharper relief. While the Administration dreams of "strategic partnership," Congress is looking for Chinese concessions on several issues and is increasingly concerned about Chinese threats. Think: One Country, Two Policies.

For good measure, Taiwan's President Lee Teng-hui, feeling slighted, seemed to spurn Peking's overtures, telling the Washington Post (November 8) that Taiwan was already a sovereign state. This suggests the possibility of serious conflict between the newfound "strategic partners." It also points up the anomaly of such a warm relationship with an emerging authoritarian power whose interests are less than fully harmonious with our own.

Since President Clinton delinked Most Favored Nation status from human rights in 1994, his Administration has consistently oversimplified China policy, reducing it to simple black-and-white choices. Seeking to rationalize their own flip-flop and soar beyond the stigma of Tiananmen Square, the Clintonites posed a choice between "engagement" and "containment." But this was a false choice framed in Cold War terms, and China is not the Soviet Union --although advocates both of engagement and of containment sometimes seem to think it is.

And that was not the only false choice. In a speech last June, National Security Advisor Sandy Berger suggested that China would move either toward "inward-looking nationalism" or toward "outward-looking integration." In fact, China will almost certainly continue to do both, integrating itself into the global system and being stubbornly nationalistic. Deng Xiaoping harnessed China's future to the global economy as long ago as 1978. The issue today is the terms of integration. Like any great power, China will seek to bend the rules to serve its interests.

It is those interests which have to be examined and addressed. China is a society in the process of unprecedented economic and social transformation. The recent Fifteenth Party Congress reaffirmed this, committing the country to a thoroughgoing economic reform, notably a "survival of the fittest" privatization of state-owned industries and the spread of a rule of law that would underpin the reform process. (The U.S. Congress also hinted at a goal of expanding China's experiment with local grass-roots democracy.) So the policy challenge is to come to terms with a dynamic China which is neither friend nor foe but an emerging great power, whose interests sometimes overlap and sometimes conflict with ours.

This means that China is capable of being cooperative and assertive simultaneously. It may cooperate on Cambodia and Korea but, at the same time, work to weaken the U.S. - Japan alliance, threaten Taiwan, or arm Iran. It all depends on the circumstances.

Neither engagement nor containment as such will tell the U.S. what to do in each of these cases. Engagement is a tactic, not a policy. (It was formerly known as diplomacy.) Of course we have to deal with 22 per cent of the human race, one of the world's largest economies, and a regime with nuclear weapons and a veto in the UN Security Council. The real issue is not engagement, but what it is supposed to achieve. That was always murky in theory, and in practice the U.S. Congress was growing increasingly restive over a policy that appeared to deliver little but the promise of more meetings, which the Administration would then cite as evidence of the policy's success.

Containment is hardly less flawed. During the Cold War the Soviet Union was an ideological and expansionist military threat to the United States and to other democracies around the globe. The USSR was also an autarky, closed to external trade and investment. Neither of these statements is true of today's China, which, among other things, is the world's third largest economy, open to foreign trade and investment, and betting its future on being part of the global economy.