The China perplex

National Review, May 5, 1997

IT has been difficult these last few months for conservatives to get passionate about anything in domestic politics. Overthrowing a Communist dictatorship, however, is an inspiring cause. It was perhaps inevitable that conservative leaders would turn their thoughts abroad, in search of dragons to slay.

We do not doubt that China is a dragon. The anti-China lobby is right to object to the Administration's subservience to business interests in its dealings with Peking. President Clinton is not enforcing the McCain - Gore (yes, that Gore) anti-proliferation law, and even refers to China as a "former Communist" country. Accommodationists say that we shouldn't provoke China. Perhaps. Neither should we allow its rulers to think they have free rein.

Most conservatives agree on these points, but emotional debate has arisen over what follows from them. Conservative advocates of normal trade relations with China have been accused of free-market romanticism at best, shilling for big business at worst: in either case, they are said to have betrayed the moral principles of Ronald Reagan's foreign policy. They rightly retort that the urge to "export democracy" is Wilsonian, not Reaganite, and that the beginning of conservatism is the recognition that the world is not made of Play-Doh. Reshaping the world along democratic lines should begin with a smaller country than China -- Somalia, say. But nobody in the intra-conservative debate is "pro-China" in the same sense that an influential sector of the Western intelligentsia was effectively pro-Soviet during the Cold War.

Our own view is that China is an authoritarian power today, rather than a totalitarian one -- a distinction that used to be important to conservatives. It is, in any event, a markedly freer country than the one which Richard Nixon toasted as an ally. Its rapid proto-capitalist development is likely to have some political consequences -- unpredictable perhaps, but more in the right than in the wrong direction. For these and other reasons, as Owen Harries powerfully argues, China is a potential enemy of the United States rather than an actual one. Our strategy to deal with China's rise must be geared toward these realities and the next forty years, not toward sloganeering in the elections of 1998 or 2000.

Our capacity to overthrow or modify the regime is anyway limited. Attempting to isolate China's economy is unlikely to advance either result. In the short term, trade restrictions would hurt the people we want to encourage: Chinese entrepreneurs, the people of Taiwan and Hong Kong (as well as American consumers). In the medium term, other countries would fill the vacuum. Even hawkish advocates of ending "most-favored-nation" trading status have no notion of what to do with China afterward. A trade cut-off would be the sort of empty moral gesture beloved of liberals.

Instead, as Peter Rodman urges in this issue, we should adopt a policy of containment. The prerequisite for that policy is defense preparedness, which has slipped alarmingly under Mr. Clinton -- and particularly missile defense. Our traditional allies must be brought on board too, so that a coordinated Western response greets any threats to freedom in Taiwan or Hong Kong. We may also need to rethink our Cold War hostility to India, which could prove a useful (and democratic) balance to China. And the U.S. should do all it can, officially and unofficially, to strengthen pro-freedom forces. This set of policies would advance our national interests prudently. Prudence may not be a rallying cry, but it remains the chief virtue of a sound foreign policy.