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American Dilemmas

The international reaction was stark. The People’s Republic of China had never claimed to function as a Western-style democracy (and indeed had consistently rejected the insinuation). Now it emerged in the media of the world as an arbitrary authoritarian state crushing popular aspirations to human rights. Deng, heretofore widely lauded as a reformer, was criticized as a tyrant.

In this atmosphere, the entire Sino-U.S. relationship, including the established practice of regular consultations between the two countries, came under attack from across a wide political spectrum. Traditional conservatives saw themselves vindicated in their conviction that China, under the leadership of the Communist Party, would never be a reliable partner. Human rights activists across the entire political spectrum were outraged. Liberals argued that the aftermath of Tiananmen imposed on America the obligation to fulfill its ultimate mission to spread democracy. However varied their objectives, the critics converged on the need for sanctions to pressure Beijing to alter its domestic institutions and encourage human rights practices.

President George H. W. Bush, who had assumed the presidency less than five months earlier, was uncomfortable with the long-range consequences of sanctions. Both Bush and his National Security Advisor, General Brent Scowcroft, had served in the Nixon administration. They had met Deng when they were in office; they remembered how he had preserved the relationship with America against the machinations of the Gang of Four and on behalf of greater scope for the individual. They admired his economic reforms, and they balanced their distaste of the repression against their respect for the way the world had been transformed since the opening to China. They had participated in the conduct of foreign policy when every opponent of the United States could count on Chinese support, when all the nations of Asia feared a China isolated from the world, and when the Soviet Union could conduct a policy of pressure against the West, unrestrained by concerns over its other flanks.

President Bush had served in China as head of the American Liaison Office in Beijing ten years earlier during tense periods. Bush had enough experience to understand that the leaders who had been on the Long March, survived in the caves of Yan’an, and confronted both the United States and the Soviet Union simultaneously in the 1960s would not submit to foreign pressures or the threat of isolation. And what was the objective? To overthrow the Chinese government? To change its structure toward what alternative? How could the process of intervention be ended once it was started? And what would be the costs?

Before Tiananmen, America had become familiar with the debate about the role of its diplomacy in promoting democracy. In simplified form, the debate pitted idealists against realists—idealists insisting that domestic systems affect foreign policy and are therefore legitimate items on the diplomatic agenda, realists arguing that such an agenda is beyond any country’s capacity and that diplomacy should therefore focus primarily on external policies. The absolutes of moral precept were weighed against the contingencies of deducing foreign policy from the balancing of national interests. The actual distinctions are more subtle. Idealists, when they seek to apply their values, will be driven to consider the world of specific circumstance. Thoughtful realists understand that values are an important component of reality. When decisions are made, the distinction is rarely absolute; often it comes down to a question of nuance.

With respect to China, the issue was not whether America preferred democratic values to prevail. By a vast majority, the American public would have answered in the affirmative, as would have all the participants in the debate on China policy. The issue was what price they would be prepared to pay in concrete terms over what period of time and what their capacity was, in any circumstances, to bring about their desired outcome.

Two broad operational policies appeared in the public debate over the tactics of dealing with authoritarian regimes. One group argued for confrontation, urging the United States to resist undemocratic behavior or human rights violations by withholding any benefit America might afford, whatever the price for America. In the extreme, it pressed for change of offending regimes; in the case of China, it insisted on an unambiguous move toward democracy as a condition for any mutual benefit.⁵

The contrary view argued that human rights progress is generally better reached by a policy of engagement. Once enough confidence has been established, changes in civil practice can be advocated in the name of common purposes or at least the preservation of a common interest.

Which method is appropriate depends in part on circumstances. There are instances of violations of human rights so egregious that it is impossible to conceive of benefit in a continuing relationship; for example the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and the genocide in Rwanda. Since public pressure shades either into regime change or a kind of abdication, it is difficult to apply to countries with which a continuous relationship is important for American security. This is especially the case with China, so imbued with the memory of humiliating intervention by Western societies.

China would be a major factor in world politics, whatever the immediate outcome of the Tiananmen crisis. If the leadership consolidated itself, China would resume its economic reform program and grow increasingly strong. America and the world would then be faced with deciding whether to move to restore a cooperative relationship with an emerging great power or to seek to isolate China so as to induce it to adopt domestic policies in keeping with American values. Isolating China would usher in a prolonged period of confrontation with a society that did not buckle when the Soviet Union, its only source of outside help, withdrew assistance in 1959. The Bush administration, in its first months, was still operating on the premises of the Cold War, in which China was needed to balance the Soviet Union. But as the Soviet threat declined, China would emerge in an increasingly strong position to go it alone because the fear of the Soviet Union, which had brought China and the United States together, would recede.

There were objective limits to American influence on China’s domestic institutions, whether confrontation or engagement was pursued. Did we have the knowledge to shape the internal developments of a country of the size, mass, and complexity of China? Was there a risk that a collapse of central authority might trigger a recurrence of the civil wars that were at least compounded by nineteenth-century foreign interventions?

President Bush was in a delicate position after Tiananmen. As former head of the United States Liaison Office in Beijing, he had gained an appreciation for Chinese sensitivities about perceived foreign interference. With his long career in U.S. politics, he also had an astute understanding of American domestic political realities. He was aware that most Americans believed that Washington’s China policy should seek—as Nancy Pelosi, the then junior Democratic representative from California, termed it—“to send a clear and principled message of outrage to the leaders in Beijing.”⁶ But Bush had also come to know that the United States’ relationship with China served vital American interests independent of the People’s Republic’s system of governance. He was wary of antagonizing a government that had cooperated with the United States for nearly two decades on some of the most fundamental security issues of the Cold War world. As he later wrote: “For this understandably proud, ancient, and inward-looking people, foreign criticism (from peoples they still perceived as ‘barbarians’ and colonialists untutored in Chinese ways) was an affront, and measures taken against them a return to the coercions of the past.”⁷ Facing pressure for stronger measures from both the right and the left, Bush maintained that

we could not look the other way when it came to human rights or political reforms: but we could make plain our views in terms of encouraging their strides of progress (which were many since the death of Mao) rather than unleashing an endless barrage of criticism. . . . The question for me was how to condemn what we saw as wrong and react appropriately while also remaining engaged with China, even if the relationship must now be “on hold.”⁸

Bush walked this tightrope with skill and elegance. When Congress imposed punitive measures on Beijing, he softened some of the edges. At the same time, to express his convictions, on June 5 and June 20, he suspended high-level government exchanges; halted military cooperation and sales of police, military, and dual-use equipment; and announced opposition to new loans to the People’s Republic by the World Bank and other international financial institutions. American sanctions dovetailed with comparable steps undertaken by the European Community, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, and with expressions of regret and condemnation from governments around the world. Congress, reflecting popular pressure, pushed for even stronger measures, including legislative sanctions (which would be more difficult to lift than administrative sanctions imposed by the President, which were at the chief executive’s discretion) and a law automatically extending the visas of all Chinese students currently in the United States.⁹

The U.S. and Chinese governments—which had acted as de facto allies for much of the previous decade—were drifting apart, with resentment and recrimination building on both sides in the absence of high-level contacts. Determined to avoid an irreparable break, Bush appealed to his long-standing relationship with Deng. He drafted a long and personal letter on June 21, addressing Deng “as a friend” and bypassing the bureaucracy and his own ban on high-level exchanges.¹⁰ In a deft diplomatic performance, Bush expressed his “great reverence for Chinese history, culture and tradition” and avoided any terms that might suggest he was dictating to Deng how to govern China. At the same time, Bush urged China’s paramount leader to understand popular outrage in the United States as a natural outgrowth of American idealism:

I ask you as well to remember the principles on which my young country was founded. Those principles are democracy and freedom—freedom of speech, freedom of assemblage, freedom from arbitrary authority. It is reverence for those principles which inevitably affects the way Americans view and react to events in other countries. It is not a reaction of arrogance or of a desire to force others to our beliefs but of simple faith in the enduring value of those principles and their universal applicability.¹¹

Bush suggested that he himself was operating at the limits of his domestic political influence:

I will leave what followed to the history books, but again, with their own eyes the people of the world saw the turmoil and the bloodshed with which the demonstrations were ended. Various countries reacted in various ways. Based on the principles I have described above, the actions that I took as President of the United States could not be avoided.¹²

Bush appealed to Deng to exercise compassion because of the effect this would have on the American public—and, implicitly, on Bush’s own freedom of maneuver:

Any statement that could be made from China that drew from earlier statements about peacefully resolving further disputes with protestors would be very well received here. Any clemency that could be shown the student demonstrators would be applauded worldwide.¹³

To explore these ideas, Bush proposed sending a high-level emissary to Beijing “in total confidence” to “speak with total candor to you representing my heartfelt convictions on these matters.” Though he had not shied from expressing the differences in perspectives between the two nations, Bush closed with an appeal for a continuation of the existing cooperation: “We must not let the aftermath of the tragic recent events undermine a vital relationship patiently built up over the past seventeen years.”¹⁴

Deng responded to Bush’s overture the next day, welcoming an American envoy to Beijing. It was a measure of the importance Bush attached to the relationship with China and his confidence in Deng that, on July 1, he sent National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger to Beijing three weeks after the violence in Tiananmen Square. The mission was a closely guarded secret, known only to a handful of high-level officials in Washington and Ambassador James Lilley, who was recalled from Beijing to be briefed in person about the impending visit.¹⁵ Scowcroft and Eagleburger flew into Beijing in an unmarked C-141 military transport plane; news of their arrival was so tightly held that Chinese air defense forces allegedly called President Yang Shangkun to inquire whether they should shoot down the mystery plane.¹⁶ The plane was equipped for refueling in midair to avoid the need for a stopover along the route and carried its own communications equipment so the party could communicate directly with the White House. No flags were displayed at the meetings or banquets, and the visit was not reported in the news.

Scowcroft and Eagleburger met with Deng, Premier Li Peng, and Foreign Minister Qian Qichen. Deng praised Bush and reciprocated his expressions of friendship but placed the blame for the strain in relations on the United States:

This was an earthshaking event and it is very unfortunate that the United States is too deeply involved in it. . . . We have been feeling since the outset of these events more than two months ago that the various aspects of US foreign policy have actually cornered China. That’s the feeling of us here . . . because the aim of the counterrevolutionary rebellion was to overthrow the People’s Republic of China and our socialist system. If they should succeed in obtaining that aim the world would be a different one. To be frank, this could even lead to war.¹⁷

Did he mean civil war or war by disgruntled or revanche-seeking neighbors or both? “Sino-US relations,” Deng warned, “are in a very delicate state and you can even say that they are in a dangerous state.” Punitive American policies were “leading to the breakup of the relationship,” he argued, although he held out hope that it could be preserved. ¹⁸ Then, falling back on the traditional stance of defiance, Deng spoke at length of China’s imperviousness to outside pressure and its leadership’s unique, battle-hardened determination. “We don’t care about the sanctions,” Deng told the American envoys. “We are not scared by them.”¹⁹ Americans, he said, “must understand history”:

[W]e have won the victory represented by the founding of the People’s Republic of China by fighting a twenty-two-year war with the cost of more than twenty million lives, a war fought by the Chinese people under the leadership of the Communist Party. . . . There is no force whatsoever that can substitute for the People’s Republic of China represented by the Communist Party of China. This is not an empty word. It is something which has been proven and tested over several decades of experience. ²⁰

It was up to the United States to improve relations, Deng stressed, quoting a Chinese proverb: “[I]t is up to the person who tied the knot to untie it.”²¹ For its part, Beijing would not waver in “punishing those instigators of the rebellion,” Deng vowed. “Otherwise how can the PRC continue to exist?”²²

Scowcroft replied by stressing the themes that Bush had emphasized in his letters to Deng. Close ties between the United States and China reflected both countries’ strategic and economic interests. But they also brought into close contact societies with “two different cultures, backgrounds, and perceptions.” Now Beijing and Washington found themselves in a world in which Chinese domestic practices, broadcast on television, could have a profound effect on American public opinion.

This U.S. reaction, Scowcroft argued, reflected deeply held values. These American values “reflect our own beliefs and traditions,” which were just as much a part of the “diversity between our two societies” as Chinese sensitivities regarding foreign interference: “What the American people perceived in the demonstrations they saw—rightly or wrongly—[as] an expression of values which represent their most cherished beliefs, stemming from the American Revolution.”²³

The Chinese government’s treatment of demonstrators was, Scowcroft conceded, a “wholly internal affair of China.” Yet it was “an obvious fact” that such treatment produced an American popular reaction, “which is real and with which the President must cope.” Bush believed in the importance of preserving the long-term relationship between the United States and China. But he was obliged to respect “the feelings of the American people,” which demanded some concrete expression of disapproval from its government. Sensitivity by both sides would be required to navigate the impasse.²⁴

The difficulty was that both sides were right. Deng felt his regime under siege; Bush and Scowcroft considered America’s deepest values challenged.

Premier Li Peng and Qian Qichen stressed similar points, and the two sides parted without reaching any concrete agreement. Scowcroft explained the impasse, as diplomats often do to explain deadlock, as a successful enterprise in keeping open lines of communication: “Both sides had been frank and open. We had aired our differences and listened to each other, but we still had a distance to go before we bridged the gap.”²⁵

Matters could not rest there. By the fall of 1989, relations between China and the United States were at their most fraught point since contact had been resumed in 1971. Neither government wanted a break, but neither seemed in a position to avoid it. A break, once it occurred, could develop its own momentum, much as the Sino-Soviet controversy evolved from a series of tactical disputes into a strategic confrontation. America would have lost diplomatic flexibility. China would have had to slow down its economic momentum or perhaps even abandon it for a substantial period with serious consequences for its domestic stability. Both would have lost the opportunity to build on the many areas of bilateral cooperation that had greatly increased in the late 1980s and to work together to overcome the upheavals threatening in different parts of the world.

Amidst these tensions, I accepted an invitation from China’s leaders to come to Beijing that November to form my own views. The President and General Scowcroft were told of the planned private visit. Before I left for Beijing, Scowcroft gave me a briefing on the status of our relations with China—a procedure that due to the long history of my involvement with China has been followed also by every other administration. Scowcroft informed me of the discussions with Deng. He gave me no specific message to convey, but if the occasion arose, he hoped I would reinforce the administration’s views. I would as usual report my impressions to Washington.

Like most Americans, I was shocked by the way the Tiananmen protest was ended. But unlike most Americans, I had had the opportunity to observe the Herculean task Deng had undertaken for a decade and a half to remold his country: moving Communists toward acceptance of decentralization and reform; traditional Chinese insularity toward modernity and a globalized world—a prospect China had often rejected. And I had witnessed his steady efforts to improve Sino-American ties.

The China I saw on this occasion had lost the self-assurance of my previous visits. In the Mao period, Chinese leaders represented by Zhou had acted with the self-confidence conferred by ideology and a judgment on international affairs seasoned by a historical memory extending over millennia. The China of the early Deng period exhibited an almost naive faith that overcoming the memory of the suffering of the Cultural Revolution would provide the guide toward economic and political progress based on individual initiative. But in the decade since Deng had first promulgated his reform program in 1978, China had experienced, together with the exhilaration of success, some of its penalties. The movement from central planning to more decentralized decision making turned out to be in constant jeopardy from two directions: the resistance of an entrenched bureaucracy with a vested interest in the status quo; and the pressures from impatient reformers for whom the process was taking too long. Economic decentralization led to demands for pluralism in political decision making. In that sense, the Chinese upheaval reflected the intractable dilemmas of reform Communism.

Over Tiananmen, the Chinese leaders had opted for political stability. They had done so hesitantly after nearly six weeks of internal controversy. I heard no emotional justification of the events of June 4; they were treated like an unfortunate accident that had descended as if from nowhere. The Chinese leaders, stunned by the reactions of the outside world and their own divisions, were concerned with reestablishing their international standing. Even allowing for China’s traditional skill in putting the foreigner on the defensive, my opposite numbers had a genuine difficulty; they could not understand why the United States took umbrage at an event that had injured no American material interests and for which China claimed no validity outside its own territory. Explanations of America’s historic commitment to human rights were dismissed, either as a form of Western “bullying” or as a sign of the unwarranted righteousness of a country that had its own human rights problems.

In our conversations, the Chinese leaders pursued their basic strategic objective, which was to restore a working relationship with the United States. In a sense, the conversation returned to the pattern of the early meetings with Zhou. Would the two societies find a way to cooperate? And, if so, on what basis? Roles were now reversed. In the early meetings Chinese leaders emphasized the distinctiveness of Communist ideology. Now they sought a rationale for compatible views.

Deng established the basic theme, which was that peace in the world depended to a considerable extent on order in China:

It is very easy for chaos to come overnight. It will not be easy to maintain order and tranquility. Had the Chinese government not taken resolute steps in Tiananmen, there would have been a civil war in China. And because China has one fifth of the world’s population, instability in China would cause instability in the world which could even involve the big powers.

The interpretation of history expresses the memory of a nation. And for this generation of China’s leaders, the traumatic event of China’s history was the collapse of central authority in China in the nineteenth century, which tempted the outside world into invasion, quasicolonialism, or colonial competition and produced genocidal levels of casualties in civil wars, as in the Taiping Rebellion.

The purpose of a stable China, Deng said, was to contribute constructively to a new international order. Relations with the United States were central: “This is one thing,” Deng said to me,

I have to make clear to others after my retirement.²⁶ The first thing I did after my release from prison was to devote attention to furthering Sino-US relations. It is also my desire to put an end to the recent past, to enable Sino-US relations to return to normal. I hope to tell my friend President Bush that we will see a furthering of Sino-US relations during his term as President.

The obstacle, according to Li Ruihuan (Party ideologist and considered by analysts as among the liberal element) was that “Americans think they understand China better than the Chinese people themselves.” What China could not accept was dictation from abroad:

Since 1840 the Chinese people have been subjected to foreign bullying; it was a semi-feudal society then. . . . Mao fought all of his life to say that China should be friendly to countries that treat us with equality. In 1949 Mao said “the Chinese people have stood up.” By standing up he meant the Chinese people were going to enjoy equality with other nations. We don’t like to hear that others ask us what to do. But Americans tend to like to ask others to do this or that. The Chinese people do not want to yield to the instructions of others.

I tried to explain to the Vice Premier in charge of foreign policy, Qian Qichen, the domestic pressures and the values compelling American actions. Qian would not hear of it. China would act at its own pace based on its determination of its national interest, which could not be prescribed by foreigners:

QIAN: We are trying to maintain political and economic stability and push ahead with reform and contact with the outside world. We can’t move under US pressure. We are moving in that direction anyway.

KISSINGER: But that’s what I mean. As you move in that direction it could have presentational aspects that would be beneficial.

QIAN: China started economic reform out of China’s own interest not because of what the US wanted.

International relations, in the Chinese view, were determined by the national interest and the national purpose. If national interests were compatible, cooperation was possible, even necessary. There was no substitute for a congruence of interests. Domestic structures were irrelevant to this process—an issue we had already encountered in the differing views regarding attitudes toward the Khmer Rouge. According to Deng, the U.S.-China relationship had thrived when this principle had been observed:

At the time that you and President Nixon decided to reestablish relations with China, China was not only striving for socialism but also for Communism. The Gang of Four preferred a system of communist poverty. You accepted our communism then. There is therefore no reason not to accept Chinese socialism now. The days are gone when state to state relations are handled on the basis of social systems. Countries with different social systems can have friendly relations now. We can find many common interests between China and the U.S.

There was a time when a Chinese leader’s abjuring a crusading role for Communist ideology would have been greeted by the democratic world as proof of a beneficent evolution. Now that the heirs of Mao were arguing that the age of ideology was over and that national interest was the determinant, eminent Americans were insisting that democratic institutions were required to guarantee a compatibility of national interests. That proposition—verging on an article of faith for many American analysts—would be difficult to demonstrate from historical experience. When World War I started, most governments in Europe (including Britain, France, and Germany) were governed by essentially democratic institutions. Nevertheless, World War I—a catastrophe from which Europe has never fully recovered—was enthusiastically approved by all elected parliaments.

But neither is the calculation of national interest self-evident. National power or national interest may be the most complicated elements of international relations to calculate precisely. Most wars occur as the result of a combination of misjudgment of the power relationships and domestic pressures. In the period under discussion, different American administrations have come up with varying solutions to the conundrum of balancing a commitment to American political ideals with the pursuit of peaceful and productive U.S.-China relations. The administration of George H. W. Bush chose to advance American preferences through engagement; that of Bill Clinton, in its first term, would attempt pressure. Both had to face the reality that in foreign policy, a nation’s highest aspirations tend to be fulfilled only in imperfect stages.

The basic direction of a society is shaped by its values, which define its ultimate goals. At the same time, accepting the limits of one’s capacities is one of the tests of statesmanship; it implies a judgment of the possible. Philosophers are responsible to their intuition. Statesmen are judged by their ability to sustain their concepts over time.

The attempt to alter the domestic structure of a country of the magnitude of China from the outside is likely to involve vast unintended consequences. American society should never abandon its commitment to human dignity. It does not diminish the importance of that commitment to acknowledge that Western concepts of human rights and individual liberties may not be directly translatable, in a finite period of time geared to Western political and news cycles, to a civilization for millennia ordered around different concepts. Nor can the traditional Chinese fear of political chaos be dismissed as an anachronistic irrelevancy needing only “correction” by Western enlightenment. Chinese history, especially in the last two centuries, provides numerous examples in which a splintering of political authority—sometimes inaugurated with high expectations of increased liberties—tempted social and ethnic upheaval; frequently it was the most militant, not the most liberal, elements that prevailed.

By the same principle, countries dealing with America need to understand that the basic values of our country include an inalienable concept of human rights and that American judgments can never be separated from America’s perceptions of the practice of democracy. There are abuses bound to evoke an American reaction, even at the cost of an overall relationship. Such events can drive American foreign policy beyond national interest calculations. No American President can ignore them, but he must be careful to define them and be aware of the principle of unintended consequences. No foreign leader should dismiss them. How to define and how to establish the balance will determine the nature of America’s relationship to China and perhaps the peace of the world.

The statesmen on both sides faced this choice in November 1989. Deng, as always practical, suggested an effort to develop a new concept of international order, which established nonintervention in domestic affairs into a general principle of foreign policy: “I believe we should propose the establishment of a new international political order. We have not made much headway in establishing a new international economic order. So at present we should work on a new political order which would abide by the five principles of peaceful coexistence.” One of which, of course, was to proscribe intervention in the domestic affairs of other states.²⁷

Beyond all these strategic principles loomed a crucial intangible. Calculation of national interest was not simply a mathematical formula. Attention had to be paid to national dignity and self-respect. Deng urged me to convey to Bush his desire to come to an agreement with the United States, which, as the stronger country, should make the first move.²⁸ The quest for a new phase of cooperation would not be able to avoid human rights issues altogether. Deng’s query of who should initiate a new dialogue was, in the end, answered by Deng himself, who began a dialogue over the fate of a single individual: a dissident named Fang Lizhi.

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American Dilemmas

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