On China Henry Kissinger

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CHAPTER 17

A Roller Coaster Ride Toward Another Reconciliation The Jiang Zemin Era

IN THE WAKE of Tiananmen, Sino-U.S. relations found themselves practically back to their starting point. In 1971–72, the United States had sought rapprochement with China, then in the final phases of the Cultural Revolution, convinced that relations with China were central to the establishment of a peaceful international order and transcended America’s reservations about China’s radical governance. Now the United States had imposed sanctions, and the dissident Fang Lizhi was in the sanctuary of the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. And with liberal democratic institutions being embraced across the world, reform of China’s domestic structure was turning into a major American policy goal.

I had met Jiang Zemin when he served as Mayor of Shanghai. I would not have expected him to emerge as the leader who would—as he did—guide his country from disaster to the stunning explosion of energy and creativity that has marked China’s rise. Though initially doubted, he oversaw one of the greatest per capita GDP increases in human history, consummated the peaceful return of Hong Kong, reconstituted China’s relations with the United States and the rest of the world, and launched China on the road to becoming a global economic powerhouse.

Shortly after Jiang’s elevation, in November 1989, Deng was at pains to emphasize to me his high regard for the new General Secretary:

DENG: You have met the General Secretary Jiang Zemin and in the future you will have other chances to meet him. He is a man of his own ideas and of high caliber.

KISSINGER: I was very impressed with him.

DENG: He is a real intellectual.

Few outside observers imagined that Jiang would succeed. As Shanghai’s Party Secretary, he had won praise for his measured handling of his city’s protests: he had closed an influential liberal newspaper early in the crisis but declined to impose martial law, and Shanghai’s demonstrations were quelled without bloodshed. But as General Secretary he was widely assumed to be a transitional figure—and may well have been a compromise candidate halfway between the relatively liberal element (including the Party ideologist, Li Ruihuan) and the conservative group (such as Li Peng, the Premier). He lacked a significant power base of his own, and, in contrast to his predecessors, he did not radiate an aura of command. He was the first Chinese Communist leader without revolutionary or military credentials. His leadership, like that of his successors, arose from bureaucratic and economic performance. It was not absolute and required a measure of consensus in the Politburo. He did not, for example, establish his dominance in foreign policy until 1997, eight years after he became General Secretary.¹

Previous Chinese Party leaders had conducted themselves with the aloof aura appropriate to the priesthood of a mixture of the new Marxist materialism and vestiges of China’s Confucian tradition. Jiang set a different pattern. Unlike Mao the philosopher-king, Zhou the mandarin, or Deng the battle-hardened guardian of the national interest, Jiang behaved more like an affable family member. He was warm and informal. Mao would deal with his interlocutors from Olympian heights, as if they were graduate students undergoing an examination into the adequacy of their philosophical insights. Zhou conducted conversations with the effortless grace and superior intelligence of the Confucian sage. Deng cut through discussions to their practical aspects, treating digressions as a waste of time.

Jiang made no claim to philosophical preeminence. He smiled, laughed, told anecdotes, and touched his interlocutors in order to establish a bond. He took pride, sometimes exuberantly so, in his talent for foreign languages and knowledge of Western music. With non-Chinese visitors, he regularly incorporated English or Russian or even Romanian expressions into his presentations to emphasize a point—shifting without warning between a rich store of Chinese classical idioms and such American colloquialisms as “It takes two to tango.” When the occasion allowed it, he might punctuate social meetings—and occasionally official ones—by bursting into song, either to deflect an uncomfortable point or to emphasize camaraderie.

Chinese leaders’ dialogues with foreign visitors usually occur in the presence of an entourage of advisors and note takers who do not speak and very rarely pass notes to their chiefs. Jiang, on the contrary, tended to turn his phalanx into a Greek chorus; he would begin a thought, then throw it to an advisor to conclude in a manner so spontaneous as to leave the impression that one was dealing with a team of which Jiang was the captain. Well read and highly educated, Jiang sought to draw his interlocutor into the atmosphere of goodwill that seemed to envelop him, at least in dealing with foreigners. He would generate a dialogue in which the views of his opposite number, and even his colleagues, were treated as deserving of the same importance he was claiming for his own. In that sense, Jiang was the least Middle Kingdom–type of personality that I have encountered among Chinese leaders.

Upon Jiang’s elevation to the top ranks of China’s national leadership, an internal State Department report described him as “[u]rbane, energetic, and occasionally flamboyant,” and related “an incident in 1987 when he rose from the VIP rostrum at Shanghai National Day festivities to conduct a symphony orchestra in a rousing version of the Internationale, complete with flashing lights and clouds of smoke.”² During a private visit by Nixon to Beijing in 1989, Jiang had, unannounced, sprung to his feet to recite the Gettysburg Address in English.

There was little precedent for this brand of informality with either Chinese or Soviet Communist leaders. Many outsiders underestimated Jiang, mistaking his avuncular style for lack of seriousness. The opposite was true. Jiang’s bonhomie was designed to define the line, when he drew it, that much more definitively. When he believed his country’s vital interests were involved, he could be determined in the mold of his titanic predecessors.

Jiang was cosmopolitan enough to understand that China would have to operate within an international system rather than through Middle Kingdom remoteness or dominance. Zhou had understood that as well, as had Deng. But Zhou could implement his vision only fragmentally because of Mao’s suffocating presence, and Deng’s was aborted by Tiananmen. Jiang’s affability was the expression of a serious and calculating attempt to build China into a new international order and to restore international confidence, both to help heal China’s domestic wounds and to soften its international image. Disarming critics with his occasional flamboyance, Jiang presented an effective face for a government working to break out of international isolation and to spare its system the fate of its Soviet counterpart.

In his international goals, Jiang was blessed with one of the most skillful foreign ministers I have known, Qian Qichen, and a chief economic policymaker of exceptional intelligence and tenacity, the Vice Premier (and eventual Premier) Zhu Rongji. Both men were unapologetic proponents of the notion that China’s prevailing political institutions best served its interests. Both also believed that China’s continued development required deepening its links to international institutions and the world economy—including a Western world often vocal in its criticism of Chinese domestic political practices. Following Jiang’s course of defiant optimism, Qian and Zhu launched themselves into extensive foreign travel, international conferences, interviews, and diplomatic and economic dialogues, facing often skeptical and critical audiences with determination and good humor. Not all Chinese observers relished the project of engaging with a Western world perceived as dismissive of Chinese realities; not all Western observers approved of the effort to engage with a China falling short of Western political expectations. Statesmanship needs to be judged by the management of ambiguities, not absolutes. Jiang, Qian, Zhu, and their senior associates managed to navigate their country out of isolation, and to restore the fragile links between China and a skeptical Western world.

Shortly after his appointment in November 1989, Jiang invited me for a conversation in which he cast events through the lens of returning to traditional diplomacy. He could not understand why China’s reaction to a domestic challenge had caused a rupture of relations with the United States. “There are no big problems between China and the U.S. except Taiwan,” he insisted. “We have no border disputes; on the Taiwan issue the Shanghai Communiqué established a good formula.” China, he stressed, made no claim that its domestic principles were applicable abroad: “We do not export revolution. But the social system of each country must be chosen by that country. The socialist system in China comes from our own historical position.”

In any event, China would continue its economic reforms: “So far as China is concerned the door is always open. We are ready to react to any positive gesture by the U.S. We have many common interests.” But reform would have to be voluntary; it could not be dictated from the outside:

Chinese history proves that greater pressure only leads to greater resistance. Since I am a student of natural sciences I try to interpret things according to laws of natural sciences. China has 1.1 billion people. It is large and has lots of momentum. It is not easy to push it forward. As an old friend, I speak frankly with you.

Jiang shared his reflections on the Tiananmen Square crisis. The Chinese government had not been “mentally prepared for the event,” he explained, and the Politburo had initially been split. There were few heroes in his version of events—not the student leaders, nor the Party, whom he described ruefully as ineffective and divided in the face of an unprecedented challenge.

When I saw Jiang again nearly a year later, in September 1990, relations with the United States were still tense. The package deal tying our easing of sanctions to the release of Fang Lizhi had been slow in implementation. In a sense, the disappointments were not surprising given the definition of the problem. The American advocates of human rights insisted on values they considered universal. The Chinese leaders were making some adjustments based on their perceptions of Chinese interests. The American activists, especially some NGOs (nongovernmental organizations), were not inclined to declare their goals fulfilled by partial measures. To them, what Beijing considered concessions implied that their objectives were subject to bargaining and hence not universal. The activists emphasized moral, not political, goals; the Chinese leaders were focused on a continuing political process—above all, in ending the immediate tensions and returning to “normal” relationships. That return to normalcy was exactly what the activists either rejected or sought to make conditional.

Lately a pejorative adjective has been entered into the debate, dismissing traditional diplomacy as “transactional.” In that view, a constructive long-term relationship with nondemocratic states is not sustainable almost by definition. The advocates of this course start from the premise that true and lasting peace presupposes a community of democratic states. This is why both the Ford administration and the Clinton administration twenty years later failed in obtaining a compromise on the implementation of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment from Congress, even when the Soviet Union and China seemed prepared to make concessions. The activists rejected partial steps and argued that persistence would achieve their ultimate goals. Jiang raised this issue with me in 1990. China had recently “adopted a lot of measures,” motivated importantly by a desire to improve relations with the United States:

Some of them are matters that even concern purely Chinese domestic issues such as the lifting of martial law in Beijing and in Tibet. We proceeded on these matters from two considerations. The first is that they are testimony to the Chinese domestic stability. Second, we don’t hide the fact that we use these measures to provide a better understanding for U.S.-China relations.

These moves, in Jiang’s view, had not been reciprocated. Beijing had fulfilled its side of Deng’s proposed package deal but had been met by escalating demands from Congress.

Democratic values and human rights are the core of America’s belief in itself. But like all values they have an absolute character, and this challenges the element of nuance by which foreign policy is generally obliged to operate. If adoption of American principles of governance is made the central condition for progress in all other areas of the relationship, deadlock is inevitable. At that point, both sides are obliged to balance the claims of national security against the imperatives of their principles of governance. Faced with adamant rejection of the principle in Beijing, the Clinton administration chose to modify its position, as we shall see later in this chapter. The problem then returns to the adjustment of priorities between the United States and its interlocutor—in other words, to “transactional” traditional diplomacy. Or else to a showdown.

It is a choice that needs to be made and cannot be fudged. I respect those who are prepared to battle for their views of the imperatives of spreading American values. But foreign policy must define means as well as objectives, and if the means employed grow beyond the tolerance of the international framework or of a relationship considered essential for national security, a choice must be made. What we must not do is to minimize the nature of the choice. The best outcome in the American debate would be to combine the two approaches: for the idealists to recognize that principles need to be implemented over time and hence must be occasionally adjusted to circumstance; and for the “realists” to accept that values have their own reality and must be built into operational policies. Such an approach would recognize the many gradations that exist in each camp, which an effort should be made to shade into each other. In practice this goal has often been overwhelmed by the passions of the controversy.

In the 1990s, American domestic debates were replicated in the discussions with Chinese leaders. Forty years after the victory of Communism in their country, China’s leaders would argue on behalf of an international order that rejected the projection of values across borders (once a hallowed principle of Communist policy) while the United States would insist on the universal applicability of its values to be achieved by pressure and incentives, that is, by intervention in another country’s domestic politics. There was no little irony in the fact that Mao’s heir would lecture me about the nature of an international system based on sovereign states about which I, after all, had written several decades earlier.

Jiang used my 1990 visit for precisely such a discourse. He and other Chinese leaders kept insisting on what would have been conventional wisdom as late as five years earlier: that China and the United States should work together on a new international order—based on principles comparable to those of the traditional European state system since 1648. In other words, domestic arrangements were beyond the scope of foreign policy. Relations between states were governed by principles of national interest.

That proposition was exactly what the new political dispensation in the West was jettisoning. The new concept insisted that the world was entering a “post-sovereign” era, in which international norms of human rights would prevail over the traditional prerogatives of sovereign governments. By contrast Jiang and his associates sought a multipolar world that accepted China’s brand of hybrid socialism and “people’s democracy,” and in which the United States treated China on equal terms as a great power.

During my next visit to Beijing in September 1991, Jiang returned to the theme of the maxims of traditional diplomacy. The national interest overrode the reaction to China’s domestic conduct:

There is no fundamental conflict of interest between our two countries. There is no reason not to bring relations back to normal. If there can be mutual respect and if we refrain from interference in internal affairs, and if we can conduct our relations on the basis of equality and mutual benefit, then we can find a common interest.

With Cold War rivalries ebbing, Jiang argued that “in today’s situation ideological factors are not important in state relations.”

Jiang used my September 1990 visit to convey that he had taken over all of Deng’s functions—this had not yet become obvious, since the precise internal arrangements of the Beijing power structure are always opaque:

Deng Xiaoping knows of your visit. He expresses his welcome to you through me and expresses his greetings to you. Second, he mentioned the letter which President Bush has written to him and in this respect he made two points. First, he has requested me as General Secretary to extend his greetings through you to President Bush. Second, after his retirement last year he has entrusted all of the administration of these affairs to me as General Secretary. I do not intend to write a letter in response to President Bush’s letter to Deng Xiaoping but what I am saying to you, although I put it in my words, conforms to the thinking and spirit of what Deng wants to say.

What Jiang asked me to convey was that China had conceded enough, and now the onus was on Washington to improve relations. “So far as China is concerned,” Jiang said, “it has always cherished the friendship between our two countries.” Now, Jiang declared, China was finished with concessions: “The Chinese side has done enough. We have exerted ourselves and we have done the best we can.”

Jiang repeated the by now traditional theme of Mao and Deng—China’s imperviousness to pressure and its fearsome resistance to any hint of foreign bullying. And he argued that Beijing, like Washington, faced political pressure from its people: “Another point, we hope the U.S. side takes note of this fact. If China takes unilateral steps without corresponding U.S. moves that would go beyond the tolerance of the Chinese people.”

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