The Clinton Administration and China Policy
On the campaign trail
in September 1992, Bill Clinton had challenged China’s governmental
principles and criticized the Bush administration for “coddling”
Beijing in the wake of Tiananmen. “China cannot withstand forever
the forces of democratic change,” Clinton argued. “One day it will
go the way of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the former
Soviet Union. The United States must do what it can to encourage
that process.”4
After Clinton took
office in 1993, he adopted “enlargement” of democracies as a
principal foreign policy objective. The goal was, he proclaimed to
the U.N. General Assembly in September 1993, to “expand and
strengthen the world’s community of market-based democracies” and
to “enlarge the circle of nations that live under those free
institutions” until humanity achieved “a world of thriving
democracies that cooperate with each other and live in
peace.”5
The new
administration’s aggressive human rights posture was not intended
as a strategy for weakening China or gaining a strategic edge for
the United States. It reflected a general concept of world order in
which China was expected to participate as a respected member. From
the Clinton administration’s point of view, it was a sincere
attempt to support practices that the President and his advisors
believed would serve China well.
In Beijing, however,
the American pressures, which were reinforced by other Western
democracies, were seen as a design to keep China weak by
interfering in its domestic issues in the manner of the
nineteenth-century colonialists. The Chinese leaders interpreted
the new administration’s pronouncements as a capitalist attempt to
overthrow Communist governments all over the world. They harbored a
deep suspicion that, with the Soviet Union disintegrating, the
United States might do as Mao had predicted: turn from the
destruction of one Communist giant to “poke its finger” in the back
of the other.
In his confirmation
hearings as Secretary of State, Warren Christopher phrased the goal
of transforming China in more limited terms: that the United States
would “seek to facilitate a peaceful evolution of China from
communism to democracy by encouraging the forces of economic and
political liberalization in that great country.”6 But Christopher’s
reference to “peaceful evolution” revived, whether intentionally or
not, the term used by John Foster Dulles to project the eventual
collapse of Communist states. In Beijing, it signaled not a hopeful
trend, but perceived Western designs to convert China to capitalist
democracy without recourse to war.7 Neither Clinton’s nor Christopher’s
statements were regarded as controversial in the United States;
both were anathema in Beijing.
Having thrown down
the gauntlet—without perhaps fully recognizing the magnitude of its
challenge—the Clinton administration proclaimed that it was ready
to “engage” China on a broad range of issues. These included the
conditions of China’s domestic reform and its integration with the
broader world economy. That the Chinese leaders might have qualms
about entering into a dialogue with the same high American
officials who had just called for the replacement of their
political system was apparently not considered an insuperable
obstacle. The fate of this initiative illustrates the complexities
and ambiguities of such a policy.
Chinese leaders no
longer made any claim to represent a unique revolutionary truth
available for export. Instead, they espoused the essentially
defensive aim of working toward a world not overtly hostile to
their system of governance or territorial integrity and buying time
to develop their economy and work out their domestic problems at
their own pace. It was a foreign policy posture arguably closer to
Bismarck’s than Mao’s: incremental, defensive, and based on
building dams against unfavorable historical tides. But even as
tides were shifting, Chinese leaders projected a fiery sense of
independence. They masked their concern by missing no opportunity
to proclaim that they would resist outside pressure to the utmost.
As Jiang insisted to me in 1991: “[W]e never submit to pressure.
This is very important [spoken in
English]. It is a philosophical principle.”
Nor did China’s
leaders accept the interpretation of the end of the Cold War as
ushering in a period of America as a hyperpower. In a 1991
conversation, Qian Qichen cautioned that the new international
order could not remain unipolar indefinitely and that China would
work toward a multipolar world—which meant that it would work to
counter American preeminence. He cited demographic
realities—including a somewhat threatening reference to China’s
massive population advantage—to bolster his point:
We believe it is impossible that such a unipolar world would come into existence. Some people seem to believe that after the end of the Gulf War and the Cold War, the U.S. can do anything. I don’t think that is correct. . . . In the Muslim world there are over 1 billion people. China has a population of 1.1 billion. The population of South Asia is over 1 billion. The population of China is more than the populations of the U.S., the Soviet Union, Europe and Japan combined. So it is still a diverse world.
Premier Li Peng
delivered possibly the most frank assessment of the human rights
issue. In reply to my delineation of three policy areas in need of
improvement—human rights, weapons technology transfer, and trade—he
stated in December 1992:
With regard to the three areas you mentioned, we can talk about human rights. But because of major differences between us, I doubt major progress is possible. The concept of human rights involves traditions and moral and philosophical values. These are different in China than in the West. We believe that the Chinese people should have more democratic rights and play a more important role in domestic politics. But this should be done in a way acceptable to the Chinese people.
Coming from a
representative of the conservative wing of the Chinese leadership,
Li Peng’s affirmation of the need for progress toward democratic
rights was unprecedented. But so was the frankness with which he
delineated the limits of Chinese flexibility: “Naturally in issues
like human rights, we can do some things. We can have discussions
and without compromising our principles, we can take flexible
measures. But we cannot reach a full agreement with the West. It
would shake the basis of our society.”
A signature China
initiative of Clinton’s first term brought matters to a head: the
administration’s attempt to condition China’s Most Favored Nation
trade status on improvements in China’s human rights record. “Most
Favored Nation” is a somewhat misleading phrase: since a
significant majority of countries enjoy the status, it is less a
special mark of favor than an affirmation that a country enjoys
normal trade privileges.8 The concept of MFN conditionality presented
its moral purpose as a typically American pragmatic concept of
rewards and penalties (or “carrots” and “sticks”). As Clinton’s
National Security Advisor Anthony Lake explained it, the United
States would withhold a benefit until it produced results,
“providing penalties that raise the costs of repression and
aggressive behavior” until the Chinese leadership made a rational
interest-based calculation to liberalize its domestic institutions.
9
In May 1993, Winston
Lord, then Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific
Affairs, and in the 1970s my indispensable associate during the
opening to China, visited Beijing to brief Chinese officials on the
new administration’s thinking. At the close of his trip, Lord
warned that “dramatic progress” on human rights, nonproliferation,
and other issues was necessary if China were to avoid suspension of
its MFN status.10 Caught between a Chinese government
rejecting any conditionality as illegitimate and American
politicians demanding ever more stringent conditions, he made no
headway at all.
I visited Beijing
shortly after Lord’s trip, where I encountered a Chinese leadership
struggling to chart a course out of the MFN conditionality impasse.
Jiang offered a “friendly suggestion”:
China and the U.S. as two big countries should see problems in the long-term perspective. China’s economic development and social stability serve China’s interests but also turn China into a major force for peace and stability, in Asia and elsewhere. I think that in looking at other countries, the U.S. should take into account their self-esteem and sovereignty. That is a friendly suggestion.
Jiang again attempted
to dissuade the United States from thinking of China as a potential
threat or competitor, thereby to reduce American incentives to try
to hold China down:
Yesterday at a symposium I spoke about this issue. I also mentioned an article in The Times which suggested China will one day be a superpower. I’ve said over and over that China will never be a threat to any country.
Against the backdrop
of Clinton’s tough rhetoric and the belligerent mood in Congress,
Lord negotiated a compromise with Senate Majority Leader George
Mitchell and Representative Nancy Pelosi that extended MFN for a
year. It was expressed in a flexible executive order rather than
binding legislation. It confined conditionality to human rights
rather than including other areas of democratization that many in
Congress urged. But to the Chinese, conditionality was a matter of
principle—just as it had been for the Soviet Union when they
rejected the Jackson-Vanik Amendment. Beijing objected to the fact
of conditions, not their content.
On May 28, 1993,
President Clinton signed the executive order extending China’s MFN
status for twelve months, after which it would be either renewed or
canceled based on China’s conduct in the interim Clinton stressed
that the “core” of the administration’s China policy would be “a
resolute insistence upon significant progress on human rights in
China.”11 He explained MFN conditionality in
principle as an expression of American outrage over Tiananmen and
continuing “profound concerns” about the manner in which China was
governed.12
The executive order
was accompanied by a rhetoric more pejorative about China than that
of any administration since the 1960s. In September 1993, National
Security Advisor Lake suggested in a speech that unless China
acceded to American demands, it would be counted among what he
called “reactionary ‘backlash’ states” clinging to outmoded forms
of governance by means of “military force, political imprisonment
and torture,” as well as “the intolerant energies of racism, ethnic
prejudice, religious persecution, xenophobia, and
irredentism.”13
Other events combined
to deepen the Chinese suspicions. Negotiations over China’s
accession to GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
(later subsumed into the World Trade Organization, or WTO),
deadlocked over substantive issues. Beijing’s bid for the 2000
Olympics came under attack. Majorities in both houses of Congress
voiced their disapproval of the bid; the U.S. government maintained
a cautious silence.14 China’s application for hosting the
Olympics was narrowly defeated. Tensions were further inflamed by
an intrusive (and ultimately unsuccessful) American inspection of a
Chinese ship suspected of carrying chemical weapons components to
Iran. All of these incidents, each of which had its own rationale,
were analyzed in China in terms of the Chinese style of Sun Tzu
strategy, which knows no single events, only patterns reflecting an
overall design.
Matters came to a
head with the visit of Secretary of State Warren Christopher to
Beijing in March 1994. The purpose of Christopher’s visit, he later
recounted, was to achieve a resolution of the MFN issue by the time
the deadline for the one-year extension of MFN would expire in
June, and to “underscore to the Chinese that under the president’s
policy they had only limited time to mend their human rights
record. If they wanted to keep their low-tariff trading privileges,
there had to be significant progress, and soon.”15
Chinese officials had
suggested that the timing of the visit was inopportune. Christopher
was scheduled to arrive the day of the opening of the annual
session of China’s legislature, the National People’s Congress. The
presence of an American Secretary of State challenging the Chinese
government on human rights issues promised either to overshadow the
body’s deliberations or to tempt Chinese officials to take the
offensive to prove their imperviousness to outside pressure. It
was, Christopher later conceded, “a perfect forum for them to
demonstrate that they intended to stand up to America.”16
And so they did. The
result was one of the most pointedly hostile diplomatic encounters
since the U.S.-China rapprochement. Lord, who accompanied
Christopher, described Christopher’s session with Li Peng as “the
most brutal diplomatic meeting he’d ever attended”17—and he had been at
my side during all the negotiations with the North Vietnamese.
Christopher related in his memoirs the reaction of Li Peng, who
held that
China’s human rights policy was none of our business, noting that the United States had plenty of human rights problems of its own that needed attention. . . . To ensure that I had not failed to appreciate the depth of their unhappiness, the Chinese abruptly canceled my meeting later in the day with President Jiang Zemin.18
These tensions, which
seemed to undo two decades of creative China policy, led to a split
in the administration between the economic departments and the
political departments charged with pressing the human rights
issues. Faced with Chinese resistance and American domestic
pressures from companies doing business in China, the
administration began to find itself in the demeaning position of
pleading with Beijing in the final weeks before the MFN deadline to
make enough modest concessions to justify extending
MFN.
Shortly after
Christopher’s return, and with the self-imposed deadline for MFN
renewal at hand, the administration quietly abandoned its policy of
conditionality. On May 26, 1994, Clinton announced that the
policy’s usefulness had been exhausted and that China’s MFN status
would be extended for another year essentially without conditions.
He pledged to pursue human rights progress by other means, such as
support for NGOs in China and encouraging best business
practices.
Clinton, it must be
repeated, throughout had every intention to support the policies
that had sustained relations with China for five administrations of
both parties. But as a recently elected President he was also
sensitive to domestic American opinion, more so than to the
intangibles of the Chinese approach to foreign policy. He put
forward conditionality out of conviction and, above all, because he
sought to protect China policy from the swelling congressional
onslaught that was attempting to deny MFN to China altogether.
Clinton believed that the Chinese “owed” the U.S. administration
human rights concessions in return for restoring high-level
contacts and putting forward MFN. But the Chinese considered that
they were “entitled” to the same unconditional high-level contacts
and trade terms extended to them by all other nations. They did not
view the removal of a unilateral threat as a concession, and they
were extraordinarily touchy regarding any hint of intervention in
their domestic affairs. So long as human rights remained the
principal subject of the Sino-American dialogue, deadlock was
inevitable. This experience should be studied carefully by
advocates of a confrontational policy in our day.
During the remainder
of his first term, Clinton toned down the confrontational tactics
and emphasized “constructive engagement.” Lord assembled America’s
Asian ambassadors in Hawaii to discuss a comprehensive Asia policy
balancing the administration’s human rights goals with its
geopolitical imperatives. Beijing committed itself to renewed
dialogue, essential for the success of China’s reform program and
membership in the WTO.
Clinton, as George H.
W. Bush had before him, sympathized with the concerns of the
advocates for democratic change and human rights. But like all his
predecessors and successors, he came to appreciate the strength of
Chinese leaders’ convictions and their tenacity in the face of
public challenge.
Relations between
China and the United States rapidly mended. A long-sought visit by
Jiang to Washington took place in 1997 and was reciprocated by an
eight-day visit by Clinton to Beijing in 1998. Both Presidents
performed ebulliently. Extended communiqués were published. They
established consultative institutions, dealt with a host of
technical issues, and ended the atmosphere of confrontation of
nearly a decade.
What the relationship
lacked was a defining shared purpose such as had united Beijing and
Washington in resistance to Soviet “hegemonism.” American leaders
could not remain oblivious to the various pressures regarding human
rights that were generated by their own domestic politics and
convictions. The Chinese leaders continued to see American policy
as at least partially designed to keep China from reaching great
power status. In a 1995 conversation Li Peng sounded a theme of
reassurance, which amounted to calming presumed American fears over
what objectives a resurgent China might seek: “[T]here is no need
for some people to worry about the rapid development. China will
take 30 years to catch up with the medium level countries. Our
population is too big.” The United States, in turn, made regular
pledges that it had not changed its policy to containment. The
implication of both assurances was that each side had the
capability of implementing what it reassured the other about and
was in part restraining itself. Reassurance thus merged with
threat.