1999 (43 page)

The West must also increase China's access to the technology it needs for industrial development. We should not sell highly sensitive technologies that could be used against us militarily to any potentially hostile nation. But neither should we be overly rigorous about technologies that have no military application but that would be indispensable to modernizing the Chinese economy. Many of these will also be available to China from other trading partners in the industrialized West. Better the Chinese get them from us so that we will be in a position to reap the benefits.

The future of the Sino–U.S. relationship is as much in the hands of American businessmen as in those of its statesmen. As Khrushchev once said to a group of Western business leaders, “You stay in power, while the politicians change all the time.” But as befits their long-range role American businessmen must learn the Eastern art of taking the long view. The Chinese think in terms of decades and centuries, while hard-driving Westerners often think no further ahead than the bottom line at the end of the current fiscal year. Many businessmen returning from China complain about the maddeningly slow pace of the Chinese foreign-trade bureaucracy. Americans are used to pitching a deal in the morning, smoothing the rough edges over a three-martini lunch, and tying up the loose ends that afternoon with a few phone calls and telexes. But the hard-and-fast sell will not work in China. The Chinese remember when the Western powers exploited their country unmercifully, and the memory has made them tough bargainers.

Nonetheless Americans who stick it out now, when the Chinese economy is just beginning to expand, will be glad they did. Over 8,300 joint ventures between Chinese and Western firms have been approved, and over 150 foreign companies have been permitted to set up wholly owned subsidiaries—in stark contrast to many other developing countries such as Mexico, which is so paranoid about outside investment that it puts heavy restrictions on foreign ownership. Those investors who have their foot in the door in 1988 and keep it there will reap unimaginable rewards as China grows and prospers. For those doing business in China, patience will lead to great rewards.

The worst mistake we could make in our China policy is to
indulge in the uniquely American practice of piously instructing other countries about how to conduct their political business. The Chinese are a fiercely independent people who have always chafed at attempts by others to influence or dominate their affairs. Statements of concern from Americans, in government or in the media, about apparent antireform or antidemocratic trends in China will serve no purpose other than to offend and alienate the Chinese leadership and possibly produce an effect that is exactly opposite to what the naive critics intend. Americans on both the left and the right must resist their bighearted urge to lecture the Chinese on human rights. And it is ludicrous for us to attempt, as some in the Reagan administration have urged, to impose our views about abortion on China, an overcrowded country where the choice is between population control and starvation.

Most important, we must avoid any misstep on the difficult issue of Taiwan. The position we took in 1972 in the Shanghai Communiqué, which has been reinforced in subsequent Sino–U.S. understandings, is the one that should govern our policy in the future. The Chinese on both Taiwan and the mainland maintain that there is only one China and that Taiwan is part of China. Our only interest is that in deciding the issue among themselves, the Chinese should decide it peacefully. We cannot and should not broker a deal. The most sensitive issue is arms. We must strictly adhere to our commitment to provide only defensive arms to Taiwan, lessening the pace of our military aid only as tensions between Taiwan and Beijing lessen.

But we must make it clear that in building our friendship with the Chinese on the mainland we will not sacrifice our Chinese friends on Taiwan. Julian Amery put the issue eloquently: “It is often necessary and legitimate to abandon causes long supported and to dissolve pledged bonds of alliance. But it is always wrong to abandon men who have been friends to their fate. We may have to jettison their interests but we should leave no stone unturned to save at least their lives.” Two of the blackest pages in the history of American diplomacy were our complicity in the murder of Diem and our insensitivity to the fate of the Shah after we greased the skids for his downfall and thus helped bring Khomeini to power. We must not commit a similar atrocity against the Taiwanese.

Many Americans who are preoccupied with the Taiwan issue fail to realize that Deng is under as much pressure, if not more, to act on Taiwan from conservatives in his own government as American Presidents have been from the pro-Taiwan lobby in the United States. It is in neither our interests nor those of our friends on Taiwan to provoke a confrontation with Beijing. Deng hopes that the agreement he made with the British on Hong Kong, by which the crown colony will revert to Chinese control in 1997 under the principle of “one country, two systems,” will serve as a starting point for a comparable arrangement on Taiwan. In any case, the more sensitive we can be to Chinese concerns on this issue, the better, both for Deng and for Taiwan. The issue is enormously complex and has no simple solution. But the Chinese are a very clever people. I am confident they will eventually resolve it peacefully.

The Chinese will watch what the United States does elsewhere in the world just as carefully as they watch what we do in China. Recent developments have given them good reason to be concerned about our consistency and dependability. Our loss in Vietnam, followed by the spread of Soviet power throughout Indochina, was a devastating strategic blow to China, which suffered twenty thousand casualties in a 1979 war with Soviet-backed Vietnam that would not have occurred if South Vietnam had not been defeated by the communist North.

The Chinese were deeply troubled by our geopolitical hibernation during the late 1970s. When I saw Mao in 1976 six months before his death, he asked me rather ruefully, “Is peace America's only goal?” I answered that we wanted a peace that was more than the absence of war—a “peace with justice.” At that time, regrettably, my words were empty. America was in the throes of the Vietnam syndrome and in no mood to fulfill its international responsibilities. Twelve years later our resolve has stiffened considerably as the rancor and bitterness of our Vietnamese experience have faded, but it has not yet been put to a real test, and the Chinese know it. Still, the national-security imperatives that brought us together remain a critical element in our relationship.
The Chinese will continue to count on us to bring pressure to bear on the Soviets to withdraw from Afghanistan; to maintain a military presence in the Pacific to balance Soviet strength; to pursue hardheaded arms-control agreements with the Soviets that will not leave them with a strategic advantage they could use to blackmail us and our friends; and to continue to resist the spread of Soviet influence in the developing world. We should do all these things in our own interests as well as in theirs.

In these and other areas, our interests and those of the Chinese are similar. Aggressively pursuing our foreign-policy interests will automatically bolster our relationship with China; failing to act when we should will hurt the relationship. Until China's defense establishment becomes stronger than it is today, the essence of its military deterrent is ours. But we must never forget that we act for our sake, not China's. Pandering to the Chinese will only earn their contempt. We can expect that in spite of our cordial relations Beijing will continue to indulge in its traditional anti-capitalist, occasionally anti-American public rhetoric. We should not object to this any more than the Chinese should object to our speaking out against communism.

But our convergent interests will diverge suddenly and sharply in the event China moves beyond rhetoric and embarks on a newly expansionist, aggressive phase in its foreign policy. For example, in part to make money and in part to offset Soviet overtures to Khomeini, the Chinese in 1986 sold $1 billion in weapons to Iran. Such a policy has its understandable motivations, but it also has its inescapable consequences. The Reagan administration reacted properly when it took measures to deprive China of high-technology equipment it wanted and needed.

As they have become more sophisticated in economic policy, so too have the Chinese become more shrewd in foreign policy. They pursue an independent, carefully calibrated range of initiatives: taking tentative steps toward relations with South Korea without endangering their long-standing ties with the communist north; gradually improving relations with their former enemy Japan without permitting an uncontrolled flood of Japanese imports and influence; keeping a line open to Iraq at the same time they sell
weapons to Iran; and, most significant, pursuing talks and exchanges aimed at warming the chill between Beijing and Moscow.

Signs of a Sino–Soviet thaw have caused considerable confusion and even some consternation in the United States. Some super-hawks had hoped that the two communist giants would go to war—in spite of the fact that even a conventional clash between China and the Soviet Union would probably escalate into a nuclear World War III. Others, pointing to such factors as a nearly sevenfold increase in bilateral trade between 1982 and 1986, fear that a Sino–Soviet rapprochement will create a newly united communist monolith that will threaten us.

Neither of these dire outcomes is likely. Deng wants better relations with the Soviet Union because they will permit him to focus more of his resources on economic development and less on defense. And he wants to reduce tensions that might escalate into war. For China the twentieth century has been a century of war. Above all China now needs a century of peace. But Deng does not want to return to the pre-1961 relationship, when China was economically dependent on the Soviet Union. He knows that China's greatest need is for economic progress. Here it is no contest between the West and the Soviet Union. The West offers everything; the Soviet Union offers very little. Only if China gives up on the West will it turn back to its ominous neighbor in the north.

Another reason China will be reluctant to return to its old relationship with the Soviet Union is that it never again wants to be a junior partner in the communist bloc. China's days of dependency are over. It is a major player in a world filled with nations that realize the force it is destined to become and that are eager to play a role in helping it develop its potential. In recent years one leader after another, Western and communist alike, has found it in his and in his country's interests to ride what one journalist called the “milk train to China” and stand with its leaders on the Great Wall. China's leaders are wise to receive every supplicant. Deng summed up China's independent foreign policy succinctly when he told me in 1985, “We are not going to tie ourselves to one chariot.”

For the same reason, at least for the moment there is a limit
beyond which the relationship between the United States and the People's Republic of China cannot grow. We are not allies. Just thirty-five years ago we were enemies. Thousands of Chinese and Americans fought each other in Korea. One of Mao's sons was among the casualties. Today we are new friends who have been brought together after years of hostility, even hatred and war, by coldly calculated common interests. These interests could change, and the friendship would change with them. We have no shared experiences, struggles, or ideals to hold us together in the face of shifting international realities; absent a major political reform movement in China, our philosophies of government will remain diametrically opposed to each other. Therefore to a large extent this promising new relationship is hostage to events over which neither side has complete control.

We must avoid romanticizing the relationship or putting too much stock in superficial curiosities about each other. Neither student exchanges nor tourism nor blue jeans nor American rock music nor cloisonné jewelry will hold us together if either China or the United States behaves in a way that the other finds unacceptable. Relations between great nations are not a tea party or a love fest; they are complicated, intricately structured devices that have to be watched and tended constantly. Unless we take care, anything that can go wrong probably will.

For the sake of our grandchildren in the next century, however, we must ensure that our relationship survives and grows. Today we are dealing with a nation that is just beginning to feel its way in the modern world; tomorrow they will be dealing with what could be the dominant power in the world. Between now and then the new friends could become new allies, and the shared experiences and values that are missing today could come to be as a result of now-unimagined events in a changing, violent, unpredictable world.

At our meeting in Hangzhou in 1972, Chou En-lai and I completed the negotiations for the Shanghai Communiqué, which marked the beginning of a new, peaceful relationship between the United States and China. To commemorate the event, we planted a three-foot-high sequoia that I had brought with me from California. It was a sapling from the oldest and tallest tree in the world,
in California's Sequoia National Park. At the time neither of us was sure the tree would grow in Chinese soil.