Beyond Peace (20 page)

When I went to China in 1972, there was a great deal of speculation about why I had changed my hard-line position of opposing recognition of the Chinese communist government. Some suggested that I had finally seen the light and that I had recognized that the notorious “free China” lobby was wrong in demonizing the communist government of China. Others suggested that I went to China to enlist Chinese support in ending the Vietnam War. Neither of these views was right.

China and the United States were brought together in part because both were concerned about the threat to China and the rest of Asia from an aggressive Soviet Union. But I believed that even if there were no Soviet threat, it was essential to develop a new relationship with China then, when China was weak and needed us, rather than waiting until later, when China needed us less than we needed them.

The issue today is not who is for or against human rights. Those who support an open China economic policy are as profoundly concerned about human rights as those who are demanding a change in that policy. The question is what policy will be most effective in convincing the Chinese leaders to provide more political freedom and to end human-rights abuses.

For twenty-five years before 1972, we had had no contact whatever with the communist Chinese government—no trade, no diplomatic relations, no tourists, no exchange of people. China was still a completely closed society with neither economic nor political freedom. Since our opening, the Chinese have astonished the world by the progress their country has made in granting economic freedom and opening up Chinese society to the free world.

During the Cold War, the United States and China were brought together and held together by our fears. In the period beyond peace, we need new economic incentives that will help to hold us together by our hopes.

Seven centuries ago, Marco Polo described China as far ahead of any European city in the “excellence of its buildings and bridges, the number of its public hospitals, the effective maintenance of public order and the manner and refinements of its people.” Between 221 and 206
B.C.
, the Chinese built the Great Wall and cut themselves off from the rest of the world. Four centuries ago China's development stopped, and the country fell hopelessly behind the rest of the world. Now China is again gaining international respect as one of the world's great powers.

Many who are inexperienced about China fail to understand that one of the keys to its history in this century has been the restoration of national pride and unity after generations of fractionalism and foreign exploitation. Their pride is neither communist nor noncommunist in character but simply Chinese, and it guarantees that China's leaders will not respond constructively to ultimatums.

I vividly recall calling on Deng Xiaoping in the fall of 1989,
four months after the Tiananmen Square crackdown. After he had greeted me in the Great Hall of the People, I told him that there had never been a worse crisis in the relationship between our countries and that it was up to China to take steps to deal with the outrage of the civilized world. With dozens of journalists from around the world looking on, he gave a boilerplate reply about not tolerating interference in China's internal affairs.

After the cameras left, he became far more animated. By then China's battle-scarred old survivor was almost totally deaf. The conversation took on a surreal character, with the official translator shouting my comments into his left ear and his daughter screaming them into his right. But while he had great difficulty hearing, he had no difficulty seeing his responsibility as his country's paramount leader. He told me that after years of subservience to foreigners, China was now united and independent and that the Chinese people would never forgive their leaders for apologizing to another nation. In almost the next breath he introduced the subject of Fang Lizhu, the dissident who was then being sheltered at the U.S. embassy in Beijing, and made a highly constructive proposal for ending the standoff.

Deng's message was unmistakable: Our differences could be bridged by discussion behind the scenes but would be exacerbated by red-hot exchanges of public rhetoric. A few months later Fang Lizhu was released, but on China's initiative, not in response to demands by the United States.

In late 1993, Deng was widely believed to have given the Chinese government these marching orders for dealing with the new administration in Washington: “Increase trust, reduce troubles, develop cooperation, and avoid confrontation.” In its first moves, the Clinton administration responded by increasing distrust, stirring up trouble, threatening noncooperation, and fomenting confrontation. A letter from President Clinton to Beijing, which listed fourteen criticisms on issues ranging from human rights to trade, set off months of diplomatic skirmishing
that came close to imperiling the constructive relations between our countries. The climax came when the United States, acting on inaccurate intelligence, erroneously accused the Chinese of selling chemicals to Iran for the production of poison gas and decided to follow and later board and inspect a Chinese vessel suspected of carrying the chemicals.

Eventually, wiser heads prevailed, and Sino-U.S. relations were put back on an even keel following a summit meeting between the U.S. and Chinese Presidents in Seattle in late 1993. Still, as Don Oberdorfer wrote just before the summit, “Much of the recent rhetoric in Washington about China seems strangely disconnected from the burgeoning urban life of Beijing and the fast-growing eastern seaboard cities. Paradoxically, the United States has seemed to be more ideological in its dealings than the increasingly pragmatic communist state.” In the future, particularly on foreign policy issues, we should treat China with the respect a great power deserves and not as a pariah nation.

Because of its huge natural and human resources, China will inevitably be an economic and military superpower in the next century. We will need China as a friend then. The Chinese have long memories. We must not poison the friendly relationship we risked so much to establish when we opened the door to China twenty-one years ago.

At the same time, realistic reappraisals of U.S. relations with Taiwan, and of the relations between the governments in Beijing and Taipei, are overdue. The Shanghai Communiqué negotiated by Henry Kissinger and Zhou Enlai twenty-one years ago brilliantly bridged the differences between the two governments by stating that the United States recognized that both agreed that there was one China, that each claimed to be the legitimate government of China, and that the differences should be settled peacefully. The situation has changed dramatically since then.

Mainland China is 250 times larger than Taiwan and has 55 times as many people. But in 1992 mainland China's economy
was only 2.2 times larger than that of Taiwan. Tiny Taiwan is an economic giant. It has the largest foreign exchange reserve in the world, is the fourteenth-largest trading country in the world, and has the twentieth-largest GNP in the world—larger than the GNPs of three fourths of the nations in the U.N. It was the sixth-largest trading partner and the sixth-largest export market of the United States in 1992. Taiwan provides twice as big a market for American exports as mainland China.

Like a couple who have gone through a bitter divorce, China and Taiwan publicly have irreconcilable differences. The separation is permanent politically, but they are in bed together economically. China can never agree that Taiwan should have equal status as a member of the U.N. But economically the two need each other. Taiwan is rapidly becoming China's biggest foreign investor. The trade between the two, much of it thinly disguised by going through Hong Kong, is enormous.

A more prosperous Taiwan serves China's interests. A more prosperous China serves Taiwan's interests. Beijing should drop its opposition to Taiwan's membership in international economic organizations. While we should not risk jeopardizing our relations with Beijing by formally recognizing Taiwan diplomatically, we should recognize Taiwan economically by strongly supporting its efforts to become a member of such organizations. And we should begin extending to Taiwan government officials the diplomatic courtesies that the leaders of one of the world's major economic powers deserve. The best guarantee of Taiwan's security is our relationship with the People's Republic of China. The Chinese will not launch a military attack against Taiwan as long as Beijing knows such an action would jeopardize their relationship with the United States.

Similar factors affect China's relationship to Hong Kong. In 1984, when China pledged that for fifty years after Hong Kong again became part of China in 1997 it would preserve Hong Kong's capitalist way of life, some observers said this was a two-China policy—with one government and two economic systems.
Milton Friedman disagreed. He said, “One country with two systems is from a dream world. One country is one country.” Economically, he has proved to be right. Despite the highly publicized disagreements between Britain's Hong Kong governor, Chris Patten, and Beijing on political issues, China and Hong Kong are one country economically and will remain so. Hong Kong is China's biggest foreign investor, and China is Hong Kong's biggest trading partner. The two economies are blended together and political differences will not pry them apart because each needs the other. Hong Kong's per capita income is $19,000, compared with Britain's $16,000. After Hong Kong again becomes part of China in 1997, their political differences will continue to appear to drive them apart, but their much stronger economic interests will inevitably draw them together. Hong Kong is one of the world's richest societies, and in the next century, China will become one. One of the reasons China will not adopt a repressive political policy in Hong Kong after 1997 is that it knows this would destroy any hope it may have to convince Taiwan to accept a similar arrangement.

The lessons of China are directly relevant to what our policies should be toward the three remaining hard-line communist states: Vietnam, Cuba, and North Korea.

In planning the American opening to China, I set one basic threshold requirement. In the 1967 article in
Foreign Affairs
in which I first publicly stressed the need for such an opening, I argued that doing so the right way would require short-run pressures “designed to persuade Peking that its interests can be served only by accepting the basic rules of international civility.” For the long run, it would require “pulling China back into the world community—but as a great and progressing nation, not as
the epicenter of world revolution.” In other words, China had to be brought into the world community, but it could not be allowed to shoot its way in.

When I wrote that, China was still an aggressive power and a serious threat to the security of its neighbors. On taking office in January 1969, one of the first things I did was to set in motion a series of initiatives aimed at achieving an opening to China in the right way. By the time of my initial visit to Beijing in 1972, China was still repressive domestically, but except for its brief invasion of Vietnam, it was no longer a direct military threat to its neighbors.

Of the three remaining communist states, North Korea clearly remains a serious, active threat, not only to South Korea but to the peace and security of the entire Pacific Rim. It has not yet crossed the threshold that I set more than twenty-five years ago for China. Until it ceases to be a threat, we should continue to treat it as the pariah nation that its leaders still persist in making it.

Vietnam and Cuba are like North Korea in that both are still run by repressive communist regimes. Between the two there are dramatic differences. But neither presents an active threat to the peace internationally.

Vietnam's present leaders have turned the country's extraordinary energies from external aggression to internal development. Like China's leaders, they retain tight political control but are opening their economy to market forces. The result is that Vietnam is now on the verge of becoming a significant economic power. In Cuba, by contrast, Castro still gives lip service to world revolution. But his Stalinist economic policies have devastated the nation's economy, and without his former Soviet sponsors, he no longer has the resources to pose a serious external threat.

In the cases of both Cuba and Vietnam, the question before us now is how we can best serve our own national interest, the interests of the people of those two nations, and the interest of the world community: by the closed door or the open door?

Of the two, Vietnam presents the easier choice. Though repressive, its government is solidly entrenched. Clearly, neither economic nor diplomatic pressures will dislodge it. The question is how best to open it further to the winds of freedom that are sweeping the world. Again, the China analogy is instructive. Increasing economic integration with the world brings greater economic freedoms, and economic freedoms build powerful internal pressure for political freedoms.

We should start by separating the question of our political relationship with Vietnam from that of our economic relationship, letting each develop at its own pace. Even if we are totally satisfied that the Vietnamese government has done all it can to account for Americans missing in action in the Vietnam War, we should keep the political relationship in a deep freeze as long as Hanoi continues to treat as second-class citizens the millions of South Vietnamese who were our allies in the war. We should follow the administration's decision to lift the trade embargo with vigorous efforts to encourage investment in Vietnam and draw it further into the global economy, not to help the present Vietnamese regime but to strengthen the forces of change.

In the case of Cuba, much of the pressure to keep our economic embargoes in force derives from the long-standing belief, particularly among many in the Cuban exile community, that this is the best way to bring a swift end to the cruel and destructive Castro regime. It is true that the collapse of the Soviet government and the subsequent cutoff of Soviet economic subsidies have put heavy new pressures on Castro. The privation is brutal. Economic conditions on the island, bad before, have become far worse. His police state has nevertheless maintained its iron grip.