On China (61 page)

Gorbachev’s dilemmas were even more vexing than Beijing’s. The Chinese controversies were about how the Communist Party should govern. The Soviet disputes were about whether the Communist Party should govern at all. By giving political reform (
glasnost
) priority over economic restructuring (
perestroika
), Gorbachev had made inevitable a controversy over the legitimacy of Communist rule. Gorbachev had recognized the pervasive stagnation but lacked the imagination or skill to break through its built-in rigidities. The various supervisory bodies of the system had, with the passage of time, turned into part of the problem. The Communist Party, once the instrument of revolution, had no function in an elaborated Communist system other than to supervise what it did not understand—the management of a modern economy, a problem it solved by colluding with what it was allegedly controlling. The Communist elite had become a mandarin class of the privileged; theoretically in charge of the national orthodoxy, it concentrated on preserving its perquisites.

Glasnost
clashed with
perestroika
. Gorbachev wound up ushering in the collapse of the system that had shaped him and to which he owed his eminence. But before he did, he redefined the concept of peaceful coexistence. Previous leaders had affirmed it, and Mao had quarreled with Khrushchev over it. But Gorbachev’s predecessors had advocated peaceful coexistence as a temporary respite on the way to ultimate confrontation and victory. Gorbachev, at the Twenty-seventh Party Congress in 1986, proclaimed it as a
permanent
fixture in the relationship between Communism and capitalism. It was his way of reentering the international system in which Russia had participated in the pre-Soviet period.

On my visits, Chinese leaders were at pains to distinguish China from the Russian model, especially Gorbachev. In our meeting in September 1990, Jiang stressed:

The Chinese leaders affirmed the same principles of coexistence as Gorbachev. But they used them not to conciliate the West, as Gorbachev did, but to wall themselves off from it. Gorbachev was treated in Beijing as irrelevant, not to mention misguided. His modernization program was rejected as ill conceived because it put political reform before economic reform. In the Chinese view, political reform might be needed over time, but economic reform had to precede it. Li Ruihuan explained why price reform could not work in the Soviet Union: when almost all commodities were in short supply, price reform was bound to lead to inflation and panic. Zhu Rongji, visiting the United States in 1990, was repeatedly lauded as “China’s Gorbachev”; he took pains to emphasize, “I’m not China’s Gorbachev. I’m China’s Zhu Rongji.”
³

When I visited China again in 1992, Qian Qichen described the collapse of the Soviet Union as “like the aftermath of an explosion—shock waves in all directions.” The collapse of the Soviet Union had indeed created a new geopolitical context. As Beijing and Washington assessed the new landscape, they found their interests no longer as evidently congruent as in the days of near alliance. Then, disagreements had been mainly over the tactics of resisting Soviet hegemony. Now, as the common opponent withered, it was inevitable that the differences in the two leaderships’ values and worldviews would come to the fore.

In Beijing, the end of the Cold War produced a mixture of relief and dread. On one level, Chinese leaders welcomed the disintegration of the Soviet adversary. Mao’s and Deng’s strategy of active, even offensive, deterrence had prevailed. At the same time, Chinese leaders could not avoid comparisons between the unraveling of the Soviet Union and their own domestic challenge. They, too, had inherited an ancient multiethnic empire and sought to administer it as a modern socialist state. Though the percentage of non-Han population was much smaller in China (about 10 percent) than the share of non-Russians in the Soviet empire (about 50 percent), ethnic minorities with distinct traditions existed. Moreover, these minorities lived in regions that were strategically sensitive, bordering Vietnam, Russia, and India.

No American president in the 1970s would have risked confrontation with China so long as the Soviet Union loomed as a strategic threat. On the American side, however, the disintegration of the Soviet Union was seen as representing a kind of permanent and universal triumph of democratic values. A bipartisan sentiment held that traditional “history” was being superseded: allies and adversaries alike were moving inexorably toward adopting multiparty parliamentary democracy and open markets (institutions that, in the American view, were inevitably linked). Any obstacle standing in the way of this wave would be swept aside.

A new concept had evolved to the effect that the nation-state was declining in importance and the international system would henceforth be based on transnational principles. Since it was assumed that democracies were inherently peaceful while autocracies tended toward violence and international terrorism, promoting regime change was considered a legitimate act of foreign policy, not an intervention into domestic affairs.

China’s leaders rejected the American prediction of the universal triumph of Western liberal democracy, but they also understood that their reform program needed America’s cooperation. So in September 1990 they sent an “oral message” through me to President Bush, which ended with an appeal to the American President:

To reinforce what Jiang had told me personally, Chinese Foreign Ministry officials gave me a written message to transmit to President Bush. Unsigned, it was described as a written oral communication—more formal than a conversation, less explicit than an official note. In addition, the Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs escorting me to the airport handed me written replies to clarifying questions I had raised during the meeting with Jiang. Like the message, they had already been conveyed at the meeting; they were given to me in writing for emphasis:

 

Question: What is the significance of Deng not answering the President’s letter?

Answer: Deng retired last year. He already sent the President an oral message saying that all administrative authority over such affairs has been given to Jiang.

 

Question: Why is the answer oral rather than written?

Answer: Deng has read the letter. But since he entrusted these matters to Jiang, he asked Jiang to reply. We wanted to give Dr. Kissinger the opportunity to convey an oral message to the President because of the role Dr. Kissinger played in favor of U.S.-Chinese relations.

 

Question: Is Deng aware of the content of your reply?

Answer: Of course.

 

Question: When you mention U.S. failure to take “corresponding measures,” what do you have in mind?

Answer: Biggest problem is continued U.S. sanctions on China. Would be best if the President could lift them or even lift de facto. Also the U.S. has a decisive say in World Bank loans. Another point concerns high-level visits which was part of the package. . . .

Question: Would you be willing to consider another package deal
?

Answer: It is illogical since the first package never materialized.

 

 

President George H. W. Bush believed from personal experience that to carry out a policy of intervention in the most populous nation and the state with the longest continuous history of self-government was inadvisable. Prepared to intervene in special circumstances and on behalf of individuals or specific groups, he thought an across-the-board confrontation over China’s domestic structure would jeopardize a relationship vital to American national security.

In response to Jiang’s oral message, Bush made an exception to the ban on high-level visits to China and encouraged his Secretary of State, James Baker, to visit Beijing for consultations. Relations steadied for a brief interval. But when the Clinton administration came into office eighteen months later they returned, for most of the new administration’s first term, to a roller coaster ride.

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: