LONDON – If President Bill Clinton is feeling beleaguered by his many domestic critics of his trip to China he should perhaps recall the damning chorus he helped orchestrate against his predecessor George Bush for pursuing much the same policies. In his first presidential debate with Bush, Clinton tore into him, accusing him, in effect, of being soft on China and promising that if he were elected the age of conciliation would end. No more would America kowtow to the Chinese economic behemoth if it meant tolerating human-rights abuses and prison labour in Chinese factories.
This line always plays well to the American public. But the centre holds, as it did before, and has for every U.S. president since Richard Nixon made his historic U-turn with his sensational Foreign Affairs article, “Asia After Vietnam”.
Here Nixon spelt out the reasons for a more conciliatory policy towards China. His most important point was the need to support a counterweight to the Soviet Union. Now, five presidents on, the U.S. appears to have no alternative to maintaining the consequences of this profound change in realpolitik, even though the reasons for it have long disappeared. The primary reason for keeping the top spinning at century’s end is U.S. financial and commercial involvement over ten times what it is in India. Yet India is a country not only of comparable size, but probably of more significant possibilities in the long-run, given its transparent democratic and legal traditions.
It is easy, as critics do,–and I have just added my part–to make Mr Clinton look ridiculous, cosying up to a totalitarian power. What a contrast with the do-nothing policy with India, even when it was apparent to a lot of India-watchers, except the CIA, that it was engaged in a headlong race to catch up China in the nuclear missile stakes.
For all the truth in such comparisons, all they do, rather perversely, is underline how difficult it is to slow a spinning top. You either choose to keep its speed up, or it topples. The U.S. now has so much political and economic capital invested in China that nothing short of an overt military challenge by China would persuade Washington to slow the relationship down–even if it means giving the impression of ignoring other friendships and downplaying other important considerations.
More to the pity, then, that the policy of engaging China often looks more shop-soiled than it actually is. But that is human nature as in all intimate relationships both sides have their temptations to take the other for granted and play their negative side. The Chinese, if not the politburo itself, then some fairly close to it, were behind the attempt to buy into an election win by the Democrats and to exploit loopholes in American rules on foreign sales of space and military-related computor technology. The Clinton Administration, for its part, brazenly broke President Bush’s promise not to sell state-of-the-art F16 fighter jets to Taiwan, partly as a sop to the U.S. right wing and partly to give one more plum to the too-powerful arms lobby.
Yet, however lopsided and, on occasion, malevolent the “opening to China” policy is, it is essentially right. Most of the time China is not the irresponsible heavyweight of common caricature. On most issues, over the last 17 years, China has behaved with shrewd regard for international stability and the best environment for economic development.
In the current Asian financial crisis it has played an exemplary role. On the political scene, in perhaps the most important of recent developments, it has allowed Hong Kong the freedom for maneuver it promised, keeping to the timetable for elections and a progressive enlargement of the democratic component.
In the recent past, in the face of North Korean hostility, it established political ties with South Korea and helped reduce tensions surrounding the discovery of North Korea’s nuclear bomb program. It has played an active role in the UN-arbitrated peace efforts in Cambodia. More recently, it has refrained from further aggressive actions in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait.
China, by and large, is not a loose cannon on the international deck, even if it has done some not very clever things–like helping Pakistan with its manufacture of nuclear bombs and its purchase of missiles. (But so has America done its share of counterproductive work in this neck of the woods–turning a blind eye to Pakistan’s nuclear program after the Soviet invasion of neighbouring Afghanistan, when Washington felt it needed Islamabad’s help.)
Keeping the China top spinning IS a sensible policy. Clinton’s effort this week to bind Beijing ever closer to Washington is undoubtedly the most promising way to proceed. But that should not preclude two important things: building a closer relationship with India; and always, week in and week out–not just one speech in Tiananmen Square–being consistently forthright on human rights. Without that broader and more moral ingredient American policy towards China will look even more self-interested than in fact it is. Over the next two years, if Clinton wants to exit the presidency on a high note, he has to get this right. Perhaps, when he gets home, he should re-read the transcript of his debate with George Bush.
