Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/080392/0803unk.001

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 6KB | 120 lines

                                                                                AMERICA ABROAD, Page 53

How Not to Break China


By Strobe Talbott


    Once again, those would-be statesmen on Capitol Hill are
trying to micromanage American foreign policy and legislate
morality in another country -- something Congress does often and
badly. Over the next several weeks, the Senate will almost
certainly pass a bill that would punish China for its internal
tyranny and irresponsible international behavior by restricting
its trade with the U.S.

    The leaders of the People's Republic richly deserve
sanctions. The people themselves, however, don't. Ever since the
Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, Congress has been looking for
ways to beat up on Deng Xiaoping, 87, and his hard-line
protege, Premier Li Peng. In addition to repressing its citizens
and persecuting its opponents, the Chinese regime has been
selling lethal high technology to a number of potential
troublemakers, particularly in the Middle East. As a result,
Sino-American relations are the worst they have been in 20
years.

    George Bush has contributed to the problem by coddling the
Deng-Li gerontocracy, thereby provoking Congress to try to
replace the Administration's Mr. Nice Guy policy with its own
tougher one. It has been 17 years since Bush was U.S. envoy to
China, yet he still seems to suffer from the clientitis that
sometimes afflicts ambassadors who represent the views of their
host governments too well. Three weeks after Tiananmen, the
President dispatched National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft
and Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger to kowtow in
secret to Deng, then sent them back several months later to
toast him in public.

    Largely in reaction to that craven and gratuitous
behavior, Congress has generated a flurry of bills that would
attach political conditions to China's most-favored-nation
status. In fact, MFN is a misnomer: it implies special treatment
but really means normal, equal treatment. All but a handful of
the 187 countries on earth have MFN, including such pariahs and
miscreants as Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya and Burma.

    Over the years, Congress has tried to use the denial of
MFN -- or what might more accurately be called the conferment
of LFN (least-favored-nation) -- status as a stick to make
countries behave. It has never worked. Instead the use of trade
as a political weapon has almost always backfired. The classic
example is also the original one: in the mid-1970s,
congressional conservatives passed the famous Jackson-Vanik
amendment, which withheld MFN from the U.S.S.R. until the
Kremlin agreed to let more Soviet Jews emigrate. Just to show
who was boss, Leonid Brezhnev decreased the number of exit visas
by two-thirds.

    The effort to link MFN to a foreign government's respect
for human rights is especially misguided in the case of China.
Since sanctions are intended to keep Chinese-made products out
of the American market, they will harm, first and foremost,
those Chinese who are involved in export businesses. That means
manufacturers, merchants and wheeler-dealers who benefited from
the Good Deng's free-market economic reforms. These
entrepreneurs are, in the main, liberals or at least apolitical.
Granted, they are not as brave or noble as the pro-democracy
activists who faced down the Bad Deng's tanks in Tiananmen, but
they are essentially on the same side. Their commercial success
is part of the larger process of coaxing China away from
communism, and they are a key part of the generation that will
take over from the old men any day.

    In order to meet this obvious flaw in the logic of
sanctions, Representative Don Pease, an Ohio Democrat, has come
up with a twist that may be clever enough to overcome both
experts' opposition and President Bush's certain veto. The Pease
bill, which passed the House last week, would impose sanctions
only on state-owned enterprises; it supposedly exempts the
private sector.

    Actually, the measure is too clever by half. It relies on
a distinction that is hard to define and impossible to enforce.
Take mohair. The textile mills that make the sweaters are
largely state owned, but the suppliers are independents. Another
example: silkworm cocoons are raised by private farmers and
small cooperatives, while the threads are woven into silk
scarves at state factories and sold by state trading
organizations. In effect, the Pease bill penalizes everyone in
the chain.

    So curtailing MFN would hurt elements in China the outside
world should be trying to help. It could also be disastrous for
Hong Kong, which relies heavily on thriving commerce in the
People's Republic, and unwelcome in Taiwan, which is quietly
investing on the mainland.

    Neither Hong Kong, Taiwan nor the booming Shenzhen Special
Economic Zone inside China itself has any representatives in the
U.S. Congress, or any votes in the Electoral College. That is
why the Senate will pass some version of the Pease bill, and it
is why Bill Clinton and the Democrats endorsed a pro-sanctions
plank in their party platform at their convention in New York
City two weeks ago. It is easier for a member of Congress to
tell his constituents -- or a candidate challenging Bush to tell
the voters -- "I'm against the butchers of Beijing!" than to
explain how free trade with China strengthens the reformers and
moderates for the power struggle to come.

    The whole episode is a vivid reminder of the uneasy, often
unhelpful interaction between U.S. politics and foreign policy,
especially in an election year. Politicians are quick to embrace
simple positions on complex issues that make them feel good and
look good -- but in fact make a bad situation worse.