TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=91TT1243> <title> June 10, 1991: Diplomacy:Getting China Wrong </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1991 June 10, 1991 Evil </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> WORLD, Page 35 DIPLOMACY Getting China Wrong </hdr><body> In keeping with tradition, the White House and Congress both overestimate their influence on Beijing By BRUCE W. NELAN--Reported by Jaime A. FlorCruz/Beijing and Christopher Ogden/Washington While Soviet specialists tend to abhor the U.S.S.R., China scholars usually love China. George Bush's assignment as head of the U.S. mission in Beijing during the 1970s was diplomatic rather than scholarly, but it had the same seductive effect on him. Even now he seems in awe of the Chinese society that he lived in for 14 months. When formulating U.S. policy toward Beijing, he relies entirely on the China expert he respects the most: himself. Despite the rumble of growing congressional protest, Bush went ahead and renewed China's most-favored-nation trading status again this year. As he pointed out last week, MFN is not really a favor but the "ordinary basis of trade," a set of low tariffs that the U.S. grants to more than 100 countries. Bush veered into hyperbole, however, when he claimed that China is such an important power that it can affect not only the stability of its region but the "entire world's peace and prosperity." And, he went on, his extension of MFN was a "policy that has the best chance of changing Chinese behavior." Critics in Congress are pushing the other way, trying to reverse Bush's policy in order to punish Beijing for its brutal treatment of pro-democracy students and its continued repression in Tibet. Senate majority leader George Mitchell introduced a bill that would end MFN in six months unless Beijing shows more respect for human rights, stops using prison labor to produce export goods and curbs its overseas sales of ballistic missiles and nuclear technology. Both the President and Congress are taking up residence in false premises. Bush should not expect the totalitarians who run China to change their behavior at home and abroad simply to keep U.S. tariff rates low. Says Zhu Qizhen, the Chinese ambassador in Washington: "We are not going to beg the U.S. to extend MFN." Congress would be equally naive to think cutting off MFN will force China to reverse its economic and security policies. Such a public loss of face would be intolerable to Beijing. Like generations of Americans before them, Washington's leaders are getting it wrong about China. In the beginning, the chimera of a vast market of hundreds of millions of consumers sent Yankee traders sailing to the China coast in the 18th century, though then as now, the Chinese masses had no money to spend on imported goods. As late as 1900, the U.S. sold only $15 million worth of goods a year to China; today the U.S. buys far more ($15.2 billion in 1990) than it sells ($4.8 billion). Beginning in the 1830s, Christian missionaries thought they saw an opportunity to carry Western religion to millions of Chinese. American church members supported the missionary effort with their contributions, but the results fell well short of their hopes. Clergymen in China were the targets of repeated antiforeign campaigns, and during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, hundreds of missionaries and thousands of converts were killed. Nationalist President Chiang Kai-shek, a convert to the Methodist Church, and his Wellesley College-educated wife naturally became the symbols of China in American eyes during World War II, along with the sturdy peasants depicted in the novels of Pearl Buck. The U.S. armed and supported Chiang as an important ally in the struggle against Japan. Washington was wrong again: Chiang spent more energy attacking Mao Zedong's communists than trying to repel the Japanese invaders. The communists took power in Beijing in 1949, and then, contrary to General Douglas MacArthur's confident predictions, the Chinese People's Liberation Army entered the Korean War against U.N. forces in 1950. The American image of China suddenly flipped back to the stereotype of Fu Manchu and the Yellow Peril. Washington's constant assumption that Chinese aggression threatened all of Southeast Asia led in time to America's war in Vietnam. Unremitting enmity continued until President Richard Nixon's triumphant visit to Beijing in 1972 set up another false impression--that China under Mao and Deng Xiaoping was a nation on the road to capitalism and possibly even democracy. It is, of course, no such thing. China remains a police state controlled by a Communist Party dictatorship and dedicated to socialist central planning with a few market mechanisms. Bush is only the latest President to make two wrong assumptions about China: first, that the U.S. has enough "leverage" to be a major influence on Chinese domestic developments, and second, that China either is or soon will be a great world power. "It's not just a failed policy of [the past] two years," says Senator Richard Lugar, a former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "The fact is that we just haven't been able to influence China at all during most periods of history." "We do put China in a special category," says Harry Harding, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "The need is for a realistic relationship, but both sides want romance." This romanticism is rooted "in our history, in the missionary presence, the traders," says Doak Barnett, professor emeritus of Chinese studies at Johns Hopkins University. "At times we are too enthusiastic. Other times we feel disillusioned, totally negative." Most of the time, Washington overestimates China's importance. Even though the "China card" is no longer needed to help the West balance the Soviet Union, Bush credits Beijing with major international influence. In the months after the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, he twice sent high-level delegations to stroke the Chinese. Like Nixon, Bush calls China a force for "stability" in Asia. In fact, China is visibly unstable. The country has experienced "primarily chaos and confusion" in this century, says Richard Holbrooke, former Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Hundreds of thousands of young Chinese rose up against their government in 1989. In spite of the continuing efforts of the security police to root out "spiritual pollution," which is what they call Western ideas and values, the youth will probably rebel again. China is not a great power either economically or militarily. It has 3 million men under arms, but its equipment is obsolete. With an annual defense budget of just over $6 billion, the military modernization will be a long time coming. China's permanent seat in the U.N. Security Council gives it little more than disruptive potential. "Geostrategically," says Winston Lord, a former U.S. ambassador to Beijing, "China needs us more than we need them." Says Burton Levin, long one of the State Department's leading China watchers, now head of the Asia Society's office in Hong Kong: "Be realistic. Forget about geopolitics and that strategic nonsense that we've heard for years. What is important is the movement toward a more open society in China." Meanwhile, Beijing is selling missiles and nuclear technology in the Middle East, warning its neighbors not to challenge its claims to the disputed Spratley Islands, and supporting the murderous Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. But China's highest official priority, regularly reiterated, is modernization of the country. Bringing that economy and society into the modern world will require huge investments over a long time. China will need tranquillity and quiet borders, not troublemaking, to get the job done. In the process, "China pursues its national interest," says Lord. "It is not going to do us any favors." The U.S. can do itself a favor by finally placing China in correct perspective. It would be wise to see China for what it is: a big, backward country with which the U.S. should maintain correct but not necessarily cordial ties. It will evolve, probably slowly, and one day it may have more in common with the U.S. than it has now. That will be the time to give it some of the special attention that generations of Americans have lavished on it by mistake. </body></article> </text>