Restless Empire

by Odd Westad

  Having elected in 1996 a GMD president sympathetic to the separatist agenda, Taiwan voters felt that in 2000 they might as well go the full distance. And so they elected a non-GMD president who had been an open supporter of Taiwanese independence. Chen Shuibian, who was in office to 2008, was the first non-GMD president of the Republic of China, and his party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), had separatism as part of its policy platform. Though Chen muted these views while in office, the leaders in Beijing were increasingly desperate. Having made opposition to any move toward “splitting” Taiwan from China a staple of party-sponsored nationalism in the 1990s, they had to devise a better strategy to counter Chen’s implicit challenge than the one that had failed so dismally against the more moderate Li Denghui in 1996. This time the PRC was rescued by a combination of the mainland’s phenomenal economic growth (which Taiwan companies wanted a part of, especially since Taiwan’s own growth figures were lagging), the corruption that emerged within Chen Shuibian’s administration, and the American need to have a stable relationship with China after President George W. Bush’s war on terror began. By emphasizing the need for prosperity for all Chinese and insisting that a safe economic future for Taiwan could only be found in cooperation with the mainland, the PRC was able to help pave the way for the thorough rejection of the DPP at the 2008 Taiwan elections. Today the relationship between the governments on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait is the best it has ever been. China is Taiwan’s largest trading partner, and Taiwan companies are among the biggest investors on the mainland. Gone are the days when all flights between Taibei and the mainland had to stop over in Hong Kong. Now passengers can fly direct from the island to Beijing in three hours or less. Not surprising, perhaps, that the people of Taiwan in 2009 overwhelmingly preferred status quo against all other alternatives: sixty-four percent, against nineteen percent for independence, and five percent for unification.17

  THE 1990S SET THE DIRECTION of Sino-American relations up to our own day. Both countries had a new generation of leaders in office. In China, Jiang Zemin, a sixty-three-year-old Soviet-trained engineer, was made head of the CCP in 1989 and would keep that office for thirteen years. In the United States Bill Clinton, a domestic policy–oriented Southern governor, served from 1993 to 2001. Both countries were drawing up new priorities, less ideological than before, and centering on rapid market-oriented economic growth. Most important of all, the Cold War had ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. No longer were the United States and China tied together in an alliance of convenience against what they had both deemed an ascending and expansionist great power. With the Soviet Union gone, the strategic picture in East Asia changed completely. Suddenly, China and the United States were the main poles of influence in the region. The United States was the dominant power, through its alliances and its military prowess, but China was rising because of its unprecedented economic growth. For both countries the issue was whether these trends would pull them apart or bring them together. Liberal intellectuals hoped for the latter, through increasing economic interdependence. Realists expected the former, through increasing great power rivalry.

  What neither side had expected or prepared for was the massively negative fallout from the Tian’anmen crackdown. In the United States the effect was particularly strong. While more than two-thirds of Americans had viewed China positively before Tian’anmen, less than a third did so in 1990.18 The lasting change in views among liberal and neoconservative elites in the United States was very strong and influences policymaking even today. Congress decided, with veto-proof majorities in both houses, to impose sanctions on China, some of which are still in place and complicate relations between the two countries. But the United States was in no way unique in its reaction to the use of soldiers against the people of Beijing. Fifty-seven other governments, including the European Union and Japan, introduced sanctions, in most cases as a result of public opinion in their countries. The main issue for many was not just what happened in China in 1989, it was the timing of it. In the span of just a few years, as the Cold War came to an end, much of the world, from Eastern Europe and Russia to South Africa and South America, seemed to move from authoritarianism to forms of participatory democracy. Only the Chinese government had shot at its democrats and survived in power. It created an outcast image for Beijing that the country, in spite of its economic success, found hard to shake off.

  Within China itself the new generation of elites who grew up in the 1990s had an almost schizophrenic view of the world’s relationship to their country. Even though most of them resented the government’s actions in 1989, they took immense pride in China’s economic progress and, bizarrely, bought into some of the regime’s propaganda about sanctions being imposed as a result of American pressure to keep China down. As Chinese nationalism grew, both officially and unofficially, through the 1990s, many young people began feeling that in spite of their own misgivings about their government, foreigners were condemning it for all the wrong reasons. The regime of Jiang Zemin may have appeared utterly uninspiring to most Chinese in political terms, but it ensured stability, growth, and increasing freedom for people in their daily lives. While 1989 was in no way forgotten, Jiang Zemin and the CCP benefited domestically from presiding over unprecedented prosperity while being more liberal in terms of information and discussion than any Communists had been before.

  The relationship between Jiang and Clinton got off to a rough start. The Chinese feared, rightly, that the new president’s emphasis on human rights might become linked to China’s trade access to US markets, and it took almost three years of Clinton’s first term before the two issues were delinked. The US administration also suspected, with some reason, that China was supplying other countries with components for their chemical and nuclear arms programs. For China, arms sales was an issue of sovereignty as much as profit, especially since the United States sold weapons globally (including to Taiwan) and had imposed an arms embargo on Beijing after 1989. Together with the 1995–1996 Taiwan crisis, these tensions stymied progress on the bilateral relationship and fed Chinese popular nationalism. In 1996 the best seller of the year in China was a hackneyed anti-American diatribe entitled China Can Say No: Political and Emotional Choices in the Post Cold-War Era.19

  Many Chinese, including Jiang Zemin, suspected that the weapons embargo and the increased concern over transfers of advanced US technology to China had to do more with the end of the Cold War than with human rights. With the Soviet Union gone, some Americans saw China as their main future rival, and these views were quickly picked up and elaborated in Beijing, especially after knowledge of the overwhelming military preponderance of the United States spread in the wake of the First Gulf War. “China must [now] pay close attention to those countries that are opposed to American interests,” one Chinese observer wrote. “China should do all it can to warn and help these countries, and prevent them from being destroyed by the United States as the Soviet Eastern European Bloc was.” While the new generation of Chinese leaders was ruing the unipolar world, many Americans of Bill Clinton’s generation believed that, in spite of Tian’anmen, China would conform to a US-led international system, while gradually becoming more open and democratic at home. It was, Clinton said over and over again, simply in China’s own interest to do so. The US president scored more than one victory. At a remarkable press conference during Clinton’s visit to China in 1998, Jiang Zemin seemed even to explain 1989 in terms of expediency rather than principle: “Today the Chinese Government solemnly commits itself to the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedom,” Jiang told Clinton and the international press corps. “With regard to the political disturbances in 1989, had the Chinese Government not taken the resolute measures, then we could not have enjoyed the stability that we are enjoying today.”20

  BY THE BEGINNING OF THE 2000s China’s relationship to the United States was contradictory. On the one hand the two countries were growing ever more similar and contact
s between them were more extensive than ever before. On the other Chinese nationalism was on the rise, with US policies as its particular target, while American concern about the nature of China’s political system was increasing. With the Soviet Union gone, Chinese leaders felt that the West’s suspicions about all forms of Communist rule had been automatically transferred to them, in spite of all they had done to conform to a Western-led international economy. On the American side the CCP regime’s human rights record and its policies in Tibet came to overshadow much of the epochal transformation that was happening in the Chinese economy. Within China the singular preoccupation with American technologies, style, music, and education continued to overwhelm all impulses that came from elsewhere, but on the international scene the two states increasingly saw each other as rivals.

  Three events at the turn of the century symbolized these contradictions. In May 1999, during its war against Serbia, US bombers dropped five 2,000-pound precision-guided bombs on the Chinese embassy compound in Belgrade, killing three Chinese and wounding twenty-one. In April 2001 an American spy plane collided with a Chinese jet fighter that was intercepting it seventy miles off the Chinese coast. The Chinese pilot was killed, and the US crew was held on an airbase in Hainan for almost two weeks before being released. But while these confrontations were taking place, China was also quietly negotiating with the United States and the world community for its accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). The resulting, unprecedented agreement gave China membership in WTO from November 2001, with full US support for its bid. Mistrust seemed to be driving the two governments apart, while economic interest seemed to be edging them closer.

  The US bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade led to one of the most serious confrontations between China and the United States since Tian’anmen. Although there is no evidence for it, many Chinese believed that the attack was deliberate, rather than a result of miscommunication and outdated maps, as the American air force claimed. China had denounced the US and NATO attack on the Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic’s regime, saying that it constituted “a flagrant violation of the United Nations Charter.” The purpose of the bombing, some Chinese nationalists believed, was to warn China off opposing US international hegemony. The attack led to furious and sometimes violent demonstrations—some instigated by the authorities—in the main Chinese cities. In Chengdu, the US consul general’s residence was burned down. President Jiang Zemin stoked the flames, saying that the rallies stemmed from “the great patriotic spirit and cohesiveness of the Chinese nation and their strong will to maintain world peace and oppose hegemony. The great PRC will not be bullied.” The main official newspaper, Renmin ribao (People’s Daily), said that NATO had “become the heir to the evil heritage of Western culture” and headlined an editorial, with clear reference to the Boxer War, “This Is Not 1899 China.”21 A poll of university students in Beijing showed that more than seventy percent thought the US bombing was a deliberate act, and there were some slogans in their demonstration criticizing President Jiang for being too weak on foreign affairs. A poem, of sorts, published in a Beijing daily caught the nationalist mood:

  When we are wearing Pierre Cardin and Nike

  When we are driving Cadillacs, Lincolns, and going to KFC and McDonald’s

  Do we have a clear conscience?

  No!!! . . .

  Can we still find glory by using foreign products?

  No!!!22

  Pollsters working for foreign companies in China found a decided drop in the consumption of Western products immediately after the bombing. But the trend lasted only a week.

  The midair collision between an American spy plan and a Chinese jet fighter two years later was interpreted by some Chinese in similar terms as the Belgrade bombing. When the new US administration of George W. Bush asserted that the US plane had been on a routine mission outside Chinese territorial waters, Renmin ribao shot back that it “sternly warns the US side that it should not absolve its domineering action with its hegemonic logic.” To most Chinese it was a question of fairness. China did not conduct reconnaissance flights up and down US coasts, and Bush’s denial of wrongdoing demonstrated what was wrong in international relations: The United States could do as it pleased, while every other country had to behave according to American rules. Chinese intelligence officials, though, were secretly pleased. The Yugoslavs had provided them with access to parts of a downed US stealth fighter from its war with NATO, and they had several months to dismantle and study the surveillance aircraft stranded on Hainan.23

  But although the embassy bombing and the spy plane incident indicated increased conflict between China and the United States, the November 2001 US-sponsored Chinese accession to the WTO pointed to a different kind of future. The concessions the Chinese government had to make to achieve their much-publicized aim of fully joining the world’s trade mechanisms were more staggering than any nationalist propaganda could imagine. China had to open up its domestic markets to foreign imports and foreign capital in all areas of production and services. Thus, the Chinese financial, telecommunications, distribution, and legal services sectors were now accessible to foreign firms. It had to stop preferential treatment for its state-owned enterprises. It had to eliminate quotas on most agricultural goods and to eliminate export subsidies for any of them. It had to build transparent financial regulations and laws that adhered to international standards. The changes the WTO agreement imposed on China went further than those for any other country, in part because of the complexities created by China insisting on being treated as a developing country. One South Asian WTO negotiator told me that seeing the glittering skyline of Pudong, Shanghai’s new financial district, from the negotiating room window did not help convince him of China’s “developing” status. The full protocol incorporated thousands of lines of tariffs and specific agreements and was put together after talks between China and every single one of the 142 members of the WTO. Having to negotiate with Haiti on beer and Fiji on sugar taught Chinese diplomats something about how international affairs worked beyond great power consultations. They learned from it. Even though top Chinese leaders were divided on the outcome, most of them agreed that WTO accession allowed them to do what they wanted to do anyway: abolish transfers to loss-making agriculture and industry and reduce tariffs on imported goods. As in other countries, it was easier for the Chinese leaders to blame foreign pressure for such unpopular decisions than to take the responsibility themselves.

  When the new century began, Chinese and Americans were eyeing each other warily. Many Chinese, including some who had lived abroad, were surprised at the influence pressure groups on human rights issues or on Tibet had on the US political system and the American public. Most Americans saw China, under its current government, as a future threat to the United States because it was undemocratic and oppressive. The fact that its economy was growing at more than twice the rate of the US economy, even through the boom years of the 1990s, began to worry some Americans. They did not realize the significance of the fundamental change that was taking place as China decided to accept integration into a US-led world economy. There was, in 2001, as George W. Bush was installed as US president and Hu Jintao was preparing to take over from Jiang Zemin (the first ever peaceful transition of power in mainland China), a sense that the Sino-American relationship was at a watershed, from where wild torrents threatened on one side and a slow but steady current flowed downriver on the other. But when the course was to be set, it was under very different winds of change than anyone had imagined in early 2001.

  IT MAY NOT BE TRUE, as some historians claim, that the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington changed everything in international affairs. But they certainly changed the Sino-American relationship almost overnight. George W. Bush had attacked his election opponent, Vice President Al Gore, for having been complicit in what Bush called the Clinton Administration’s coddling of the Chinese Communists. But the authorities in Beijing had become used to such rheto
ric during US election campaigns from whomever were not in office, and largely disregarded what Bush had said. Instead they chose to remember George W.’s long-standing ties to China, from when he came to stay with his father—the later president George H. W. Bush—when Bush père was US representative in the Chinese capital in 1974–1975. The spy plane crisis soon caused real concern for the Beijing leadership. But it was the new president’s insistence on referring to China as a “strategic competitor” and as the main challenge to US security that upset Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao most. Then came 11 September. The Bush administration turned to fighting a “war on terror” in the Middle East and at home, which not only took its attention away from China but made that country’s regime a partner in another US global campaign. For the Chinese leadership it was a welcome break from the tensions in the relationship and from the US focus on the CCP’s human rights violations. Jiang called Bush by telephone on 12 September and told the US president that “China is ready to strengthen dialogue and cooperation with the United States and the international community in the joint efforts in combating all sorts of terrorist violence.”24

  China supported the US attacks against terrorist bases in Afghanistan after 9/11. It accepted the overthrow of the Taliban regime because of the support Kabul had given to Osama bin Laden. In fact, Beijing was happy to see the Taliban go because of their suspected links to Islamist organizations in China’s own Muslim-populated northwestern province Xinjiang. The long lead-up to the US war against Iraq put more strains on the Sino-American relationship, but even in the case of a US invasion not supported by the UN Security Council the Chinese leaders saw their interests best served by not opposing it too strongly. As things turned out, China could verbally dissent from the invasion and occupation of Iraq from a safe distance, while leaving to Russia and the Americans’ own European allies Germany and France to provoke Washington’s ire by attempting to block military action. The new Chinese president, the buttoned-down bureaucrat Hu Jintao, did not want to take any risks over a war he believed was coming whatever China said or did. No surprise, then, that Bush’s Secretary of State, General Colin Powell, in September 2003 characterized relations with China as “the best they have been since President Nixon’s first visit.”25