Freedom is contagious. Economic freedom inevitably leads to political freedom. This happened in South Korea, Taiwan, Chile, and other countries ruled by dictatorial regimes. It will happen in China, but only if economic freedom is not suppressed by frightened political dictators or sabotaged by shortsighted U.S. policies cutting back on trade with China because of its human-rights abuses.
China is not of purely economic importance for the United States. From the late 1940s to the early 1990s, it has not hesitated to assert its interests by military means. In 1951, it entered the Korean War. In the 1950s, it put military pressure on Taiwan’s offshore islands. In 1962, it clashed militarily with India. In the 1960s and 1970s, it supported the Vietnamese and Cambodian communists in the Vietnam War. Between 1968 and 1969, Chinese and Soviet armies repeatedly clashed over the Ussuri River region. In 1979, China attacked its ideological stepchild, Vietnam, after Hanoi invaded Cambodia and persecuted ethnic Chinese in Vietnam.
Today, China and Russia exist in an uneasy “Asian détente.” China’s hard-liners would prefer to see the failure of Yeltsin’s democratic government, because it would lessen the ideological threat of Russian democracy and weaken Russia’s ability to protect its interests in East Asia. At the same time, Chinese officials fear a new resurgent, nationalistic Russia because it would inevitably clash with China over important economic regions in East Asia and force China to divert its attention from other areas.
The major concern for China’s leaders lies to the east. Japan has become the economic rainmaker in Asia, investing more than $60 billion in the region. The Chinese welcome Japan’s economic investments, but they are highly suspicious of the motives behind Japan’s policies in Asia. China’s rulers remember Japan’s brutal aggression before and during World War II. That is one reason China is eager for the United States to continue its role in Asia. Even the most hard-line communist leaders in China recognize that the United States poses no threat to China and serves as an important restraining influence on its Japanese and Russian rivals.
It is ironic that many liberal scholars in the United States who strongly supported our opening to China in 1972, when Mao allowed neither political nor economic freedom, now oppose close U.S.-Chinese relations because of China’s denial of political freedom and abuse of human rights. Cutting back our trade with China by revoking China’s most-favored-nation status would be a tragic mistake. We cannot improve the political situation in China through a “scorched earth” economic policy. Revoking China’s MFN status would hurt the free-market reformers and entrepreneurs who hold the key to China’s future. Not only would it devastate the mainland’s economy, it would lay waste to the surrounding region as well. No other nation in Asia supports our linking most-favored-nation status to human rights. It would do irreparable damage to Hong Kong, which serves as a conduit for over 45 percent of China’s exports, and to Taiwan and Macao, which depend on trade with Hong Kong for their survival.
The threat of MFN revocation is vigorously opposed by almost all Chinese, including most dissidents, who view the high-profile grandstanding of U.S. politicians as a calculated effort to humiliate a proud nation and its people. They know that the term “most-favored nation” is a misnomer. Only 10 of the 188 nations in the world do not have that status. Several of the 178 who do have it have human-rights policies as bad as, or worse than, those of China. Ironically, many liberals who oppose extending MFN to China were among the first to endorse lifting the U.S. trade embargo against Vietnam—like China, one of the world’s most repressive hard-line communist regimes.
Winston Churchill once said, “Russia fears our friendship more than our enmity.” This can also be said of China’s leaders today. While they know that China’s economic progress depends on the continuation of free-market policies, they are aware that economic freedom is a mortal threat to a political dictatorship.
We should strongly protest China’s human-rights abuses whenever and wherever we can. But punishing China’s leaders for human-rights abuses by restricting and reducing our economic contacts does not serve the long-term interest of those Chinese who want more political freedom. It may make us feel better, but if we close the door to economic reform, we will lock out all prospects for peaceful political change on foreign policy in the foreseeable future. That is too high a price to pay for a sense of moral superiority.
We should also resist lecturing the Chinese about their birth control policies. Abortion is a highly inflammatory issue in the United States. I believe that no decision is more uniquely private than whether or not a woman should have an abortion. Government should not interfere with an individual’s right to make that decision. I know that a great number of fair-minded people strongly disagree with my position. What we can all surely agree on is that we should not impose our views on this highly controversial issue on other nations, such as China, with massive population problems. Leaders of such nations have to choose between allowing abortion or condemning millions of people to starvation because of overpopulation.
Whatever the motives of China’s critics, they are hampering the conduct of the constructive relations that we must have with the world’s most populous nation, one of the world’s nuclear powers, and potentially the twenty-first century’s richest nation—and they are jeopardizing the best hope of the Chinese people for lives of freedom and prosperity.
The stakes are incredibly high. Nick Kristof, writing in Foreign Affairs last year, put the issue in perspective:
China is becoming a fourth pole in the international system. This is particularly true when one looks at “Greater China,” consisting of the People’s Republic, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. According to World Bank projections, Greater China’s net imports in the year 2002 will be $639 billion, compared to $521 billion for Japan. Likewise, using comparable international prices, Greater China in the year 2002 is projected to have a gross domestic product of $9.8 trillion, compared to $9.7 trillion for the United States. If those forecasts hold, in other words, Greater China would not just be another economic pole; it would be the biggest of them all.
Today, China’s economic power makes U.S. lectures about morality and human rights imprudent. Within a decade, it will make them irrelevant. Within two decades, it will make them laughable. By then the Chinese may threaten to withhold most-favored-nation status from the United States unless we do more to improve living conditions in Detroit, Harlem, and South-Central Los Angeles.
China is justly criticized for promoting weapons proliferation by selling arms whenever and wherever it can, including to many pariah states. The United States’ complaints about other nations’ arms sales is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. We have cornered 56 percent of the world arms market, with $13 billion in sales annually, compared with $800 million for China and $1.5 billion for Russia. Although we are far more discriminating than others in choosing our clients, we are not in the best position to criticize others. The only way to stem proliferation is to reduce arms sales across the board internationally, including our own.
Unlike human-rights grandstanding, the strategy of continuing economic cooperation and relying on diplomatic pressures has had some success. China released its most famous dissident, Wei Jingsheng, after holding him in prison for almost fifteen years. Other dissidents have received lighter sentences in large part because U.S. government officials kept up the pressure for their release and lodged complaints in international conferences. In the end, democracy and human rights will be more effectively enlarged by the expansion of market forces and the influence of Chinese entrepreneurs in Hong Kong and Taiwan than by frontal assaults on the government in Beijing.
It is risky to make predictions about China. To paraphrase Lord Curzon, Great Britain’s Viceroy in India one hundred years ago, China is like a great university from which the scholar never gets a degree. Most observers agree that there will be a struggle for power after Deng Xiaoping leaves the scene. Those who assume there will be a renewal of political warlordism in China
are focusing too much on China’s past and not enough on the new China we must deal with today. Regional leaders want more autonomy from a central system that inflicted great harm on them during the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward, but they are loyal Chinese who do not seek independence. The greater danger is that China will be divided by a new economic wall between the rich in the coastal provinces and the poor in the interior unless more progress is made in bringing the benefits of economic prosperity to all.
Two groups are in contention to succeed Deng. Moderates favor an expansion of the rule of law, movement toward a federal system, creation of genuine private property, and rapid elimination of subsidies for agriculture, rents, and business. The more doctrinaire group favors a strong Communist Party—but one that is becoming less a revolutionary party than a ruling, technocratic party. Its leaders would prefer to see restraints on growth in the private sector and generally slower economic growth. They have a greater suspicion of the West, especially the United States. They want a continuing strong role for state corporations, even if government subsidies are necessary. Both groups claim that they support free-market reforms. They disagree on the pace and extent of those reforms.
China is permanently locked into the world market. There will be no return to the economic isolation of the 1960s and early 1970s. Even the most reactionary hard-line communists, while totally opposed to political reforms, have no choice but to support the free-market economic policies that have tripled the income of the Chinese people in the past ten years.
The good economic news from China has obscured some of the enormous problems China’s new leaders will confront. The specters of corruption and unrestrained greed haunt China. This is not grease to make the economic mechanism run smoothly, as in Korea and Japan. It is money taken directly out of the system. The central authorities are trying to put the brakes on corruption, but they cannot touch the main perpetrators, the high-level party cadres and the so-called red princes. There are too many Chinese leaders who have their hands in the till for us to expect an attack on this problem now. But thoughtful Chinese leaders know that a government that tolerates corruption will inevitably become the victim of corruption.
The Chinese share with the Germans a pathological fear of inflation. Many remember the last days of the Nationalist regime in Shanghai, when money was carted around in wheelbarrows and inflation helped destroy a dying regime. An austerity program aimed at a soft landing, launched in May of 1993 by Vice Premier Zhu, China’s leading economic official, seems to have worked without causing a nosedive in GNP growth. But the tragedy of Tiananmen Square in 1989 reminds us of the danger of political unrest if inflation leads to an economic downturn.
How the post-Deng struggle will end depends mainly on what happens within China. But developments outside China, including those in Russia, can affect the result. If the Russian experiment in economic and political freedom succeeds, China’s moderates will benefit. If Russia’s reforms fail, this will encourage the reactionaries.
The policies of the United States will also affect the outcome of the succession struggle. If we cut back our trade with China’s free-market sector in order to punish China’s leaders for their human-rights abuses, we will weaken those who want to increase political freedom.
• • •
When I went to China in 1972, there was a great deal of speculation about why I had changed my hard-line position of opposing recognition of the Chinese communist government. Some suggested that I had finally seen the light and that I had recognized that the notorious “free China” lobby was wrong in demonizing the communist government of China. Others suggested that I went to China to enlist Chinese support in ending the Vietnam War. Neither of these views was right.
China and the United States were brought together in part because both were concerned about the threat to China and the rest of Asia from an aggressive Soviet Union. But I believed that even if there were no Soviet threat, it was essential to develop a new relationship with China then, when China was weak and needed us, rather than waiting until later, when China needed us less than we needed them.
The issue today is not who is for or against human rights. Those who support an open China economic policy are as profoundly concerned about human rights as those who are demanding a change in that policy. The question is what policy will be most effective in convincing the Chinese leaders to provide more political freedom and to end human-rights abuses.
For twenty-five years before 1972, we had had no contact whatever with the communist Chinese government—no trade, no diplomatic relations, no tourists, no exchange of people. China was still a completely closed society with neither economic nor political freedom. Since our opening, the Chinese have astonished the world by the progress their country has made in granting economic freedom and opening up Chinese society to the free world.
During the Cold War, the United States and China were brought together and held together by our fears. In the period beyond peace, we need new economic incentives that will help to hold us together by our hopes.
Seven centuries ago, Marco Polo described China as far ahead of any European city in the “excellence of its buildings and bridges, the number of its public hospitals, the effective maintenance of public order and the manner and refinements of its people.” Between 221 and 206 B.C., the Chinese built the Great Wall and cut themselves off from the rest of the world. Four centuries ago China’s development stopped, and the country fell hopelessly behind the rest of the world. Now China is again gaining international respect as one of the world’s great powers.
Many who are inexperienced about China fail to understand that one of the keys to its history in this century has been the restoration of national pride and unity after generations of fractionalism and foreign exploitation. Their pride is neither communist nor noncommunist in character but simply Chinese, and it guarantees that China’s leaders will not respond constructively to ultimatums.
I vividly recall calling on Deng Xiaoping in the fall of 1989, four months after the Tiananmen Square crackdown. After he had greeted me in the Great Hall of the People, I told him that there had never been a worse crisis in the relationship between our countries and that it was up to China to take steps to deal with the outrage of the civilized world. With dozens of journalists from around the world looking on, he gave a boilerplate reply about not tolerating interference in China’s internal affairs.
After the cameras left, he became far more animated. By then China’s battle-scarred old survivor was almost totally deaf. The conversation took on a surreal character, with the official translator shouting my comments into his left ear and his daughter screaming them into his right. But while he had great difficulty hearing, he had no difficulty seeing his responsibility as his country’s paramount leader. He told me that after years of subservience to foreigners, China was now united and independent and that the Chinese people would never forgive their leaders for apologizing to another nation. In almost the next breath he introduced the subject of Fang Lizhu, the dissident who was then being sheltered at the U.S. embassy in Beijing, and made a highly constructive proposal for ending the standoff.
Deng’s message was unmistakable: Our differences could be bridged by discussion behind the scenes but would be exacerbated by red-hot exchanges of public rhetoric. A few months later Fang Lizhu was released, but on China’s initiative, not in response to demands by the United States.
In late 1993, Deng was widely believed to have given the Chinese government these marching orders for dealing with the new administration in Washington: “Increase trust, reduce troubles, develop cooperation, and avoid confrontation.” In its first moves, the Clinton administration responded by increasing distrust, stirring up trouble, threatening noncooperation, and fomenting confrontation. A letter from President Clinton to Beijing, which listed fourteen criticisms on issues ranging from human rights to trade, set off months of diplomatic skirmishing that came close to imperiling the constructive re
lations between our countries. The climax came when the United States, acting on inaccurate intelligence, erroneously accused the Chinese of selling chemicals to Iran for the production of poison gas and decided to follow and later board and inspect a Chinese vessel suspected of carrying the chemicals.
Eventually, wiser heads prevailed, and Sino-U.S. relations were put back on an even keel following a summit meeting between the U.S. and Chinese Presidents in Seattle in late 1993. Still, as Don Oberdorfer wrote just before the summit, “Much of the recent rhetoric in Washington about China seems strangely disconnected from the burgeoning urban life of Beijing and the fast-growing eastern seaboard cities. Paradoxically, the United States has seemed to be more ideological in its dealings than the increasingly pragmatic communist state.” In the future, particularly on foreign policy issues, we should treat China with the respect a great power deserves and not as a pariah nation.
Because of its huge natural and human resources, China will inevitably be an economic and military superpower in the next century. We will need China as a friend then. The Chinese have long memories. We must not poison the friendly relationship we risked so much to establish when we opened the door to China twenty-one years ago.
At the same time, realistic reappraisals of U.S. relations with Taiwan, and of the relations between the governments in Beijing and Taipei, are overdue. The Shanghai Communiqué negotiated by Henry Kissinger and Zhou Enlai twenty-one years ago brilliantly bridged the differences between the two governments by stating that the United States recognized that both agreed that there was one China, that each claimed to be the legitimate government of China, and that the differences should be settled peacefully. The situation has changed dramatically since then.
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