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China—whose 1.1 billion people represent one-fifth of the world’s population—has not only become a key political player but could also become a major global economic power in the coming decades. As one of the corners in the Pacific triangle, China is a voice in the world that cannot be ignored and a force in the world that cannot be isolated. Exactly twenty years ago, we opened the door to China. In the next twenty years, we must keep the door open as China secures its place in and integrates itself into world affairs.
China’s emergence as a global heavyweight is inevitable. With a significant nuclear capability and the largest conventional army in the world, it could become a military superpower within decades. Its population has increased by more than 200 million since 1978, a figure only slightly smaller than the entire population of the United States. If its per capita income were to rise to half of Hong Kong’s—a feasible objective over the next fifty years—its GNP would be $5.1 trillion higher than today, an increase about equal in size to the current U.S. economy. If its economic reforms continue, the creative enterprise of its people could make China not only the world’s most populous but also the world’s richest nation in the twenty-first century.
To understand where we should take the U.S.-Chinese relationship, we must understand where we have been. For a generation after the Communist revolution in 1949, the two countries squared off against each other in angry confrontation. While the United States recognized the Republic of China on Taiwan as the country’s sole legitimate government, the Communist Chinese became the junior partner in a close alliance with the Soviet Union under Stalin and Khrushchev. While the United States provided aid and troops to prevent Communist victories in Korea and South Vietnam, the Communist Chinese sacrificed tens of thousands of soldiers—including Mao Zedong’s only son—to support the aggression of North Korea and provided indispensable economic and military assistance to the aggressors in North Vietnam.
Despite these profound differences, I had decided before the 1968 presidential election that the time had come for a rapprochement with the People’s Republic of China. I did so not because I had changed my views about the Communist regime but because its leaders were in the process of changing their foreign policies. From 1959 to 1963, the Sino-Soviet bloc disintegrated over ideological disputes about whose brand of communism was purest and over geopolitical conflicts about whether China would move from junior to full partner in the alliance. As a result of the split with Moscow, China found itself isolated and surrounded by hostile powers by the late 1960s:
—To the northeast, Japan possessed minimal military forces but posed an enormous potential challenge because of its economic might.
—To the south, India had the world’s second-largest population, had an active program to develop nuclear weapons, had crossed swords with China in a series of border clashes, and had the capacity to become a dangerous threat with Soviet support.
—To the north, the Soviet Union had strategic forces capable of knocking out China’s nuclear forces in a surgical first strike, had deployed more than forty fully modernized divisions on the border, and had engaged in armed clashes over disputed territories along the Sino-Soviet frontier.
—Across the Pacific, the United States represented the Communist regime’s most deadly ideological enemy but was the only major Pacific power that had no designs, present or future, on China.
This geopolitical isolation forced Communist China’s leaders not only to look to themselves rather than to rely on foreign aid to foster economic development at home but also to retrench from their adventurist policies abroad. After I took office in 1969, I probed their intentions, concluded that this represented a genuine sea change in foreign policy, and decided that it was time to end our mutual enmity. On February 27, 1972, I signed the Shanghai Communiqué in Beijing, which was the culmination of three years of behind-the-scenes negotiations and which set the stage for the eventual restoration of full diplomatic relations in 1979.
Foreign policy analysts have since speculated that the primary motivation behind our diplomatic overtures was a desire to enlist China’s help in ending the Vietnam War or to recruit Beijing as a counterweight to Moscow in Asia. Both were important reasons for my initiative. The primary reason I changed our policy toward China, however, was that China was changing its policies toward the world. Even if there had been no war in Vietnam or no Soviet threat, it was vital for the United States to end China’s isolation. As I observed in an article in Foreign Affairs in 1967, “Taking the long view, we simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates, and threaten its neighbors.”
As a consequence partly of our initiative, China slowly awakened to the modern world, gradually moving away from the nightmares of the Cultural Revolution, and began to look to the West for solutions to its economic problems. Our rapprochement opened the door for China to the world community, and it opened the eyes of the Chinese to the world.
When Deng Xiaoping took power in 1977, he launched an ambitious economic reform program. He decollectivized agriculture, granting 750 million farmers twenty-year leases on their land and freeing them not only to decide what, when, and how to produce but also to receive the returns from their own labor. He allowed private firms to compete with state-owned enterprises in cities. His protégés, Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, took these reforms even further after 1984. They opened “special economic zones” with free-market institutions in China’s coastal provinces, thereby unleashing the talents of the Chinese people and attracting massive foreign investment. Deng and his pro-reform lieutenants cast aside ideological rigidity in favor of economic progress. As he once remarked, “It does not matter what color the cat is as long as it catches mice.”
The results were stunning. While Soviet per capita income has declined after seven years of Gorbachev’s reforms, Deng’s initiatives doubled China’s rural incomes in six years and its per capita income in ten years. The growth rate in agricultural output quadrupled, from a 2 percent average annual increase during 1958-1978 to 8 percent during 1979–1984. China today produces enough to feed its 1.1 billion people with some left over for export. The Soviet Union, with over twice the territory of China, has to import food for a population one-fourth the size of China’s. The share of industrial output produced by state-owned enterprises declined from 80 percent in the late 1970s to 50 percent in 1991, thus channeling resources into the highly productive private sector. If these reforms remain in place for a generation, China will become a major economic power and bring one-fifth of mankind out of poverty and into the global middle class—in spite of, not because of, its Communist government.
As China broadened its contacts with the world economy, these ties transformed Chinese society. After 1972, basic goods and conveniences of modern life—televisions, washing machines, refrigerators, sewing machines, and bicycles—became widely available. More important, people who had been locked into their towns and provinces began to broaden their horizons. They took advantage of their new job mobility and of the easing of residency restrictions. They were exposed to the world through greater freedom for travel and through television coverage of events abroad. They began to express themselves more freely as the state retreated from efforts to police the thoughts of its citizens. More than two hundred thousand students traveled abroad to study and brought back with them the Western ideas of human rights and democratic government.
While calm on the surface, pro-democracy political currents ran deep within Chinese society. Those ideas were openly advocated by Beijing students in pro-reform posters pasted on the so-called Democracy Wall in 1978 and later in large-scale demonstrations in 1986. Communist officials—including Hu and Zhao—began to speak of the need to match economic change with political reforms. The globalization of the Chinese economy, the communications revolution, and the increase in international exchange of ideas and people broke the hold of the Communist ide
ology on China’s society.
The old regime and these new ideas clashed at Tiananmen Square in June 1989. For more than six weeks, over 1 million students and workers engaged in peaceful demonstrations—triggered by Hu’s death—not to overthrow the state, but to engage officials in a dialogue on the need for political reform. Their calls were met not with reason and understanding but with tanks and bullets. An estimated 1,300 demonstrators were killed and 10,000 wounded in the one-sided battle. Another 10,000 were taken into custody, most of whom were sentenced to prison or to hard labor on state work farms and some of whom were executed. Nineteen eighty-nine was a year of triumph for the 90 million people of Eastern Europe, with rule by law replacing rule by terror. It was a year of tragedy for the 1.1 billion people of China, as high hopes for political reforms were dashed by the harsh realities of martial law.
The global political effect of Tiananmen Square was magnified by the fact that unlike the killing of peaceful demonstrators in Lithuania in 1990 by the Soviet Black Berets, the massacre in China took place under the microscope of live international television. Although not the most brutal event in Chinese history—more than 5 million Chinese were slaughtered during and after the 1949 revolution and more than 1 million were killed and 100 million brutally persecuted during the Cultural Revolution—the cold-blooded killings in Tiananmen Square were undoubtedly the most widely witnessed. The images of brave pro-democracy demonstrators standing up to army tanks were beamed into millions of homes and seared into the memories of America and the world. The excessive use of lethal force, the show trials and cruel sentences meted out to demonstrators, the Orwellian lies and disinformation disseminated by Communist officials, and the callous refusal of the regime to express any regret for its actions squandered the goodwill China had built up since the U.S.-Chinese rapprochement in 1972.
The Beijing regime’s brutal actions deserved the universal condemnation they received. President Bush’s actions—an arms sales cutoff, a suspension of most senior-level discussions, an extension of visas for Chinese citizens studying in the United States, and an offer of humanitarian assistance for victims of the violence—represented a proper, measured response. But the additional sanctions advocated by administration critics, including even a total economic boycott, would have been not only useless but also counterproductive.
Our objective must be to keep the process of reforms alive until the current hard-line leadership passes from the scene. This might not be the most emotionally satisfying course of action, but it is the most sound strategically. And it also holds the greatest promise of success. No sanctions, however draconian, will induce Beijing’s leaders to bow to the demands of foreign powers with respect to China’s domestic affairs. It would be futile to try to extract a formal recantation through external coercion. Instead, the challenge for those who support political liberalization in China is to develop the U.S.-Chinese relationship in ways that foster conditions conducive to peaceful internal change.
Too much is at stake in our relationship to substitute emotionalism for foreign policy. China is one of the world’s five major geopolitical power centers. It is a nuclear power. It continues to be a key player in the crucial regional conflicts in Afghanistan, Cambodia, and the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. It exercises a veto over any North Korean actions against South Korea. Taiwan’s interests and Hong Kong’s political and economic future are best served by close ties between their friends in the West and Beijing. For example, the fact that the PRC must choose between using force to conquer Taiwan and forfeiting its relationship with the United States is the best guarantee of Taipei’s security. The United States and China also share common interests on a wide range of bilateral issues, such as intelligence cooperation, trade, and cultural exchange. It will be impossible to deal with environmental problems on a global level without the cooperation of those who rule one-fifth of all the people in the world. Those who call for total economic sanctions as a response to Chinese human rights violations are like surgeons who would perform a delicate operation with a butcher knife instead of a scalpel.
Moreover, as a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, China has veto power over resolutions authorizing actions to block or reverse aggression. While Gorbachev was widely praised for his support of the U.N. resolutions against Iraq, too little credit has been given to China for abstaining from using the veto. If the Bush administration had alienated and isolated China, we would have had no influence with China on those resolutions or any other critical matters before the U.N. Security Council.
To determine the proper course, Americans must take the long view. Today, China has arrived at a critical moment in its evolution. Its leaders must ask themselves three questions. Will they replace the bold economic reforms Deng initiated fifteen years ago with the old-style Communist policies that almost suffocated China previously? Will they forfeit China’s potential greatness and consign their nation to the backwater of oppression and stagnation? Will they make common cause with the unrepentant Communist leaders of Cuba, Vietnam, and North Korea or join countries from Mongolia to Albania in the search for ways to introduce needed political reforms?
Economically, China has moved halfway to a free-market system. It now has two economies—one private and one state-owned—locked in mortal competition. The state sector, inefficient and unimaginative, depends on the graces of government leaders to survive. The private sector, productive and creative, is sustained by the process of economic reforms, the initiative and talents of individual Chinese, and the links between China and the world economy. Since Deng launched his reforms, these two sectors—and the millions of bureaucrats and entrepreneurs whose interests are inextricably intertwined with them—have been circling each other warily. While each side has experienced progress and setbacks over time, this battle is far from settled.
Economic reforms, thrown into reverse gear after Tiananmen Square, are getting back on track. At first, Communist hard-liners, by imposing strict austerity on the private sector, tried to restore the dominance of state-owned enterprises. Available capital went to the state sector. Price controls were imposed. Controls over foreign trade were recentralized. As a result, economic growth plummeted from an annual average of 11 percent during 1983-1989 to 3.6 percent in 1991. Soon, however, the hard-liners were forced into making concessions to China’s private sector. The spirit of free enterprise refused to die. Local, provincial, and even some national officials—all of whom had increased their power as a result of Deng’s decentralization of economic power—rejected the new restrictions. In addition, hard-liners had to face the fact that workers had adopted the ethos of the free market and that the nation had become a consumer society. Because of the free-market reforms, the economic train left the station. To maintain stability, the hard-liners had to temper their assault on the reforms.
Politically, China’s human rights situation continues to be abysmal. In contrast to the dramatic democratic reforms in the former Soviet Union, China has come under the rule of neo-Stalinists. Imprisoned demonstrators—many held without charges and without hope of release—have received no amnesties. Many prisoners work in forced labor camps for substandard wages or none at all. Propaganda campaigns against “spiritual pollution” from the West and in favor of communism dominate Chinese news media. Censors monitor all publications. Intellectual exchange has been stifled. While the noose of martial law has been loosened, it still rings the neck of Chinese society.
This does not mean that the hard-liners have totally consolidated their grip on power. The drama in Tiananmen Square—where the demonstrations lasted more than six weeks before the crackdown—had been protracted because even the Communist leadership, particularly in the Central Committee, had split down the middle over how to respond. Those who had opposed the use of lethal force have not been totally vanquished. For every Li Peng—the most hated man in China—who wants to maintain totalitarian control over Chinese society there is still another Zhao Ziyang who wants to beg
in the process of political liberalization.
The current leadership in China is split into three generational levels. On top are the hard-liners, led by Deng Xiaoping. Mostly octogenarians, they led the original revolution and still serve as the ideological anchors of Chinese communism. The second level is China’s current leadership. These men—mainly in their sixties and including Li Peng and Jiang Zemin—take a hard line on ideological issues and control the instruments of power. The third level holds the future of China. This group of younger, local and provincial leaders is more pragmatic. By setting aside ideology, they want to bring China into the world and prosperity to China. Though the hard-liners hold the upper hand today, the moment of truth will come when these two forces struggle for power after Deng passes from the scene.
Internationally, China must choose between playing a responsible role in the international community and pursuing a narrow agenda that will alienate its friends and end in self-defeating isolation. Its leaders have sold arms to the repressive regime in Myanmar. They have continued to provide arms and supplies to the Khmer Rouge, who slaughtered 2 million Cambodians during their three-year rule in the 1970s. They have not only refused to join international conventions to control the spread of ballistic missiles but have also sold M-9 missiles to Syria—thereby enabling Damascus to target every major city in Israel—and M-11 missiles to Pakistan, as well as the CSS-2 medium-range ballistic missile to Saudi Arabia. In addition, they have assisted Pakistan’s nuclear program and built a reactor in Algeria that could be used to develop nuclear weapons. As the self-appointed leaders of the underdeveloped world, Chinese officials claim such actions are within their prerogatives, but they will be ousted from the inner circle of major powers if they continue to engage in them.
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