A Medium Leap Forward?

When Caspar Weinberger met with Deng Xiaoping last week at Peking's Great Hall, the Chinese leader ex plained that he hears best with his left ear. Would the U.S. Defense Secretary be kind enough to sit on that side? asked Deng. Weinberger obliged, adding felicitously that he hears best with his right ear. "Aha," said Deng with a smile, "we have a good basis for cooperation."

Indeed, for the first time since 1979, the U.S. and China seem genuinely determined to hear each other out. Although Taiwan, as ever, remains a problem, other, less volatile matters are now seen as the basis for building better relations. A decade ago, President Nixon's grandly symbolic visit to China presaged a new era. In 1979, under President Carter, the two countries established formal diplomatic ties. Shortly afterward, in January of 1980, Defense Secretary Harold Brown went to China with word that the U.S. was willing to export to Peking items of high technology, though not weapons. The Chinese were eager to buy and later presented the U.S. with a secret shopping list.

Yet from the moment Reagan was elected, the Chinese were as suspicious of him as he was of them. In 1981 then U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig journeyed to China to try to warm Peking up, but when he returned he was forced to back down on promises he had made because of entrenched ideological and political opposition in Washington. Relations between the two countries chilled even more.

Several seemingly minor imbroglios kept relations icier than ever. Consider the Hukuang Railroad bonds affair, a legal chestnut dating back to securities issued by the imperial Chinese government in 1911. Last year a U.S. district court in Alabama issued a default judgment against China to the tune of $41 million owed on the bonds. When the U.S. granted political asylum to the young Chinese tennis star Hu Na in April, the Chinese bristled and cut back on a whole range of cultural exchange agreements.

These tensions notwithstanding, both sides, it seems, were in fact conducting talks behind closed doors to sound each other out. In February of this year Secretary of State George Shultz, in Peking, found that while the Chinese were posturing publicly about Taiwan, in private they were expending most of their steam over a U.S. promise, first proffered by Haig, to reclassify China's trade status. In May Commerce Secretary Malcolm Baldrige informed the Chinese that Reagan had in fact reclassified China, putting it in the category of a "friendly country with which the U.S. is not allied."

In the spring of 1983 the Administration began drafting new guidelines for "dual use" technology--that is, items that have both military and civilian capabilities. Finally, during Weinberger's five-day trip last week, the Defense Secretary briefed the Chinese on these new guidelines. Peking is still subject to U.S. laws regarding the "end use" of such technology (so that it will not be passed on to other users, like North Korea). But the eventual net effect of the reclassification and the new guidelines should be to allow Peking to import a considerably broader range of products, including computers.

The cordiality apparent during Weinberger's trip does not mean there will be a great leap forward in U.S.-China relations. The Chinese, as Premier Zhao Ziyang told Weinberger, are waiting to see if U.S. words will be "proved by deeds and actions." The U.S. must worry whether Peking is using it mainly as a pawn in its closer-to-home struggle with the U.S.S.R. But for an Administration that early this summer announced plans to sell Taiwan $800 million in arms, relations are perhaps better than could have been anticipated. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.