How Bad Is China?

By Johanna McGeary

How Bill Clinton must pine for the days when America had an enemy clearly identified and a cause righteous beyond doubt. Foreign policy then was so fundamental a case of us-against-them that "bipartisan consensus" actually worked. When survival was at stake, national interests, not special interests, had a fair chance to prevail.

Well, forget that when China, not the Soviet Union, is the other big boy on the planet. The U.S. has always had trouble figuring out what cubbyhole to stick the world's most populous communist nation into: a geostrategic card to play? Someone we can do business with? The next evil empire? Now, by one of those sudden confluences of the political stars, the off-and-on debate over how to handle China is at a high boil just as Clinton sets forth on the first presidential visit to the People's Republic since Beijing's tanks mowed down the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square nine years ago.

Ever since then, there's been a difference of opinion between Main Street and the Beltway. American citizens turned their back on a nation they judged morally and politically beyond the pale, and public opinion has yet to recover. But policymakers couldn't quite do the same, recognizing that the U.S. had no option but to deal with China. Its rising power made it a force to be reckoned with, like it or not. And so Clinton, after some I'll-do-it-different demagoguery of his own, became the sixth President since Richard Nixon opened the way in 1972, to practice "constructive engagement" with China.

No country today brings out more of the passions--or the hypocrisy--in Washington politicians. Every time they get the chance, those who see profit in it pummel the "butchers in Beijing" about all manner of failings, aiming their blows as much at Clinton as at China's communist die-hards. Antiabortion activists rail at China's forced abortions. Exiled crusader Harry Wu charges China with harvesting human organs from executed prisoners for sale. Human-rights advocates complain that Clinton is ignoring systemic repression; partisans of the Dalai Lama call for a free Tibet; labor advocates bang the drums about unfair competition. Even businessmen courted by Clinton complain that China's markets are still closed. It makes for great sound bites when they all clamor to know what Clinton's brand of engagement has brought them.

Of course it is Beijing's bosses who are responsible for making their nation what former U.S. diplomat Chas. W. Freeman calls a "uniquely credible miscreant," guilty of behavior that deserves to be picked on. But the natural suspicion and swings in sentiment that always affect U.S. attitudes toward China have been hyperamplified by a convergence of election-year politics, Republican interparty fissures, and a string of unfortunate events, like the allegations of illicit Chinese campaign contributions, Indian and Pakistani nuclear blasts and reports of a possible national-security breach in U.S. satellite sales to China. Some of the steam in Washington rises from real issues, but a lot is the hot air of partisan politics.

At the moment, those playing the emotive chords have captured the debate. Clinton's fairly cogent defense of his policies in a speech two weeks ago would never fit on a bumper sticker, though the bombast of a lot of critics allowed him to cast the terms as a choice between foolish isolation and practical engagement. No one who knows foreign policy thinks the U.S. should turn China into a pariah state, and only a handful called for Clinton to cancel his trip.

So how bad is China? The simple answer is there is no simple answer, just ambiguous facts. Like dual-use exports for civilian or military purpose, China's behavior can be benign or malign, better or not good enough. There's plenty to worry about if you're worried about China.

HUMAN RIGHTS

The Clinton Administration repeats over and over to Beijing that its relations with the U.S. cannot reach "full potential" without "significant" improvement in human rights. For years, China's leaders turned a deaf ear, insisting that such issues as freedom of expression, due process, the imprisonment of dissidents, prison labor and religious tolerance were none of Washington's business. "We were talking to a wall," says a senior official. "Now we can, and we do, talk seriously about these matters."

Of such small steps is progress made. Beijing's leaders seem immune to bullying, but dogged dialogue and economic advancement are persuading them to allow more personal liberties. Chinese citizens today lead remarkably free lives, as masters of their own fates and fortunes. Satellite dishes and the Internet beam in unauthorized information undreamed of a few years ago. Beijing has slowly been enshrining into law such individual prerogatives as property protection and the right to sue. The Chinese can even mock their leaders and criticize government policies--in the privacy of their homes. Beijing, in theory, opened itself up to international monitoring when it signed one of two key U.N. covenants on human rights last October and pledged to sign the other soon. "The unanswered question is whether to take their commitments seriously," says Mike Jendrzejczyk, Washington director of Human Rights Watch/Asia.

Although the record is improving glacially, Administration officials and human-rights observers agree it is still quite bad. "By world standards, they're woefully short," says a White House official. What is distorting the picture is the tendency of some activists to narrow the focus to the most sensational charges, like forced abortions. Human-rights experts in and out of government have found some anecdotal evidence that these abuses happen but no proof that the government promotes them.

Such allegations, the experts say, should not crowd out attention to China's main sin: a system that does not permit any freedoms that might challenge the control of the ruling Communist Party in word or deed and arbitrarily punishes anyone who tries to do so. These issues are most directly antithetical to American values but do not lend themselves to quick, dramatic solutions. China's government does not allow freedom of expression or association, peaceful demonstration or independent labor unions; it does employ detention, torture, the denial of due process. Western experts and the Chinese government agree that there are about 2,000 prisoners incarcerated for "counterrevolutionary" crimes, and 158 Beijing residents are still in detention for their roles in Tiananmen. Of the 230,000 Chinese who have been in labor camps for "re-education" for up to three years without trial, a number are thought to be prisoners of conscience rather than ordinary criminals, the incidence of this decidedly extrajudicial form of punishment has increased more than 50% in the past four years. The crime of "counterrevolution" was abolished a year ago, but the new crime of "endangering state security" has proved to be an even better catchall provision. "They have made a hard-nosed decision to maintain political stability at all costs," says Jendrzejczyk.

While the religious right has tarred Beijing with a reputation for wholesale repression, religious freedom is officially guaranteed, and millions of Chinese eagerly embracing Christianity and other faiths can pray at thousands of houses of worship. The freedom is qualified, however, by a requirement that all religious organizations register, so authorities can keep a watchful eye lest activism stray too far. "If it's anything but pure worship, the Chinese get very nasty," says a White House official. Religious groups that refuse to register, such as openly pro-Vatican Roman Catholics and energetically proselytizing Protestant sects, invite harassment, interrogation, sometimes even arrest and fines from overzealous local officials. A handful of major organizers and outspoken leaders are known to have been jailed for lengthy terms.

Persecution of Tibet's Buddhists is another matter. Along with restive Muslims in Xinjiang province, followers of the Dalai Lama are regarded as dangerous "splitists" who must be ruthlessly suppressed to keep the nation together. It is not their religion but their nationalism that is worrisome to Beijing, driving the government to clamp harsh controls on the monasteries where the independence drive is strongest. China--and the U.S.--regard Tibet as an integral part of China, giving Clinton the tricky task of pushing to end Buddhist repression without supporting separatism.

The increasingly powerful Dalai Lama lobby in the U.S. calls Tibet an "occupied country" and presses vociferously for independence, accusing China of a deliberate campaign to wipe out the Tibetan religion and Sinicize the region by flooding it with ethnic-Chinese migrants. Barry Sautman, a Hong Kong law professor deeply involved in Tibet-related issues, says between 600 and 1,200 people are imprisoned for various political offenses that boil down to preaching separation. He insists "there is no evidence" independent demographers can find that Beijing deliberately masterminded any planned program of population transfer.

Administration officials feel that political slanging over human rights is not helping them in Beijing. They reject the hard-line right's argument that the U.S. should isolate China to get better results, dispute the liberals' charge that engagement without human-rights content is giving Beijing a free ride, and get exasperated with the simplistic tone of the debate. As a high-ranking official explains, "The fact that you make different progress on different issues does not mean the slow issues have got to guide the rest."

WEAPONS

For most of the past 20 years, China has exported dangerous weapons to countries the U.S. distrusts. Beijing makes strategic calculations that run against U.S. interests, and it is not sufficiently self-regulating to police its leaky, corrupt munitions system. By most accounts, at a minimum China has supplied Pakistan with nuclear-reactor and bomb designs, ring magnets to enrich uranium, and technical know-how to produce nuclear weapons, and with short-range M-11 missile components and equipment to make their own. And China has sold nuclear reactors and uranium-enrichment equipment to Iran, along with Silkworm ground-based antiship missiles and precursor chemicals for weapons of mass destruction.

But China's calculus of its interests has been evolving as it tallies what it must give up to win international acceptance. The U.S. has hammered hard on proliferation and levied sanctions on key companies when China has flagrantly disobeyed. As a result, most experts agree, Beijing has grudgingly but measurably cleaned up its act, virtually halting nuclear proliferation and cutting back on missile sales. Says a senior defense official: "In the past couple of years, there has been steady progress."

China, agrees Douglas Paal, president of the Asia Pacific Policy Center and a former Bush White House official, is not now at the top of the list of world proliferators. Beijing has signed or acceded to key control treaties, including the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention. China says it will observe the Missile Technology Control Regime, which effectively blocks sales of high-tech weapons to bad-boy nations, but won't sign it. Of course, the U.S. will not know until it knows if China is cheating. Beijing "works harder to hide its exports," warns Gary Milhollin of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control. "They've shifted to stealth exports of components so the U.S. won't see."

The more troubling proliferation question is not what China sells abroad but what the U.S. sells to China. Congress has been delving into the details of the Loral satellite deal to uncover whether the company leaked damaging technical know-how in the course of investigating why the Chinese launch rocket exploded on take-off. That information allegedly could help Beijing improve the reliability and accuracy of the 13 nuclear missiles it keeps aimed at U.S. cities. Loral has admitted committing a possible procedural violation of export-control laws in forwarding a report of its investigation to the Chinese but denies that sensitive information was passed along. A senior Pentagon official makes this assessment of the situation: "In the worst case, it might help them improve their missiles marginally, but the military balance with us would not shift much."

The controversy does open to fresh scrutiny a very difficult issue: To what extent do all U.S. sales of dual-use technology (items for legitimate civilian purposes that can also be turned to military use) help China modernize its military and improve its nuclear and missile arsenal? The question is hardly new, and scientists have been arguing back and forth for years whether China should be allowed to buy a whole array of items, from supercomputers and centrifuges to clean rooms and ground-positioning systems. "They don't just want our hardware," says Henry Sokolski, a former Bush proliferation specialist. "They want our know-how and know-why, so they can do it themselves."

All these items require export licenses, and each satellite sale must win a waiver from sanctions imposed after Tiananmen. Every waiver requested has been granted: nine by former President Bush, 11 by Clinton. Critics are asking whether Clinton made the process dangerously easier by transferring responsibility from the security-minded State Department to the sales-eager Commerce Department two years ago. Such sales, says a Pentagon official, "are a manageable problem," but the U.S. "should err on the side of caution."

COMMERCE

Clinton is regularly vilified by a broad spectrum of critics who charge him with selling out American values in the name of trade with China. The impression they give is that Washington will concede anything to do business deals with Beijing. China is a tough customer when it comes to buying American. There is an enticing market there of 1.2 billion people, but most U.S. trade with China runs the other way. The deficit is running at $4.3 billion because Americans buy 70% of their low-end consumer goods, like shoes, toys and textiles, from China, which has replaced richer Asian nations as the cheapest supplier (which keeps U.S. inflation down). What America mainly sells to the Chinese is high-value-added items like machinery, aircraft and transportation equipment, a few big-ticket sales that don't begin to penetrate to China's exploding consumer class.

The Chinese market remains largely untapped because Beijing works at keeping it closed. The government is genuinely worried about competition at a time when massive reform of its moribund state enterprises is throwing millions out of work, but it is still a locked-down, state-protected economy. By dint of insistent negotiating, the U.S. has since 1993 reached 15 trade agreements that have opened the door somewhat. Included are two very difficult treaties to protect intellectual-property rights. The world's worst pirater, says U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky, "has gotten very serious about this because they have to if they want foreign investment."

The Chinese very much do, but on their own terms. They are eager to join the World Trade Organization, which is an admission ticket to the global economic community. U.S. businessmen keen to expand their sales want China in too. But the Clinton Administration is holding out for "commercially meaningful terms" necessitating wholesale change in the Chinese economy before saying yes. As a result, the complicated negotiations required before China can join have been slow and painstaking and are nowhere near conclusion. Beijing tends to respond only if pressed hard, says Barshefsky, though "not always and not as much as we want." Washington intends to hold up China's membership until Beijing meets its terms. "We're not asking anything from China they can't reasonably do," says Barshefsky. "It might be a stretch, yes, but will we settle for less? No."

Considering all the heavy baggage Clinton is toting to Beijing, it's a good thing summitry involves more symbolism than substance. The Chinese are mainly intent on replacing those ugly negatives of Tiananmen with positive pictures, and so for nine days the American President will star in a series of carefully scripted, made-for-TV encounters with the Chinese people. Out of this voyage, China's spin doctors hope, will emerge a more humane and dynamic image, befitting their nation's role as a 21st century superpower.

Clinton will have to work hard on his own symbolism if he doesn't want to look sandbagged. Much has been made about how he will handle the politically touchy arrival ceremony in Tiananmen Square, but he will need to appear just as surefooted in his talks with China's leaders inside the Great Hall of the People. Little serious business is planned, but the political noise from Washington will sharply limit his ability to show flexibility on many items on the agenda. And it will put pressure on him to say something bold and daring on the hot-button cause of human rights. Clinton may have to choose between doing things that will advance long-term U.S. interests and those that will help him (or avoid hurting him) in domestic politics. He's slick enough so that he may be able to please the home folks without angering the Chinese, but it won't be easy, not even for Bill.

China is neither our enemy nor our ally. There are plenty of things to hate about its behavior, but there is good reason to push it to do better. Its government is not relentlessly inimical to us. Beijing has been constructive in managing the India-Pakistan nuclear arms race and has contributed to global economic stability during Asia's financial crisis. The issue before the U.S. is not whether to engage the Asian giant; it's how. China is a tough interlocutor, and Clinton has got to be--and be seen to be--just as tough. It is not naive but self-interested for the U.S. to use all its clout to make tomorrow's China less of a worry than today's.

--With reporting by Jay Branegan/Washington, Sandra Burton/Hong Kong and Jaime A. FlorCruz/Beijing

With reporting by Jay Branegan/Washington, Sandra Burton/Hong Kong and Jaime A. FlorCruz/Beijing