CHAPTER 14
Reagan and the Advent of Normalcy
O NE OF THE obstacles to continuity in America’s foreign policy is the sweeping nature of its periodic changes of government. As a result of term limits, every presidential appointment down to the level of Deputy Assistant Secretary is replaced at least every eight years—a change of personnel involving as many as five thousand key positions. The successors have to undergo a prolonged vetting process. In practice, a vacuum exists for the first nine months or so of the incoming administration, in which it is obliged to act by improvisation or on the recommendations of holdover personnel, as it gradually adjusts to exercising its own authority. The inevitable learning period is complicated by the desire of the new administration to legitimize its rise to office by alleging that all inherited problems are the policy faults of its predecessor and not inherent problems; they are deemed soluble and in a finite time. Continuity of policy becomes a secondary consideration if not an invidious claim. Since new Presidents have just won an election campaign, they may also overestimate the range of flexibility that objective circumstances permit or rely excessively on their persuasive power. For countries relying on American policy, the perpetual psychodrama of democratic transitions is a constant invitation to hedge their bets.
These tendencies were a special challenge to the relationship with China. As these pages show, the early years of rapprochement between the United States and the People’s Republic of China involved a period of mutual discovery. But later decades depended importantly on the two countries’ ability to develop parallel assessments of the international situation.
Harmonizing intangibles becomes especially difficult when leadership is in constant flux. And both China and the United States witnessed dramatic leadership changes in the decade of the 1970s. The Chinese transitions have been described in earlier chapters. In the United States, the President who opened relations with China resigned eighteen months later, but the key foreign policy remained in place.
The Carter administration represented the first change in political parties for the Chinese leadership. They had observed statements by Carter as a candidate promising a transformation of American foreign policy to embrace a new openness and emphasis on human rights. He had said little about China. There was some concern in Beijing whether Carter would maintain the “anti-hegemony” dimension of the established relationship.
As it turned out, Carter and his top advisors reaffirmed the basic principles of the relationship—including those with respect to Taiwan personally affirmed by Nixon during his visit to Beijing. At the same time, the advent of Deng and the collapse of the Gang of Four gave the dialogue between China and the United States a new pragmatic dimension.
The most intense strategic dialogue between the United States and China had barely been established when another change of administrations brought in a new Republican President with a landslide win. For China, the new President was an unsettling prospect. Ronald Reagan was difficult to analyze even for China’s meticulous researchers. He did not fit any established category. A former movie star and president of the Screen Actors Guild who had willed himself to political prominence, Reagan represented a dramatically different kind of American conservatism than the withdrawn and cerebral Nixon or the serene Midwestern Ford. Defiantly optimistic about American possibilities in a period of crisis, Ronald Reagan, more than any high American official since John Foster Dulles, attacked Communism as an evil to be eradicated within a finite period of time, not a threat to be contained over generations. Yet he focused his critique of Communism almost entirely on the Soviet Union and its satellite states. In 1976, Reagan had campaigned against Gerald Ford for the Republican presidential nomination by attacking the détente policy with the Soviet Union, but had, on the whole, avoided criticizing the rapprochement with China. Reagan’s critique of Soviet intentions—which he continued with renewed vigor in the 1980 campaign—had much in common with the lectures Deng had been delivering to top American officials since his first return from exile. Yet in Reagan’s case, it was paired with a strong personal attachment to the prevailing political order in Taiwan.
In October 1971, Nixon had encouraged Reagan, then Governor of California, to visit Taiwan as a special emissary to affirm that the improvement of relations between Washington and Beijing had not altered the basic American interest in Taiwan’s security. Reagan left the island with warm personal feelings toward its leaders and a profound commitment to the relationship of the peoples of America and Taiwan. Subsequently, while Reagan stopped short of challenging the existing understanding with Beijing, he was highly critical of the Carter administration’s move to sever formal diplomatic ties with Taipei and downgrade the American Embassy in Taiwan to an unofficial “American Institute.” In his 1980 presidential campaign against Carter, he pledged that under a Reagan administration there would be “no more Vietnams,” “no more Taiwans,” and “no more betrayals.”
Technically, the embassy in Taipei had been the American Embassy to China ; the American decision, culminated under the Carter administration, to relocate this embassy to Beijing was a belated recognition that the Nationalists were no longer poised to “recover the mainland.” Reagan’s implicit critique was that the United States should have retained a full embassy in Taipei as part of a two China solution recognizing both sides of the Taiwan Strait as separate independent states. Yet in its negotiations with the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations (and with all other governments negotiating the terms of diplomatic recognition), this was the one outcome that Beijing consistently and adamantly refused to consider.
Ronald Reagan thus embodied the existing American ambivalence. A powerful commitment to the new relationship with Beijing coexisted with a strong residue of emotional support for Taiwan.
One of Reagan’s themes was to advocate “official relations” with Taiwan, though he never explained publicly exactly what this meant. During the 1980 presidential campaign, Reagan decided to try to square the circle. He sent his vice presidential candidate, George H. W. Bush, to Beijing, where he had served with distinction as head of the U.S. Liaison Office, which functioned in lieu of an embassy. Bush told Deng that Reagan did not mean to imply that he endorsed formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan; nor did Reagan intend to move toward a two China solution. 1 Deng’s frosty reply—surely not unaffected by the fact that Reagan repeated his advocacy of formal relations with Taiwan while Bush was in Beijing—induced Reagan to ask me, in September 1980, to serve as an intermediary in delivering a similar, somewhat more detailed, message on his behalf to the Chinese ambassador, Chai Zemin. It was a tall order.
Meeting with Chai in Washington, I affirmed that, despite his campaign rhetoric, candidate Reagan intended to uphold the general principles of U.S.-Chinese strategic cooperation established during the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations and outlined in the Shanghai Communiqué and the 1979 communiqué announcing normalization of diplomatic relations. Specifically, Reagan had asked me to convey that he would not pursue a two China policy, or a “one China, one Taiwan” policy. I added that I was sure that the ambassador and his government had studied Governor Reagan’s career, and that in doing so they would have noted that he had many close friends on Taiwan. Attempting to put this in a human context, I argued that Reagan could not abandon personal friendships and that Chinese leaders would lose respect for him if he did so. As President, however, Reagan would be committed to the existing framework of U.S.–People’s Republic relations, which provided a basis for shared Chinese and American efforts to prevent “hegemony” (that is, Soviet dominance). In other words, Reagan, as President, would stand by his friends but also by America’s commitments.
It cannot be said that the Chinese ambassador received this information with unrelieved enthusiasm. Conscious of the favorable public opinion polls projecting Reagan’s victory in November, he took no chances in expressing an opinion.
Taiwan Arms Sales and the Third Communiqué
The early phase of the Reagan administration was marked by its chief’s faith that his persuasiveness could bridge the gap between two, on the face, incompatible positions. In practice, it meant that both positions were carried out simultaneously. The issue had some urgency because normalization had taken precedence over resolving a final legal status for Taiwan. Carter had stated that America intended to continue to supply arms to Taiwan. Deng, eager to complete the normalization process so that he could confront Vietnam with at least the appearance of American support, proceeded with normalization, in effect ignoring Carter’s unilateral statement on arms supply. In the meantime, in 1979 the U.S. Congress had responded to the winding down of the official American diplomatic presence in Taipei by passing the Taiwan Relations Act. This legislation outlined a framework for continued robust economic, cultural, and security ties between the United States and Taiwan, and declared that the United States “will make available to Taiwan such defense articles and defense services in such quantity as may be necessary to enable it to maintain a sufficient self-defense capacity.” 2 As soon as the Reagan administration took office, Chinese leaders raised the Taiwan arms issue again, treating it as an unfinished aspect of normalization and bringing to a head the American internal contradictions. Reagan made no secret of his wish that some arms sales to Taiwan go forward. His Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, had a contrary view. Haig had been my deputy on the Nixon White House staff that planned the secret visit in 1971. He had led the technical team that advanced Nixon’s visit, during which he had a substantive conversation with Zhou. As a member of the generation that had experienced the start of the Cold War, Haig was keenly aware of how the addition of China to the anti-Soviet camp altered the strategic equilibrium. Haig treated the potential role of China as a de facto American ally as a breakthrough to be preserved as a top priority. As a result, Haig sought for ways to come to an understanding with Beijing whereby the United States would supply arms to both China and Taiwan.
That scheme foundered on both sides. Reagan would not agree to formal arms sales to China, and Beijing would not consider a deal that implied a trade of principle for military hardware. Matters threatened to get out of hand. Haig, conducting arduous negotiations both within the U.S. government and with his counterparts in Beijing, achieved an agreement that permitted both sides to postpone a final resolution, while establishing a roadmap for the future. That Deng acquiesced in so indefinite and partial an outcome demonstrates the importance he attached to maintaining close relations with the United States (as well as his confidence in Haig).
The so-called Third Communiqué of August 17, 1982, has become part of the basic architecture of the U.S.-China relationship, regularly reaffirmed as part of the sacramental language of subsequent high-level dialogues and joint communiqués. It is odd that the Third Communiqué should have achieved such a status together with the Shanghai Communiqué of Nixon’s visit and the normalization agreement of the Carter period. For the communiqué is quite ambiguous, hence a difficult roadmap for the future.
Each side, as before, restated its basic principles: China affirmed its position that Taiwan was a domestic Chinese affair in which foreigners had no legitimate role; America restated its concern for a peaceful resolution, going so far as to claim that it “appreciates the Chinese policy of striving for a peaceful resolution.” This formulation evaded the consistent and frequently repeated Chinese assertion that it reserved its freedom of action to use force if a peaceful resolution proved unfeasible. The key operative paragraph concerned arms sales to Taiwan. It read:
[T]he United States Government states that it does not seek to carry out a long-term policy of arms sales to Taiwan, that its arms sales to Taiwan will not exceed, either in qualitative or in quantitative terms, the level of those supplied in recent years since the establishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and China, and that it intends to reduce gradually its sales of arms to Taiwan, leading over a period of time to a final resolution. In so stating, the United States acknowledges China’s consistent position regarding the thorough settlement of this issue. 3
None of these terms was precisely defined—or, for that matter, defined at all. What was meant by “gradually” was left open; nor was the “level” reached in the Carter period, which was to be the benchmark, ever specified. While the United States abjured a policy of long-term arms sales, it gave no indication of what it understood by “long-term.” While China reaffirmed its insistence on a final settlement, it established no deadline and submitted no threat. Domestic imperatives on both sides dictated the limits: China would not accept the principle of a foreign arms supplier on what it considered its own territory. American politics, underscored by the passage of the Taiwan Relations Act by wide margins in the U.S. Congress, did not permit any cutoff of arms for Taiwan. It is a tribute to the statesmanship on both sides that this state of affairs has been continued for nearly thirty years since the events discussed in these pages.
The immediate aftermath of the Third Communiqué showed that its meaning was not self-evident to the President of the United States. He told the publisher of the National Review : “You can tell your friends there I have not changed my mind one damn bit about Taiwan. Whatever weapons they need to defend themselves against attacks or invasion by Red China, they will get from the United States.” 4 Reagan felt so strongly on this subject that he called Dan Rather, then the anchor on the CBS Evening News, to deny reports that he no longer backed Taiwan, declaring: “There has been no retreat by me. . . . We will continue to arm Taiwan.” 5
To carry out the President’s conviction, the White House secretly negotiated the so-called Six Assurances with Taiwan to restrict the implementation of the communiqué it had just signed with China. The assurances affirmed that the United States had not set a specific date to end arms sales to Taiwan, had not committed to consulting with Beijing on such sales, had not committed to amend the Taiwan Relations Act, had not altered its position regarding Taiwan’s political status, and would neither pressure Taipei to negotiate with Beijing nor serve as a mediator. 6 The assurances were reinforced by a memorandum placed in the files of the National Security Council that tied observance of the communiqué to the peaceful solution of the differences between the People’s Republic and Taiwan. The administration also proceeded to give a liberal interpretation to the Third Communiqué’s concept of “reducing” “arms sales” to Taiwan. Through technology transfers (technically not “arms sales”) and an inventive interpretation of the “level” of various weapons programs, Washington extended a program of military support to Taiwan whose duration and substance Beijing seems not to have anticipated.
The Taiwan Relations Act, of course, binds the President; it has never been acknowledged by China’s leaders, who do not accept the premise that American legislation can create an obligation with respect to arms sales to Taiwan or condition American diplomatic recognition on the peaceful resolution of the Taiwan issue. It would be dangerous to equate acquiescence to circumstance with agreement for the indefinite future. That a pattern of action has been accepted for a number of years does not obviate its long-term risks, as Beijing’s heated reaction to the arms sale of the spring of 2010 demonstrates.
The Reagan administration’s China and Taiwan policy during the first term was therefore a study in almost incomprehensible contradictions—between competing personalities, conflicting policy goals, contradictory assurances to Beijing and Taipei, and incommensurable moral and strategic imperatives. Reagan gave the impression of supporting all of them at once, all as a matter of deep conviction.
To the scholar or the traditional policy analyst, the Reagan administration’s early approach to the People’s Republic and Taiwan violated every ground rule of coherent policy. However, as with many other controversial and unconventional Reagan policies, it worked out quite well in the following decades.
The remarkable aspect of Reagan’s presidency was his ability to blunt the edges of controversy even while affirming his own essentially unchanging convictions. Whatever his disagreements, Reagan never turned them into personal confrontations; nor did he transform his strong ideological convictions into crusades other than rhetorical. He was therefore in a position to reach across ideological gulfs on the basis of practicality and even goodwill—as Reagan and his subsequent Secretary of State George Shultz’s remarkable series of negotiations with their Soviet counterparts Mikhail Gorbachev and Eduard Shevardnadze over nuclear arms limitations would demonstrate. With respect to China, its leaders came to understand that Reagan had gone as far as his convictions permitted and to the utmost limit of what he was able to accomplish within the American political context. He would therefore gain credit for goodwill even while taking positions that would have been rejected—perhaps even indignantly—had they been put forward in a more formal setting or by a different President.
The seeming contradictions in the end established two timelines: what would be done immediately and what might be left to the future. Deng seems to have understood that the communiqué established a general direction. It could be traveled once conditions had altered the context that prevented it at the beginning of the Reagan administration.
After Shultz took over the State Department in 1982, despite some uncomfortable conversations and bruised egos, the United States, the People’s Republic, and Taiwan all emerged from the early 1980s with their core interests generally fulfilled. Beijing was disappointed with Washington’s flexible interpretation of the communiqué; but on the whole, the People’s Republic achieved another decade of American assistance as it built its economic and military power and its capacity to play an independent role in world affairs. Washington was able to pursue amicable relations with both sides of the Taiwan Strait and to cooperate with China on common anti-Soviet imperatives, such as intelligence sharing and support for the Afghan insurgency. Taiwan obtained a bargaining position from which to negotiate with Beijing. When the dust eventually settled, the most vocally anti-Communist and pro-Taiwan President since Nixon had been able to preside over a “normal” relationship with the People’s Republic of China without any major crisis.
China and the Superpowers—The New Equilibrium
The real drama of the 1980s was not in Washington’s and Beijing’s relations with each other, but in their respective relationships with Moscow. The impetus was a series of significant shifts in the strategic landscape.
In assessing China’s policies, one contingency can generally be excluded: that Chinese policymakers overlooked a set of discoverable facts. So when China went along with the ambiguous language and the flexible interpretation of the Taiwan clause in the Third Communiqué, it can only have been because it thought cooperation with the United States would fulfill its other national purposes.
When Ronald Reagan came into office, the strategic offensive started by the Soviet Union in the late 1970s had not yet run its course. In the years since the collapse of the American position in Indochina, the Soviet Union and its proxies had embarked on an unprecedented (and nearly indiscriminate) series of advances in the developing world: in Angola, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and Indochina. But the U.S.-China rapprochement had set up a significant bulwark against further expansion. Powered by the convictions of Deng and his colleagues and skillful cooperation by American officials of both political parties, the horizontal line Mao envisioned had, in fact, taken shape.
By the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union faced coordinated defense—and, in many cases, active resistance—on almost all of its borders. In the United States, Western Europe, and East Asia, a loose coalition of nearly all the industrial countries had formed against the Soviet Union. In the developed world, the Soviet Union’s only remaining allies were the Eastern European satellites in which it stationed troops. Meanwhile, the developing world had proven skeptical about the benefits of popular “liberation” under Soviet and Cuban arms. In Africa, Asia, and Latin America, Soviet expansionist efforts were turning into costly stalemates or discredited failures. In Afghanistan, the Soviet Union experienced many of the same trials America had undergone in Vietnam—in this case, backed by coordinated efforts of the United States, China, the Gulf States, and Pakistan to sponsor and train an armed resistance. In Vietnam itself, Moscow’s attempt to bring Indochina united under Hanoi into the Soviet orbit met a forceful rebuff from China, facilitated by American cooperation. Beijing and Washington were—as Deng had so vividly described it to Carter—“chopping off” Soviet fingers. At the same time, the American strategic buildup, especially the Strategic Defense Initiative championed by Reagan, posed a technological challenge that the stagnant and overburdened Soviet economy—already bearing a defense burden three times that of the United States as a percentage of each country’s respective GDP—could not begin to meet. 7
At this high point in Sino-American cooperation, the Reagan White House and the top Chinese leadership had roughly congruent assessments of Soviet weakness; but they drew significantly different conclusions about the policy implications of this new state of affairs. Reagan and his top officials perceived Soviet disarray as an opportunity to go on the offensive. Pairing a major military buildup with a new ideological assertiveness, they sought to pressure the Soviet Union both financially and geopolitically and drive for what amounted to victory in the Cold War.
The Chinese leaders had a similar conception of Soviet weakness, but they drew the opposite lesson: they saw it as an invitation to recalibrate the global equilibrium. Beginning in 1969, they had tacked toward Washington to redress China’s precarious geopolitical position; they had no interest in the global triumph of American values and Western liberal democracy that Reagan proclaimed as his ultimate goal. Having “touched the buttocks of the tiger” in Vietnam, Beijing concluded that it had withstood the high point of the Soviet threat. It now behooved China to tack back toward an enhanced freedom of maneuver.
In the 1980s, therefore, the euphoria of the original opening had run its course; the overriding Cold War concerns of the recent past were being overcome. Sino-American relations settled into the sort of interactions major powers have with each other more or less routinely with fewer high points or troughs. The beginning of the decline of Soviet power played a role although the chief actors on both the American and the Chinese side had become so used to Cold War patterns that it took them a while to recognize it. The weak Soviet response to the Chinese invasion of Vietnam marked the beginning of an at first gradual, then accelerating, Soviet decline. The three transitions in Moscow—from Leonid Brezhnev to Yuri Andropov in 1982, from Andropov to Konstantin Chernenko in 1984, and from Chernenko to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985—at a minimum signified that the Soviet Union would be preoccupied with its domestic crises. The American rearmament begun under Carter and accelerated under Reagan gradually altered the balance of power and constrained the Soviet readiness to intervene around its periphery.
Most of the Soviet gains of the 1970s were reversed—though several of these retreats did not take place until the George H. W. Bush administration. The Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia was ended in 1990, elections were held in 1993, and refugees prepared to return home; Cuban troops withdrew from Angola by 1991; the Communist-backed government in Ethiopia collapsed in 1991; in 1990, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua were brought to accept free elections, a risk no governing Communist Party had ever before been prepared to take; perhaps the most important, Soviet armies withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989.
Soviet retreats gave Chinese diplomacy a new flexibility to maneuver. Chinese leaders spoke less of military containment and began to explore their scope for a new diplomacy with Moscow. They continued to list three conditions for improving relations with the Soviets: evacuation of Cambodia; ending Soviet troop concentrations in Siberia and Mongolia along the northern Chinese border; and evacuation of Afghanistan. These demands were in the process of being fulfilled largely by changes in the balance of power that made Soviet forward positions untenable and the decisions to withdraw inevitable. The United States received reassurances that China was not ready to move toward Moscow—the Chinese proving that two sides could play at triangular diplomacy. The reassurances, in any event, had a dual purpose: they affirmed continued adherence to the established strategy of preventing Soviet expansion, but they also served to bring China’s growing options before the United States.
China soon began to exercise its new options globally. In a conversation I had with Deng in September 1987, he applied the new framework of analysis to the Iran-Iraq War, then raging in its fifth year. The United States was backing Iraq—at least enough to prevent its being defeated by the revolutionary regime in Tehran. Deng argued that China needed “leeway” to take a more “flexible position” toward Iran so that it could play a more significant role in the diplomacy to end the war.
Deng had been carrying out Mao’s horizontal line concept during the confrontation with the Soviet Union. It was now being transformed back into a Three Worlds approach in which China stood apart from superpower competition and in which adherence to an independent foreign policy would allow it to pursue its preferences in all three circles: the superpowers; the developed country circle; and the Third World.
Hu Yaobang, a Deng protégé and Party Secretary, outlined the prevailing Chinese foreign policy concept to the Communist Party’s Twelfth National Congress in September 1982. Its key provision was a reprise of Mao’s “China has stood up”: “China never attaches itself to any big power or group of powers, and never yields to pressure from any big power.” 8 Hu began with a tour d’horizon outlining China’s critical assessment of American and Soviet foreign policies and a list of demands for actions by which each power could demonstrate its good faith. The failure to resolve the Taiwan issue meant that “a cloud has all along hung over the relations” between China and the United States. Relations would “develop soundly” only if the United States ceased interfering in what China regarded as its purely internal affair. Meanwhile, Hu commented loftily, “We note that Soviet leaders have expressed more than once the desire to improve relations with China. But deeds, rather than words, are important.” 9
China, for its part, was solidifying its position in the Third World, standing apart from and to some degree against both superpowers: “The main forces jeopardizing peaceful coexistence among nations today are imperialism, hegemonism and colonialism. . . . The most important task for the people of the world today is to oppose hegemonism and safeguard world peace.” 10
In effect, China claimed a unique moral stature as the largest of the “neutral” powers, standing above superpower contests:
We have always firmly opposed the arms race between the superpowers, stood for the prohibition of the use of nuclear weapons and for their complete destruction and demanded that the superpowers be the first to cut their nuclear and conventional arsenals drastically. . . .
China regards it as her sacred international duty to struggle resolutely against imperialism, hegemonism and colonialism together with the other third world countries. 11
It was traditional Chinese foreign policy served up at a Communist Party Congress: self-reliance, moral aloofness, and superiority, coupled with a commitment to negate superpower aspirations.
A 1984 State Department memorandum sent to President Reagan explained that China had positioned itself
both to support [the American] military buildup against Soviet expansionism and to attack superpower rivalry as the major cause of global tension. As a result, China is able to pursue parallel strategic interests with the US and, at the same time, to strengthen its relations with what it perceives to be an ascendant Third World bloc. 12
In 1985 a CIA report described China as “maneuvering in the triangle” by cultivating closer ties with the Soviet Union through a series of high-level meetings and inter–Communist Party exchanges of a protocol level and frequency not seen since the Sino-Soviet split. The analysis noted that Chinese leaders had resumed referring to their Soviet counterparts as “comrade,” and calling the Soviet Union a “socialist” (as opposed to “revisionist”) country. Top Chinese and Soviet officials had held substantive consultations on arms control—an unthinkable concept in the previous two decades—and during a week-long 1985 visit by the Chinese Vice Premier Yao Yilin to Moscow, the two sides signed a landmark agreement on bilateral trade and economic cooperation. 13
The notion of overlapping circles was more or less what Mao had been advancing toward the end of his life. But the practical consequence was limited. The Third World defined itself by its distinction from the two superpowers. It would lose this status if it shifted definitively to one side or another, even in the guise of admitting a superpower to its ranks. As a practical matter, China was on the way to becoming a superpower, and it was acting like one even now, when it was just beginning its reforms. The Third World, in short, would exercise major influence only if one of the superpowers joined, and then, by definition, it would stop being a Third World. So long as the Soviet Union was a nuclear superpower and relations with it were precarious, China would have no incentive to move away from the United States. (After the Soviet Union’s collapse, there were only two circles left, and the question would be whether China would step into the place vacated by the Soviet Union as a challenger or opt for cooperation with the United States.) The Sino-American relationship of the 1980s was, in short, in transition from a Cold War pattern to a global international order that created new challenges for China-U.S. partnership. All this assumed that the Soviet Union remained the basic security threat.
The architect of the opening to China, Richard Nixon, understood the world in the same way. In a memorandum to President Reagan after a private visit to China in late 1982, Nixon wrote:
I believe it is very much in our interest to encourage the Chinese to play a greater role in the third world. The more successful they are, the less successful the Soviet Union will be. . . .
What brought us together primarily in 1972 was our common concern about the threat of Soviet aggression. While that threat is far greater today than it was in 1972, the major unifying factor which will draw us closer together in the next decade could well be our economic interdependence. 14
Nixon went on to urge that, for the next decade, the United States, its Western allies, and Japan should work jointly to speed the economic development of China. He had a vision of an entirely new international order emerging based essentially on using China’s influence to build the Third World into an anti-Soviet coalition. But not even Nixon’s prescience extended to a world in which the Soviet Union had collapsed and, within a generation, China would be in a position where much of the world’s economic health depended on its economic performance. Or where the question would be raised whether China’s rise would make international relations bipolar again.
George Shultz, Reagan’s redoubtable Secretary of State and a trained economist, came up with another, American conception of concentric circles, which placed the Sino-U.S. relationship into a context beyond the Soviet-American conflict. He argued that overemphasis on China’s indispensability for dealing with the Soviet threat gave China an excessive bargaining advantage. 15 Relations with it should be on the basis of strict reciprocity. In such a diplomacy, China would play its role for its own national reasons. Chinese goodwill should result from common projects in the joint interest. The purpose of China policy should be to elaborate these common interests. Simultaneously, the United States would seek to reinvigorate its alliance with Japan—the country in which Mao, a few years earlier, had urged American officials to “spend more time”—a fellow democracy, and now, after decades of rapid growth in the aftermath of the Second World War, a major global economic player. (Decades of intervening economic malaise have obscured the fact that in the 1980s Japan’s economic capacity not only vastly outmatched China’s, but was assumed by many analysts to be on the verge of surpassing that of the United States.) This relationship was given a new footing by the personal camaraderie that developed between Reagan and Japan’s Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone—or, as it came to be known in the media, the “Ron and Yasu show.”
Both the United States and China were edging away from the previous alignment in which they saw themselves as strategic partners facing a common existential threat. Now that the Soviet menace had begun to recede, China and the United States were in effect partners of convenience on selected issues on which their interests aligned.
During the Reagan period, no fundamental new tensions developed, and inherited issues like Taiwan were handled undramatically. Reagan performed with characteristic vitality during a 1984 state visit to China—at several points even conjuring up phrases from classical Chinese poetry and the ancient divination manual the I Ching or Book of Changes to describe the cooperative relationship between the United States and China. Attempting more Mandarin Chinese than any of his predecessors, Reagan even invoked the Chinese idioms “tong li he zuo” (“connect strength, work together”) and “ hu jing hu hui” (“mutual respect, mutual benefit”) to describe the U.S.-China relationship. 16 Yet Reagan never developed a record of close exchanges with any Chinese counterpart as he had with Nakasone—for that matter, no American President did with his Chinese counterpart—and his visit was given no major issues to settle and confined itself to a review of the world situation. When Reagan criticized a certain unnamed “major power” for massing troops on China’s borders and threatening its neighbors, this portion of his speech was omitted from the Chinese broadcast.
As the Reagan years ended, the situation in Asia was the most tranquil it had been in decades. A half century of war and revolution in China, Japan, Korea, Indochina, and maritime Southeast Asia had given way to a system of Asian states on essentially Westphalian lines—following the pattern of sovereign states emerging in Europe at the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648. With the exception of periodic provocations from the impoverished and isolated North Korea and the insurgency against the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan, Asia was now a world of discrete states with sovereign governments, recognized borders, and a nearly universal tacit agreement to refrain from involvement in each other’s domestic political and ideological alignments. The project of exporting Communist revolution—taken up eagerly in turn by Chinese, North Korean, and North Vietnamese proponents—had drawn to a close. An equilibrium between the various centers of power had been preserved, in part due to the exhaustion of the parties and in part due to American (and subsequently Chinese) efforts to turn back various contestants for dominance. Within this context, a new era of Asian economic reform and prosperity was taking root—one that in the twenty-first century may well return the region to its historic role as the world’s most productive and prosperous continent.
Deng’s Reform Program
What Deng labeled “Reform and Opening Up” was not only an economic but also a spiritual endeavor. It involved, first, the stabilization of a society at the edge of economic collapse and, then, a search for the inner strength to advance by new methods for which there was no precedent in either Communist or Chinese history.
The economic situation inherited by Deng was close to desperate. China’s collectivized agricultural structure was barely keeping pace with the needs of its massive population. Per capita food consumption was roughly the same as it had been in the early Mao period. One Chinese leader was reported to have admitted that 100 million Chinese peasants—the equivalent of nearly half the entire American population in 1980—went without sufficient food. 17 The closing of the school system during the Cultural Revolution had produced calamitous conditions. In 1982, 34 percent of China’s workforce had only a primary school education, and 28 percent were considered “illiterates or semiilliterates”; just 0.87 percent of China’s workforce was college-educated. 18 Deng had called for a period of rapid economic growth; but he faced the challenge of how to transform an uneducated, isolated, and still largely impoverished general population into a workforce able to assume a productive and competitive role in the world economy and to withstand its occasional strains.
The traditional tools available to those undertaking the reform compounded the challenge. Deng’s insistence on modernizing China by opening it to the outside world was the same kind of effort that had thwarted reformers since it was first attempted in the second half of the nineteenth century. Then the obstacle was the reluctance to abandon a way of life Chinese associated with what defined China’s special identity. Now it was how to overturn the practices on which all Communist societies had been operating while maintaining the philosophical principles on which the cohesion of the society had been based since Mao’s time.
At the beginning of the 1980s, central planning was still the operating mode of all Communist societies. Its failures were apparent, but remedies had proved elusive. In its advanced stage, Communism’s incentives were all counterproductive, rewarding stagnation and discouraging initiative. In a centrally planned economy, goods and services are allocated by bureaucratic decision. Over a period of time, prices established by administrative fiat lose their relationship to costs. The pricing system becomes a means of extorting resources from the population and establishing political priorities. As terror by which authority was established eases, prices turn into subsidies and are transformed into a method of gaining public support for the Communist Party.
Reform Communism proved unable to abolish the laws of economics. Somebody had to pay for real costs. The penalty of central planning and subsidized pricing was poor maintenance, lack of innovation, and overemployment—in other words, stagnation and falling per capita income.
Central planning, moreover, provided few incentives to emphasize quality or innovation. Since all a manager produced would be bought by a relevant ministry, quality was not a consideration. And innovation was, in effect, discouraged lest it throw the whole planning edifice out of kilter.
In the absence of markets that balanced preferences, the planner was obliged to impose more or less arbitrary judgments. As a result, the goods that were wanted were not produced, and the goods that were produced were not wanted.
Above all, the centrally planned state, far from creating a classless society, ended up by enshrining class stratification. Where goods were allocated rather than bought, the real rewards were perquisites of office: special stores, hospitals, educational opportunities for cadres. Enormous discretion in the hands of officials inevitably led to corruption. Jobs, education, and most perquisites depended on some kind of personal relationship. It is one of history’s ironies that Communism, advertised as bringing a classless society, tended to breed a privileged class of feudal proportions. It proved impossible to run a modern economy by central planning, but no Communist state had ever been run without central planning.
Deng’s Reform and Opening Up was designed to overcome this built-in stagnation. He and his associates embarked on market economics, decentralized decision making, and opening to the outside world—all unprecedented changes. They based their revolution on releasing the talents of the Chinese people, whose natural economic vitality and entrepreneurial spirit had long been constrained by war, ideological dogma, and severe strictures on private investment.
Deng had two principal collaborators on the reforms—Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang—though he later fell out with both when they attempted to carry the principles of economic reform into the political field.
One of the youngest participants in the Long March, Hu Yaobang emerged as a Deng protégé and later fell with Deng in the Cultural Revolution; when Deng returned to power, he elevated Hu to some of the highest leadership posts in the Communist Party, culminating in his appointment as General Secretary. During his tenure, Hu was associated with relatively liberal stances on political and economic issues. With his forthright manner, he consistently pushed the limits of what his party and society were willing to accept. He was the first Communist Party leader to appear regularly in Western suits and provoked controversy by suggesting that Chinese abandon chopsticks for knives and forks. 19
Zhao Ziyang, appointed Premier in 1980 and General Secretary of the Communist Party in January 1987, had pioneered agricultural decollectivization while Party Secretary in Sichuan. His success in producing a significant rise in living standards earned him the approbation of rural Chinese, as expressed in a pithy pun on his last name (a near homonym for the Chinese word “look for”): “If you want to eat grain, Zhao (look for) Ziyang.” Like Hu Yaobang, he was politically unorthodox. He was ultimately removed as General Secretary by Deng at the height of the Tiananmen crisis.
Deng and his colleagues were impelled, above all, by the shared rejection of the Cultural Revolution. All the leaders who governed China had survived degradation, and many of them physical abuse. The experiences of the Cultural Revolution permeated the conversation of Chinese leaders. I had a wistful conversation with Deng in September 1982 when I was in China on a private visit:
KISSINGER: I met you in April 1974 when you came to the 6th Special [U.N. General] Assembly and then with Mao and you did not speak a word.
DENG: Then in November of 1974 [in Beijing] we were the two persons who talked the most because that time Zhou was sick and I was in charge of the State Council, and in 1975 I was in charge of the workings of the Party and the government. Only for one year I was struck down. When we look back to this period of history it was very interesting. It was such setbacks which enlightened us. . . . Our experience from 1979 to 1981 proved that our policies are correct. You have not been here for 3½ years. Do you see any changes?
KISSINGER: When I was here last time—it may be due to my ignorance—I had the sense that the Chairman of the Advisory Commission [Deng] had many opponents in high position. . . .
DENG: . . . People abroad often wonder if there is political stability in China. To judge if there is political stability in China one must see if there is stability in areas where 800 million Chinese live. Today the peasants are most happy. There are also some changes in the cities but not as much as in the countryside. . . . [People] have greater confidence in the socialist economic institutions and greater trust in the Party and government. This is of far reaching significance. Before the Cultural Revolution the Party and the government had high prestige but the prestige was destroyed in the Cultural Revolution.
There was little experience on which to draw for the reform effort. When I returned in 1987, Zhao Ziyang gave me an advance explanation of a program to be submitted to the Party Congress that October. He emphasized that China was on a complicated and very long course of meshing capitalism with socialism:
A key question being addressed is how to rationalize the relationship between socialism and market forces. The report will state that planning for socialism should include use of market forces and not exclude them. Since [John Maynard] Keynes all countries, including capitalist ones, have practiced some degree of government interference in economic activities. The U.S. and South Korea are examples. Governments regulate either through planning or the market; China will use both methods. Enterprises will make full use of market forces and the State will guide the economy through macroeconomic policies. There also will be planning where necessary, but future regulation by planning will be one means and will not be viewed as the very nature of socialism.
In pursuing these objectives, Deng would move gradually. In Chinese terms, the leadership would “cross the river by feeling the stones,” charting a path in part on the basis of what worked. Mao’s continuous revolution was, in effect, jettisoned together with visions of utopian transformation. The Chinese leadership would not let ideology constrain their reforms; they would instead redefine “socialism with Chinese characteristics” so that “Chinese characteristics” were whatever brought greater prosperity to China.
To facilitate the process, China welcomed foreign investment, in part through Special Economic Zones on the coast, where enterprises were given wider latitude and investors were granted special conditions. Given China’s previous negative experience with “foreign investors” on its coast in the nineteenth century—and the prominent role this experience played in the Chinese nationalist narrative—this was an act of considerable boldness. It also showed a willingness—to some degree unprecedented—to abandon the centuries-old vision of Chinese economic self-sufficiency by joining an international economic order. By 1980, the People’s Republic of China had joined the IMF and the World Bank, and foreign loans were beginning to flow into the country.
Systematic decentralization followed. Agricultural communes were abandoned by encouraging the so-called responsibility centers, which, in practice, amounted to family farming. For other enterprises, a distinction was elaborated between ownership and management. Ownership would remain in the hands of the state; management would be left largely to managers. Agreements between the authorities and the managers would define the function of each, with substantial latitudes for managers.
The results of these changes were spectacular. Between 1978—the year the first economic reforms were promulgated—and 1984, the income of Chinese peasants doubled. The private sector, driven by the renewal of individual economic incentives, rose to constitute nearly 50 percent of the gross industrial output in an economy that had been ordered almost entirely by government fiat. China’s Gross Domestic Product grew at an average rate of over 9 percent annually throughout the 1980s—an unprecedented and nearly uninterrupted period of economic growth that continues as of this writing. 20
An effort of such scope depended, above all, on the quality of the officials charged with carrying out the reforms. This was the subject of an exchange with Deng in 1982. In response to my question as to whether the rejuvenation of personnel was moving in the desired direction, Deng replied:
DENG: Yes. I think I can say so. But it is not over yet. We have to continue. The agricultural problem has not been solved. We have to be patient. Two years ago we put Premier Zhao Ziyang and Hu Yaobang in jobs of the first line. Perhaps you have noticed that 60% of the members of the Party Committee are below age 60 and many are about 40.
KISSINGER: I have noticed this.
DENG: This is not enough. We have to make arrangements for return of old comrades. That is how we set up the Advisory Commission. I recommended myself to be the Chairman of the Advisory Commission. It means that personally I want to gradually shake off the official positions and put myself in the position of advisor.
KISSINGER: I have noticed some colleagues who are older than the Chairman and they have not joined the Advisory Commission.
DENG: That is because our party is very old. And it is necessary to keep some old people in the first line. But this problem will be gradually solved.
KISSINGER: I was told that the problem of the Cultural Revolution was that many people became cadres who did not have the same high level of education that is customary. Is that a problem and will you be able to deal with it?
DENG: Yes. Our criteria to select those to be responsible cadres are as follows: They must be revolutionaries. They must be younger. Better educated. Professionally competent. As I said, the 12th Party Congress has not only shown the continuity of the new policies but also insured continuity and the personnel arrangements have also assured continuity.
Five years later, Deng was still concerned with how to rejuvenate the Party. In September 1987, he gave me a preview of what he was planning for the upcoming Party Congress scheduled for October. Tanned, rested, and at eighty-three displaying undiminished vigor, Deng said that he would like to entitle the forthcoming congress “A Conference of Reform and Opening to the Outside World.” Zhao Ziyang would be given the key position of General Secretary of the Communist Party, replacing Hu Yaobang and necessitating the selection of a new Premier. Hu Yaobang had “made some errors,” Deng said—presumably in letting a set of 1986 student protests go too far—but he would remain in the Politburo (a distinction from previous periods when individuals removed from high office would also be removed from the policy process). No member of the Standing Committee (the executive committee of the Communist Party) would retain a dual position, speeding up the transition to the next generation of top officials. Other “senior people” would retire.
Deng would, he explained, now move from economic to political structural reforms. It would be much more complicated than economic reform because “it would involve the interests of millions of people.” The divisions of work between the Communist Party and government would change. Many Party members would have to change jobs when professional managers took over for Party Secretaries.
But where was the line that separated policymaking from administration? Deng replied that ideological issues would be for the Party, operational policy for managers. Asked for an example, Deng indicated that a shift of alliance toward the Soviet Union would be clearly an ideological issue. From my many conversations with him, I concluded that this would not be a frequent subject. On further reflection, I wonder whether by merely broaching such a previously unthinkable concept, Deng was not serving notice that China was weighing tacking back to greater freedom of diplomatic maneuver.
What Deng was proposing politically had no precedent in Communist experience. The Communist Party, he seemed to suggest, would maintain an overall supervisory role in the nation’s economy and political structure. But it would steadily withdraw from its previous position of controlling the detailed aspects of Chinese daily life. The initiatives of individual Chinese would be given wide scope. These sweeping reforms, Deng maintained, would be carried out “in an orderly manner.” China was stable now, and “must remain so if it is to develop.” Its government and people “recall [ed] the chaos of the Cultural Revolution,” and they would never allow it to recur. China’s reforms were “unprecedented”; this would inevitably mean that “some mistakes will be made.” The vast majority of people supported the current reforms, he said, but “courage” and “prudence” would be required to ensure their success.
As it turned out, these were not abstract issues: Deng would soon be forced to confront the tensions inherent in his program of “orderly” reform. While most of the world was marveling at the surging Chinese economic growth rate, the tens of thousands of students being sent abroad, and the changes in the standard of living inside the country, there emerged significant indications that new currents were churning within.
The early stages of the reform process tended to merge the problems of planning with those of the market. The attempt to make prices reflect real costs inevitably led to price increases, at least in the short term. Price reform caused a run on savings to buy up goods before prices went even higher, creating a vicious cycle of hoarding and greater inflation.
In a September 1987 meeting, Zhao Ziyang outlined a shift toward reliance on market forces for about 50 percent of GDP. Beyond the technical economic issues, this required a substantial recasting of the command system. There was to be greater emphasis, as in European states, on indirect control of the economy through manipulation of the money supply and intervention to forestall depression. Many central institutions in China would have to be dismantled and the functions of others redefined. To facilitate this process, a review of Party membership and a streamlining of the bureaucracy was ordered. Since this involved thirty million individuals and was carried out by the very people whose activities needed to be modified, the review faced many obstacles.
The relative success of economic reform produced constituencies at the core of the later discontent. And the government would face declining loyalty from the political cadres whose jobs the reforms threatened.
Administering a two-price system opened many avenues for corruption and nepotism. The shift to market economics actually increased opportunities for corruption, at least for an interim period. The fact that two economic sectors coexisted—a shrinking but still very large public sector and a growing market economy—produced two sets of prices. Unscrupulous bureaucrats and entrepreneurs were thus in a position to shift commodities back and forth between the two sectors for personal gain. Undoubtedly some of the profits in the private sector in China were the result of widespread graft and nepotism.
Nepotism is a special problem, in any event, in a culture as familyoriented as the Chinese. In times of turmoil, Chinese turn to their families. In all Chinese societies—whether it is mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore, or Hong Kong—ultimate reliance is placed on family members, who in turn benefit in ways determined by family criteria rather than abstract market forces.
The marketplace created its own discontent. A market economy will, in time, enhance general well-being, but the essence of competition is that somebody wins and somebody loses. In the early stages of a market economy, the winnings are likely to be disproportionate. The losers are tempted to blame the “system” rather than their own failure. Often they are right.
On the popular level, economic reform had raised Chinese expectations about living standards and personal liberties, while at the same time creating tensions and inequities that many Chinese felt could only be redressed by a more open and participatory political system. The Chinese leadership was also increasingly divided about China’s political and ideological course. The example of Gorbachev’s reforms in the Soviet Union raised the stakes of the debate. To some in the Chinese leadership, glasnost and perestroika were dangerous heresies, akin to Khrushchev’s throwing away the “sword of Stalin.” To others, including many in China’s younger generation of students and Party officials, Gorbachev’s reforms were a possible model for China’s own path.
The economic reforms overseen by Deng, Hu, and Zhao had transformed the face of Chinese daily life. At the same time, the reappearance of phenomena eradicated during the Mao years—income disparities, colorful and even provocative clothing, and an open celebration of “luxury” items—prompted traditional Communist cadres to complain that the People’s Republic was succumbing to the dreaded “peaceful evolution” to capitalism once projected by John Foster Dulles.
While Chinese officials and intellectuals often framed this debate in terms of Marxist dogma—such as a high-profile campaign against the threat of “bourgeois liberalization”—the split ultimately went back to the questions that had divided China since the nineteenth century. By turning outward, was China fulfilling its destiny, or was it compromising its moral essence? What, if anything, should it aim to learn from Western social and political institutions?
In 1988, the debate crystallized around a seemingly esoteric television miniseries. Broadcast on Chinese Central Television, the sixpart documentary River Elegy adopted the metaphor of China’s turbid, slow-moving Yellow River to argue that Chinese civilization itself had grown insular and stagnant. Blending indictments of traditional Confucian culture with a veiled critique of more recent political developments, the film suggested that China needed to renew itself by looking outward to the “blue ocean” of the outside world, including Western culture. The series catalyzed a national debate, including discussion at the highest levels of China’s government. Traditional Communists considered the film “counterrevolutionary” and succeeded in having it banned, albeit after it had first been broadcast. 21 The generations-long debate over China’s destiny and its relationship with the West was active again.
CHAPTER 15
Tiananmen
C RACKS IN THE Soviet monolith began to emerge in Eastern Europe at the start of 1989, leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall in November and the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union itself. But China seemed stable, and its relations with the rest of the world were the best since the Communist victory in 1949 and the proclamation of the People’s Republic. Relations with the United States especially had made major progress. The two countries were cooperating in thwarting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan; the United States was selling significant levels of arms to China; trade was increasing; and exchanges, from cabinet members to naval vessels, were flourishing.
Mikhail Gorbachev, still presiding over the Soviet Union, was planning a visit to Beijing in May. Moscow had met to a significant extent the three conditions put forward by Beijing for an improvement in Sino-Soviet relations: withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan; redeployment of Soviet forces away from the Chinese border; and a Vietnamese withdrawal from Cambodia. International conferences were routinely scheduled for Beijing—including a meeting that April of the board of directors of the Asian Development Bank, a multilateral development organization that China had joined three years earlier, which unexpectedly provided a backdrop for the unfolding drama.
It all began with the death of Hu Yaobang. Deng had overseen his rise in 1981 to General Secretary, the highest leadership post of the Communist Party. In 1986, when conservative critics blamed Hu for indecisiveness in the face of student demonstrations, he was replaced as General Secretary by Zhao Ziyang, another protégé of Deng, while remaining a member of the ruling Politburo. During a Politburo meeting on April 8, 1989, the seventy-three-year-old Hu suffered a heart attack. His stunned colleagues revived him and rushed him to the hospital. He suffered another heart attack there and died on April 15.
As with Zhou Enlai’s passing in 1976, Hu’s death was the occasion for politically charged mourning. However, in the intervening years, the restrictions on permissible speech had been relaxed. While Zhou’s mourners in 1976 had veiled their criticisms of Mao and Jiang Qing in allegorical references to ancient dynastic court politics, the demonstrators over Hu in 1989 named their targets. The atmosphere was already tense due to the upcoming seventieth anniversary of the May Fourth Movement, a 1919 campaign by nationalist-minded Chinese protesting the weakness of the Chinese government and perceived inequities in the Treaty of Versailles. 1
Hu’s admirers laid wreaths and elegiac poems at the Monument to the People’s Heroes in Tiananmen Square, many praising the former General Secretary’s dedication to political liberalization and calling for his spirit to live on in further reforms. Students in Beijing and other cities took the opportunity to voice their frustration with corruption, inflation, press restrictions, university conditions, and the persistence of Party “elders” ruling informally behind the scenes. In Beijing, seven demands were put forward by various student groups, which threatened to demonstrate until the government had implemented them. Not all the groups supported every demand; an unprecedented confluence of disparate resentments escalated into upheaval. What had started as a demonstration evolved into an occupation of Tiananmen Square challenging the authority of the government.
Events escalated in a manner neither observers nor participants thought conceivable at the beginning of the month. By June, antigovernment protests of various sizes had spread nationwide to 341 cities. 2 Protesters had taken over trains and schools, and main roads in the capital were blocked. In Tiananmen Square, students declared a hunger strike, attracting widespread attention from both local and international observers and other nonstudent groups, which began to join the protesters. Chinese leaders were obliged to move Gorbachev’s welcoming ceremony from Tiananmen Square. Humiliatingly, a muted ceremony was held at the Beijing airport without public attendance. Some reports held that elements of the People’s Liberation Army defied orders to deploy to the capital and quell the demonstrations, and that government employees were marching with the protesters in the street. The political challenge was underscored by developments in China’s far west, where Tibetans and members of China’s Uighur Muslim minority had begun to agitate based on their own cultural issues (in the Uighur case, the recent publication of a book claimed to offend Islamic sensibilities). 3
Uprisings generally develop their own momentum as developments slide out of the control of the principal actors, who become characters in a play whose script they no longer know. For Deng, the protests stirred the historical Chinese fear of chaos and memories of the Cultural Revolution—whatever the stated goals of the demonstrators. The scholar Andrew J. Nathan has summed up the impasse eloquently:
The students did not set out to pose a mortal challenge to what they knew was a dangerous regime. Nor did the regime relish the use of force against the students. The two sides shared many goals and much common language. Through miscommunication and misjudgment, they pushed one another into positions in which options for compromise became less and less available. Several times a solution seemed just within reach, only to dissolve at the last moment. The slide to calamity seemed slow at first but then accelerated as divisions deepened on both sides. Knowing the outcome, we read the story with a sense of horror that we receive from true tragedy. 4
This is not the place to examine the events that led to the tragedy at Tiananmen Square; each side has different perceptions depending on the various, often conflicting, origins of their participation in the crisis. The student unrest started as a demand for remedies to specific grievances. But the occupation of the main square of a country’s capital, even when completely peaceful, is also a tactic to demonstrate the impotence of the government, to weaken it, and to tempt it into rash acts, putting it at a disadvantage.
There is no dispute about the denouement, however. After hesitating for seven weeks and exhibiting serious divisions within its ranks over the use of force, the Chinese leadership cracked down decisively on June 4. The General Secretary of the Communist Party, Zhao Ziyang, was dismissed. After weeks of internal debates, Deng and a majority of the Politburo ordered the PLA to clear Tiananmen Square. A harsh suppression of the protest followed—all seen on television, broadcast by media that had come from all over the world to record the momentous meeting between Gorbachev and the Chinese leadership.
American Dilemmas
The international reaction was stark. The People’s Republic of China had never claimed to function as a Western-style democracy (and indeed had consistently rejected the insinuation). Now it emerged in the media of the world as an arbitrary authoritarian state crushing popular aspirations to human rights. Deng, heretofore widely lauded as a reformer, was criticized as a tyrant.
In this atmosphere, the entire Sino-U.S. relationship, including the established practice of regular consultations between the two countries, came under attack from across a wide political spectrum. Traditional conservatives saw themselves vindicated in their conviction that China, under the leadership of the Communist Party, would never be a reliable partner. Human rights activists across the entire political spectrum were outraged. Liberals argued that the aftermath of Tiananmen imposed on America the obligation to fulfill its ultimate mission to spread democracy. However varied their objectives, the critics converged on the need for sanctions to pressure Beijing to alter its domestic institutions and encourage human rights practices.
President George H. W. Bush, who had assumed the presidency less than five months earlier, was uncomfortable with the long-range consequences of sanctions. Both Bush and his National Security Advisor, General Brent Scowcroft, had served in the Nixon administration. They had met Deng when they were in office; they remembered how he had preserved the relationship with America against the machinations of the Gang of Four and on behalf of greater scope for the individual. They admired his economic reforms, and they balanced their distaste of the repression against their respect for the way the world had been transformed since the opening to China. They had participated in the conduct of foreign policy when every opponent of the United States could count on Chinese support, when all the nations of Asia feared a China isolated from the world, and when the Soviet Union could conduct a policy of pressure against the West, unrestrained by concerns over its other flanks.
President Bush had served in China as head of the American Liaison Office in Beijing ten years earlier during tense periods. Bush had enough experience to understand that the leaders who had been on the Long March, survived in the caves of Yan’an, and confronted both the United States and the Soviet Union simultaneously in the 1960s would not submit to foreign pressures or the threat of isolation. And what was the objective? To overthrow the Chinese government? To change its structure toward what alternative? How could the process of intervention be ended once it was started? And what would be the costs?
Before Tiananmen, America had become familiar with the debate about the role of its diplomacy in promoting democracy. In simplified form, the debate pitted idealists against realists—idealists insisting that domestic systems affect foreign policy and are therefore legitimate items on the diplomatic agenda, realists arguing that such an agenda is beyond any country’s capacity and that diplomacy should therefore focus primarily on external policies. The absolutes of moral precept were weighed against the contingencies of deducing foreign policy from the balancing of national interests. The actual distinctions are more subtle. Idealists, when they seek to apply their values, will be driven to consider the world of specific circumstance. Thoughtful realists understand that values are an important component of reality. When decisions are made, the distinction is rarely absolute; often it comes down to a question of nuance.
With respect to China, the issue was not whether America preferred democratic values to prevail. By a vast majority, the American public would have answered in the affirmative, as would have all the participants in the debate on China policy. The issue was what price they would be prepared to pay in concrete terms over what period of time and what their capacity was, in any circumstances, to bring about their desired outcome.
Two broad operational policies appeared in the public debate over the tactics of dealing with authoritarian regimes. One group argued for confrontation, urging the United States to resist undemocratic behavior or human rights violations by withholding any benefit America might afford, whatever the price for America. In the extreme, it pressed for change of offending regimes; in the case of China, it insisted on an unambiguous move toward democracy as a condition for any mutual benefit. 5
The contrary view argued that human rights progress is generally better reached by a policy of engagement. Once enough confidence has been established, changes in civil practice can be advocated in the name of common purposes or at least the preservation of a common interest.
Which method is appropriate depends in part on circumstances. There are instances of violations of human rights so egregious that it is impossible to conceive of benefit in a continuing relationship; for example the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and the genocide in Rwanda. Since public pressure shades either into regime change or a kind of abdication, it is difficult to apply to countries with which a continuous relationship is important for American security. This is especially the case with China, so imbued with the memory of humiliating intervention by Western societies.
China would be a major factor in world politics, whatever the immediate outcome of the Tiananmen crisis. If the leadership consolidated itself, China would resume its economic reform program and grow increasingly strong. America and the world would then be faced with deciding whether to move to restore a cooperative relationship with an emerging great power or to seek to isolate China so as to induce it to adopt domestic policies in keeping with American values. Isolating China would usher in a prolonged period of confrontation with a society that did not buckle when the Soviet Union, its only source of outside help, withdrew assistance in 1959. The Bush administration, in its first months, was still operating on the premises of the Cold War, in which China was needed to balance the Soviet Union. But as the Soviet threat declined, China would emerge in an increasingly strong position to go it alone because the fear of the Soviet Union, which had brought China and the United States together, would recede.
There were objective limits to American influence on China’s domestic institutions, whether confrontation or engagement was pursued. Did we have the knowledge to shape the internal developments of a country of the size, mass, and complexity of China? Was there a risk that a collapse of central authority might trigger a recurrence of the civil wars that were at least compounded by nineteenth-century foreign interventions?
President Bush was in a delicate position after Tiananmen. As former head of the United States Liaison Office in Beijing, he had gained an appreciation for Chinese sensitivities about perceived foreign interference. With his long career in U.S. politics, he also had an astute understanding of American domestic political realities. He was aware that most Americans believed that Washington’s China policy should seek—as Nancy Pelosi, the then junior Democratic representative from California, termed it—“to send a clear and principled message of outrage to the leaders in Beijing.” 6 But Bush had also come to know that the United States’ relationship with China served vital American interests independent of the People’s Republic’s system of governance. He was wary of antagonizing a government that had cooperated with the United States for nearly two decades on some of the most fundamental security issues of the Cold War world. As he later wrote: “For this understandably proud, ancient, and inward-looking people, foreign criticism (from peoples they still perceived as ‘barbarians’ and colonialists untutored in Chinese ways) was an affront, and measures taken against them a return to the coercions of the past.” 7 Facing pressure for stronger measures from both the right and the left, Bush maintained that
we could not look the other way when it came to human rights or political reforms: but we could make plain our views in terms of encouraging their strides of progress (which were many since the death of Mao) rather than unleashing an endless barrage of criticism. . . . The question for me was how to condemn what we saw as wrong and react appropriately while also remaining engaged with China, even if the relationship must now be “on hold.” 8
Bush walked this tightrope with skill and elegance. When Congress imposed punitive measures on Beijing, he softened some of the edges. At the same time, to express his convictions, on June 5 and June 20, he suspended high-level government exchanges; halted military cooperation and sales of police, military, and dual-use equipment; and announced opposition to new loans to the People’s Republic by the World Bank and other international financial institutions. American sanctions dovetailed with comparable steps undertaken by the European Community, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, and with expressions of regret and condemnation from governments around the world. Congress, reflecting popular pressure, pushed for even stronger measures, including legislative sanctions (which would be more difficult to lift than administrative sanctions imposed by the President, which were at the chief executive’s discretion) and a law automatically extending the visas of all Chinese students currently in the United States. 9
The U.S. and Chinese governments—which had acted as de facto allies for much of the previous decade—were drifting apart, with resentment and recrimination building on both sides in the absence of high-level contacts. Determined to avoid an irreparable break, Bush appealed to his long-standing relationship with Deng. He drafted a long and personal letter on June 21, addressing Deng “as a friend” and bypassing the bureaucracy and his own ban on high-level exchanges. 10 In a deft diplomatic performance, Bush expressed his “great reverence for Chinese history, culture and tradition” and avoided any terms that might suggest he was dictating to Deng how to govern China. At the same time, Bush urged China’s paramount leader to understand popular outrage in the United States as a natural outgrowth of American idealism:
I ask you as well to remember the principles on which my young country was founded. Those principles are democracy and freedom—freedom of speech, freedom of assemblage, freedom from arbitrary authority. It is reverence for those principles which inevitably affects the way Americans view and react to events in other countries. It is not a reaction of arrogance or of a desire to force others to our beliefs but of simple faith in the enduring value of those principles and their universal applicability. 11
Bush suggested that he himself was operating at the limits of his domestic political influence:
I will leave what followed to the history books, but again, with their own eyes the people of the world saw the turmoil and the bloodshed with which the demonstrations were ended. Various countries reacted in various ways. Based on the principles I have described above, the actions that I took as President of the United States could not be avoided. 12
Bush appealed to Deng to exercise compassion because of the effect this would have on the American public—and, implicitly, on Bush’s own freedom of maneuver:
Any statement that could be made from China that drew from earlier statements about peacefully resolving further disputes with protestors would be very well received here. Any clemency that could be shown the student demonstrators would be applauded worldwide. 13
To explore these ideas, Bush proposed sending a high-level emissary to Beijing “in total confidence” to “speak with total candor to you representing my heartfelt convictions on these matters.” Though he had not shied from expressing the differences in perspectives between the two nations, Bush closed with an appeal for a continuation of the existing cooperation: “We must not let the aftermath of the tragic recent events undermine a vital relationship patiently built up over the past seventeen years.” 14
Deng responded to Bush’s overture the next day, welcoming an American envoy to Beijing. It was a measure of the importance Bush attached to the relationship with China and his confidence in Deng that, on July 1, he sent National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger to Beijing three weeks after the violence in Tiananmen Square. The mission was a closely guarded secret, known only to a handful of high-level officials in Washington and Ambassador James Lilley, who was recalled from Beijing to be briefed in person about the impending visit. 15 Scowcroft and Eagleburger flew into Beijing in an unmarked C-141 military transport plane; news of their arrival was so tightly held that Chinese air defense forces allegedly called President Yang Shangkun to inquire whether they should shoot down the mystery plane. 16 The plane was equipped for refueling in midair to avoid the need for a stopover along the route and carried its own communications equipment so the party could communicate directly with the White House. No flags were displayed at the meetings or banquets, and the visit was not reported in the news.
Scowcroft and Eagleburger met with Deng, Premier Li Peng, and Foreign Minister Qian Qichen. Deng praised Bush and reciprocated his expressions of friendship but placed the blame for the strain in relations on the United States:
This was an earthshaking event and it is very unfortunate that the United States is too deeply involved in it. . . . We have been feeling since the outset of these events more than two months ago that the various aspects of US foreign policy have actually cornered China. That’s the feeling of us here . . . because the aim of the counterrevolutionary rebellion was to overthrow the People’s Republic of China and our socialist system. If they should succeed in obtaining that aim the world would be a different one. To be frank, this could even lead to war. 17
Did he mean civil war or war by disgruntled or revanche-seeking neighbors or both? “Sino-US relations,” Deng warned, “are in a very delicate state and you can even say that they are in a dangerous state.” Punitive American policies were “leading to the breakup of the relationship,” he argued, although he held out hope that it could be preserved. 18 Then, falling back on the traditional stance of defiance, Deng spoke at length of China’s imperviousness to outside pressure and its leadership’s unique, battle-hardened determination. “We don’t care about the sanctions,” Deng told the American envoys. “We are not scared by them.” 19 Americans, he said, “must understand history”:
[W]e have won the victory represented by the founding of the People’s Republic of China by fighting a twenty-two-year war with the cost of more than twenty million lives, a war fought by the Chinese people under the leadership of the Communist Party. . . . There is no force whatsoever that can substitute for the People’s Republic of China represented by the Communist Party of China. This is not an empty word. It is something which has been proven and tested over several decades of experience. 20
It was up to the United States to improve relations, Deng stressed, quoting a Chinese proverb: “[I]t is up to the person who tied the knot to untie it.” 21 For its part, Beijing would not waver in “punishing those instigators of the rebellion,” Deng vowed. “Otherwise how can the PRC continue to exist?” 22
Scowcroft replied by stressing the themes that Bush had emphasized in his letters to Deng. Close ties between the United States and China reflected both countries’ strategic and economic interests. But they also brought into close contact societies with “two different cultures, backgrounds, and perceptions.” Now Beijing and Washington found themselves in a world in which Chinese domestic practices, broadcast on television, could have a profound effect on American public opinion.
This U.S. reaction, Scowcroft argued, reflected deeply held values. These American values “reflect our own beliefs and traditions,” which were just as much a part of the “diversity between our two societies” as Chinese sensitivities regarding foreign interference: “What the American people perceived in the demonstrations they saw—rightly or wrongly—[as] an expression of values which represent their most cherished beliefs, stemming from the American Revolution.” 23
The Chinese government’s treatment of demonstrators was, Scowcroft conceded, a “wholly internal affair of China.” Yet it was “an obvious fact” that such treatment produced an American popular reaction, “which is real and with which the President must cope.” Bush believed in the importance of preserving the long-term relationship between the United States and China. But he was obliged to respect “the feelings of the American people,” which demanded some concrete expression of disapproval from its government. Sensitivity by both sides would be required to navigate the impasse. 24
The difficulty was that both sides were right. Deng felt his regime under siege; Bush and Scowcroft considered America’s deepest values challenged.
Premier Li Peng and Qian Qichen stressed similar points, and the two sides parted without reaching any concrete agreement. Scowcroft explained the impasse, as diplomats often do to explain deadlock, as a successful enterprise in keeping open lines of communication: “Both sides had been frank and open. We had aired our differences and listened to each other, but we still had a distance to go before we bridged the gap.” 25
Matters could not rest there. By the fall of 1989, relations between China and the United States were at their most fraught point since contact had been resumed in 1971. Neither government wanted a break, but neither seemed in a position to avoid it. A break, once it occurred, could develop its own momentum, much as the Sino-Soviet controversy evolved from a series of tactical disputes into a strategic confrontation. America would have lost diplomatic flexibility. China would have had to slow down its economic momentum or perhaps even abandon it for a substantial period with serious consequences for its domestic stability. Both would have lost the opportunity to build on the many areas of bilateral cooperation that had greatly increased in the late 1980s and to work together to overcome the upheavals threatening in different parts of the world.
Amidst these tensions, I accepted an invitation from China’s leaders to come to Beijing that November to form my own views. The President and General Scowcroft were told of the planned private visit. Before I left for Beijing, Scowcroft gave me a briefing on the status of our relations with China—a procedure that due to the long history of my involvement with China has been followed also by every other administration. Scowcroft informed me of the discussions with Deng. He gave me no specific message to convey, but if the occasion arose, he hoped I would reinforce the administration’s views. I would as usual report my impressions to Washington.
Like most Americans, I was shocked by the way the Tiananmen protest was ended. But unlike most Americans, I had had the opportunity to observe the Herculean task Deng had undertaken for a decade and a half to remold his country: moving Communists toward acceptance of decentralization and reform; traditional Chinese insularity toward modernity and a globalized world—a prospect China had often rejected. And I had witnessed his steady efforts to improve Sino-American ties.
The China I saw on this occasion had lost the self-assurance of my previous visits. In the Mao period, Chinese leaders represented by Zhou had acted with the self-confidence conferred by ideology and a judgment on international affairs seasoned by a historical memory extending over millennia. The China of the early Deng period exhibited an almost naive faith that overcoming the memory of the suffering of the Cultural Revolution would provide the guide toward economic and political progress based on individual initiative. But in the decade since Deng had first promulgated his reform program in 1978, China had experienced, together with the exhilaration of success, some of its penalties. The movement from central planning to more decentralized decision making turned out to be in constant jeopardy from two directions: the resistance of an entrenched bureaucracy with a vested interest in the status quo; and the pressures from impatient reformers for whom the process was taking too long. Economic decentralization led to demands for pluralism in political decision making. In that sense, the Chinese upheaval reflected the intractable dilemmas of reform Communism.
Over Tiananmen, the Chinese leaders had opted for political stability. They had done so hesitantly after nearly six weeks of internal controversy. I heard no emotional justification of the events of June 4; they were treated like an unfortunate accident that had descended as if from nowhere. The Chinese leaders, stunned by the reactions of the outside world and their own divisions, were concerned with reestablishing their international standing. Even allowing for China’s traditional skill in putting the foreigner on the defensive, my opposite numbers had a genuine difficulty; they could not understand why the United States took umbrage at an event that had injured no American material interests and for which China claimed no validity outside its own territory. Explanations of America’s historic commitment to human rights were dismissed, either as a form of Western “bullying” or as a sign of the unwarranted righteousness of a country that had its own human rights problems.
In our conversations, the Chinese leaders pursued their basic strategic objective, which was to restore a working relationship with the United States. In a sense, the conversation returned to the pattern of the early meetings with Zhou. Would the two societies find a way to cooperate? And, if so, on what basis? Roles were now reversed. In the early meetings Chinese leaders emphasized the distinctiveness of Communist ideology. Now they sought a rationale for compatible views.
Deng established the basic theme, which was that peace in the world depended to a considerable extent on order in China:
It is very easy for chaos to come overnight. It will not be easy to maintain order and tranquility. Had the Chinese government not taken resolute steps in Tiananmen, there would have been a civil war in China. And because China has one fifth of the world’s population, instability in China would cause instability in the world which could even involve the big powers.
The interpretation of history expresses the memory of a nation. And for this generation of China’s leaders, the traumatic event of China’s history was the collapse of central authority in China in the nineteenth century, which tempted the outside world into invasion, quasicolonialism, or colonial competition and produced genocidal levels of casualties in civil wars, as in the Taiping Rebellion.
The purpose of a stable China, Deng said, was to contribute constructively to a new international order. Relations with the United States were central: “This is one thing,” Deng said to me,
I have to make clear to others after my retirement. 26 The first thing I did after my release from prison was to devote attention to furthering Sino-US relations. It is also my desire to put an end to the recent past, to enable Sino-US relations to return to normal. I hope to tell my friend President Bush that we will see a furthering of Sino-US relations during his term as President.
The obstacle, according to Li Ruihuan (Party ideologist and considered by analysts as among the liberal element) was that “Americans think they understand China better than the Chinese people themselves.” What China could not accept was dictation from abroad:
Since 1840 the Chinese people have been subjected to foreign bullying; it was a semi-feudal society then. . . . Mao fought all of his life to say that China should be friendly to countries that treat us with equality. In 1949 Mao said “the Chinese people have stood up.” By standing up he meant the Chinese people were going to enjoy equality with other nations. We don’t like to hear that others ask us what to do. But Americans tend to like to ask others to do this or that. The Chinese people do not want to yield to the instructions of others.
I tried to explain to the Vice Premier in charge of foreign policy, Qian Qichen, the domestic pressures and the values compelling American actions. Qian would not hear of it. China would act at its own pace based on its determination of its national interest, which could not be prescribed by foreigners:
QIAN: We are trying to maintain political and economic stability and push ahead with reform and contact with the outside world. We can’t move under US pressure. We are moving in that direction anyway.
KISSINGER: But that’s what I mean. As you move in that direction it could have presentational aspects that would be beneficial.
QIAN: China started economic reform out of China’s own interest not because of what the US wanted.
International relations, in the Chinese view, were determined by the national interest and the national purpose. If national interests were compatible, cooperation was possible, even necessary. There was no substitute for a congruence of interests. Domestic structures were irrelevant to this process—an issue we had already encountered in the differing views regarding attitudes toward the Khmer Rouge. According to Deng, the U.S.-China relationship had thrived when this principle had been observed:
At the time that you and President Nixon decided to reestablish relations with China, China was not only striving for socialism but also for Communism. The Gang of Four preferred a system of communist poverty. You accepted our communism then. There is therefore no reason not to accept Chinese socialism now. The days are gone when state to state relations are handled on the basis of social systems. Countries with different social systems can have friendly relations now. We can find many common interests between China and the U.S.
There was a time when a Chinese leader’s abjuring a crusading role for Communist ideology would have been greeted by the democratic world as proof of a beneficent evolution. Now that the heirs of Mao were arguing that the age of ideology was over and that national interest was the determinant, eminent Americans were insisting that democratic institutions were required to guarantee a compatibility of national interests. That proposition—verging on an article of faith for many American analysts—would be difficult to demonstrate from historical experience. When World War I started, most governments in Europe (including Britain, France, and Germany) were governed by essentially democratic institutions. Nevertheless, World War I—a catastrophe from which Europe has never fully recovered—was enthusiastically approved by all elected parliaments.
But neither is the calculation of national interest self-evident. National power or national interest may be the most complicated elements of international relations to calculate precisely. Most wars occur as the result of a combination of misjudgment of the power relationships and domestic pressures. In the period under discussion, different American administrations have come up with varying solutions to the conundrum of balancing a commitment to American political ideals with the pursuit of peaceful and productive U.S.-China relations. The administration of George H. W. Bush chose to advance American preferences through engagement; that of Bill Clinton, in its first term, would attempt pressure. Both had to face the reality that in foreign policy, a nation’s highest aspirations tend to be fulfilled only in imperfect stages.
The basic direction of a society is shaped by its values, which define its ultimate goals. At the same time, accepting the limits of one’s capacities is one of the tests of statesmanship; it implies a judgment of the possible. Philosophers are responsible to their intuition. Statesmen are judged by their ability to sustain their concepts over time.
The attempt to alter the domestic structure of a country of the magnitude of China from the outside is likely to involve vast unintended consequences. American society should never abandon its commitment to human dignity. It does not diminish the importance of that commitment to acknowledge that Western concepts of human rights and individual liberties may not be directly translatable, in a finite period of time geared to Western political and news cycles, to a civilization for millennia ordered around different concepts. Nor can the traditional Chinese fear of political chaos be dismissed as an anachronistic irrelevancy needing only “correction” by Western enlightenment. Chinese history, especially in the last two centuries, provides numerous examples in which a splintering of political authority—sometimes inaugurated with high expectations of increased liberties—tempted social and ethnic upheaval; frequently it was the most militant, not the most liberal, elements that prevailed.
By the same principle, countries dealing with America need to understand that the basic values of our country include an inalienable concept of human rights and that American judgments can never be separated from America’s perceptions of the practice of democracy. There are abuses bound to evoke an American reaction, even at the cost of an overall relationship. Such events can drive American foreign policy beyond national interest calculations. No American President can ignore them, but he must be careful to define them and be aware of the principle of unintended consequences. No foreign leader should dismiss them. How to define and how to establish the balance will determine the nature of America’s relationship to China and perhaps the peace of the world.
The statesmen on both sides faced this choice in November 1989. Deng, as always practical, suggested an effort to develop a new concept of international order, which established nonintervention in domestic affairs into a general principle of foreign policy: “I believe we should propose the establishment of a new international political order. We have not made much headway in establishing a new international economic order. So at present we should work on a new political order which would abide by the five principles of peaceful coexistence.” One of which, of course, was to proscribe intervention in the domestic affairs of other states. 27
Beyond all these strategic principles loomed a crucial intangible. Calculation of national interest was not simply a mathematical formula. Attention had to be paid to national dignity and self-respect. Deng urged me to convey to Bush his desire to come to an agreement with the United States, which, as the stronger country, should make the first move. 28 The quest for a new phase of cooperation would not be able to avoid human rights issues altogether. Deng’s query of who should initiate a new dialogue was, in the end, answered by Deng himself, who began a dialogue over the fate of a single individual: a dissident named Fang Lizhi.
The Fang Lizhi Controversy
By the time of my visit in November 1989, the dissident physicist Fang Lizhi had become a symbol of the divide between the United States and China. Fang was an eloquent proponent of Western-style parliamentary democracy and individual rights with a long history of pushing at the boundaries of official tolerance. In 1957, he had been expelled from the Communist Party as part of the Anti-Rightist Campaign, and during the Cultural Revolution he was imprisoned for a year for “reactionary” activities. Rehabilitated after Mao’s death, Fang pursued a successful academic career, speaking out in favor of increased political liberalization. Following the pro-democracy demonstrations of 1986, Fang was again reprimanded, though he continued to circulate calls for reform.
When President Bush visited China in February 1989, Fang was included on the list the U.S. Embassy had recommended to the White House to be invited to a state dinner hosted by the President in Beijing. The Embassy followed what they thought was the precedent of Reagan’s visit to Moscow during which he met self-declared dissidents. The White House approved the list—though probably unaware of the intensity of the Chinese views with respect to Fang. Fang’s inclusion on the invitation list provoked a contretemps between the United States and the Chinese government and within the new Bush administration. 29 Eventually it was agreed between the Embassy and the Chinese government that Fang would be seated far from Chinese government officials. On the night of the event, Chinese security services stopped Fang’s car and blocked him from reaching the venue.
Though Fang did not personally participate in the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, the student protesters were in sympathy with the principles he advocated, and Fang was believed to be a likely target for government reprisal. In the immediate wake of the June 4 crackdown, Fang and his wife sought refuge at the American Embassy. Several days later, the Chinese government issued an arrest warrant for Fang and his wife for “crimes of counter-propaganda and instigation before and after the recent turmoil.” Government publications demanded that the United States turn over the “criminal who created this violence” or face a deterioration of U.S.-China relations. 30 “We had no choice but to take him in,” Bush concluded in his diary, “but it’s going to be a real stick in the eye to the Chinese.” 31
Fang’s presence in the Embassy was a source of constant tension: the Chinese government was unwilling to let its most prominent critic leave the country for fear that he would agitate from abroad; Washington was unwilling to turn over a dissident espousing liberal democracy to face what was certain to be harsh retribution. In a cable to Washington, Ambassador James Lilley noted of Fang, “He is with us as a constant reminder of our connection to ‘bourgeois liberalism’ and puts us at odds with the regime here. He is a living symbol of our conflict with China over human rights.” 32
In his June 21 letter to Deng Xiaoping, Bush raised “the matter of Fang Lizhi,” regretting that it was a “high-profile wedge driven between us.” Bush defended the American decision to grant Fang refuge—based on, he asserted, “our widely-accepted interpretation of international law”—and averred that “[w]e cannot now put Fang out of the Embassy without some assurance that he will not be in physical danger.” Bush offered the possibility of settling the matter discreetly, noting that other governments had solved similar issues by “quietly permitting departure through expulsion.” 33 But the issue proved resistant to negotiation, and Fang and his wife remained in the Embassy.
During the briefing General Scowcroft had given me prior to my departure for Beijing he familiarized me with the case. He urged me not to raise it, since the administration had said all it could say. But I could respond to Chinese initiatives within the framework of existing policy. I had followed his advice. I had not raised the Fang Lizhi issue, nor had any of my Chinese interlocutors. During my farewell call on Deng, he suddenly introduced the subject after a few desultory comments on the reform problem and used it to suggest a package deal. An extended summary of the relevant exchange will give the flavor of the mood in Beijing six months after Tiananmen:
DENG: I talked with President Bush about the Fang Lizhi case.
KISSINGER: As you know, the President did not know about the invitation to the banquet until it was already public.
DENG: He told me that.
KISSINGER: Since you have raised Fang, I would like to express a consideration to you. I did not raise the issue in any of my other conversations here because I know that it is a matter of great delicacy and affects Chinese dignity. But I think your best friends in America would be relieved if some way could be found to get him out of the Embassy and let him leave the country. There is no other single step which would so impress the American public as having it happen before there is too much agitation.
At this point, Deng got up from his seat and unscrewed the microphones between his seat and mine as a symbol that he wanted to talk privately.
DENG: Can you make a suggestion?
KISSINGER: My suggestion would be that you expel him from China and we agree that as a government we will make no political use of him whatsoever. Perhaps we would encourage him to go to some country like Sweden where he would be far away from the US Congress and our press. An arrangement like this could make a deep impression on the American public, more than a move on any technical subject.
Deng wanted more specific assurances. Was it possible for the American government to “require Fang to write a confession” to crimes under Chinese law; or for Washington to guarantee that “after his expulsion [from China] . . . Fang will say and do nothing opposing China”? Deng broadened this to a request that Washington “undertake the responsibility that it prevent further nonsense being uttered by Fang and by [other Chinese] demonstrators” currently in the United States. Deng was looking for a way out. But the measures he proposed were outside the legal authority of the American government.
DENG: What would you think if we were to expel him after he has written a paper confessing to his crimes?
KISSINGER: I would be surprised if he would do this. I was at the Embassy this morning, but I did not see Fang.
DENG: But he would have to do it if the US side insists. This issue was started by people at the US Embassy including some good friends of yours and including people I thought of as friends. 34
What if the American side required Fang to write a confession and after that we could expel him as an ordinary criminal and he can go where he wants. If this won’t do, what about another idea: The US undertakes the responsibility after his expulsion that Fang will say and do nothing opposing China. He should not use the US or another country to oppose the PRC.
KISSINGER: Let me comment on the first proposal. If we ask him to sign a confession, assuming we could even do that, what matters is not what he says in the Embassy but what he says when he gets out of China. If he says that the American government forced him to confess, it will be worse for everyone than if he did not confess. The importance of releasing him is as a symbol of the self-confidence of China. To contradict the caricatures that many of your opponents have made of China in the US.
DENG: Then let’s consider the second proposal. The US would say that after he leaves China, he will make no remarks opposing the PRC. Can the US give such a guarantee?
KISSINGER: Well, I am speaking to you as a friend.
DENG: I know. I am not asking you to undertake the agreement.
KISSINGER: What might be possible is that the US government agrees that the US government will make no use of Fang in any way, for example on the Voice of America or in any way which the President can control. Also we could promise to advise him not to do it on his own. We could agree that he would not be received by the President or given any official status by any US governmental organization.
This led Deng to tell me about a letter he had just received from Bush proposing the visit of a special envoy to brief him on the forthcoming U.S. summit with Gorbachev and to review the Sino-American relationship. Deng accepted the idea and connected it with the Fang discussions as a way to find an overall solution:
In the process of solving the Fang issue, other issues may also be put forward in order to achieve a package solution to all the issues. Now things are like this. I asked Bush to move first; he asks me to move first. I think if we can get a package then there is no question of the order of the steps.
The “package deal” was described by Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qichen in his memoirs:
(1) China would permit Fang Lizhi and his wife to leave the U.S. embassy in Beijing to go to the United States or a third country, (2) The United States, in ways that suited itself, should make an explicit announcement that it would lift the sanctions on China, (3) Both sides should make efforts to conclude deals on one or two major economic cooperation projects, (4) The United States should extend an invitation to Jiang Zemin [just appointed as General Secretary of the Communist Party to replace Zhao Ziyang] to pay an official visit the following year. 35
After a further exchange on the modalities of Fang’s possible exile, Deng ended this part of the conversation:
DENG: Will Bush be pleased and agree to this proposal? KISSINGER: My opinion is that he will be pleased with it.
I expected Bush to welcome the demonstration of Chinese concern and flexibility, but I doubted that the pace of improving relations could be as rapid as Deng envisaged.
A renewed understanding between China and the United States had become all the more important because the growing upheaval in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe seemed to undermine the premises of the existing triangular relationship. With the Soviet empire disintegrating, what had become of the motive for the original rapprochement between the United States and China? The urgency was underlined as I left Beijing the evening of my meeting with Deng and learned, at my first stop in the United States, that the Berlin Wall had fallen, shattering the premises of Cold War foreign policy.
The political revolutions in Eastern Europe nearly engulfed the package deal. When I returned to Washington three days later, I reported my conversation with Deng to Bush, Scowcroft, and Secretary of State James Baker at a dinner in the White House. As it turned out, China was not the principal subject. The subject of overriding importance for my hosts at that moment was the impact of the fall of the Berlin Wall and an imminent meeting between Bush and Gorbachev—set for December 2–3, 1989, in Malta. Both issues required some immediate decision about tactics and long-term strategy. Were we heading for the collapse of the East German satellite where twenty Soviet divisions were still stationed? Would there now be two German states, albeit a non-Communist East German one? If unification became the goal, by what diplomacy should it be sought? And what should America’s attitude be in foreseeable contingencies?
Amidst the drama surrounding the Soviet collapse in Eastern Europe, Deng’s package deal could not receive the priority it would have elicited in less tumultuous times.
The special mission I discussed with Deng did not take place until mid-December, when Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger visited Beijing for the second time in six months. The visit was not secret as the July trip had been (and at this point, still remained) but was intended to be low-profile to avoid congressional and media controversy. However, the Chinese side engineered a photo op of Scowcroft toasting Qian Qichen, provoking considerable consternation in the United States. Scowcroft would later recount:
[A]s the ritual toasts began at the end of the welcoming dinner given by the foreign minister, the television crews reappeared. It was an awkward situation for me. I could go through with the ceremony and be seen as toasting those the press was labeling “the butchers of Tiananmen Square,” or refuse to toast and put in jeopardy the whole purpose of the trip. I chose the former and became, to my deep chagrin, an instant celebrity—in the most negative sense of the term. 36
The incident demonstrated the conflicting imperatives of the two sides. China wanted to demonstrate to its public that its isolation was ending; Washington sought to draw a minimum of attention, to avoid a domestic controversy until an agreement had been reached.
Inevitably, discussion of the Soviet Union occupied much of Scowcroft and Eagleburger’s trip, though in quite the opposite direction from what had become traditional: the subject now was no longer the military menace of the USSR, but its growing weakness. Qian Qichen predicted the disintegration of the Soviet Union and described Beijing’s surprise when Gorbachev, on his visit in May, at the height of the Tiananmen demonstrations, asked China for economic assistance. Scowcroft later recounted the Chinese version of these events:
The Soviets did not grasp the economy very well and Gorbachev often did not grasp what he was asking of it. Qian predicted the collapsing economy and the nationalities problems would result in turmoil. “I have not seen Gorbachev taking any measures,” he added. “Gorbachev has called on the Chinese side to provide consumer necessities,” he told us. “ . . . [W]e can provide consumer goods and they will pay back in raw materials. They also want loans. We were quite taken aback when they first raised this. We have agreed to extend some money to them.” 37
The Chinese leaders put forward their “package” solution to Scowcroft and linked the release of Fang Lizhi to the removal of American sanctions. The administration preferred to treat the Fang case as a separate humanitarian issue to be settled in its own right.
Further upheavals in the Soviet bloc—including the bloody overthrow of Romania’s Communist leader, Nicolae Ceauşescu—bolstered the sense of siege in the Chinese Communist Party. The disintegration of the Eastern European Communist states also strengthened the hand of those in Washington who argued that the United States should wait for what they saw as the seemingly inevitable collapse of the Beijing government. In this atmosphere, neither side was in a position to depart from its established positions. Negotiations over Fang’s release would continue through the American Embassy, and the two sides would not reach a deal until June 1990—over a year after Fang and his wife first sought refuge and eight months after Deng had put forward his package proposal. 38
In the meantime, the annual reauthorization of China’s Most Favored Nation trade status—required for “nonmarket” countries under the terms of the 1974 Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which made Most Favored Nation treatment conditional on emigration practices—was transformed into a forum for congressional condemnation of China’s human rights record. The underlying assumption of the debate was that any agreement with China was a favor, and under the circumstances repugnant to American democratic ideals; trade privileges should thus be predicated on China’s moving toward an American conception of human rights and political liberties. A sense of isolation began to descend on Beijing and a mood of triumphalism on Washington. In the spring of 1990, as Communist governments collapsed in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Romania, Deng circulated a stark warning to Party members:
Everyone should be very clear that, in the present international situation, all the attention of the enemy will be concentrated on China. It will use every pretext to cause trouble, to create difficulties and pressures for us. [China therefore needs] stability, stability, and still more stability. The next three to five years will be extremely difficult for our party and our country, and extremely important. If we stand fast and survive them, our cause will develop quickly. If we collapse, China’s history will regress for several tens of years, even for a hundred years. 39
The 12- and 24-Character Statements
At the close of the dramatic year, Deng chose to carry out his long-planned retirement. During the 1980s, he had taken many steps to end the traditional practice of centralized power ending only by the death of the incumbent or the loss of the Mandate of Heaven—criteria both indefinite and inviting chaos. He had established an advisory council of elders to which he retired leaders who were holding on to lifetime tenure. He had told visitors—including me—that he himself intended to retire soon to the chairmanship of that body.
Starting in early 1990, Deng began a gradual withdrawal from high office—the first Chinese leader to have done so in the modern period. Tiananmen may have accelerated the decision so that Deng could oversee the transition while a new leader was establishing himself. In December 1989, Brent Scowcroft proved to be the last foreign visitor to be received by Deng. At the same time, Deng stopped attending public functions. By the time of his death in 1997, he had become a recluse.
As he receded from the scene, Deng decided to buttress his successor by leaving behind a set of maxims for his guidance and that of the next generation of leaders. In issuing these instructions to Communist Party officials, Deng chose a method from Chinese classical history. The instructions were stark and succinct. Written in classical Chinese poetic style, they embraced two documents: a 24-character instruction and a 12-character explanation restricted to high officials. The 24-character instruction read:
Observe carefully; secure our position; cope with affairs calmly; hide our capacities and bide our time; be good at maintaining a low profile; and never claim leadership. 40
The 12-character policy explanation followed with an even more restricted circulation among the leaders. It read:
Enemy troops are outside the walls. They are stronger than we. We should be mainly on the defensive. 41
Against whom and what? The multiple-character statements were silent on that issue, probably because Deng could assume that his audience would understand instinctively that their country’s position had grown precarious, both domestically and even more so internationally.
Deng’s maxims were, on one level, an evocation of historic China surrounded by potentially hostile forces. In periods of resurgence, China would dominate its environs. In periods of decline, it would play for time, confident that its culture and political discipline would enable it to reclaim the greatness that was its due. The 12-character statement told China’s leaders that perilous times had arrived. The outside world had always had difficulty dealing with this unique organism, aloof yet universal, majestic yet given over to occasional bouts of chaos. Now the aged leader of an ancient people was giving a last instruction to his society, feeling besieged as it was attempting to reform itself.
Deng sought to rally his people not by appealing to its emotions or to Chinese nationalism, as he easily could have. Instead he invoked its ancient virtues: calm in the face of adversity; high analytical ability to be put in the service of duty; discipline in pursuit of a common purpose. The deepest challenge, he saw, was less to survive the trials sketched in the 12-character statement than to prepare for the future, when the immediate danger had been overcome.
Was the 24-character statement intended as guidance for a moment of weakness or a permanent maxim? At the moment, China’s reform was threatened by the consequences of internal turmoil and the pressure of foreign countries. But at the next stage, when reform had succeeded, China’s growth might trigger another aspect of the world’s concern. Then the international community might seek to resist China’s march to becoming a dominant power. Did Deng, at the moment of great crisis, foresee that the gravest danger to China might arise upon its eventual resurgence? In that interpretation, Deng urged his people to “hide our capacities and bide our time” and “never claim leadership”—that is to say, do not evoke unnecessary fears by excessive assertiveness.
At its low point of turmoil and isolation, Deng may well have feared both that China might consume itself in its contemporary crisis and also that its future might depend on whether the leaders of the next generation could gain the perspective needed to recognize the perils of excessive self-confidence. Was the statement addressed to China’s immediate travail, or to whether it could practice the 24-character principle when it was strong enough to no longer have to observe it? On China’s answer to these questions depends much of the future of Sino-American relations.
CHAPTER 16
What Kind of Reform?
Deng’s Southern Tour
I N JUNE 1989, with the Communist Party leadership divided on what to do, the Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, appointed by Deng three years earlier, was purged over his handling of the crisis. The Party Secretary of Shanghai, Jiang Zemin, was elevated to head the Communist Party.
The crisis confronting Jiang was one of the most complex in the history of the People’s Republic. China was isolated, challenged abroad by trade sanctions and at home by the aftermath of nationwide unrest. Communism was in the process of disintegrating in every other country in the world except North Korea, Cuba, and Vietnam. Prominent Chinese dissidents had fled abroad, where they received asylum, a sympathetic ear, and freedom to organize. Tibet and Xinjiang were restive. The Dalai Lama was feted abroad; in the same year as Tiananmen, he won the Nobel Peace Prize amidst an upsurge of international attention to the cause of Tibetan autonomy.
After every social and political upheaval, the most serious challenge for governance is how to restore a sense of cohesion. But in the name of what principle? The domestic reaction to the crisis was more threatening to reform in China than the sanctions from abroad. Conservative members of the Politburo, whose support Deng had needed during the Tiananmen crisis, blamed Deng’s “evolutionary policy” for the crisis and pressured Jiang to return to traditional Maoist verities. They went so far as to seek to reverse seemingly well-established policies such as the condemnation of the Cultural Revolution. A Politburo member named Deng Liqun (also known as “Little Deng”) asserted: “If we fail to wage a resolute struggle against liberalization or [against] capitalistic reform and opening up, our socialist cause will be ruined.” 1 Deng and Jiang held exactly the opposite view. The Chinese political structure, in their perception, could be given a new impetus only by accelerating the reform program. They saw in improving the standard of living and enhancing productivity the best guarantee of social stability.
In this atmosphere Deng, in early 1992, emerged from retirement for his last great public gesture. He chose the medium of an “inspection tour” through southern China to urge continued economic liberalization and build public support for Jiang’s reform leadership. With reform efforts stagnating and his protégés losing ground to traditionalists in the Party hierarchy, the eighty-seven-year-old Deng set out with his daughter Deng Nan and several close associates on a tour through economic hubs in southern China, including Shenzhen and Zhuhai, two of the Special Economic Zones established under the 1980s reform program. It was a crusade for reform on behalf of “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” which meant a role for free markets, scope for foreign investment, and appeal to individual initiative.
Deng, at this point, had no official title or formal function. Nevertheless, like an itinerant preacher, he turned up at schools, hightechnology facilities, model businesses, and other symbols of his vision of Chinese reform, challenging his countrymen to redouble their efforts and setting far-reaching goals for China’s economic and intellectual development. The national press (which was, at the time, controlled by conservative elements) initially ignored the speeches. But accounts in the Hong Kong press eventually filtered back to mainland China.
In time, Deng’s “Southern Tour” would take on an almost mythical significance, and his speeches would serve as the blueprint for another two decades of Chinese political and economic policy. Even today, billboards in China portray images and quotations from Deng’s Southern Tour, including his famous dictum that “development is the absolute principle.”
Deng set out to vindicate the program of reform against the charge that it was betraying China’s socialist heritage. Economic reform and development, he argued, were fundamentally “revolutionary” acts. Abandoning reform, Deng warned, would lead China down a “blind alley.” To “win the trust and support of the people,” the program of economic liberalization must continue for “a hundred years.” Reform and opening up, Deng insisted, had allowed the People’s Republic to avoid civil war in 1989. He reiterated his condemnation of the Cultural Revolution, describing it as beyond failure, a kind of civil war. 2
The heir of Mao’s China was advocating market principles, risk taking, private initiative, and the importance of productivity and entrepreneurship. The profit principle, according to Deng, reflected not an alternative theory to Marxism but an observation of human nature. Government would lose popular support if it punished entrepreneurs for their success. Deng’s advice was that China should “be bolder,” that it should redouble its efforts and “dare to experiment”: “We must not act like women with bound feet. Once we are sure that something should be done, we should dare to experiment and break a new path. . . . Who dares claim that he is 100 percent sure of success and that he is taking no risks?” 3
Deng dismissed criticism that his reforms were leading China down the “capitalist road.” Rejecting decades of Maoist indoctrination, he invoked his familiar maxim that what mattered was the result, not the doctrine under which it was achieved. Nor should China be afraid of foreign investment:
At the current stage, foreign-funded enterprises in China are allowed to make some money in accordance with existing laws and policies. But the government levies taxes on those enterprises, workers get wages from them, and we learn technology and managerial skills. In addition, we can get information from them that will help us open more markets. 4
In the end, Deng attacked the “left” of the Communist Party, which was in a sense part of his own early history, when he had been Mao’s “enforcer” in creating agricultural communes: “At present, we are being affected by both Right and ‘Left’ tendencies. But it is the ‘Left’ tendencies that have the deepest roots. . . . In the history of the Party, those tendencies have led to dire consequences. Some fine things were destroyed overnight.” 5
Prodding his countrymen by appealing to their national pride, Deng challenged China to match the growth rates of neighboring countries. In a sign of how far China has come in less than twenty years since the Southern Tour, Deng, in 1992, extolled the “four big items” it was essential to make available to consumers in the countryside: a bicycle, a sewing machine, a radio, and a wristwatch. China’s economy could “reach a new stage every few years,” he declared, and China would succeed if the Chinese dared to “emancipate our minds and act freely” in responding to challenges as they arose. 6
Science and technology were the key. Echoing his pathbreaking speeches from the 1970s, Deng insisted that “intellectuals are part of the working class”; in other words, they were eligible for Communist Party membership. In an overture to Tiananmen supporters, Deng urged intellectuals who were in exile to return to China. If they possessed specialized knowledge and skills, they would be welcomed regardless of their previous attitudes: “They should be told that if they want to make their contributions, it would be better for them to come home. I hope that concerted efforts will be made to accelerate progress in China’s scientific, technological and educational undertakings. . . . We should all love our country and help to develop it.” 7
What an extraordinary reversal in the convictions of the octogenarian revolutionary who had helped build, often ruthlessly, the economic system he was now dismantling. When serving in Yan’an with Mao during the civil war, Deng gave no indication that he would, fifty years later, be traveling around his country, urging reform of the very revolution he had enforced. Until he ran afoul of the Cultural Revolution, he had been one of Mao’s principal aides, distinguished by his single-mindedness.
Over the decades, a gradual shift had taken place. Deng had come to redefine the criteria of good governance in terms of the well-being and development of the ordinary person. A considerable amount of nationalism was also involved in this dedication to rapid development, even if that required adopting methods prevalent in the previously reviled capitalist world. As one of Deng’s children later told the American scholar and head of the National Committee on United States–China Relations David Lampton:
In the mid-1970s, my father looked around China’s periphery, to the small dragon economies [Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea]. They were growing at eight to ten percent per year and these economies had a considerable technological lead over China. If we were to surpass them and resume our rightful place in the region and ultimately the world, China would have to grow faster than them. 8
In the service of this vision, Deng was advocating many American economic and social principles as part of his reform program. But what he called socialist democracy was vastly different from pluralistic democracy. He remained convinced that, in China, Western political principles would produce chaos and thwart development.
Yet even as he espoused the need for an authoritarian government, Deng saw his ultimate mission as passing on power to another generation, which, if his development plan succeeded, was bound to develop its own conception of political order. Deng hoped that the success of his reform program would remove the incentive for a democratic evolution. But he must have understood that the change he was bringing about was bound eventually to lead to political consequences of as yet unpredictable dimensions. These are the challenges now facing his successors.
For the immediate future, Deng, in 1992, stated relatively modest goals:
We shall push ahead along the road to Chinese-style socialism. Capitalism has been developing for several hundred years. How long have we been building socialism? Besides, we wasted twenty years. If we can make China a moderately developed country within a hundred years from the founding of the People’s Republic, that will be an extraordinary achievement. 9
That would have been in 2049. In fact, China has done much better—by a generation.
Over a decade after Mao’s death, his vision of continuous revolution was reappearing. But it was a different kind of continuous revolution based on personal initiative, not ideological exaltation; connection with the outside world, not autarky. And it was to change China as fundamentally as the Great Helmsman sought, albeit in a direction opposite of what he had conceived. This is why, at the end of the Southern Tour, Deng sketched his hope for the emergence of a new generation of leaders with their own new viewpoints. The existing leadership of the Communist Party, he said, was too old. Now over sixty, they were better suited for conversation than for decisions. People of his age needed to stand aside—a painful confession for someone who had been such an activist.
The reason I insisted on retiring was that I didn’t want to make mistakes in my old age. Old people have strengths but also great weaknesses—they tend to be stubborn, for example—and they should be aware of that. The older they are, the more modest they should be and the more careful not to make mistakes in their later years. We should go on selecting younger comrades for promotion and helping train them. Don’t put your trust only in old age. . . . When they reach maturity, we shall rest easy. Right now we are still worried. 10
For all the matter-of-factness of Deng’s prescriptions, there was about them the melancholy of old age, conscious that he would miss the fruition of what he was advocating and planning. He had seen—and, at times, generated—so much turmoil that he needed his legacy to be a period of stability. For all his show of assurance, a new generation was needed to enable him, in his words, “to sleep soundly.”
The Southern Tour was Deng’s last public service. The implementation of its principles became the responsibility of Jiang Zemin and his associates. Afterward Deng retired into increasing inaccessibility. He died in 1997, and by then Jiang had solidified his position. Aided by the extraordinary Premier Zhu Rongji, Jiang carried out the legacy of Deng’s Southern Tour with such skill that, by the end of his term in office in 2002, the debate was no longer over whether this was the proper course but rather over the impact of an emerging, dynamic China on world order and the global economy.
CHAPTER 17
A Roller Coaster Ride Toward Another Reconciliation The Jiang Zemin Era
I N THE WAKE of Tiananmen, Sino-U.S. relations found themselves practically back to their starting point. In 1971–72, the United States had sought rapprochement with China, then in the final phases of the Cultural Revolution, convinced that relations with China were central to the establishment of a peaceful international order and transcended America’s reservations about China’s radical governance. Now the United States had imposed sanctions, and the dissident Fang Lizhi was in the sanctuary of the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. And with liberal democratic institutions being embraced across the world, reform of China’s domestic structure was turning into a major American policy goal.
I had met Jiang Zemin when he served as Mayor of Shanghai. I would not have expected him to emerge as the leader who would—as he did—guide his country from disaster to the stunning explosion of energy and creativity that has marked China’s rise. Though initially doubted, he oversaw one of the greatest per capita GDP increases in human history, consummated the peaceful return of Hong Kong, reconstituted China’s relations with the United States and the rest of the world, and launched China on the road to becoming a global economic powerhouse.
Shortly after Jiang’s elevation, in November 1989, Deng was at pains to emphasize to me his high regard for the new General Secretary:
DENG: You have met the General Secretary Jiang Zemin and in the future you will have other chances to meet him. He is a man of his own ideas and of high caliber.
KISSINGER: I was very impressed with him.
DENG: He is a real intellectual.
Few outside observers imagined that Jiang would succeed. As Shanghai’s Party Secretary, he had won praise for his measured handling of his city’s protests: he had closed an influential liberal newspaper early in the crisis but declined to impose martial law, and Shanghai’s demonstrations were quelled without bloodshed. But as General Secretary he was widely assumed to be a transitional figure—and may well have been a compromise candidate halfway between the relatively liberal element (including the Party ideologist, Li Ruihuan) and the conservative group (such as Li Peng, the Premier). He lacked a significant power base of his own, and, in contrast to his predecessors, he did not radiate an aura of command. He was the first Chinese Communist leader without revolutionary or military credentials. His leadership, like that of his successors, arose from bureaucratic and economic performance. It was not absolute and required a measure of consensus in the Politburo. He did not, for example, establish his dominance in foreign policy until 1997, eight years after he became General Secretary. 1
Previous Chinese Party leaders had conducted themselves with the aloof aura appropriate to the priesthood of a mixture of the new Marxist materialism and vestiges of China’s Confucian tradition. Jiang set a different pattern. Unlike Mao the philosopher-king, Zhou the mandarin, or Deng the battle-hardened guardian of the national interest, Jiang behaved more like an affable family member. He was warm and informal. Mao would deal with his interlocutors from Olympian heights, as if they were graduate students undergoing an examination into the adequacy of their philosophical insights. Zhou conducted conversations with the effortless grace and superior intelligence of the Confucian sage. Deng cut through discussions to their practical aspects, treating digressions as a waste of time.
Jiang made no claim to philosophical preeminence. He smiled, laughed, told anecdotes, and touched his interlocutors in order to establish a bond. He took pride, sometimes exuberantly so, in his talent for foreign languages and knowledge of Western music. With non-Chinese visitors, he regularly incorporated English or Russian or even Romanian expressions into his presentations to emphasize a point—shifting without warning between a rich store of Chinese classical idioms and such American colloquialisms as “It takes two to tango.” When the occasion allowed it, he might punctuate social meetings—and occasionally official ones—by bursting into song, either to deflect an uncomfortable point or to emphasize camaraderie.
Chinese leaders’ dialogues with foreign visitors usually occur in the presence of an entourage of advisors and note takers who do not speak and very rarely pass notes to their chiefs. Jiang, on the contrary, tended to turn his phalanx into a Greek chorus; he would begin a thought, then throw it to an advisor to conclude in a manner so spontaneous as to leave the impression that one was dealing with a team of which Jiang was the captain. Well read and highly educated, Jiang sought to draw his interlocutor into the atmosphere of goodwill that seemed to envelop him, at least in dealing with foreigners. He would generate a dialogue in which the views of his opposite number, and even his colleagues, were treated as deserving of the same importance he was claiming for his own. In that sense, Jiang was the least Middle Kingdom–type of personality that I have encountered among Chinese leaders.
Upon Jiang’s elevation to the top ranks of China’s national leadership, an internal State Department report described him as “[u]rbane, energetic, and occasionally flamboyant,” and related “an incident in 1987 when he rose from the VIP rostrum at Shanghai National Day festivities to conduct a symphony orchestra in a rousing version of the Internationale, complete with flashing lights and clouds of smoke.” 2 During a private visit by Nixon to Beijing in 1989, Jiang had, unannounced, sprung to his feet to recite the Gettysburg Address in English.
There was little precedent for this brand of informality with either Chinese or Soviet Communist leaders. Many outsiders underestimated Jiang, mistaking his avuncular style for lack of seriousness. The opposite was true. Jiang’s bonhomie was designed to define the line, when he drew it, that much more definitively. When he believed his country’s vital interests were involved, he could be determined in the mold of his titanic predecessors.
Jiang was cosmopolitan enough to understand that China would have to operate within an international system rather than through Middle Kingdom remoteness or dominance. Zhou had understood that as well, as had Deng. But Zhou could implement his vision only fragmentally because of Mao’s suffocating presence, and Deng’s was aborted by Tiananmen. Jiang’s affability was the expression of a serious and calculating attempt to build China into a new international order and to restore international confidence, both to help heal China’s domestic wounds and to soften its international image. Disarming critics with his occasional flamboyance, Jiang presented an effective face for a government working to break out of international isolation and to spare its system the fate of its Soviet counterpart.
In his international goals, Jiang was blessed with one of the most skillful foreign ministers I have known, Qian Qichen, and a chief economic policymaker of exceptional intelligence and tenacity, the Vice Premier (and eventual Premier) Zhu Rongji. Both men were unapologetic proponents of the notion that China’s prevailing political institutions best served its interests. Both also believed that China’s continued development required deepening its links to international institutions and the world economy—including a Western world often vocal in its criticism of Chinese domestic political practices. Following Jiang’s course of defiant optimism, Qian and Zhu launched themselves into extensive foreign travel, international conferences, interviews, and diplomatic and economic dialogues, facing often skeptical and critical audiences with determination and good humor. Not all Chinese observers relished the project of engaging with a Western world perceived as dismissive of Chinese realities; not all Western observers approved of the effort to engage with a China falling short of Western political expectations. Statesmanship needs to be judged by the management of ambiguities, not absolutes. Jiang, Qian, Zhu, and their senior associates managed to navigate their country out of isolation, and to restore the fragile links between China and a skeptical Western world.
Shortly after his appointment in November 1989, Jiang invited me for a conversation in which he cast events through the lens of returning to traditional diplomacy. He could not understand why China’s reaction to a domestic challenge had caused a rupture of relations with the United States. “There are no big problems between China and the U.S. except Taiwan,” he insisted. “We have no border disputes; on the Taiwan issue the Shanghai Communiqué established a good formula.” China, he stressed, made no claim that its domestic principles were applicable abroad: “We do not export revolution. But the social system of each country must be chosen by that country. The socialist system in China comes from our own historical position.”
In any event, China would continue its economic reforms: “So far as China is concerned the door is always open. We are ready to react to any positive gesture by the U.S. We have many common interests.” But reform would have to be voluntary; it could not be dictated from the outside:
Chinese history proves that greater pressure only leads to greater resistance. Since I am a student of natural sciences I try to interpret things according to laws of natural sciences. China has 1.1 billion people. It is large and has lots of momentum. It is not easy to push it forward. As an old friend, I speak frankly with you.
Jiang shared his reflections on the Tiananmen Square crisis. The Chinese government had not been “mentally prepared for the event,” he explained, and the Politburo had initially been split. There were few heroes in his version of events—not the student leaders, nor the Party, whom he described ruefully as ineffective and divided in the face of an unprecedented challenge.
When I saw Jiang again nearly a year later, in September 1990, relations with the United States were still tense. The package deal tying our easing of sanctions to the release of Fang Lizhi had been slow in implementation. In a sense, the disappointments were not surprising given the definition of the problem. The American advocates of human rights insisted on values they considered universal. The Chinese leaders were making some adjustments based on their perceptions of Chinese interests. The American activists, especially some NGOs (nongovernmental organizations), were not inclined to declare their goals fulfilled by partial measures. To them, what Beijing considered concessions implied that their objectives were subject to bargaining and hence not universal. The activists emphasized moral, not political, goals; the Chinese leaders were focused on a continuing political process—above all, in ending the immediate tensions and returning to “normal” relationships. That return to normalcy was exactly what the activists either rejected or sought to make conditional.
Lately a pejorative adjective has been entered into the debate, dismissing traditional diplomacy as “transactional.” In that view, a constructive long-term relationship with nondemocratic states is not sustainable almost by definition. The advocates of this course start from the premise that true and lasting peace presupposes a community of democratic states. This is why both the Ford administration and the Clinton administration twenty years later failed in obtaining a compromise on the implementation of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment from Congress, even when the Soviet Union and China seemed prepared to make concessions. The activists rejected partial steps and argued that persistence would achieve their ultimate goals. Jiang raised this issue with me in 1990. China had recently “adopted a lot of measures,” motivated importantly by a desire to improve relations with the United States:
Some of them are matters that even concern purely Chinese domestic issues such as the lifting of martial law in Beijing and in Tibet. We proceeded on these matters from two considerations. The first is that they are testimony to the Chinese domestic stability. Second, we don’t hide the fact that we use these measures to provide a better understanding for U.S.-China relations.
These moves, in Jiang’s view, had not been reciprocated. Beijing had fulfilled its side of Deng’s proposed package deal but had been met by escalating demands from Congress.
Democratic values and human rights are the core of America’s belief in itself. But like all values they have an absolute character, and this challenges the element of nuance by which foreign policy is generally obliged to operate. If adoption of American principles of governance is made the central condition for progress in all other areas of the relationship, deadlock is inevitable. At that point, both sides are obliged to balance the claims of national security against the imperatives of their principles of governance. Faced with adamant rejection of the principle in Beijing, the Clinton administration chose to modify its position, as we shall see later in this chapter. The problem then returns to the adjustment of priorities between the United States and its interlocutor—in other words, to “transactional” traditional diplomacy. Or else to a showdown.
It is a choice that needs to be made and cannot be fudged. I respect those who are prepared to battle for their views of the imperatives of spreading American values. But foreign policy must define means as well as objectives, and if the means employed grow beyond the tolerance of the international framework or of a relationship considered essential for national security, a choice must be made. What we must not do is to minimize the nature of the choice. The best outcome in the American debate would be to combine the two approaches: for the idealists to recognize that principles need to be implemented over time and hence must be occasionally adjusted to circumstance; and for the “realists” to accept that values have their own reality and must be built into operational policies. Such an approach would recognize the many gradations that exist in each camp, which an effort should be made to shade into each other. In practice this goal has often been overwhelmed by the passions of the controversy.
In the 1990s, American domestic debates were replicated in the discussions with Chinese leaders. Forty years after the victory of Communism in their country, China’s leaders would argue on behalf of an international order that rejected the projection of values across borders (once a hallowed principle of Communist policy) while the United States would insist on the universal applicability of its values to be achieved by pressure and incentives, that is, by intervention in another country’s domestic politics. There was no little irony in the fact that Mao’s heir would lecture me about the nature of an international system based on sovereign states about which I, after all, had written several decades earlier.
Jiang used my 1990 visit for precisely such a discourse. He and other Chinese leaders kept insisting on what would have been conventional wisdom as late as five years earlier: that China and the United States should work together on a new international order—based on principles comparable to those of the traditional European state system since 1648. In other words, domestic arrangements were beyond the scope of foreign policy. Relations between states were governed by principles of national interest.
That proposition was exactly what the new political dispensation in the West was jettisoning. The new concept insisted that the world was entering a “post-sovereign” era, in which international norms of human rights would prevail over the traditional prerogatives of sovereign governments. By contrast Jiang and his associates sought a multipolar world that accepted China’s brand of hybrid socialism and “people’s democracy,” and in which the United States treated China on equal terms as a great power.
During my next visit to Beijing in September 1991, Jiang returned to the theme of the maxims of traditional diplomacy. The national interest overrode the reaction to China’s domestic conduct:
There is no fundamental conflict of interest between our two countries. There is no reason not to bring relations back to normal. If there can be mutual respect and if we refrain from interference in internal affairs, and if we can conduct our relations on the basis of equality and mutual benefit, then we can find a common interest.
With Cold War rivalries ebbing, Jiang argued that “in today’s situation ideological factors are not important in state relations.”
Jiang used my September 1990 visit to convey that he had taken over all of Deng’s functions—this had not yet become obvious, since the precise internal arrangements of the Beijing power structure are always opaque:
Deng Xiaoping knows of your visit. He expresses his welcome to you through me and expresses his greetings to you. Second, he mentioned the letter which President Bush has written to him and in this respect he made two points. First, he has requested me as General Secretary to extend his greetings through you to President Bush. Second, after his retirement last year he has entrusted all of the administration of these affairs to me as General Secretary. I do not intend to write a letter in response to President Bush’s letter to Deng Xiaoping but what I am saying to you, although I put it in my words, conforms to the thinking and spirit of what Deng wants to say.
What Jiang asked me to convey was that China had conceded enough, and now the onus was on Washington to improve relations. “So far as China is concerned,” Jiang said, “it has always cherished the friendship between our two countries.” Now, Jiang declared, China was finished with concessions: “The Chinese side has done enough. We have exerted ourselves and we have done the best we can.”
Jiang repeated the by now traditional theme of Mao and Deng—China’s imperviousness to pressure and its fearsome resistance to any hint of foreign bullying. And he argued that Beijing, like Washington, faced political pressure from its people: “Another point, we hope the U.S. side takes note of this fact. If China takes unilateral steps without corresponding U.S. moves that would go beyond the tolerance of the Chinese people.”
China and the Disintegrating Soviet Union
An undercurrent of all the discussions was the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev had been in Beijing at the beginning of the Tiananmen crisis, but even while China was being rent by domestic controversy, the basis of Soviet rule was collapsing in real time on television screens all across the world as if in slow motion.
Gorbachev’s dilemmas were even more vexing than Beijing’s. The Chinese controversies were about how the Communist Party should govern. The Soviet disputes were about whether the Communist Party should govern at all. By giving political reform (glasnost ) priority over economic restructuring (perestroika ), Gorbachev had made inevitable a controversy over the legitimacy of Communist rule. Gorbachev had recognized the pervasive stagnation but lacked the imagination or skill to break through its built-in rigidities. The various supervisory bodies of the system had, with the passage of time, turned into part of the problem. The Communist Party, once the instrument of revolution, had no function in an elaborated Communist system other than to supervise what it did not understand—the management of a modern economy, a problem it solved by colluding with what it was allegedly controlling. The Communist elite had become a mandarin class of the privileged; theoretically in charge of the national orthodoxy, it concentrated on preserving its perquisites.
Glasnost clashed with perestroika . Gorbachev wound up ushering in the collapse of the system that had shaped him and to which he owed his eminence. But before he did, he redefined the concept of peaceful coexistence. Previous leaders had affirmed it, and Mao had quarreled with Khrushchev over it. But Gorbachev’s predecessors had advocated peaceful coexistence as a temporary respite on the way to ultimate confrontation and victory. Gorbachev, at the Twenty-seventh Party Congress in 1986, proclaimed it as a permanent fixture in the relationship between Communism and capitalism. It was his way of reentering the international system in which Russia had participated in the pre-Soviet period.
On my visits, Chinese leaders were at pains to distinguish China from the Russian model, especially Gorbachev. In our meeting in September 1990, Jiang stressed:
Efforts to find a Chinese Gorbachev will be of no avail. You can see that from your discussions with us. Your friend Zhou Enlai used to talk about our five principles of peaceful coexistence. Well they are still in existence today. It won’t do that there should only be a single social system in the world. We don’t want to impose our system on others and we don’t want others to impose theirs on us.
The Chinese leaders affirmed the same principles of coexistence as Gorbachev. But they used them not to conciliate the West, as Gorbachev did, but to wall themselves off from it. Gorbachev was treated in Beijing as irrelevant, not to mention misguided. His modernization program was rejected as ill conceived because it put political reform before economic reform. In the Chinese view, political reform might be needed over time, but economic reform had to precede it. Li Ruihuan explained why price reform could not work in the Soviet Union: when almost all commodities were in short supply, price reform was bound to lead to inflation and panic. Zhu Rongji, visiting the United States in 1990, was repeatedly lauded as “China’s Gorbachev”; he took pains to emphasize, “I’m not China’s Gorbachev. I’m China’s Zhu Rongji.” 3
When I visited China again in 1992, Qian Qichen described the collapse of the Soviet Union as “like the aftermath of an explosion—shock waves in all directions.” The collapse of the Soviet Union had indeed created a new geopolitical context. As Beijing and Washington assessed the new landscape, they found their interests no longer as evidently congruent as in the days of near alliance. Then, disagreements had been mainly over the tactics of resisting Soviet hegemony. Now, as the common opponent withered, it was inevitable that the differences in the two leaderships’ values and worldviews would come to the fore.
In Beijing, the end of the Cold War produced a mixture of relief and dread. On one level, Chinese leaders welcomed the disintegration of the Soviet adversary. Mao’s and Deng’s strategy of active, even offensive, deterrence had prevailed. At the same time, Chinese leaders could not avoid comparisons between the unraveling of the Soviet Union and their own domestic challenge. They, too, had inherited an ancient multiethnic empire and sought to administer it as a modern socialist state. Though the percentage of non-Han population was much smaller in China (about 10 percent) than the share of non-Russians in the Soviet empire (about 50 percent), ethnic minorities with distinct traditions existed. Moreover, these minorities lived in regions that were strategically sensitive, bordering Vietnam, Russia, and India.
No American president in the 1970s would have risked confrontation with China so long as the Soviet Union loomed as a strategic threat. On the American side, however, the disintegration of the Soviet Union was seen as representing a kind of permanent and universal triumph of democratic values. A bipartisan sentiment held that traditional “history” was being superseded: allies and adversaries alike were moving inexorably toward adopting multiparty parliamentary democracy and open markets (institutions that, in the American view, were inevitably linked). Any obstacle standing in the way of this wave would be swept aside.
A new concept had evolved to the effect that the nation-state was declining in importance and the international system would henceforth be based on transnational principles. Since it was assumed that democracies were inherently peaceful while autocracies tended toward violence and international terrorism, promoting regime change was considered a legitimate act of foreign policy, not an intervention into domestic affairs.
China’s leaders rejected the American prediction of the universal triumph of Western liberal democracy, but they also understood that their reform program needed America’s cooperation. So in September 1990 they sent an “oral message” through me to President Bush, which ended with an appeal to the American President:
For over a century, the Chinese people were all along subjected to bullying and humiliation by foreign powers. We do not want to see this wound reopened. I believe that as an old friend of China, Mr. President, you understand the sentiments of the Chinese people. China cherishes Sino-U.S. friendly relations and cooperation which did not come easily, but it cherishes its independence, sovereignty and dignity even more.
Against the new background, there is all the more need for Sino-U.S. relations to return to normal without delay. I am sure that you can find a way leading to that goal. And we will make the necessary response to any positive actions that you may take in the interest of better Sino-U.S. relations.
To reinforce what Jiang had told me personally, Chinese Foreign Ministry officials gave me a written message to transmit to President Bush. Unsigned, it was described as a written oral communication—more formal than a conversation, less explicit than an official note. In addition, the Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs escorting me to the airport handed me written replies to clarifying questions I had raised during the meeting with Jiang. Like the message, they had already been conveyed at the meeting; they were given to me in writing for emphasis:
Question: What is the significance of Deng not answering the President’s letter?
Answer: Deng retired last year. He already sent the President an oral message saying that all administrative authority over such affairs has been given to Jiang.
Question: Why is the answer oral rather than written?
Answer: Deng has read the letter. But since he entrusted these matters to Jiang, he asked Jiang to reply. We wanted to give Dr. Kissinger the opportunity to convey an oral message to the President because of the role Dr. Kissinger played in favor of U.S.-Chinese relations.
Question: Is Deng aware of the content of your reply?
Answer: Of course.
Question: When you mention U.S. failure to take “corresponding measures,” what do you have in mind?
Answer: Biggest problem is continued U.S. sanctions on China. Would be best if the President could lift them or even lift de facto. Also the U.S. has a decisive say in World Bank loans. Another point concerns high-level visits which was part of the package. . . .
Question: Would you be willing to consider another package deal?
Answer: It is illogical since the first package never materialized.
President George H. W. Bush believed from personal experience that to carry out a policy of intervention in the most populous nation and the state with the longest continuous history of self-government was inadvisable. Prepared to intervene in special circumstances and on behalf of individuals or specific groups, he thought an across-the-board confrontation over China’s domestic structure would jeopardize a relationship vital to American national security.
In response to Jiang’s oral message, Bush made an exception to the ban on high-level visits to China and encouraged his Secretary of State, James Baker, to visit Beijing for consultations. Relations steadied for a brief interval. But when the Clinton administration came into office eighteen months later they returned, for most of the new administration’s first term, to a roller coaster ride.
The Clinton Administration and China Policy
On the campaign trail in September 1992, Bill Clinton had challenged China’s governmental principles and criticized the Bush administration for “coddling” Beijing in the wake of Tiananmen. “China cannot withstand forever the forces of democratic change,” Clinton argued. “One day it will go the way of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The United States must do what it can to encourage that process.” 4
After Clinton took office in 1993, he adopted “enlargement” of democracies as a principal foreign policy objective. The goal was, he proclaimed to the U.N. General Assembly in September 1993, to “expand and strengthen the world’s community of market-based democracies” and to “enlarge the circle of nations that live under those free institutions” until humanity achieved “a world of thriving democracies that cooperate with each other and live in peace.” 5
The new administration’s aggressive human rights posture was not intended as a strategy for weakening China or gaining a strategic edge for the United States. It reflected a general concept of world order in which China was expected to participate as a respected member. From the Clinton administration’s point of view, it was a sincere attempt to support practices that the President and his advisors believed would serve China well.
In Beijing, however, the American pressures, which were reinforced by other Western democracies, were seen as a design to keep China weak by interfering in its domestic issues in the manner of the nineteenth-century colonialists. The Chinese leaders interpreted the new administration’s pronouncements as a capitalist attempt to overthrow Communist governments all over the world. They harbored a deep suspicion that, with the Soviet Union disintegrating, the United States might do as Mao had predicted: turn from the destruction of one Communist giant to “poke its finger” in the back of the other.
In his confirmation hearings as Secretary of State, Warren Christopher phrased the goal of transforming China in more limited terms: that the United States would “seek to facilitate a peaceful evolution of China from communism to democracy by encouraging the forces of economic and political liberalization in that great country.” 6 But Christopher’s reference to “peaceful evolution” revived, whether intentionally or not, the term used by John Foster Dulles to project the eventual collapse of Communist states. In Beijing, it signaled not a hopeful trend, but perceived Western designs to convert China to capitalist democracy without recourse to war. 7 Neither Clinton’s nor Christopher’s statements were regarded as controversial in the United States; both were anathema in Beijing.
Having thrown down the gauntlet—without perhaps fully recognizing the magnitude of its challenge—the Clinton administration proclaimed that it was ready to “engage” China on a broad range of issues. These included the conditions of China’s domestic reform and its integration with the broader world economy. That the Chinese leaders might have qualms about entering into a dialogue with the same high American officials who had just called for the replacement of their political system was apparently not considered an insuperable obstacle. The fate of this initiative illustrates the complexities and ambiguities of such a policy.
Chinese leaders no longer made any claim to represent a unique revolutionary truth available for export. Instead, they espoused the essentially defensive aim of working toward a world not overtly hostile to their system of governance or territorial integrity and buying time to develop their economy and work out their domestic problems at their own pace. It was a foreign policy posture arguably closer to Bismarck’s than Mao’s: incremental, defensive, and based on building dams against unfavorable historical tides. But even as tides were shifting, Chinese leaders projected a fiery sense of independence. They masked their concern by missing no opportunity to proclaim that they would resist outside pressure to the utmost. As Jiang insisted to me in 1991: “[W]e never submit to pressure. This is very important [spoken in English ]. It is a philosophical principle.”
Nor did China’s leaders accept the interpretation of the end of the Cold War as ushering in a period of America as a hyperpower. In a 1991 conversation, Qian Qichen cautioned that the new international order could not remain unipolar indefinitely and that China would work toward a multipolar world—which meant that it would work to counter American preeminence. He cited demographic realities—including a somewhat threatening reference to China’s massive population advantage—to bolster his point:
We believe it is impossible that such a unipolar world would come into existence. Some people seem to believe that after the end of the Gulf War and the Cold War, the U.S. can do anything. I don’t think that is correct. . . . In the Muslim world there are over 1 billion people. China has a population of 1.1 billion. The population of South Asia is over 1 billion. The population of China is more than the populations of the U.S., the Soviet Union, Europe and Japan combined. So it is still a diverse world.
Premier Li Peng delivered possibly the most frank assessment of the human rights issue. In reply to my delineation of three policy areas in need of improvement—human rights, weapons technology transfer, and trade—he stated in December 1992:
With regard to the three areas you mentioned, we can talk about human rights. But because of major differences between us, I doubt major progress is possible. The concept of human rights involves traditions and moral and philosophical values. These are different in China than in the West. We believe that the Chinese people should have more democratic rights and play a more important role in domestic politics. But this should be done in a way acceptable to the Chinese people.
Coming from a representative of the conservative wing of the Chinese leadership, Li Peng’s affirmation of the need for progress toward democratic rights was unprecedented. But so was the frankness with which he delineated the limits of Chinese flexibility: “Naturally in issues like human rights, we can do some things. We can have discussions and without compromising our principles, we can take flexible measures. But we cannot reach a full agreement with the West. It would shake the basis of our society.”
A signature China initiative of Clinton’s first term brought matters to a head: the administration’s attempt to condition China’s Most Favored Nation trade status on improvements in China’s human rights record. “Most Favored Nation” is a somewhat misleading phrase: since a significant majority of countries enjoy the status, it is less a special mark of favor than an affirmation that a country enjoys normal trade privileges. 8 The concept of MFN conditionality presented its moral purpose as a typically American pragmatic concept of rewards and penalties (or “carrots” and “sticks”). As Clinton’s National Security Advisor Anthony Lake explained it, the United States would withhold a benefit until it produced results, “providing penalties that raise the costs of repression and aggressive behavior” until the Chinese leadership made a rational interest-based calculation to liberalize its domestic institutions. 9
In May 1993, Winston Lord, then Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, and in the 1970s my indispensable associate during the opening to China, visited Beijing to brief Chinese officials on the new administration’s thinking. At the close of his trip, Lord warned that “dramatic progress” on human rights, nonproliferation, and other issues was necessary if China were to avoid suspension of its MFN status. 10 Caught between a Chinese government rejecting any conditionality as illegitimate and American politicians demanding ever more stringent conditions, he made no headway at all.
I visited Beijing shortly after Lord’s trip, where I encountered a Chinese leadership struggling to chart a course out of the MFN conditionality impasse. Jiang offered a “friendly suggestion”:
China and the U.S. as two big countries should see problems in the long-term perspective. China’s economic development and social stability serve China’s interests but also turn China into a major force for peace and stability, in Asia and elsewhere. I think that in looking at other countries, the U.S. should take into account their self-esteem and sovereignty. That is a friendly suggestion.
Jiang again attempted to dissuade the United States from thinking of China as a potential threat or competitor, thereby to reduce American incentives to try to hold China down:
Yesterday at a symposium I spoke about this issue. I also mentioned an article in The Times which suggested China will one day be a superpower. I’ve said over and over that China will never be a threat to any country.
Against the backdrop of Clinton’s tough rhetoric and the belligerent mood in Congress, Lord negotiated a compromise with Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell and Representative Nancy Pelosi that extended MFN for a year. It was expressed in a flexible executive order rather than binding legislation. It confined conditionality to human rights rather than including other areas of democratization that many in Congress urged. But to the Chinese, conditionality was a matter of principle—just as it had been for the Soviet Union when they rejected the Jackson-Vanik Amendment. Beijing objected to the fact of conditions, not their content.
On May 28, 1993, President Clinton signed the executive order extending China’s MFN status for twelve months, after which it would be either renewed or canceled based on China’s conduct in the interim Clinton stressed that the “core” of the administration’s China policy would be “a resolute insistence upon significant progress on human rights in China.” 11 He explained MFN conditionality in principle as an expression of American outrage over Tiananmen and continuing “profound concerns” about the manner in which China was governed. 12
The executive order was accompanied by a rhetoric more pejorative about China than that of any administration since the 1960s. In September 1993, National Security Advisor Lake suggested in a speech that unless China acceded to American demands, it would be counted among what he called “reactionary ‘backlash’ states” clinging to outmoded forms of governance by means of “military force, political imprisonment and torture,” as well as “the intolerant energies of racism, ethnic prejudice, religious persecution, xenophobia, and irredentism.” 13
Other events combined to deepen the Chinese suspicions. Negotiations over China’s accession to GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (later subsumed into the World Trade Organization, or WTO), deadlocked over substantive issues. Beijing’s bid for the 2000 Olympics came under attack. Majorities in both houses of Congress voiced their disapproval of the bid; the U.S. government maintained a cautious silence. 14 China’s application for hosting the Olympics was narrowly defeated. Tensions were further inflamed by an intrusive (and ultimately unsuccessful) American inspection of a Chinese ship suspected of carrying chemical weapons components to Iran. All of these incidents, each of which had its own rationale, were analyzed in China in terms of the Chinese style of Sun Tzu strategy, which knows no single events, only patterns reflecting an overall design.
Matters came to a head with the visit of Secretary of State Warren Christopher to Beijing in March 1994. The purpose of Christopher’s visit, he later recounted, was to achieve a resolution of the MFN issue by the time the deadline for the one-year extension of MFN would expire in June, and to “underscore to the Chinese that under the president’s policy they had only limited time to mend their human rights record. If they wanted to keep their low-tariff trading privileges, there had to be significant progress, and soon.” 15
Chinese officials had suggested that the timing of the visit was inopportune. Christopher was scheduled to arrive the day of the opening of the annual session of China’s legislature, the National People’s Congress. The presence of an American Secretary of State challenging the Chinese government on human rights issues promised either to overshadow the body’s deliberations or to tempt Chinese officials to take the offensive to prove their imperviousness to outside pressure. It was, Christopher later conceded, “a perfect forum for them to demonstrate that they intended to stand up to America.” 16
And so they did. The result was one of the most pointedly hostile diplomatic encounters since the U.S.-China rapprochement. Lord, who accompanied Christopher, described Christopher’s session with Li Peng as “the most brutal diplomatic meeting he’d ever attended” 17 —and he had been at my side during all the negotiations with the North Vietnamese. Christopher related in his memoirs the reaction of Li Peng, who held that
China’s human rights policy was none of our business, noting that the United States had plenty of human rights problems of its own that needed attention. . . . To ensure that I had not failed to appreciate the depth of their unhappiness, the Chinese abruptly canceled my meeting later in the day with President Jiang Zemin. 18
These tensions, which seemed to undo two decades of creative China policy, led to a split in the administration between the economic departments and the political departments charged with pressing the human rights issues. Faced with Chinese resistance and American domestic pressures from companies doing business in China, the administration began to find itself in the demeaning position of pleading with Beijing in the final weeks before the MFN deadline to make enough modest concessions to justify extending MFN.
Shortly after Christopher’s return, and with the self-imposed deadline for MFN renewal at hand, the administration quietly abandoned its policy of conditionality. On May 26, 1994, Clinton announced that the policy’s usefulness had been exhausted and that China’s MFN status would be extended for another year essentially without conditions. He pledged to pursue human rights progress by other means, such as support for NGOs in China and encouraging best business practices.
Clinton, it must be repeated, throughout had every intention to support the policies that had sustained relations with China for five administrations of both parties. But as a recently elected President he was also sensitive to domestic American opinion, more so than to the intangibles of the Chinese approach to foreign policy. He put forward conditionality out of conviction and, above all, because he sought to protect China policy from the swelling congressional onslaught that was attempting to deny MFN to China altogether. Clinton believed that the Chinese “owed” the U.S. administration human rights concessions in return for restoring high-level contacts and putting forward MFN. But the Chinese considered that they were “entitled” to the same unconditional high-level contacts and trade terms extended to them by all other nations. They did not view the removal of a unilateral threat as a concession, and they were extraordinarily touchy regarding any hint of intervention in their domestic affairs. So long as human rights remained the principal subject of the Sino-American dialogue, deadlock was inevitable. This experience should be studied carefully by advocates of a confrontational policy in our day.
During the remainder of his first term, Clinton toned down the confrontational tactics and emphasized “constructive engagement.” Lord assembled America’s Asian ambassadors in Hawaii to discuss a comprehensive Asia policy balancing the administration’s human rights goals with its geopolitical imperatives. Beijing committed itself to renewed dialogue, essential for the success of China’s reform program and membership in the WTO.
Clinton, as George H. W. Bush had before him, sympathized with the concerns of the advocates for democratic change and human rights. But like all his predecessors and successors, he came to appreciate the strength of Chinese leaders’ convictions and their tenacity in the face of public challenge.
Relations between China and the United States rapidly mended. A long-sought visit by Jiang to Washington took place in 1997 and was reciprocated by an eight-day visit by Clinton to Beijing in 1998. Both Presidents performed ebulliently. Extended communiqués were published. They established consultative institutions, dealt with a host of technical issues, and ended the atmosphere of confrontation of nearly a decade.
What the relationship lacked was a defining shared purpose such as had united Beijing and Washington in resistance to Soviet “hegemonism.” American leaders could not remain oblivious to the various pressures regarding human rights that were generated by their own domestic politics and convictions. The Chinese leaders continued to see American policy as at least partially designed to keep China from reaching great power status. In a 1995 conversation Li Peng sounded a theme of reassurance, which amounted to calming presumed American fears over what objectives a resurgent China might seek: “[T]here is no need for some people to worry about the rapid development. China will take 30 years to catch up with the medium level countries. Our population is too big.” The United States, in turn, made regular pledges that it had not changed its policy to containment. The implication of both assurances was that each side had the capability of implementing what it reassured the other about and was in part restraining itself. Reassurance thus merged with threat.
The Third Taiwan Strait Crisis
The tensions surrounding the granting of Most Favored Nation status were in the process of being overcome when the issue of Taiwan reemerged. Within the framework of the tacit bargain undergirding the three communiqués on which the normalization of relations had been based, Taiwan had established a vibrant economy and democratic institutions. It had joined the Asian Development Bank and APEC (Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation) and participated in the Olympic Games with Beijing’s acquiescence. For its part, Beijing had put forward, beginning in the 1980s, proposals for unification in which Taiwan was to be given total internal autonomy. So long as Taiwan accepted its status as a “Special Administrative Region” of the People’s Republic (the same legal status that Hong Kong and Macao were to have), Beijing pledged, it would be permitted to retain its own distinct political institutions and even its own armed forces. 19
Taipei’s reaction to these proposals was circumspect. But it benefitted from the People’s Republic’s economic transformation and became increasingly economically interdependent with it. Following the loosening of restrictions on bilateral trade and investment in the late 1980s, many Taiwanese companies shifted production to the mainland. By the end of 1993, Taiwan had surpassed Japan to become the second-largest source of overseas investment in China. 20
While economic interdependence developed, the two sides’ political paths diverged significantly. In 1987, Taiwan’s aging leader, Chiang Ching-kuo, had lifted martial law. A dramatic liberalization of Taiwan’s domestic institutions followed: press restrictions were lifted; rival political parties were allowed to stand for legislative elections. In 1994, a constitutional amendment laid the groundwork for the direct election of the Taiwanese President by universal suffrage. New voices in Taiwan’s political arena that had had their activities circumscribed by the martial law–era restrictions now began advocating a distinct Taiwanese national identity and potentially formal independence. Chief among them was Lee Teng-hui, the mercurial agricultural economist who had worked his way up the ranks of the Nationalist Party and was appointed its chairman in 1988.
Lee incarnated everything Beijing detested in a Taiwanese official. He had grown up during the Japanese colonization of Taiwan, taken a Japanese name, studied in Japan, and served in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. Later he had received advanced education in the United States, at Cornell University. Unlike most Nationalist Party officials, Lee was a native Taiwanese; he was outspoken about regarding himself as “a Taiwan person first and a Chinese person second,” and was a proud and insistent proponent of Taiwan’s distinct institutions and historical experience. 21
As the 1996 election drew nearer, Lee and his Cabinet engaged in a series of acts designed step by step to increase what they described as Taiwan’s “international living space.” To the discomfort of Beijing (and many in Washington), Lee and other senior ministers embarked on a course of “vacation diplomacy” that found large delegations of Taiwanese officials traveling “unofficially” to world capitals, occasionally during meetings of international organizations, and then maneuvering to be received with as many of the formal trappings of statehood as possible.
The Clinton administration attempted to stand apart from these developments. In a November 1993 meeting and press conference with Jiang Zemin in Seattle, on the occasion of an APEC summit of nations from both sides of the Pacific, Clinton stated:
In our meeting I reaffirmed the United States support for the three joint communiqués as the bedrock of our one China policy. . . .
The policy of the United States on one China is the right policy for the United States. It does not preclude us from following the Taiwan Relations Act, nor does it preclude us from the strong economic relationship we enjoy with Taiwan. There’s a representative [of Taiwan], as you know, here at this meeting. So I feel good about where we are on that. But I don’t think that will be a major stumbling block in our relationship with China. 22
For Clinton’s approach to work, Taiwan’s leaders needed to exercise restraint. But Lee was determined to push the principle of Taiwan’s national identity. In 1994, he sought permission to stop in Hawaii to refuel his plane en route to Central America—the first time a Taiwanese President had landed on American soil. Lee’s next target was the 1995 reunion at Cornell, where he had obtained his economics PhD in 1958. Vigorously urged by the newly elected Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, Congress voted unanimously in the House and with only one dissenting vote in the Senate to support Lee’s visit. Warren Christopher had assured the Chinese Foreign Minister in April that approving Lee’s visit would be “inconsistent with American policy.” But in the face of such formidable pressure, the administration reversed itself and granted the request for a personal and unofficial visit.
Once at Cornell, Lee delivered a speech straining the definition of “unofficial.” After a brief nod to fond memories of his time at Cornell, Lee launched into a rousing talk on the aspirations of Taiwan’s people for formal recognition. Lee’s elliptical phrasings, frequent references to his “country” and “nation,” and blunt discussion of the imminent demise of Communism all exceeded Beijing’s tolerance.
Beijing recalled its ambassador from Washington, delayed the approval of the American ambassadorial nominee, James Sasser, and canceled other official contacts with the American government. Then, following the script of the Taiwan Strait Crises of the 1950s, Beijing began military exercises and missile tests off the coast of southeast China that were equal parts military deterrent and political theater. In a series of threatening moves, China fired missiles into the Taiwan Strait—to demonstrate its military capabilities and to warn Taiwan’s leaders. But it used dummy warheads, thus signaling that the launches had a primarily symbolic quality.
Quiescence on Taiwan could be maintained only so long as none of the parties challenged the three communiqués. For they contained so many ambiguities that an effort by any party to alter the structure or to impose its interpretation of the clauses would upend the entire framework. Beijing had not pressed for the clarification, but once it was challenged, it felt compelled to demonstrate at a minimum how seriously China took the issue.
In early July 1995, as the crisis was still gathering momentum, I was in Beijing with a delegation from the America-China Society, a bipartisan group of former high officials dealing with China. On July 4, we met with then Vice Premier Qian Qichen and the Chinese ambassador to the United States, Li Daoyu. Qian laid out the Chinese position. Sovereignty was nonnegotiable:
Dr. Kissinger, you must be aware that China attaches great importance to Sino-U.S. relations, despite our occasional quarrels. We hope to see Sino-U.S. relations restored to normal and improved. But the U.S. government should be clear about the point: we have no maneuver-room on the Taiwan question. We will never give up our principled position on Taiwan.
Relations with China had reached a point where the weapon of choice of both the United States and China was the suspension of high-level contacts, creating the paradox that both sides were depriving themselves of the mechanism for dealing with a crisis when it was most needed. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, each side proclaimed friendship with the other less to pursue a common strategic objective than to find a way to symbolize cooperation—at that moment, in defiance of its actuality.
The Chinese leaders conveyed shortly after my arrival their desire for a peaceful outcome by one of the subtle gestures at which they are so adept. Before the formal schedule of the America-China Society began, I was invited to give a talk at a secondary school in Tianjin that Zhou Enlai had once attended. Accompanied by a senior Foreign Ministry official, I was photographed near a statue of Zhou, and the official introducing me used the occasion to recall the heyday of close Sino-American cooperation.
Another sign that matters would not get out of hand came from Jiang. While the rhetoric on all sides was intense, I asked Jiang whether Mao’s statement that China could wait one hundred years for Taiwan still stood. No, replied Jiang. When I asked in what way not, Jiang responded, “The promise was made twenty-three years ago. Now only seventy-seven years are left.”
The professed mutual desire to ease tensions ran up, however, against the aftermath of the Tiananmen crisis. There had been no high-level dialogue, nor a ministerial visit, since 1989; the only high-level discussion for six years had been at the sidelines of international meetings or at the U.N. Paradoxically, in the aftermath of military maneuvers in the Taiwan Strait, the immediate issue resolved itself into a partly procedural problem of how a meeting between leaders could be arranged.
Ever since Tiananmen, the Chinese had sought an invitation for a presidential visit to Washington. Both Presidents Bush and Clinton had evaded the prospect. It rankled. The Chinese, too, were refusing high-level contacts until assurances were given to forestall a repetition of the visit to America by the Taiwanese President.
Matters were back to the discussions at the end of the secret visit twenty-five years earlier, which had briefly stalemated over the issue of who was inviting whom—a deadlock broken by a formula by Mao, which could be read as implying that each side had invited the other.
A solution of sorts was found when Secretary of State Christopher and the Chinese Foreign Minister met on the occasion of an ASEAN meeting in Brunei, obviating the need of determining who had made the first move. Secretary Christopher conveyed an assurance—including a still classified presidential letter defining American intentions—regarding visits to America by Taiwanese senior officials and an invitation for a meeting of Jiang with the President.
The summit between Jiang and Clinton materialized in October, though not in a manner that took full account of China’s amour propre. It was not a state visit nor in Washington; rather, it was scheduled for New York, in the context of the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the United Nations. Clinton met with Jiang at Lincoln Center, as part of a series of similar meetings with the most important leaders attending the U.N. session. A Washington visit by a Chinese President in the aftermath of Chinese military exercises in the Taiwan Strait would have encountered too hostile a reception.
In this atmosphere of inconclusive ambivalence—of veiled overtures and tempered withdrawals—Taiwan’s parliamentary elections, scheduled for December 2, 1995, raised the temperature again. Beijing began a new round of military exercises off the Fujian coast, with air, naval, and ground forces conducting joint maneuvers to simulate an amphibious landing on hostile territory. This was accompanied by an equally aggressive campaign of psychological warfare. The day before the December legislative election, the PLA announced a further round of exercises to take place in March 1996, just prior to the Taiwanese presidential election. 23
As the election approached, missile tests “bracketing” Taiwan hit points just off key port cities in the island’s northeast and southwest. The United States responded with the most significant American show of force directed at China since the 1971 rapprochement, sending two aircraft carrier battle groups with the carrier Nimitz through the Taiwan Strait on the pretext of avoiding “bad weather.” At the same time, walking a narrow passage, Washington assured China that it was not changing its one China policy and warned Taiwan not to engage in provocative acts.
Approaching the precipice, both Washington and Beijing recoiled, realizing that they had no war aims over which to fight or terms to impose which would alter the overriding reality, which was (in Madeleine Albright’s description) that China “is in its own category—too big to ignore, too repressive to embrace, difficult to influence, and very, very proud.” 24 For its part, America was too powerful to be coerced and too committed to constructive relations with China to need to be. A superpower America, a dynamic China, a globalized world, and the gradual shift of the center of gravity of world affairs from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific required a peaceful and cooperative relationship. In the wake of the crisis, relations between China and the United States improved markedly.
As relations began to approach previous highs, yet another crisis shook the relationship as suddenly as a thunderclap at the end of a summer day. During the Kosovo war, at what was otherwise a high point in U.S.-Chinese relations, in May 1999, an American B-2 bomber originating in Missouri destroyed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. A firestorm of protests swept over China. Students and the government seemed united in their outrage at what was assumed to be another demonstration of American disrespect for China’s sovereignty. Jiang spoke of “deliberate provocation.” He elaborated with defiance revealing a latent disquiet: “The great People’s Republic of China will never be bullied, the great Chinese nation will never be humiliated, and the great Chinese people will never be conquered.” 25
As soon as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was informed, she asked the Deputy Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to accompany her to the Chinese Embassy in Washington, though it was the middle of the night, to express the regrets of the U.S. government. 26 Jiang felt obliged by the public mood, however, to express his own outrage but then to use that expression to restrain his public (a pattern similar to that of American Presidents on the human rights issue).
Chinese indignation was matched on the American side by arguments that China needed to be faced down. Both viewpoints reflected serious convictions, and illustrated the potential for confrontation in a relationship in which both sides were drawn by the nature of modern foreign policy into tensions with each other around the world. The governments on both sides remained committed to the need for cooperation, but they could not control all the ways the countries impinged on each other. It is the unsolved challenge of Chinese-American relations.
China’s Resurgence and Jiang’s Reflections
In the midst of the periodic crises recounted above, the 1990s witnessed a period of stunning economic growth in China, and with it a transformation of the country’s broader world role. In the 1980s, China’s “Reform and Opening Up” had remained partly a vision: its effects were noticeable, but their depth and longevity were open to debate. Within China itself the direction was still contested; in the wake of Tiananmen some of the country’s academic and political elites advocated an inward turn and a scaling back of China’s economic links with the West (a trend Deng ultimately felt obliged to challenge through his Southern Tour). When Jiang assumed national office, a largely unreformed sector of state-owned enterprises on the Soviet model still constituted over 50 percent of the economy. 27 China’s links to the world trade system were tentative and partial. Foreign companies still were skeptical about investing in China; Chinese companies rarely ventured abroad.
By the end of the decade, what had once seemed an improbable prospect had become a reality. Throughout the decade China grew at a rate of no lower than 7 percent per year, and often in the double digits, continuing an increase in per capita GDP that ranks as one of the most sustained and powerful in history. 28 By the end of the 1990s average income was approximately three times what it had been in 1978; in urban areas the income level rose even more dramatically, to roughly five times the 1978 level. 29
Throughout these changes, China’s trade with neighboring countries was burgeoning, and it played an increasingly central regional economic role. It tamed a period of dangerously escalating inflation in the early 1990s, implementing capital controls and a fiscal austerity program that were later credited with sparing China the worst of the Asian financial crisis in 1997–98. Standing, for the first time, as a bulwark of economic growth and stability in a time of economic crisis, China found itself in an unaccustomed role: once the recipient of foreign, often Western, economic policy prescriptions, it was now increasingly an independent proponent of its own solutions—and a source of emergency assistance to other economies in crisis. By 2001, China’s new status was cemented with a successful application to host the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, and the conclusion of negotiations making China a member of the WTO.
Fueling this transformation was a recalibration of China’s domestic political philosophy. Traveling further along the reformist road Deng had first charted, Jiang undertook to broaden the concept of Communism by opening it from an exclusive class-based elite to a wider spectrum of society. He spelled out his philosophy, which became known as the “Three Represents,” at the Sixteenth Party Congress in 2002—the last Congress he would attend as President on the eve of the first peaceful transfer of power in China’s modern history. It laid out why the Party that had won support through revolution needed now to represent as well the interests of its former ideological foes, including entrepreneurs. Jiang opened the Communist Party to business leaders, democratizing the internal governance of the Communist Party in what remained a one-party state.
Throughout this process, China and the United States were becoming increasingly intertwined economically. At the beginning of the 1990s the total volume of U.S. trade with mainland China was still only half the volume of American trade with Taiwan. By the end of the decade U.S.-China trade had quadrupled, and Chinese exports to the United States had increased sevenfold. 30 American multinationals viewed China as an essential component of their business strategies, both as a locus of production and as an increasingly monetary market in its own right. China in turn was using its increasing cash reserves to invest in U.S. Treasury bonds (and in 2008 would become the largest foreign holder of American debt).
In all this China was surging toward a new world role, with interests in every corner of the globe and integrated to an unprecedented degree with broader political and economic trends. Two centuries after the first mutually miscomprehending negotiations over trade and diplomatic recognition between Macartney and the Chinese court, there was a recognition in both China and the West that they were arriving at a new stage in their interactions, whether or not they were prepared for the challenges it would pose. As China’s then Vice Premier Zhu Rongji observed in 1997: “Never before in history has China had such frequent exchanges and communications with the rest of the world.” 31
In earlier eras—such as Macartney’s or even the Cold War era—a “Chinese world” and a “Western world” had interacted in limited instances and at a stately pace. Now modern technology and economic interdependence made it impossible, for better or for worse, to manage relations in such a measured manner. As a result, the two sides confronted a somewhat paradoxical situation in which they had vastly more opportunities for mutual understanding, but, at the same time, new opportunities to impinge on each other’s sensitivities. A globalized world had brought them together, but also risked more frequent and rapid exacerbation of tensions in times of crisis.
As his period in office moved toward its conclusion, Jiang expressed his recognition of this danger in a personal, almost sentimental, way not generally found in the aloof, conceptual, self-contained manner of the Chinese leadership. The occasion was a meeting in 2001 with some members of the America-China Society. Jiang was in the last year of his twelve-year tenure but already seized by the nostalgia of those who are leaving activity in which, by definition, every action made a difference for a world in which they will soon be largely spectators. He had presided over a turbulent period, which had begun with China substantially isolated internationally, at least among the advanced democratic states, the countries China most needed to implement its reform program.
Jiang had surmounted these challenges. Political cooperation with America had been reestablished. The reform program was accelerating and producing the extraordinary growth rate that would, within another decade, turn China into a financial and economic global power. A decade that began in turbulence and doubt had turned into a period of extraordinary achievement.
In all of China’s extravagant history, there was no precedent for how to participate in a global order, whether in concert with—or opposition to—another superpower. As it turned out, that superpower, the United States, also lacked the experience for such a design—if indeed it had the inclination for it. A new international order was bound to emerge, whether by design or by default. Its nature and the measures for bringing it about were the unsolved challenges for both countries. They would interact, either as partners or as adversaries. Their contemporary leaders professed partnership, but neither had yet managed to define it or build shelters against the possible storms ahead.
Now Jiang was encountering a new century and a different generation of American leaders. The United States had a new President, the son of George H. W. Bush, who had been in office when Jiang was elevated so unexpectedly by events no one could have foreseen. The relationship with the new President started with another unsought military clash. On April 1, 2001, an American reconnaissance plane flying along the Chinese coast just outside Chinese territorial waters was being tailed by a Chinese military aircraft, which then crashed into it near Hainan Island off China’s southern coast. Neither Jiang nor Bush permitted the incident to torpedo the relationship. Two days later, Jiang left on a long-planned trip to South America, signaling that he, as head of the Central Military Commission, did not expect crisis action. Bush expressed regret, not for the reconnaissance flight but for the death of the Chinese pilot.
Some foreboding of the danger of drifting events seems to have been in Jiang’s mind during the meeting with America-China Society members, as he meandered on in a seemingly discursive statement quoting classical Chinese poetry, interjecting English phrases, extolling the importance of U.S.-Chinese cooperation. Prolix as his utterances were, they reflected a hope and a dilemma: the hope that the two countries would find a way to work together to avoid the storms generated by the very dynamism of their societies—and the fear that they might miss their chance to do so.
The key theme of Jiang’s opening remarks was the importance of the Sino-American relationship: “I am not trying to exaggerate our self-importance, but good cooperation between the U.S. and China is important for the world. We will do our best to do that [said in English ]. This is important for the whole world.” But if the whole world was the subject, were any leaders really qualified to deal with it? Jiang pointed out that his education had started with traditional Confucianism on a trajectory that included Western education, then schools in the former Soviet Union. Now he was leading the transition of a country that dealt with all these cultures.
China and the United States were confronting an immediate issue, the future of Taiwan. Jiang did not use the familiar rhetoric to which we had become accustomed. Rather, his remarks concerned the internal dynamics of the dialogue and how it might be driven out of control, whatever the intention of the leaders, who might be urged by their publics to actions they would prefer to avoid: “The biggest issue between the U.S. and China is the Taiwan issue. For example, we often say ‘peaceful resolution’ and ‘one country, two systems.’ Generally speaking, I limit myself to saying these two things. But sometimes I add that we cannot undertake not to use force.”
Jiang could not avoid, of course, the issue that had caused a deadlock in over 130 meetings between Chinese and American diplomats before the opening to China or the deliberate ambiguities since. But while China refused to abjure the use of force because it would imply a limitation of its sovereignty, it had in practice refrained from it for thirty years by the time of the conversation with Jiang. And Jiang had put forward the sacramental language in the gentlest of manners.
Jiang did not insist on an immediate change. Rather, he pointed out that the American position contained an anomaly. The United States did not support independence for Taiwan nor, on the other hand, did it promote reunification. The practical consequence was to turn Taiwan into “an unsinkable aircraft carrier” for America. In such a situation, whatever the intentions of the Chinese government, the convictions of its population might generate their own momentum toward confrontation:
[I]n the nearly twelve years I’ve been in the Central government, I’ve felt very strongly the sentiments of the 1.2 billion Chinese people. Of course we have the best aspirations toward you, but if a spark flares up it will be hard to control the emotions of 1.2 billion people.
I felt obliged to reply to this threat of force, however regretfully and indirectly formulated:
[I]f the discussion concerns use of force it will strengthen all the forces that want to use Taiwan to harm our relationship. In a military confrontation between the U.S. and China, even those of us who would be heartbroken would be obliged to support our own country.
Jiang replied not by repeating the by now traditional invocation of the imperviousness of China to the danger of war. He took the perspective of a world whose future depended on Sino-American cooperation. He spoke of compromise—a word almost never used by Chinese leaders about Taiwan, even when it was practiced. He avoided making either a proposal or a threat. And he was no longer in a position to shape the outcome. He called for a global perspective—precisely what was most needed and what each nation’s history made most difficult:
It is not clear whether China and the U.S. can find common language and resolve the Taiwan question. I have remarked that if Taiwan were not under U.S. protection, we would have been able to liberate it. Therefore, the question is how we can compromise and get a satisfactory solution. This is the most sensitive part of our relations. I am not suggesting anything here. We are old friends. I do not need to use diplomatic language. In the final analysis, I hope that with Bush in office our two countries can approach U.S.-China relations from a strategic and global perspective.
The Chinese leaders I had previously met had a long-range perspective, but it drew a great deal from lessons of the past. They also were in the process of undertaking great projects with significance for a distant future. But they rarely described the shape of the middle-term future, assuming that its character would emerge from the vast efforts in which they were involved. Jiang asked for something less dramatic but perhaps even deeper. At the end of his presidency, he addressed the need to redefine the philosophical framework of each side. Mao had urged ideological rigor even while making tactical maneuvers. Jiang seemed to be saying that each side should realize that if they were to cooperate genuinely, they needed to understand the modifications they were obliged to make in their traditional attitudes. He urged each side to reexamine its own internal doctrines and be open to reinterpreting them—including socialism:
The world should be a rich, colorful, diversified place. For example, in China in 1978 we made a decision for reform and opening up. . . . In 1992 in the Fourteenth National Congress I stated that China’s development model should be in the direction of a socialist market economy. For those who are accustomed to the West, you think the market is nothing strange, but in 1992 to say “market” here was a big risk.
For that reason, Jiang argued that both sides should adapt their ideologies to the necessities of their interdependence:
Simply put, the West is best advised to set aside its past attitude toward communist countries, and we should stop taking communism in naive or simplistic ways. Deng famously said in his 1992 trip to the South that socialism will take generations, scores of generations. I am an engineer. I calculated that there have been 78 generations from Confucius until now. Deng said socialism will take so long. Deng, I now think, created very good environmental conditions for me. On your point about value systems, East and West must improve mutual understanding. Perhaps I am being a bit naive.
The reference to seventy-eight generations was intended to reassure the United States that it should not be alarmed at the rise of a powerful China. It would need that many generations to fulfill itself. But political circumstances in China had certainly changed when a successor of Mao could say Communists should stop talking about their ideology in naive and simplistic ways. Or speak of the need for a dialogue between the Western world and China over how to adjust their philosophical frameworks to each other.
On the American side, the challenge was to find a way through a series of divergent assessments. Was China a partner or an adversary? Was the future cooperation or confrontation? Was the American mission the spread of democracy to China, or cooperation with China to bring about a peaceful world? Or was it possible to do both?
Both sides have been obliged ever since to overcome their internal ambivalences and to define the ultimate nature of their relationship.