Now the challenge is to keep three days of heartburn in Beijing from opening a rift in Sino-U.S. relations that nobody wants. Within three months, Bill Clinton must decide whether China has met his standards for “overall, significant progress” in human rights. If not, he insists, Washington will revoke China’s trade privileges as a most-favored nation (MFN). Congressional leaders are leaning on the White House to follow through. China could lose a catastrophic $10 billion in annual exports to the United States, as well as a million jobs in export industries. U.S. losses would be just as devastating. American investors have flooded into China in the last two years: 200 U.S. companies have registered in Shanghai alone. If these pioneers and U.S. giants like Boeing and AT&T are frozen out of the China market, Japanese and European competitors are ready to move in.
A Sino-U.S. trade war would have costs beyond dollars and cents: it would bolster China’s forces of party control and state enterprise, while isolating the new class of private entrepreneurs. “By lifting MFN we would to a large extent be hurting the very people who are liberalizing China,” says a U.S. official. The dissidents who have reemerged to campaign for human rights and free unions almost unanimously support MFN as an important aid in moving their country toward freedom.
U.S. officials were furious that China staged a highly public crackdown on the eve of Christopher’s arrival. Some blamed Communist “troglodytes” focused only on their internal power struggles. “We are involved in a really dangerous game of chicken,” said one administration official, but the Chinese “just don’t get it.” Winston Lord, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, detonated when a Chinese spokesman accused America of “casting shadows.” For Beijing to accuse Washington of bad faith while rounding up dissidents “is really an extraordinary act of chutzpah,” he said. Christopher tried to make the U.S. dismay perfectly clear. He didn’t give an arrival statement because aides couldn’t find words that would neither unduly offend nor encourage their hosts. Christopher also decided against an official banquet so that he wouldn’t have to give a toast-and even canned a scheduled sightseeing tour of the Forbidden City to avoid any suggestion that he might be having fun.
Yet the ugly diplomacy was partly an accident of timing. Due to commitments in Australia and Japan, Christopher arrived in Beijing just as the National People’s Congress, China’s parliament, was convening. “It’s not a good time to visit,” says a Chinese official. Translation: it’s Christopher’s problem if he shows up while Beijing is clearing out the usual troublemakers before a big government meeting. Christopher wanted his trip to be the culmination of the Clinton administration’s policy of “comprehensive engagement.” For Six months cabinet members and legislators have streamed into Beijing to underline U.S. seriousness about human rights and evoke the bounteous trade and technology transfers that are possible if Beijing makes enough concessions. Christopher himself has met with Foreign Minister Qian Qichen five times in the last six months. Last week he brought along the under secretary of defense for policy to pass the message to the People’s Liberation Army. But as Chinese leaders continue to recite their own mantra-that U.S. interests lie in staying out of China’s internal affairs and renewing MFN-administration officials have begun to conclude that the U.S. message isn’t getting through.
The Beijing leadership actually has reason to focus on internal politics just now. After encouraging Hong Kong-style entrepreneurship for 15 years, China’s economic reformers have just begun the task of cutting loose the huge state enterprises that block the further expansion of Chinese capitalism. The reorganization threatens to throw millions of people out of work at a time when job-seeking peasants already are crowding coastal cities. In the circumstances, the seasoned, anti-Communist labor unionists who have begun reorganizing could mount the kind of challenge to the government that was beyond the reach of the students in Tiananmen Square five years ago.
The new dissident movement has been taking shape for years. In 1991, 16 activists tried to form a secret organization, the Democratic Freedom Party. They were rounded up a year later, were charged with counterrevolutionary activity and are still awaiting trial and inevitable conviction. Their successors absorbed the lesson. Last November nine dissidents from Beijing and other major cities signed a “peace charter” that appealed for democratic reforms-but also explicitly supported the Communist Party. This time authorities arrested the signatories in outlying cities but spared those in Beijing. Encouraged, dissidents began circulating public petitions earlier this month demanding the right to strike and to form independent unions. They claim that 38 separate dissident cells are gathering signatures across China-the largest collective act of opposition since the Tiananmen uprising.
The dissidents were determined to keep their cool, and so were U.S. policymakers. Back in Washington, a senior White House official emphasized that renewing MFN was still an “open question” and that the Chinese still had time to show progress on human rights. “The tea leaves should not be read to imply that American policy has changed,” said the senior official. “It has not.” For all the turmoil in Beijing last week, the Clinton administration still gives China credit for steps in the right direction. Beijing has hosted a Red Cross delegation to discuss prison inspections, curtailed the export of certain products made by prison labor and released a few political inmates, including Tibetans-all items on Clinton’s checklist. Christopher himself will doubtless continue to prod Beijing. From a distance.
