Beyond History's Shadow

Bill Clinton's summit with Jiang Zemin comes just as a new China is emerging. Why both leaders must learn to work together.

By Michael Elliott

Shortly after 10:15, on May 25, a small piece of history was made. The president of the United States picked up the phone and, thanks to a newly installed digital link, was able for the first time to place a direct call to Jiang Zemin, the president of the People's Republic of China. The two men talked for more than half an hour. Clinton was worried that Pakistan was about to test a nuclear device; China, he said, was probably the only power that could persuade Pakistan to back off: would it do so? Jiang stopped short of a promise, but sounded encouraging. "We have a common view," the Chinese president told his American counterpart.

President Clinton and Chinese President Jiang Zemin toast at White House state dinner in 1997. (Greg Gibson/AP)

Hello? In conventional wisdom, the United States and China have a common view on nothing. Look only at the headlines, and you would think that the context of Clinton's nine-day visit to China was nothing but crisis. On Capitol Hill, the Republican majority has launched two investigations into allegations that campaign contributions from Asian donors were designed to grease the export of sensitive high technology to China. At least two criminal inquiries are examining possible violations of controls on exports to China. In the most prominent case, Loral Space & Communications and Hughes Electronics are under investigation for allegedly supplying China with sensitive information about how to improve their rockets and missiles, while helping the Chinese solve the crashes of two civilian rockets that were launching American satellites. Loral and Hughes deny any wrongdoing.

Outside the military field, human-rights activists insist that China is a police state, which imprisons dissidents, tramples on religious freedoms and has turned Tibet into a charnel house. Faced with a huge and growing U.S. trade deficit with China--which in 1998 is projected to exceed $50 billion--trade hawks lobby against renewing China's most-favored-nation status. For his critics, Clinton's trip, including a welcoming ceremony in Tiananmen Square, is just a kowtow to a tyrant; it was inevitable, in those circumstances, that the president should have felt it necessary, on June 11, to give a long, defensive speech on his administration's "principled and pragmatic" policy to China.

Contrast such defensiveness with the view of the visit in Beijing. On TV, promos hark back to moments of Sino-American amity during World War II. Posters of Clinton and Jiang, in heroic poses, bedeck city streets. A Beijing antiques dealer whips out a transparent snuff bottle with Clinton's face painted inside. ("Done by a master," he says. "Just $250.") Jiang himself tells everyone how wonderfully warm his hosts were during his American trip last year. In Washington, Jiang told the Politburo, Clinton fiddled with a podium step so that he would not tower over his Chinese counterpart. "From such a small gesture," said Jiang, "you can discern the character of a politician."

Imagine, then, what the Chinese must think of the mood in Washington. Beijing's leaders, says one Chinese academic, "are offended by recent allegations about Chinese behavior. We have a hard time separating U.S. internal politics from real perceptions of China."

In fact, China doesn't make it easy to get accurate perceptions of itself. Take the crucial issue of arms proliferation. No single question so sharply defines whether the two countries can build, in Jiang's words to NEWSWEEK, a "constructive strategic partnership." History does not suggest optimism. In the 1980s, Beijing sold arms to virtually anyone, no questions asked--missiles to Saudi Arabia and Syria, weapons to both sides in the Iran-Iraq war, nuclear technology to Pakistan.

And now? Chinese intentions are still not clear (and even if Jiang did urge caution on his Pakistani allies last month, they didn't listen). On the one hand, American officials insist that China has quietly and gradually adopted a more responsible proliferation policy. When asked by NEWSWEEK about potential weapon sales to Iran and Pakistan, Jiang replied: "The answer, very simply, is that we don't plan to sell missiles." Recently, American officials told their Beijing counterparts that lower-level Chinese officials were thinking of selling Iran anhydrous hydrogen fluoride, despite the fact that it can be used in the production of nuclear weapons. Beijing scuttled the talks. At the same time, in an interview with NEWSWEEK, Sha Zukang, China's chief arms-control official, implied that China's efforts to dissuade Pakistan from further destabilizing measures would not go as far as the United States would like. China is still not a signatory to the multilateral missile-technology-control regime (though it follows some of its precepts).

Still, looked at objectively, many of America's concerns about China can seem overblown. Take them one by one. If there is a true danger from the proliferation of lethal military technologies, it is more likely to come from the cowboy capitalism of Russia, with its thousands of destitute scientists, than from China. That American firms in the satellite business have formed close contacts with those who launch Chinese rockets is inevitable. There is massive global demand for satellite capacity, but only a limited supply of rockets--American, Chinese, Russian and French--that can dump them into space. To ask American companies to boycott China's rockets is to ask them to give up their global leadership of the industry.

Campaign contributions? After months of investigation by federal authorities, there is still no hard evidence that Asian money bought any significant favors from Clinton for China. Civil liberties? There are countries whose record on fundamental civil and religious freedom is no worse than China's; Hollywood stars have not, so far, launched a Campaign for a Free Saudi Arabia. American exposure to the Chinese economy needs to be placed in context; in 1995, the value of American foreign direct investment in Denmark was greater than that in China; in 1996, American exports to Belgium oustripped those to China.

All beside the point; when it comes to relations between the dragon and the eagle, facts count for little. What matters is a long, complex history of hopes, disillusionments and shifting images. As if they were looking through a distorting glass, Chinese and Americans see each other first as titans--and then, with an imperceptible shift of perspective, as villains.

Almost from the moment that American ships first moored on the China coast, the two nations have had extravagant views of each other--and then found disappointment. In the 19th century, American missionaries flocked to China, bringing the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. (At much the same time, Standard Oil's kerosene lamps were bringing China light of another kind.) But then darkness descended again. American missionaries were killed during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900; the 2-year-old Henry Luce, whose publications would later sustain the China lobby, fled to Korea with his missionary parents.

President Richard Nixon shakes hands with Communist Chinese leader Mao Zedong during Nixon's historic 1972 trip. (AP)

In the 20th century, the process of hope and disappointment continued. China thought that Woodrow Wilson would defend its interests at the Versailles peace conference in 1919; instead, the peace treaty recognized Japan's special (for which read: rapacious) interests in China. Mao Zedong welcomed an American military mission to his headquarters in Yanan, and told John Service, a diplomat attached to the mission, "We will not be afraid of democratic American influence... We cannot risk any conflict with you." Within a few years, Mao's human waves broke over American forces in Korea, Washington echoed to the cry "Who lost China?" and witch hunts persecuted those (including Service) who were thought sympathetic to the Reds.

Are things different now? Can China and the United States see each other as they would like to be seen? Not easily. Nine years after the massacre in Tiananmen Square, the scene that many Americans think typifies China is that of a lone demonstrator stalling an armored column as it rumbled through the streets of Beijing. As the TV talking heads anchored away, their pictures showed China as a tyrannical place, led by those prepared to ruthlessly suppress all those who sought a life more free. That view was accurate; for years, China would not admit that the boy who stopped the tanks existed--he was a confection of Western journalists with "ulterior motives."

From China's point of view, Clinton's trip is best seen as an attempt to give Americans an image that will replace that of a boy and a tank--maybe Clinton amid Qin Shi Huangdi's terra-cotta army in Xian, or visiting a church in Beijing. But new images do not necessarily imply a new reality. In large measure, the central question surrounding Clinton's trip is whether China has really changed since 1989.

Walking around the glittering shopping malls of Beijing, talking to the members of the newly affluent Chinese middle class, it is plain that China is not the country it was nine years ago. Official language has changed; China's leaders today no longer deny what happened in Tiananmen Square, but focus on what has happened since--an embrace of market economics and new political and legal rights. More important, on the streets and in the media, "unofficial" China is giving real shape to such rights.

Take the hot TV show (a 30-second spot costs $3,700) "Oriental Horizon." A recent segment dwelled on the abuse of sirens on officials' cars. Reporters followed a car, siren wailing, to the airport, stuck a microphone under the nose of the embarrassed passenger--then cut to regulations that explained exactly when sirens could and could not be used. Trivial? Not at all. For all those who watched the show, its message was plain: laws apply to officials as well as to everyone else, and it's OK to shove a microphone into a bureaucrat's face.

Still, caution remains sensible; this isn't Kansas. "On human rights and religious freedoms," said Clinton this month, "China remains on the wrong side of history." Though some of those at the forefront of this year's Beijing spring boldly criticize anyone, others are more careful. "They praise Jiang, saying what a great reformer he is and how he should push reforms even more," says Wang Ruoshui, a former deputy editor of the People's Daily who lost his job in 1984 for criticizing the "cult of Mao." Instead of fighting the system, today's opposition is learning how to avoid confrontation and skirt obstacles.

Skeptics would say, moreover, that the new mood in China proves only so much. You can have nightclubs, modern art, punk rock, and still be a geopolitical menace; one reason that weapons proliferation is such a crucial bilateral issue. But in truth, America needs more from China than a negative promise that it will not misbehave; it needs positive help. With Japan's economy in recession and its political system in semipermanent paralysis, Washington now needs China to assist in bringing economic and political stability to a suddenly volatile part of the world.

Can such a partnership be built? If so, it would be something new. Both countries assume that fate has called them to shape the world; they yield to none in pride, or in the defense of what they perceive to be their vital national interests. Hopes can still be dashed. A "new" China will still be China. It will, as Clinton has said, "choose its own destiny." There will be times--depend on it--when that choice will, once again, incline China to demonize the United States; and when those Americans who hanker for another cold war appear to have the whip hand in Washington. But perhaps, as the new China and the new century unfold, leaders in both nations will be able to say, "We can and must work together." Not a quote from Clinton or Jiang; but from Mao, to his American wartime visitors in the hills of Yanan.

— With George Wehrfritz, Melinda Liu and Dorinda Elliott in Beijing and Karen Breslau, Michael Hirsh and Mark Hosenball in Washington