y subject today is U.S.-China relations on the eve of the visit of Mr.
Zhu Rongji to the United States. In the decade that has elapsed since the
last visit of a Chinese premier, much has transpired that is deeply
troubling and, indeed, profoundly alarming.
Ten years ago, a frightened
Chinese regime that had watched pro-Western demonstrators shake every
Communist state in Europe decided it would not happen in China. Tanks
were sent to disperse students in Tienanmen Square, for the crime of
having demanded democratic reforms beneath a replica of the Statue of
Liberty. We yet do not know how many perished in that massacre.
Seventeen
years before that atrocity, I rode through that same square with President
Nixon; I am one of ten surviving members of the 1972 U.S. delegation that
opened up the People's Republic. So, my experience with China goes back
half a lifetime. And let me state for the record my view: America should
not seek any conflict or confrontation with China, nor do we seek some
Sino-American Cold War to replace the U.S.-Soviet Cold War. Nor did I
oppose the rapprochement pursued by presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan, and
Bush, asking only that it be done with eyes open -- for the aging men who
rule China today were all young apparatchiks in a Maoist regime that had
as much blood on its hands as Hitler and Stalin.
President Clinton's
initial determination to reengage with China also seemed to me well worth
the effort. Because Beijing controls twenty-two percent of the world's
population and possesses nuclear weapons, we cannot ignore China and we
cannot isolate China. But our vision of the Asia-Pacific region is one of
peace, prosperity, and independence for all nations, and we cannot embrace
as a friend and partner a mighty and expansionist power that is openly
hostile to the ideals of human dignity and freedom on which this nation
was founded. As a Pacific power, we have interests in Asia we cannot
permit to be imperiled, and friends and allies whom we cannot allow to be
bullied or subjugated.
It is thus a time for truth about the Peoples
Republic of China, and about the China policy of this White House. In a
sentence, the Clinton policy of "constructive engagement" has degenerated
into willful self-delusion and craven appeasement; and that policy is
leading directly to a confrontation, and possible conflict, with China.
In
the last decade, America has sought to mollify China. Since 1990, Beijing
has been allowed to run up $274 billion in trade surpluses with the United
States. Our trade concessions have given China the second largest hoard
of hard currency in the world, $150 billion.
Last year alone, China rang
up a $57 billion trade surplus with the United States, representing almost
100 percent of China's economic growth. The U.S. has voted to provide
Beijing with World Bank and Asian Development Bank loans that amount to
foreign aid, and Beijing has been permitted to purchase America's latest
technology, including dozens of supercomputers.
Since 1990, moreover,
America has reduced its strategic missile forces and cut conventional
forces by the equivalent of the entire land, air, and sea forces that
fought Desert Storm. Defense spending that consumed 6% of our GNP in the
Reagan era now consumes only half that. Reagan's 600-ship navy, which
patrolled the China coast, has been cut almost in half.
Thus, the U.S.
has not threatened China in this decade; the U.S. has sought to befriend
China. But what have been the fruits of our "engagement"? Since Tienanmen
Square in 1989:
- China has provided missiles to Iran and nuclear technology to Pakistan.
- Chinese naval forces have occupied Mischief Reef in the Spratly Islands
that sit astride Japan's oil lifeline.
- China has fired missiles toward Taiwan to intimidate its government and
to disrupt free elections.
- China has warned Japan against any deeper military cooperation with the
United States, and warned us that any deployment of theater missile
defense would be an unfriendly act, as would any missile defense of Japan
or Taiwan.
- China has launched the greatest military buildup in Asia since Japan in
the 1930s, using hard currency from its U.S. trade to buy the latest in
Russian anti-ship weaponry.
- With the complicity, or laxity, of the White House, China has stolen
U.S. satellite and missile technology, and the technology for the W88
miniaturized nuclear warhead, and targeted 13 of its first 18 ICBMs on the
United States.
- China has ignored our protests to pursue cultural genocide in Tibet and
persecute Roman Catholics, Evangelical Christians, and political
dissidents. This cruel regime forces abortions and sterilizations on
married women for the crime of wanting to have a second child.
To those who say that China's internal policies are its own business, I
say that, as Beijing treats its own defenseless citizens, so it defines
its own character, and so it will treat us, if ever we permit our defenses
to atrophy and decline. Mr. Clinton's decision not to permit human rights
outrages to interfere with trade has proven a shameful capitulation.
Americans are being true neither to themselves nor their heritage as the
champions of freedom and decency if they engage in business-as-usual with
tyrants who trample upon all that we profess to hold sacred. For
Americans there must always be some things still greater in the hierarchy
of values than the bottom line of a balance sheet. It is time to put
country before commerce, and let America be America again.
Last year,
President Clinton went to Beijing, proclaimed China to be our "strategic
partner," and returned to tell us that China had re-targeted its missiles
away from the United States. And what has been China's record since?
According to the Department of State, China's "human rights record
deteriorated sharply last year." Even Mr. Clinton now seeks to have China
condemned by the UN Commission on Human Rights. Here is a bill of
particulars on Beijing's persecution agenda:
- In Jiangxi province, 76-year-old Roman Catholic bishop Zeng Jingmu is
serving three years in a labor camp for saying mass without permission.
- In Shandong, police broke up a Protestant worship service and arrested
most of the 61 worshipers; many are serving twelve-year prison sentences.
- In Tibet, fourteen Buddhist nuns serving up to nine years had nine years
added for recording pro-independence songs in prison.
- Last fall, when dissidents tried to register a new democratic party, 30
organizers were arrested; the leaders are serving 13-year sentences.
A great power that is frightened of even peaceful challenges to its power
and legitimacy is both unhealthy and dangerous. Also, China has steadily
expanded to 200 the number of M-9 and M-11 missiles targeted on Taiwan,
building to a force of 650, and has mock-test fired missiles at U.S.
forces on Okinawa and in South Korea. How threatening are these missiles?
A reading of "America's Maginot Line" in December's "Atlantic Monthly" is
instructive.
"With forty-five missiles," writes Paul Bracken, "China could virtually
close Taiwan's ports, airfields, waterworks and power plants, and destroy
the oil-storage facilities of a nation that needs continual replenishment
from the outside world." China today is building the missile capacity to
paralyze Taiwan. And because U.S. bases in Asia are naked to missile
attack, those bases are becoming as much hostages against U.S. action as
centers of U.S. power. Missile strikes against these "soft targets,"
writes Bracken, could wreak havoc, destroy airfields, fuel dumps, and
weapons and ammunition depots. Under missile fire, America's bases in the
Far East could be rendered useless.
What is China up to? The answer
seems clear and ominous. In 1996, when the U.S. sent two carriers to the
waters off Taiwan, China had between thirty and fifty missiles aimed at
Taiwan and no air force capable of challenging our 7th Fleet. Thus,
Beijing dissolved the crisis.
But China is now clearly preparing for another crisis to force Taiwan
back to the "embrace of the Motherland," and intends to use the threat of
a missile blockade if Taiwan resists. If the U.S. 7th Fleet attempts to
intervene, China intends to have the air, sea, and missile capacity to put
at risk every U.S. warship and base between the Asian coast and Guam. This
confrontation may still be a few years off, but China is clearly preparing
for it; and if we do not act to prevent it, there is a near certainty it
is coming.
This is where the unrequited appeasement of China has left the
next President. In the words of Asian scholar Arthur Waldron of the
University of Pennsylvania, "U.S. policy...has smoothed the road for an
ultranationalist dictatorship in China -- even as U.S. security failures
have ensured that the dictatorship will have state-of-the-art weapons."
The Clinton China policy is a demonstrable failure. Yet, the President
refuses to see it, or concede it, and seems determined to retain his rosy
view of what China is about. And in their failure to renounce Clinton's
China's policy, Republicans, too, are embracing a series of myths about
China.
The first myth is the Utopian belief that peace descends on the
wings of trade. As long as we trade with China, it is said, we need never
confront China. History, however, reveals this notion to be bunk. The
bloodiest war of the 19th century was inside a free-trade zone, between
the United States of America and the Confederate States of America. In
the 1930s Japan's best customers were China and the U.S.; Tokyo attacked
both. During the Battle of Britain, Nazi Germany's reliable supplier of grain
and gasoline was Stalin's USSR, upon whom Hitler turned as soon as the
battle was over.
The "China market," visions of which so intoxicate the
Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, is an enduring myth
dating back to the turn of the century when Secretary of State John Hay
proclaimed an Open Door in China. Big Business slavered over the prospect
of 400 million new customers. And how did Big Business benefit? Where
China accounted for 1% of U.S. trade in 1900, that figure soared to 2% by
1930, with most of that in tobacco sales and cigarettes. The truth: China
has never been an important export market; we sell more to tiny Singapore.
Last year, less than two percent of our exports went to China, but China
ran up huge trade surpluses with us in electrical equipment, heavy
machinery, footwear, furniture, apparel, clothing, leather and plastics.
What were our big sellers to China, besides aircraft? Cotton, live
animals, starches, fibers, meat, cereals, wood pulp, raw hides, skins,
residues and waste from the food industries, oil seeds, animal and vegetable fat, and fertilizer. Isn't that pretty much what the thirteen
colonies sent to George III?
Let me repeat: the "China market" is a myth.
Beijing tailors its trade policy to augment state power. It buys what it
needs and cannot produce, such as Boeing planes, while stealing our
technology to create its own airframe industry.
Now, I understand what China is doing; what I don't understand is what
America is doing. U.S. trade policy today is impossible to defend in terms
of U.S. strategic interests. America imposes sanctions on democratic
India for testing nuclear weapons to deter China, which has attacked India
twice.
But when Beijing targets nuclear missiles on the United States, we call
China our "strategic partner." When generals in Haiti violate human
rights, they get invaded, but when the Chinese Communists trample on the
human rights of a billion people, they are rewarded with a $57 billion
trade surplus. For the Administration, which has all its political capital
wagered on the China card, there may be no turning back. But it is time
for Congress to renounce a Clinton policy that is leading to
confrontation, while it strengthens Beijing for that confrontation. What
should be done?
- Until China closes its concentration camps, stops coercive abortions,
and ceases its persecution of Christians, Tibetans, and dissidents,
Congress should suspend MFN and impose on all Chinese imports the same
taxes China imposes on goods from the U.S.A.
- Congress should vote to block the transfer of any new high-tech military
technology to China's regime.
- Congress should demand that the U.S. veto new loans to China from the
World Bank or Asian Development Bank, and reject the admission of China to
the World Trade Organization, and work for the admission of Taiwan.
- The Republican Party should declare its intent to shift the center of
gravity of U.S. policy away from Asia's dictators toward Asia's democrats.
- As America is an island nation and the Pacific is our frontier, we must
restore the U.S. Navy to the preeminence it had under President Reagan. A
decade of slashing defense for social programs, and of using the American
military for social experiments by 1960s radicals, must come to an end.
Finally, the United States must assert that any decision to deploy purely
defensive weapons, such as the theater missile defense (TMD), is not
subject to China's veto. And if Beijing does not halt its own missile
buildup, we should interrupt normal trade. An embargo on China would
hardly be felt by America; but it would bring an instant currency and
economic collapse in China.
Let me repeat: No one wants a confrontation or
conflict with China; but Beijing needs to be jolted into an awareness that
threats against Taiwan or our friends in the Pacific, mean an end to U.S.
economic engagement and a closing of the U.S. market. In the 6th century
B.C., Chinese general Sun Tzu wrote, "The opportunity to defeat the enemy
is provided by the enemy himself." Today, China is dependent on U.S. trade
and goodwill for loans, for yearly infusions of hard currency, and for
virtually its entire economic growth.
In this relationship, today, the U.S. has the whip hand; we will not have
it too much longer.
Now is the time to use our leverage to demonstrate forcefully the cost to
Beijing of going down the road toward confrontation over Taiwan, so that,
further down this road, it will not be necessary to use our military power
-- and put at risk our fleets, our forces in Asia, and our cities. General
MacArthur said, half a century ago, that those who would appease China are
"blind to history's clear lesson;" there is no instance where appeasement
has led to other than a "sham peace."
We do not want a sham peace; we want
real peace. But peace requires a clarity of vision and firmness of
purpose woefully absent from our China policy since that awful June night
when those tanks rolled through Tienanmen Square. A confrontation with
China, or a conflict with China, I repeat, is avoidable; but this
administration must stop turning a blind eye to China's belligerent
encroachments, or that confrontation will become inevitable.
