Wanna Dance?
Warming up for his Washington trip, Zhu Rongji tangoed--and tangled--with Madeleine Albright on tough issues. Can China and the U.S. get in step?
By ANTHONY SPAETH
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When Madeleine Albright last came to Beijing eleven months back, the trip was a sparkler. Less than an hour after landing at Beijing Capital Airport, the U.S. Secretary of State was inking an agreement to set up a hotline between Bill Clinton and Chinese President Jiang Zemin.
Last week she returned for her fifth official visit, but sparkle had turned to frost. The government-run People's Daily ignored her arrival, and when it finally deigned to write about Albright, the piece was buried beneath a report on Jiang's meeting with Cuba's foreign minister. Her trip was intended to build momentum toward premier Zhu Rongji's planned visit to Washington in April, but her meetings with Zhu and then Jiang got sidetracked, as expected, by clashes on human rights. After Albright raised the ever-sensitive issue, the Chinese responded with their own report on the dire human rights situation in the U.S., which was portrayed as an "abyss of racial discrimination," with a manipulated press, low voter turnouts for elections and rampant crime. (It included a not-often-publicized statistic on the high murder rate afflicting the U.S. catering industry.) Said Albright at the end of her notably flinty trip: "Last June, our two Presidents agreed to a candid dialogue on human rights. In the last two days, we have seen what a candid dialogue looks like."
It didn't take a China watcher to parse that comment: the static on the line between Washington and Beijing is still pretty deafening. And while the relationship between the two giants is famously gyroscopic, there are actually some brand new points of conflict. Human rights rhetoric always grabs the headlines, which the Chinese seemed determined to provide this time around, detaining at least three dissidents in the week before Albright's arrival. But China also protested Washington's decision to finance research on a Theater Missile Defense system, the new avatar of Ronald Reagan's Star Wars defense shield--and to possibly include Taiwan within its protective bubble. As far as anyone knows, there's only one country that might wish to lob ballistic missiles at Taiwan, and that's China, which considers the island a renegade state, its property, and not a suitable tenant inside an high-tech American defense umbrella. (Taiwan recently complained of China's deployment of 100 new missiles pointing in its direction.) Not to mention other contentious chestnuts: will China open up its market to American businesses in order to get a seat in the World Trade Organization? Is it snapping up U.S. technology, against U.S. regulations, for its military, and selling missile technology to Iran and Pakistan? What is it doing to make the world safer from North Korea?
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