The China Summit: How Bad Is China?

How Bill Clinton must pine for the days when America had an enemy clearly identified and a cause righteous beyond doubt. Foreign policy then was so fundamental a case of us-against-them that "bipartisan consensus" actually worked. When survival was at stake, national interests, not special interests, had a fair chance to prevail.

Well, forget that when China, not the Soviet Union, is the other big boy on the planet. The U.S. has always had trouble figuring out what cubbyhole to stick the world's most populous communist nation into: a geostrategic card to play? Someone we can do business with? The next evil empire? Now, by one of those sudden confluences of the political stars, the off-and-on debate over how to handle China is at a high boil just as Clinton sets forth on the first presidential visit to the People's Republic since Beijing's tanks mowed down the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square nine years ago.

Ever since then, there's been a difference of opinion between Main Street and the Beltway. American citizens turned their back on a nation they judged morally and politically beyond the pale, and public opinion has yet to recover. But policymakers couldn't quite do the same, recognizing that the U.S. had no option but to deal with China. Its rising power made it a force to be reckoned with, like it or not. And so Clinton, after some I'll-do-it-different demagoguery of his own, became the sixth President since Richard Nixon opened the way in 1972, to practice "constructive engagement" with China.

No country today brings out more of the passions--or the hypocrisy--in Washington politicians. Every time they get the chance, those who see profit in it pummel the "butchers in Beijing" about all manner of failings, aiming their blows as much at Clinton as at China's communist die-hards. Antiabortion activists rail at China's forced abortions. Exiled crusader Harry Wu charges China with harvesting human organs from executed prisoners for sale. Human-rights advocates complain that Clinton is ignoring systemic repression; partisans of the Dalai Lama call for a free Tibet; labor advocates bang the drums about unfair competition. Even businessmen courted by Clinton complain that China's markets are still closed. It makes for great sound bites when they all clamor to know what Clinton's brand of engagement has brought them.

Of course it is Beijing's bosses who are responsible for making their nation what former U.S. diplomat Chas. W. Freeman calls a "uniquely credible miscreant," guilty of behavior that deserves to be picked on. But the natural suspicion and swings in sentiment that always affect U.S. attitudes toward China have been hyperamplified by a convergence of election-year politics, Republican interparty fissures, and a string of unfortunate events, like the allegations of illicit Chinese campaign contributions, Indian and Pakistani nuclear blasts and reports of a possible national-security breach in U.S. satellite sales to China. Some of the steam in Washington rises from real issues, but a lot is the hot air of partisan politics.