E-Notes
U.S. Policy Toward China: Judge China by Its Deeds, Not Its Words
by June Teufel Dreyer
April 6, 2001
This essay is based on a speech to members of the Foreign Policy Research Institute on March 14, 2001— before the latest tension over the aircraft collision near Hainan. Dr. June Teufel Dreyer is Professor of Political Science at the University of Miami/Coral Gables and Senior Fellow at FPRI. The third edition of her book China’s Political System: Modernization and Tradition was published by Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., in 1999.
The People’s Republic of China is a complex society where there is a great deal happening. The problem for US policymakers is what these changes mean. Frequently, the signals are mixed, with some giving cause for optimism about Sino-American relations, and others for alarm. This leaves the decision-maker considerable leeway to interpret trend lines as he or she wishes — that is, the dots can be connected in ways that lead to nearly opposite conclusions for American policy. Frequently, the deciding factor is the ideological bent that the policymaker has had all along.
On the optimistic side, mainland China has made great strides over the past two decades:
- Its economic growth rate has been among the highest in the world, and will probably be between seven and eight percent for 2001.
- Four student activists who were involved in the 1989 demonstrations at Tiananmen Square, were released from prison early, a few weeks apart. One of them, Zhou Yongjun, gained worldwide attention when he knelt on the steps of the Great Hall of the People, begging the Chinese leadership to accept the petition from the students that he held aloft.
- At the end of February, the Standing Committee of China’s highest legislative body, the National People’s Congress, approved the UN’s International Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
These and other developments have encouraged some people to conclude that the PRC is successfully making the transition from a planned socialist economy to a market-oriented capitalist economy, and from a tightly controlled communist society to an open, civil society.
On the less optimistic side, critics point out that:
- Economic growth has bypassed whole professions and regions of the country. The differences between rich and poor, both at the level of the individual and the province or region, have been greatly exacerbated, engendering much jealousy and tensions. For example, the average annual income in urban areas last year was 6,280 yuan, but only 2,253 yuan in rural areas. This disparity of nearly three to one is continuing to widen: last year urban incomes went up by 6.4 percent, while rural incomes increased only 2.1 percent. One percent of the country’s population owns 40 percent of its wealth, while the working class pays more than 40 percent of the country’s total personal income tax.
- The recently freed dissidents have been in jail or exile for most of the time since the demonstrations nearly twelve years ago; their respective sentences were due to end in a few months anyway. Their release does not indicate that party and government are softening their position on human rights, but rather that this is the time of year that the UN debates a resolution on human rights, and China wants to avoid being censured. Therefore, these China observers point out not only that concessions can be expected every year at this time, but that they are even more likely this year, given that Beijing is hoping to be selected as the site of the 2008 Olympics. And, in what has been termed “hostage diplomacy,” the individuals can always be re-arrested, as has happened to at least one of the recently freed dissidents before, as well as to others, including Wei Jingsheng, China’s most famous dissident
- This very same logic also explains China’s signing on to the UN human rights treaty. It should also be noted that Beijing has hedged on a full commitment to the part of the treaty that has been the biggest problem for China, Article 8, which proclaims the right to form and join free labor unions. PRC law allows only one labor union, the All China Federation of Trade Unions, which is firmly under government control. The formation of independent groups is prohibited, and the Chinese constitution does not recognize the right to strike.
- Party and government are, moreover, vicious oppressors of not only political dissidents and advocates of independent trade unions, but also of any group that is not firmly under the control of the central government.
- This explains the motivation behind the decision to attack members of Falun Gong, a quasi-religious organization that insists it has no political agenda. When 10,000 of its adherents appeared unannounced in Beijing in April 1999, the leadership interpreted their presence as a clear political challenge, which perhaps it was. But this cannot justify beating and torturing the movement’s adherents— resulting in the death of a number of people who are likely to have simply been practicing breathing exercises for their health, just as they have claimed.
- At the same time, there was a crackdown on other religious groups— almost as if the government was looking for a convenient excuse.
- Unofficial Christian churches have been disbanded and their premises destroyed. Catholics are a particular target, because of their direct connection to a foreign “ruler,” the pope, and many priests have reportedly been jailed and physically abused.
- Tibetan Buddhist monasteries have had similar problems.
- Some ethnic minorities, including Tibetans and various Muslim groups, are very unhappy; the Chinese press regularly rails against “separatist tendencies” among them.
- There are also increasing numbers of disturbances caused by peasants who are incensed by high taxes. and by workers who are unhappy about being thrown out of jobs in the process of the economic restructuring that has accompanied the transition from the socialist planned economy to the capitalist market economy; pensions and unemployment benefits often aren’t paid. Again according to official figures, six million workers who were laid off by state- owned enterprises last year haven’t been able to find jobs, and every year an additional 11 million new people enter the job market. Both of these groups have grown restive, and have faced oppression from party and government
- Environmental disaster is looming on the horizon. Nine of the world’s ten most polluted cities are in China, rivers are drying up, and the deserts are expanding. According to the official news agency, the PRC’s deserts expanded at an annual rate of 2,460 square km from 1985 through 1995, and desert expansion has become more of a problem since then. Beijing, for example, has been subjected to steadily increasing sandstorms in recent years; one of these sandstorms a few weeks ago was so severe that it actually affected Taiwan, several hundred miles away, as well.
- Virtually everyone is upset with rising levels of corruption, and most people are cynical about the government’s efforts to clean it up.
In terms of China’s international behavior, things are hardly better:
- A CIA report released in March 2001 accuses the PRC of failing to keep its pledge to avoid engaging in any new nuclear cooperation with Iran.
- The PRC has also been assisting Iraq in building anti-aircraft systems in contravention of UN sanctions. The US has complained to China three times about this.
- The military budget for FY 2001 represents a 17. 7 percent increase over the previous year, even though the PRC faces no external enemy.
Taiwan has problems as well, though of a different sort. It is a full-fledged democracy. In March 2000, for the first time since the founding of the Republic of China in 1912, the candidate of an opposition party won the presidency over the standard-bearer of the ruling party, the Kuomintang (KMT). The economic miracle of the 1960s and 1970s was thus followed by a political miracle: the peaceful transition to democracy.
Taiwan has the kinds of problems one would expect to find in a prosperous democracy:
- There was a huge controversy over whether to finish the country’s 4th nuclear power plant, which was started under the KMT government and opposed bitterly by the opposition party, the DPP. The KMT, which still has the most seats in the Legislative Yuan, won in the sense that work will resume on “Nuclear Four;” although the two sides agreed that their eventual goal will be a nuclear-free Taiwan.
- The education minister has been under fire for opposing a new transcription system for writing Chinese characters, and also for reducing the number of hours that non-Mandarin languages are taught in school.
- The banking system has more bad commercial loans than it should. No one expects it to collapse: international financial analysts judge Taiwan’s situation as not nearly as serious as Japan’s, and point out that the country’s enormous foreign exchange reserves, low external debt, and sophisticated high-tech industrial sector give it a strong shield against a regional economic crisis. Indeed, Taiwan was barely bruised by the financial crisis of 1997-98 that battered much of Asia.
However, Taiwan’s major problem by far is the mainland, which has threatened to invade if peaceful unification under Beijing’s formula of “one country, two systems” is not achieved within some unspecified time period which is understood to mean soon. Taiwan looks at Hong Kong, which is already under the one country-two systems rubric, and is not reassured. It is also clear that there is no way in which the lives of the people of Taiwan would be improved by accepting unification with the mainland.
This poses dilemmas for the United States, which would like to maintain good relations with both. The US has obligations to Taiwan, dating back to the days of the Korean War, when then-president Harry Truman ordered the US Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait and his successor, Dwight Eisenhower, signed a mutual security treaty with the island. That treaty was abrogated by the Carter administration but, after an outcry in Congress, it was replaced with looser, but still very important, reassurances contained in the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979. The US would also like good relations with the mainland. How to do this is a major dilemma confronting the Bush administration. My advice would be:
- Do not assume that China will necessarily evolve into a democracy. The transition away from a socialist economy does not automatically result in pluralist democracy, as has been shown by the experience of the former Soviet Union. The facile assumption that Sino-US tensions will disappear when the mainland becomes capitalist is as ludicrous as Karl Marx’s prediction that nationality and ethnic tensions would disappear with the advent of communism. What China seems to have evolved thus far is a kind of state capitalism under which entrepreneurs understand that they have to toe the party line in order to stay in business. While this could transition into pluralist decision-making, it would be unwise to assume that it will.
- Do not assume that a democracy will necessarily be easier to deal with than the current autocracy. One of the few emotions that the current mainland government has been able to tap to shore up its legitimacy is nationalism. Several generations of mainlanders have been educated to believe that Taiwan has “always” been part of the ancestral land and that its return at the earliest possible date is a sacred quest. In fact, Taiwan was held by China only under the Qing, or Manchu, dynasty— who were not ethnically Chinese— only after 1683 and only loosely held. It was a province of China for barely ten years, from 1885 to 1895, under the Manchus, and it has never been part of the People’s Republic of China. Most present-day Chinese are unaware of this. The current government is able to restrain these nationalist passions as it deems advisable for diplomatic purposes. A popularly elected democratic government might find it impossible to do so.
- Recognize that the “one China” policy is a dangerous semantic trap, and avoid being drawn into pronouncements that could play into Beijing’s definition of that one China— i.e., that the one China has its capital in Beijing and that Taiwan is a province thereof. The one China policy was a clever diplomatic ruse devised by then-secretary of state Henry Kissinger and Chinese premier Zhou Enlai to enable their two countries to cooperate against a perceived threat from the Soviet Union. It was possible only because the Taiwan government of Chiang Kai-shek insisted that it was the government of all China, and the people of Taiwan who did not agree were powerless to object. Even so, the phrase Kissinger and Zhou agreed upon, “Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait agree that there is but one China; the United States does not challenge this position” never rang quite true. The people of Taiwan are now free to express their opinion, and a large number of them do not agree. Moreover, there is no Soviet threat. President Clinton, prompted by domestic scandal to move ahead his scheduled trip to China and under pressure from his hosts for a quid pro quo, went far down the road to accepting the mainland’s position when he iterated the “three noes” (no support for two Chinas; no support for one China, one Taiwan; no support for Taiwan’s entry into international organizations where sovereignty is an issue). There should be no further official mention of the three noes, and as little mention of the one-China concept as possible.
- Be skeptical of Chinese claims that the entire future of Sino-American relations depends on the US getting one upcoming foreign policy decision right— meaning the way Beijing wants the United States to do it. A major current issue is that of arms sales to Taiwan. Sources in Beijing have said that if the US agrees to sell the Aegis-class destroyers that Taiwan has requested, China would be likely to respond by increasing the number of missiles targeted at Taiwan by several hundreds, hold military exercises directed against Taiwan this spring and summer, which might include lobbing missiles in the Taiwan Strait as it did in 1995-96, and refusing to cooperate with the United States on nonproliferation, including in Iran and Iraq. It should be pointed out that the number of missiles that the mainland has targeted against Taiwan has increased exponentially over the past several years, which is a major factor giving credence to the island’s request that it needs more capable weapons. And also that, since the PRC has not been cooperating with the United States already on non-proliferation with Iran and Iraq, contrary to its promises, its threat to cease cooperation has limited validity.
- Know China’s words, and be prepared to quote them back to China where relevant. Remonstrations to Beijing about its human right abuses are invariably refuted with arguments that the People’s Republic is a sovereign state, and as such can do what it wishes. Washington needs to remind Beijing that the United States is also a sovereign state. As such, it can invite, or allow to travel at will, anyone from anywhere who comes in peace and is willing to abide by its laws. Its government officials should be free to meet with these visitors. There should be no need to shunt the Dalai Lama into a side office of the White House, and no repetition of the then-president of Taiwan being confined to the Honolulu airport during a transit stop in 1994. Nor should there be a repetition of the administration’s telling members of Congress that they were not to meet with current president Chen Shui-bian during a stopover in Los Angeles in 2000. The US State Department, moreover, should never have told the Republic of China on Taiwan, as it did a few weeks ago, that its naval ships should avoid stopping over in the Marshall Islands lest it offend Beijing.
Also, Beijing has frequently said that trade decisions should not be affected by disagreements over human rights and political considerations. Yet it has hinted that trade relations with the United States will suffer if Washington goes ahead with arms sales to Taiwan and persists in criticizing its human rights record. Past disagreements have resulted in Beijing purchasing Airbuses from Europe rather than Boeing jets from the United States, and signing contracts with Mercedes rather than General Motors. We should remind Beijing of this whenever the issue is raised, adding also that since the terms of trade are reciprocal and the balance of trade is lop-sidedly in China’s favor— the US trade deficit with China in 2000 was $83.8 billion, America’s largest, compared with Japan at $81.3 billion, in second place— so Chinese businesses are apt to suffer even more.
- Realize the defeatism inherent in the phrase “the United States can do very little to change China.” This is usually operationalized as “we are helpless, so we shouldn’t try.” To be sure, there are limits on America’s ability to change China. Washington does, however, have some leverage. As previously mentioned, Chinese leaders do care about trade. Further, a drop in business with the US would cause additional layoffs, which are already causing major headaches for the leadership. And Beijing also wants badly to host the Olympics.
- Decide what we really want from a relationship with China. We must lay out some objectives for ourselves that are sufficiently concrete to be meaningful but not so specific that we box ourselves in. At the same time, we need to have in mind what we will do if China does not comply. Let them know, quietly — since face, and not causing others to lose face, is important— what this will be. Then, if the Chinese leadership refuses, we must act. There should be no repetition of the 1996 fiasco, when the Clinton administration decided not to punish China for the sale to Pakistan of nuclear equipment used to produce weapons-grade enriched uranium. This is taken as a sign of weakness, and will be interpreted as an invitation to evade more understandings in the future. It is absolutely vital for American credibility that the Chinese understand that their actions have consequences, and that we mean what we say. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech in early March in which he said, among other things, that China would be regarded as neither as a strategic partner nor as an enemy, but that if the Chinese do see fit to test our resolve or they would regret it, is a fine start. The very best advice I can offer the new administration is to build on this start. Do not allow threats that “U.S.-China relations will deteriorate if….” to intimidate us into making concessions that weaken the American position. And do remember to judge China by its deeds, not its words.
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