U.S.-China Relations Enter New Era

James R. Sasser’s initiation as the U.S. ambassador to China was a trial by fire that would have singed even the most experienced diplomat.

The United States had been without an ambassador for eight months. Soon after Sasser arrived, China, hoping to intimidate voters in Taiwan--which it considers part of its territory--announced military exercises off the Taiwanese coast and moved troops and materiel, including missiles, into position.

Sasser was not a diplomat, not by a long stretch. President Clinton had named the Tennessee lawyer to the important Beijing post as a consolation prize after Sasser, a Democrat, lost his 1994 bid for a fourth term in the Senate, where he had hoped to become majority leader.

Moreover, he was following in the footsteps of veteran ambassador and old China hand J. Stapleton Roy, who is marvelously fluent in Chinese. Sasser couldn’t say “cat” in Chinese. His limited experience with the complicated Taiwan issue included a 1977 trip to Taipei seeking business for Tennessee soybean farmers that the Taiwan lobby sponsored.

But Sasser survived his early test. A year after taking his post as ambassador to the world’s most populous country, Sasser says the tense days of “sweaty palms” and “tongue lashings” are over.

Skillfully calling on his White House connections--Sasser and Vice President Al Gore are old Senate chums--and his remaining friends in Congress, Sasser has played a key role in building the Clinton administration’s “policy of engagement” with the People’s Republic of China.

Chinese officials, meanwhile, praise Sasser for helping them to understand the complexities of Congress, which had caught them off balance when it swerved to the ideological right following the 1994 elections.

In an interview last week in his office at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, Sasser said he sees a marked turn away from confrontation in the Clinton administration’s China policy. Signaling an important shift, Sasser said the use of trade sanctions had not been an effective way of dealing with Beijing.

“I think we are moving away from the use of sanctions, and I think there also is a sense that perhaps that’s not the most productive way of trying to influence Chinese behavior,” he said.

But he warned that Beijing’s handling of Hong Kong--which Britain will return to Chinese rule in July--and the growing U.S.-China trade deficit loom as potential threats to the relationship.

“If there were severe problems in the hand-over,” he said, “then I think it has the potential to have a very chilling impact on the relationship.”

The second main threat to what Sasser described as “accommodation” between the two world powers is the mounting bilateral trade deficit, which in 1996 reached an estimated $36.2 billion in China’s favor, according to Commerce Department sources.

“If the deficit continues to grow, I think it has the potential to be a very significant issue in the U.S. Congress, particularly so if the U.S. should get into an economic downturn and people there are losing their jobs and are looking for someone to blame it on.”

Sasser said he expects relations to continue to improve during Clinton’s second term. In one of the president’s first announcements after his reelection, he said he plans to visit Beijing. The Chinese government had been avidly seeking such a meeting since 1989, when the bloody army crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square ended Sino-American summits.

“We’re now starting to move to some degree beyond the so-called ‘post-Tiananmen reaction,’ ” Sasser observed. “I think as people are moving beyond that, they’re starting to take a look at China in other ways. And I think it is dawning on them that, yes, this is the most populous nation in the world. Yes, this is a very important relationship. And yes, we need to think in depth about it and not simply be reacting on a crisis-to-crisis basis.”

Sasser came to Beijing last January when U.S.-China relations were at a low point after the Clinton administration, reversing two decades of policy and promises, agreed in May 1995 to grant Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui a visa to come to the United States. China, which tolerates no formal recognition of the place they call a “renegade province,” was enraged.

In the months leading up to Taiwan’s presidential elections last March, military tensions mounted in the narrow 100-mile strait separating Taiwan from the mainland. Alarmed by Beijing’s show of force, which included firing missiles perilously close to Taiwan’s coast, the U.S. dispatched two aircraft carriers, the Independence and the Nimitz, to waters off Taiwan.

Looking back, Sasser says he now sees the Taiwan crisis as a major factor in the subsequent rebuilding of U.S.-China relations.

“I think it forced both sides to draw back and look at the relationship anew. . . . All of a sudden, senators and congressmen were looking around and seeing aircraft carriers speeding down there to Taiwan, and they were thinking, ‘How far do we really want this thing to go?’ ”

Proof that the relationship has come full circle, Sasser said, was the recent visit to the White House by Chinese Defense Minister Gen. Chi Haotian, whom Sasser accompanied to a meeting with Clinton.

In his own views on China, Sasser himself has come full circle. When he was in the Senate, Sasser voted several times to link Chinese human rights issues to trade, a position he said he no longer favors.

Sasser said his views about China changed “over a period of six or eight years.” In explanation, he quoted one of his old law professors.

“Young man,” the professor said, “the reason that the dinosaur is extinct is that it couldn’t turn around fast enough.”