Summit Was Sometimes Blunt, but China Kept Its Edge on Key Points

It didn’t have the arresting grandeur that Ronald Reagan mustered in Berlin 10 years ago when he challenged Mikhail S. Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”

But President Clinton’s dramatic declaration last week that China was “on the wrong side of history” in its denial of human rights and basic democratic freedom was in some ways even more powerful. Clinton’s rebuke during last week’s joint press conference with Chinese President Jiang Zemin was spontaneous, not staged, and it came while the target of his words was not hundreds of miles, but only a few feet, away. In their sweep and moral certitude, Clinton’s words will surely stand among the most memorable of his presidency.

But the fact that Clinton had to challenge Jiang so directly suggests how difficult the relationship with China is likely to remain. Clinton fired his salvo only after Jiang, both in public and private, had offered a serviceable impersonation of the Great Wall in brushing aside American concerns about human rights. It was admirable that Clinton delivered such an eloquent indictment; it was sobering that he felt the need to.

Sobering, in fact, may be the best description of last week’s encounter. While the meetings with Jiang yielded some important gains on security issues, they produced little progress on either the human rights or economic disputes dividing the two countries. In all, the summit demonstrated the limits, as much as the possibilities, of Clinton’s commitment to “constructive engagement” with the world’s most populous nation.

That approach seems to be generating the most progress on questions of security. China pledged to continue working toward resolving the tension in Korea. Jiang also seemed resigned to the new guidelines tightening security cooperation between the United States and Japan in Asia. In recent weeks, Chinese officials have denounced the agreement as a form of “containment”; but in his private meetings with Clinton, Jiang merely restated China’s historic concerns about Japanese militarism, American officials say.

Most important, Jiang agreed to suspend further assistance to Iran’s nuclear power program, apart from completing two existing projects that American officials do not consider proliferation risks. That agreement--which triggered Clinton’s decision to allow U.S. firms to sell civilian nuclear power technology to China--represented the summit’s major achievement. “Partially they have accepted the geostrategic argument that it is not a good idea for Iran to get nuclear weapons,” said one senior administration official. “And partially it says if it comes down to Iran or the United States, they would rather have the relationship with the United States.”

Yet the question of Chinese relations with Iran also demonstrates the continuing complexity of China’s intentions. Facing intense U.S. objections, China also verbally agreed to stop selling cruise missiles to Iran; but American officials acknowledge that “it is less clear” whether it committed to stop sending Iran the technology it needs to construct ballistic missiles. That uncertainty is likely to be a central focus for congressional critics already looking to derail or delay Clinton’s decision to provide China access to American nuclear power technology.

On the economic front, Jiang displayed fewer cracks in the wall. The summit brought no breakthrough in the glacially advancing negotiations between Washington and Beijing over the terms of China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, the standard-setting body for international trade. China--which this year may run a larger trade surplus with the U.S. than even Japan--offered only a broad reduction in average tariffs (which may hide continued high levies on the products where the U.S. is strongest), and left American officials “frustrated” by providing no concessions on nontariff barriers to foreign products, such as restrictive licensing and distribution rules.

“I would have thought the Chinese would have brought more with them to Washington, and the fact that they didn’t makes me think . . . this WTO struggle could be a longer one than we thought,” said Greg Mastel, vice president at the Economic Strategy Institute.

The same verdict applies, with even more force, on human rights. Asked at the press conference about the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square, Jiang conceded not even a flicker of regret; when Clinton argued that without greater freedom China could never be either truly prosperous nor fully accepted in the world community, Jiang recited his vacuous contention that “democracy and human rights . . . are relative,” not absolute, concepts.

The senior administration official said the summit’s clear message on human rights was that Chinese leaders “clearly have not reached the point where they can institutionally undertake a reevaluation” of their repressive approach. “There were no hints that things were coming on the political [liberalization] front,” the official said.

With so little to show for his concern, Clinton is already hearing from human rights activists disappointed he received Jiang at all without specific concessions in advance. But unless Clinton was willing to subsume the entire relationship to progress on human rights--an indulgence no one in his seat can afford--he had no choice. And once Jiang arrived, Clinton pressed the human rights case as forcefully and publicly as any critic could reasonably desire.

This week, the House of Representatives will vote on a series of measures to express more tangible dissatisfaction with China. Some are recklessly provocative--such as a resolution calling on Clinton to develop a missile defense plan for Taiwan. Others--increased funding for Radio Free Asia, more attention to blocking Chinese products made with prison labor--make more sense. But all of these efforts--like Clinton’s eloquence on human rights last week--suffer from the same deficiency of scale: The frustrating truth is that the U.S. simply can’t change China as much as it would like.

That may be the hard lesson of last week’s summit. Jiang left Washington as he arrived, neither exactly friend nor foe. Living with ambiguity isn’t an American strong point. But if there was a subliminal message behind Jiang’s stony front last week, it read: Get used to it.