Split In White House on China's MFN
(South China Morning Post | January 18, 1994)
When Hong Kong's man in Washington, Barrie Wiggham, was asked last November if the territory was radically altering its lobbying stance on China's Most Favoured Nation (MFN) trading status, he said speculation was premature — the action would not start until the New Year.
What a prediction. Right on cue, on January 1, The New York Times published an interview with the US ambassador to Beijing, Stapleton Roy, in which he appeared to tear up the basic premise of the Clinton administration's policy on MFN — that Beijing's continued trade privileges should be tied to human rights.
Mr Roy described China as having made 'dramatic' progress in improving its people's lives and suggested the trade-human rights linkage might need to be rethought. Immediately, the great MFN guessing game began in earnest. The media started some between-the-lines reading to find import in the blandest of statements from administration officials on the MFN question. It was sensed that Mr Roy's comments exposed a split in White House thinking on China, and another foreign policy dispute was in the making.
Thus, even after the US State Department moved to paraphrase Mr Roy's comments to less controversial effect, Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen later made a few remarks on China that were immediately squeezed for some mystical significance. Mr Bentsen, who is visiting China on January 19, said: "There are other issues that must be raised besides economic ones, such as human rights. But one of the ways to promote human rights is to encourage market reform and trade."
In a reference to the row over Mr Roy, the Washington Post report on Mr Bentsen's speech concluded: "Bentsen's was the second administration voice within a week that appeared to counsel softening the threat to withdraw the preferential trading status from China."
Mr Bentsen had been shoved into the same corner as Mr Roy - an apparently renegade camp that dared to mention economics in the same sentence as human rights, thereby softening President Bill Clinton's emphasis on the latter. Mr Bentsen could well have read the report because he was asked later at a press conference whether he did in fact favour uncoupling MFN from human rights. His answer was an emphatic "no", adding the administration's routine line that MFN would only be renewed in June if Beijing made enough progress on human rights.
In reality, it is improbable his earlier remarks had anything of the subversive nature interpreted by the press. He is, after all, in charge of economic matters, and is hardly likely to go to Beijing and talk to senior leaders this month about nothing but forced labour camps. Mr Bentsen's visit was planned last September by the State Department as part of its new rapprochement policy, and is a major plank of its bid to woo China into concessions on all fronts.
But the media is not alone in playing guessing games. Fervent anti-China Congressman Tom Lantos, who sits on the influential Foreign Affairs Committee, last week wrote to Assistant Secretary of State Winston Lord demanding clarification of Mr Roy's comments and wanting to know if Mr Lord agreed with them. "I deeply regret his seeming equation of economic development with genuine political reform and progress of human rights," the letter ran.
Mr Lantos, of course, knows full well that Mr Lord, a former ambassador to Beijing and a prime architect of the MFN/human rights policy, does not agree. But that does not bring the congressman or anyone else much closer to knowing which way Mr Clinton will go when the MFN decision is made in June.
For months now, administration officials have been impeccably vague on the matter, robotically citing the formula that China has to make 'significant progress' on human rights. This is no accident; the May 28 executive order signed by the president used exactly that phrase because 'significant progress' is an unquantifiable entity that can be stretched, in best political fashion, to suit whatever end the administration expects of it.
But despite the views of relative hard-liners such as Mr Lord, it is fair to say few of them have much idea how the decision will ultimately go. The annual human rights report on China, to which finishing touches are being applied, will predictably give little indication. It will almost certainly pull no punches on China's lack of human rights improvement — it is written for Congress' benefit after all — but will leave enough space for that "significant progress" to be fulfilled by June.
If the administration appears to be undecided on MFN — or even worse, divided on the matter — there is a simple reason: the man who heads it. Mr Clinton gets top marks for public dynamism, but his first year in charge has shown him to be privately indecisive.
But there is no doubt he wants to call the ultimate shot on China. Mr Clinton has come a long way since his pre-election admonishments to the Beijing regime, via his new Asiacentrism and his meeting with President Jiang Zemin. He recently told an aide he wanted China to be his "special project". One thing is certain: he wants to renew MFN.
If Hong Kong calculates it will lose 70,000 jobs from MFN denial, the cost to the US workforce may be much greater, assuming Beijing retaliates with its own trade measures. The blocking of so many cheap Chinese goods from the US market would also force up prices and hit retailers. These are political risks that are simply too damaging for Mr Clinton to take as the US economy tries to shrug off a deep recession. "He knows also that his vision of the Asian economic community would be severely undermined by denying China's MFN. It is something that not one of the region's leaders would remotely support," an Asia research expert said.
It is highly probable, however, that Mr Clinton has formed a wish-fulfilment policy: to renew MFN by hook or by crook. However, such a policy only works painlessly if one can rely on two things - China's complicity and Congress' full approval. Neither are likely.
The matter of subduing prickly congressmen is Mr Clinton's biggest hurdle, particularly if they think he is reneging on his human rights commitments. That is why the next two months are crucial in the debate; several congressional delegations have either just visited China or are there this week, including one led by House majority leader Richard Gephardt.
A Gephardt aide said that not only was the congressman there to form his own opinions on the human rights issue but would be expected to report back to the administration on what he saw. By bringing key politicians such as Mr Gephardt into the China policy process, the administration hopes to avoid the exhausting annual clashes over MFN as those presided by veto-wielding former president George Bush.
However, the anti-China brigade, led by Mr Lantos, and colleagues such as Christopher Smith (in China at the moment) are strong in numbers and vocal. Congressman Frank Wolf, miffed at being denied a visa to visit this month, made ominous anti-MFN noises in a press call last week.
Then there is a high-profile hearing in a month's time planned by the Ways and Means Committee's trade sub-committee. According to Donald Anderson, president of the US-China Business Council, its chairman, the moderate Sam Gibbons, is nevertheless firmly in the camp that believes China must show stronger progress on human rights. It is a hearing to which the administration will have to send top officials armed with solid evidence that China deserves MFN.
By the same token, the White House is also able to use the hammer of Congress to convince China to play fair. In Mr Bentsen's meetings, and those tentatively scheduled by State Department human rights official John Shattuck for the spring, Beijing will be told that if Congress does not like what it sees, Mr Clinton may not be able to go against its democratic wishes. If that sounds a little disingenuous, it is worth noting the quite overt lack of assistance Beijing is providing Mr Clinton so far in his bid to renew the trading privileges.
The MFN executive order last May cited several areas where progress needed to be shown — freedom of emigration, forced prison labour, releasing political prisoners, humane treatment of prisoners, allowing broadcasts into the country, and Tibet. Yet when administration officials talk of 'some progress' so far, to what are they referring?
The Sino-US bilateral agreement on inspecting prisons has hardly been enforced, since US officials were denied entry to five requested sites and allowed to see two other innocuous ones; a couple of high-profile prisoners such as Wei Jingsheng were cynically set free in time for last year's Olympics bid, but after that the prison gates stayed shut; a token gesture allowing Red Cross officials into Chinese jails was announced, but nothing has been heard since; and although Mr Shattuck was allowed to visit Tibet, it is not clear quite what conclusions he could have drawn.
Added to this have been new high-profile trials of student leaders, the expulsion of dissident labour leader Han Dongfang, and the announcement of a sinister "eugenics" programme of forced sterilisation that has already concerned Washington. Hardly the moves of a state keen to earn top marks for human rights.
In short, China is calling Mr Clinton's bluff, having calculated that the US needs China's economy as much as vice-versa. It appears confident it will secure MFN without having to show much human rights progress at all. It has big business on its side, from the US multinationals down to the American cities and states that trade heavily with China — the places Mr Wiggham said he would be visiting to whip up lobbying support on the issue.
This leaves Mr Clinton in the unenviable position of having to wriggle furiously to justify MFN, should he indeed grant it. In terms of human rights progress, that word "significant" is going to be virtually redefined, given China's intransigence on showing goodwill.
As the carrot is not being chased, the stick has to be brought out once in a while. Although last week's tough moves to cut back China's textile export quotas had justification in the trade arena, it can also be seen as a gesture that Washington can play hard when it wants. When the restless natives in Congress begin to stir up trouble on human rights this spring, the White House will at least be able to point to its tough stances on trade and arms proliferation as proof that it is standing firm on some issues.
Friends of Tibet (INDIA),
PO Box 16674, Bombay 400050
www.friendsoftibet.org