In China Trade Debate, U.S. Must Deal in Fresh Options to Get Results

As President Clinton last week celebrated, yet again, the end of the Cold War in Europe, the chorus at home demanding a new confrontation in Asia was raising its voice and sharpening its case.

In an eloquent and powerful speech in Detroit, House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) last week argued on moral and economic grounds against granting China most-favored-nation trading status, as Clinton has formally requested. “What have we gained by trafficking with a tyranny that debases the dignity of one-fifth of the human race?” Gephardt pointedly asked.

In a characteristically insistent television interview, conservative tribune Patrick J. Buchanan made the security case for cutting off trade: China, he thundered, was using its trade surplus to finance Asia’s most rapid military buildup “since the 1930s.”

The problem with these analyses isn’t their concerns about China’s behavior--or even their disappointment with Clinton’s response to it. The problem is the means both offer for pressuring China--revoking its MFN status--could easily make things worse.

Buchanan’s logic equates China with the former Soviet Union, which was denied MFN status during the Cold War. But that analogy assumes we are destined to reach a level of sustained political and military hostility with China that may still be avoidable.

No one can say for certain exactly how China would respond to the loss of MFN status--which actually provides it the same tariff treatment we offer almost every nation in the world, including some of our least favorite (such as Iran and Iraq). But the unacceptable risk is that withdrawing MFN status would provoke a backlash in China that accelerates all the belligerent trends we want to reverse.

“What we would do,” said Larry Diamond, editor of the Journal of Democracy, “is create a self-fulfilling prophecy of an emerging superpower that then becomes . . . much more defensive externally and repressive internally than it might otherwise be.”

That’s a persuasive argument. But Clintonites take too much comfort from it. For the evidence is equally slight that his approach of “engagement” is moderating Chinese behavior. Clinton appears to have argued himself into a corner where he has so much invested in the dialogue itself that he’s grown reluctant to roil it, even over legitimate disagreements. The process has subsumed the result.

In the long run, as Clinton argues, increased prosperity will inevitably increase the demand inside China for liberty and democracy. But there’s no guarantee affluence alone will force China’s rulers to satisfy that demand--and even less reason to believe that it will do so any time soon. If you ran across a Doberman in a dark alley, you wouldn’t wait for generations of breeding to temper its hostility. The same is true of waiting for prosperity to pacify China: Both problems demand responses with more immediate impact.

Perversely, the annual debate on whether to maintain China’s MFN status--due for a congressional vote by late July--now impedes the development of these fresh options. The virtually exclusive focus on MFN status allows both sides to make sweeping ideological statements while diverting them from the hard work of devising more precise responses to specific problems that China poses. Denial of MFN status would amount to operating on China with a chain saw; what’s needed are scalpels.

In a recently released paper, Robert A. Manning, a senior fellow at the centrist Progressive Policy Institute, laid some on the table. Threatening the withdrawal of MFN status, he points out, is a less effective means of opening China’s market (and attacking our $40-billion trade deficit with the country) than insisting on tough terms for Chinese entry into the World Trade Organization. If the U.S. continues to hang tough on that issue--ignoring the pressure to reach agreement before Chinese President Jiang Zemin’s visit to America this fall--these talks offer the best prospect of compelling China to open its economy to foreign products and services.

On security issues, Manning sensibly proposes head-on “results-oriented” talks with China “on the future of nuclear weapons . . . and curbing [its] military and nuclear exports,” especially to Iran and Pakistan. The U.S. could tighten the screws, he argues, by banning imports from companies owned by the Chinese military until China abides by nonproliferation and chemical weapons treaties it has already signed.

As Gephardt suggests, the U.S. could pursue its concern over China’s human rights record by invigorating international forums, like the quiescent U.N. Commission on Human Rights. Even more important, the U.S. could strengthen independent civic organizations and the rule of law in China by increasing funding for the National Endowment for Democracy, which promotes democracy abroad. Myopically, Congress has been cutting the NED’s budget; amid all the hand-wringing over freedom in China, last year the endowment and its affiliated agencies had only $1.6 million to spend promoting it.

Sticks alone aren’t the answer: Clinton has wisely responded to China’s eagerness for a place at the table by drawing it into the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. And, as Manning observes, if economically anemic Russia has earned a seat at the annual G-7 meeting of leading economies, why not burgeoning China?

None of these ideas promises an end to conflict with China. Neither Buchananesque confrontation nor Clintonite conciliation--nor even some third-way synthesis of the two--is likely to change the world’s largest nation as much as we would like. U.S. policy can’t ensure that China turns one way or the other: A more reasonable goal, as Manning says, is “creating a political environment where China has every incentive to make the right decisions.”

Avoiding our own mistakes--like withdrawing MFN status--is the first step toward creating that environment, but only that. A policy centered on simply maintaining MFN status is as inadequate as one built on revoking it. With his veto, if nothing else, Clinton will probably beat back the congressional drive to deny trade benefits to China. But he would be foolish to ignore the demand for new thinking that this challenge represents.

Ronald Brownstein’s column appears in this space every Monday.