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Cooperation Not Confrontation
| Article
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10716 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1993 |
2,016 Words |
| Author
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James Lilley
James Lilley is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
He is former American ambassador to China and the Republic of
Korea and former director of the American Institute in Taiwan. |
The Clinton administration has inherited a stable relationship with China. It is its choice whether it wants to improve this relationship, keep it the same, or send it downhill.
Rather than the much-hyped strategic relationship of the 1970's and '80s we now have a relationship based on solid building blocks in education, trade agreements, exchanges, and some mutual interests in world affairs. We also have continuing differences on human rights, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and inequities in commerce.
This is not an abnormal or particularly fragile situation. It can be managed by us in ways compatible with our interests that can in turn contribute to world stability and in the process get a better deal for the Chinese people. Or it can emphasize the negatives and put us into confrontation with China, involve us deeply in Chinese domestic politics with untold consequence, and destabilize the stable.
The trauma of Tiananmen Square in June 1989 swept away in one stroke the perception in the United States that China was on the inevitable path of reform, that it would go the way of Eastern Europe, and that pluralistic democracy would replace a collapsing Marxist dogmatism. China was viewed as a strategic partner and had been for four presidencies of both parties.
This misperception was nowhere more vivid than in the arrival in Shanghai of three American naval ships in May 1989, three weeks before Tiananmen. This was considered at the time a brilliant stroke of geopolitics in the triangular diplomacy mode.
The U.S. military would be demonstrating its cooperative relationship with its Chinese military partners in confronting Soviet hegemonism at the same time that paramount leader Deng Xiaoping was reestablishing a party-to-party relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union in Beijing. We would upstage the Russians, Gorbachev would see the American Navy in Shanghai on his trip south, and our own admiral would be in Beijing right after Gorbachev to meet with his Chinese counterparts.
Did we ever have it wrong! The real action was not on the Huangpu River in Shanghai or in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. It was in Tiananmen Square and on the Bund in Shanghai, where hundreds of thousands of demonstrators were in the streets demanding change, and an end to corruption, nepotism, and suppression.
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