[THIS KUTTNER COMMENTARY SOUNDS LIKE A CALL FOR WHAT AMOUNTS TO A NEW COLD WAR.] China policy needs toughening By Robert Kuttner, 05/30/99 The revelations in the Cox report about two decades of Chinese nuclear spying impeach the most basic premises of the China policy of four US administrations. Central to that policy is the assumption that America's emerging economic relationship with China was the key to a growing convergence of strategic interests. Create economic links, the rationale went, and multiple benefits would follow. First, economic ties would help China evolve from communism to capitalism, and, presumably, from dictatorship to democracy. Second, US companies would get an early advantage in the potentially huge domestic China market, beating out Japanese and European rivals. China would join America's economic sphere of influence. By extension, the American model of capitalism would be further enhanced, worldwide. Third, a closer strategic and military affinity would naturally follow. Each of these premises is now defunct. While the United States has wishfully turned a blind eye to China's human-rights violations and its mercantilist economy, China's evolution toward Western-style democracy has remained glacial. Dissenters continue to be harassed. Labor conditions remain brutal. China allows in some Western entrepreneurs and buys some Western products, but its trade deficit with the United States continues to soar, and it still essentially practices state capitalism, not free markets. Astonishingly enough, even after the Cox revelations, the Clinton administration was still supporting Chinese membership in the World Trade Organization. The premise that China would somehow be a unique American economic ally has proven naive. Since the era when the West carved China into economic spheres of influence (invariably followed by reactive Chinese nationalism), China has been adroit at playing off one foreign nation against another. Indeed, the reaction throughout China after the accidental bombing of China's embassy in Belgrade was spontaneous and real. Chinese authorities acted to contain even uglier demonstrations, not to foment them. Anti-Western feeling remains just below the surface. China will do what is in China's interest. If we are naive enough to further that interest, China will take full advantage. Beginning in the early 1970s, after the famous Nixon-to-China reversal, the Beijing regime recognized the value of a tactical US-China alliance against the Soviets. That brilliant gambit was in the positional interest of both countries, but it hardly meant that our two nations were ideological or free-market soulmates. The most naive premise of all has now turned out to be that forging closer economic links would make us close military allies - the sort who do not steal each other's secrets. As the United States has been accelerating exchange programs, inviting Chinese scientists to come to our laboratories, relaxing export controls on strategic products in order to enhance a closer commercial relationship, the Chinese government has been stealing us blind. Ever since the French political philosopher Montesquieu, naive globalists have been preaching that nations that trade with other do not make war on each other. The view was especially popular in the laissez-faire era before World War I, a uniquely savage carnage among intimate trading partners.The ink was scarcely dry on the recent thesis of author and columnist Thomas Friedman that no two countries with McDonald's franchises have ever gone to war with each other when US bombs nearly hit the McDonald's in Belgrade. Dream on. What explains this astonishing lapse? One explanation is ideological. The United States is so intent on creating a single free-market world that we are blinded by our own visions of grandeur and hegemony. The second explanation is commercial. US multinational companies have become the new China lobby, eager to beat their rivals to open China's markets and massively pressuring Congress to extend China's provisional most-favored-nation status. The administration, responsive to the corporate agenda, has eagerly gone along, to the exclusion of human rights, labor rights, and - incredibly - even national security concerns. Now is the time for an agonizing and bipartisan reappraisal. The Republicans gloat that the disclosures happened on Clinton's watch. But four administrations - two Republican and two Democratic - shared this naive set of policies. China should be viewed as the strategic and ideological rival that it is. That doesn't mean we shouldn't pursue convergent interests and act to damp down the risk of military conflict. But China is not an emergent Asian version of American capitalism, much less American democracy. China may eventually evolve in that direction, but in the meantime containment would not be too strong a word for an appropriate policy. If China wishes to be accepted as a member in good standing of the fraternity of democratic and capitalist nations, let the Beijing government earn it. Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect. His column appears regularly in the Globe. This story ran on page E7 of the Boston Globe on 05/30/99. © Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.
