Clinton and China, unraveling

On the matter of President Clinton's trip to China, a few observations:

1. Why did he not go earlier? This is an important question leveled in the context of Mr. Clinton's statement last Thursday to the National Geographic Society. The trip would be the first visit by an American President to China in this decade, he reminded us. Again: Why? Mr. Clinton has been President since January 1993. If it was so important to go to China, why did he wait nearly six years? It isn't as if there has been a total diplomatic freeze, on the order of the 1959-72 Sino-American freeze. What caused the delay?

2. If it was not necessary to go earlier, what exactly prompted this trip? Is it that Mr. Clinton saw a great opportunity ahead of him, and feared that if he didn't take it, the Chinese wouldn't love him in December as they loved him in July? What is that opportunity? Is it an opening the success of which requires total preliminary secrecy, much as Mr. Nixon shrouded in secrecy his plans to go to China in 1972, and to negotiate with North Vietnam?

3. Defenders of Mr. Clinton's insistence that he had to conform to conventional decorum and appear in Tiananmen Square plead the importance of Chinese face. And that's true, it is very important. Mao Tsetung the great revolutionist nevertheless adhered to the traditions of the Middle Kingdom that required foreigners to pause outside Peking before entering the hallowed capital. Thus Mr. Nixon and the press that preceded him touched down at Shanghai before moving on to Peking. So the Chinese have face, the Yankees don't have face, sez who?

4. The alternatives to his agreeing to make this trip, said Mr. Clinton, were isolationist. But of course that isn't really true. For one thing, to turn down an invitation is not to ignore the other guy--on the contrary, it's to pay special attention to him. And we are hardly isolationist in our economic dealings with China. Last year we imported approximately $62 billion worth of Chinese products. That year the Chinese imported about $13 billion worth of our products. This is so because of the general poverty of China. The fastest way to do something about that is for the Chinese to import a copy of Milton Friedman's book Capitalism and Freedom, and to let down their trade barriers. Is Mr. Clinton preparing to pull out a pair of scissors and cut a ceremonial ribbon repealing anti-U.S, practices? Has he been working on this for six years, ever since he insisted publicly that we should deny Most Favored Nation treatment to China unless it improved human rights? To whom did he confide all this secret planning? Ron Brown?

5. May 30, 1988. Moscow. "President Reagan hammered at the rights issue in afternoon speeches May 30 at the Danilov Monastery in Moscow and at Spaso House [home of the U.S. ambassador]. At the monastery, a thirteenth-century Russian Orthodox complex, the President called for the Soviet government to permit closed churches to be reopened. Americans, he said, `feel it keenly when religious freedom is denied to anyone anywhere.'"

A one-shot Reagan human-rights spasm nestled in a monastery and then within the walls of his own embassy? Oh no. May 31, Moscow. "The highlight of Reagan's third day in the USSR was an afternoon address to the students of the Lenin Hills campus of Moscow State University, Gorbachev's alma mater. Speaking beneath a large bust of V. I. Lenin, the founder of Soviet Communism, the President said: `Today the world looks expectantly to signs of change, steps toward greater freedom in the Soviet Union. We watch and we hope as we see positive changes taking place. There are some I know in your society who fear that change will bring only disruption and discontinuity, who fear to embrace the hope of the future ... Sometimes it takes faith.'" A year after that the Berlin Wall came down, and two years later the Soviet Union dissolved. Post hoc propter hoc? No, that trip can't be identified as loosening the stone that brought on the freedom landslide. But it did give Americans a great draft of self-pride, and it gave Russians a great thrill to know that in their own capital city, the head of the other superpower could say publicly what so many of them could say in those days only to themselves, and in their prayers.

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