No Respect

No Respect
The wages of Clinton's China policy.
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Thursday, April 5, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT

The sole advantage of the current U.S.-China crisis is that it offers an opportunity to clean up some of the wreckage that was the Clinton administration's foreign policy in general, and China policy in particular. With the midair collision that sent a Chinese jetfighter into the South China Sea and handed China's government the chance to poke through one of America's most sophisticated surveillance aircraft while holding its 24 crew members hostage--and demanding a U.S. apology--it's about time America figured out that what we have with China is hardly a "strategic partnership."

Instead, we have a situation in which, after eight years of President Clinton's "constructive engagement," China's communist rulers have almost no respect for the United States.

Why should they? China's President Jiang Zemin, Prime Minister Zhu Rongji and their fellow cadres have stolen U.S. missile technology and nuclear secrets, persecuted their own democrats--and any other rivals--aplenty, and increasingly threatened America's democratic Chinese ally, Taiwan. Somewhere in there, Beijing also achieved a fascinating degree of access to Mr. Clinton's political fund-raising procedures, something that must have left China's bosses cynical about any U.S. talk of principles. And notwithstanding a bit of human-rights muttering by the Clinton administration (which doesn't seem to have helped the 1.2 billion humans in China) Beijing's dictators were rewarded with a series of U.S. benedictions perhaps best summed up by Mr. Clinton's chummy public pilgrimage in 1998 to Tiananmen Square.

In other words, the way the U.S. managed to be China's "partner" under Mr. Clinton was to play mainly by China's rules. And those rules are brutal. A big lesson from the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square was that the top concern of China's rulers is to keep their monopoly on political power, whatever the cost to their countrymen, not to mention their neighbors or their "partners" across the Pacific.

In a country as large and restive as China, keeping a lock on power takes a lot of calculation. And it is going to take a lot of determination in Washington to persuade China's rulers that their old calculus will not keep winning them rewards, especially not at U.S. expense.

All that sounds rather general. To see just how crazy a maze we have encouraged China's rulers to create, take a case less prominent than the airplane smash-up, but just as emblematic of the underlying problems in U.S-China relations.

Social scientist Li Shaomin was arrested by Chinese authorities as he crossed into China from Hong Kong almost six weeks ago. Mr. Li, 44, is precisely the kind of smart, liberal thinker that China, as it mills through the immense task of modernization, desperately needs. Born in China, he studied at Princeton, and in 1995 became a U.S. citizen. Mr. Li could have stayed safely in America. But his interest in China, and his hopes for his homeland's peaceful progress, were such that he moved back to Asia and took a teaching job in Hong Kong, a good place from which to study China's evolution.

On the evening of Feb. 25, Mr. Li set out from his home in Hong Kong on what his wife, Liu Yingli, says they expected to be a one-night trip into Shenzhen, China's special enterprise zone just over the border. He did not return. Five days later, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing called with the news that Mr. Li had been detained. Chinese officials gave the embassy no reason for his arrest. Mr. Li remains jailed without justice. According to his wife, the only news has come via a U.S. Embassy official who was allowed two visits, both under the watchful eye of Chinese security officials.

What's going on? The best guess is that China's authorities are making an example of Mr. Li. The aim may be, and the effect certainly is, to send the message that they do not want liberal thinkers, even peaceful ones, on their turf. Especially not those like Mr. Li, who happen to be intimately acquainted with China and its culture--in other words, people in a position to make some especially useful contribution.

Meanwhile, China's delegates will soon be packing their bags for the annual International Monetary Fund and World Bank spring meetings in Washington later this month. They have every reason to expect that the World Bank in particular will lavish hundreds of millions of dollars worth of projects upon them, in the name of helping China's progress. Currently, some 110 World Bank projects are under way in China, slated for a total of $18.2 billion in funding, of which some $10.1 billion has yet to be disbursed (something the Bush administration might want to ponder). And the money keeps coming. Since last July, the bank has approved four new projects, to the tune of some $375 million in subsidized loans to Beijing. Four more projects, entailing subsidized loans worth another $400 to $500 million, are up for approval before November.

The U.S. is one of the prime contributors to the World Bank. These subsidies do not go to the impoverished Chinese citizens they are, in theory, supposed to help. Every dime of the huge below-market loans gets funneled through Beijing's central government, increasing centralized clout over whichever local authorities end up on this U.S.-backed dole. Most of these projects are for massive highways, waterways and other infrastructure works.

So let's review this picture. Rather than turn to someone like Li Shaomin for the large contribution he could make to China's wealth and modernization, Beijing slams him in jail as a political pawn and a warning to his reform-minded colleagues. Meanwhile, the U.S., in the hope of helping China reform, serves as a major source of cheap World Bank funds so China's central government can build itself roads and waterways--which in turn frees up other Chinese government funds for such equipment as fighter jets and missiles.

This is just one small sample, of course, of a U.S.-China policy that has helped back President Jiang into an odd corner, in which there's simply not a lot to gain from respecting the United States. If President Bush, by standing firm, can now manage to change those ground rules, he would be doing right not only by the U.S., but by the people of China as well.

Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Thursdays on OpinionJournal.com and in The Wall Street Journal Europe as "Letter From America."