Chris Cox 1997 Keeper of the Flame remarks

On the Occasion of His Acceptance of
the Center for Security Policy’s "Keeper of the Flame"

28 October 1997

As we meet tonight, America’s security policy toward Asia — and the Center’s own advice on this subject — are much on the minds of people in Washington and across the country because of the visit of Jiang Zemin to Washington. For those of us who have long been working on Asia policy, and China policy in specific, this is a great opportunity….This year, I have traveled twice to the People’s Republic of China and met myself with Jiang Zemin. Since I have been Chairman of the [House Republican] Policy Committee, we have introduced several pieces of legislation relating to East Asia policy, nine of which will come to the floor of the House a week from tomorrow in a full-day session of over 12 hours devoted to China policy-an unprecedented opportunity.

The Lesson of the Recent Taiwan Crisis

In early 1996, at the time of the Taiwan missile crisis, the Policy Committee produced, and I introduced on the floor of the House, a very pointed resolution that stated that if the People’s Republic of China were, without provocation, to attack Taiwan, the United States would defend Taiwan. And that resolution passed the House of Representatives with 369 votes in favor, and only 14 votes against it. Immediately following this, the Clinton Administration abandoned its policy, which they described as "strategic ambiguity," and sent two carrier battle groups into the Taiwan Strait — immediately following which the People’s Republic of China lifted the blockade of Taiwan, and called off the balance of the missile tests. The scheduled Presidential elections on Taiwan went forward as planned. The months following have been peaceful. That is all to the good.

But it is ironic that the Clinton Administration described its own policy as "strategic ambiguity," because that is exactly what I would say about it in criticism. How was the government in Beijing to know what would be the United States’ response if the PRC did attack? And why would we want to keep that a secret from them? Yet there were even sharper ambiguities than that. The Clinton policy was ambiguous about our security perimeter in the region, recalling Dean Acheson’s tragic misstep concerning South Korea in 1950.

And the policy was morally ambiguous. It equated the kind of provocation for which the People’s Republic of China was responsible in launching missiles into the Taiwan Strait with the supposed provocation of the government of Taiwan’s holding democratic presidential elections — or sending its leader to receive an honorary degree from Cornell University.

The Folly of Inconstancy and ‘Strategic Ambiguity’

Strategic ambiguity is a dangerous policy, because uncertainty risks war. A security policy of strategic ambiguity is the opposite of a policy of peace through strength: it risks war through weakness. But even ambiguity doesn’t quite capture the Clinton policy, which is, even more than ambiguous, uncertain and unpredictable.

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…The President’s China policy remains the clearest example of a lack of constancy. In the face of Communist China’s ongoing export of chemical weapons technology to Iran, even the Clinton State Department cited seven Chinese violations in May of this year. The CIA has designated the People’s Republic of China "the most significant supplier of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) related goods and technology to foreign countries." In August, of this year, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency concluded that it is "highly probable" Communist China is violating the biological weapons convention. Just last month, the United States Navy reported that China is the most active supplier of Iran’s chemical, nuclear and biological weapons program. What will be the Clinton response to all of this at the summit tomorrow?

The answer is that Bill Clinton is expected to activate the 1985 Nuclear Cooperation Agreement with China — an agreement that requires a presidential certification that the People’s Republic of China has become a responsible member of the non-proliferation community. A more self-defeating example of "coddling dictators in Beijing," to use Bill Clinton’s words, would be hard to find.

China is Not Free

The Clinton policy of so-called engagement — unilateral and unconditional engagement, to be sure — is premised on the sound notion that the United States should wish China to be our friend. That is indeed a sound notion. We should, and we do, wish China to be our friend. But we must seek more than that. We must also desire to have friendly relations not with the largest Communist nation on earth, but with a free China.

While the collapse of Communism in the former Soviet Union gives us hope that China, too, will one day be free, the current government of the People’s Republic of China exercises control over more people than any one-party dictatorship in history. Communist China, with two-thirds of its urban work force employed in state-owned industries, is anything but a free market. The notorious Laogai prison system, on which my colleague Rep. Chris Smith has held hearings today, holds between six and eight million Chinese citizens captive and employed in slave-labor industries — some 140 export industries that ship to 70 countries around the world. There is no rule of law in China. Transparency International recently declared that China is the fifth most corrupt nation in the world. Private rights of ownership in real property are negligible. And the People’s Liberation Army, whose official military budget has more than doubled in the 1990s, supplements that spending with off-budget subsidies through the ownership of an enormous conglomerate of commercial firms that themselves are significant marketplace actors. This is not free enterprise.

Will Economic Determinism Work?

Yes, China is changing. But it’s not changing any more than anyone would expect a modern Communist state to change. Many people in the Clinton administration and in the business community argue that China’s economic progress is miraculous. It means, they say, that China cannot be Communist. If China still has a Communist economy, they say, how could it grow by 10 percent a year?

Well, that’s an old and meaningless argument, considering the base of poverty against which Chinese economic growth is measured. Communist China reported a growth rate in 1958 of 22 percent at the height of the tragic "Great Leap Forward." Twenty-two percent annual economic growth is simply fabulous — provided you are more interested in statistics than food. During this same period, China’s economic policies led to a man-made famine that claimed 20 million lives.

Yet throughout this period, even up to the time of Mao’s death in 1976, foreign business people were saying exactly what they are saying today. Many U.S. investors expressed open admiration for what was going on under Mao. David Rockefeller, for example, praised "the sense of national harmony," and argued that Mao’s revolution "succeeded not only in producing more efficient and dedicated administration, but also in fostering high morale and community of purpose."

But while the enthusiasm for Chinese Communism is remarkably long-enduring (and seems willing to endure anything), such endorsements, just as in the case of Stalin’s Russia, have borne little or no relation to the truth. Just as "miraculous" as these reported economic growth figures is that after so many years of such progress, Communist China is still so poor. The truth is that today, even after all of these years of "miraculous" growth, the per capita gross domestic product of the People’s Republic of China ranks it below such emblems of Third World poverty as Lesotho, the Congo, Senegal, Bolivia, Guatemala, and Honduras.

Even today, the People’s Republic of China needs our help. And they deserve it. All of this history means not that we should refuse to engage China, but rather that America should seek to influence China for the better.

A ‘Policy of Freedom’

But following the Clinton Administration’s policy of passivity has coincided with a trend away from freedom and the rule of law. We should do the opposite. We should actively promote freedom.

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…The American President should say simply to Jiang Zemin what the American President should say to the world: We wish an end to Communism to China. Because we love the peoples of China, we wish them to be free.

Last year, the then-Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Winston Lord, paid a visit to my office. We discussed these matters, and I asked him why it is that the President of the United States cannot say that we wish that China were not Communist. He replied that of course we wish it were so — but we just can’t say it.

And thus, with a silence as eloquent as President Reagan’s international appeals for freedom that helped topple the Soviet Empire, the Clinton Administration has forsworn a policy of anti-Communism.

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When the Ming Dynasty replaced the Mongols in the 14th century, China embarked on its own Age of Exploration-an era that antedated, and rivaled in all respects, anything that was going on in Europe. Chinese fleets scoured the Indian Ocean, visiting Indonesia, Ceylon, even the Red Sea and Africa-where they picked up giraffes and brought them back to the amazement of the people back home.

But this is where Chinese exploration ended. Who knows? With a little more wind, the Chinese might have rounded the Cape of Good Hope. They might have reached Europe. They might even have discovered America.

Today, the irrepressible dreams of human freedom live on in China’s diverse and tolerant peoples. But China’s explorers and discoverers are kept down by worst of the 20th century’s legacies, the last vestiges of totalitarianism, which also live on still in Communist China.

It’s my hope that as we close the 20th century, America — whose unique mission in world history is to promote freedom — can provide the Chinese people with a little more wind to fill their sails, so that this time they will round the corner, so that this time they will actually be free. When that happens, China and the United States of America will truly be friends. And the world will be a much safer place.