Deng’s Demise is an Opportunity to Take Stock, Change Course on One-Sided U.S. Policy of ‘Engagement’ with China

(Washington, D.C.): The long-awaited
(and possibly long-postponed)
announcement of Deng Xiao Ping’s passing
offers the United States a long-overdue
opportunity to reconsider its policy
toward Communist China. This policy,
which the Clinton Administration calls
“constructive engagement,” has
been practiced to varying degrees by
every American president since Richard
Nixon stunned the world by going to China
twenty-five years ago yesterday.

A Failed Policy

For many years, this policy of
engagement was rationalized as a way to
provide a critically important strategic
counterweight to the Soviet Union. Such
an imperative was cited to justify
ignoring the nature of the Communist
government in Beijing which was, in many
ways, even more repressive than that of
the USSR.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union,
however, the original rationale for
“engaging” China has been
supplanted in official circles with a
new, more crass justification: It’s good
for business — at least for some
American businesses (principally, it
would appear, those participating in the
importing of Chinese products into the
U.S.) Those reluctant to be seen as
indifferent to morality and human rights
often try to mask these pecuniary
motivations with an ironic sop to Marxian
economic determinism. They confidently
predict that China’s exposure to free
market capitalism and the attendant rise
in standards of living will inexorably
undermine and ultimately destroy the
Communist power structure.

In practice, this American policy has
not appreciably liberalized the Chinese
political system. Instead it has served
primarily to facilitate totalitarian
China’s transition from isolated pariah
nation to regional hegemon and
incipient superpower. Eulogies to
Deng and other Western appraisals of his
tenure as China’s ruler have,
nonetheless, focused nearly exclusively
upon the economic manifestations of this
transition. With the exception of
occasional (and generally passing)
comment about Deng’s ruthless suppression
of human rights, the universal image of
Deng Xiao Ping as a “man we could do
business with” has tended to
reinforce the impression that U.S. policy
has been successful to date — and should
be continued.

Collision Course

Largely unremarked is the fact that China
is on a collision course with the United
States. While the exact timing
and circumstances of a future conflict
cannot be predicted with confidence at
this juncture, there is ever less doubt
that Beijing’s long-term ambitions in
East Asia and globally are being pursued and
can only be fully realized at U.S.
expense.

Under Deng, China’s immense and
growing trade surplus with the United
States (currently about $37 billion per
year) provided hard currency needed to
help underwrite the Peoples Liberation
Army’s staggering modernization program.
The fact that since 1988, China has
issued roughly 75 bond offerings — some
36 of which have been dollar denominated
— raising billions in undisciplined,
unconditioned cash, should give every
American pause. So should the more than
700 PLA front companies believed to be
operating in the United States for the
purpose of acquiring militarily relevant
technology and otherwise advancing the
Chinese armed forces’ Great Leap Forward
into the 21^st century. Equally
galling is the fact that Beijing has been
receiving enormous assistance from the
Clinton Pentagon under the guise of
“defense conversion.” href=”97-D31.html#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾

It is virtually certain, moreover,
that the PLA will be the principal
beneficiary as Deng’s appointed
successor, President Jiang Zemin,
struggles to consolidate power or has it
wrested from his grasp by one or more of
the ruthless Communist leaders who wish
to supplant him. href=”97-D31.html#N_2_”>⁽²⁾
There is, in short, little prospect in
the near- to medium-term that the Chinese
military will receive less funding for
its ambitious military modernization
program. The industrial espionage,
coercive trade deals and diplomacy,
technology transfers and apparent
influence operations against the Clinton
White House aimed at advancing this
program (among other Chinese interests)
will likely also continue. And the
leadership will almost certainly
intensify the repression at home and
expansionist, even bellicose, foreign
policies favored by the Army’s
commanders.

The Bottom Line

It is high time for the United States
to begin addressing the obvious, ominous
implications of the aforementioned trends
in China. The U.S. can no longer safely
ignore: China’s emerging geo-strategic
and military power; the dangers posed by
its aggressive plans for Hong Kong,
Taiwan, the oil-rich Spratly Islands and
the rest of Asia; and its ongoing
proliferation of deadly conventional and
unconventional weapons to rogue nations
around the world.

The United States should, for example,
refrain from reflexively seeking
“stability,” urging a peaceful
transition of power in China (read, more
of the same indefinitely) and conjuring
up new ways to accommodate Beijing’s
demands in pursuit of a trade uber
alles policy. Indeed, serious
thought should be given to ways to
encourage constructive instability in
China — the sort of instability that
could weaken and perhaps even shatter the
brutal totalitarian repression that makes
the Chinese government so beastly to its
own people and such a menace, at least in
the medium- to long-term, to others.

At a minimum, the United States must
abandon its present appeasement policy of
largely one-sided “engagement”
with China. Special interests profiting
from trade and financial deals with
China, former U.S. officials on retainer
with Beijing and its proxies and others
motivated by similar parochialism must no
longer be granted virtually exclusive
sway over American relations with the
Chinese. And steps must be taken at once
to begin reasserting the United States’
determination to remain the dominant
military power in the Far East in defense
of its own interests there and those of
its key allies and trading partners.

– 30 –

1. See the
Center’s Decision Brief
entitled An Alternative to
Clinton’s Failed China Policy: ‘Strategic
Containment and Tactical Trade Ambiguity
(No. 96-D
29, 19 March 1996).

2. Today’s
announcement that the Army strongly
supports Jiang may not be the last word;
it nonetheless underscores the importance
Jiang has assigned to establish close
ties to the PLA.