The Political Interest

By Michael Kramer

Retreat, some call it. Surrender, capitulation, appeasement. These are just a few of the damning words used by those who oppose Bill Clinton's decision to extend China's trading status as a most favored nation. The others aren't publishable -- but all of them are wrong. The words that better describe the President's action are realistic and courageous. The question, as Clinton said last Thursday, is not whether the U.S. should pressure Beijing to improve its abysmal human-rights record. The question is how best to do it while ensuring that America gets a piece of the action in the world's fastest-growing economy. The two interests may appear antithetical, but they are not.

For several reasons, Clinton is right to switch course and de-link the issues of human rights and trade. First, in threatening to throttle America's growing commerce with China because Beijing oppresses its citizens, the U.S. has stood alone. "No other nation agreed with us," said Clinton. "It wasn't like there was a big multinational coalition; it's not like sanctions on Iraq." Only America has annually debated forgoing trade with a nation that will spend more than $1 trillion during the next decade on infrastructure projects alone. Only America would permit moral considerations to preclude a company like Boeing from making a fortune in China. As everyone else has rushed to embrace China's markets, it has become clear that isolating Beijing is an impossibility.

Second, the yearly threat to end MFN was having no effect on Beijing's leaders, who view even whispered rebukes as "unacceptable interference." As Clinton said last week, a proud Confucian culture that prizes order over liberty is especially reluctant to take steps perceived as kowtowing to U.S. pressure.

Third, as the President understands, prosperity is often the best and sometimes the only route to freedom. Although "((economic)) growth alone will not democratize China," said U.S. Senator Bill Bradley, whom Clinton invoked to defend his stance, "it creates a fluid political and social environment and the emergence of a class of prosperous Chinese -- all of which fuel democratization. Evidence from South Korea and Taiwan shows that prosperity breaks down old controls and generates demands for improved political and social conditions."

The courage to change is often the very definition of leadership, and this particular Clinton flip-flop is better yet because the President expressed his new position without the legalistic fudging that has too often characterized his tenure. This time a foolish and failed policy was forthrightly acknowledged to have outlived its "usefulness," and squarely junked.

The President's resolve will be tested by those who deride his new policy as "trickle-down liberty." Human rights, democracy and trade are "linked inseparably and indivisibly," declared House of Representatives majority leader Richard Gephardt. Clinton's reversal "will encourage China's intransigence," added Senate majority leader George Mitchell. Rather than fight to revoke MFN altogether, these influential Democrats will soon seek to broaden the category of penalized products to exclude from the U.S. about $900 million in goods produced by China's army and its commercial partners. With many in Congress eager to demonstrate their toughness, that proposal could attract majority support. If it does, said Bradley, it could invite retaliation against U.S. exports to China "and antagonize a key actor ((the military)) in China's succession struggle."

Better to second the President's conversion. As George Bush said in 1991, before Clinton blasted him for "coddling" Beijing's dictators, "It is wrong to isolate China if we hope to influence it." Bush was right then. Clinton is right now.