Overseas Perspectives 
by S. Giovanna Giacomazzi 


Bush reverses thirty years of China policy: Reconciliation to rivalry

“The collision in the skies and the forced landing at Hainan of an EP-3, the huge electronic flying ear with which the Americans listen to Chinese communications, is everything but an accident.”

I was taken aback when I read these words in an editorial in Italy’s Il Corriere della Sera during my usual perusal of the foreign press last week.

According to Sergio Romano, professor of international relations at the renowned Bocconi University in Milan and former Italian ambassador to the Soviet Union, this episode is simply the latest act in a “disturbing sequence of disagreements and hostile signals.”   He is referring to the “treason” of a senior colonel of the People’s Liberation Army who defected to the United States and the arrest of two American “spies” in China.  He is also alluding to important political divergences:  the promise of the Bush administration to furnish arms to Taiwan and the anti-missile project so dear to the new president, but which the Chinese consider a threat to their national security.

The conservative Italian commentator notes that had this incident occurred a year ago when Washington’s relationship with China was defined as a “strategic partnership,” the prognosis certainly would have been more favorable.  Today conditions are very different.  In the short time that Bush has occupied the White House, he has managed not only to reverse the policies of the predecessor that he is so keen not to imitate, but also, quite paradoxically, he has succeeded in undermining a relationship that several Republican presidents had worked very hard and patiently to construct over the past few decades.

The Great Reconciliation began exactly 30 years ago when the Chinese invited the Americans to a ping-pong tournament.  While the entire world watched the surprising event on television, two extraordinary weavers of peace and policies, Henry Kissenger and Zhou Enlai, were making history behind the scenes.

The opening toward China during Nixon’s presidency ended the bi-polarization of the cold war and helped the Chinese to break out of the isolation that was forced upon them by the madness of Mao’s ideology and the demagogic fury of the Cultural Revolution.

Suddenly the world became tri-polar.  During the mid-seventies, the man working in Peking to consolidate the new friendship with the Chinese was none other than the president’s father, George Bush.  Later, China and the United States would discover themselves as allies against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

The policies of Deng Xiaoping and his program of the Four Modernizations would soon confirm the far-sightedness of Nixon and Kissinger.  China reformed its economy and registered growth rates that were over 10% for a number of years.

When the crackdown occurred in 1989 in Tienanmen Square, public opinion against the oppression was strong in the United States as well as is in other Western democracies.  The Chinese rulers had decided that capitalism may be good for China, but that a fast track to democracy could lead to chaos.

The pressure was on among the anti-Chinese lobbyists in Washington.  However, the man in the White House was George Bush, the former ambassador.  He knew that the road to transformation in China was necessarily a long one, and that if there was one thing that could damage that process, it was ostracism from the United States.

Clinton’s China policy was exactly like that of his predecessor, Bush the father.  Up until a couple of weeks ago, one might have said that the policy of the United States toward China was neither Republican nor Democrat, but simply American.  Now there are doubts.

Romano conjectures between two alternatives, neither of which are very comforting.  The adoption of such a brusque change of attitude may be simply for the sake of Bush’s desire to modify any and all policies of his predecessor.  Or, these skirmishes may “belong to the apprenticeship of a young president that governs the world, but who only knows something about Texas.”

He praises Bush on the one hand, for surrounding himself with collaborators of no small intellectual and professional stature for the management of international affairs.  However, he admonishes him on the other for dedicating most of his time to the task of “reducing taxes and to the bargaining process that is necessary to pull off such a complicated operation in Congress.”

He blames Bush’s personal character, his hasty style, and the pressure he is under from those who contributed to get him where he is today for the President’s muscle flexing and the raising of his voice to proclaim that the interests of America come before any other consideration.

The former ambassador believes that Bush will soon be forced to realize and take into account the fact that Americans are not the only ones who have “interests.”

The general consensus among international commentators in the European press is critical of both the initial attitude of the United States and the behavior of China, neither of which was conducive to promoting the interests of either country.

The leadership of both countries appeared to be acting more in accordance with what they felt public opinion expected of them, rather than with regards to their true pragmatic interests, be they economic, diplomatic, or strategic, of maintaining good relations with each other.

April 2001

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