The New York Times / By DAVID E. SANGER
WASHINGTON, May 21 -- For seven years now, very little has gone as planned in Bill Clinton's effort to shape a new relationship with China. Now, amid increasing confidence among White House officials this weekend that they will prevail in one of the most crucial Congressional votes in a decade, the president who came to office knowing little about China may leave claiming he fundamentally altered Washington's relations with Beijing.
For Mr. Clinton, the problem has not been a lack of vision. Once in office, he quickly cast away his campaign attacks on President Bush for "coddling dictators" in Beijing. And since 1994, he has steadily built on his theme that the Internet and China's growing economic ties to the West would ultimately create pressures for political openness that Beijing will not be able to control.
The problem has been one of execution. The Chinese have hardly cooperated, jailing more dissidents even as Mr. Clinton argued that economic freedom would eventually produce political freedom. Nor has there been much help from the president's fellow Democrats, most of whom have fought his trade and China policies at every turn.
But in recent weeks, Mr. Clinton has sworn to close friends and colleagues that he will not let himself repeat the same mistake he now blames himself for making at least twice before -- letting the politics of the moment, or even the prospect of a war within his own political party, pull him back from a step he is convinced is the best hope of keeping China from becoming an adversary.
"He knows he blew it in 1995 and again last year," said one of Mr. Clinton's foreign policy advisers, referring to Mr. Clinton's decision to grant a visa to Taiwan's president in 1995 to visit the United States, and then to walk away last year from a sweeping trade deal with China's reform-minded prime minister, Zhu Rongji.
So with the passion of a convert, Mr. Clinton is spending hours each day arguing the merits of a strategic vision he took years to adopt. In small gatherings in the Yellow Oval Room of the White House residence and even aboard Air Force One as he took New York Democrats to his wife's formal nomination for the Senate race, he has offered lectures about competing scenarios of what America's dealings with China may look like in 2025.
In public, his aides say the vote, scheduled for Wednesday, is still too close to call. "We don't have the 218 to pass it, and the opposition do not have 218 at this point, in my opinion, to stop it," Commerce Secretary William Daley, who is leading the administration's lobbying drive, said today on CBS' "Face the Nation."
In private, however, many of Mr. Clinton's advisers suspect the bill to give China permanent trade status -- thus ending an annual Congressional review -- will pass by a margin of 10 votes or more, chiefly because of the support of Republicans. The Republican whip in the House, Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, said today that "we're moving toward that magic number of 218," giving much of the credit to lobbying by the president.
For Mr. Clinton, the vote may be the last hope of making a deep imprint on foreign affairs in his second term. With time running out for a Mideast peace accord or a new arms deal with Russia, the outcome of the vote has taken on huge importance in the president's mind.
"He hates the word, but it's the legacy thing, in a big way," said one cabinet member.
But even if Mr. Clinton wins, the victory may feel incomplete.
Mr. Clinton acknowledges that for all his talk about the benefits for America of economic globalization -- how it opens new markets for American exports and innovation -- fewer Democrats are with him on this than on the1993 passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement. He told a colleague not long ago, "I'm doing this despite my party, not with it."
Even allies say that is because his commitment to rebuilding the China relationship and pursuing a trade policy for a new era of globalized commerce has waxed and waned.
"As in so many things," said Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a leading advocate of the trade bill, "he too often let the politics of last month or next month affect decisions toward China that go to half-century strategic issues." Only in recent times, he added, "has the president begun to see this in historic terms."
So far, the White House strategy has been fairly straightforward. Mr. Clinton has largely let others argue the economic benefits, and avoided direct engagement with the labor unions that fear that any gains from an increase in exports to China will be outweighed by the movement of American jobs there.
Instead, the president has focused his arguments on national security, saying the real point of letting China into the World Trade Organization is to further economic engagement to give a boost to China's reformers and prevent the two nations from drifting into adversarial roles.
But with the coalition in Congress so fragile, Mr. Clinton's staff has carefully shielded him from much public engagement about the deal. They canceled a television address to the nation this evening, for fear it would anger undecided Democrats. After lengthy discussions, they declined to make him available for an interview on his seven years of dealings with China, again out of concern he might say something that could cost a few needed votes.
To the enormous frustration of the White House, the Chinese are hardly aiding Mr. Clinton's cause. In past years, when Congress was gearing up for a vote on the annual renewal of trading status, Beijing usually released a few long-imprisoned dissidents.
But this time, as Mr. Daley said recently, "the Chinese certainly aren't making it any easier." While they moderated their reaction to the inauguration this weekend of a new Taiwanese president, Chinese authorities have continued to arrest members of the Falun Gong religious group, and recently sentenced a leader of the fledgling Democracy Party to a long term in prison. Mr. Clinton, curiously, has made no recent public comments about those arrests.
Mr. Clinton and his team have tried to turn China's continued crackdowns to their advantage, arguing that the trade deal, by ushering in Western technology, legal systems and ideas, will ultimately undercut the ability of the Chinese government to repress dissent.
At the United States Coast Guard Academy on Wednesday, the president took this argument further than he ever has before, making the case that "when over 100 million people in China can get on the Net, it will be impossible to maintain a closed political and economic society."
"He's right, but it will take a generation," said Sandra Kristoff, who headed the Asian operations of the National Security Council in Mr. Clinton's first term. President Jiang Zemin of China is taking the other side of that bet, hoping that -- like Singapore -- he can reap the benefits of an open economic system while suppressing, or at least managing, true political opposition.
Mr. Clinton will likely be deep into retirement before historians can assess whether he or Mr. Jiang have guessed right. But it is already clear that Mr. Clinton's journey to his strategic vision of dealing with China was a long road with many unintended detours.
His first 18 months in office were spent digging his way out of his own campaign rhetoric. His comments had inflamed the Chinese, and Sen. Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat, said, "I remember telling him one day that the first step was that he had to treat China with respect." Mr. Clinton, he said, "seemed surprised."
By the end of 1993, and a disastrous trip to China by Secretary of State Warren Christopher, it was clear that the president's effort to link China's trading rights to its performance on human rights and arms proliferation was collapsing. It was a short intellectual leap to granting permanent trade status.
"There was no evidence that we ever gained any leverage over the Chinese with annual renewal," said Charlene Barshefsky, Mr. Clinton's trade representative. "It was an empty threat. We knew it, and the Chinese knew it."
Mr. Clinton reversed course, saying he could make more progress with China through engagement than with threats -- the conclusion his predecessors had reached.
Then in 1995, with his re-election looming, Mr. Clinton allowed Lee Tung-hui, Taiwan's president, to make a private visit to Cornell University for a college reunion, over the objections of many advisers. Mr. Clinton feared that denying the visa would prompt Congress to rewrite the Taiwan Security Act, worsening relations with Beijing. But he underestimated the outrage in Beijing.
Mr. Clinton now views that as a mistake. "There were two stages to his learning about China," said one former adviser, who dealt with China policy daily. "After the campaign he learned that China was a lot more complex than he believed. And now he's learned the second part -- that dealing with China means putting the security interests first, and not letting politics get in the way."
If that was the lesson, it was forgotten again in April 1999. By that time Mr. Clinton and Mr. Jiang had exchanged visits to China and the United States, and gotten to the final stages of the 13-year-long negotiations for China's entry into the World Trade Organization. Mr. Zhu, the prime minister who has come to personify China's economic reform movement, arrived in Washington ready to end the wrangling with an offer of a huge range of openings.
Many advised Mr. Clinton to take it; but he listened to Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin and Gene Sperling, the head of the National Economic Council, who feared that if a deal were struck, Congress was in no mood to pass it.
Mr. Clinton realized almost immediately he had made a mistake, but it was too late. Once the United States accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the air war over Kosovo just a few weeks later, talks froze. They were not resumed until marathon negotiations in November, and then some of the terms had changed -- for better, and for worse.
"The previous deal couldn't have passed,"' Mr. Sperling said recently, referring both to the details of the pact and the Congressional climate. "This one can.":
