Washington Post / By Robert G. Kaiser, Washington Post Staff Writer / Thursday, May 25, 2000
In the debate over China's trade status, President Clinton and other administration officials held out the promise that an affirmative vote yesterday would encourage China's reformers and undermine its hard-liners, "reduce tensions along the Taiwan Strait," produce "a more stable Asia," discourage the proliferation of missiles, minimize the danger of "a new arms race" in Asia and more.
The president got his affirmative vote in the House with surprising ease. So how does he now bring home all that bacon? "I certainly have never suggested that one's going to see overnight transformations," said Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, the president's national security adviser, after yesterday's vote. "We're talking here about a process."
According to a range of China specialists, there won't be much bacon any time soon. Several speculated that the first visible impact of China's membership in the World Trade Organization may actually come in relations between China and Taiwan, not China and the United States.
"Our headaches with China will now increase rather than decrease," said Michael Oksenberg, a professor at Stanford University who worked on China issues at the National Security Council under President Jimmy Carter. A strong supporter of bringing China into the WTO, Oksenberg said the Chinese are ill-prepared to open their economy in the ways WTO membership requires. "The Chinese are going to be very vexing trading partners," he predicted, noting that there has been strong opposition inside China to WTO membership from bureaucrats who run the country's state-owned industries, still the largest part of the Chinese economy.
"We ought to keep our euphoria under control here," said Winston Lord, ambassador to China in the Bush administration and assistant secretary of state for Asian affairs in the first Clinton administration. Yesterday's vote "is obviously significant," he added, "but I think there's a tendency to exaggerate its impact."
A "no" vote yesterday would have produced "a storm," said Joseph Nye, dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, who worked in the Pentagon and the CIA in the first Clinton administration and spent last week in China. But the immediate consequences of the "yes" vote will be less tangible, he predicted. "When you dodge a bullet, you don't know that otherwise you would have been dead," Nye said.
Berger had gone so far as to predict that China would have interpreted a House vote against permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) as "a decision by the U.S. to seek a path of containment and contention," ensuring hostile Chinese-American relations.
Many students of China are impressed by Beijing's decision to seek WTO membership, and hope that it will ensure the continuing evolution of a real market economy in the world's biggest country. Very few prominent China scholars have spoken out against granting China permanent normal trade status or welcoming it into the WTO. But the benefits China experts foresee are years off.
Yesterday's House vote was not a final step. The Senate still must approve PNTR, which Senate leaders say it will do easily next month. If the Senate votes in June, China could become a full member of the WTO by July or August.
Other Asian governments, including Taiwan's, strongly support the Chinese bid for membership in the WTO and urged the United States to grant PNTR. So did the semiautonomous government in Hong Kong, the former British colony now legally part of China but guaranteed self-rule on most matters.
Taiwan could be an early beneficiary of yesterday's vote. The WTO will likely admit Taiwan right after admitting China, a boon for the flourishing island that the mainland government considers part of "one China." The new president of Taiwan, Chen Shui-bian, offered this week to establish direct economic ties with the mainland to replace the indirect relations, mostly through Hong Kong, that have existed until now. Already, experts say, Taiwanese businesses have invested $40 billion to $60 billion in mainland China and are eager to invest more.
Now that China will be joining the world economic system, Oksenberg said, Taiwan isn't going to want to see Japanese and Korean investors get a jump on China's markets. Chen's offer, if accepted by China, could lead to a qualitative change in economic relations between Beijing and Taipei.
Laura D'Andrea Tyson, the former White House official who is now dean of the business school at the University of California at Berkeley, led a delegation of Americans to Chen's inauguration last weekend. She said yesterday that the Taiwanese she met, including the new president, were eager to improve economic relations with the mainland. She added that they believe that "increasing [China's] commercial ties to the world ... is the single most important thing that can be done to preserve China's stability and encourage China's gradual evolution into a more open system."
But senior U.S. officials agree with several of these academic experts that Chinese-Taiwanese relations could also sour quickly. Administration officials this week noted that the first weeks after the election of Chen--for years an avowed proponent of Taiwanese independence--had been tense and worrisome. Nye said he heard Chinese speculating last week in Beijing that Chen's recent moderate statements are just a cover to help him promote eventual Taiwanese independence--a sign that suspicions in Beijing run deep.
"China is not going to be duck soup for us," said Richard H. Solomon, who served as ambassador to the Philippines and assistant secretary of state in the Bush administration and is now president of the U.S. Institute for Peace.
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