The New York Times / By DAVID E. SANGER
WASHINGTON, May 24 -- With his victory today on trade with China, Bill Clinton has finally defined his imprint on American foreign policy: the president who cemented in place the post-cold-war experiment of using economic engagement to foster political change among America's neighbors and its potential adversaries.
It is a path he chose in 1993, when 10 months into his presidency he defied his party and pushed through the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada. At the same time, he reversed course on China, despite his 1992 campaign criticisms of his predecessor for "coddling dictators," and concluded that denying China trading rights as a weapon to change its behavior was a policy doomed to failure.
Today, eight months from the end of his presidency -- and with even fewer Democrats on his side -- he convinced a Congress skeptical about trade and even more suspicious about China that normalizing trade relations was the best bet for encouraging political reform in the world's most populous nation.
And he persuaded them that rejecting the trade bill would bolster hard-liners in Beijing who are convinced that America's secret agenda is to contain China's power, economically and militarily.
It will be years before anyone knows if the economic roll of the dice behind today's vote, or the strategic one, will pay off. On paper, the accord promises vast new openings for American agricultural goods, telecommunications equipment and Internet providers, among others. But history suggests that as soon as China's tariffs come down, new bureaucratic barriers will magically appear.
As in the Nafta debate, the economic benefits were undoubtedly oversold. China is already at work on ways to slow the promised influx of American competitors in its market, at least until it can figure out what to do with the tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of workers, mostly in state-owned industries, whose livelihoods are threatened by the country's promise to open its markets to the world.
But in the end, Mr. Clinton ultimately prevailed because he was able to sell a long-term vision of how America could use its economic power to change, and perhaps undermine, the nature of one-party rule in China. And his opponents in the floor debate -- both those who feared the loss of American jobs and those who fear China's rising power -- offered no real alternative, no convincing strategy of how America would expand its presence in China or attempt to open up its political system.
"This was never a fight about the nature of the problem in China. It was a fight about the nature of the solution," Samuel R. Berger, Mr. Clinton's national security adviser, said in an interview this morning as the final House debate was getting under way. "It's about whether we best deal with China in a punitive way or by a combination of promoting internal change and external validation of that change."
That Mr. Clinton won the China argument at all is remarkable. Few countries evoke such deep emotions in Congress and among political activists.
"More people are imprisoned today for their beliefs than at any time since the Cultural Revolution" in 1966-76, said Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat and long-time opponent of trade relations with China.
While it is impossible to verify Representative Pelosi's count -- the number of political detentions in China is kept secret by the government in Beijing -- administration officials do not deny that the crackdown on the Falun Gong religious group has sent imprisonments soaring.
Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican and defense hawk, charged that America's trade with China was simply building up Beijing's nuclear capacity, and compared Mr. Clinton's engagement policy to Neville Chamberlain's failed effort to moderate Germany's behavior in the 1930's. "You don't make a liberal by hugging a Nazi," he said.
But in this debate, Mr. Clinton's approach to trade was as divisive as his approach to China. Despite America's incredible prosperity, trade policy still runs like a huge geologic fault through the Democratic party. For seven years now Mr. Clinton has argued endlessly that international economic development ultimately offers economic opportunities for workers in the world's most innovative economy.
Yet he has convinced few.
Labor unions fought fiercely against him -- and a pained Al Gore -- arguing that "economic engagement" was simply a code word for moving American jobs to China.
Just compare today's vote tallies with the battle over Nafta. In 1993, when the American economy was just crawling out of a recession and unemployment had yet to fall, Mr. Clinton got 102 out of 258 Democrats to vote for the free trade accord with Mexico and Canada -- or 39 percent.
Today he persuaded far fewer Democrats: 73 out of 211 voting on the bill, or 35 percent. In one of the great turnabouts of modern times, it was the House Republicans -- who impeached Mr. Clinton last year -- who saved his foreign policy legacy today, voting overwhelming for the China deal 164 to 57.
The decline in Democratic support is all the more notable since this may have been, in President Clinton's words, the "most one-sided trade deal in history." While Nafta required huge openings of the American market -- threatening American tomato farmers and car-parts makers -- the accord to usher China into the World Trade Organization put all the market-opening obligations on Beijing. China got no reciprocal trade openings, just an agreement to let them into the organization that sets the rules for world trade.
"This is one of the conundrums that all of us have had to wrestle with," said Gene Sperling, the head of Mr. Clinton's National Economic Council who helped negotiate the deal struck with China in November, an accord that Congress indirectly approved today. "Despite the growth in our economy, despite the record-low unemployment, you see nothing but increased anxiety about globalization, technology and trade. It's everywhere."
In the end, though, Mr. Clinton's success in twisting arms had little to do with the bill's economic merits. He won over the undecided using a bit of Lyndon Johnson-style vote-buying -- one congressman got a zip code for a small town, and two others got a natural gas pipeline near El Paso -- and a large dose of Richard Nixon's geostrategy.
Like Nixon and all the presidents who followed him, Mr. Clinton has become an engagement enthusiast. And while economic interdependence was the course advocated by George Bush, Mr. Clinton has become a far more articulate proponent than Mr. Bush ever was.
So if he leaves office with a Clinton Doctrine, it is this: Doing well for American business can, under the right conditions, do good for the cause of liberalization and democracy in authoritarian corners of the world.
"We know that trade alone will not bring freedom to China or peace to the world," Mr. Clinton said late this afternoon in the Rose Garden, before celebrating what clearly will be one of the last legislative victories of his presidency. "We will have more positive influence with an outstretched hand than with a clenched fist."
It is a doctrine Mr. Clinton has subscribed to only when it is politically convenient -- Cuba, for example, is still a notable exception.
Now the hard part -- making the leap from economic openings to political progress -- will be left to Mr. Clinton's successor.
China's record of compliance with trade accords is poor (though Europe and the United States don't do much better). There is little doubt that, once a member of the World Trade Organization, Beijing will use its clout there to work against the international regulation of labor and environmental rights that Mr. Clinton says are so necessary.
And while China's intelligentsia sees the pressure to open China's markets as a huge lift to economic and political reform -- and to the country's embattled chief reformer, Prime Minister Zhu Rongji -- the opposition to true market opening will be fierce.
China's real political constituencies are its wildly inefficient, often bankrupt state-owned enterprises. As foreign competition pours in, many will go belly up. When the workers demonstrate, the country's insecure officials may well decide to crack down, with echoes of Tiananmen Square that would inevitably inflame American opinion.
"No one said this would be an easy path or a short one," said Charlene Barshefsky, the United States trade representative, who led the China negotiations. "There will be setbacks, lots of them. But we've tried the other means of effecting change in China and they have failed. This has a chance, a good chance."
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