What Do We Want From Beijing?

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AP

Nixon shakes hands with Mao on historic trip, 1972.

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China was a communist power in 1972, of course, and guilty of many of the same crimes as the Soviets. But the communist rivals had been at loggerheads -- and at times on the brink of war -- since 1962, which made China a valuable strategic partner for Washington at the height of the Cold War. The death of Mao Zedong and his replacement by Deng Xiaoping in 1976 opened the possibility of expanding the relationship beyond a calculated "enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend" alliance. Deng launched the first tentative steps toward transforming China's economy in the direction of free enterprise -- a process that is currently maturing, although far from completed. For the U.S., China was no longer simply a means of tying up Soviet military resources on their eastern flank; suddenly the bright lights of business in the world's largest potential market began to beckon.

By the time the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, a substantial proportion of Main Street America's brand-name consumer goods was being manufactured in China, while U.S. high-tech firms were cutting the cost of launching communications satellites by outsourcing the job to the Chinese military.

The Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989 confounded expectations that China's emergent capitalism would necessarily bring democracy in its wake. Although it made coaxing human rights concession out of Beijing an integral part of the engagement between the two countries, the crackdown didn't fundamentally alter the business relationship between Washington and Beijing. Candidate Bill Clinton used that fact as a stick with which to beat up on President Bush in the '92 campaign, but once in power he too became an eager proponent of separating human rights criticism from the business of business.

Despite criticizing Beijing's human rights record, the cautionary experience of Russia's demise leads Washington policymakers to cut China some slack in terms of democracy. With tens of millions of people potentially left unemployed by the transition to a market economy, multiparty elections aren't exactly the first order of business for Beijing. "The Chinese government's main concern is avoiding anarchy," says Dowell. "They're willing to do almost anything to preserve order, because they fear that the whole country will break apart if central power is weakened." And the U.S. certainly has a greater economic stake in maintaining stability in China than it did in Russia.

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