AT HIS VILLA IN BEIJING, DENG Xiaoping, 91, sits in a wheelchair unable to speak. Sometimes he is shown a document, specially printed in oversized characters. He nods, shakes his head or simply stares. One of his daughters then attempts to decipher his meaning. Years ago, Deng resigned from his official positions and tried to retire, but Chinese tradition and the ethos of the Communist Party conspire to force him to rule, or pretend to rule, until the moment he is pronounced dead. While he lingers, dozens of party elders, senior military leaders, provincial kingpins and Politburo members are maneuvering for influence, and the country and the world watch to see who will lead China's 1.2 billion people.
At the moment, the man who has the inside track is President Jiang Zemin, who last week held a sort of mini-summit with President Bill Clinton in New York City. Clinton and Jiang talked for two hours at Lincoln Center without reaching any new agreements. But they were determined to demonstrate publicly that Sino-American relations, which have been strained and verging on bad, are starting to improve. White House spokesman Michael McCurry offered a painstaking formulation: Clinton was "confident that we have begun a process that will lead to a series of dialogues that will help improve the opportunity" for better relations.
For Jiang, the most important audience was back in Beijing. He is in day-to-day control of the government, he has accumulated all sorts of impressive titles, but many Chinese and China watchers consider him weak, and he is still looking for ways to present himself as a dominating figure. During the planning for his trip to the U.S. for last week's 50th anniversary of the U.N., he tried to wangle an invitation for a full-scale state visit to Washington. But the Clinton Administration, mindful of how sour Congress's attitude toward China had become, invited him to Washington only at the less imperial level of a "working visit." Jiang balked and ended up settling for the rendezvous with Clinton in New York. Even then there was a last-minute hitch. The day before the meeting, China insisted that it be moved out of the New York Public Library because the building housed an exhibit that included material on the protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
State visit or not, Jiang seemed determined to wring all the advantage he could out of the occasion. He tried to put Clinton on the defensive, insisting he was still outraged that the U.S. had granted Taiwan's President Lee Teng-hui a visa to travel to his alma mater, Cornell University, last June. A Chinese official claimed later that the U.S. "has made it clear to the Chinese side that it has drawn a lot of lessons from the damage it has wrought upon Sino-U.S. relations."
In part, Jiang's message was what it seemed: a demand that the U.S. stick to its official "one-China" policy and avoid giving any encouragement to Taiwanese independence. At the same time, Jiang's denunciations served other purposes. He gained credit with hard-liners in Beijing, especially the military, for stoutly supporting China's national interests and standing up to the U.S. superpower. More and more, the regime has exploited nationalism to shore up its legitimacy, and this emergence on the New York stage provided Jiang with a fine opportunity to appear as China's advocate.