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Jiang in Crawford: The interregnum
summit
By John Gershman
Last
week's Crawford, Texas, summit between US President
George W Bush and Chinese President Jiang Zemin was
notable less for the major new policy initiatives (there
were none) than for the fact that it reflects a US-China
relationship that remains contested and contradictory
despite the historically unprecedented numbers of
meetings between the leaders of both countries.
It was Jiang's third meeting in 12 months with a
US president who had campaigned against the Bill Clinton
administration's efforts to forge a "strategic
partnership" with China and for regarding it as a
"strategic competitor" instead. Ironically, it is under
Bush that the US-China relationship has more elements of
a partnership than did relations during the Clinton era.
Security issues are the centerpiece of the US-China
relationship, a theme echoed by Jiang's speech at the
George Bush Presidential Library at Texas A&M
University. He promised to cooperate more closely with
the United States to maintain peace on the Korean
Peninsula, South Asia and the Middle East, and prevent
the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
The meeting was of greater importance to Jiang
than it was to Bush, who is focused on the upcoming
mid-term elections as well as the war on terrorism,
Iraq, and North Korea. For Jiang the meeting represented
his final curtain call before the transition to the new
generation of leaders that will take place at the Party
Congress early next month. (In fact, the initial reports
of the leadership shuffle emerged while Jiang was en
route to the United States.) Jiang will likely use the
summit, and the fact that he is the first Chinese
president to be hosted by a US president at his home, as
evidence of the important role he could play in
maintaining good relations with the US even after his
"retirement". This can fuel his efforts to maintain
influence in foreign affairs after the new leadership
takes over.
The tone of this summit was much
more positive than that of the last presidential meeting
earlier this year. At that meeting Jiang failed to
provide an export control regime for sensitive military
technologies that Washington has been advocating for
several years, while Bush pointedly declined to voice a
commitment to abide by the three Sino-US communiques
that shape the relationship with Taiwan in addition to
the Taiwan Relations Act.
This time around the
tone was a little different. In August China announced
new export control regimes for missile and
biological-weapons technologies. Days later, the White
House officially labeled the relatively obscure Eastern
Turkestan Islamic Movement a "terrorist organization",
reinforcing China's efforts to label pro-independence
Uighur activists in Xinjiang as terrorists. This month,
the Chinese government freed Ngawang Sandrol, a Tibetan
nun who had been imprisoned for nearly a decade for
"counter-revolutionary" activities, including attending
a non-violent Tibetan independence demonstration. Two
high-level envoys of the Dalai Lama, including his
brother, were permitted to visit Tibet for the first
time in two decades. The US State Department announced
that a bilateral human-rights dialogue would take place
in Beijing in December.
And several major
commercial deals announced in the days before the summit
highlighted the continuing importance - albeit secondary
- of closer economic ties. The deals include:
Refining and petrochemical joint ventures worth US$3
billion between Sinopec (China's largest petroleum and
petrochemical company) and ExxonMobil in the coastal
provinces of Fujian and Guangdong.
Motorola, Lucent Technologies and Nortel Networks
signed roughly $1 billion worth of agreements with China
Unicom, China's second-largest mobile-phone operator, to
upgrade its mobile-phone network and expand
operations.
Anheuser-Busch, the world's largest brewer, is
slated to increase its stake in China's Tsingtao
Brewery, the country's largest, to 27 percent from 4.5
percent over the next seven years.
Axens North America signed an engineering-services
contract with Shenhua Group to provide the basic design
and technical services for a coal-liquefaction project
in Inner Mongolia.
Although both men raised
almost ritualistic concerns over Taiwan at the summit -
Bush voiced concerns about a continuing Chinese missile
buildup across from Taiwan while Jiang raised the issue
of increases in the quality and quantity of US arms
sales to Taiwan - Bush did reiterate the
administration's support for the "one China" policy
"based on the three communiques and the Taiwan Relations
Act".
There has been a significant increase in
intelligence and police cooperation since the terrorist
attacks of September 11, 2001, and initial agreement on
a diplomatic approach to North Korea. But a number of
outstanding issues remain unresolved. The major global
issue involves Iraq, while Taiwan and non-proliferation
remain key bilateral irritants. While human rights are
routinely referred to, they clearly occupy a position
well below security and economic issues in the Bush
administration's hierarchy of priorities.
On
Iraq, the Bush administration wants a United Nations
resolution that contains the threat of military action
unless Saddam Hussein disarms. China, Russia and France
are reluctant to endorse a resolution that authorizes
the United States to use force and opposes any
unilateral US action. China has not publicly criticized
the US-British draft UN resolutions on Iraq, leaving it
to France and Russia to craft an alternative. The
question now is what kind of deal Jiang could exact for
Chinese acquiescence, as everyone expects Beijing at
least to abstain from any vote.
In terms of
proliferation the Bush administration views the new
export control regime has having at least one major
flaw: China reserves the right to ship materials that
were contracted before November 2000, the date of a
US-China moratorium on such sales. US officials are
pushing Beijing to scrap all such "grandfathered" deals.
Absent steps on these issues, the United States is
unlikely to lift the restrictions on dual-use exports or
repeal the ban on the launch of US commercial satellites
from Chinese rockets.
The Bush administration
claims that it desires a "constructive, cooperative and
candid" relationship with China. This clever
alliteration disguises deeper contradictions in US
policy, however, between a group of hawks (including
members of Vice President Dick Cheney's staff, Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz,
and Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and
International Security John Bolton) and engagement
advocates led by Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Early in the administration, the hawks appeared
ascendant, and their rhetoric considerably sharper than
that of the Clinton administration. The Clintonesque
pattern of engagement did prevail at key points,
however, such as the resolution of the April 2001
imbroglio involving the EP-3 spy plane collision. And
since the September 11 attacks, engagement appears to
have won the battle for the public face of the Bush
administration's policy toward China.
The hawks
have not given up, however. In the wake of the spy-plane
incident, the Pentagon halted military ties and they
have yet to return to pre-April 2001 levels (lower-level
exchanges are likely to increase, but only to discuss
issues of common concern - eg, North Korea, South Asia,
terrorism - and not bilateral strategic issues).
Rumsfeld remains the only major cabinet member not to
have met with his Chinese counterpart.
Having
apparently lost the intra-administration battle over how
to conduct direct relations with China, the Pentagon has
focused on upgrading relations with Taiwan and other
allies in the region. In the midst of the spy-plane
negotiations in April 2001, the Bush administration
approved the most generous arms package for Taiwan in a
decade, including destroyers, anti-submarine planes, and
diesel submarines. While Bush administration rhetoric
with respect to Taiwan became less strident after the
September 11 attacks, the Pentagon quietly continued to
forge closer links between the United States and
Taiwanese military establishments, which included a
meeting between Wolfowitz and Taiwan's minister of
defense in late 2001.
Last month Taiwan's deputy
defense minister visited the Pentagon in what was the
highest-level reception given to an envoy from the
island in 23 years, and the US Congress designated
Taiwan a "non-NATO ally" despite the lack of formal
relations between Washington and Taipei. Beijing was
uncharacteristically quiet about these latest events,
apparently focused on the leadership transition. It
remains to be seen whether the new leadership will be as
accommodating.
The Crawford summit was not a
watershed event in US-China relations - it left many big
questions about the future of bilateral relations
unanswered and its impact on Jiang's career trajectory
remains uncertain as well. But it reflects the
interregnum that exists in US-China relations: the
post-Tiananmen era has ended but a new one has yet to be
built.
John Gershman
john@irc-online.org is a senior analyst at the
Interhemispheric Resource Center and the Asia/Pacific
editor for Foreign Policy in Focus.
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