[Editorial] The undercurrents of distrust developing between U.S. and China

Selig S. Harrison

By Selig S. Harrison

Logically and rationally, the United States should be able to have good relations with both China and India, the two rising powers of Asia. But logic and rationality rarely govern international affairs. The undercurrents of distrust now developing between Washington and Beijing were dramatically spotlighted during Chinese president Hu Jintao’s troubled White House visit two weeks ago. Meanwhile, the Bush Administration is talking about a new "strategic partnership" with New Delhi, starting with an agreement now pending in Congress for civilian nuclear cooperation.

In protocol terms, President Hu’s appearance with President Bush on the White House lawn was a disaster. First came the insults screamed into President Hu’s face by a Falun Gong activist a few feet away posing as a journalist. Then a White House official referred to the "Republic of China" (Taiwan) instead of "The People’s Republic of China" when he introduced the Chinese national anthem.

President Bush made a perfunctory apology to President Hu for the Falun Gong incident, but the White House bureaucracy was unrepentant. On April 22, the day after President Hu left Washington, an angry Chinese Embassy delegation met with a representative of the National Security Council. The Chinese wanted to know how it was possible that an activist of a banned organization opposed to the Beijing regime was permitted to come so close to President Hu.

A National Security Council spokesman, Frederic Jones, added fuel to the fire. He explained that "Epoch Times," the Falung Gong newspaper, is a "legitimate news organization," that its reporters had attended White House events previously and "had always comported themselves in a professional way." "We would have no reason not to allow them entry," Jones said, or to be suspicious when a woman physician who had never covered previous events, Wenyi Wang, suddenly applied for a one-day pass to cover President Hu's visit.

Chinese officials had warned the White House of the potential for protests before President Hu’s visit. However, no special security measures were taken, so it is conceivable that the White House did not know that Ms. Wang had disrupted a meeting in Malta when former Chinese President Jiang Zemin visited there five years ago.

Was it merely incompetence and bureaucratic laziness that led to the protocol disasters? If so, it is deeply insulting to China that the visit of its leader was treated so casually. But there are suspicions that it was not just accidental. The White House staff includes several highly-placed hard-line ideologues who regard China as an inevitable threat to the United States. One of these is J.W. Crouch, Deputy Director of the National Security Council. Two others are John Rood, Director for Non-Proliferation in the Council, and Vice-President Cheney’s Chief of Staff, David Addington. Given the well-known views of this "Axis of Evil," it would not be surprising if China suspects that more than incompetence and laziness were involved.

The widely-read New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd, devoted her entire column on the day after President Hu’s departure to an imaginary conversation in which Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld gloat over what happened on the White House lawn. "Those Commies got what was coming to them," says Mr. Rumsfeld in Ms. Dowd’s satire. "That little Commie thought he could come here and act like we’re the second-rate power, like we’re supposed to kowtow to him just because China can call us in anytime on hundreds of billions of our national debt!"

The fact that China does hold so much U.S. debt underlines the economic linkages that make both sides anxious to avoid a confrontation over politically divisive issues like Iran, North Korea and the revaluation of the yuan. The United States wants China to continue buying U.S. Treasury securities, and China wants continued access to the U.S. market and U.S. technology. But the undercurrents of distrust are becoming unmistakable. The refusal of the Bush Administration to treat the Hu visit as a "state visit" and the substitution of a "working lunch" for the formal White House dinner accorded to Jiang Zemin by Bill Clinton in 1997 cast a cloud over the Hu visit that never lifted. As New York Times White House correspondent David Sanger reported, the visit was "truly a mess," with "the tension unmistakable and the body language bad."

The atmosphere of uncertainty surrounding the future of U.S. relations with China contrasts markedly with the upbeat mood of U.S.-Indian relations. The prospects for passage of the controversial civilian nuclear cooperation agreement remain uncertain, but even if the agreement is rejected by Congress or its implementation postponed, it is likely that U.S. relations with India will continue to improve.

In East Asia, the United States is reluctant to accept the inevitability of eventual Chinese dominance in the region and sees Beijing as a threat to U.S. influence. By contrast, in South Asia, India and the United States have no geopolitical conflicts. The United States sees the Indian Navy as a potential offset to Chinese naval expansion and as a partner with the U.S. Navy in keeping the sea lanes open for oil traffic from the Persian Gulf. Both Washington and New Delhi are opposed to Islamic radical forces in the Gulf, Central Asia and Southeast Asia. Both share democratic values and have widespread linguistic compatibility in English as well as economic compatibility in the form of market economies.

Unlike its predecessors, the Bush Administration has given implicit recognition to India’s de facto nuclear weapons status from the start. Condoleeza Rice wrote in the Journal 'Foreign Affairs' in January, 2000, before Bush was elected, that the United States should not look at India in relation to Pakistan but rather in relation to China, clearly implying that India’s nuclear weapons serve as a counterweight to Chinese nuclear weapons in the Asian balance of power. This approach lies behind the controversial decision to negotiate a civilian nuclear cooperation agreement, which provides for a formal separation of Indian civilian and military nuclear facilities, thus giving implicit recognition to India as a de facto nuclear weapons state. India conducted its first nuclear test in 1974, six years after the conclusion of the NPT, and is thus not designated as a "nuclear weapons state" in the treaty. China tested in 1964 and got into the nuclear club just under the wire.

India desperately needs to expand the nuclear component of its energy program in order to keep pace with multiplying electricity demands as its population soars past one billion. But critics of the agreement complain that it rewards India for its "bad behavior" in refusing to sign the NPT and in proceeding to develop nuclear weapons. Defenders point out that the NPT is ambiguous with respect to whether de jure nuclear weapons states like the U.S. can sell civilian nuclear technology to non-signatories. A 1978 U.S. law went beyond the NPT to ban such sales, and it is this law that Congress is seeking to amend. The fact that the NPT is ambiguous has enabled Mohammed El Baradei, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, to support the agreement, as do the governments of Britain, France and Russia, but its fate in Congress remains uncertain.

SELIG S. HARRISON, Director of the Asia Program at the Center for International Policy, is a senior scholar of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and director of the Century Foundation’s Project on the United States and the Future of Korea. He has specialized in South Asia and East Asia for fifty years as a journalist and scholar and is the author of six books on Asian affairs and U.S. relations with Asia, including Korean Endgame: A Strategy For Reunification and U.S. Disengagement, published by Princeton University Press in May 2002.