President Jiang in America - 7 November 1997

The President of China has come and gone and it's fair to say that nothing has changed except the deposit of a cheque for $3billion. China has no intention of opening up its markets more widely to American goods.

For the third time it has promised not to do what it has been doing, which is transferring the technology for making nuclear bombs to Pakistan. For once the United States, through Mr Clinton, asked China what it had to say about the massacre in Tiananmen Square, a nine-year memory that does not fade here. President Jiang maintained his perpetual smile and said that in a nation of 1.2billion, it was essential to preserve social stability and discipline dissidents.

Mr Jiang did not hem and haw or retreat into vague political jargon. He firmly dropped the reminder that Taiwan is part of China, though he didn't say that he has any present designs on the rebellious island. Most of these themes, with the same responses, came up in the social occasions, the implied threats or lamentations very much softened by many toasts and mild jokes.

These banquets vividly reminded me of the last night at Yalta all those years ago, when President Roosevelt, Mr Churchill and Stalin raised their vodka glasses on high, mellowed into a jolly old boy relationship and agreed to the coming independence of the countries of eastern Europe invaded by the Nazis while Stalin, who could smile with the best of them, toasted the agreements and quietly laid his long-range plans to take over Poland, Hungary, Romania and Czechoslovakia.

So, President Jiang, how about the repression of Tibet? No repression there. Tibet had not been repressed but liberated. I don't suppose for a minute that President Clinton had hoped to change Mr Jiang's ideas on any of these ideological points but every survey of popular opinion shows that most Americans cling to the belief that American foreign policy ought to have a moral basis. That it's only right to protest against any country that gaols, let along tortures, people for their opinions.

Some nations, Europeans particularly, regard this American passion for exportable democracy as noble but naïve. Well, whichever it is, it's been a constant in American public opinion since, you might say, President Woodrow Wilson and nobody has expressed it with more conviction, especially when he was running both times for President, than Mr Clinton.

If that's so, why did he invite Mr Jiang in the first place and what did he expect to get out of the meeting? The question was put to him by many powerful voices in the media before Mr Jiang arrived and the answer, never expressed quite as nakedly as this, was: China is about to become the mightiest economy in the whole of Asia.

Twenty-five years ago, if there was an Asian economy to woo and fear, it was the Japanese. In those 25 years the economy of China has kept a self-made promise, that the wiseacres of the West – the bankers, economists, financiers –ridiculed at the time, to quadruple its economy. In fact it has quintupled. Just to state that simple massive fact gives an immediate deceptive picture of a vast, confident, newly-prosperous nation.

All the knowledgeable people who've been there lately say, not so. The Chinese are as much bewildered by their economy as impressed by it. The institutions that should control any economy hardly exist. Banking systems, government methods of policing the markets and they've descended to, as in Russia, a plague of corruption and – in the wake of unprecedented industrial production – very wide destruction of the landscape, of the environment. And all this in a country larger than the United States with a population greater than the combined populations of North America, Europe and Russia, all ruled from a single capital.

So, to the Chinese leaders, the word stability does not mean keeping in order a great continental nation with ripples of trouble, it means controlling voices of reformers, even if there are only 3,000 of them, who might cause millions of people to run amok. China on the loose, an old long-gone pundit used to say, was the worst thing that could happen to the Western world.

A sign that President Clinton had this in mind was made clear when he talked about China's historical fears of chaos and disintegration. American policy towards Communist China for the first 20 years or so from the Communist conquest in 1949 officially hardly existed and, a Chinese historian has recently pointed out, it was a period of almost uninterrupted disaster and misery for the Chinese people.

And then, in 1972, the world, certainly the mass of Americans, was astounded to hear that their president, Mr Richard Nixon, had arrived in Beijing to make friends, to establish an American policy with Communist China. Nobody, no politician in America, had ever risen to fame, to the House, then the Senate, then the Presidency, on such a single emotion, so tenaciously held, as his hatred of Communism.

Accordingly Mr Nixon's forceful gesture in this breakthrough to China was mocked by all good men and true. The pundits who support Mr Clinton's expansion of this Nixon engagement policy point to great improvement in China's economy and also in the recognition of human rights. The people who are against it are mostly conservative Republicans who have now jumped on the ideological bandwagon and accused Mr Clinton of having parked all ideals to accommodate despotism. The liberal Democrats, as usual, go on regretting the imprisonment of two famous dissidents, but hope that Mr Jiang will one day decline into a liberal.

Of course, in view of his old rhetoric about despots and human rights, Mr Clinton had to ask the questions along those lines and he got unembarrassed answers. But what had moved him to recognise what his administration calls a reality check was, of course, the first fact we mentioned – the sudden looming up on the horizon of China as an oncoming economic giant, the economic giant of Asia.

Mr Jiang had no trouble accepting this realistic invitation because he was willing to pay a price, higher by far, than all the Asians who'd paid thousands to have coffee in the White House. Mr Jiang paid $3billion to give an order for 50 aircraft from – who else – the biggest airplane manufacturer in the world, Boeing of Seattle, a mighty firm that, inexplicably, in its last report was over $200million in the red.

So Mr Jiang went back home where those millions and millions had seen, on television in public squares, the salutes and the trooping ceremonies of welcome, the handshakes and smiles between the two presidents, the tour of the House with the Speaker, Mr Newt Gingrich, no less, as host. No shots, of course, of the questions about Tibet or Tiananmen Square. Altogether a picture of the leader as the jovial ally and equal of President Clinton.

When Mr Jiang flew home though, I felt there was among more Americans than would care to be polled, a sense of relief, an inner feeling that perhaps, after all, what was good for the economy, the American economy, was good for American foreign policy.

The relief didn't last long. Exit Mr Jiang, enter the incorrigible, the inimitable, the detestable Saddam Hussein. A friend, waking to a morning bulletin of the tube, said in a pained phrase what I believe most Americans felt – "Not again".

Saddam Hussein had made the bold, the outrageous, announcement that he would stop any Americans on the United Nations inspection team from going on with their job, which is to poke around, find and destroy any weapons of mass destruction that he might still be making and hiding, in spite of the six-year-old United Nations ban, agreed to by a defeated Saddam, on all such weapons including poison gas and germ warfare labs and to permit, at all times, inspection by United Nations officers.

What it's hard for most of us to believe is that the UN has been at it all these years, constantly finding new dumps and sites and now, according to the Australian head of the inspectors, coming on a buried weapon that Saddam very much wants to keep hidden.

Even more outrageous to the "What, not again", Americans. Saddam announced he would shoot down any American airplanes fulfilling their UN function of flying over a region of Iraq. To which, as you know, the United States, with United Nations agreement, has said it will withhold, for one week only, any more U2 reconnaissance flights, while a UN team goes off to negotiate, that is argue, with Saddam Hussein.

There's a lively fear here that an interval for so-called negotiation will give him time to cripple more monitoring equipment, which he's been doing, or dismember or immobilise equipment that can grow biological seed stocks, not tomorrow, but today.

The hugeness of the problem is reflected in the fact that England is the size of New York State and that Iraq is eight times as large as either of them and until we develop radar and sonar cameras that can penetrate deep underground from invisible altitudes, the job of clearing even a few thousand acres of hidden stocks of small lethal weapons, is obviously enormous.

The weapon Saddam feared the UN was just beginning to move in on was probably the hideous nerve gas, VX, a small canister of which is capable of paralysing the population of a large, perhaps the largest, cities. That's what we're up against and the time to find it and negotiate it out of being, is short. That is the cheerful letter for the week.

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