Clinton in China, June 1998 - 26 June 1998

Let me throw us back to a date and an event, only a quarter of a century ago, that shocked Europe and America like nothing since, say, the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor that brought the United States into the Second World War.

It was a curt announcement from the White House put out in February 1972 that President Nixon was going to China. At that time it was about as startling as if, right after the disaster of Dunkirk, we'd heard that Mr Churchill was going to pay a courtesy call on Hitler.

Mr Nixon had climbed into the presidency mainly because he'd campaigned all his political life against Communists and Communism. He first got into the House and then into the Senate by defeating liberal candidates he attacked as being soft on Communism.

He came to national fame for tracking down a Soviet spy in the State Department, and from then on, ranged the country asserting that Harry Truman's administration was riddled with Communists from top to bottom. A charge that gave Mr Truman what he called "conniption fits" and a stream of abusive epithets about Mr Nixon that in modern times one politician has rarely used against another.

When he got into the White House, President Nixon though was realistic enough to know that just huffing and puffing against the Soviet Union was no sort of policy for the only other superpower. He began to make up to her. But China was another matter. A remote, potentially dangerous superpower of a billion people, perhaps thinking of developing nuclear power. A society just as totalitarian in the treatment of its people as the Soviets.

We were prepared for Mr Nixon's visit by three evenings of television of a sort of documentary tour of China which, of course, had been vetted by the Chinese. It confirmed our worst suspicions of what lay outside these uniformly pretty pictures of the charm, the simplicity, the abounding joy and innocence of life among the 800 million people.

The last charming ceremony prepared for Mr Nixon was a group of eight-year-old Chinese children performing a military dance in which they stabbed the air with fixed bayonets. What we got out of these elaborate Intourist travelogues was the impression that there must have been, off the beaten track of the official guides, a very great deal to hide.

"Why", people here asked, "why should the great Communist hunter go to China?" Because Mr Nixon, with the encouragement of his Secretary of State, Mr Henry Kissinger, began to think of China no longer as a remote, nasty enemy, but as a sleeping giant of nearly a billion people, with a promising economy, hints of a nuclear programme, and, most of all, not to be thought of as an implacable enemy of the Soviet Union.

Mr Nixon, in fact, beyond all previous presidents, saw into a likely future of China as a country likely to conclude a pact with the Soviets as unthinkable as the Hitler-Stalin Pact that guaranteed the Second World War.

Nixon, we didn't realise till later was going to China to attempt the improbable balancing act of starting a new, friendly diplomatic relationship with China and, at the same time, easing the prolonged tension with the Soviet Union by proposing, in Moscow, only a month later, the first agreement to limit strategic nuclear weapons. Well, because of Mr Nixon's later disgrace, it's a little late in the day to admit that he and Secretary Kissinger succeeded brilliantly and may be credited with the start of the long defrosting of the Cold War.

Now there's no great surprise about President Clinton's mission to China. Only in the past month, one very pressing reason has appeared which is the rather urgent American wish to help the Chinese economy stay strong, and not get caught up in the wash if the Japanese economy founders.

This is such a new thought that only a few months ago the best fiscal minds in Wall Street or Washington would have laughed themselves silly at the mention of it. It's only such a very short time ago that we'd come to think of Japan as the mighty economic power of the Far East. We're still getting used to the truth of Japan seen as a rather desperately weak economy.

There are many other good, if not so urgent, reasons. China is now a full-blown nuclear manufacturing power and possesses missiles targeted on United States' cities. Washington has only lately confirmed that China delivered a whole shipment of equipped nuclear missiles to Pakistan.

This would be disturbing any time but is a knotty problem indeed just when the sale of high technology equipment has become such a big item in American trade with China. So much so that the scanning or monitoring of it has been transferred from the state department to the commerce department. Some of the president's critics say, "A first-class blunder".

The United States has a trade imbalance with China of $40 billion in China's favour. Now of course China has its own plans and anxieties. Two well-aired grievances – it keeps objecting to the existence of the official US government radio programme in Chinese, the Voice of America in Asia. The Communist countries of Europe always kept up a row about the Voice of America in Europe, broadcast in many languages, on the same grounds as the Chinese, that it constitutes foreign interference in a nation's internal affairs.

China's more serious grievance is about the treaty America has with the island of Taiwan, to respect it as a separate China. A treaty which carries the implication, if not the direct threat, of armed intervention if mainland Communist China moves to invade and take it over. This has been the big bone of contention with China since it became a Communist nation in 1949.

So, there are many serious things to discuss between the number one superpower and what now begins to look like becoming number two. How far and candidly they will be discussed is something we may never know. But the president has been persuasive enough in various little speeches and in his weekly radio address to have a solid majority of Americans approve of his visit.

One thing that's helped a great deal, I think, is the television films we've seen, the preparatory tours of the new China that have been done by half-a-dozen different networks. Little documentaries, very different from the ones that prepared us 26 years ago for Nixon's visit, the syrupy sauce about the total joy of the populace and their wild enthusiasm for their form of government, the only one most of them had known.

This time, it was clear much of the film shot had not been censored. We saw quite a bit of the poverty of the rural millions remarking wistfully that the reported prosperity of the cities had passed them by. One anchorman talked in Tiananmen Square with a young dissident who wanted to present to an official a petition for redress of grievances. Two soldiers approached, brushed him off and told him to get lost. It's progress of a kind.

We saw a great deal of the living symbols of the new economy that is mingling, often ignoring, the old sacred doctrine. Entrepreneurs of many kinds, several interesting millionaires and one unforgettable scene. A young woman, a prosperous realestate agent who had torn down government buildings the government couldn't afford to keep up and built condominiums. She said the lifeline to her wealth and the new comfort of her tenants was a western novelty they'd never heard of before. The idea of the mortgage.

There is one snag to the success of the mission – the insistence of some people that this visit is about nothing but China's flouting of human rights. To some, indeed to many, public men and women in the United States, the only point of the president's mission is to stand in Tiananmen Square and lecture the Chinese about the shame and brutality of the infamous massacre nine years ago.

Well, by now you'll know what the president did about it. It must have been an excruciating decision, whichever way he wanted to play it. A true dilemma.

While we, the papers, the tube on practically all its channels, has been consumed with the China trip, domestically they've just been issued, three thundering decisions of the Supreme Court. Too late for a sensible comment.

And there is the appalling plight of the state of Florida, hit by a heatwave which down there in summer means daily temperatures well over 100° coming at the end of the longest drought in 50 years. Result? Most of the state – it's the size of England – is a tinder box and at the moment has a quarter of a million acres flaming away from single strokes of lightning, 80 new fires every day. It's the sort of news that you can't comment on, only deplore.

Move onward and upward, still in the near south, to the state of Missouri. Native state of Mark Twain, Harry Truman, Ginger Rogers, TS Eliot. There is a very small town there called Republic which grows fruits and vegetables and till now has gone about its business without scandal or publicity.

Like most other cities, towns, it has a flag or a crest and Republic's includes a small simple drawing of a fish, the familiar stylised drawing in two flowing lines we all would recognise. Somebody has pointed out what lots of citizens didn't know – that the fish has been for thousands – two thousand years – a symbol of Christianity and Christ as Fisher of Men.

Small uproar. ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union, which will defend the free speech rights of anybody from Nazis to the Ku Klux Klan and back again has moved in. The fish defies the separation of Church and State. It must go. Ho hum.

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