Why our hardliners are wrong - detractors of US-Russia policy

Critics of U.S. China policy have been enjoying unprecedented attention lately. Between those who want to get tough with China and those who want to be more accommodating, the Clinton administration's second-term project to consolidate and expand cooperative Sino-U.S. relations has been vastly complicated. Advocates of nearly every stripe have had a hand in distorting China's impact on American interests and Washington's policy record since the late 1980s, which, despite its bad press, has had important successes. Character assassination has been so rampant and policy critiques so politicized that the normal rules of evidence used to evaluate a serious, complicated set of policy choices have been among the first casualties. Lost, too, in many cases, has been any sense of the geopolitics of the problem - that cool-headed assessment of capabilities and motives that ought to be our first task, not an emotionally exhausted afterthought.

Particularly egregious have been many of the claims of those neo-cold warriors in their efforts to persuade Americans to abandon engagement and follow a policy of "containing" the "China threat." As an example of the hostile hyperbole that has become quite common, consider this statement of June 9 from the Washington-based William J. Casey Institute of the Center for Security Policy: "The nature of the threat posed by China is in key respects of a greater magnitude and vastly greater complexity than that mounted by the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War." It is a rousing statement, to be sure, but by no reasonable or objective measure is it even remotely true.

If we step back and evaluate the issues fairly, two truths come clear: China is not a "rogue state", and U.S. policy has made important gains in affecting Chinese behavior over a wide range of issues bearing on important American interests. Both points may be demonstrated by looking at military and economic dimensions of the bilateral relationship, as well as at the heated debate over China's human rights practices.

Security Conflicts and Accommodations

The most serious Chinese challenge to the United States is its potential military power. The Chinese economy is growing and Beijing's ability to increase defense spending is growing with it. But advocates of containing China vastly overestimate Chinese power and underestimate our own.

A larger Chinese economy will not necessarily lead to greater military power. China can import weaponry, but sustained improvement in military capabilities will require indigenous defense modernization. China still cannot manufacture a reliable 1970s-generation fighter plane, much less anything like a U.S. F-16. The need of the People's Liberation Army to import Russian equipment is telling. Buying from Russia is a quick and relatively inexpensive way for China to equip its forces with materiel far superior to indigenous products. But this should not be particularly upsetting to U.S. planners, whose forte is the destruction of Soviet equipment with remarkable speed and skill. Moreover, China lacks the basic ability to maintain Russian equipment. It now requires extensive Russian assistance to repair many of its recently acquired SU-27s and its Kilo submarines.

China has developed a limited number of more modern destroyers, but it is decades away from being able to manufacture and deploy a first-generation, limited capability aircraft carrier. The PLA lacks the ability to conduct sustained military operations more than 100 miles from the Chinese shoreline. China is a formidable land power, but in maritime Southeast Asia, where U.S. interests are most at stake, China is militarily inferior even to such countries as Singapore and Malaysia.

In the end, China may succeed in modernizing its military. But it may fail, too - economic and technological modernization is a precarious enterprise. As an export processing zone for the advanced industrial countries, China has succeeded in raising living standards and its GNP, but this is a far cry from developing the economic and technological capabilities to field a twenty-first century military force.

U.S. military supremacy is so overwhelming that Washington has the luxury of being able to observe Chinese technology development and weapons production before adopting countervailing policies. As Secretary of Defense William Cohen recently observed, Washington has global superiority in every phase of warfare, and while China is trying to catch up, the United States is not standing still. Not only is the U.S. defense budget greater than the combined defense budgets of the next six largest competitors, but U.S. technology and weapons modernization are advancing so rapidly that, in all probability, with each passing day and despite its strenuous efforts, China's technological and military capabilities are losing ground rather than catching up with those of the United States.

Politically, too, the American alliance system in Asia is superior to anything the Chinese can hope to have. Logistically, the U.S. alliance with Japan and its access to basing facilities throughout the region give the United States an enormous advantage. Diplomatically, China is increasingly viewed in the region as a problem to be managed, while the United States is seen as a relatively disinterested power-broker whose aims are compatible with regional peace and prosperity for all. A potential Chinese alliance with Burma can hardly offset the U.S. relationship with Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the maritime states of Southeast Asia (including, still, the Philippines). With such logistical and diplomatic superiority to bring to bear, current U.S. defense spending and weapons acquisitions are already more than sufficient to hedge against China's potential development of advanced military capabilities.

It is true, nevertheless, that despite China's limited military capabilities the PLA can use force effectively and is not shy to do so. The PLA has been part of every major crisis in East Asia since 1949. It has the ability to disrupt regional stability and inflict considerable costs on U.S. interests. Clearly, the most serious security conflict in U.S.-China relations remains the Taiwan issue, and it is in principle unresolvable. Beijing wants unification under PRC role and reserves the right to use force to bring it about. The United States insists on Taiwan's right to make its choices free from military pressure.

Even if the Taiwan issue is intractable in principle, it can be managed so that U.S.-China conflicts of interest do not disrupt cooperative relations; this has clearly been the U.S. experience from the early 1970s to the early 1990s. U.S. policy has guaranteed Taiwan's security and, as important, has provided an environment in which Taiwan developed a prosperous economy and a flourishing democracy. These successes form the bedrock of Taiwan's diplomatic autonomy, and the only concession Washington had to make to help Taiwan achieve them was to refrain from actions that could be interpreted as support for formal Taiwanese independence.

Equally important, Washington's multifaceted assistance to Taiwan did not make improved relations with China impossible. Diplomatically, what seemed a zero-sum game between Taiwan and the mainland turned out not to be zero-sum at all for American policy. The main reason for this was China's strong desire to cooperate with the United States against the Soviet Union, but it was not the only reason. Mutually beneficial economic relations and cooperation in maintaining regional stability on a wide range of issues were also important, and they remain so despite the fact that the Soviet Union is no longer there as a common enemy. Indeed, a good deal less has changed than is often assumed. China today no less than before wants to avoid heightened U.S.-China adversarial relations, much less a literal fight with the United States over Taiwan. That being so, Washington can continue to protect Taiwan's most vital interests - security from mainland power and continued economic and political development - and avoid great power conflict and escalation of regional tension by employing more or less the same Taiwan policy that has worked well over the past twenty-five years. The United States can fulfill its moral obligations to Taiwan and assure its "realist" objectives toward both Taiwan and the mainland without having to do either more against the mainland or less in favor of Taiwan.

Chinese weapons exports have drawn much attention from critics of U.S. China policy. It has now become common knowledge that, as Gary Bauer pronounced recently in the Wall Street Journal (June 26), "The Chinese have treated pariah states such as Iran and Iraq as their 'most favored nation' trading partners. They have been doing a land-office business in chemical weapons, including poison gas, and nuclear materials." It is true that Chinese commercial enterprises have exported chemical weapons materiel. But it is also true that its weapons proliferation policy is in substantive compliance with all international arms control agreements.

Since the end of the Cold War, and with the partial exception of its strategic relationship with Pakistan, China has not exported a single missile, transferred any nuclear technology, or engaged in proliferation of chemical weapons raw materials in violation of any international arms control regime. Contrary to several reports, China has not exported the M-9 missile to Syria. Its missile exports to the Middle East have consisted solely of short-range missiles that are not covered by the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR). Its cooperation with Algeria in nuclear energy, which dates back to the mid-1980s, has been under the continuous inspection of the International Atomic Energy Agency. In 1995 Beijing canceled its nuclear energy project with Iran. Its 1996 ring magnet transfer to Pakistan did not violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). China's policy on chemical weapons proliferation has been equally compliant. Although in May 1997 Congress imposed sanctions on Chinese firms for exporting chemical weapons materiel to Iran, these exports did not violate the Chemical Weapons Convention.

China's most serious proliferation activities have been its nuclear assistance to Pakistan in the 1980s and its missile transfers to Pakistan in the 1990s. But just as post-Cold War U.S. weapons and technology transfers to Britain and Japan reveal that Washington engages in nuclear and missile proliferation when it suits its interests, Chinese transfers to Pakistan reflect its security interests. In some respects China's Pakistan policy may fairly be compared to American indulgence toward Israel's nuclear weapons. While the United States was never the principal supplier of Israeli nuclear technology or know-how, Washington and Beijing both prefer that their respective allies be able to deter attacks from more powerful adversaries on their own. It is safer that way, and avoids complicating their own relations with other countries. Just as Washington does not want its support for Israel needlessly to jeopardize its relations with Arab countries, Beijing does not want its support for Pakistan to derail its efforts to improve relations with India.

This is not to equate Pakistan with Israel, Japan, and Britain, which have well deserved reputations for prudence. No moral equivalency is intended or required. But the United States should avoid the conceit that a given mode of behavior can be wrong for every country in the world but still right for the United States because of the purity of its motives. Obviously, when other countries develop similar policies to pursue similar objectives, interest rather than morality is the appropriate standard of judgment. Washington does not turn an occasional deaf ear toward proliferation because it believes that proliferation is morally good, but because there are occasions when it is a necessary and a lesser evil. There is no reason to assume that China's motives in its relations with Pakistan turn on a different sort of reasoning - and every reason to think, by the way, that had the United States acted as a truer ally to Pakistan, much of what China provides that country would have been rendered unnecessary.

Overall, Chinese policy has supported the development of the global non-proliferation order. China has progressively joined international arms control agreements. In 1992 it formally joined the NPT. In 1996, despite the implications for its unreliable nuclear deterrent and grumbling from the PLA, Beijing signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Over PLA objections, it has also signed and ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention, and agreed to the Land Mine Protocol to the Convention on Inhumane Weaponry. Recently, Chinese leaders have expressed interest in joining the Zangger Group, the export control arm of the NPT. Chinese participation in these regimes reflects American success at pressuring Beijing to accept global responsibility for controlling proliferation, even at a cost to China's own interests.

There are important arms control regimes from which China is shut out, including the MTCR and the Wassenaar Group, which oversees conventional weapons exports. It is America that has blocked Chinese participation. Chinese absence from the MTCR is most troubling. Washington can have but limited confidence that Beijing will refrain from missile proliferation when it was party neither to the original negotiations nor to subsequent adjustments to the MTCR. Even in these circumstances, Chinese exports to Pakistan stand as its only violation of the MTCR, and these - particularly the 1992 transfer of M-11 missiles - were only made in direct retaliation for the U.S. sale of 150 F-16s to Taiwan, itself an unambiguous violation of the August 1982 U.S.-China communique. As in any bilateral relationship, contemporary or historical, China is inclined to retaliate when American violations of U.S.-China agreements undermine its interests. This is not roguish but realist.

In the non-nuclear realm, the United States does not oppose proliferation of missiles because they are "weapons of mass destruction", but because they are the only delivery system against which the United States has no defense. But for most countries, U.S. F-16s, which Washington sells freely, are more threatening and more destructive than a Chinese M-11 missile. It is not at all clear that U.S. arms exports are any less "destabilizing" than Chinese exports.

Obviously, Chinese exports of weapons not covered by arms control regimes could undermine U.S. interests. But thus far the impact has been minimal. Exports of low technology short-range cruise missiles and chemical weapons precursors to Iran do not enhance Iran's ability to contend with the U.S. Navy or Air Force as much as they undermine American diplomatic efforts to enforce dual containment. But here China's record is not much different from that of many other countries, including several U.S. allies. The most flagrant challenge to Washington's dual containment policy with respect to Iraq comes not from China but from France, Turkey, and Russia, all of whom have strained to lighten the sanctions regime for financial reasons. Meanwhile, Japan and the members of the European Union trade with Iran as they do with any other country, and greatly resent U.S. efforts to stop them from doing so. German dual-use technology exports to Iran continue unchecked. This commerce is more important to Tehran than anything that China provides.

China's record is far from perfect when it comes to arms dealing, but it is not the flagrant violator it is often represented as being. Its more controversial exports reflect legitimate security interests rather than predatory political or opportunistic commercial interests. Moreover, some Chinese violations reflect not central government policy but rather Beijing's limited control over economic enterprises and its inability to establish an effective export control regime. Political and economic decentralization best explain the 1996 Chinese export to Pakistan of ring magnets and the export to Iran of chemical weapons materiel. In these circumstances, the appropriate response is not to carry out "feel-good diplomacy" and sanction Beijing for policies it does not control, thus increasing tension without hope of practical benefit, but to assist its effort to develop a more effective regulatory system. Indeed, Washington's restrained response to the export of ring magnets to Pakistan reflected such a sober analysis; this did not, of course, prevent it from being savaged in much op-ed commentary.

With specific reference to the Middle East, the most sensitive area in which Chinese behavior has been criticized, China has for the most part respected U.S. interests, and it has not done so without cost to itself. China has no inherent reason to refrain from proliferation to regions outside East Asia; since such countries cannot harm China directly, it might simply have allowed economic interests to drive its export policy. Instead, China has accommodated U.S. policy because both the Bush and Clinton administrations have effectively combined coercive threats with constructive diplomacy. Since China's first missile exports to the Middle East in 1988, the systematic application of limited and well targeted sanctions has persuaded Chinese leaders that Washington pays close attention to these PRC exports, and that exports that violate international regimes or harm U.S. interests risk disrupting U.S.-China cooperation. At the same time, the continuation of engagement in other areas has worked to convince Chinese leaders that cooperation with the United States is still feasible and worthwhile. The net result is that U.S. policy has compelled Beijing to comply with international arms control regimes and cooperate with U.S. interests more generally than might have been expected.

Economic Conflicts and Costs

The most important economic conflicts between the United States and China concern Chinese piracy of intellectual property rights (IPR), the large and growing U.S. trade deficit with China, the terms for Chinese admission to the World Trade Organization (WTO), and prison-labor exports. But as is the case concerning security conflicts, the attention given to Chinese economic policy is disproportionate to its impact on U.S. interests. Similarly, criticism of U.S. trade policy fails to acknowledge American success in bringing China's behavior into greater compliance with those interests.

Chinese IPR piracy has been the focus of periodic U.S.-China tensions. Seeking Chinese cooperation in reducing financial losses to U.S. entertainment and software industries, Washington has threatened economic sanctions if China does not change its domestic policies. But while Chinese piracy of IPR is certainly a problem, the extent of losses both in absolute and comparative terms is much exaggerated. The widely used figure of $2 billion is an industry estimate premised on an inelastic demand curve. That is, estimates of losses are calculated on the basis of the profits that would have been earned if the hypothetical quantity of licensed sales were to equal actual pirated sales. Obviously, this is very unrealistic; no one expects fully above-board retailers to sell the same number of products at seven or ten times the black market price. The actual profits from licensed sales would have been but a small fraction of $2 billion. U.S. financial losses are not irrelevant, and it is true that a matter of principle is involved, but these losses are negligible given the scale on which Hollywood and the American computer software industry operate.

Equally important, critics fail to apply a comparative perspective on Chinese IPR piracy. Piracy is a worldwide phenomenon and no country is fully effective at stopping it. Indeed, industry groups have targeted not China but Greece, Paraguay, and Russia as priority countries for U.S. IPR policy. Nor is China among the eleven countries that these groups have recommended be placed on the special 301 "priority watch list." According to industry estimates, losses to U.S. firms from piracy in Japan are nearly double those from piracy in China. In absolute terms, the greatest losses to American industries occur in the United States itself. Further, if industry estimates used assumptions based on more realistic elastic demand curves, then estimates of relative losses to Chinese IPR piracy would be even smaller.

Moreover, in contrast to losses from other markets, Chinese enforcement abilities are relatively weak; indeed, IPR piracy in China affects domestic manufacturers on a wide range of name-brand consumer goods, including computer software products, more than it affects U.S. industries. It also harms the legitimacy of the Chinese government. Its inability to prevent the manufacture and sale of inferior imitations of popular name-brand consumer goods has earned it a reputation among its own people for ineffective protection of consumer interests. To a large extent, lax PRC enforcement of intellectual property rights is not by design, but reflects the government's general inability to develop effective regulatory and legal systems.

But despite the chaos in Chinese society, American policy has succeeded in encouraging reforms that meet the interests of U.S. manufacturers. Beijing has fundamentally fulfilled its 1992 agreement with the United States to enact domestic legislation protecting the intellectual property rights of foreign companies. The 1995 U.S.-China agreement on the implementation of Chinese domestic legislation has also scored important successes. Between May 1996 and March 1997, due in part to Chinese government offers of rewards for information, Beijing shut down thirty-seven illegal compact disc factories, and Chinese courts have begun to sentence violators to significant prison terms.

The American trade deficit with China is large and growing, but the relevant policY issue is the impact of the deficit on the U.S. domestic economy. It is, in fact, very small, largely because Chinese exports to the United States primarily consist of goods that American workers no longer make, such as low-cost textiles, shoes, toys, and inexpensive low technology electronic goods. The United States stopped making such things over twenty years ago when Japanese products captured the American market. Subsequently, as Japanese labor costs increased, products from Taiwan, South Korea, and Hong Kong dominated the U.S. market. Now, as labor costs in Taiwan, South Korea, and Hong Kong have increased, Chinese consumer goods are in turn taking their places. Chinese export success has primarily affected the overall trade deficits and labor conditions of Taiwan, South Korea, and Hong Kong, not those of the United States. The proof is in the data: The cumulative U.S. trade deficit with China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan has not appreciably grown since 1988; only the distribution of the U.S. deficit among these markets has changed.

America's response to a trade imbalance should reflect the extent to which that imbalance is the result of a trading partner's conscious policy choices as opposed to other factors. In the case of Japan, Washington confronted this issue in the 1980s and the lesson of that experience should be clear: The U.S. deficit with Japan declined not in response to changing Japanese trade policy, but in response to changes in exchange rates and in the Japanese economy itself. The trade deficit with China also reflects economic conditions. China's national savings rate is far higher than that of the United States, and the Chinese are much poorer per capita than Americans. Thus, the United States can readily import inexpensive Chinese consumer goods, while there is a limited market in China for America's expensive high technology goods. Contrasting economic conditions guarantee that the United States will have a large trade deficit with China regardless of how much pressure the United States applies and how much Chinese trade policy changes. As Henry S. Rowen put the matter in these pages, "The Sino-American bilateral trade balance reflects market behavior far more than official manipulation."(1)

Regardless of the economic causes of trade deficits, it is generally in the American interest to minimize the obstacles to doing business in China, so long as doing so does not obviously prejudice American strategic interests. But American businesses widely agree that despite the corruption that exists there and the fact that its laws and regulations are largely unenforceable, it is already far easier to do business in China than in Japan or South Korea. Thus, in sectors in which the United States has a global comparative advantage - including civilian aircraft, grain export, computers, high technology electronic goods such as cellular telephones, and industrial machinery - it does well in the Chinese market. As in the case of IPR piracy, American attention to the trade deficit is disproportionate to the impact of that deficit on U.S. interests and to the role that U.S. and Chinese government policies can play in affecting it.

Nevertheless, U.S. trade policy has achieved some important successes in improving access to China's market. In response to the threat of punitive tariffs advanced by the Bush administration in 1992, Beijing agreed to make transparent its trade regulations. By 1995 Beijing had substantively complied with this agreement, making it easier for foreign businesses to operate in China. In response to pressure from the Clinton administration, Beijing agreed this year for the first time to liberalize foreign access to its textile market. While these developments will not fundamentally affect the trade balance, they do promote America's objective in expanding market access and promoting fairer U.S.-China trade. They also show that, contrary to established opinion on American op-ed pages, the Chinese are not intrinsically duplicitous; they will implement negotiated agreements to maintain U.S.-China cooperation.

Another important issue concerns China's admission to the WTO. This problem is frequently portrayed as having been made difficult by China's refusal to accept the norms of the international liberal trade order. The Chinese have indeed resisted U.S. proposals, but the conflict is one of interest, not principle. Admission to the WTO is based on individually negotiated agreements reflecting the economic interests of both the applicant and the existing WTO membership. As was the case with Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore at earlier stages of their development, China's leaders seek an agreement that will protect its infant industries from international competition. This is Hamiltonian in character, not Stalinist. But the size of China's market and its potential economic influence require Washington to adopt a more demanding posture toward Chinese protectionism than that which it had earlier adopted toward the protectionism of the smaller Asian economies.

The solution to this conflict is not Chinese isolation from the WTO. At present, China protects its domestic industries and still enjoys many WTO benefits indirectly from the MFN status it receives from the advanced industrial economies. Without U.S. concessions to Chinese interests, China will remain outside the WTO, its protectionist policies will continue to influence the global economy, and it will bear no obligation whatsoever to liberalize those policies. It is in the U.S. interest to create Chinese obligations to liberalize its trade by bringing China into the WTO. This may require a prolonged liberalization schedule as well as granting the PRC permanent MFN status. Such concessions would be politically controversial, but they promote our interests. Not only would they commit China to eventual trade liberalization, but Chinese membership in the WTO would replace often counterproductive unilateral American pressure with more politically acceptable multilateral pressure that could, additionally, reinforce the efforts of pro-reform Chinese politicians.

Toward the end of 1996 the Clinton administration adopted a more flexible policy on China's admission to the WTO. But the flap over campaign finance irregularities and sensitivities over the return of Hong Kong to China raised domestic political temperatures to the point that the risks of compromising with China fell before the less costly path of deferral. It may well be that Beijing will refuse to compromise and seek an agreement that will allow China to "free-ride" indefinitely on the WTO regime, in which case the United States should block Chinese membership. But until the United States is willing to consider serious changes in current policy and negotiate an agreement that takes into account both Chinese and U.S. interests, we will never find out if a mutually acceptable agreement is possible.

The final trade issue concerns Chinese export of goods made by so-called slave labor in Chinese prisons. On this issue, American hypocrisy and obfuscation frame the debate. The issue is not whether there are political prisoners in China. Of course there are. Nor is the issue whether the Chinese government compels its prisoners to work and then exports the goods to gain an unfair trade advantage. It does. But so does the United States. American prisoners are frequently compelled to work, making license plates or clothing, or in chain-gangs doing road construction, and there is no American law prohibiting export of prison-made goods. By U.S. standards, too, the conditions in Chinese prisons are horrendous, but they have to be if Beijing is not to make prisons more comfortable than villages in the impoverished Chinese countryside. Finally, there is no evidence that China has exported to the United States goods made by human rights prisoners.

Human Rights: Not Whether But How

China's human rights violations are numerous and grave. The United States has a moral imperative and a mandate from its people to include human rights diplomacy in its China policy. The issue is not whether to try to change China for the better, but how most effectively to go about it.

The focus of American debate these days is over the wisdom of having normal trade relations with China and conducting regular high level U.S.-China diplomatic exchanges while Chinese leaders imprison political dissidents. Congressional pressure on the White House has tried to hold U.S.-China cooperation hostage to the fate of Chinese dissidents and has thus turned these dissidents into bargaining chips. Chinese leaders care little if a dissident remains in jail or is released to the constant supervision of a hoard of security police. Our making clear to China that the release of dissidents is the quid pro quo for improved U.S.-China relations gives Beijing a vested interest in keeping dissidents in jail until it can secure a payoff for releasing them.

In the past, China released dissidents prior to the congressional MFN vote, and then cracked down on them immediately afterwards. China seemed prepared to release a prominent dissident, Wang Dan, prior to Vice President Gore's 1997 visit to Beijing, but changed its plans when it became clear that releasing dissidents would not at that time achieve any relaxation of America's China policy, which had become hostage to the then-raging campaign finance scandal. It is unseemly and self-indulgent for the United States to reduce China's democracy activists to political pawns in U.S.-China relations and increase their jail time by so doing. Yet that is exactly the effect of current U.S. policy in this sphere.

It is difficult to see how punishing Beijing's imprisonment of dissidents by downgrading political and economic relations will promote political liberalization in China. Should the United States stigmatize China by sanctioning its human rights violations, it will most likely encourage the Chinese leadership to adopt more repressive domestic policies; hostile U.S.-China relations, after all, can only intensify Beijing's concern with subversion and domestic instability. Overt American diplomatic pressure has not encouraged China to loosen its restraints on political speech; and sanctions, while they may make their American sponsors feel better, will only make the situation in China worse.

The harsh criticism of U.S. human rights policies by congressional critics and human rights groups fails - or refuses - to recognize American successes. Part of the problem is one of definition. By limiting the definition of human rights to the freedom of public dissent, human rights activists obscure a wide range of activity that should also be free from government interference. A broader, and better, benchmark is the extent to which people can live their lives free from government harassment and intimidation. By this standard, China has made considerable and rapid progress, for which the United States and its democratic allies can rightly claim significant credit.

As is the case with all one-party authoritarian systems, the Chinese government monitors a wide range of public activity. Within the constraints of one-party rule, however, the Chinese people increasingly enjoy unprecedented access to Western entertainment programs on television, in cinemas, and on stage. The Chinese consumer market is flourishing, with production determined by consumer demand for Western-style clothing, make-up, entertainment magazines, and fast food. The most popular movies are produced in Hollywood, and the most popular pop music comes from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States. American basketball players are superstars in China, too.

These developments are not trivial. Through them Chinese society has developed values antithetical to those of its leadership. Increasing interaction has meant that Western cultures are penetrating China's society and have started to create the conditions for political cleavages between government and society, and ultimately for political change. The weakening of government authority is already apparent in Chinese universities. In the sciences, engineering, and humanities, and even in many of the social sciences, government interference has significantly diminished. Scholars with doctorates from the United States and other countries are teaching in Chinese universities and are transforming courses across the curriculum. Domestic and international migration is practically unrestricted. Most significant, in recent years there has been an expansion of multiple-candidate competitive free elections in rural China.

Chinese leaders continue to direct abhorrent human rights abuses, including torture of Tibetan independence activists and imprisonment of leaders of unapproved religious activities. But compared to many countries in the Middle East and Southwest Asia - in which the sale and lifetime servitude of child brides is commonplace, religious tolerance is nearly nonexistent, women suffer intolerable abuse, and Western popular culture is barred - and to the one-party dictatorships of sub-Saharan Africa, where even slavery is tolerated and degrading and harmful tribal customs brook no challenge, China's performance, and particularly its recent record of positive change, does not cry out for special censure. South Asian countries, even including democratic India, tolerate slavery, and the horrid abuse of women in India is especially disturbing. The point is not that China's human rights record is good, but that abhorrent violations occur throughout the Third World and that, as in both security and economic issues, U.S. attention to China's human rights situation is disproportionate to China's violations when viewed comparatively and in the context of its improving situation.

Much of the impetus behind recent positive changes comes from the collapse of Communist Party control and the continuing decentralization of economic power in China. But Western involvement with China's economy and society has also been influential. Mere interaction with Americans, whether through educational exchanges, travel, or business, has exposed the Chinese people to Western values and to what is for them the novel notion that people can be free from the fear of their own government. It has clearly stimulated demands for similar freedoms in China; there would never have been a democracy movement in the spring of 1989 without Western interaction with the Chinese economy.

Economic interaction has also impressed the Chinese with the superiority of capitalism, which has already contributed not only to higher standards of living but also to the economic independence required for genuine social autonomy. Such interaction has underscored the value - increasingly, the necessity - of an institutionalized legal system to protect both enterprises and individuals from arbitrary authority. The determined independent development of the Chinese legal profession and the widespread demand for impartial law enforcement clearly reflect a highly positive Chinese exposure to Western ways.

Both the Western success at contributing to change in China through broad-based personal ties, and the Western failure to change appreciably the lot of Chinese dissidents by threatening to limit those ties, underscore the importance of resisting demands that the United States reduce its level of engagement with China. Some of the most successful foreign activities in China, including programs in legal training and for the promotion of democracy, have been funded by the U.S. government and American philanthropic organizations. The record of Western interaction with post-Mao China is overwhelmingly positive. It suggests that we should put an end to the detrimental politicization of human rights policy, and expand U.S.-China cooperation wherever practicable.

There are no unmanageable U.S.-China conflicts. The Taiwan problem raises the most sensitive and dangerous issues, yet even here Beijing and Washington have established a way to satisfy their respective interests without undermining cooperative relations. In both economic and security relations, conflicting interests are amenable to negotiation and mutually satisfactory outcomes. As in any negotiation between great powers, solutions will require mutual compromise. But through negotiations with China, the United States can further a wide range of bilateral and regional interests and maintain regional and global stability, while simultaneously promoting change in China that reflects American values.

It is fashionable to argue that the end of the Cold War has undermined the strategic foundation for U.S.-China cooperation. This is true, but the removal of one support is not a reason to go about destroying all the rest. Cooperation is still important, and an adversarial relationship between the United States and China will only become inevitable if one of the two sides insists on it. Given the consequences that would flow for all of East Asia, it would be disastrous if it were Americans who so insisted.

1 "Off-Center on the Middle Kingdom", The National Interest (Summer 1997), p. 104.

Robert S. Ross is professor of political science at Boston College and research associate at the John King Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University. He is coauthor of The Great Wall and the Empty Fortress: China's Search for Security (W.W. Norton, 1997).

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