China's hard-liners get lucky

Sino-American relations are being buffeted by a flurry of developments, the outcome of which is uncertain, since they lend themselves to contrasting perspectives. One of these, explored by our Asia correspondent Harvey Stockwin, is how recent events are likely to affect the political fortunes of the hard-line communists currently ascending to the communist party leadership.

HONG KONG (JP): Hard-liners in the politburo of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) must be sighing with amazed relief.

Under their aegis, China's foreign policy has gone from blunder to blunder, culminating in the recent counterproductive military hostility towards Taiwan.

The hard-liners ought to be coming under intense fire from less hard-line factions for the way in which they have mishandled China's national interests.

Instead, the United States, the Clinton administration, and President Bill Clinton himself, are coming to their rescue. The hard-liners can claim that their policies are justified, after all.

This is but one of several crucial perspectives which emerge as Sino-American relations go through a particularly difficult period. Literally -- not merely figuratively -- Sino-American relations have ended up on the garbage dump.

Suddenly, China has belatedly discovered that it is importing American rubbish.

It has been widely reported that among recent American exports to China are U.S. household junk, medical waste and even some toxic trash.

Additionally, it is now said that radioactive waste has been dumped in the far western Chinese province of Xinjiang after being imported from Kazakhstan, home to the nuclear testing grounds of the former Soviet Union. For the moment, however, Sino-Kazakh relations are not a political priority for Beijing whereas Sino-American relations are.

Undoubtedly, the real explanation for this unusual way of rectifying the imbalance of Sino-American trade -- which runs heavily in China's favor -- lies in the basic fact that someone made a quick buck from exporting the affluent while someone made some quick renminbi by importing it. (Some of the trash imports are legitimate, being utilized in China's recycling industry.)

The trade is obviously part of the vast network of corruption which currently engulfs China. The quick renminbi having been made, the rubbish is left to take care of itself. Piles of it were evidently recently found close to Beijing.

CCP hard-liners are, of course, totally opposed to any Chinese media investigation of pervasive Chinese corruption. The American trash, properly utilized and manipulated by the severely- controlled Chinese media, does serve the useful purpose of being an obvious insult to China's national pride.

"As everyone knows," the propagandists will say, "American treats China as nothing more than a dumping ground for its refuse."

The insult enables China to go on a domestic offensive, and arouse more anti-American sentiment. The trashing of Sino- American relations comes at a time when American pressure on several other fronts would otherwise place China, and the hard-liners, on the defensive.

Even when China is on the defensive, there is advantage for the hard-liners. The Clinton administration has chosen to go after China on only one issue -- the protection of intellectual property rights. Sanctions have been threatened. Undoubtedly the Americans have a strong case.

China is violating American copyright on a massive scale as it manufactures, and exports, pirated compact disks, CD-ROMs, videos and computer software. It signed an agreement with the U.S. a year ago, promising to end these practices. It has clearly failed to live up to that accord. In fact, more pirate factories appeared to open as Sino-American relations deteriorated over the Taiwan issue.

Beijing claims that its lack of control in the southern province of Guangdong, situated next to Hong Kong, make suppression of piracy difficult. The Americans say this is nonsense. If the pirates ever started circulating CDs advocating the overthrow of the communist party, the factories would be closed overnight.

Nevertheless, the fact that Beijing has weak control over Guangdong, and other distant provinces, remains a crucial ingredient of both China's economic growth and the CCP's political weakness.

If the U.S. interest is sustained China's economic growth, and a weakened communist structure, then it should turn a blind eye to piracy. It has not done so. It wants the anti-piracy agreement to be fully implemented. This gives the hard-liners the perfect excuse to try and crackdown on Guangdong, and on Hong Kong when China takes over there in 1997.

There is speculative evidence that Beijing negotiators may even have asked the U.S. to help them exercise such control by imposing sanctions, though other sources suggest that such a suggestion would be alien to China's nationalist sentiment.

Beijing has now ordered the police to take action against the pirates. This does not mean proper investigation, trials and convictions under China's almost non-existent rule of law. It probably means a few token persons, said to be pirates, will be publicly executed.

So if the Americans turn around and complain about human rights abuses, the hard-liners will have the perfect answer: "You Americans want it both ways. You want us to crackdown on pirates. When we do, you want us to use kid gloves."

In the same way, American pressure over piracy will give CCP hard-liners the perfect excuse to make even further inroads on Hong Kong's promised autonomy after the change of sovereignty in 1997, and will undermine contradictory U.S. pressure for Hong Kong's autonomy to be sustained.

But the basic way in which the CCP hard-liners can claim to be justified is that they can claim their policies pay.

The Chinese perennially play hardball power politics both with each other, in the pursuit of domestic political primacy, and with foreign countries. This is in contrast to the Americans who tend to confuse morality and politics both at home and abroad. When the Americans do this, the Chinese naturally end up convinced of their need to display toughness -- and of likely American weakness in response.

Now the Americans have further buttressed that conviction. What Clinton should have done was to lay down his positions on China's nuclear proliferation sales to Pakistan and on copyright piracy, announce sanctions, and then wait for a Chinese response.

But Clinton did not want to appear too tough on China. So he let China off the hook over the magnetic ring sales to Pakistan.

Further, no sooner were the copyright sanctions announced than Clinton himself, Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Defense Secretary William Perry all made major speeches stressing the importance of China ties.

"I want better relations with China," Clinton stressed as he announced his intention to sustain China's most-favored nation trading privileges, even though he had earlier imposed sanctions for piracy.

This all translates, within the CCP realm of realpolitik, into lack of American resolve. Within that realm, the CCP hard-liners can assert in party conclaves that toughness still pays.

It may not do so. The hard-liner perceptions of the U.S. may turn out to be wrong. But, at the very least, the current U.S. approach to China does not give CCP reformers, if there are any, much room for maneuver.

Reformers cannot argue that the hard-liners have failed to win any American concessions.

Even the recently revealed massive scandal of 2,000 Chinese AK-47s smuggled into the U.S., while very damaging to China's image within the U.S., may help the hard-line cause within the CCP.

Again, pervasive corruption is the probable explanation for the arms smuggling into San Francisco, allegedly by two Chinese state corporations heavily involved in the arms trade.

It is an old Chinese maxim to minimize China's weakness in power politics by getting "barbarian to fight barbarian" and, by extension, for barbarians to fight among themselves. Since those smuggled AK-47s could easily have led to many more deaths, or massacres on the streets of American cities, any corrupt official, asked to account within the CCP for the smuggling, has a ready hard-line defense.

Meanwhile, no speeches are being made by China's leaders detailing the need for better relations with the U.S.