Clinton leads huge delegation to communist China

Our Asia correspondent Harvey Stockwin begins a series of articles on President Bill Clinton's current visit to China with a commentary on the unusual size of the U.S. delegation.

HONG KONG (JP): At first glance, it appears that the Clinton administration is moving en bloc to the Middle Kingdom for the next 10 days, June 24 to July 3.

At second glance, it becomes clear that President Bill Clinton is taking a larger official delegation to China than any previous U.S. president --- and a larger official delegation than has ever gone even on state visits to longstanding U.S. allies such as Japan, Germany or Great Britain.

In addition to the president and the First Lady, all the important cabinet members are going, according to a list issued yesterday by the Office of the Press Secretary in the White House.

The only exception is the Secretary of Defense William Cohen. But Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, Agriculture Secretary Daniel Glickman, Commerce Secretary William Daley, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Janet Yellen and U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky will all be concentrating their attention on China in China for the next 10 days.

This is the more remarkable when it is recalled that Asia is still in the midst of a deepening economic and political crisis, which should require officials like Albright and Rubin to concentrate instead on the wider global picture, while Clinton involved himself in the task of positive image-creation within China.

The likely China-bias of the Clinton administration in the next 10 days, and perhaps beyond, is further emphasized by the fact that Assistant Secretaries at State, Treasury, Agriculture, and Trade will not be minding the store back in Washington DC, but will also be traveling through China with their bosses.

The Clinton administration had hoped to entice some leading Republican Congressmen and Senators to join the official party but in the end the three senators and three congressmen with Clinton are all Democrats.

Needless to say, the National Security Council, and the Clinton-created National Economic Council, are well represented as is the Office of the Press Secretary.

Altogether there are no less than 49 members of the U.S. official delegation on the state visit.

This large number would be explicable were the United States engaged in a major negotiation during the Clinton visit. But according to an itinerary seen by The Jakarta Post, the only day set aside for formal exchanges is Saturday June 27 in Beijing.

Apart from that, the trip is mainly sight-seeing, a questionable pastime for Presidents let alone their underlings.

One major oddity of the official delegation list is that a highly important member of the U.S. government is placed fifth from last on the list, below a Deputy Press Secretary.

The official concerned is the Commander-in-Chief of U.S. armed forces in the Pacific (CINCPAC), four-star Admiral Joseph Prueher. Official sources are at a loss to explain why the Admiral should be ranked so low on the list. Just possibly, Prueher's position reflects the low regard in which many members of the Clinton administration hold the U.S. military.

It can be reasonably assumed that Chinese officialdom, with its innate respect for the power a person wields, is most unlikely to rank Admiral Prueher 45th in the pecking order when it comes to banquet placements.

But the huge delegation, with its many demands, will almost certainly strain the Chinese bureaucratic capacity to handle it. Just to complicate matters the U.S. Chief of Protocol Mary Mel French is 29th on the delegation list -- way above the Admiral.

The size of the official delegation reinforces the main political problem posed by the Clinton odyssey to China: Asian worries concerning the direction in which U.S. Asian policy is headed.

The U.S. has told its friends and allies that "strategic partnership" with China does not mean alliance, and that no new departures are planned. The trouble with such a huge official delegation is that it further enhances the impression that the Americans, always prone to romanticize China, are about to make a huge lurch towards the Middle Kingdom.

However the possibility exists that there is a simple explanation for the core of the U.S. government swanning across the Pacific to Tiananmen Square.

When President Bush went to China in February 1989, Air Force One still had the limited capacity of being merely a Boeing 707.

Under Clinton, Air Force One has become a Boeing 747 jumbo jet, with so many more places to fill.