'Helmsman' status eludes Jiang

By Edward Neilan

Clinton visit is positive for both leaders but substantive changes needed before Deng's policies are eclipsed.

STANFORD, California (JP): Both U.S. President Bill Clinton and China President Jiang Zemin performed well on the recent Clinton visit, with each side attaining respective political and atmospheric goals to near-perfection.

It would be easy to minimize the substantive effects of history's "greatest diplomatic photo opportunity. "

But any time the leader of the world's strongest democracy can spend nine days walking around and talking in the midst of the world's strongest communist nation, that must count for something in itself.

Clinton's performance has been analyzed to death by pundits on both sides of the Pacific.

It is worth considering the fortunes of President Jiang at this juncture; by all accounts he has avoided any gaffes and won applause for his visit to the United States last year and for his hosting of Clinton last month.

As he prepares for a visit to Tokyo in September, Jiang stands on the verge of a hat trick of summit successes. A strongly- positive visit to Japan would give him three straight gold star ratings for diplomatic interchanges.

For all of this accomplishment -- don't forget the smooth Hong Kong handover and China stability during the Asia financial crisis -- at a difficult juncture in Asia history, Jiang has not been sufficiently innovative to allow his designation as a "Great Helmsman" in modern Chinese politics.

Membership in that select coterie -- in the view of most China analysts -- is restricted so far to late Chairman Mao Zedong for bringing about the communist revolution that unified China, to former "paramount leader" Deng Xiaoping for opening the door to economic reform and managing its ramifications, and to the late former president Chiang Ching-kuo for setting the foundation for the first Chinese democracy and a free economic model in Taiwan.

Jiang was Deng's choice to carry out his policies. Two previous choices as heirs--Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang--were swept along in the democratization tide and had to be sacrificed.

So far Jiang has been the model follower, the consummate communist apparatchik.

Deng, from the grave, gets extra points for his wisdom in choosing Jiang as his successor.

I recall my assignment in China in late May 1989 as three- pronged: 1. Cover the Asian Development Bank meeting; 2. Cover the visit to China of the Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev; and 3. Cover the mounting pro-democracy demonstrations around Tiananmen Square.

As it turned out, the listing was in reverse priority.

The Chinese saw in Gorbachev's policies a real threat to their view of the world. And they were right, from their viewpoint.

Gorbachev put political reform ahead of economic reform and lost the Soviet Union.

Deng was adamant that China would stay the economic reform course. There must be no threat to the control of the Chinese Communist Party. The Tiananmen Square massacre a few days later punctuated the argument.

Gorbachev had ended his visit on the eve of the Tiananmen eruption with a speech that avoided any reference to the turmoil of Chinese politics.

I accompanied the Gorbachev party from Beijing to Shanghai for a day -- demonstrations there were peaceful and orderly as restricted by Mayor Zhu Rongji, now the premier and economic czar -- and the Soviet leader said nothing meaningful, only a few words of tribute to a statue of Russian poet Pushkin.

Jiang will be no Chinese Gorbachev although Clinton seemed to imply that Jiang was the man to lead China to democratic nirvana. Jiang will have to earn his spurs as a Great Helmsman some other way, not through the reform of Deng's policies.

An opportunity for change may not present itself to Jiang and so his main mission may continue to be "staying the course." He has the strength of Premier Zhu and the youth of Vice-Premier Hu Jintao backing him up.

But Great Helmsmen are not made because they are good at arranging diplomatic itineraries. Jiang's test will come when he is faced with some of the problems accompanying growth in the world's most populous nation.

A whole range of trade problems await compounded by the belief that China is taking away items at the low end of the market from just about every Asian nation. Then there is the World Trade Organization (WTO) membership issue.

Jiang should find the handover of Macao to Chinese rule in 1999 to be duck soup, the Asian version of a slam dunk.

But the expectations from China's military are that after Macao, Jiang will show some results on Taiwan. President Lee Teng-hui says Beijing and Washington have no right to talk about settling Taiwan's future. He's correct about that. Come to think of it, contrary to popular impression, Taiwan's current position was probably enhanced in the eyes of the world, rather than diminished, by the Clinton-Jiang conversations.

The writer is a Tokyo-based analyst of Northeast Asian affairs and a Media Fellow at Hoover Institution, Stanford University.