Tiananmen Square massacre revisited

What little might have been achieved at the Jiang Zemin-Bill Clinton summit has yet to be revealed to the public. Our Asia correspondent Harvey Stockwin argues that, by themselves reviving the memory of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, the Chinese have caused unnecessary damage to Sino-American relations.

HONG KONG (JP): China and the United States clearly illustrated one vital aspect of what is wrong with Sino-American relations immediately before Chinese President Jiang Zemin and U.S. President Bill Clinton held their brief two-hour summit in New York.

Late Monday, the summit was switched from the New York Public Library to the Lincoln Center, normally the home of ballets and operas. Symbolically, in view of the numerous contortions to which Sino-American relations is currently being subjected, the two leaders met in the ballet rehearsal room wherein dancers vigorously exercise prior to the real performance.

The switch was made because Chinese officials objected to a presentation in the library, which is currently screening video footage of the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and the massacre which brought the demonstrations to an abrupt end.

The video presentation was not put on because of the summit: It has been running since May as part of a larger presentation entitled "What Price Freedom". One segment of the exhibition criticized U.S. treatment of native Americans.

Given known Chinese sensitivities on this score, it is amazing that the Clinton Administration did not discover in advance that the Tiananmen video was currently being shown and choose an alternative summit venue from the outset. But, of course, for Americans, such an exhibition of historical facts is commonplace and unexceptional.

The Clinton Administration went to a good deal of trouble to find the right venue for the summit meeting on Monday between Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin in upstate New York at the Hyde Park Memorial Library of former President Franklin Roosevelt, who presided over the Soviet-American alliance during World War II.

The two chairs once used by Roosevelt and British wartime leader Winston Churchill were even brought out, placed where FDR and Churchill had once sat -- and Yeltsin loved all the fuss and attention to detail in his honor.

Jiang Zemin will be noting that the same care over details was lacking in his case.

By the same token, Chinese communist officials have once again shot themselves in the foot by making such a high-profile objection.

First, they have revived memories of the Beijing Massacre, which sent Sino-American relations into a nose-dive from which they have yet to emerge.

Second, by objecting to the video, Chinese officials have guaranteed that Beijing Massacre footage will once again be shown on television screens around the world as part of the summit coverage. They might have chosen to ignore it.

Third, the officials have added to China's currently adverse image in the United States by being seen to object to a library's contents, thereby reminding Americans that Beijing is willing to pay a very high price to limit freedoms within China.

Fourth -- as with Taiwan so with the library -- instead of displaying the self-confidence that proceeds from real strength, the Chinese once more demonstrated the hypersensitivity and paranoia which stems from an awareness of weakness. In Beijing, the problem is seen to be one of China being shown proper respect. In the U.S. the problem becomes one of China not behaving in such a way that it is automatically respected.

Several commentators have pointed out that China's leaders seem to have no idea just how unpopular China has become in the U.S. as a result of the Beijing Massacre together with the almost-continuous crackdown on dissent within China since then.

The small pre-summit incident also serves as a reminder that, six years after the Beijing Massacre, those in power in Beijing have made absolutely no move to diminish lingering resentment over the massacre within China itself.

Many China-watchers earlier predicted that, before too long, there would be a change to the official line, which asserts that the Tiananmen demonstrations were a "counter-revolutionary rebellion". On the contrary, so far there have been no signs of any such "reversal of verdicts" campaign within the Chinese Communist Party. In his recently-published memoirs, former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker recalls that he was horrified when Chinese Premier Li Peng frankly told him that the Beijing Massacre was "a good thing".

Overall, this latest episode pointedly indicates that one of the tendencies dragging down Sino-American relations is the current inability of the two nations to understand, and tolerate, the internal politics and attitudes of each other.

Given the ongoing exhibition at the library, the Clinton Administration should not have chosen it as the site for the summit. But, once that choice had been made, Jiang Zemin's advisors should have realized that resurrecting memories of the Beijing Massacre would not do any good for Jiang's image as China's future leader.