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CONFIDENTIAL - NOT FOR PUBLICATION

My 17th arrival in Beijing still recalled the twist in
my stomach of the day in July 1971 when I landed in a
Pakistani plane at a military airfield on the outskirts of
the Chinese capital. Rarely in real life - and even less
often in diplomacy - is one privileged to engage in an act
both important and unprecedented. That initial visit marked
more than the first negotiation in a generation between the
United States and the world's most populous nation with the
longest tradition of uninterrupted self-government. It also
signified an attempt by the Nixon Administration to recast
the traditional American approach to foreign policy as a

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morality play. Conscious of America's overinvolvement in
Vietnam it sought to develop criteria based on a concept of
the American national interest and design a course of action
based on a careful assessment of risks and benefits. The
basic premise of the new China policy was that peace could
be built only with the participation of a country containing
one fifth of the total world population and that had played
the key role in Asia for several millenia.

On that long ago day in 1971, China was in the grips of
the Cultural Revolution which we despised and which was
incomparably more repressive than anything that has occurred
in recent months. We remembered as well the anguish and the
casualties inflicted on Americans by Chinese forces in the
Korean war. But in opening to China, we sought to help
America and the cause of peace, not reward an erstwhile
military enemy and continuing logical opponent.

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We encountered a country with many features highly unattractive to Americans but whose leaders however assessed the world situation from a perspective paralleling our own. And so America and China embarked on a long march of seeking to reconcile purposes and submerge differences in pursuit of a common objective. That goal was stated to be preventing the hegemony of any country or group of countries, which is a technical way of saying that both countries felt equally threatened by any attempt to dominate the world. They would cooperate to prevent that threat, however much they might differ on ideology or domestic practices.

For almost twenty years, five Presidents of both major American parties pursued that objective without partisan controversy. It seemed only natural that President Bush would inaugurate his term in office by visiting the capital in which he had served with distinction as the chief of America's diplomatic mission. Only in recent months and

under the impact of Tienanman Square have Sino-US relations
become controversial. President Bush felt obliged to re-
strict high level contacts and to forbid the sale of mili-
tary equipment; while I was in China the Congress was
extending these sanctions and making them permanent.

Like most Americans I was shocked by the brutality with
which the domestic upheaval was handled and even more by the
trial, purges and propaganda which followed. I was saddened
by the personal fate of some of the losers in the Communist
leadership struggle, many of whom I had known and respected.
But unlike most Americans, I have been involved in the
conduct of foreign policy when every opponent of the United
States could count on Chinese support, when all the nations
at the periphery of Asia feared a China isolated from the
rest of the world and when the Soviet Union could concen-
trate all its resources and pressures against us unre-
strained by concerns over its other flanks.

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As I landed in China, a number of questions were on my
mind. Had Tienanman Square ended the policy begun in 1971?
Or was it Gorbachev who had killed triangular diplomacy in
which China was seen as an indispensable component? Would
China's leadership be so preoccupied with domestic problems
as to no longer be capable of playing a significant interna-
tional role? Would China's domestic crisis still moderniza-
tion, dooming China to become an economic and strategic
backwater?

I was aware that in the United States an unusual
coalition was forming against the China policy of the past
two decades: remnants of the old China lobby which had never
been at ease with the new relationship with Beijing; disap-
pointed former admirers of Communist Chinese reforms who had
hoped for a straight-line evolution towards democracy; and
activitists giving human rights principal - occasionally
exclusive - priority among American interests.

Some of the most sophisticated observers of China had warned me that Deng and his colleagues had irrevocably ruined their credibility. According to that school of thought, they would be replaced within a few years by new leaders more acceptable to the majority of Chinese as well as to America. America, I was told, should wait for that event, isolate the existing regime and take care not to disillusion all the forces waiting for change.

These views, though held by some dear friends of mine, make me uneasy. Waiting for a leadership change in a country as complex as China can easily create a vicious circle of abdication, recrimination and self-fulfilling prophecy. The passing from the scene of current leaders could take years; the transitional process many additional years while American foreign policy exhausts itself in the debilitating process of seeking to shape the internal developments of a country of the size, mass and complexity of China. It is

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true that Mao proved unable to sustain his chosen successor.
But he died within months of making his choice. Deng was in
the wings. Even then it took three years for Deng to achieve
unchallenged power. Could Deng have done so had we been a
party to his struggle? And who are these leaders for whom we
are told to wait? How should we promote them? Would not the
incumbent leaders fighting for their political lives seek to
turn China's disasterous experience with foreign interven-
tion against us by stimulating xenophobia so that in the end
we will be left neither with our domestic preference nor
with a viable foreign policy?

Then,too, I consider it unjust to cast Deng in the role
of Mao who had been Deng's jailer and caused Deng's son to
become a paraplegic. I cannot forget the Deng who emerged
from exile in 1974 and fought courageously for the American
connection and domestic reform until he was purged again in
1976. I had heard from him of his plans to decentralize

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Chinese decisionmaking, to improve the lot of the communes,
to introduce market principles and to open China to the
outside world. At a "private" dinner in 1979 in the Great
Hall of the People after Deng had returned from exile, he
repeated his aspirations and wound up with a poignant
phrase: "I hope we do not make any mistakes because China
has suffered too much to be able to afford another mistake."
If Deng had made such a mistake it was his tragedy, not his
intention.

In the intervening decade I had watched Deng bring
about astonishing material progress. And that very success
set in motion forces for which he failed to provide a
political framework.

My values are different from Deng's. He was and remains
a dedicated Communist. He has believed in political stabili-
ty as a precondition of economic progress and as a guarantee
of Chinese unity and Chinese independence.

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But I respect the old man who set himself the Herculean task to remold his country: the Communists toward acceptance of decentralization and reform; the traditional Chinese toward modernity, that is, to become like the rest of the world - a prospect China has historically rejected.

I state my prejudices in order to give perspective to my impressions. They are based on extended conversations with four of the members of the Standing Committee (the highest authority), a nearly three-hour meeting with Deng and talks with leading members of the economic and military teams as well as with former foreign ministers and ambassadors to the United States. Perhaps like many travelers I went a long way to rediscover my own prejudices. I can in any case only report as honestly as possible what struck me.

The China I saw on this trip had lost the self-assurance of our previous encounters. In the Mao period Chinese leaders acted with the inward certitude conferred by the

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belief in a superior ideology and a seasoned judgement on
international affairs. The China of the early Deng period
was possessed of an almost naive faith that the overwhelming
suffering of the Cultural Revolution would provide its own
impetus towards economic and political progress. But in the
past decade China experienced not only the exhilaration but
also the penalty of success. The movement from central
planning to decentralized decisionmaking in a Communist
society turns out to be in constant jeopardy from two
directions: the resistance of an entrenched bureaucracy with
a vested interest in the status quo, and from impatient
reformers for whom the process takes too long. Sooner or
later, economic decentralization leads to demands for corre-
sponding political pluralism. But veteran Communists find it
nearly impossible to abandon the principle of the leading
role of the Communist party which has been sustained through
a lifetime of struggle. In that sense the tragedy of the

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Chinese upheaval reflects the intractable dilemma of Communism itself.

The Chinese leaders had opted for their interpretation of political stability. They had done so hesitantly: I heard no great justification of the events of June 4th; they were treated almost like an unfortunate accident. My impression is that the Chinese leaders had not wanted the final bloodbath. They were panicked into it when demonstrators captured several trucks with weapons.

Now the Chinese leaders, stunned by the reactions of the outside world, seem concerned with reestablishing public support. Even allowing for China's proverbial skill in putting the foreigner on the defensive, I believe that my interlocutors had a real problem understanding America's purposes. Leaders I have known for a decade and a half asked me to explain American reactions to an event that had injured no American interests and for which China claimed no

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universal validity. Explanations of America's historic
commitment to human rights were dismissed either as a form
of Western "bullying" or as a sign of unwarranted American
righteousness.

There was some difference in the reactions of the
various leaders. What I would call the moderate faction
spoke of the estrangement with sorrow and was prepared to
discuss how it might be repaired - though not in American
terms applied to China's internal conditions. The more
hardline element seemed to be prepared for a showdown,
perhaps even spoiling for it. Their spokesmen appeared to
prefer a policy of confrontation designed to rally the
Chinese people to a program of uniting against foreign
pressures.

The difference between moderates and hardliners on this
issue seems to revolve around the question of whether the
challenge of the outside world has gone beyond the point of

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toleration or is still in the process of reaching it. I am
convinced that confrontation is inevitable if the Chinese
leadership decides that the breach with America can be
healed only by measures it believes will undermine its
stability. Then it will close ranks. As Li Ruihuan, the
youngest member of the Standing Committee, said in the
course of an otherwise extremely moderate presentation: "We
have had many experiences with America, some good, some not
so good. We have cooperated and we have opposed each other.

We prefer cooperation. But our experience with foreign
bullying since 1840 does not encourage us to take foreign
advice on internal matters. We were friends of the Soviet
Union until they started bullying us. Then we broke with
them and stood alone against both superpowers for 12 years.

And our relations with the Soviet Union have never recov-
ered. Americans should consider our history."

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Li Ruihuan's general presentation to me was balanced and non-confrontational. Though in charge of party ideology, he drew a distinction between philosophical positions which would remain a monopoly of the party and practical implementation which would be delegated to the provinces and to enterprises - which was more or less the theme with which Deng began in 1979. In this respect, Li Ruihuan summed up a common theme. All leaders insisted that the process of economic reform and opening to the outside world would continue as before. "I am still the same man I was in 1974 and in 1979," Deng said. And he added that his basic policies of economic reform had stood the test of time.

The Chinese leaders seem to have decided - perhaps at the plenum of the Central Committee that was meeting while I was in Beijing - that the campaign against bourgeois liberalization had been too sweeping. The new General Secretary, Jiang Zemin, pointed out that the slogan contradicted the

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proclaimed desire for opening to the outside world. It made
little sense, he argued, to invite the cooperation of
capitalists into joint ventures while attacking the system
it represented. He and other leaders therefore criticized
specific manifestations of the Western way of life, such as
pornography, drugs, gambling and materialism. This did not
quite explain the stridency of the attacks on bourgeois
liberalism since I am not aware of many capitalists extol-
ling these issues. For the rest, all leaders insisted that
they would strive for a balance between enterprise and
planning appropriate to doubling the Gross National Product
in the next decade.

There was to be sure a significant difference in
emhpasis amidst the seeming consensus on principle. The
moderate group around Deng seemed to stress decentralization
and enterprise; the more conservative faction generally
associated with Li Peng emphasized planning and central

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control. The moderates deemed opening to the outside world desirable while the conservatives generally treated it as a necessary evil. The moderates sought - at least in conversations with me - to mute the attack on Western institutions; the conservatives appeared to relish it.

The prospect of reform, therefore, will be shaped by the leadership constellation which exists at any given moment. Before going to China, I had read accounts of the struggle between Deng and the de facto head of the Chinese armed forces, the President of China, Yang. That was not my impression of their relationship. My view of the outcome of the plenum of the Central Committee was that Deng had succeeded in two major efforts: (1) he had established the concept of retirement while leaders were still healthy and vigorous and thus created the basis for removing some of the old time leaders brought back to defeat the upheavals of last June. Significantly, President Yang spoke of his desire

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to retire at the same age as Deng some three years hence;
(2) by making the new General Secretary, Jiang Zemin, the
Chairman of the all-important military commission - a post
denied to both his purged predecessors, Hu Yaobang and Zhao
Ziyang. Deng has put his protege, at least on paper, at the
head of the only institution with a national organization in
every province of China other than the Communist party, over
which Jiang also presides. My impression is, therefore, of a
tacit alliance between Deng, Yang, the General Secretary
Jiang Zemin and Li Ruihan which between them ought to be
able to carry through the reformist course charted by Deng.
Whether this will happen depends on whether Deng lives long
enough to consolidate this leadership group and whether
China can avoid external shocks. In this sense, the
hardliners in America who are seeking to isolate China, far
from encouraging reform, may be doing the work of the

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hardliners in Beijing, who consider isolation not a penalty
but a solution.

It is of course possible that even the more moderate
Chinese leaders will not be able to bring off a continuation
of reform or that in the end they will give economic reform
a meaning different from what was said during my visit to
Beijing. It could also happen that the current retrenchment
undertaken to reduce inflation will be used by lower level
cadre to choke off private enterprise as some reports have
suggested. Were this to happen, China would fall back into
backwardness and isolation to the benefit neither of its
extraordinary people nor of mankind at large. America cannot
prevent China from isolating itself; it should not however
promote China's isolation by its own policies.

But does it matter? In the age of Gorbachevism, is
China still a relevant factor in international affairs? Does
the present leadership have meaningful views on matters of

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geopolitical significance? I was struck by the fact that a
year of domestic turmoil has not dulled the sensitive
Chinese perception of international realities. To be sure, it
is an approach not very congenial to some American precon-
ceptions. No Chinese leader I have met at any time has
believed that individuals have the power to change the
requirements of the national interest, or that personal
relations can act as a solvent to international tensions -
two perceptions dear to much American thought about foreign
policy. The Chinese leaders - and on this subject there is
no moderate or conservative faction - see Gorbachev not as a
new dispensation but as an erratic representative of histor-
ic Russian hegemonial aspirations, either as a bungler or a
dangerous gambler. Chinese leaders continue to view the
Soviet Union as the descendant of the Russian empire which
in the last century acquired three million square kilometers
of Chinese territory. (This figure is not mine, but was

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mentioned by Chinese leaders). They seem convinced that
Gorbachev is more likely to produce turmoil than hope and
that in the end Russia may strike out in despair or in its
collapse generate an international anarchy that could in the
end engulf China as well.

Chinese leaders are disquieted by events in Eastern
Europe partly because the disintegration of Communist
parties worries them, but even more because they fear a
general international crisis. They also are concerned that
events in Eastern Europe might tempt the Soviet Union and
the United States into tranquillizing Europe by means of a
condominium in Europe which frees Soviet energies in Asia.

As the United States retreats militarily and becomes
less relevant economically China fears increasingly the
emergence of a predatory Japan. It therefore continues to
value a strategic understanding with the United States to
avoid becoming the victim of trends it interprets far more

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sceptically than the West. China is prepared to show restraint in Indochina and Korea and to take into serious consideration American views on international affairs generally, provided it does not interpret American policy as designed to overthrow the existing political system in China.

The question therefore becomes not whether China is willing to cooperate with the United States but whether the United States considers China sufficiently important to deal with it in our own interest even while we severely disappoint Chinese domestic conduct. It is difficult to believe that the US would cut itself off voluntarily from one fifth of the human race at the precise moment that Eastern Europe teeters between chaos and repression and the Soviet Union between glasnost and prestroika while Japan is on the way to being a superpower and India waxes more every year. I know no student of Japan who is not convinced that

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an America irrelevant in China would compound Japan's declining respect for the United States caused by lagging economic performance and a declining military role. I cannot conceive how we would propose handling Asian security problems, especially Cambodia or Korea, if China reverts to its policy of the Sixties. And problems of nuclear proliferation, transfer of high technology weapons transfer and dealing with the environment would be much more difficult to handle in the face of a hostile China.

Some argue that China would never let matters reach that point. The present leadership surely would be loath to embark on a course so dangerous to both countries. But in my view, it will in the end conclude that one concession it cannot make is an admission of vulnerability to foreign pressures with respect to its domestic institutions. In the view of the Chinese leadership, this would bring down on

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China's head the historic nightmare of a recurrence of a
century of foreign intervention.

China prefers a close relationship with the United
States to all others because as the geographically most
distant major country we are also the least intrusive
friend. By the same token, we are also the least threatening
enemy. If confrontation appears inevitable, Beijing may
decide it can pursue it harshly with relative impunity.
China will pay a considerable price for America's goodwill
in the area of foreign policy. But if it concludes that
America no longer recognizes a mutuality of interests, it
loses little by a policy of confrontation.

The key difference between my view and that of the
avocates of sanctions is over the assessment of Chinese
options. I do not question their objective of defending
human rights. I doubt that their method is appropriate to

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their objective and I fear that they will undermine the
cause of peace without advancing the prospects of democracy.

Economic sanctions rarely work. In this case, their effectiveness will be further eroded by the certain refusal of other industrial democracies to sustain them and by the relatively small amount of American credits at issue. It is highly probable that within a period of a few months, most European countries as well as Japan will lift restrictions much less significant from the start at the precise moment that the US Congress is extending ours. And the economic cooperation of some of America's allies with China is already much greater than ours. A good example is a subway being built in Shanghai supported by soft loans of $500 million from Germany and $25 million from the United States. No one can believe that the cut-off of the American portion will significantly affect the enterprise. Indeed, during my