July 27, 1999

MEMORANDUM TO: OPINION LEADERS

FROM: GARY SCHMITT

SUBJECT: China

How embarrassing. Taiwan's president states the obvious – a free and democratic people should be accorded the dignity of being treated as a state – and the U.S. secretary of state demands "an explanation" from him designed to placate a Beijing regime that openly reserves the right to put an end to Taiwan's democracy by military force. But, for all the secretary's bowing and scraping, the advice she received from China's foreign minister was the diplomatic equivalent of "shut up and sit down": "The United States should say little and act with great caution."

Of course, why shouldn't the Chinese leadership treat the United States with contempt? How often can the United States ignore China's weapons proliferation, its undermining of the rule of law in Hong Kong, its violation of the most basic human rights, its unfair trade practices, its espionage, and its attempt to covertly influence the American political process without leading China's leaders to believe that the American government will tolerate virtually anything to avoid a confrontation. Throw in annual, now nearly automatic, votes by Congress to approve MFN-status for China and the Clinton's Administration's apparently endless apologizing for our bombing of China's Belgrade embassy (and its silence about the trashing of our own in Beijing), and it would be absurd for the China's leaders to take any other view.

U.S.-China policy needs to be radically rethought, starting with our "One China" policy. If this policy ever made sense, it did so when the United States was anxious to bring China into a de facto alliance aimed at containing the Soviet Union. However, in the absence of a Soviet threat, the policy makes sense only if China is still in fact a "strategic partner." But this is demonstrably not the case. To the contrary, as China's refusal to admit that the U.S. bombing of its embassy was an accident reveals, this is a government that cannot conceive of a non-adversarial relationship. As the following Weekly Standard editorial written by Project directors William Kristol and Robert Kagan concludes, it is time for conservatives to recognize that fact and begin redefining the U.S-China relationship along more realistic and strategically sound lines.