China Comes the Evolution

By Bruce W. Nelan

A specter is haunting China -- the specter of capitalism. But the octogenarian leaders in Beijing don't come right out and say that. They call their bugaboo "peaceful evolution," an innocuous-sounding code phrase for what they think is an onslaught led by the U.S. to overturn their socialist system.

The Chinese hard-liners, like those in Stalinist North Korea and anachronistic Vietnam, are determined not to share the fate of their communist counterparts in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. China's internal watchdogs are visibly busier now than they were before the August coup attempt in Moscow. Police squads patrol city streets at night and keep close watch on the families and friends of jailed dissidents. Party offices are conducting more ideology classes than usual.

Meanwhile, George Bush almost pleads guilty to the Chinese charge of subversive activities. "China is important," he said in a speech to the Asia . Society in New York City last week. "It is our policy to remain engaged. We believe this is the way to effect positive change in the world's most populous nation." Bush does in fact hope for peaceful evolution in China, but American diplomatic, cultural and commercial efforts in that direction are well publicized and hardly conspiratorial -- and so far, not noticeably effective.

With such sharply conflicting political concerns, the U.S. and China might have taken the view that this is not a good time to try to sort out the many issues that divide them. An internal Chinese Communist Party document warned in September: "The West will now step up its pressure on China, and a small number of bourgeois liberal elements in China could try to take advantage of the situation."

Beijing is skittish enough these days to consider any concession to the West as a step onto a slippery slope. For his part, Bush is fighting efforts in Congress to eliminate China's most favored nation trading status because of its human rights abuses. To fend it off, he needs evidence that the Chinese are ready to improve their behavior at home and abroad.

Both countries put their stakes on Secretary of State James Baker's visit to Beijing last week. He is the highest ranking American official to arrive since the government forces massacred pro-democracy demonstrators at Tiananmen Square in June 1989. He tried to deflect the inevitable criticism with a message similar to Bush's: "You cannot work out or solve problems if you are not willing to sit down and talk to people."

The points of conflict are, as he put it, "real," and human rights are one of the most inflamed. Some 800 participants in the democracy movement remain in prison, many of them in deplorable conditions. The Chinese gulag is still crowded, and its inmates turned out some of the goods that helped build China's $10.4 billion trade surplus with the U.S. last year. Both the prison labor and the trade surplus are sore points in Washington.

So is Beijing's seeming willingness to sell weaponry and nuclear equipment to almost any state with the cash to pay for it. China has delivered missiles to Pakistan, contracted to sell missiles to Syria and is cooperating on nuclear technology with Iran and Algeria. Though China says it is supplying items for peaceful nuclear programs, the recipients can use them for any purpose they choose, and their likely intention is to build atom bombs. The U.S. demands a halt.

The Chinese, of course, would like to ignore American protests. But that is not so easy now that the Soviet Union is out of the superpower business and the trade and investment China needs so badly are available mostly from capitalist nations. "China knows full well that its future depends on relations with developed countries," says Gaston Sigur, a former Assistant Secretary of State for Asia.

Accordingly, Beijing has had to rein in its truculence a bit. China has said it is willing to sign the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, and in September Beijing agreed to talk about ways to guarantee Washington that prison-made goods would not be sold to the U.S. China has indicated it will consider adhering to the guidelines of the 18-nation Missile Technology Control Regime. It also helped establish the U.N.-administered peace settlement that returned Prince Norodom Sihanouk to Cambodia last week.

By the time Baker arrived in Beijing on Friday, his meetings in other Asian capitals had turned North Korea's nuclear weapons program into the most prominent topic on his agenda. Experts say Pyongyang is probably producing plutonium and might have enough for a bomb within two to five years. American officials said they hoped to enlist China, Japan and the Soviet Union in a joint effort to push North Korea out of the nuclear field.

This, it happens, is a matter on which the U.S. and China might possibly find common ground, even though the Chinese feel protective about the remaining Marxist states in Asia. "There should be no nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula," said Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qichen. Neither did he want to encourage U.S. influence, so Qian added that "consultation" and "dialogue" were the way to proceed because "we do not wish to see any international pressure."

Baker responded that an international call for North Korea to halt its weapons program "does not necessarily involve pressure." He hoped to handle the problem "politically and diplomatically," he said. Beijing seemed to be preparing to tell Baker that China, not the U.S., should take the lead on this. The Chinese want to keep Pyongyang from getting the bomb, but they also want Korea to remain divided so they will not have to compete with a vibrant new economy on their border. Most of all, they want to prevent the U.S. from dominating Asian regional affairs.

Baker held marathon talks with Qian, President Yang Shangkun, Premier Li and party chief Jiang Zemin, ticking off U.S. concerns about political repression, arms sales, the trade imbalance, North Korea. A senior State Department official, recalling Baker's eight months of shuttle diplomacy that led to the Middle East peace talks in Madrid, called the discussions in Beijing "every bit as tough and difficult, if not tougher." At one point President Yang told the secretary that some problems "cannot be solved for the time being, and the two sides may well leave them aside." On the eve of his departure Sunday, the Chinese had given Baker nothing. American officials were still hoping for an 11th-hour concession. But even if they got one, Chinese pledges of better behavior have not proved durable in the past.

"On one hand," says Hunter College professor Donald Zagoria, "they're going to try to meet some American concerns. On the other, they're going to show they have alternatives." Among those are China's increasing cooperation with countries like Vietnam and Iran, nations that share a deep resentment of U.S. influence.

Long-term improvement in Sino-U.S. relations will have to wait until a new generation takes over in Beijing. The old men in charge there now, like those in Vietnam and North Korea, are veterans of the revolutions that put Marxism in power. They intend to hold sway until they die. President Yang, 84, reportedly told his colleagues that the Soviet Union fell apart because it had no "old revolutionaries" left.

The U.S. and other democratic nations must maintain some contact with China if only to provide incentives against its taking even more objectionable steps and to help educate a younger generation of leaders in dealing with the West. But the transition could be lengthy, and the gerontocrats will do their best to fight off the "spiritual pollution" of liberal ideas and the haunting conspiracy of peaceful evolution.

With reporting by Jaime A. FlorCruz/Beijing and J.F.O. McAllister with Baker