Was This Trip Necessary?

President Bush has defended his dispatch of high-level emissaries to China this past weekend as a necessary act of statecraft, aimed at lessening Beijing’s isolation in a time of momentous international change and so, presumably, encouraging a more stable world. But the furtiveness with which this mission was mounted, along with its flat-out contradiction of the Administration’s 6-month- old ban on such contacts, and the appearance it has left of Washington approaching Beijing as a supplicant, all foster an impression of a foreign policy driven more by whim and uncertainty than by clear vision. Behind this supposed act of political pragmatism lies an embarrassing moral flabbiness.

In the wake of the 25-hour trip by National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, the White House has rushed to say that U.S.-China relations still are not normal. The economic, military and political sanctions imposed after the massacre of protesters in Tien An Men Square last June 4 remain--well, more or less--in place. Then what was the point? Bush, on reflection, argues that “I do not want to isolate the Chinese people,” while other high officials contend that the American approach bolstered China’s political moderates. But the isolation of the Chinese people is solely the doing of their own government, not something that was begun or can be ended in Washington. As for helping the so-called moderates in the Chinese regime, anyone who lacked sufficient credentials as a hard-liner seems to have been driven from office and disgraced in the crackdown that followed the June repression.

At this point there isn’t a shred of evidence that China’s government plans to end its human rights abuses. The one change that can be detected after the American initiative is that overnight the country’s propaganda machine has reduced its attacks on U.S. policy. What the Chinese people will undoubtedly infer from this is that Washington and Beijing have indeed found the common ground that Bush says he is looking for. Could anything be more profoundly demoralizing to those in China who continue to hunger for a freer and more humane society?