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Remarks by Clintons at Shanghai Roundtable
Following is a transcript of remarks by President Clinton and the First Lady in a roundtable discussion today on shaping China for the 21st Century:
Shanghai Library Shanghai, People's Republic of China
THE PRESIDENT: Let me begin by thanking all of you for agreeing to participate in this roundtable discussion. I want to say that the purpose of this discussion is to help me and my wife and the American people, through us, understand the changes that are going on in modern China, the challenges that are out there, and what all of you are doing in your various lives to deal with these changes. For us, this is a very exciting opportunity to come here, to see what is going on, and also to try to come to grips with the areas where China and the United States can cooperate, the areas where we still have differences and how we might not only manage those differences, but even work together there to try to come to some common agreement. Everyone understands that there is a new China emerging in the world that is more prosperous, more open and more dynamic. I have been to a small village near Xian where people now elect their local officials. I have already had the opportunity to meet with some small businesspeople and others who are agents of change in the modern China. But this is really the first opportunity I have had to meet with such a diverse group of Chinese citizens who are active in so many different areas. So I hope that you will help us to understand what is going on and to speak with us frankly and openly, and understand that what we want is to build the right sort of partnership and friendship with the Chinese people over the long run into the 21st century. If I could begin, I think I would like to ask Professor Zhu, how has China changes in the last couple of years and what is the role of the legal profession in this change?
PROFESSOR ZHU: It is my great pleasure to be asked the first question. As a professor in legal institute, from my point of view, when I graduated from Fudan University and it was to find a job in -- (inaudible) -- there are only two only grades in my institute and about 2,000 students. Currently there are 4,000 students; over 400 post-graduates. In terms of quantity, we can see there is major improvement and great change. At the time, there were only Fudan University and -- China Political and Science Institute, which had law majors. However, currently, there are 13 universities in Shanghai that have included a law school. Thousands of people are learning law, so first we can see are quantitative change. After graduation, many of the graduates have entered into the bar. This indicates a greater need for lawyers from society. We've got information that currently civil cases in China have undergone a major increase. This doesn't mean there were no disputes in China in earlier times. It was only because the Chinese people were not willing to resort to law at the time. Currently people have a stronger awareness and a sense of legal protection. When there are lawsuits, the lawyers have business to do and there is a greater need for lawyers. As a result, there are many legal majors being established.
THE PRESIDENT: Mr. Wang has been a consumer advocate, and we have read about you in the American press. I wonder if you could follow up on what Professor Zhu said in terms of the work you do. Do you believe that the quality of products, consumer products is getting better -- first question. And tell us what the relationship is between what you do and the legal profession. Can people have adequate access to legal remedies if they are sold inferior products?
MR. WANG: In 1984, China promulgated the law on the protection of the rights and interests of consumers. In 1985, I found out a very special prescription, Article 49, which prescribes that the businessmen which -- behaviors, should make compensation for the consumers. This is something in dispute with the civil law. However, because the civil law prescribes that equal compensation should be made, that this one should be more compensation than the value. At the time there was a very serious problem with shoddy and fake goods. After my work --greatest good arose because in China in early time stress was laid on the collective interest or the national interest, the interest of state. The interest of consumers or the individuals did not attract much attention. Through my fight against shoddy and fake goods and providing service for most of the people and to protect their interests, I've done something for society, but many people failed to understand me and great disputes arose and there are huge debates. Despite the disputes and the critics, I persisted. Some people said that I'm immoral and I'm really a hooligan, or I'm not kind of lawful citizen -- I'm a very good citizen. However, I think I'm doing something in the best interest of the majority of people. With the sponsorship and the support from some enterprises, recently we found a company. This company on the one hand will provide some consulting service to the consumers on their interest. On the other hand, our company will do some investigation work for those companies whose rights have been violated. Those enterprises whose rights have been violated need investigation. So we have taken up this job. From April this year up to now we have helped our clients, over 50 such investigation cases -- by the end of 1987 we've helped over 10,000 consumers by providing them with a consultancy service. Through our efforts and the help and publicity work done by the Chinese media, currently the awareness of the consumer interest protection law has been enhanced and the Article 49 has taken its root among the hearts of the Chinese people. Shoddy goods and fake goods have decreased in number. In the departments -- people would find it very hard to find those inferior goods in the major department stores. However, in the non-mainstream channels such goods do exist. By the way, I wanted to ask you a question, Mr. President. In America we have such kind of world hunters -- who will take the special responsibility to catch those criminals and there is a large group of people who live on this. I think my work is bearing some similarity to this group of people. If I did such kind of work in the United States of work, would I be criticizing the state as immoral?
THE PRESIDENT: No. Interestingly enough, many of our governments in what you would call the province level, our state governments, and some of our larger city governments actually have their own consumer advocates, people who are employees of the government whose job it is to work to find out things that are being done, in effect, that work a fraud, that are unfair or illegal to consumers when they buy homes, when they buy cars, when they buy other products. So, in our country, people who find those kinds of problems very often are themselves employees of the government and generally are quite highly regarded. Now, of course, if they find a very big company doing something that's going to be very expensive to fix, they're sometimes criticized by the company. But, by and large, consumer advocates enjoy a very favorable position in American society. It has not always been so, but I would say that for the last 20 to 25 years, they do. I would like to ask our novelist, Ms. Wang, to talk a little bit about how the atmosphere for writers, for artists, movie makers, other creative people has changed in China in the last few years. How would you describe those changes?
MS. WANG: I'm a novelist. I'm an individual employed -- self-employed, free-lance, so I can only view this question from a personal and individual perspective. Over the recent years, or over the past two decades, great changes have taken place in China. I believe this has been very evident to the President and Mrs. Clinton since you came to China. I, myself, feel that the greatest change that happened in China is the change in the values of people because of the change in their livelihood. For instance, the younger generation will always have quite different views from our views -- I think this is a very good opportunity. Currently, such great changes have taken place in China and literally in China we face a great change. It doesn't mean whether our books can get published. Each year we publish several hundred long novels in China. Personally I have signed a contract of publishing with three publishing houses, so currently, the problem is not whether your novels can get published, but whether you can come up with good novels. Each day the life is providing richer in the materials and information to the novelist. We must work hard. The only problem is with the time. I think the biggest challenge for us is proposed by the market. After reform and opening up policies introduced in China, various kinds of contract activities have been in full swing. All kinds of audiovisual products and TVs, radios are competing with novels for audience. So I think the biggest challenge for the novelists -- from the market. We must try real hard to simulate what happened around and to come up with high-quality novels. Only this way can we establish ourselves on the market.
Q: I have a question, Mr. President. In a country like the United States, a very strong country, is literature a tiny thing in your country? For instance, in your personal life will literature have any impact on you?
THE PRESIDENT: Oh, yes, very much, and I think not only for enjoyment but also for enlightenment. We have many books of literature, all kinds of prose and poetry published in America every year, and heavily taught in our schools, and at least in our case, widely discussed in our home with our daughter. She is now reading books in the university that, if we haven't read them she wants to know why, and she expects us to try to understand those things. So I would say that for millions and millions of Americans, literature is a very important force in their lives. And every week in our newspapers, there is a publication of the best-selling books and the books that are in hardcover, the books that are in paperback. So it's quite a large part of American life, I think. I would like to ask Madame Xie if you could tell us a little bit from your perspective, about how China has been changing, and, in particular, whether there is any difference in university life, and the emphasis that the young people are placing on different areas of study.
MS. XIE: Yes, that's right, I work in the universities, and over the past 20 years, the university that I work with has benefited tremendously from this policy of reform and opening. Just to tell my personal story from the perspective of Fudan University, we've sent about 1,400 teachers to study abroad as visiting scholars or as post-graduates. And 80 percent of them have been back, playing a very important role in their position in the university. And every year we have a very large exchange program with our foreign visiting scholars. Those people played a pivotal role in providing stimulus to studies of our university. And it was just as your Excellency, Mr. President, said, that reform and opening up also had a major impact on university life. Before reform and opening up, the best students also goes to mathematics and others, but these years the best students always go to law, to study M.B.A. and economics. They are not so very much interested in the traditional subjects such as mathematics. It is maybe one of the contributions of reform and opening up of China.
THE PRESIDENT: If I could just follow up on that and perhaps anyone, professors, who would like to comment on this -- when I was talking with President Jiang he said, I am trained as an engineer and Premier Zhu Rongji is trained as an engineer. They were both mayor of Shanghai. The present mayor of Shanghai, we were walking down and he said, I am an engineer. And he said, we were all trained in an era when we had to build China, we had to build things, we had to know how to do things that people did with their hands. And now that we have a more complex society and people's rights have to be protected, for example, in what they buy and we have to work out the complex relationships between people in a market economy, we need more lawyers. I think China only has like 115,000 lawyers, something like that. And so, I wonder if maybe the changes are not a necessary evolution of the change in society.
Q: Well, there are a lot of students who are very interested in law subjects. Well, in China we do have not sufficient lawyers and in your country you have plenty. And so many American friends told me that we can export some of them to you. (Laughter.)
THE PRESIDENT: I tell President Jiang we have too many lawyers and too few engineers. So maybe instead of changing all the courses in the universities, we should just trade each other -- we'll give you lawyers, you could give us engineers. (Laughter.)
Q: But it's true that there are many students who want to enter the law college or university every year. On average, there will be one student to apply for law subjects that can be actually accepted as a university student. And about only one-fourth or a quarter of those students can be qualified to be a college student. So that means that the law subjects really are a hot topic today in Shanghai.
MRS. CLINTON: We have a president of the university here -- I think Dr. Wu could perhaps give us some information about that.
DR. WU: We also want to pick up the subject of free form and the changes. Professor Xie also has talked about this. Professor Xie is an old professor, renowned professor of Fudan University. I've been with the university, a professor for four years. Mr. President, you talk about the changes of university life -- before I touch on that, may I talk a little bit on humanities studies. My university is focused on engineering. Mr. President, you talked earlier about there are many engineers today who are actually the leaders of China. And this context is closer related to the focus and the target of China for the current being -- that is, economic construction. But today in my university there are some departments that are devoted to more varied subjects -- for example, law and humanities studies, literature, et cetera. And we believe that any for university who should gear themselves for the need of the 21st century it's really important for them to have a variety of those subjects, of those disciplines. Education today should be geared to a more globalized world, because our economy is global, so must be our educational system. So we should take into account this need in our educational system. I pursued studies in Europe -- not in America, in Europe -- after the Cultural Revolution. And the number of those faculty and teachers in my university who have studied abroad was about two-thirds. So in this way the teachers have a strong feeling that there must be a change to the university education. So reform is a must for China. Many of the students in the university can speak excellent English, better than I do. And one of the characteristics of a university is that many of the students study German. When Vice President Gore was in Shanghai he talked with the President of the University and he said about Internet, which is part of Information Highway, and he wanted to know what was the latest development of Internet. And I said our students can get access to Internet. That is the real target and the trend of the world and it's what we are trying for. If you permit me, I would also ask a small question to you, because in China today the economic development calls for a development in science and technology. In China we have a slogan which says that "science and technology for economic development." Today, we need science and technological support for sustainable economic development. And I believe that there is no boundary whatsoever in science and technology. So we focus a lot on exchanges in science and technology field. We encounter some of the problems, for example, for high-tech, the prohibition of export of high-technology. This may impact adversely on China. And I was very heartened by the fact that recently there was a lift of the ban of exporting of the advanced nuclear power generation facilities to China. And I was very glad to hear that. Also, about information technology -- this is what China needs, because this is an economy driven mostly by knowledge of science and technology. So, do you think, Mr. President, there will be a trend of great openness in the future to allow greater degrees of exchanges between not only faculties and students, but in other areas? Thank you.
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, I do, and I believe it is very important. We are trying to do two things in the United States. One is to make sure more of our young people, wherever they live, even if they live in very poor communities, are exposed at an early age to science and technology. We are trying to connect all of our schools to the Internet by the Year 2000, because our goal is to take the very remote schools, the schools in the poorest urban areas, and make sure they can have a connection and access to information that anybody anywhere in the world has. I think that is important. Then we also want to have more cooperation internationally. Perhaps the most successful part of the U.S.-China partnership in the last few years has been our cooperation in science and technology, although because there has been no great conflict, it's very often not in the news. But Chinese and American scientists, for example, discovered that children born with spina bifida, which is a very painful childhood birth problem, largely come from mothers that didn't have enough folic acid. So it changed the whole way the world viewed this terrible problem. Chinese and American scientists have learned more about how to predict earthquakes and other natural disasters. So I think we have to do more of that. And then the third area is the one you mentioned of technology transfer. We are now implementing our peaceful uses of nuclear energy agreement. I personally believe that in the energy area it's the most important thing. I asked President Jiang if we could have a major focus of our science and technology partnership in the future be on the relationship of energy use to the environment, because America is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, warming the climate. China will soon be larger than America. So we have this huge challenge -- how to allow China to continue to grow, how can Shanghai build more beautiful buildings like this and have people have good places to live and all of that, and still not destroy the environment of the world. The scientists know that this can be done. Most political leaders and business leaders don't believe it. Most political and business leaders think this is a problem my grandchildren will deal with -- I have to create wealth now, I have to create opportunity. Scientists know we can grow the economy and improve the environment. So I think this will be the biggest challenge for us. Now, in terms of the technology transfer, one last thing. We are working very hard to deal with the so-called national security implications of technology transfer. Sometimes they are quite real. So we are working through that. But I think in the energy and environment area we will have no problems. And there will be more of this. I think I would like to, if I might, just go on to Professor Zuo, because I know you've done a lot of work on migrant research. And one of the most interesting things to us here is how China is managing the growth of its large cities. And in America we have a similar phenomenon, mostly because of immigration coming from beyond our borders. But we still allow about a million people a year -- just under a million people a year to come legally to the United States from other countries. And most of them come to large cities. And so some of our cities are growing, as Shanghai is growing. And perhaps you could tell us about the challenges that that presents and what you are doing in your research.
PROFESSOR ZUO: Well, I'd first like to thank you, Mr. President, for your question. As you know, I was a student returning from my studies in the United States and I'm really privileged and honored to be here to discuss with Mr. President and the First Lady. Mr. President, you are right that since the mid-1980s the scale and the importance of the population flow within China was tremendous, largely, the result of more job opportunities in urban centers. Farmers and peasants who saw that a job opportunity for them in the farming activities which was not so attractive were attracted to large centers. And reform and opening up has allowed those peasants and farmers out in rural areas of China to seek job opportunities in cities. Currently, the management of work permits for those farmers and for those city dwellers are different in the sense that there has been a certain restriction on seeking job opportunities for the farmers in the cities. And there is worry for those city dwellers that the unlimited inflow of outside laborers may limit job opportunities for them. Currently, we have about 2 million people in Shanghai who are coming from the provinces in China; they have the permit to live in Shanghai and to work here. The majority of that part of the population saw their income level greatly improved in comparison with their past. The municipal government is currently considering a plan to improve our service to them -- for example, how to provide educational opportunities for the children of those, what we call the floating population, and how can we provide medical services, et cetera. And there is much for us to address. The difference between rural areas and urban areas of China -- it must happen, but I know it will take time. And, Mr. President, I know, because you said earlier that you are interested in knowing the changes of China as a result of reform and opening up, and also you were there addressing the questions from the audience in Peking University and those were mainly about national issues or the political issues. And there are many issues which are about the people's daily life, questions which are not often focused or brought into attention. I was in the United States in 1984, and when I was back in China I saw some colleague going to my working place in jeans and I feel comfortable. And that time I was not really endorsing the jeans, but when I was in the United States I saw many people wearing jeans and I became acquainted and accustomed. And also, it is true, too, to jazz music. And one night I was invited to a concert which is performed in one of my family's house and the house was not very large to accommodate many people; however, the environment was lively. So I was impressed. Today there are not many people who have the chance to go abroad, but they know that there are many popular American stars and they know those popular stars' names better than I do. And many of the kids in China loves Kentucky Fried Chicken or McDonald's. And there are parents worrying about whether there will be a problem with obesity or overweight. I once heard there is a producer of a film who worries about development of the Chinese film industry because now the audience, the Chinese audience is accustomed to American film. And when they get that taste, they will be accustomed to that kind of film flavor. But anyway, I do believe that all the films and all those cultures from different backgrounds should contribute in their way to the development of the human society, and it is the reality that China has a lot of ways to learn from the United States. But, of course, there are also many aspects in Chinese culture that can be valuable lessons to the United States. And this provides a new chance to learn from each other. Thank you, Mr. President.
THE PRESIDENT: If I could just make two brief points. First of all, as to the last point you made about films and travel, even though we have more and more access to each other, to our information and to our ideas over the Internet -- and some day I suppose people will -- every time someone like Ms. Wang writes a new book, someone will be in a matter of days able to pull it up on the Internet and read it all over the world in their own language. I still think that it's actually important to have these people-to-people exchanges and to have more American students, for example, coming to China and more Chinese going to America. I think that's very important. I feel the same way about the movies. I actually have seen some movies I thought were extraordinarily powerful movies. And I think we should have more of that and we should be -- we should encourage our artists to come here. And, of course, there's so many Chinese-American artists that would give anything to perform in China and would feel very honored about that. So I hope that we will be open and that the governments will encourage more of that. The only other point I wanted to make is just --about your research and how you deal with these millions of people that are coming here to find work. This is a global issue. There are many cities that have nowhere near the opportunities that Shanghai does in other parts of the world, that are still growing by leaps and bounds all the time, because even though there are huge numbers of poor people in these cities, there is still a chance that the city life will be better than it is in the rural areas in other countries. So if you look at the whole world -- if you look at Africa, if you look at the Middle East and Central Asia, if you look at all these places, you have cities growing by leaps and bounds in countries that have been poor. And as I said, in our country, it's a place where we try to manage all the new immigrant populations and we have all the same challenges you do, plus, often, language differences. So I would just say that this is an area where, again, we may be able to cooperate and where we need to help even beyond our borders deal with these vast migration flows. They will be one of the central, defining trends, in my view, of the next 30 to 40 years. And so I thank you for that. Yes, Professor.
Q: May I ask you a question, because you are the youngest President in the history of the United States? And I know both you and the First Lady are lawyers and used to be professors in a law school. Usually, when a President retires, they were about 70, or more than that, and they did not work any more. I wonder whether you will continue your law profession or you will do something in the legal exchange with other countries? If you want to be a lawyer, do you want to remain in Washington or return to Arkansas? (Laughter.)
THE PRESIDENT: I was hoping you would offer me a position here. (Laughter.)
Q: No, you don't speak Chinese. (Laughter.)
THE PRESIDENT: I'm not too old to learn. (Laughter.) Actually, I am the third youngest President ever; and I think the second youngest to be elected. President Theodore Roosevelt and President John Kennedy were both a little younger than me when they took office. So I'll be about 54 when I leave office and I don't intend to retire. But I haven't decided what to do yet or where to do it -- except I will always have a home in my home state, in Arkansas, and I intend to build a library there to house my presidential papers and to tell the story of the time in which I served as President. But beyond that I have not made any final plans. So maybe I will apply for a visiting professorship. (Laughter.)
Q: We welcome you to our university as a visiting professor. You are more than welcome. (Laughter.)
MRS. CLINTON: I know that we want to hear from all the panelists, and I'd like to hear from the young man who has been so successful in the --
THE PRESIDENT: He's not here, is he?
MRS. CLINTON: He's not here? There he is, back there.
THE PRESIDENT: You may talk if you like.
MRS. CLINTON: Yes, about the Internet, because you were talking about the Internet and the explosion of the Internet. And what I'm interested in is, are there any restrictions on access to the Internet in China?
Q: Right now it's just purely in the application form, you can get it right away.
MRS. CLINTON: Right away. So there's no restrictions, universally available to anyone who has the funds to have access to it.
Q: Yes, and also the going rate is very fast. We're talking about more than 1 million right now.
MRS. CLINTON: More than 1 million --
Q: Internet users.
MRS. CLINTON: Internet users. In the entire country?
Q: Yes.
MRS. CLINTON: And so what is the rate of increase, do you think, in terms of projection?
Q: By the year 2000, maybe around 5 million. So we're talking about 30 percent growth rate.
MRS. CLINTON: Good. Well, I was interested in that because, of course, one of the things that we are asked about on this trip quite often is what the changes in China mean for the people. And most people in the world, in my country and in your country, are not as well educated as those of us sitting here around this table talking. Most people in your country, my country, and throughout the world are looking for opportunities to educate their children, to provide health care for their children, to have a good job. And with the explosion in information, how do you see that affecting the lives of the vast majority of people in this country?
Q: That is a very good question. Actually, yesterday I just launched a project called the China Right. The idea is to try to provide the virtual office for the small and the medium company in China and the U.S., do some cyber-exchange through the Internet. And I own the Cyber Cafe in China. I'm enjoying the 30 percent monthly growth rate, and those are a lot of people using the Internet to do whatever they want. It's very interesting.
MRS. CLINTON: Thank you.
THE PRESIDENT: Let me ask you one question about your Internet figures. This library has an Internet room upstairs. I just visited it. Is it really possible to know how many Internet users there are? I mean, how do you know?
Q: There is called a -- (inaudible) -- an administration bureau. Everybody have to fill in a form and they have their own domain name and IP address, so we can gather all the numbers correctly. While you are the initiator and the regulator of the global Information Superhighway, do you have any agenda to set up some first priority to global Internet standard involving China, especially the private sector, and do some exchange between U.S. and China -- where is a gateway we can contact in the U.S.?
MRS. CLINTON: We couldn't hear you.
Q: Okay. We have one million Chinese based database right now already online. In my website, I'm looking for a gateway to identify a partner in the U.S., also do some small and medium company exchange through the Internet. Where is a way I can get it in the U.S.?
MRS. CLINTON: You're looking for a partner to create an opportunity for an exchange on small and medium business opportunities?
Q: Yes.
MRS. CLINTON: That's something that we'll look into and see if we can get you some information about that.
THE PRESIDENT: There is probably more growth among new companies in this area than any other area in the American economy. It's exploding. So it may be that someone is following this conversation right now and you'll get a call within 30 minutes, for all I know. (Laughter.) But we will see what we can do.
MRS. CLINTON: I would also like to ask Bishop Jin, because one of the great concerns that many people in United States have is whether the changes that we've heard about in terms of education, university opportunities, information access, consumer protection, legal process and the rule of law have also occurred with respect to freedom of thought and freedom of religion. And, Bishop, you have been on the front lines of religious freedom in China. How would you describe the changes of the last several years?
BISHOP JIN: Well, I am the bishop responsible for the Shanghai Catholic diocese. And you may not know so much about the history of Shanghai's Catholics, Catholics that live in Shanghai. And currently, within my parish we have 78 churches and there are 160,000 followers. And we have 200 priests coming from all parts of China. And we have also priests from various parts of the world, including from the United States -- priests from -- and also there are priests from Italy, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the provinces. And I send the best of my students to study abroad. Some of them went to Italy, some of them to France. I sent about 40 students to study Cannon law in Princeton. And some of them have already been back. And also I have a publishing house, which is authorized to publish the Bibles and others, which was written in Latin and also in English. We also published about 100 books, some of them new and some of them old. An old president of a United States college has published many very interesting religious books and it was available in China and can be published here. Also we translated -- we have a translated version of a Belgian religious church. And I just had opportunity to go to Belgium recently and I was invited to have a discussion with him. And it was very informative. And every year we print tens of millions of those religious books. You talked about computers and Internet. Here in Shanghai, within the Catholic Church, we have about 100 computers. We have a computer room. And we also have a classroom devoted to language training and also we have training programs to train students. And also we have a nunnery school. All this information -- I don't think that our American counterparts know these things -- (inaudible) --they have about 20,000 believers. But today the number grows by leaps and bounds to about 60 million, even. There are many of those who believe in the Protestant, Catholic. In China, all of those in this religion are working very hard to enlarge the scale of the believers. And I don't think there are any ways that these beliefs in religion are restricted in China. And here I really want to tell something that is not always readily known to others from our side. People were often asked about if the Chinese Catholic Church was cooperating with the Communist Party. And the answer is simple: Why should the church believers here do something against our government, which is a government of ours? Here we adopted this policy of dialogue instead of contending with each other. I believe, Mr. President, you are here to have more dialogues with us, with Chinese government not to contend with us. So I believe all the church believers, religious believers, they should have dialogues instead of having conflicts with the government. And about the underground religion, my understanding is that, well, those people who were going what we call underground or having covered religious activities because of the fear of being some negative effects on them -- I don't quite understand why those people should do this kind of thing. And I would like you to send a message to the Catholic believers in the United States, to relay the message of believers in China our respect for them. And I certainly hope with this visit by your Excellency, Mr. President, the Catholic believers in China can cooperate more with our counterparts in the United States. Thank you very much, Mr. President.
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you, sir. I would like to ask Mr. Wu now to talk a little bit about -- I know that you're a professor of American studies and perhaps you have some observations about how the relations between our two countries have changed in the last few years and what advice you could give us going forward here.
MR. WU: It's a good question. I think the presidential visit to China is conducted at a very important moment of Sino-U.S. relations. Before 1952, China and the U.S. experienced decades of confrontation. It was Mr. Nixon that opened the door between the two countries; however, there were twists and turns after that. Just as -- yesterday you were in the Peking University. Some Chinese students asked -- many Chinese were worrying whether the United States would contain a growing China. There are disputes between the two countries on such issues as Taiwan and others. Especially around the year of 1996, there were many worries on the Chinese side about the China policy of the United States. However, after that we have witnessed a major shift in the China policy of United States. Last year President Jiang paid a state visit to the States and now you've come to China. That indicates a new stage has been begun in Sino-U.S. relations. So I think you've played a very important leader's role in the improvement of Sino-U.S. relations. As to the future development of such relations in the 21st century, I believe that a mutually independence, economic independence of the two countries will further increase, as the United States is the third largest trading partner of China and that China is the fourth one of the States. I think the economic cooperation will further grow in the future. And I think so long as we conduct dialogues in a frank spirit and exchange personal visits and eliminate disputes through dialogues, we can achieve a lot. You talked about human rights with President Jiang in Beijing, I think it was a very good way. That means that our relationship is now going to maturity. There is good reason for us to become good friends, not enemies. I think the importance of such relations will overpass that of the U.S.-Japan relations. I am optimistic about that.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, first let me thank you for what you said. I do believe that my coming here and the work we've done in the last two years, President Jiang's trip to the United States, has helped to resolve some of the misunderstandings. I had a chance to reiterate our Taiwan policy, which is that we don't support independence for Taiwan, or two Chinas, or one Taiwan-one China. And we don't believe that Taiwan should be a member in any organization for which statehood is a requirement. So I think we have a consistent policy. Our only policy has been that we think it has to be done peacefully. That is what our law says, and we have encouraged the cross-strait dialogue. And I think eventually it will bear fruit if everyone is patient and works hard. I also agree that the human rights dialogue I had with President Jiang was a good thing. I hope it will lead to more open discussion here. And I would be encouraged if that happened. Let me -- if I could, I'd like to ask you a more personal question. I read in your -- I got a little biography of all of you before I came here, and I would like to ask -- I noticed that you were born in a small rural community, like me. All my mother's people came from a community, actually, that never had more than 150 people, although I was born in the largest city in my little area, which had at the time 6,000 people. One of the struggles we work at all the time in the States is trying to make sure that our children, no matter where they're born -- if they're born in some remote rural area or some very poor area in the inner-city -- that they still have a chance, if they have ability, as you obviously did, to live the future of their imaginations and their dreams. Do you believe that you have a system now in China which would give every boy and girl growing up in a small rural village like you the chance that you had to become what you have become?
Q: I think my personal experience is a very typical case, because China is a third-world country, developing country, and I was born in the third world of China. It was relatively poor and backward; however, despite all the poor circumstances, I was able to get education, I came to Shanghai, and I worked in my university. So I think in China, even though the overall economic and cultural level were quite low, the government has great efforts to popularize the nine-year compulsory education. Especially in my home town, many poor children, due to their difficult situations at home, could afford not -- tuition themselves. The government and the community, with help from the outside world, initiated a program called Project Hope. Through the Hope, they could go back to their classrooms. Even in my village, there was a Hope school which was financed by Friendship Taxi company. After this school was established, my nephew and my niece were able to go to this school. So the government and all walks of life in this society have done a lot to help those poor children go back to the classrooms.
THE PRESIDENT: Dr. Wu and Madame Xie and anyone else, what percentage of the students in your university come from poorer families where the parents of the students had no education to speak of?
Q: According to our late statistics, about 15 percent of the students have very poor family background. Just now, you raised the issue and asked us a question. In our school we provided students with scholarship, financial aid, and help them have a part-time job. Currently, the society has paid attention to education and many foundations have been found which took as their major mission to help those children to get back to school. In some remote areas or some small places, students still are able to come to our university, and the percentage is relatively high. Just now I only mentioned those children with indigent family backgrounds; of course it includes urban poor. I think such difficulties have been accumulated over the years. The teaching facilities and education facilities are poor. I think those students in the rural and the remote areas are finding a lot difficult to take part in the national examination to get enrolled in university. However, we have equal treatment to these students. But in practice they have more difficulties in getting in the university due to the financial problems. I think, just now, as the Professor mentioned, there are a lot of government measures come out, but, however, it takes time. I think it takes time for us to fully implement. Moreover, I think, except for money, according to my understanding, in the countryside, more girls -- more girl dropouts than boys. I think this has something to do with the mentality of the parents. The parents will believe as the girls will marry off, so it doesn't matter much if they get educated or not. For instance, originally in our school we had about one-third of girls and two-thirds of boys. However, currently, we had half and half. And nowadays, we had more than -- better -- more girl students in than boys, and even we have girls who surpass their boy counterparts, especially in cities.
Q: That's true, we have an increase in girl university students. However, I think it has something to do with discipline. For instance, in the law major we have more girl students; however, in math and physics we have fewer girls. The girl scholars at the higher levels are even fewer. For instance, in our foreign language discipline, we have more girls. However, when we have a doctor degree, we have fewer girls. So the degree goes, the fewer the girls are. I think it is a common problem world over. It still takes time to change the situation. I think in education we still have disparities between regions and cities and rural areas, especially in the inland areas where the mountainous areas or some poor areas are most part of it. Many children have very poor family conditions and they live in very scattered places. They have to walk miles to get to the school. However, they have few opportunities. The reason is the poor financial situation of their families. Another reason may be their parents prefer them to go to work earlier. I think our leaders have already gained awareness of this problem and they've decided to increase investment and input into basic education. The cost of education of the total GDP accounts for only about more than 2 percent. Compared with average level it is quite low. So we think many government leaders and leaders in the People's Congress are actively considering how to increase the government input in education. However, currently we are faced with one problem --that is the fiscal power is quite scattered. That means the central government's revenues find it very hard to increase. In principle, education is under the jurisdiction of local governments, like the United States. Some local governments prefer to use the money in those areas with economic return. So in some localities the importance has not been attached to education. However, I think through the efforts and appeal from the whole society this situation has experienced a major change. However, the disparities do exist and we need to work hard in order to eliminate such differences.
THE PRESIDENT: I think what will happen in China -- I believe this will happen because of the technological revolution. I think in your economic growth you will almost leap over a whole generation of economic experiences that older European countries and perhaps the United States experienced, where you will essentially be creating an industrialized and a post-industrial society at the same time. And, therefore, more quickly you will have to educate more people at higher levels than we did. Because what happened in the 20th century in America is first everyone had about -- you know, first education was the province of the elite. And then everyone got about four years of education, and then six. And then we went finally to high school education. And then when I became President, about half of our young people are going on to university. Now people are actually coming back to university in huge numbers. The average age of our university student is going higher, because we have more people not only coming right out of our high schools but also coming back from society, because everyone recognizes now that we have to universalize very high levels of education because of the way the society works. So I think that this will happen in China more quickly just because of this moment in history, and I think it will be a very good thing. I wanted to -- I know we're about to run out of time, but I wanted to ask a couple of more questions. Go ahead, Professor Xie, do you want to make a point? Because my question is unrelated to this, so go ahead.
Q: -- continue this discussion, but we know you have a very busy schedule. And we're very glad to be here to discuss our life here with you and we thank you for listening.
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you. I want to ask two quick questions, one of Ms. Wang.
Q: I really want to ask a question, but I want to know whether the time permits. I have a question for the First Lady. I interviewed many women from different social strata, but really this is the first time for me to have a dialogue with the First Lady, so I really want to grasp this opportunity with both hands. I want to know first, the First Lady, your every gesture or word you said will be brought to public attention through media. Do you feel some kind of restriction on your movement or impact on your personal life? Is there any difference when you were not the First Lady, for example, as a wife?
MRS. CLINTON: I often refer to my life before the White House as when I was a "real person," because when you are in a position like this, people, particularly all of these people with their pencils and their cameras, try to record everything you do and then they try to put meaning into it -- whether you intend the meaning or not. So it is a very unusual experience to be in this kind of position with this much attention for things that you have no real conscious awareness or purpose for. And I think it is a particular problem for someone in this position that I currently hold, but I think it is part of a larger issue about how we, as women, are perceived and evaluated, not just in my society but throughout the world, because there are certain expectations and even stereotypes in every culture that are imposed upon women. And whether you are in an independent role, as you are as a novelist, or as the professor is as a law professor, or in a vicarious role, such as this role is, there are many, many stereotypes and expectations that are imposed upon the individual which may or may not have anything to do with how the individual perceives herself. So it is a constant challenge. I think in a public position it is more obvious, but even in a private position for many women it is a constant challenge to claim your own identity and your own position and to make clear who you are, as opposed to society's expectations as to who you should be because you hold a position of woman novelist, woman law professor, First Lady, or any of the other positions that women hold in any society.
Q: Thank you very much.
THE PRESIDENT: Go ahead, Mr. Wang.
MR. WANG: I want to know from you, Mr. President, the organizations or institutions responsible for protecting the consumers' rights -- will they have any vested interest related to manufacturers, for example. Last year I had a civil case with the department store. Actually, the defendant was a manager of the store, and I feel really strange about that, because the interest of the consumer is vastly different from the manager, the manager of a store. So based on this conflict within interest, within consumers and the sellers, I believe that there should be no entanglement in terms of relationship between the consumers protection groups and the sellers -- I mean, the managers of the stores, because here in China in certain cases there were those managers of the department store who were also members of the consumer rights group who can actually exert his or her influence on operations of the consumer group. I don't think this fits the picture, and I want to know what the situation is in the United States.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, in the United States a consumer in the position that you just mentioned -- let's say someone bought something in a department store and it was defective -- I would say there might be four things that could happen. And I don't want to complicate the answer, but I have to give you a complete answer. First of all, in America we have pretty clear laws on this, and so the best companies would just take the merchandise back and give the person his money back or give the person a new product, because they wouldn't want to get a reputation of being unfair to consumers or a reputation of selling bad products. So the first thing the person would do is to take it back, because of the laws. Now, secondly, the person might go to the consumer advocate in the government. That's the one I talked to you about. Suppose this happened in New York City. Well, New York City has a Consumer Affairs Bureau. Now, maybe sometimes it's more active for the consumers than others, depending on whether the Mayor believes in this cause or not. So if there's no opportunity there, then the person would have either an independent consumer group -- there are some -- or you could go into court and pursue your remedy there. So I don't think there's a problem of having the consumer groups themselves too tied to the manufacturers. And if there's a pattern or practice of selling bad products, then it's almost certain that there would be a remedy found in our courts.
Q: Well, in addition, some of the courts in China, after they have given award on a certain case, they would encounter this problem of having difficulties of law enforcement. The word or the judgment made by the court may not be enforced. It's also quite widespread in China. We have seen cases where the court has given award to -- I mean, the defendant won the case; however, they find it difficult to enforce that. Is it possible for this kind of situation to happen in the United States, and if so, how to correct it?
MRS. CLINTON: It is. And sometimes even after people get a judgment, they have to continue to work very hard through the legal system to enforce their judgment. So it's a continuing problem.
THE PRESIDENT: You mentioned -- you said, well, sometimes if there's a good store with a good brand name, that you won't have these problems, but if people are selling off-brands or off the street, or whatever, they might. You have real problems in America in enforcing these orders if it's difficult to find the company that sold the product or difficult to find their bank account.
MRS. CLINTON: I know we have very little time left, but I want to be sure that each of you has had a chance to say whatever you wish to say about the changes in China. And I'd like to pose a question like this, and it will have to be answered very shortly because we don't have much time. One of the reasons that the President wanted to do this was to have a chance for Americans to learn more about how Chinese saw the future and the changes in China, because it's very difficult, even with all this information we have in the world, often to get an accurate perception. I just talked about some of the stereotypes that are sometimes used about women. Well, different cultures use stereotypes about different societies, different people, different countries, and there's often misunderstandings that are created because of the perceptions that come across through the media about what is or is not happening. And sometimes there's not an opportunity for people to get a broader view. And, of course, many Americans are quite interested in what is happening in China, but don't know very much about the changes that are occurring and don't know how to evaluate what is happening here, and how we should define our relationship going forward, which is why the President thought it was so important to come to try to begin this dialogue that we referred to. Are there any points any of you would like to make about what is happening in China today, both the changes and the challenges about continuing change that you would like to be sure the American people understood so that the American people would have a better idea of what is really happening in China, and through their understanding, the American government can be more involved with and more engaged in the partnership and relationship that the President has talked about on his visit here -- both the good, the bad, the hard, the easy -- what points, additionally, would you like to make to the American people?
Q: Let me go first. I wish to take my time to respond very briefly to your question to describe most graphically the largest change taking place in China can be described in this way. My kid who is five, his childhood will be a lot better than mine. And I believe the change in China will continue along its way, and the changes in China or the specific form that is taking place will have a large impact on our life. China and the United States certainly are big countries in the world and the relationship between our two countries will take time to evolve. And I hope that as China develops it can be integrated with the outside world, with the global society -- this issue will certainly be more meaningful and have more powerful impact on our relationship between China and the United States. There should be change in China, but there should be no expectation that such a populous country can have the same change that the United States witnessed during a 200-year lapse. Rome was actually not built overnight and there will be a process of evolvement. What we want to see is the pace, there is a quick pace for this change to take place. And my friends cares very much about human rights record of China. And I believe this cannot be separated from the process of building a legal framework. You, Mr. President and the First Lady, talked about a lot of these issues. And the United States has a very long history of building democracy, of over 200 years, many of which has been manifested in, for example, business contracts, in other legal contracts. And China is in the process of making that happen. With the daily perfection of its legal framework there will be more democracy. To tell you my story in a period from 1966 to 1996, that is around the Cultural Revolution, our life is way better than it was. So actually we enjoy, the Chinese people enjoy every bit of democracy given under the law, as long as he or she doesn't violate the law. So I want, Mr. President and First Lady, to know that democracy does not mean giving people, every individual the freedom to do what he likes. And in China our legal framework is being perfected on a daily basis. Thank you very much. And I want to say that there are, as you said, tremendous changes in the daily life of China. Whatever the pace that takes place, it is change. And my perception is, particularly for American people, the American people needs more understanding about China. I've been to the United States, on trips to the United States four or five times and spent quite a lot of time there. And my feeling is it will be easier for the Chinese people to understand the American people than the other way around -- I mean for people of approximately the same age. And the influence of the media on this aspect is greater in the United States than in China. And I believe as long as the people understands what the other part needs can we do a lot better. I want to make a little bit of an addition, and I believe literature provides a channel for people to understand a society better. There has been a lot of translation work done on foreign works, literatures, which provides a channel for Chinese people to understand more about the cultures of the United States and other countries. But there is a problem. There is not many American publishing house to introduce the Chinese books, written in Chinese and then have them translated and made available to the audience, to the readers. And I would suggest that, Mr. President, you can send a message back to your homeland there needs to be work done in that area. I want to also say that in China, as you have seen, there is a lot more openness and it makes us easier to make friends with people all over the world. And exchanges and having dialogues are certainly one of the most pleasurable things between our two nations. The Chinese people are becoming more and more conscious of their rights, about their consumer rights, and more and more people are being informed of their rights. And this great awareness of their rights represents a great leap forward in Chinese democracy. From the economic point of view I can see two changes. One is from these changes the people will benefit from this process. There are no people hurt. And the process also takes easier. By the end of the 1970s we began our reform in the farming system in China, which is a household responsibility issue. And this change was certainly a benefit for the majority of the people and there will be some people's interest who sacrificed or compromised temporarily -- the reshuffling of the government organizations in the Chinese central government. Sometimes I heard that people from abroad were worried about the slow pace of democratic changes, but I have to tell that it is a very complicated process and it can take time. And there will be disputes among those people who are involved in this kind of thought, or other kind of thought; there will be conflicting ideas. And I just want to say that I look forward to having more Chinese opportunities to exchange with the United States -- people from the United States.
Q: Just now, Mr. President talked about the difficulties faced by those students from poor family backgrounds. And I want to say that maybe Jesus is in favor of the impoverished, and he will provide help, he will pray for them, and our Shanghai diocese is very caring about those poor students. The Catholic Shanghai diocese has set up Project Hope primary schools in provinces in China. Those primary schools provide the place to accommodate the education needs of the poor kids. And we certainly want to do this better, as far as the Shanghai Parish is concerned. And as far as the universities and colleges in Shanghai is concerned, the Shanghai Parish also wants to do certain projects. We talked about this with our president from the university. And I myself is from poor family background and I had memories of very poor life when I was a kid. And unable to pay my tuition and get education, so I really was moved by the stories of the poor students who cannot obtain those educational opportunities only because they cannot pay the tuition.
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. If I could close, I would just like to make a couple of points. First of all, thank you all very much for being here, for me and for Hillary and I think for the members of Congress and the Secretary of State and the members of our delegation this has been an enriching experience and I have a much, I think, better feel for what is going on in modern China. Secondly, if I might just close with a few words about our perspective on this whole issue of the relationship between social progress and individual rights, or human rights. I think there are basically three different categories of issues here and I'd leave these thoughts with you. When it comes to just creating more opportunity for people to have a better life and refraining from oppressing people in horrible ways, I think it's obvious that China since the end of the Cultural Revolution has made enormous progress -- almost unprecedented for any society in human history. And then there's the second category of problems, which is just the basic legal problems or personal problems that people find in a complex society -- whether it's consumer protection problems or -- Hillary, yesterday, was talking to some people who were involved in legal work in Beijing and there was a women who got a divorce from a husband who had been abusing her. But their apartment house came to him because of his work, so where does she live now with their child? Those kinds of problems. I agree with what Madame Xie said. We have to -- these rule of law issues, we need to just keep working through these and work together on them. But in the third area, I think there is still some considerable difference, and that is to what extent does a different political opinion or a different religious conviction enrich a society and make it stronger; and to what extent does it promote instability and weaken the enormous work that has to because done? And I think that we just have to kind of be honest here. China has had many challenges. It's a much bigger country than the United States. It's coming very far very fast. And I think there is a tendency among the Chinese, in government and perhaps in the society, to see these kinds of political or religious dissents as -- at least to be very super-sensitive to the prospect of instability because China has suffered in the past from instability. In the United States, because of our history, there is always a tendency to believe that anybody's political opinion and religious expression deserves great protection and great respect, and no matter how different it is from ours, that allowing the widest possible room for expression of political and religious feelings makes a country stronger, a society stronger over the long run. That has been our experience. So I think we have to understand our two perspectives and honestly confront these things as they present difficulties in our relationship and look at them as opportunities to try to build a common future, because I do think that, as I said in Beijing in the press conference I had with President Jiang and at the university, the forces of history are driving us toward a common future. We have to build a common future. And so it's important that we be able to discuss these things in a open way. I think all of you did a terrific job today expressing your point of view and also giving my fellow Americans and me a window on modern China. And we thank you very much.
MRS. CLINTON: Thank you.
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you. (Applause.)
END 11:08 A.M.
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Clinton, for first time, spells out Taiwan policy
SHANGHAI, June 30 (Reuters) - U.S. President Bill Clinton, in comments likely to please his Chinese hosts but dismay Taiwan, on Tuesday spelled out in detail for the first time in public the official U.S. policy on Taiwan.
At a round-table discussion in Shanghai, Clinton said he had laid out the policy at his summit in Beijing with President Jiang Zemin last Saturday.
"I had a chance to reiterate our Taiwan policy which is that we don't support independence for Taiwan, or 'two Chinas', or 'one Taiwan, one China', and we don't believe that Taiwan should be a member in any organization for which statehood is a requirement," Clinton said.
White House aides, including Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, have set out the policy in precisely those terms.
But Clinton himself, at least in public, had always defined U.S. policy more vaguely.
The crux of the issue is the word "independence," which means different things in Taipei and Beijing.
Taiwan's Nationalist rulers already claim a form of independence for the island as the seat of power of the Republic of China, founded on the mainland in 1912 and transplanted in 1949.
The Nationalists retreated to Taiwan in 1949 after being routed in a civil war by the Communists, who set up the People's Republic of China.
China regards Taiwan as a rebel province and has threatened to invade if the island formally declared independence.
It has fought tooth-and-nail to isolate Taiwan diplomatically and prevent it joining international bodies, including the United Nations.
Before the summit China had been pressing for a fourth China-U.S. communiqué to set out the policy that Clinton elaborated.
But Washington ruled it out.
"I think we have a consistent policy," Clinton said at the roundtable, referring to Taiwan.
On reunification of Taiwan and China, he said: "Our own policy has been that we think it should be done peacefully, that is what our law says, and we have encouraged a cross-Strait dialogue and I think eventually it will bear fruit if everyone is patient and works hard."
White House spokesman P.J. Crowley said it "may well be" the first time Clinton had publicly outlined the U.S. position.
But he played down the comments, saying Clinton was only reiterating "our long-standing policy with regard to Taiwan."
"I wouldn't attach any special significance to it," Crowley said.
"Our policy has been very public, very well known. There's no change in our policy based on what the president said today. The president was responding to a question."
Clinton last week ruled out any change to the U.S. position on Taiwan during his nine-day visit to China.
"Our position with regard to Taiwan is embodied in the three communiqués and in the Taiwan Relations Act and in the facts of our relationship over the years," Clinton told reporters during his first stop in Xi'an last Friday.
"So I think it's obvious there will be no change in our position one way or the other on this trip."
Taiwan residents fear the United States could betray the interests of the island as its relations with China improve.
Under the communiqués and the Taiwan Relations Act, the United States is committed to a policy that recognizes Beijing as the sole legitimate government of China.
Taipei denies any dreams of independence and says it espouses eventual reunion, but only if the Communists give up their absolute grip on power and embrace a mutually acceptable democracy.
No other issue has more potential to throw a wrench in newly restored China-U.S. ties than Taiwan, which goes to the core of Chinese nationalism and identity.
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Clinton hears of progress, worries in China
By Steve Holland
SHANGHAI, June 30 (Reuters) - Chinese intellectuals opened a window on Chinese life for U.S. President Bill Clinton on Tuesday, giving him a glimpse of progress and problems in areas ranging from religious freedom to the impact of American fast food.
Clinton gave them his ideas of how China might progress faster -- a greater respect for dissent would help, he said -- and his wife Hillary provided some insight into the first couple's own travails.
Clinton and Hillary, on the third stop of a five-city tour, of China spent the morning at Shanghai Library with a Roman Catholic bishop, a novelist, a consumer advocate, a law professor, a physicist, a university president and a researcher.
It was the kind of session Clinton typically holds on his travels in the United States.
"This has been an enriching experience and I have a much, I think, better feel for what is going on in modern China," the president said.
In a roundtable discussion, Bishop Jin Luxian, who spent 27 years in prison for his religious beliefs, told the Clintons the number of believers in China was growing "by leaps and bounds."
"In China all of those religions are working very hard to enlarge the scale of the believers," Jin said.
"And I don't think there is any way that these beliefs and religions are restricted in China."
The Clintons were told when they went to church in Beijing on Sunday that the number of practicing Protestants alone had grown from 700,000 in 1949 to more than 10 million now.
Clinton said China had made "enormous strides" in enabling people to enjoy better lives, but added, in what has become a theme of his nine-day visit, that it should permit greater personal freedoms.
"To what extent does a different political opinion or a different religious conviction enrich a society and make it stronger, and to what extent does it promote instability and weaken the enormous work that has to be done?" he asked.
"...I think there is a tendency among the Chinese in the government and perhaps the society...to be super-sensitive to the prospect of instability because China has suffered in the past from instability," he said.
He said the United States had been strengthened by allowing the widest possible freedoms of expression and religious beliefs.
Social researcher Zuo Xuejin said American fast food and movies were having an impact on China.
"China knows Kentucky Fried Chicken or McDonald's and there are parents who worry about problems of obesity or overweight," he said.
The Chinese were getting to know the United States through its films, Zuo said.
He said Americans should watch Chinese movies to learn valuable lessons about China's culture.
"I feel the same way about the movies," Clinton replied.
"I actually have seen some Chinese movies that have been extraordinarily powerful. I think we should have more of that."
The experts displayed curiosity about Clinton and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
She was asked if she ever felt confined by life in the White House.
She did, she replied, especially because of reporters who endlessly "try to report everything you do and try to put meaning into it whether you meant anything by it or not."
Mrs. Clinton has been bitter for a long time about negative press coverage of the legal problems besetting the Clinton presidency.
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BY TIM MORRISON
Whether he's being challenged by students in Beijing on America's problems with race and poverty, or offering fitness secrets on Shanghai talk radio, Clinton has impressed many Chinese with his sincerity and subtlety. "He's pretty good at relating to people on an everyday level," said TIME Correspondent Jay Branegan.
Well, all good things have to end sometime. Clinton's enunciation Tuesday of the U.S. position on Taiwan, the first time he personally had advocated the "one-China" policy, was clearly choreographed, and not very well.
The meeting with Shanghai representatives and community leaders that was the context for Clinton's statement, had originally included Edward Zeng, an Internet entrepreneur from Beijing. But when Zeng arrived at the Shanghai Library where the discussion took place, he couldn't find his name on any of the place cards at the table. His seat had been taken by Wu Xinbo, an assistant professor at the Center for American Studies at Shanghai's Fudan University. Zeng ended up sitting in back with the rest of the spectators until Hillary Clinton attempted to address a question to him, at which point he came forward to answer.
Following this exchange, and a flurry of notes among Clinton, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger and an aide, Clinton turned to professor Wu and asked how he, as an expert on the U.S., would define the current relationship between the two countries and how the summit could improve it. Wu replied at length on the history of Sino-U.S. relations, and the critical period at which Clinton and Jiang were having their summits, both last October in Washington and this week in China. Clinton thanked Wu for his comments and launched into a tangential statement on his chance to reiterate U.S. Taiwan policy in his meetings with President Jiang Zemin on Saturday. "We don't support independence for Taiwan," said Clinton, "or 'two Chinas' or 'one-Taiwan one-China.' And we don't believe that Taiwan should be a member in any organization for which statehood is a requirement."
Wu later stated that the original list of panelists had been cut at the last minute for space reasons. Nonetheless, said TIME Beijing bureau chief Jaime FlorCruz, "It seems pretty clear that the meeting was orchestrated by the Americans so Clinton could publicly restate the Taiwan policy." Some U.S. observers speculate that Clinton wanted to pay Jiang back for Saturday's press conference on human rights and the Dalai Lama; others say that Clinton needed a non-political forum to make a statement that would please China and not alienate Taiwan, America's ally.
Not surprisingly the statement brought a sharp response from Taiwan, which complained that the U.S. had no business negotiating its future with China. In Beijing, officials expressed hope that Clinton follow his words with action as soon as possible. Members of the Clinton entourage, meanwhile, played down the incident as being a mere reiteration of long-standing U.S. policy -- although they seemed to be the only ones to do so. "In China, when a leader says something, that means it's law," said Branegan.
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Stumping on the Bund Clinton goes into full man-of-the-people mode in China's showcase city
BY TIM MORRISON
Leaving China's capital of Beijing for its financial and cosmopolitan center of Shanghai, President Clinton also seemed to leave behind the political side of his message for a more popular one. He spent his day here meeting with local community leaders and appearing on a radio call-in show.
"There was basically very little policy and a lot of glad handing," said TIME correspondent Jay Branegan of Clinton's activities. The radio show, the first unscripted appearance by a foreign head of state, was flooded with callers asking about everything from China's entry into the World Trade Organization to how the President keeps fit. "He really seemed to enjoy himself," said Branegan. "The people-to-people things really seem to be Clinton's bag. Like what we say in America, he feels your pain."
Clinton certainly knows how to make a big impression. His off-the-cuff talk was not only unprecedented for foreign leaders but extremely rare for Chinese politicians. Mayors and governors had appeared on the show before, but national leaders were unheard of--or from.
Chinese who had expected the President to bully and harp upon the issues of human rights, Tiananmen, and Tibet during his visit have been pleasantly surprised: Clinton has so far been subtle, sensitive and well-prepared, and his radio debut was no different, although instances of substance took a back seat. According to Branegan, "What you're seeing here is Clinton bringing real American-style campaigning to China."
One aspect of American-style campaigning Clinton probably didn't mind leaving at home was dealing with the continuous scandals which have shadowed his term. It was not until five days into the trip that a reporter asked White House spokesman Mike McCurry about Monica Lewinsky.
This isn't to say that people don't know about the scandals; there are several books out in China which deal with the President's peccadilloes. "No one has really come out and asked him anything about it in public," says TIME Beijing bureau chief Jaime Florcruz of the Chinese response. "People kind of feel it's his business." On this, the Chinese people and their government are in complete accord: in the days before Clinton's arrival, copies of one of the more scurrilous books were removed from stores by Beijing authorities.
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White House Briefing by McCurry, Daley, Brainard
Following is a transcript of a press briefing by Press Secretary Mike McCurry, Secretary of Commerce William Daley, and Special Assistant to the President for International Economic Policy Lael Brainard:
Portman Ritz Carlton Shanghai, People's Republic of China
MR. MCCURRY: I really don't have a whole lot that I am doing here. I'm stalling until Secretary of Commerce Bill Daley, and Lael Brainard from the National Economic Council staff, come to tell you a little bit more about the context of the President's visit to Shanghai, what it says about some of our efforts to promote economic cooperation between the People's Republic and the United States, and the window that Shanghai is into the possible future for China as you see around you the enormous results of the economic change that is occurring here in South China. So they'll be talking about that, talking a little bit about the importance of the President's visit tomorrow with young entrepreneurs and some of the other elements of the schedule. So, for the wires in the front, they will set up tomorrow for you pretty well. And I can just do clean-up on anything else that you need.
Q: There are a lot of holes in tomorrow's schedule. The whole afternoon is open, the whole evening is open. Can you fill that in at all?
MR. MCCURRY: Not -- as I said, a lot of time tomorrow afternoon, and there are a couple of different possibilities of things he might do. Most of it will be consistent with some of the touring he's been doing, but we are looking at perhaps an opportunity to do some more outreach to the Chinese people. We'll alert you to that if we nail it down.
Q: Tomorrow night?
MR. MCCURRY: Tomorrow night? I don't have any indication of a plan yet for tomorrow night.
Q: Can you give us your own personal or the President's comparison of talk radio between the United States and what he did here?
MR. MCCURRY: I think he enjoyed it, and I think the questions -- they tended to be curious about Bill Clinton as a person, as you could tell from some of the people who dialed in. And that most likely is because there's not the same level of attention to the personal side of leadership here in China that there is in the United States. So obvious questions that an American audience would know the answer to might be of somewhat greater interest here. But you could see a range of questions from people who clearly enjoy the opportunity to question leaders about issues that are central in their own lives. And with that respect, talk radio or emerging talk radio in China is very similar to talk radio in the United States -- that there's a high degree of interest in things that substantively impact the lives of average citizens. Now, that said, as all of you know, some venues of talk radio in the United States are much more prone to political discourse and political combat. I don't think that they've reached that point yet here in China and maybe that's to their benefit.
Q: Mike, were there any agreements on screening the callers as to the nature of the questions that would be put through?
MR. MCCURRY: No, we asked only that they follow what their normal practice is and try to encourage as diverse a possible range of questions that would be appropriate for the President. But we didn't put any restrictions on the questioning. And I'm not -- as far as I know, the station and the program conducted their call-ins the way they normally do.
Q: Mike, just to follow, do you know if the callers are required some way to identify themselves so they can be later identified?
MR. MCCURRY: You'd really have to pose that question to the station. I don't know the answer to that. They obviously were referring to people by name as they called in, so they had some idea of who they were.
Q: Mike, what effect do you think this commitment statement of the three no's by the President will now have on the cross-straits dialogue? What do you hope that will achieve?
MR. MCCURRY: Well, I don't know that it has great significance because it's merely a reiteration of longstanding U.S. policy that had previously been reiterated by the Secretary of State and by the National Security Advisor. The President himself had indicated prior to coming here that he would reaffirm longstanding U.S. policy, and he did so. And I believe that during the course of this visit we've made it clear both publicly and privately that we hope the people of Taiwan and the people of the People's Republic find an amicable resolution to the question of Taiwan. And that obviously would be a useful outcome of a cross-strait dialogue.
Q: Was there any particular reason why he stated the three no's here rather than in Beijing? He had a couple of opportunities when he was specifically asked about Taiwan back in Beijing and he didn't --
MR. MCCURRY: I think no particular reason. He knew he would have some opportunity to do it and the opportunity arose today.
Q: Mike, is there any reason the President didn't challenge the comment of Mr. Wu: "I think the importance of such relations will overpass that of U.S.-Japan relations. I'm optimistic about that"? That was at the end of the question. The President then gave a Taiwan answer.
MR. MCCURRY: The President has in other settings addressed that question. This is not devil-take-the-hindmost in Asia-U.S. diplomacy; this is about building more constructive, useful relationships throughout this region. Our interests in this region, particularly with respect to security, are defined by our alliances with our five longtime and closest treaty partners in Asia, and that's the bedrock foundation of American presence and policy in Asia. That's the longstanding view of the United States.
Q: Has the U.S. written -- given any written commitment to the three no's?
MR. MCCURRY: None that I'm aware of. There are, obviously, the three communiqués and the Taiwan Relations Act and U.S. law.
Q: Mike, Mr. Wu was not originally planned to attend this discussion meeting. Originally, it was that Mr. Chen, the expert on the Internet, who was invited to speak. But we learned from him that he was bumped this morning when he got to --
MR. MCCURRY: I don't know the answer to that. I'll have to look into that and see if I can get an answer.
Q: -- said that he just took the opportunity of reiterating the three no's today. In fact, he had an opportunity at Beijing University, when somebody asked specifically about Taiwan --
MR. MCCURRY: You're correct. I should have pointed out that at Beijing University yesterday he obviously said the same thing and reaffirmed U.S. policy towards Taiwan -- you're correct.
Q: -- no big deal, but you must know the Taiwanese are treating it like an enormous deal and some of them are very upset, right?
MR. MCCURRY: I don't know why they would be upset at a reiteration and restatement of longstanding United States policy that they're well familiar with.
Q: Because a U.S. President has never said that before.
MR. MCCURRY: Well, administrations have said that. The Secretary of State has said that recently. The National Security Advisor has said it. I don't think it's a surprise the President would reiterate longstanding policy.
Q: Mike, the point is that the President of the United States -- it's the first time that he has said it, not an official, not a lower ranking guy, right? And don't the Chinese place a lot of importance on that?
MR. MCCURRY: Whoever chooses to attach special significance to that will. We understand that.
Q: What did he mean when he said "statehood" in that three no's clause -- and the U.S. is a state, Taiwan is kind of like a province, but now the Chinese use the word sovereign and --
MR. MCCURRY: I think he meant in the sense of sovereign nation. I think we're being a little exegetical here.
Q: We're being what?
MR. MCCURRY: Exegetical. It's a tendency to look for illumination in text.
Q: Was there any conscious decision for the President to make the statement here in Shanghai instead of Beijing, though?
MR. MCCURRY: I think there was some -- as I told many of you, some likelihood that he would find some opportunity during the course of the trip and it happened here in Shanghai. Okay. I don't have anything to add on that subject. Anything else?
Q: Has the President or administration officials raised this --
MR. MCCURRY: We, at a variety of levels, are working that issue. I'm not aware that the President himself has raised it yet. But we certainly are well aware of the issue and hope that the people of new York have an opportunity to benefit from the rich culture that China has to offer the world.
Q: Why didn't the President have anything to say when the bishop stated his view about repression of religious Catholics here in the country? It seems that his view is more optimistic than the U.S. government's view.
MR. MCCURRY: Well, the President obviously has concerns and has spoken directly to them and is aware that there are others who don't share the Bishop's optimistic outlook. But the President also believes that having been incarcerated for 27 years, the bishop is entitled to state whatever view he has on the matter.
Q: Does that include his wonderment, the bishop's wonderment -- "I don't quite understand why those people should do this kind of thing," talking about underground religious activities. The President understands why they do it, doesn't he?
MR. MCCURRY: Oh, I think the President has already addressed that when he's talked about the importance we attach to the ability to freely express one's religious faith without interference by government. And we're well aware of the concerns of those in China who believe that sometimes there are fetters placed on the practice of religion and the expression of religious faith. And we take those concerns seriously.
Q: Mike, what's the status of the Guilin visit? There were heavy rains or something. Is it still on?
MR. MCCURRY: Our advance team reports that there have been very heavy rains and obviously a lot of flood damage, but that the community still is excited about the President coming and that the effects of the flooding from the last several days seem to be subsiding, and that should not at this point pose any interference. But they will keep an eye on it.
Q: The boat ride is on as well?
MR. MCCURRY: I don't know what adjustments they're making given the flooding that's occurred there. But it's obviously extensive flooding; it's been some of the worst that they've had in 50 years. I think four people have lost their lives and a number of people are homeless.
Q: Mike, in the hours and days since the two televised press conferences and the speech at the university, what kind of reaction or ramifications have you detected seeing as a result of those two telecasts?
MR. MCCURRY: I think we had some of our -- you mean here in China? Well, we spoke yesterday to that, or some of our top China folks tried to assess it. And I think it's a little bit early for us to make any preliminary conclusions on what the impact of those events are. I think they are extraordinary in that clearly that type of thing has not happened before. Anecdotally, we do believe that it has triggered some type of discussion within the body politic of China. But that is good in and of itself. Where it leads or what it amounts to or what additional things might happen as a result of that type of opening is something that's not entirely clear to us. Maybe it's not even clear to the Chinese authorities themselves. But it was clearly a useful thing for the people of China to have exposure to the views of the President of the United States. It was welcomed by the President and by our delegation. And we hope it signals some reconsideration of the degree to which this has been a very closed political culture. We hope so. We have no way of knowing whether it will be. But having made a conscious decision to be that open, it sometimes becomes hard to reverse decisions like that. So, hopefully, that will be something that will continue.
Q: In the pool report you were quoted as saying something to the effect -- I don't want to misquote you -- that as a result of this gesture by the Chinese, the U.S. has to be very careful or go out of its way to reward them, to pay them back --
MR. MCCURRY: No, no, no. That's not what I said and I want you to go back and look at that carefully. I said that there is some risk associated with the openness that President Jiang Zemin has allowed. And we recognize that and we obviously want to encourage openness and spirited public debate and find the right ways to do that and reward that type of openness. And there's a lot of different ways that that could happen.
Q: What did you mean by, reward that kind of open --
MR. MCCURRY: Well, to try to provide momentum for it, to try to encourage more discussion like it, to try to encourage progress on other fronts and to recognize that project as it achieves, clearly.
Q: -- after that also about minimizing the opportunity for those who may not agree with his decision --
MR. MCCURRY: That's correct. We understand, too, that that's a very complicated political dynamic that exists in this country and that there are no doubt within the ruling elite people who question some of the decisions that have been made associated with the President's trip, and that, as in any political environment, people will look to try to calculate their own opportunities. And so we obviously want to try to help the good guys as much as we can.
Q: -- is there some U.S. official going to Taiwan to brief going to Taiwan to brief --
MR. MCCURRY: Yes, he addressed yesterday that, consistent with our informal, unofficial relations, Mr. Bush, who is head of our coordination office, would provide a briefing at an appropriate point.
Q: On another subject, do you think Ken Starr should have put off Linda Tripp's testimony to --
MR. MCCURRY: I don't know enough about his inquiry to know what decisions he's made with respect to timing and what factors went into it. So I don't have any comment.
Q: How do you think that it would impact the investigation and this trip?
MR. MCCURRY: I have no way of speculating on that. It hasn't had any impact on our work here.
Q: In his two private occasions, tonight and tomorrow, is the gentleman, Mr. Wang Dao Han being invited? The last time Tony Lake tried to meet with him, I guess due to the weather he was not able to fly from Beijing to Shanghai. So will this time Mr. President himself or the senior staff going to meet with him?
MR. MCCURRY: I don't know the answer to that. I am not aware of any plans for that. His work is, of course, widely known in our government. Both his radio program and his newsletter are considered good, authoritative sources of information on the condition of workers in South China. But I'm not aware at this point of any plans for anyone in our delegation to see him.
Q: Mike, did that flag and the documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, get presented to the Chinese officials?
MR. MCCURRY: My understanding is that, as I indicated to you, that they were presented by our staff as they did the official exchange of gifts. I have to confess I never did track down what was exactly exchanged. I don't think we -- unless we put that out and I didn't know about it, I'd have to go find that out.
Q: Could you take that question?
MR. MCCURRY: Yes.
Q: And see if there was any response from the Chinese officials to that particular set of gifts.
MR. MCCURRY: I will. Secretary of Commerce, William Daley, who we're delighted to have with us as part of this delegation, who has been busy promoting economic opportunity for the citizens of the United States of America, is here and present with us. And it's an honor, sir, to have you here. Thanks.
SECRETARY DALEY: Thanks, Mike. Let me just for a few minutes make a couple of remarks and then obviously open it up. This is a very multifaceted trip by the President, lots of issues that he has been dealing with. Obviously, the commercial relationship between the United States and China is important, it is important to our economy. We have seen tremendous opportunities come about for U.S. businesses in China The growth of investment in China is enormous. Shanghai, I think, as a city -- if you look you see the new China and a different China from the other visits to parts of the country that we've gone to. We've had numerous successes in this trip. I think one of the most, for me, rewarding visits was to visit a brand new hospital that opened in Beijing. It was the first majority privately-owned hospital opened in China by women-owned business. The name of the company was Chindex, small company opened a 24-room hospital to bring American-type patient service to China. It's a small hospital, but I think it symbolizes a changing China and new opportunities for American businesses. We are all well aware of the large investments that have been made in China and we are also well aware of the market access issues that we've talked about repeatedly. And I have, as I've been here meeting with U.S. business representatives, been made once again well aware of the lack of opportunities in many ways for American businesses. But at the same time, every one of the businesses I spoke to, business leaders have indicated strongly that they believe that there is a change that has occurred over the last two years and it is extremely positive. We see opportunities in the aviation sector, as the aviation infrastructure is improved in China there will be tremendous opportunities for U.S. businesses. In the housing arena also, as they begin to privatize. Probably the most important sector, of course, is the infrastructure of China which needs to expand and grow -- whether it's bridges, power -- power development, bridges, roads, airports, a whole host of areas. I will be leading as the President announced in his list of items of this trip an infrastructure development mission early in 1999 of U.S. businesses and a number of federal agencies along with that trip, to look for opportunities for U.S. businesses to participate in this growing infrastructure of China. So we feel very positive about the commercial developments in this trip, look forward to the visit tomorrow of the President to the exchange and his speech tomorrow before the Chamber here in Shanghai. So I would open it up at this point to any questions which you may have.
Q: What kinds of themes do you expect the President to touch on?
SECRETARY DALEY: I think Mike's going to brief on the speech tomorrow, to be honest with you. Or someone else is. I know he said I was, and I told him when he asked me if I was going to brief on it I said, if I do, it will be a very short one. (Laughter.)
Q: As a result of this trip are the Chinese any closer to membership in the WTO?
SECRETARY DALEY: I would hope so. I think both Presidents statements on Saturday about their strong commitment to it -- but what has been said repeatedly by us, by Ambassador Barshefsky, by the President, is that it must be on commercially meaningful terms. It is not a political decision, it is a commercial decision.
Q: -- progress made as a result of this trip?
SECRETARY DALEY: I think the progress was made right before the trip in the negotiations between the Ambassador Barshefsky and the MOFTEC people. There was progress made there and I think it was substantial.
Q: Can you tell us what the obstacles are? Can you elaborate a little bit more on that, please?
SECRETARY DALEY: There's a whole host of them that I know the Ambassador has elaborated on. They relate to market access and the market must be open more. The offers that have been put forward just aren't sufficient at this point to allow us to move forward.
Q: Mr. Secretary, that's not just a U.S. decision, is it? Are there other countries involved in seeking --
SECRETARY DALEY: Yes, and they have the same concerns -- the European Union has the same concerns about the openness of this market. So it's not a deal that's done with the United States alone -- obviously, we're an important player but it's not --
Q: Would there still be a European --
SECRETARY DALEY: It could be. The odds are if the U.S. comes to terms then most of the world will be with us. But the bottom line is they also have to move.
Q: Could you describe for us how the satellite controversy back in the states affected either the tone or the outcome of any of your talks?
SECRETARY DALEY: No one mentioned it to me in any of our discussions at all. I don't think it had much of an impact, to be frank with you, with the people that we've talked to you, whether the governmental or it's not been raised by any of the businesspeople, U. S. businesspeople that I've talked to.
Q: You yourself and the President also mentioned that the skyrocketing U.S. trade deficit to China was unacceptable. Do you find anything that can make it acceptable now, or is there any concrete commitment made by the Chinese side that we would be able to see the shrinking of the deficit?
SECRETARY DALEY: I think there has been an acknowledgement that they understand that this has the potential to be a political issue, and that we do have a disagreement over the amount of the deficit. They believe it's much smaller than our figures. But the bottom line is, our exports have not grown anywhere near the degree that their exports to the United States have. But as far as concrete steps that have been taken in the last five days, no.
Q: Mr. Secretary, do you think that you've seen any progress in terms of the President's engagement policy politically over the past few days, with the discussions on human rights, his live telecasts, and so forth, very friendly meeting on Saturday. Do you think that any of the warming of the political side of the relationship will have some fungibility when it comes to the commercial side and spark them to be more compromising on market access questions?
SECRETARY DALEY: I think it will, and I'll base that primarily on the comments of the U.S. businesspeople that we've met with. They feel that this trip and the tone that the President has set, and obviously the fact that he went through with the trip after some criticism at home, was an incredibly important thing for them and for the opportunities that they see in China. We, in the commercial service operation department of Commerce, have a whole list of projects that we advocate on day in and day out in China. And most of the people who we advocate on behalf of that we've talked to feel that this trip will give them a substantial boost in their discussions as we go forward. So I think it does go a long way in helping with the commercial relationship and the opportunities for American businesses, absolutely.
Q: Why didn't you bring any business leaders with you? Why no business delegation?
SECRETARY DALEY: Well, I think the only pure business delegation that was ever taken on a presidential trip was when President Bush went to Japan with three auto-making -- auto manufacturer CEOs. There's been some business people on other trips, but I think the decision was to keep this strictly governmental, understandably.
Q: You took businessmen to Africa.
SECRETARY DALEY: A couple of businesspeople as part of a much larger delegation. Not just businesspeople, but a whole host of different -- people from different arenas, including Congress. But it was not -- there was never, in any of the discussions that I've had discussed as far as a business trip, many months ago, even when this trip was first talked about.
Q: There was a lot of anticipation here that the President might visit an American plant or factory, such as the GM plant or Motorola, and there were a lot of talks about that. Has anything like that been scheduled, and if not, why not? It seems like a good way to show how Americans are engaging here.
SECRETARY DALEY: No, I think -- a lot of the companies talked about trying to get the President to do a whole host of things, visit their plants, visit schools that they support, and a whole host of them. But I never was involved in any discussions about him coming out, but a lot of businesses were trying to get him out to them. I think that the message that the President has delivered, basically relating back to the question that was asked a few minutes ago, of greater cooperation is the most important thing that could happen in this and the symbolic visit to a U.S. business here would just, in my opinion, be nowhere near the impact -- positive impact for U.S. businesses that the overall message of engagement has been for them.
Q: As a result of the end-use site visits, are there any licenses in the pipeline that would now be approved, any specifics you can tell us about?
SECRETARY DALEY: Well, I think that's a framework. A lot has to be developed, to be frank with you, exactly how we move forward as far as end-use visits are concerned. But it's the first time in 13 years that the Chinese government -- the U.S. government's been pushing to try to get a discussion about end-use. We finally got a framework to move forward, on a case-by-case basis, look at the opportunity to have visits. So I think it's important as a start, but there's a long way to go in trying to get that.
Q: Do you anticipate that Commerce is going to have to hire more people to make these visits, or do you have --
SECRETARY DALEY: No, not at this point we don't. We have plenty of people.
MR. TOIV: Lael is going to get up now and give you a little idea of what we're doing tomorrow.
MS. BRAINARD: Hi. The President is going to spend a lot of tomorrow focusing on the economic reforms and economic dynamism in China and the related commercial opportunities and commercial ties that are growing between our two countries. This is something that Shanghai provides a fairly unique opportunity to do. I hope all of you have had a chance to wander around outside. Shanghai has been at the forefront of China's economic reforms. It has frequently been the test city for a lot of reforms that have been introduced then on to the national scene in China. And so this is a sort of unique opportunity for him to talk about the economic reforms and how they're changing ordinary citizens' lives in China, how they're creating opportunities for American businesses, and also how they are creating challenges that all of us face in our own economies, but in China in particularly noticeable ways. It will also give him an opportunity to wander around and to see some of those reforms having an effect on people's lives. In the morning he will give a set of remarks at the AM-CHAM. And there I think he'll want to focus a little bit more than he has in his previous remarks on the economic transformation that is really sweeping the landscape in China; talk about how American businesses have been part of that, the kinds of opportunities that are created for American business, but also very much the challenges that are faced by Chinese people who are changing their jobs, leaving state-owned enterprises, facing the private job market for the first time, trying to start their own businesses, owning their own companies, et cetera. And he'll also want to talk a little bit about, I would imagine, the sort of financial -- the broader financial context that China is facing, which he has discussed with both President Jiang and Premier Zhu when he was in Beijing. And then in terms of the day --
Q: What is AM-CHAM?
MS. BRAINARD: The American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, sorry. He'll be giving his remarks at the American Chamber in Shanghai, which I believe is the fastest growing American Chamber in all of Asia, which tells you something about Shanghai's dynamism. In terms of the other things that he will be doing over the course of the day, he'll probably stop by to see the Shanghai Stock Exchange for himself. As those of you who have seen it will know, it's really very modern. I believe it is the first of two stock exchanges in all of China, and obviously it's a real symbolism of the capitalist transformation of the economy. He will also visit with a number of entrepreneurs who represent the different types of Chinese citizens who are starting to own and run their own businesses -- from people who have been laid off from state enterprises to members of the younger generation who have really aspired from day one to go into the private sector. So it will be an opportunity for him to ask how they view the economic environment and what kinds of impediments they face in starting businesses, et cetera. He will also spend some time at a housing development, a fairly new housing development where he will meet with a Chinese family that is purchasing or has purchased its own home for the first time. The housing sector is undergoing really a fundamental transformation in China as well. This is one of the reforms that Premier Zhu has pointed to as something that he really wants to see undertaken starting this year. And I believe July 1 is an important date, that on that date work units, which are the traditional source of housing, subsidized rental housing, will phase out subsidized rental housing over time and mortgages will become more available to ordinary Chinese, so that, for the first time a lot of Chinese families will be able to choose where they want to live of right track first time and obviously that will free them up to look for the best economic opportunity, as well. So that's quite a dramatic change, but obviously it's going to play out over a long time horizon. So I think those are all the pieces of his day tomorrow. If anybody has any questions on any of them I'd be happy to answer.
Q: What about the speech, the themes of his speech?
MS. BRAINARD: The themes of his speech, I think he'll be talking about how China's economic reforms have changed the lives of ordinary citizens, expanding the kinds of personal freedoms that they have, the kinds of opportunities that has created for American businesses, the kind of challenges American businesses still face selling into the Chinese market -- which is something that he also raised in his government meetings in Beijing and which are an ongoing source of concern to our private sector -- and talking a little bit about the reform challenges ahead.
Q: Can you give us some figures? Do you have any numbers on how much has been invested in the real estate here in Shanghai and how important it is for the general development of the economy in China and whether America can count on that so that the Chinese economy can start to develop and help out, basically.
MS. BRAINARD: I, unfortunately, don't have numbers on the housing market in Shanghai. We could perhaps try to get some for you. I have seen a variety of estimates of how much stimulus the housing reforms would provide to the Chinese economy. But we don't have any analyses of those ourselves. I think they're sort of the ones that you will have seen in articles that are readily accessible to you. I haven't seen any independent economic analyses of those.
Q: You mentioned he'll say something about reform challenges ahead. What are some of those?
MS. BRAINARD: Well, I think China is in the midst of a quite fundamental transformation. Obviously the economy has changed massively in the last two decades. But they still have a long way to go in terms of reforming the state owned enterprises, restructuring the financial system -- the obvious kinds of things, creating a social safety net that is independent of the state owned enterprises.
Q: The current Japanese recession-depression started with the real estate bubble. Shanghai is the epitome of a different kind but nonetheless a big real estate problem for China with all this over building, these huge vacancy rates here especially. In your discussions here do you guys have any sense of how big a problem this is -- have a better idea and is this likely to trip up China's growth?
MS. BRAINARD: I don't have any sort of independent sources on that issue. I think we obviously have had real estate and financial problems in the past. I think loads of economies have experienced them. And one of the things that we are doing with the Chinese that is significant is we are trying to engage them on a variety of different areas where we might provide technical assistance based on our past experiences and expertise, among which is included the banking system.
Q: Thank you.
END 5:50 P.M.
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Clinton Remarks on Shanghai Radio Program
Following is a transcript of remarks by President Clinton today on a Shanghai radio program:
Studios of Shanghai Radio Shanghai, People's Republic of China 12:14 P.M.
PRESIDENT CLINTON: First of all, I want to thank the Mayor for welcoming me to Shanghai, and say I very much enjoyed my first morning here. We did go to the library, my wife and I did, and we met with a number of citizens from in and around Shanghai who are involved in one way or another in China's remarkable transformation. And they helped us a lot to understand what is going on in China. I also want to say a word of appreciation to President Jiang for the very good meeting we had in Beijing and for making it possible for me to reach out to the people of China through televising our press conference together, and then, of course, I went to Beijing University yesterday, Beida, and spoke with the students there and answered questions. And that was also televised. And then to be here in Shanghai, one of the very most exciting places in the entire world, to have the chance to begin my visit here with this radio program is very exciting. So I don't want to take any more time. I just want to hear from the questioners and to have a conversation so that when it's over, perhaps, both the American people and the people of China will understand each other better.
MR. ZUO: Mr. President, you already can see our TV screen -- right in front of you there are so many people waiting in line to talk to you. We're really happy about this. How about we just start right here, okay?
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Let's do it.
Q: I am in a foreign trading company in the city of Shanghai, and the question I'd like to ask of President Clinton is as follows: Right now, America is the number two trading partner of China and the President of the United States, in facing the Southeast Asian crisis today, and also as far as increasing the cooperation between our countries, what do you think and what would you like to do to make this better?
THE PRESIDENT: First of all, Mr. Fong, that is a very good question and it has occupied a major amount of my time since last year, when we saw the difficulties developing in Indonesia, in the Philippines, in Thailand, in Korea and, of course, in Japan. I would like to begin by saying I believe that China has done a very good job in holding its currency stable, in trying to be a force of stability during the Southeast Asian crisis. Secondly, we are working together, the U.S. and China, and we are working through the IMF to try to help all these countries stabilize their economies and then restore growth. But I think the last point I'd like to make is that we cannot see growth restored in Asia unless it is restored in Japan. Now, in Japan the people are about to have an election for the upper house of the Diet, so this is not an easy time for them. But the government is going to disclose in the next couple of days what it intends to do in the area of financial reform. If it is a good proposal and the confidence of the investors of the world is raised, then I believe you will see the situation begin to turn around and the pressure will be eased in China and we can see some economic growth come back to Japan and these other countries. It is very important to the United States and very important to China. We're working hard on it.
MR. ZUO: Yes, that's right, everybody should know that we've been working so hard, we in China have been working so hard to try to not devaluate the RMB. That would be a great pressure on us. Mayor, it seems to me that I remember that the United States has a lot of trade going very well with us here right now; is that right?
MAYOR XU: Yes, that's right, you're right about that. This year we had a lot of trade growth between us and the United States. It was up 30 percent in the first five months. To Shanghai, as far as imports and exports go, actually there's pretty much of a balance because in Shanghai we import a lot of equipment, high-tech stuff from the United States. We hope that our trade will continue to develop with the United States.
MR. ZUO: Okay, Mr. Fong. Today there are a lot of people wanting to talk to the President so we'll just end it here, okay? Mr. President, you were just at the library before this and now there's somebody from the library calling -- look at that. (Laughter.) They'd like to engage an exchange with you, okay?
Q: Mr. President, I am from the Shanghai Library. I work there and my name is Mr. Chung. When you were touring our library with Mayor Xu just now and talking with him when you were at the library I was very happy. I was so happy that you were there doing this. And the question that I'd like to ask you is as follows: Please, can you tell me, as far as getting the Shanghai Library and American libraries going for better and better exchanges, what can we do to increase the amount of exchange and cooperation between them?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, first of all, I think that we need to make sure that all of our major libraries are connected through the Internet so that we can ship information back and forth over the Internet that is not available in the libraries themselves. For example, if you have total Internet connection with the New York Public Library, which is our largest public library, then there would be things that you have they don't have, but you could send them over the Internet. There would be things that they have that you don't have that could be shared. So what I will do, since you have asked this question, is, when I get home, I will ask the people who are in charge of our major libraries -- the Library of Congress, which is the biggest library in Washington, D.C., it's our national library, and the New York Public Library, and perhaps one or two others, to get in touch with the Shanghai Library and see whether we can establish a deeper partnership. I was very impressed that the Shanghai Library has 300,000 members who actually pay the annual membership fee -- 10 yuan. And I think that -- we have many people using our libraries, too. I would also like to figure out, if I might, how these big libraries in America and China can better serve the small libraries in the rural areas, where people are so hungry for information and they don't have as much as we do, those of us who live in the bigger areas. So I will work on this.
Q: Okay. Thanks, Mr. President.
MR. ZUO: Mr. President was just saying that libraries, especially in the rural areas should expand what they can provide. We agree, not just for the people living in the city, but a lot of people are saying, our farmers, or those people living -- they want to read, too. Give them books to read. A lot of people -- what we're doing now is teaching them, we're bringing libraries to the countryside.
THE PRESIDENT: But as you know, you now have the computers with the Internet hookups, and if you have printers there, then people all over China can order articles out of the Shanghai Library and just print them out on the computer. So that all you have to have now is a hookup with a printer in the small libraries, in the smallest villages and anything in the Shanghai Library can be sent to them. Of course, it's more expensive if it's a book. But if it's just an article it's easy to print out, takes just a couple of minutes.
MAYOR XU: Yes, but we really have to take computer knowledge and spread it, right. It's very important here, computer-wise, we have to get everyone connected, connected to the Information Superhighway. For the countryside in China there are a lot of people that don't even have a power grid, that don't even have electricity there. So first we've got to get the power grid going, we've got to get that out to everyone. That's the first thing we've got to do, because I think, what I'd like to add here is that this library has like 300,000 people who have a library card. And every year they pay 10 RMB, or something like that. But they only take up five percent of the entire resources, they only make up five percent of the budget. And the government has to make up a lot of that. As the Mayor, I'm willing to put that money in. I think that's very important, the best investment you can make to improve the life and education and information situation for the people living in Shanghai. So I'm willing to do that. and also acquire the skills necessary to operate in the MR. ZUO: Right now we're talking about libraries. Look, here we have somebody talking about education issue. We have Mr. Wong on here and he'd like to ask Mr. President and the Mayor to talk about education in China and the United States.
Q: Distinguished Mr. Clinton and Mayor Xu, I am very happy that I was able to get in on this call. I am one of the college professors living in Shanghai and I'd like to ask a question, which is, you are both connected with education. That's your fate. You're both education type people. Mr. Clinton, since you've been in office you have been advocating education reform, and I think you, Mr. Xu, have been the president of a university. So can you both talk about educational exchanges and the future for them between the United States and China? That's the question I'd like to ask here.
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Well, first of all, let me say that we are working very hard in America to make sure that more of our own people go on to university, and also acquire the skills necessary to operate in the computer age. So, I have worked very hard to open the doors of universities to more people, to make sure that the cost of the education is not a bar to people going. Now, in addition to that, we want to promote more exchanges of students. I want more American students to go to other places in the world, including China, to study, to learn the language, to learn the culture, to understand the nation. And I very much want to bring even more students from around the world to the United States to study. So perhaps there's something we can do coming out of this trip -- the Mayor and I -- to have more exchanges with people from the Shanghai area, because I believe it's very important. And I think it will only grow more important as we move into this new century.
MAYOR XU: Oh, I very much agree with what President Clinton said about how important education is. And we have to let everybody have the access to education -- everyone have the privilege to have education. I agree. In Shanghai, the education is quite universal. It's more universal here than it is anywhere else in the country. We, right now, among our high school graduates, 60 percent of them get into colleges. But we right now would even like to raise that percentage. We'd like to work through radio education, TV education, or adult education, to try to fill up the extra 40 percent, to make up that gap. As for the education issue, I would like to talk a little bit here with the President about something. Let's talk about traditional Chinese education versus American education. We have a different way -- a different way of thinking about it. For example, in the Chinese education, we talk about the filling of information into the student, whereas in the United States, they try to make the students more able, they try to teach you how to have ability to do things. So a lot of tests -- Chinese students are very good at getting very good grades on tests, but not necessarily when it comes to scientific research. I think in this area, the two of us should try to reach a balance point. I think that's very important. Another thing I'd like to say here is that whether you're talking about the parents or the schools in China, we have very high standards for discipline. They have to work together, and they have to be disciplined. We have high standards in this area. And in the United States, I believe, they emphasize the students being free, they want to give them more freedom. So a lot of the professors in China think it's so hard to understand how it's going on there. They think it's such a messy, loud situation in the classes, or that it's not so organized. They think it's so weird. A lot of times when you ask questions here in China, the students are too shy to raise their hands and ask the questions, because they're used to listening to the teacher speak, not listening -- to participating. So what I think, in educational exchanges, a good basis for these exchanges would be that we have to first talk about our basic thoughts, our basic philosophy towards education. I think both types of education have good points to them, but I think we have to learn from each other.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, actually, here's a case where I think we would greatly benefit from working together, because there is no perfect system. If you just start with the issue of discipline, we know that without a certain amount of discipline and order in the classroom, it's impossible for learning to occur. We also know if there is too much order, where everything is structured, the child may close up and not be open to information and to learning. So we have tried all kinds of things. In our country, for example now, many of our schools are going back to an older practice of requiring the students to wear uniforms every day, as is the case in many other countries, on the theory that it makes people more disciplined, it also gives a spirit of equality. This is sweeping our country, really, and doing very well. On the other hand, we want enough freedom in the classroom so that the children have the confidence they need to participate in the class discussion. Now, on the second matter, which I think is very important, does education emphasize drilling information into the head of the student, or should it emphasize sort of creative or critical thinking? I think the answer is, clearly, both. How can you be a creative thinker if you don't know something in the first place. First, you must know what you need to know. You must have the information. On the other hand, if you look at how fast things are changing -- in this Information Age the volume of facts in the world is doubling every five years. That's a stunning thing. The volume of information is doubling every five years. Therefore, it's very important not only what you know today, but what you are capable of learning and whether you can apply what you know to solving new problems. So I think what we need is a careful balance between making sure our students have the bedrock information without which you can't make those decisions, but also learn to be creative in the way you think to deal with the exploding information of the world.
MAYOR XU: Yes, after listening to you talk, Mr. President, I think you have a very deep understanding of education. I also agree with what you're saying. So if the Chinese and the United States want to engage in exchanges, first of all, we have to have a new consensus on our concept of education. And that way we can have better exchanges. Recently, there was an example we had where we had some American teachers come here to teach high school. And a lot of parents didn't like it because the teachers didn't give enough tests. So they could speak English okay, but they couldn't pass the tests. So a lot of the parents in China didn't think this was the right way. A lot of times what we do here is we make them memorize a lot of grammar and make them memorize a lot of vocabulary -- that's our way of doing it. So I think we need to have more exchanges in this area.
THE PRESIDENT: But, to be fair, we need more exchanges, too, because what sometimes happens in America is, if you don't have pretty high standards for measuring whether everybody knows what they should know, then the very best students may do better under our system and they go on and win the Nobel Prizes or they create the new companies, but we leave too many behind because we don't make sure they know. So I think there's something we have to learn from each other and we really should work on this. Because every advanced society -- the Japanese could join with us in this, the Russians could join with us in this. We all have the same interests here in finding the right balance in our educational systems.
MR. ZUO: Look here, the President and the Mayor have been having such an enthusiastic discussion about education, even I'm jumping into this discussion. Usually when I do a program like this education becomes an issue a lot, becomes a topic that we discuss. But the topic that comes -- when we have an issue like this I want to get into, I want to talk to the President about it. How about investment in education? A lot of times it's a slow process. You have to invest in a project or a company, though, it's fast -- you can get a payback right away. So a lot of people think, oh, I don't know what to do in this area, should I invest in education, because it's a long payback period. What do you think and how do you -- what do you do in this area?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, it is a long payback period but it has the highest payback of any investment. If you invest in a child's education -- maybe they're five years old when they start, and maybe they're in their early 20s when they get out of university -- that's a long time. And you have to hire all these teachers along the way and pay for all the laboratory facilities and all that. But there's nothing more important. And then the young person gets out into world in which ideas create wealth and gives back to society many times over. So people shouldn't look at it just as one person investing in another; it ought to be China investing in its future, the United States investing in its future, together investing in a peaceful, stable, prosperous world. Education, ideas, information -- they give us the capacity to lift people out of poverty and to lift people out of the ignorance that make them fight and kill each other, and to give us an understanding about how to solve the environmental problems of the world, which are great -- this is worth investing in. It's more important than everything else. Yes, it takes a long time to pay out in the life of one child. But the payouts for a country are almost immediate.
MR. ZUO: Yes, that's right. So, in other words, we have to have far-reaching and ambitious goals. We have to look toward the future. We have to make investments in the long-term. The same thing for the Sino-U.S. relationship -- we have to invest and look toward the future. Okay, how about we talk about a question here that everyone seems to be very interested in. Somebody wants you to predict who is going to win the World Soccer Cup. Can you do that? In a minute we're going to ask you this, we're going to test you on this question. Get ready, get prepared.
Q: Hi. My name is Lee. Here is the question that my friends and I want to ask. We're very happy and we welcome you here. We're very happy about your visit. We noticed that you've been involved in a lot of activities and you seem to very healthy, and you seem to have a very nice figure, Mr. President. And we like a lot of sports, too, in our university. We're into sports. So I'd like to ask you, Mr. President, first of all, when you were in college, which sports did you like to play? That's the first question. The second question I'd like to ask, if you could answer, Mr. President, is how do you maintain your energy in your work? And then, also, the last thing I'd like to ask, can you predict who's going to win, which team is going to win the World Soccer Cup?
MR. ZUO: Oh, yes, so many questions. You threw a lot of questions at him all at once.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, when I was in college, I liked to play basketball, which is very popular in America, and I liked to job. I have jogged -- I am a runner, you know, and I did that for most of the last almost 30 years. Then, about a year and half ago I hurt my leg, and I couldn't run for several months, and I began to work on the Stairmaster. You know, it's the machine, you find them in a lot of these gyms. You walk up and down stairs. And I do that quite a lot now because it's quicker than running. And I play golf. I like golf very much. It's my favorite sport. Even though it doesn't burn a lot of calories, it makes my mind calm. So I like it. Now, on the World Cup, it's hard for me to predict. I will say this -- the World Cup is now becoming important to Americans in the way it's important to other countries, because soccer came rather late to America because we had football and basketball. Now, more and more of our children are playing soccer. And I think the World Cup is a great way of bringing people together. You know, the United States has been estranged from Iran for a long time, but we had this great soccer game and they beat us fair and square -- it was heartbreaking for Americans, but they won a great, fascinating soccer match and they eliminated us from the World Cup. I'm not an expert in soccer, but I think the Brazilians are always hard to beat. I've watched them play a lot and they're very good.
MR. ZUO: So since we're talking about soccer, now even I am inspired to ask some questions here. Everybody knows that the United States and Iran was a competition that everyone was interested in in the World Soccer Cup. Everybody was thinking about that time a long time ago that the ping-pong diplomacy, those 20-something years ago, that started the relationship between the United States and China. Now the question we'd like to ask you, Mr. President, is, is it possible that we can do soccer diplomacy in this area? Can you give us some information in this area, because we here in Shanghai are very interested in international issues?
THE PRESIDENT: I think it could be possible. The Iranians like wrestling very much, and we have exchanged wrestling team visits. And they treated our American wrestlers with great respect and friendship, which meant a great deal to me. And then we were honored to receive their wrestlers. So I think -- the new President of Iran seems to be committed to not only lifting the economic and social conditions of his people, but also having a more regular relationship with the rest of the world, in accordance with international law and basically just conditions of good partnership. So I'm hoping that more will come out of this. But I think Americans were riveted by the soccer game. And they were impressed because we were supposed to win the game and we had lots of chances and our players played very well -- they played very well, they had lots of chances, they could have scored eight times or something -- but the Iranians had two fast breaks and they played with such passion and they had those two chances and they capitalized on both of them. And we respect that. It was very good.
MR. ZUO: Of course we hope for peace between our two countries, but not only that, we hope for peace all over the world, right? Okay, how about now let's continue to get some calls here. We have caller number four, who has a very interesting question here. Go ahead. Q: Hi. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, Mayor Xu.
MAYOR XU: Hi, how are you?
Q: Hi. I'm just a regular citizen here of the city of Shanghai. I am just an employee at a certain place in Shanghai. I'd like to ask a question. Right now in Shanghai we are encouraging people to have private cars. Is this going to make the traffic conditions worse, more crowded in Shanghai? And also is this going to make more environmental pollution for our city? I'd like to ask the mayor this question.
MAYOR XU: You've asked quite a good question here. We at the city government are just in the process of considering this. We are often debating this issue when we talk about traffic in the city because there are 13 million people in the city of Shanghai and it is very, very densely populated. So our basic policy is to develop the public transportation system -- that's our priority -- like the subway system, buses, all these types of public transportation. Of course, though, I would just like to correct you for a second. We didn't encourage people to buy, private citizens to buy cars. We just relaxed the regulations on and the restrictions on individuals buying cars. Because in the past few years there have been some citizens who have bought apartments, then also they bought cars. And they were living far away and they didn't have a car, so they needed to have a car. And then there were other people who bought houses that you Westerners live in that are farther away, and they thought that it would be better if they had own cars. So in the past few years what we did was we had like an auction, sort of, on the license plate that you could get for your car, and the amount you had to pay for the license plate was pretty much as much as the car itself cost. So, as far as this goes, we've relaxed the restrictions. The government has decided pretty much to relax it to maybe 10,000 cars. As for how much this is going to affect the traffic situation, we still have to try to -- whatever the situation, we have to meet the needs of the people at all different income levels. And as for the environmental question, we have to use unleaded gas. I think leaded gas should not be used in Shanghai. And then by 2000, we're also going to have use purifiers, these filters -- these filters that will make the emissions that come out of the cars up to standards. We'll use these methods to control the situation, because right now, we have, like, I think only 700,000 or so cars, less than in Beijing, less than in Tokyo, less than in Hong Kong. And our roads also need improvement. But what the most important is that we need to manage -- we need to the "software" of how to managed the roadwork system. We have to know how to manage better the roads, the road system. For instance, for the one-way roads, we have to have maybe some roads that are not -- some will be one way, some will not allow you to park or stop, things like that, measures like that will help us improve the traffic situation. I really understand what you're thinking. As the Mayor, I'm also afraid of there being too many cars. Thank you very much for asking that question. Do you have any other questions that you want to ask?
MR. ZUO: Even though Mr. President is here, look at this -- some of the people here are still interested in asking questions of the Mayor about their city, because they're interested and they're excited.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, they should be. I mean, that's a very basic thing. I would like to comment on one thing the questioner asked, because I was impressed that he is concerned that if everyone has a private car, the air pollution will grow worse. Let me say, this is a big problem everywhere in the world. But I once told President Jiang, I said, my biggest concern is that China will get rich in exactly the same way America got rich, but you have four times as many people, so no one will be able to breath, because the air pollution will be bad. Now, one of the things that you need to know is that when a car, an automobile burns gasoline, about 80 percent of the heat value of the gasoline is lost in the inefficiency of the engine. But they are now developing new engines, called fuel injection engines, where the fuel goes directly into the engine and it is about four times more efficient. So I hope that within a matter of just a few years, in the U.S., in China, and throughout the world, all these engines will be much, much less polluting. And that will be very good for the health of the people of China and for the health of world environment.
MAYOR XU: Correct. That's a good thing. We, right now, are in the process of thinking about natural gas, LNG, that is, using it for cars, for taxis --
THE PRESIDENT: Very good.
MAYOR XU: -- for buses. And at the same time, even for personal motorcycles. We're thinking of making them electric instead of gasoline.
MR. ZUO: Mr. President, we were just talking about cars a second ago, and do you agree that, as for the development of cars, including in Shanghai and in China, we shouldn't make the same mistakes that you guys made in America necessarily, we should do it as suits the conditions in China, the development of the automobile market?
THE PRESIDENT: Absolutely. I think, for one thing, you should be much more disciplined than we were about making sure you have good, high-quality mass transit, because in the cities where we have good mass transit, people use it. So, if you have good mass transit, then I think people should be free to have cars, and it's a nice thing to have, but they won't have to drive them so much and you won't have the pollution problems. Then I think the city, as the Mayor said, can set a good example. You can have electric vehicles, you can have natural gas vehicles. And then, as I said, within a few years, I believe all of us will be driving cars that, even if they use gasoline, will be much, much more efficient. Otherwise, if we don't do these things, the air pollution will be terrible and it will create public health problems that will cost far more than the benefits of the automobile. You don't want that. And you can avoid it. You can avoid the mistakes we made with technology and good planning.
Q: Yes, thanks.
MR. ZHU: The time has gone so fast. I would love if we could make the time go slower. Okay, let's look -- there's somebody names Ms. Tong, number three.
Q: Hi, Mr. Mayor and Mr. President. I work at the Shanghai gymnasium, and I'd like to ask of the two of you -- or I should say I'd like to tell the two of you something. In 1996 I went to America and I studied a little bit for 10 months there. And I felt like it really enriched me and I felt like the United States was a beautiful, rich and very open country -- especially I went to certain places where there were some gardens and pretty places. And I felt so at home when I saw these things, that they sort of reminded me of the Orient, of the Eastern places. And I thought, oh, this is in the United States? I'm glad to see this. But what I felt bad was that my kid was studying at a school there and a lot of the American friends there, American teachers there thought that Cantonese was Mandarin -- because a lot of the early immigrants, Chinese immigrants to the United States were Cantonese. I said, no, this is Mandarin. This is the common language we speak in China. I was hoping that you could have more exchanges -- whether it's the people or the government -- to get to know each other better, to get to know even more and get closer and closer and closer. I think in this way, the Mayor and Mr. President, you're getting closer and closer, and even if we don't have any better conditions I would still like to know, what are you guys planning to do to improve and increase the cooperation and the amount that we get in touch in the future between the two of us?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, first of all, I perfectly agree with you. I think that this is a very important point. That's why I came to China. That's why I am very pleased that the press conference I had with President Jiang was televised and why I did a question and answer session at Beijing University yesterday and why I'm doing this today. I think that we need more of this. And as I said to an earlier caller, when I go home I intend to see what I can do about sending more Americans to China and trying to make it possible for more Chinese to come to America. Because the more we do these things the more we will be able to work through our differences and build a common future. And, besides that, it will make life more interesting and more fun.
Q: Okay. Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor and Mr. President.
MR. ZUO: All right. Let's look at number two. Hi, I'm very sorry to make you wait so long.
Q: Mr. President and Mr. Mayor, hi. I am engaged in science and technology and I love what I do. And thank you very much for what you're doing and you're talking about today. I'd like to ask you today, right now we are in the Information Age, we are in the knowledge age. We're also in the economic age, where everyone is worried about the world economy and the development of it. What I'd like to know is, as far as expanding, promoting cooperation in science and technology between the United States and China, what are you planning to do?
THE PRESIDENT: We have had for many years a U.S.-China science and technology forum -- (inaudible) -- some research that has helped us to predict extreme weather events. And it has helped us to predict the coming of earthquakes. We have also had scientific research which has helped us to uncover the cause of a condition in newborn babies, called spina bifida, that is caused in part by the mother's having not enough folic acid. And that has helped us to have more healthy children. My wife, two days ago, talked to a mother whose first child was born with this condition and the second child was born perfectly normal because of the research done by our people together. So we have made a commitment, President Jiang and I, to identify other areas where we will do more work. And if you or anyone listening to this program, if you have any ideas you ought to send them to this station or the Mayor; they will send them on to me -- because I think we should do more science research together.
Q: Okay. So we've talked about a lot of things here. And in my mind since the President of the U.S. has stepped off the plane in China there's something that I've been thinking. I don't know if you've noticed -- I very much admire the courage that President Clinton has. This time his visit to China was opposed by some congressmen and senators. And we think that that's -- we call that people that didn't cooperate or weren't in harmony with his thinking -- but he still came anyway, he came to China. What I'd like to ask here is, after this visit -- right now, of course, it's only part of it -- but up until this point in time, up until today, can you tell me, do you have enough courage when you go back to the United States to convince the people, the nonbelievers, that what you're doing is right? Do you have facts and materials and information? If you don't have enough facts, don't have enough materials, I can provide you with more.
THE PRESIDENT: I believe that what the American people have seen already -- that our media has reported back on my meeting with President Jiang, and the press conference, yesterday, the meeting with the students, today, the meeting with the citizens before I came over here, and this -- it clearly shows that whatever differences we have in our systems and the differences of opinion we have about what human rights policy ought to be, what the scope of freedom of religion ought to be -- any of these differences, that we still have a lot in common and by working on the things we have in common we may also come to an understanding about how to manage our differences. And I believe that the forces of history will bring about more convergence in our societies going forward. The Mayor and I were talking earlier about the education systems and how, in the end, we need to educate young people with the same kinds of skills. And I believe, as I have said repeatedly, that high levels of personal freedom are quite important to the success of a society in the Information Age, because you need people who feel free to explore, to state their views, to explore their own convictions, and then live out their own dreams, and that this will add to the stability of a society by enriching it. That's what I believe. And we've been able to have these conversations here. And the government and the people of China have been very open. Also, yesterday, the students were very open in asking me some rather probing, difficult questions. And all of this, I think, is good. So I think the American people will see when I go home that this was a good thing that I came here. And it's a good thing that we have a working relationship.
Q: I work in one of the government departments and my name is Wong. And the question I'd like to ask you is as follows: As for Chinese accession into the WTO and the negotiations, these negotiations have been going on for several years and I believe that the United States has an attitude in these talks which is very important, which everyone will really look to. So I hope that the United States will have a more positive attitude to let China get into the WTO as soon as possible. As far as this issue goes, can we have President Clinton talk a little bit about what you think about it? Thanks.
THE PRESIDENT: Yes. First of all, obviously I think it is important for China to be a member of the World Trade Organization because China is a major economic power that will grow only larger over time. Secondly, it should be obvious that we in the United States want to support China's economic growth. After all, we are by far the largest purchaser of Chinese exports. No other country comes close to the percentage of exports that we purchase in the United States. So we support your growth. But we believe that when China becomes a member of the WTO, it must do so on commercially reasonable terms; that is, you must allow access to your markets, not only of American products, but of others as well, and there should be some open investment opportunities. And all of this should be done, however, in recognition of the fact that China is still an emerging economy, so you are entitled to have certain longer timetables and certain procedural help in this regard. So what we're trying to do in America is to say, okay, China should be in the World Trade Organization, but it has to be a commercially realistic set of understandings when you have memberships, and yet we owe you the right to a reasonable period of transition as you change your economy. And I think we'll get there. I think we'll reach an agreement before long.
MAYOR XU: We very much hope that what Mr. President just said will come to fruition. Of course, we're hoping for that day; we're waiting for that day.
MR. ZUO: Okay, Mr. President, you've noticed and you've seen that there are so many people waiting in line on the screen here to talk to you. There is not enough time; that's obvious. But somebody has asked you that in this constructive strategic relationship to promote world peace, they want to know what kind of meaning this has. They also want to know what the United States -- what else the United States can do in the Southeast Asian financial crisis, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There are a lot of questions, but I think in the interest of time -- well, I think that in the future we might have other times to do this again, but I think for the time let's not take any more calls. A minute ago when I was talking with you, when I was talking to the President, he said that in the United States, in America, he often gets in contact with the citizens, but he's never done this type of program outside the United States. It's right, this was the first time? Yes, the first time. So what I'd like to know is, what do you think? What impressions do you have of this first time?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, first of all, I have enjoyed it very much. I want to thank all the people who called in with their questions and tell you that I'm sorry we didn't get to answer more questions. But it's always the way. People everywhere want to engage their leaders in dialogue. And so I thank you for your questions. They were very good ones. And if I didn't get to answer your question, I'm sorry. But this has been a historic occasion. And perhaps now when I travel to other countries, I will ask them if they will do the same thing. This was a very good idea.
MR. ZUO: Thanks. Just now, Mayor Xu, you should also have come to see that in our program the people listening also hope that you will come back to this program. They'll engage in an exchange with you.
MAYOR XU: Okay, fine. As long as you arrange it, I'll come. I myself, as the mayor, that should be part of my job. That's an important part of my job, to be in close contact with the citizens of the city.
MR. ZUO: So after doing such a program with the President, did you think it was -- wasn't it fun? Didn't you have a good time?
MAYOR XU: Yes, it was very, very nice. I liked the way the President answered a lot of the questions. He has a lot of far-reaching thoughts, and he has a lot of far sight. I learned a lot from him.
MR. ZUO: The time went so fast. Look at that, it's pretty much almost gone. But we'll remember it forever, and we hope that the friendship between China and the United States will last forever, just as President Clinton said. We hope it will be just as long as the Great Wall. And I would like now, for the Shanghai radio station and on behalf of this program, I'd like to really express my heartfelt thanks to the President and the Mayor for participating in this program. Thank you very much to those in the audience. Bye.
THE PRESIDENT: Good-bye. Thank you.
END
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Clinton Remarks at Reception Hosted by Mayor of Shanghai
Following is a transcript of remarks by President Clinton at a reception in his honor hosted by the Mayor of Shanghai:
Shanghai Museum Shanghai, People's Republic of China
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor, Madame Xu, to Museum Director Ma, ladies and gentlemen. It is a great honor for my wife and members of our family, six members of the United States Congress, and many members of our Cabinet and other American citizens to be here in Shanghai tonight. This museum is a fitting symbol of what I have seen in China these last few days -- the magnificence of your ancient past and your brilliant future. I have seen a nation rising in its influence in the world, with China's leadership for stability in the Asian economic crisis; and China's leadership for peace on the Korean Peninsula and in working with us to help to deal with the difficulties caused by the nuclear tests by India and Pakistan. I have seen the Chinese people rising, millions of them, out of poverty; millions more finding interesting work of their own choice, pursuing more educational opportunities, having more say in their local affairs. I saw a great example of that when the Mayor and I did a talk radio show this morning here in Shanghai. And I was especially impressed when one of the callers called in and said, " don't want to talk to the President, I want to talk to the Mayor about traffic problems in Shanghai. (Laughter.) Shanghai is truly the place where East meets West. Over the last 150 to 200 years, the West has not always been the best of partners in Shanghai, but now we have a good partnership. I am especially pleased that a United States firm, RTKL, will design the new Scienceland Museum here. I hope that is a symbol of the kinds of positive, good things we will do together in the future. I also want to say a special word of appreciation to your mayor. Mr. Mayor, I heard -- this may not be a true story, but don't tell me if it's not -- (laughter) -- I heard that years ago when your predecessor, Zhu Rongji, invited you to head Shanghai's Central Planning Commission you told him you hated the whole idea of central planning. And Zhu replied, then you're exactly the man I want for the job. (Laughter.) Now we see you unleashing this city's great potential, cutting red tape, fighting corruption, protecting the environment, spurring an artistic revival. You are making Shanghai a place the world looks to for commerce, culture and people of different walks of life thriving together. Mr. Mayor, in 1996, when I asked the American people to give me another term as President of the United States, the theme of my campaign was, building a bridge to the 21st century. In Shanghai, you are building that bridge to the 21st century, and we want to build it with you. Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause.)
END
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FOCUS-Clinton urges China to respect human rights
By Steve Holland
BEIJING, June 29 (Reuters) - U.S. President Bill Clinton, addressing the university that gave birth to China's 1989 pro-democracy movement, appealed to Beijing on Monday to grant greater freedom to the Chinese people, arguing that "freedom strengthens stability."
But in a lively question-and-answer period with students Clinton was asked to defend human rights practices in the United States, and he admitted that his own country remains burdened by racial discrimination, crime and other afflictions.
"We are still not perfect," he said.
Clinton's speech at Peking University, hotbed of the dissent that was crushed by Chinese authorities on June 4, 1989 at Tiananmen Square, was broadcast live on state television.
It was a second remarkable concession by communist authorities, who had allowed millions of Chinese to watch live a post-summit news conference on Saturday where Clinton and Chinese President Jiang Zemin exchanged frank views on a range of subjects from human rights to Tibet.
Applause erupted in the packed hall inside the university library building when Clinton denied -- in response to a question whether he was hiding anything behind his smile -- that he had ulterior motives in seeking a friendlier relationship between the United States and China.
"I want a partnership. I'm not hiding another design behind a smile. That's what I really believe," he said.
Praising China as an ancient culture whose "greatest days are still ahead," Clinton called for a fuller partnership between the United States and China to tackle problems such as the budding nuclear arms race between India and Pakistan and the Asian economic crisis.
He said he had felt the "steady breeze of freedom" emerging in China during his nine-day visit but nonetheless believed deeper changes were needed to ensure individual liberties for China's 1.2 billion people.
"We believe, and our experience demonstrates, that freedom strengthens stability, and helps nations to change," he said.
Jiang had said in the leaders' televised exchanges on Saturday that the Tiananmen Square crackdown was necessary to preserve China's stability.
Clinton insisted the United States was not trying to impose its ideals on China.
"But we are convinced that certain rights are universal, not American rights or European rights or rights for developed nations ... the right to be treated with dignity, the right to express one's opinion, to choose one's own leaders, to associate freely with others, and to worship or not, freely, however one chooses," he said.
Several students were critical and expressed suspicion of the United States.
Clinton denied America was threatening China by selling arms to Taiwan or by maintaining a security relationship with Japan.
"You ask me, does the United States want to contain China? The answer is no,'' he said.
"I believe it would be far better for the people of the United States to have a partnership on equal, respectful terms with China in the 21st century, than to have to spend enormous amounts of time and money trying to contain China..."
China considers Taiwan a breakaway province and is suspicious that the United States supports its independence.
"Our policy is that any weapons sales to Taiwan must be for defensive purposes only. China must not believe we are in any way trying to undermine our own 'one China' policy," Clinton said.
Afterward, White House spokesman Mike McCurry said it was encouraging that China again had allowed a presidential event to be televised live.
"This demonstrates the greater willingness by the Chinese authorities to open this society to political debate," he said.
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Clinton takes media message to Shanghai
By William Kazer
SHANGHAI, June 30 (Reuters) - U.S. President Bill Clinton, charged up by vigorous exchanges with the Chinese over America's political beliefs and social values, took his media message to the business capital of China on Tuesday.
After unique exposure on state-run national television for his appearances in Beijing following his summit with President Jiang Zemin, Clinton was to take part in a Shanghai radio phone-in.
The audience would be much smaller than the millions of Chinese homes across the country that the president reached with his robust debate with Jiang and a no-holds-barred dialogue with students at Peking University, but the president seemed assured of some more lively argument.
Shanghai Radio 990's weekday show "Citizens and Society," hosted by local celebrity Zuo Anlong, is popular and as the students demonstrated on Monday the Chinese are not backward in speaking their minds to the leader of the Western world.
Clinton on Monday argued passionately for human rights and a "new relationship" with China before more than 1,000 students at Peking University, where the 1989 democracy movement flourished until it was crushed by tanks in Tiananmen Square.
His audience gave him a tough grilling following the keynote speech of his nine-day state visit, the first by a U.S. president since the massacre.
One skeptic asked if his friendly smiles masked a plot to "contain" China.
Another challenged him on America's own human rights record, prompting Clinton to concede problems of drugs, crime and racial discrimination.
Clinton began his first full day in Shanghai with a freewheeling discussion on "Shaping China for the 21st Century" with community leaders at Shanghai's library, said to be the third biggest in Asia with 40 million books.
"For us this is a very exciting opportunity to come here, to see what is going on and hopefully come to grips with the areas where the United States and China can cooperate, the areas where we still have difficulties and how we might not only manage those differences but work together to try to come to some kind of agreement," he said.
The president told the students yesterday that "freeminds" was the message for the new millennium.
The American president has had unprecedented access to China's mass media since his post-summit news conference with Jiang.
China's television viewers, used to the tightly controlled official version of events, have not seen such open displays of opposing views since the heady days of 1989 -- and certainly never have seen an American president displayed in such raw and vivid detail.
The president's two-day stay in business-obsessed Shanghai may not cause the same national stir on the political front.
Clinton was expected to drum on as well about America's current world-beating formula for economic success.
Shortly after stepping down from Air Force One at Shanghai's Hongqiao airport late on Monday, Clinton, his wife Hillary and their daughter Chelsea were driven off for an evening tour along the water front financial district, the Bund.
It was the booming business capital of Asia in the 1920s and 1930s before war and communist revolution knocked it back in time and Hong Kong took over its financial glory.
But Shanghai is making a comeback.
Many in Hong Kong, absorbed back into China a year ago after 150 years of British rule, fear its growing economic muscle and business vibrancy.
Clinton on Wednesday will visit the symbol of the city's financial prowess, the sleek $150 million stock exchange building.
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Clinton breaks Tiananmen taboo, but for how long?
By Benjamin Kang Lim
BEIJING, June 29 (Reuters) - China's tiny band of dissidents labored for nine years without success to break a political taboo barring public debate on the Tiananmen Square massacre. U.S. President Bill Clinton's visit put the issue on Chinese national television and into millions of homes in one afternoon when he debated with President Jiang Zemin at a news conference following their summit on Saturday. And, again on live TV, Clinton argued for personal freedom on Monday at Peking University, a hotbed of pro-democracy protests that were crushed by the army on June 4, 1989.``The impact is very big,'' said veteran dissident Ren Wanding, who was released in 1996 after seven years in prison for his role in the 1989 demonstrations. "Since the presidents of the two countries can publicly discuss June 4 on television, ordinary people throughout the country can also publicly discuss it in future,'' he told Reuters. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, were killed when soldiers backed by tanks and machineguns crushed the democracy movement. Hundreds more were rounded up and leaders fled abroad. Fear gripped the nation after the crackdown, and until Saturday discussion on the subject was limited to between family members and close friends in private. "Generally, ordinary people do not dare publicly discuss June 4,'' said Jiang Qisheng, a dissident jailed for 1- years without trial for his activities in 1989.``But this time ordinary people are talking about it like they have never before.' The dissidents agreed that the live broadcasts would help to make China more open and free. But dissident Jiang had reservations. "One or two live broadcasts cannot resolve major problems,'' he said. ``Eating a spoonful of food will not make one fat.' As Clinton neared the end of his trip, the dissidents said they suspected the window his visit had opened to televised political debate would quickly be closed again. Chinese authorities are worried about ``peaceful evolution''-- the demise of communism due to creeping Western influence. "It's a risk,'' Jiang, the dissident, said of the live broadcasts. ``It won't happen again.' He and other dissenters said China was not about to overturn its official verdict that the 1989 demonstrations were a "counter-revolutionary rebellion." On the other hand, official language has mellowed in recent years and the demonstrations are now referred to as a "political disturbance." Ren said the Communist Party agreed to air the Clinton-Jiang news conference and Clinton's keynote speech live because it was confident its grip on power would not be threatened. "It's not worried at all. The Communist Party believes one party politics will continue. It is in control of the army,'' he said. "It is not afraid of any democracy movement."
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WH Briefing by Kristoff, Bader, Roth, Shirk
Following is a transcript of a June 29 White House press briefing in Beijing by Sandy Kristoff, senior director of Asian affairs, NSC; Jeff Bader, director of Asian affairs, NSC; Stanley Roth, assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs, and Susan Shirk, deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs:
Shangri-la Hotel Beijing, People's Republic of China
MR. MCCURRY: I wanted you to get some sense -- when we talk about constructive engagement, I think it's important to look at the nuts and bolts of that. And I'm delighted that we have some of the people who have been working in and around the summit to tell you a little bit more about some of the substantive achievements of the President's time here. We're about halfway through the President's visit to China, and some extraordinary things have happened in the course of the visit, things that I'm not sure that I can explain or any of us can explain entirely. And certainly what's happened during this trip -- the press conference, the national televised address the President made to the people of China today -- could likely have some profound impact on the way the political culture of China adapts to the changes that are underway here -- clearly underway. When the President of the United States is trying to find out more and learn more, when the Secretary of State is trying to find out more and learn more, and when the National Security Advisor is trying to bring it all together for proper briefings of the President and others, they turn to those in our government who are really the best experts that we have and who might arguably be the best experts anywhere on what is occurring in this very rapidly changing and dynamic society. There's a lot that you all have asked those of us who are sort of political appointees of the President about what's happening on this trip, what the President has accomplished, what is the meaning of some of the truly historic things we've seen, but we decided it would be useful for you to have an opportunity just to ask questions of those that we would ask questions of when we're trying to figure it out. And so, for that reason, departing from what is the usual custom here, we're going to bring you the people who have actually been doing all the work at this summit and who I think, now that the substantive portions of the meetings here in Beijing have concluded, can take a breather for a second and step back and reflect on some of it. So I'm delighted to introduce in no particular order -- and they don't plan to speak. I think they're more interested in hearing what your observations and questions are, because they've been wrestling with it themselves -- but available to you now are Sandy Kristoff, who is the Senior Director of Asian Affairs at the National Security Council; Jeff Bader, the very hardworking peripatetic Director of Asian Affairs at the National Security Council; a second time around in the administration, Stanley Roth, who is the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, previously served at the National Security Council himself; and Susan Shirk, who is the Deputy Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs at State. These are our best China hands and are now in your hands. They reserve the right to disagree with each other.
Q: It seems to me that one obvious question is, do you think that the debate, such as it was, on Saturday, and the President's address today reverberates and causes an impact here in China, or is it just an isolated event and we go back to business as usual as soon as the President is gone?
MS. KRISTOFF: I think the debate that happened at the joint press conference and the President's speech at Beida were extraordinary events. I think they were heard widely by not only the American public back home, but by, more importantly, the Chinese people. And I think what it is is evidence of the way in which the President's policy has worked and has been successful in terms of engagement, because what engagement really means is that you can work through your differences, continue to agree to disagree, and continue to fight, not pull any punches, and at the same time, produce results and cooperate in areas where you do have shared interests. And I think that that's what this summit actually showed.
MR. ROTH: Let me say that I think the best answer to that question really is in a lot of pieces that you've been doing, because while we've been busy following around the President, the Secretary of State, and the other officials, many of you have been interviewing Chinese people. And I think the real answer is going to come not from American officials, but, of course, from the people of China. And we've seen repeated quotes in the press from people indicating that it will have profound reverberations from here, that this is being noted, studied, that this is an unusual event, and that they have recognized this. And I think this will be percolating within China for quite some time to come.
MS. SHIRK: I was an academic in my former life, so as a China watcher, I will say that I do think this is a significant political event in China -- a domestic political decision by Jiang Zemin to allow President Clinton to speak directly to the Chinese people at the press conference and in the Beida discussion with the students. Taboo subjects that had not been discussed previously such as Tiananmen and Tibet were discussed at that press conference. Jiang Zemin even initiated the discussion of Tibet. It's not going to be possible to bury those subjects again. And I'm sure that many of the things that President Clinton said about the connection between freedom and stability by speaking to the Chinese people on their own terms, their own ideas about stability, I think will certainly resonate with a good many people in China. Now, as to what happens next, we don't know. I don't think it would be wise to say this opens up a whole new era in China, but it was a very self-conscious decision on President Jiang's part to allow this kind of open discussion of previously taboo ideas.
MR. BADER: I'm not going to repeat -- but I think every previous speaker has covered it pretty well -- but just a number or two. We've estimated about 85 to 90 percent of the people of China have access to television. This was covered on television, covered on radio nationally -- both events. None of us are aware of any precedent for this -- for a foreign leader having a live broadcast to an audience throughout China.
Q: Can you talk a little bit about the internal discussion about Tibet? I mean, the fact that Jiang discussed the subject openly is very, sort of, tantalizing for me. Did he show any more interest in a private setting in pursuing this in a way that you people feel is meaningful?
MR. BADER: Carol, the private discussions on Tibet -- I think what you saw in public, what Jiang said was very significant. I cannot recall a Chinese leader ever talking about multiple channels of discussion with the Dalai Lama before, talking about openness to dialogue. They've used that phrase, but the context in which it was offered suggested a kind of new readiness to talk if certain conditions are met. Now, he laid out conditions. Clearly, they haven't closed yet. But we welcomed what President Jiang said, if it was a positive statement. The private discussions -- I think what you heard in public represents the Chinese position, and that was the significant part, the fact that he said it publicly.
Q: Given the fact that when Albright was here in April, my understanding was that you felt basically that they were not prepared to move on Tibet at all. What do you attribute the change, the apparent change from then to now?
MR. BADER: I wouldn't go too far in saying that there has been -- I don't want to overplay or -- how should I say -- exaggerate how close they may be to a dialogue. There are still conditions. But the tone of what he said was new, and as I say, the fact that he way public about it before a nationwide audience was new. The Dalai Lama has said some things in the last few months in his visit to the United States. They were very positive about strengthened U.S.-China relations, about the way to deal with China. I think it is -- one can't know what is going through the minds of the Chinese leaders on this, but it is possible. I'm sure they're observing these statements and it's possible this is a reflection of that.
Q: Two things were said before the summit -- one was that the Chinese wanted to give the President a successful summit, and secondly, they wanted to move into a post-Tiananmen phase of relations. First off, is there any sense, any belief that the Chinese permitted the televising of these things as a way to be able to give the President a successful summit. And secondly, are we now, because of this summit, in a post-Tiananmen phase?
MS. KRISTOFF: I think when we, this year, started planning for this summit we had a couple of goals in mind -- one, to produce a summit that had concrete results, that advanced the issue that were most important to us and those we had already outlined in the October summit. I think a summit without results would not have been a successful summit. So I think you've got to sort of zero in on what we actually produced. One of the other things that I think we had as a goal of the administration for this was to -- and other people have spoken about this -- was to show the American people the complexity of China; that China is dynamic, is changing, has enormous challenges before it. Americans have not seen much of China. And part of the way that we wanted that to happen was to have pictures to go back home. I think the other thing we wanted to do was to have the President have access to the Chinese people, through the joint press appearance, through his speech at Beida, and through a series of events that he's going to do throughout this trip, so that an image of America could be given to the average Chinese. That would not have happened in the absence of the broadcast of the press --
Q: You're talking about an American goal, I'm talking about the Chinese goals of wanting a successful summit and wanting to move into a post-Tiananmen phase.
MS. KRISTOFF: And what I'm saying is that over the course of months of trying to set this summit up our description of what constituted a success became as well a Chinese acceptance or willingness or belief, if you will, that the notion of the President having access of images of China going back to the United States, that that was fundamentally an important part of making this summit a success.
Q: Are we in a post-Tiananmen phase?
MS. KRISTOFF: Are we in a post-Tiananmen phase? I think we're in the next phase of the relationship. We're going to build on the successes.
MR. ROTH: If you mean does Tiananmen cease to be an issue, the answer is, of course not. If you mean are we working to improve the relationship to increase our strategic dialogue, increase the overall -- of course.
Q: I was wondering if you could share with us some of the analysis that has come by your people as they read the Chinese media and newspapers over the last couple of days. It wasn't just that they broadcast this thing live, but there were things that we're published or not published, broadcast or not broadcast province by province. What have you found interesting that we haven't noticed?
MS. SHIRK: I think it's really too soon to have a full analysis. Naturally, we'll be very interested in the response of Chinese people throughout the country to these events and to the President's remarks, and I hope we'll be learning more in the next several weeks.
MR. BADER: I can add a little bit. Frankly, we've been a bit overwhelmed with preparing our leaders for the events and haven't done the full analysis that Susan was talking about yet. But I think we've seen some preliminary indications. The Xin Hua coverage was not complete. They left out significant portions. They had a couple of sentences about -- I saw a reference I think to Sandy Berger saying this was the most candid discussion on human rights that had been held in whatever. So Xin Hua was certainly selective. I think what this demonstrates in a way is that you had a decision here by the leadership to televise and broadcast these things live, which was a bold decision. But you have a system which still, obviously, is far from a free system and which was selective and restrictive in the way it covered it. But the full analysis, I think we need some time to see just how much of it they're going to cover it and how much they're not.
Q: One follow-up. From the guest lists of the state dinner, what can you tell? For instance, were all the members of the politburo there? Does Li Peng take the kind of role you would expect him to as the second-ranking figure?
MR. BADER: I wasn't at the head table, but from where I was sitting, I could see what appeared to be all of the members of the politburo standing committee. I counted -- I think they were all there. So I think that was meant to be a show of leadership unity.
Q: Are any of you familiar with how the audience was selected for the Peking University event today, and did it strike any of you that some of the questions on sensitive subjects from the students seemed to be particularly in keeping with Chinese party dogma?
MS. SHIRK: I spoke with the senior White House advance person about this. The seats were divided up by departments. Each department has a certain number of seats, and then they drew lots. So it was a random selection. In fact, he told me that Beijing University had its own press conference. I guess you weren't there to describe the method because there was such interest in how this was done.
MR. ROTH: Let me take a crack at the second half of your question. I think you really miss the significance of the questions if you only look at it as in similarity between some of the official positions. I think what you saw from the students were two different faces of China that exist side by side. One, I think you saw some real friendship for the United States. You saw that particularly at the second event, where the President got a tremendous round of applause as he worked up to the podium and even as he just walked onto the stage. And I think that was real, not ginned up. At the same time, I think you saw real evidence of the growing nationalism of the current generation in China itself, and that was reflected in a number of questions. And the President picked up on that in one of his responses towards the end. And so when you see this nationalistic face, whether it be on Taiwan, whether it be on demonstrations at Harvard or any of these other subjects, I think that reflects a genuine trend that is out there. And that's something that we have to deal with in the future.
Q: If I could just follow up, does that mean that the current university students don't care about human rights or democracy in the way the 1989 students did?
MR. ROTH: I don't think so. I think that's --
MR. BADER: This is not exactly an answer to your question, but the feedback that we got to the President's speech -- not necessarily university, but generally around town in the soundings we took -- was overwhelmingly positive. And of course a good component of that was about human rights. That suggests to me that there is a tremendous interest in human rights broadly in the society, and that the remarks on that subject were well received. I would be surprised if Beida were the exception to that.
Q: There was a question about Taiwan from the students, and the tone was rather nationalistic. Of course, the President gave the standard answer. But according to Sandy Berger the other day when he briefed us, Jiang Zemin spoke at length about the Taiwan issue, and the President in response didn't state the so-called three no's of the "One China" policy. Can you give us a sense of how the Taiwan discussions went and what percentage of the bilaterals that touched on this particular issue?
MS. KRISTOFF: I think that the discussion between the two presidents was not dominated by the Taiwan question. I don't think that you could say that it took up 80 percent of the conversation. The bilateral between the two presidents focused on human rights, nonproliferation, some trade points, and then, from China's side, the Taiwan issue. As Berger made very clear yesterday, and as we can all repeat here today, the President reaffirmed our longstanding policy on Taiwan. He made it quite clear that our policy is consistent and unchanged -- and no news beyond that.
Q: Will somebody from the delegation be going to Taiwan to brief the government there or simply Richard Bush of the AIT, as reported? Any decision made on that?
MR. ROTH: Having worked for Richard -- with Richard Bush and hired him 15 years ago, I think saying "simply Richard Bush" does him a disservice. This is a very significant senior -- Q: Well, I'm not trying to denigrate Richard Bush.
MR. ROTH: He will be the briefer.
Q: He will. When will he be going?
MR. ROTH: Shortly.
Q: I have two unrelated questions -- one on MTCR. Obviously, the Chinese have agreed to go this step toward MTCR because they think it's in their interest. I'm curious why they think it's more in their interest today than it was several years ago when we were sanctioning their missile behavior, and what's changed in their mentality and thinking. And secondly, when you experts stood around this weekend, what's your best guess as to why they decided to broadcast the press conference?
MS. SHIRK: I think the short answer to that question is that through its own calculations, and through our discussions, China has really come to rethink what its interests are in these regional situations, such as South Asia and the Persian Gulf. And I think that China now has come to see that it has an interest in helping to preserve stability in these regions; that to nurture a close relationship with one particular ally through various mechanisms, including support for its missile program, in the long term is not really in its own interests. Second, it really has -- China has come to have a real stake in the global nonproliferation regime. I think you see this in the way they've joined all the various regimes one by one. There still are a couple they haven't joined, but we think that their new interest in moving toward joining the MTCR is highly, highly significant. The Chinese do have a record, when they say that they are actively studying joining a regime, of shortly thereafter actually joining it. So we think this is really a major accomplishment of the summit.
Q: What about the second half of it? The second part of this question -- why do you think Jiang decided to televise the --
MR. BADER: Okay, the short answer is, we do not know. We do not know. Having said that, President Jiang clearly had to understand that there was going to be a tremendous audience for this event -- I mean, probably hundreds of millions of people, and if not hundreds of millions of people, hundreds of millions of people will hear about it -- or the conversation was all about this, almost immediately. President Jiang had to be aware of that in making the decision. So I think that President Jiang consciously made a decision -- and President Jiang, having been to Washington and having been to the joint press conference, had a sense of the kinds of subjects that would be discussed, and he made a conscious decision to allow this kind of discussion before a large national audience. Now, again, I'm going to retreat into the -- it's too early to analyze what this meant, but I guess what I'm saying is, this is significant, and I think it's significant not only in terms of bilateral relations. The earlier question talked about was this a successful summit and how much were they trying to please us. I think this should not be seen solely or even primarily as something that was done for President Clinton, because President Jiang is a Chinese politician and Chinese politicians, like American politicians, make calculations based upon domestic result and domestic impact.
Q: I watched the Chinese television coverage, live coverage of your President's speech at Beijing University. And the English translator, I mean, the American translator, didn't sound very familiar with the Chinese language. And even my daughter, who is 11 years old, could not understand her very much your Chinese translator. So at the end of the CCTV, the CCTV announcer said, okay, he was very sorry that the translator was offered by the American side. So they agreed with President Bill Clinton's speech, that we should increase exchange, but the first exchange must be to study Chinese language. And what's your comment about that? And another thing is, why did your President didn't answer the student question directly. That's why the second question -- you should answer my question directly. Two questions.
MR. ROTH: This is very easy, actually. The President connected very well with the audience at Beida, and you could see -- being in the audience, you could see as a question came, that the President was listening very carefully. He was very comfortable in his answer. He was speaking directly to the students that asked the question. If that didn't come through on television, that's a shame, but within the auditorium I think it was a very connected event. And I don't think that any of the four of us would say anything other than that, yes, certainly, more people should learn Chinese.
Q: Can I ask just a simple question regarding Taiwan? The Chinese side usually will link the U.S. arms sales policy to Taiwan to the proliferation issue. Are they still doing so?
MR. ROTH: Simple question, simple answer. No linkage. We did not agree to any linkage. No change on U.S. policy.
Q: To follow up on the earlier question about how well the Chinese audience heard it, have you heard anything about technical problems. We've heard that from some of our bureaus, those watching on Chinese television, had great difficulty hearing the audio sound for much of the broadcast.
MR. ROTH: We were all at the event -- so we haven't --
Q: Are you going to check into that, because it's possible it's a technical problem or it's possible it's deliberate?
MR. MCCURRY: No indication that it was deliberate. We did check into it. And CCTV was having trouble with the feed that was coming from the interpreter's booth and going into what their main audio feed was. There were times, especially when the President was speaking extemporaneously, where they were trying to work in the booth to figure out what the correct interpretation would be, where the volume dropped down and people really did experience trouble. We've heard that anecdotally from a number of different people. But as one CCTV executive communicated to someone that we are in contact with, this was new to them. They don't customarily do these types of live broadcasts, and so they were thinking it through. The other point on the interpretation -- the President wanted these to be very personal remarks and worked on them right up to the very last minute, and there was not the time that one would normally have to prepare a more elegant and sophisticated interpretation, but we're confident that the President's message did get through. And certainly the response was a very positive one.
Q: U.S. officials have made clear that the reason why the President did not meet with dissidents is because of fear of retribution, harassment. I'm wondering if the reason why we didn't get any questions from the students at Peking University is the same reason: they feared, for the same reason. Could we realistically have expected them to ask about human rights or sensitive issues?
MR. BADER: First of all, on the dissident question, the President made a decision about what was going to be the most effective way to advance human rights in China and the overall agenda. We think that having the President speak to hundreds of millions of Chinese about human rights was the best way to do so. And I think we had much greater impact doing it that way than various alternatives. Now, as for the questions, I don't know -- again, this is just speculation. If you picture a foreign leader visiting the United States before an American student audience, the American students probably would not be critical of their own country in their questions; they would be critical of the foreign leader's policies. So I'm not surprised that there were not questions from the students pointing to problems within China. I think that's not so much unique to China; I think that's kind of a universal phenomenon.
Q: Can you address some of the -- are we seeing some dovetailing here? And how do you look at the play-off between allowing the President to go nationwide and talk about these issues so openly? And is China trying to help the President address some of the criticism in the U.S.? Or is there an agenda here domestically with some of the anti-leftist books that we're seeing and some of the movement in that direction?
MS. KRISTOFF: I think in the run-up to the summit the Chinese were well aware of the discordant voices in the United States that were criticizing the President, his decision to come, his entire China policy. I think that on the trips that many of us took to China in the run-up to the summit, including Mr. Berger's trip in early June, we made clear that the only way we could counter the critics was if we had results from the summit -- results on issues that mattered, like nonproliferation, like security questions, like South Asia, like energy and environment. And so that's what -- I think that that's what we focused on. I think that's what China focused on. And that was literally what the discussions were about for the last six, seven, eight weeks.
Q: One more analytical point. If you compare the coverage here to last fall when Jiang Zemin was in the United States with what you've, on a preliminary basis, noticed here so far, what differences do you see?
MR. BADER: I think this was clearly far more extensive, that you heard the entire message. The entire press conference was broadcast, including things that were critical of aspects of Chinese policy. That didn't happen at the previous summit in terms of how it played in China itself -- major difference.
Q: Are we anywhere near a stage of China like what we saw in the Soviet Union in the late '80s?
MS. SHIRK: Turn to the academic, right. I don't think it's the same. I think the historical experiences of the two countries are very different. I think China has had a tremendous transformation in its economic life, in its social and cultural life. And I think that this is certainly stimulating a certain amount of political debate. Where it ends up, we really don't know. I think it would really be a mistake to look at the trajectory of the Soviet Union and Russia and say the exact same thing is going to happen in China.
MR. MCCURRY: I want give a special thank you to Sandy Kristoff. That may very well have been her last briefing before she goes out to make a fortune in the private sector.
THE PRESS: Thank you.
END
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Transcript of June 29 McCurry Briefing
Following is a transcript of a June 29 White House press briefing by Mike McCurry:
Shangri-La Hotel Beijing, People's Republic of China
MR. MCCURRY: I want to give a special thank you to Sandy Kristoff, that may very well have been her last briefing before she goes off to make a fortune in the private sector. All right. We are now, as you know, going to Shanghai later today and completing out the balance of the trip. I think most of you got the schedule on the President's calendar for tomorrow. And unless there's any other local business --
Q: Can you give us a highlight about what you expect to come out of the meeting tomorrow?
MR. MCCURRY: The President is very much looking forward to his visit to Shanghai. He spoke today about the future of this relationship. In many ways, Shanghai is the future of China because of the changes that are taking place in China are reflected in the very dynamic growth, economically, and the changes occurring in South China. And he will see that and literally be a part of that over the coming days. He's especially interested in this discussion that he will have about the 21st century in China with Shanghai community leaders. Obviously, touring the library is an opportunity for him to make vivid the argument he made today, that information technologies and the flow of information will inevitably produce change in China. And touring the library will be a dramatic part of that. He is looking forward to his interview on radio and the opportunity, we hope, to have some direct dialogue with citizens in Shanghai. And then he will meet the mayor and some of the community leaders and see the leadership of what is one of the most dynamic areas in China.
Q: -- in any way that you haven't had a large business delegation?
MR. MCCURRY: A large?
Q: Business delegation.
MR. MCCURRY: No, because in many ways -- I made this point to the others -- when the President has traveled, for example, to Africa, we've taken business leaders there. As they establish a foothold and develop new commercial relationships in emerging areas of market opportunity. China is much different because literally American business is here. I mean, he will be seeing members of the American Chamber of Commerce, but they are well established here. This is not a case of the President needing to bring business with him to China; they are literally already here and they're interested in what we can do to further the relationship and to be of assistance.
Q: On "Face The Nation," Secretary Albright said we didn't do as well on trade as we wanted to. Can you elaborate?
MR. MCCURRY: Well, I think that we had hoped to find an amicable way in which China could accede to the WTO. And we still have disagreements on that and we're still going to have to work through that. That's principally what the reference was to.
Q: Mike, can you tell us how and why it was decided that the President and the delegation should stay at the Diaoyutai Guest House here in Beijing?
MR. MCCURRY: I can't. There are a lot of things that went into the decision. I mean, it was convenient and had a number of ways in which we could accommodate various parts of the delegation. I saw one reference to the fact that, you should have stayed at the China World Hotel because it's more accessible. And those of you who have ever stayed there with part of any delegation -- and Secretary of State and others -- know that that's a bit preposterous. It's no more accessible than the Diaoyutai would be.
Q: There's a nice mall there?
MR. MCCURRY: Yes, there's a good drugstore there.
Q: Mike, as a follow up, has the delegation or U.S. officials been given any special, or not special, caution about having discussions at the Diaoyutai or discussing sensitive information in their room?
MR. MCCURRY: Whenever the President's delegation goes anywhere we get a briefing from U.S. security officials on the nature of the security environment we're going into. And we received that briefing prior to coming to China, the way we would receive it before going into any foreign country.
Q: Are there one or more bubbles over there?
MR. MCCURRY: We have ways in which we can do the orderly business of the government in a secure manner.
Q: Was Sasser off the reservation when he said on ABC that communism in China is possibly coming to an end?
MR. MCCURRY: No. I saw the transcript of what he said and he was forced to make a prediction about the nature of the political regime here and whether or not it would change over time, and I think he said, probably. And I think that's probably a fair assessment.
Q: Can you give us more of a preview about the speech tomorrow morning at 9:40 a.m.
MR. MCCURRY: No. I wish I could. I, personally, can't; we'll see if any of my sharpshooters can.
Q: Sandy talked about moving from individual dissidents -- you know, asking for release of individual dissidents -- to moving to these classes, What is he exactly talking about? And have we rank ordered them?
MR. MCCURRY: For a long time in the difficult nature of the human relations dialogue with China we were at a point where -- that resonates familiarly with those of you who remember the 1970s and early 1980s with respect to the Soviet Union -- that we were asking about --
Q: But human rights was always the first issue discussed.
MR. MCCURRY: And it in many ways still is. It certainly was still the major dominant focus of this trip in many ways. But at that point the only way you could make progress was by giving named individuals and trying to get piece by piece, case by case, some progress. We're in a situation where that has proved somewhat effective with the People's Republic; when we've raised individual cases we've had some individual success in getting releases or getting different arrangements made. But I think everyone would desire to move from the anecdotal to a structure in which these concerns can be raised and dealt with in a more thorough and comprehensive way. Don't underestimate the significance of the announcement by the two Presidents that we are resuming the human rights dialogue between our two governments. Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights John Shattuck has quite literally at this moment putting together the nuts and bolts of that part of this relationship, which will included -- late in the fall -- a conference in Washington that will allow experts in the rule of law and human rights from both of our sides to really talk about what it means for China to formally sign the international covenant and how that will be reflected in the day-to-day practices of the government, drawing on some of the expertise of people who are not necessarily in the United States government, but are some of our top human rights experts. That's the kind of cooperation and dialogue we want to see on this issue. We certainly want to see progress in individual cases. But we've reached the point now where -- you know, we're looking for lists of people that we can submit, but the sense is that that's not enough because we need to move to a much larger, more thorough way of addressing these concerns.
Q: I read where when President Clinton came to Moscow in January of 1994 and signed a de-targeting agreement and got permission to appear on Russian national television, and the next day Guydar was out and the whole of Russian politics changed for the worse for a while. Give us a sense of why we think that the American delegation feels that this time it's going to be better, different than it was in January of 1994 in Moscow.
MR. MCCURRY: Well, we can't predict -- this is not a transparent regime and there's still, and will remain, aspects of the Chinese leadership that remain opaque to U.S. decision makers. But there are clear -- as you saw from our experts who briefed a moment ago -- some conscious decisions made about the way in which they dealt with this government -- our government dealt with this President and it perhaps reflects something about the internal dynamic of their ruling elite. We can't know for sure, we can't understand entirety the kind of challenges and the dynamic that President Jiang Zemin faces. But the actions developed at this summit do suggest a certain course for the future, and that is a hopeful course. We certainly are going to, on behalf of our government, do things that encourage those tendencies that we think reflect the futures that both of our peoples desire.
Q: Mike, what does resuming human rights dialogue -- when did that dialogue exist before?
MR. MCCURRY: Since late 1995, the formal structure of a dialogue had been in suspension and had been reserved for the highest level meetings that we had between our two governments. Up until that time, up until April of 1994 we had had a formal structure for human rights dialogue and then that was put in abeyance -- although human rights continued to be a very major element of the agenda we pursued through our bilateral contacts and became a built in priority of the bilateral agenda for this exchange of state visits.
Q: On religious freedom, an underground preacher that we talked to right outside the church yesterday mentioned that even within the church itself there is a group of people who are being suppressed, in terms of not being able to practice their religion liberally. Is the President aware of an issue like that?
MR. MCCURRY: Well, we certainly were aware of some of the restrictions that exist on freedom of expression and freedom of faith, that's one of the things that we've raised and one of the reasons why we pressed hard for the exchange of religious leaders that occurred late last year and earlier this year. That will remain an ongoing concern. All of our concerns for human rights are going to remain. I don't think anyone should interpret the events of the last two days being a melting away of these very serious obstacles that exist between our two governments on these issues. What we have tried to do is find a way to overcome some of those differences and to build on the more hopeful elements of this trip to see if we can't lend momentum to the improvements that we seek. By no means do the difficulties, do some of our concerns wither away.
Q: I'd like to follow up on that question. How about Chinese underground preachers -- who see Clinton going there, you know, doing a Sunday service? It's basically affirming that there is freedom of religion in the country.
MR. MCCURRY: Well, we didn't confirm that there is freedom of religion. What we did was acknowledge the trend that the pastor at this church spoke to at the end of his sermon yesterday -- the growth of a more organized form of, practice of worship in China and the development of more opportunities for people to gather in places where they can express their faith. We certainly would suggest that some of the restrictions we're aware of are still there and they will lend more reason and urgency to the dialogue on human rights that we will pursue.
Q: I apologize for coming in a minute late, if this has already been asked. But it appeared that the Chinese made a very late decision to allow televising of the speech at Beijing. Could you talk a little about how that came about and what you know about it, what your thoughts are?
MR. MCCURRY: Well, I know that they had reserved the right to allow nationwide television broadcast and had not made any decision on that -- certainly as late as yesterday, as late as last night and it was an open question this morning. To my knowledge they did not ever indicate to us that it was not likely. Our own expectation was that having allowed the nationwide broadcast of the press conference it would have been difficult for them not to allow broadcast of the President's remarks because they would not want to appear to take some kind of step backwards. At the same time, they had a lot of logistic concerns which I think ended up being reasonably well placed. They had concern about the ability to make the logistical arrangements that would be necessary for an event of that magnitude, given that it's not something that they customarily do. And they pressed hard for finalizing arrangements and we pressed hard for them keeping an open mind about a speech that clearly was not going to get written until the very last minute.
Q: How do you feel about the decision that they went ahead with it?
MR. MCCURRY: Oh, I think the United States very much welcomed the opportunity that Chinese citizens had to see our President -- President Clinton put great care into thinking how he would present his argument to the students and thought a lot about the format for his exchange with the citizens; crafted his answers, he told me afterwards, because he wanted to really address the younger generation that was in that audience. And he thought very specifically of how he could talk to them in a way that would be very personal and he hoped very convincing. And he said it was -- in the back of his mind somewhere was the fact that his own daughter, who is a college student, was in the audience too and he was almost talking to -- wanted to talk to this audience of students in a way that would be comfortable for them and for their generation.
Q: -- the Chinese to sign the U.N. convention during the G-8, and is that maybe where Clinton and Jiang will next meet?
MR. MCCURRY: I don't know. I know that there may be other opportunities before then. The G-8 will not be until next year, in Germany.
Q: General --
MR. MCCURRY: You're thinking of UNGA, U.N. General Assembly. There may be some prospect that that would be a venue, but it hasn't been decided as far as I know.
Q: But you don't know where the next meeting will take place?
MR. MCCURRY: I don't know. I'm not aware that there's been any conversation to that end, yet. Although, there clearly is an agreement that this dialogue at this level is very useful for both governments and I think both Presidents would acknowledge that they would expect that to continue.
Q: (Inaudible).
MR. MCCURRY: Well, we haven't set any time and place, though.
Q: Can I get you to expand a little bit on the point you made a minute ago about the care the President put into his remarks? It seemed to me that in his visit here in Beijing we've seen a lot of the same techniques that Clinton uses in domestic -- for his domestic audiences. A lot of times the same phrases in his domestic speech as we heard -- here today. What do you make of that and is he getting more comfortable bringing his personal style into foreign policy? Does this particular summit lend itself more to that kind of personal style?
MR. MCCURRY: Well, part of it is that's the nature of the President; that's just who he is and I think he approaches situations like this using whatever reservoir of skills and talents he's got as a political leader. But I also think he's uncommonly good at understanding the perspectives of those that he's dealing with and understanding what their concerns are. He spent a lot of time, for example, yesterday -- or, Saturday -- thinking about the argument the Chinese often make about stability in response to our pressing our concerns about human rights, and wanted to preempt that argument or address that from their perspective. And I think one of the things that makes him effective -- whether the audience is domestic or whether it's overseas -- is that he really does deal with the issues that really motivate the concerns of the audience that he's addressing. And I think he knew, was not surprised that there were questions about Taiwan and about, you know, some of the issues raised in the Q&A today because he's been told that and he's experienced some of that in his own dialogue.
Q: After you showing some kind of cooperation from Chinese side -- are you considering lifting any kind of sanctions like OPIC or other things?
MR. MCCURRY: Well, I can't -- I think Mr. Berger, when he was here, talked about the Tiananmen sanctions regime that's in place and talked about the kind of criteria that exists under our law for considering whether or not those can be addressed. And as you know, that has not been a principle focus of this summit and I don't have much to add beyond that to what Mr. Berger said.
Q: Mike, do you see the focus now shifting from human rights to commercial or other themes as we go on to Shanghai? What kind of themes do you see in Shanghai?
MR. MCCURRY: No. I mean, as the President argued today, these are integrally linked -- that the kind of economic explosion you've seen in South China is predicated on the flow of information and the ability of people to make free choices -- choices, both in the marketplace and then in the structuring of their own lives. And those go together hand in hand. I think the message is that the prosperity that is Shanghai and South Asia can go hand in hand with greater respect for individual freedom. And, in fact, in some ways those two are -- one's necessary for the other; they're not divisible, as the President said today.
Q: Mike, you're going to be going on to Hong Kong after Shanghai. What will be the message, the sort of summing up that he'll be giving in Hong Kong?
MR. MCCURRY: The focus in Hong Kong will clearly be on the turnover and the transformation one year later and what we have seen, what the expectations are, the remaining concerns that we have and the ways in which, again, we can celebrate the transformation that has occurred in Asia and talk about the central role that China plays in the economic stability of the region -- since Hong Kong opens up the aperture somewhat for a broader view of all of the Asian regional economy.
Q: To follow up on a question here about the Chinese -- how late they made their decision. I was wondering whether we transmitted to them the advance excerpt that was released in the press room today and whether that may have played some role in their decision to allow the speech to go forward on television.
MR. MCCURRY: They were quite anxious to receive an advance text. But as you know, we did not make one available -- I think we did make available to them the same excerpts that we made available to all of you, although they would have had access to the same excerpts once they were made available.
Q: It was after that that they made a decision to put it on national television?
MR. MCCURRY: I don't know precisely when they made the decision. They'd have to tell you that. We learned late morning that it looked relatively certain that they were going to televise it, and that we certainly were aware that they were equipping themselves to provide live coverage if necessary.
Q: Can you share the President's mood now, how tired he is?
MR. MCCURRY: He's actually enjoyed -- you know, for those of you who've traveled with Bill Clinton, this has not been a schedule that has been hell-bent by any means. And he's had I think some of the respiratory stuffiness that he has back home he's had here, but he's feeling great and he feels very satisfied with his meetings; delighted with the kind of coverage that's been available; confident that he has been able to project some of his message to the Chinese public; and delighted to build on these past of couple of days and move into the second half of the trip.
Q: Mike, can you be a little bit more precise. You said, you know, late morning. Do you recall when it was exactly?
MR. MCCURRY: I don't think they had ever at one point said, ta-daa, we're going to do this. I think it was clear from our advance people who were over on site that they had everything necessary to do a live broadcast. We had expected that they probably would. And we may not have ever been told formally that they were going to do it. I think it became generally assumed that's what they were going to do late in the morning. We were still, though, awaiting confirmation even as the broadcast began. I asked the Embassy to double check and make sure that it was being nationally televised. So we didn't really have confirmation, per se, until it was on the air.
Q: Sorry for the repetition, but the question of translation -- was there any problem, other than the fact that it was not as elegant as you would have liked?
MR. MCCURRY: Since I don't speak Chinese I really can't answer it beyond the answer I already gave.
Q: Was there any problem with the transmission of the translation?
MR. MCCURRY: Our understanding anecdotally from checks with our consulates is that there was some audio difficult, but it was just -- the audio was -- it sounded like the pods were down or something, that you had to really boost it in order to hear it.
Q: Were there any technical problems at the news conference broadcast, do you know?
MR. MCCURRY: I don't know the answer to that. I hadn't heard any reported, none that I was aware of.
Q: At the end of the speech of Bill Clinton the crowd was very excited, they wanted to reach out and shake hands with him. Normally, in the states the President is pretty good coming down and shaking hands with the crowd. The crowd pushed up to the front, he just left.
MR. MCCURRY: The President, during his remarks -- some of you may have seen this, too -- to his right the crowd was pressing forward and there were some students that looked like they were literally falling over. There was kind of a separation between the kids who were standing and the kids who were seated, and some of the kids actually looked like they were going to fall over because of the press. The President said that when he saw the press of the people coming forward he was very concerned about not repeating the incident that occurred in Accra, so he wanted not to create that. But I think he spent a lot of time waving and saying goodbye to the kids. Normally, we would work a ropeline; but I think, from experience, he doesn't want to do anything that's going to put anyone in danger.
Q: -- the question he asked about translation. But there was a rumor going around that the translator for CCTV was provided by Washington. Is that right?
MR. MCCURRY: We did a lot on this before you arrived here, so check the earlier transcript.
Q: I apologize. Okay.
Q: You're saying there's no special restrictions here because of Chinese security -- rope lines? Because I don't think he has done a rope line, has he?
MR. MCCURRY: He hasn't, and none that -- we wouldn't necessarily accept those restrictions in any event. But I think he made a judgment call on -- he was prepared to go do a rope line, but he made a judgment call that that probably was not a smart thing to do, just given what he read in the crowd there.
Q: Again, at the library lawn, the crowd was sort of being limited to much further away from the stage position. But as it gets closer, the whole crowd comes around. Whose decision was that?
MR. MCCURRY: On the library audience we initially, this morning, were initially told that they had provided tickets for only 400 people. And said, well, look, our understanding is there are many more students that want to be there. I don't know if there was any estimate on the crowd, but there may have been a couple thousand people there by the end. So they clearly let more people in. I think they had originally planned for an audience that they had ticketed of 400; they ended up with an impromptu audience that included a lot of students who just wanted to be there. So that may have been why there were kids hanging off of speakers and out dorm windows and things like that.
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China's newly invigorated media reflect a growing pluralism and the authorities' inability to control it
BY NISID HAJARI
When U.S. President Richard Nixon made his pilgrimage to China in 1972, news came easily. Readers had only to know a few hundred Chinese characters in order to decipher the stock phrases and agitprop that comprised the unsmiling People's Daily. Cheeky TV viewers referred to the nightly 7 o'clock broadcast as the "7:20 News," well aware that they needn't watch the first 20 minutes of sloganeering. Reporters--minions of the state--were urged not to strive for truth, but to love renmin, the people.
Now journalists, like nearly everyone else in China, reserve their greatest affection for the renminbi, the people's currency. And that shift has had its own revolutionary consequences. Chinese airwaves are filled not only with soap operas, music videos and reruns of Murder, She Wrote, but also a slew of hard-hitting TV newsmagazines with names like Focus and Frank Talk. Nearly 2,000 newspapers are distributed across the country, complemented by some 3,600 provincial, city and local papers. Thousands of magazines, whose numbers have blossomed exponentially in recent years, join them on newsstands. That flowering has given rise to a new generation of media professionals--younger, more energetic and well-traveled, and less bound to propaganda than to profit. In their hands the Chinese press has begun to rethink its role: one recent poll found that 70% of journalists ranked social responsibility as their top priority, while less than a third felt they should serve as mouthpieces of the Communist Party.
Even China's more independent-minded journalists know they haven't shed that Orwellian role entirely. A surge in investigative reporting has struck a nerve with readers rankled by petty and large-scale corruption. By churning out muckraking local stories--about cops accepting bribes to free criminals or bureaucrats blowing public funds on parties--the Guangzhou-based supplement Nanfang Zhoumo (Southern Weekend) has doubled its circulation to 1.3 million since 1992. But these campaigns also serve the interests of Beijing, where officials fear that unchecked corruption could provoke unrest. The targets of these exposes are often chosen as much for their political vulnerability as for the seriousness of their abuses; the bigger names--like Chen Xitong, a former mayor and party chief of Beijing--fall only when it suits more powerful figures. Direct criticism of those top officials is still off-limits.
Yet diverse forces are helping to clear the way for a freer press. The pressure to turn a profit has undercut the slow-footed state media. The Communist Party newspaper, People's Daily, which claimed a circulation of nearly 7 million at the start of Deng Xiao-ping's economic reforms in 1979, now has only 2 million. Government subsidies have begun to shrink. Meanwhile, newspapers like the Shanghai-based Xinmin Evening Daily, which specialize in the pithy, colorful infotainment that has become a staple of U.S. daily journalism, have grown fat on advertising revenue. Nearly 100 other evening papers, their editors still chosen by the party, have sprung up to emulate that formula. People's Daily has introduced a four-page financial section to cater to the 32 million Chinese who now play the stock market. Even the official news agency Xinhua has diversified into public relations and the financial-data business.
Such grudging steps testify to the changing tastes--and increased savvy--of readers. Once the state media could ignore or cover up natural or man-made disasters; now even the most traditional outlets look to improve the speed and accuracy of their reporting. (At least sketchy details of touchy subjects like recent bombings in Beijing, Urumqi and Wuhan have been swiftly broadcast across the country.) The increased clout of readers, however, has not always encouraged more sophisticated coverage. Among the most successful new publications in Beijing is the Shopping Guide, a daily compendium of airy feature stories and classified ads for everything from lipstick to used cars.
Indeed, the Chinese media's newfound obsession with the bottom line has itself spawned abuses. Stories are often dictated by advertisers' needs--or by more prurient concerns. Glossy magazines and racy tabloids feature half-nude pin-ups and tales of sex and violence. The Song dynasty classic The Water Margin was recently reissued under the title Three Women and 105 Men. (The Lives of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin reappeared as The Four Most Attractive Men.) Journalists often ask publicists for "taxi fare," bribes to ensure positive coverage.
The greatest threat to this new freedom may come from Old Guard types like Minister of Propaganda Ding Guan'gen. Many serve as the party's representatives in media organs and exhort underlings to be patriotic and uphold socialism. Moreover, China's leaders have no intention of unleashing an entirely free press. The unspoken threat--of fines, reprimands, even jail terms--promotes a self-censorship that even now recedes only in fits and starts. Still, change is in the air, and the people want to read all about it.
Reported by Jaime A. FlorCruz/Beijing
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Remarks by President Clinton at Beijing University
Following is a transcript of remarks by President Clinton to the students and community of Beijing University today:
Beijing University Beijing, People's Republic of China
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Thank you. Thank you, President Chen, Chairmen Ren, Vice President Chi, Vice Minister Wei. We are delighted to be here today with a very large American delegation, including the First Lady and our daughter, who is a student at Stanford, one of the schools with which Beijing University has a relationship. We have six members of the United States Congress; the Secretary of State; Secretary of Commerce; the Secretary of Agriculture; the Chairman of our Council of Economic Advisors; Senator Sasser, our Ambassador; the National Security Advisor and my Chief of Staff, among others. I say that to illustrate the importance that the United States places on our relationship with China. I would like to begin by congratulating all of you, the students, the faculty, the administrators, on celebrating the centennial year of your university. Gongxi, Beida. (Applause.) As I'm sure all of you know, this campus was once home to Yenching University which was founded by American missionaries. Many of its wonderful buildings were designed by an American architect. Thousands of Americans students and professors have come here to study and teach. We feel a special kinship with you. I am, however, grateful that this day is different in one important respect from another important occasion 79 years ago. In June of 1919, the first president of Yenching University, John Leighton Stuart, was set to deliver the very first commencement address on these very grounds. At the appointed hour, he appeared, but no students appeared. They were all out leading the May 4th Movement for China's political and cultural renewal. When I read this, I hoped that when I walked into the auditorium today, someone would be sitting here. And I thank you for being here, very much. (Applause.) Over the last 100 years, this university has grown to more than 20,000 students. Your graduates are spread throughout China and around the world. You have built the largest university library in all of Asia. Last year, 20 percent of your graduates went abroad to study, including half of your math and science majors. And in this anniversary year, more than a million people in China, Asia, and beyond have logged on to your web site. At the dawn of a new century, this university is leading China into the future. I come here today to talk to you, the next generation of China's leaders, about the critical importance to your future of building a strong partnership between China and the United States. The American people deeply admire China for its thousands of years of contributions to culture and religion, to philosophy and the arts, to science and technology. We remember well our strong partnership in World War II. Now we see China at a moment in history when your glorious past is matched by your present sweeping transformation and the even greater promise of your future. Just three decades ago, China was virtually shut off from the world. Now, China is a member of more than 1,000 international organizations -- enterprises that affect everything from air travel to agricultural development. You have opened your nation to trade and investment on a large scale. Today, 40,000 young Chinese study in the United States, with hundreds of thousands more learning in Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America. Your social and economic transformation has been even more remarkable, moving from a closed command economic system to a driving, increasingly market-based and driven economy, generating two decades of unprecedented growth, giving people greater freedom to travel within and outside China, to vote in village elections, to own a home, choose a job, attend a better school. As a result you have lifted literally hundreds of millions of people from poverty. Per capita income has more than doubled in the last decade. Most Chinese people are leading lives they could not have imagined just 20 years ago. Of course, these changes have also brought disruptions in settled patterns of life and work, and have imposed enormous strains on your environment. Once every urban Chinese was guaranteed employment in a state enterprise. Now you must compete in a job market. Once a Chinese worker had only to meet the demands of a central planner in Beijing. Now the global economy means all must match the quality and creativity of the rest of the world. For those who lack the right training and skills and support, this new world can be daunting. In the short-term, good, hardworking people -- some, at least will find themselves unemployed. And, as all of you can see, there have been enormous environmental and economic and health care costs to the development pattern and the energy use pattern of the last 20 years -- from air pollution to deforestation to acid rain and water shortage. In the face of these challenges new systems of training and social security will have to be devised, and new environmental policies and technologies will have to be introduced with the goal of growing your economy while improving the environment. Everything I know about the intelligence, the ingenuity, the enterprise of the Chinese people and everything I have heard these last few days in my discussions with President Jiang, Prime Minister Zhu and others give me confidence that you will succeed. As you build a new China, America wants to build a new relationship with you. We want China to be successful, secure and open, working with us for a more peaceful and prosperous world. I know there are those in China and the United States who question whether closer relations between our countries is a good thing. But everything all of us know about the way the world is changing and the challenges your generation will face tell us that our two nations will be far better off working together than apart. The late Deng Xiaoping counseled us to seek truth from facts. At the dawn of the new century, the facts are clear. The distance between our two nations, indeed, between any nations, is shrinking. Where once an American clipper ship took months to cross from China to the United States. Today, technology has made us all virtual neighbors. From laptops to lasers, from microchips to megabytes, an information revolution is lighting the landscape of human knowledge, bringing us all closer together. Ideas, information, and money cross the planet at the stroke of a computer key, bringing with them extraordinary opportunities to create wealth, to prevent and conquer disease, to foster greater understanding among peoples of different histories and different cultures. But we also know that this greater openness and faster change mean that problems which start beyond one nations borders can quickly move inside them -- the spread of weapons of mass destruction, the threats of organized crime and drug trafficking, of environmental degradation, and severe economic dislocation. No nation can isolate itself from these problems, and no nation can solve them alone. We, especially the younger generations of China and the United States, must make common cause of our common challenges, so that we can, together, shape a new century of brilliant possibilities. In the 21st century -- your century -- China and the United States will face the challenge of security in Asia. On the Korean Peninsula, where once we were adversaries, today we are working together for a permanent peace and a future freer of nuclear weapons. On the Indian subcontinent, just as most of the rest of the world is moving away from nuclear danger, India and Pakistan risk sparking a new arms race. We are now pursuing a common strategy to move India and Pakistan away from further testing and toward a dialogue to resolve their differences. In the 21st century, your generation must face the challenge of stopping the spread of deadlier nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. In the wrong hands or the wrong places, these weapons can threaten the peace of nations large and small. Increasingly, China and the United States agree on the importance of stopping proliferation. That is why we are beginning to act in concert to control the worlds most dangerous weapons. In the 21st century, your generation will have to reverse the international tide of crime and drugs. Around the world, organized crime robs people of billions of dollars every year and undermines trust in government. America knows all about the devastation and despair that drugs can bring to schools and neighborhoods. With borders on more than a dozen countries, China has become a crossroad for smugglers of all kinds. Last year, President Jiang and I asked senior Chinese and American law enforcement officials to step up our cooperation against these predators, to stop money from being laundered, to stop aliens from being cruelly smuggled, to stop currencies from being undermined by counterfeiting. Just this month, our drug enforcement agency opened an office in Beijing, and soon Chinese counter narcotics experts will be working out of Washington. In the 21st century, your generation must make it your mission to ensure that today's progress does not come at tomorrow's expense. China's remarkable growth in the last two decades has come with a toxic cost, pollutants that foul the water you drink and the air you breathe -- the cost is not only environmental, it is also serious in terms of the health consequences of your people and in terms of the drag on economic growth. Environmental problems are also increasingly global as well as national. For example, in the near future, if present energy use patterns persist, China will overtake the United States as the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, the gases which are the principal cause of global warming. If the nations of the world do not reduce the gases which are causing global warming, sometime in the next century there is a serious risk of dramatic changes in climate which will change the way we live and the way we work, which could literally bury some island nations under mountains of water and undermine the economic and social fabric of nations. We must work together. We Americans know from our own experience that it is possible to grow an economy while improving the environment. We must do that together for ourselves and for the world. Building on the work that our Vice President, Al Gore, has done previously with the Chinese government, President Jiang and I are working together on ways to bring American clean energy technology to help improve air quality and grow the Chinese economy at the same time. But I will say this again -- this is not on my remarks -- your generation must do more about this. This is a huge challenge for you, for the American people and for the future of the world. And it must be addressed at the university level, because political leaders will never be willing to adopt environmental measures if they believe it will lead to large-scale unemployment or more poverty. The evidence is clear that does not have to happen. You will actually have more rapid economic growth and better paying jobs, leading to higher levels of education and technology if we do this in the proper way. But you and the university, communities in China, the United States and throughout the world will have to lead the way. (Applause.) In the 21st century your generation must also lead the challenge of an international financial system that has no respect for national borders. When stock markets fall in Hong Kong or Jakarta, the effects are no longer local; they are global. The vibrant growth of your own economy is tied closely, therefore, to the restoration of stability and growth in the Asia Pacific region. China has steadfastly shouldered its responsibilities to the region and the world in this latest financial crisis -- helping to prevent another cycle of dangerous devaluations. We must continue to work together to counter this threat to the global financial system and to the growth and prosperity which should be embracing all of this region. In the 21st century, your generation will have a remarkable opportunity to bring together the talents of our scientists, doctors, engineers into a shared quest for progress. Already the breakthroughs we have achieved in our areas of joint cooperation -- in challenges from dealing with spina bifida to dealing with extreme weather conditions and earthquakes -- have proved what we can do together to change the lives of millions of people in China and the United States and around the world. Expanding our cooperation in science and technology can be one of our greatest gifts to the future. In each of these vital areas that I have mentioned, we can clearly accomplish so much more by walking together rather than standing apart. That is why we should work to see that the productive relationship we now enjoy blossoms into a fuller partnership in the new century. If that is to happen, it is very important that we understand each other better, that we understand both our common interest and our shared aspirations and our honest differences. I believe the kind of open, direct exchange that President Jiang and I had on Saturday at our press conference -- which I know many of you watched on television -- can both clarify and narrow our differences, and, more important, by allowing people to understand and debate and discuss these things can give a greater sense of confidence to our people that we can make a better future. From the windows of the White House, where I live in Washington, D.C., the monument to our first President, George Washington, dominates the skyline. It is a very tall obelisk. But very near this large monument there is a small stone which contains these words: The United States neither established titles of nobility and royalty, nor created a hereditary system. State affairs are put to the vote of public opinion. This created a new political situation, unprecedented from ancient times to the present. How wonderful it is. Those words were not written by an American. They were written by Xu Jiyu, governor of Fujian Province, inscribed as a gift from the government of China to our nation in 1853. I am very grateful for that gift from China. It goes to the heart of who we are as a people -- the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the freedom to debate, to dissent, to associate, to worship without interference from the state. These are the ideals that were at the core of our founding over 220 years ago. These are the ideas that led us across our continent and onto the world stage. These are the ideals that Americans cherish today. As I said in my press conference with President Jiang, we have an ongoing quest ourselves to live up to those ideals. The people who framed our Constitution understood that we would never achieve perfection. They said that the mission of America would always be "to form a more perfect union" -- in other words, that we would never be perfect, but we had to keep trying to do better. The darkest moments in our history have come when we abandoned the effort to do better, when we denied freedom to our people because of their race or their religion, because there were new immigrants or because they held unpopular opinions. The best moments in our history have come when we protected the freedom of people who held unpopular opinion, or extended rights enjoyed by the many to the few who had previously been denied them, making, therefore, the promises of our Declaration of Independence and Constitution more than faded words on old parchment. Today we do not seek to impose our vision on others, but we are convinced that certain rights are universal -- not American rights or European rights or rights for developed nations, but the birthrights of people everywhere, now enshrined in the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights -- the right to be treated with dignity; the right to express one's opinions, to choose one's own leaders, to associate freely with others, and to worship, or not, freely, however one chooses. In the last letter of his life, the author of our Declaration of Independence and our third President, Thomas Jefferson, said then that "all eyes are opening to the rights of man." I believe that in this time, at long last, 172 years after Jefferson wrote those words, all eyes are opening to the rights of men and women everywhere. Over the past two decades, a rising tide of freedom has lifted the lives of millions around the world, sweeping away failed dictatorial systems in the Former Soviet Union, throughout Central Europe; ending a vicious cycle of military coups and civil wars in Latin America; giving more people in Africa the chance to make the most of their hard-won independence. And from the Philippines to South Korea, from Thailand to Mongolia, freedom has reached Asia's shores, powering a surge of growth and productivity. Economic security also can be an essential element of freedom. It is recognized in the United Nations Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. In China, you have made extraordinary strides in nurturing that liberty, and spreading freedom from want, to be a source of strength to your people. Incomes are up, poverty is down; people do have more choices of jobs, and the ability to travel -- the ability to make a better life. But true freedom includes more than economic freedom. In America, we believe it is a concept which is indivisible. Over the past four days, I have seen freedom in many manifestations in China. I have seen the fresh shoots of democracy growing in the villages of your heartland. I have visited a village that chose its own leaders in free elections. I have also seen the cell phones, the video players, the fax machines carrying ideas, information and images from all over the world. I've heard people speak their minds and I have joined people in prayer in the faith of my own choosing. In all these ways I felt a steady breeze of freedom. The question is, where do we go from here? How do we work together to be on the right side of history together? More than 50 years ago, Hu Shi, one of your great political thinkers and a teacher at this university, said these words: "Now some people say to me you must sacrifice your individual freedom so that the nation may be free. But I reply, the struggle for individual freedom is the struggle for the nation's freedom. The struggle for your own character is the struggle for the nation's character." We Americans believe Hu Shi was right. We believe and our experience demonstrates that freedom strengthens stability and helps nations to change. One of our founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, once said, "Our critics are our friends, for they show us our faults." Now, if that is true, there are many days in the United States when the President has more friends than anyone else in America. (Laughter.) But it is so. In the world we live in, this global information age, constant improvement and change is necessary to economic opportunity and to national strength. Therefore, the freest possible flow of information, ideas, and opinions, and a greater respect for divergent political and religious convictions will actually breed strength and stability going forward. It is, therefore, profoundly in your interest, and the world's, that young Chinese minds be free to reach the fullness of their potential. That is the message of our time and the mandate of the new century and the new millennium. I hope China will more fully embrace this mandate. For all the grandeur of your history, I believe your greatest days are still ahead. Against great odds in the 20th century China has not only survived, it is moving forward dramatically. Other ancient cultures failed because they failed to change. China has constantly proven the capacity to change and grow. Now, you must re-imagine China again for a new century, and your generation must be at the heart of China's regeneration. The new century is upon us. All our sights are turned toward the future. Now your country has known more millennia than the United States has known centuries. Today, however, China is as young as any nation on Earth. This new century can be the dawn of a new China, proud of your ancient greatness, proud of what you are doing, prouder still of the tomorrows to come. It can be a time when the world again looks to China for the vigor of its culture, the freshness of its thinking, the elevation of human dignity that is apparent in its works. It can be a time when the oldest of nations helps to make a new world. The United States wants to work with you to make that time a reality. Thank you very much. (Applause.)
Q: Mr. President, I'm very honored to be the first one to raise question. Just as you mentioned in your address, Chinese and American people should join hands and move forward together. And what is most important in this process is for us to have more exchanges. In our view, since China is opening up in reform, we have had better understanding of the culture, history, and literature of America, and we have also learned a lot about you from the biography. And we have also learned about a lot of American Presidents. And we have also seen the movie, Titanic. But it seems that the American people's understanding of the Chinese people is not as much as the other way around. Maybe they are only seeing China through several movies, describing the Cultural Revolution or the rural life. So my question is, as the first President of the United States visiting China in 10 years, what do you plan to do to enhance the real understanding and the respect between our two peoples? Thank you.
THE PRESIDENT: First of all, I think that's a very good point. And one of the reasons that I came here was to try to -- because, as you can see, a few people come with me from the news media -- I hope that my trip would help to show a full and balanced picture of modern China to the United States, and that by coming here, it would encourage others to come here and others to participate in the life of China. I see a young man out in the audience who introduced himself to me yesterday as the first American ever to be a law student in China. So I hope we will have many more Americans coming here to study, many more Americans coming here to be tourists, many more Americans coming here to do business. The First Lady this morning and the Secretary of State had a meeting on a legal project. We are doing a lot of projects together with the Chinese to help promote the rule of law. That should bring a lot more people here. I think there is no easy answer to your question. It's something we have to work at. We just need more people involved and more kinds of contacts. And I think the more we can do that, the better. Is there a another question?
Q: Mr. President, as a Chinese, I'm very interested in the reunification of my motherland. Since 1972, progress has been made on the question of Taiwan question, but we have seen that the Americans repeatedly are selling advanced weapons to Taiwan. And to our great indignation, we have seen that the United States and Japan have renewed the U.S.-Japan security treaty. And according to some Japanese officials, this treaty even includes Taiwan Province of China. So I have to ask, if China were to send its naval facility to Hawaii, and if China were to sign a security treaty with other countries against one part of the United States, will the United States agree to such an act; will the American people agree to such an act? (Applause.)
THE PRESIDENT: First of all, the United States policy is not an obstacle to the peaceful reunification of China and Taiwan. Our policy is embodied in the three communiqués and in the Taiwan Relations Act. Our country recognized China and embraced a one China policy almost 20 years ago. And I reaffirmed our one China policy to President Jiang in our meetings. Now, when the United States and China reached agreement that we would have a one China policy, we also reached agreement that the reunification would occur by peaceful means, and we have encouraged the cross-strait dialogue to achieve that. Our policy is that any weapon sales, therefore, to Taiwan must be for defensive purposes only, and that the country must not believe -- China must not believe that we are in any way trying to undermine our own one China policy. It is our policy. But we do believe it should occur -- any reunification should occur peacefully. Now, on Japan, if you read the security agreement we signed with Japan, I think it will be clear from its terms that the agreement is not directed against any country, but rather in support of stability in Asia. We have forces in South Korea that are designed to deter a resumption of the Korean War across the dividing line between the two Koreas. Our forces in Japan are largely designed to help us promote stability anywhere in the Asian Pacific region on short notice. But I believe that it is not fair to say that either Japan or the United States have a security relationship that is designed to contain China. Indeed, what both countries want is a security partnership with China for the 21st century. For example, you mentioned NATO -- we have expanded NATO in Europe, but we also have made a treaty, an agreement between NATO and Russia, to prove that we are not against Russia anymore. And the most important thing NATO has done in the last five years is to work side by side with Russia to end the war in Bosnia. And I predict to you that what you see us doing with China now, working together to try to limit the tension from the Indian and the Pakistani nuclear tests, you will see more and more and more of that in the future. And I think you will see a lot of security cooperation in that area. And we can't see the agreements of today through the mirror of yesterday's conflicts.
Q: Mr. President, I've very glad to have this opportunity to ask you a question. With a friendly smile you have set foot on the soil of China and you have come to the campus of Beida, so we are very excited and honored by your presence, for the Chinese people really aspire for the friendship between China and the United States on the basis of equality. As I know that before your departure from the States, you said that the reason for you to visit China is because China is too important and engagement is better than containment. I'd like to ask you whether this sentence is kind of a commitment you made for your visit or do you have any other hidden sayings behind this smile. Do you have any other design to contain China? (Laughter and applause).
THE PRESIDENT: If I did, I wouldn't mask it behind a smile. (Laughter.) But I don't. That is, my words mean exactly what they say. We have to make a decision -- all of us do, but especially the people who live in large nations with great influence must decide how to define their greatness. When the Soviet Union went away, Russia had to decide how to define its greatness. Would they attempt to develop the human capacity of the Russian people and work in partnership with their neighbors for a greater future, or would they remember the bad things the happened to them in the past 200 years and think the only way they could be great would be to dominate their neighbors militarily? They chose a forward course. The world is a better place. The same thing is true with China. You will decide both in terms of your policies within your country and beyond, what does it mean that China will be a great power in the 21st century? Does it mean that you will have enormous economic success? Does it mean you will have enormous cultural influence? Does it mean that you will be able to play a large role in solving the problems of the world? Or does it mean you will be able to dominate your neighbors in some form or fashion, whether they like it or not? This is the decision that every great country has to make. You ask me, do I really want to contain China? The answer is no. The American people have always had a very warm feeling toward China that has been interrupted from time to time when we have had problems. But if you go back through the history of our country, there's always been a feeling on the part of our people that we ought to be close to the Chinese people. And I believe that it would be far better for the people of the United States to have a partnership on equal, respectful terms with China in the 21st century than to have to spend enormous amounts of time and money trying to contain China because we disagree with what's going on beyond our borders. So I do not want that. I want a partnership. I'm not hiding another design behind a smile, it's what I really believe. (Applause.) Because I think it's good for the American people and it's my job to do what's good for them. What's good for them is to have a good relationship with you.
Q: Mr. President, I'm going to graduate this year and I'm going to work in Bank of China. Just now, Mr. President, you mentioned the responsibilities of the young generation of the two countries for international security, environment, and the financial stability. I think they are really important. And I think the most important thing is for the young people to be well educated. And I know, Mr. President, you love your daughter very much, and she is now studying at Stanford. So, my question is, several years ago you proposed the concept of knowledge economy -- so, my first question is, what do you think the education of higher learning, what kind of role can this play in the future knowledge economy? And the second question is, what expectations do you have, Mr. President, for the younger generation of our two countries?
THE PRESIDENT: Let me answer the knowledge economy question first. And let me answer by telling you what I have tried to do in the United States. I have tried to create a situation in America in which the doors of universities and colleges are open to every young person who has sufficient academic achievement to get in, that there are no financial burdens of any kind. And we have not completely achieved it, but we have made a great deal of progress. Now, why would I do that? Because I believe that the more advanced an economy becomes, the more important it is to have a higher and higher and higher percentage of people with a university education. Let me just tell you how important it is in the United States. We count our people -- every 10 years we do a census and we count the numbers of the American people and we get all kinds of information on them. In the 1990 Census, younger Americans who had a college degree were overwhelmingly likely to get good jobs and have their incomes grow. Younger Americans who had two years or more of university were likely to get good jobs and have their incomes grow. Younger Americans who didn't go to university at all were likely to get jobs where their incomes declined and were much more likely to be unemployed. And the more advanced China's economy becomes, the more that will be true of China -- the more you will need very large numbers of people getting university education and technical education. So I think it is very, very important. Now, let me say one expectation I have for the younger generation of Americans and Chinese that has nothing to do with economics. One of the biggest threats to your future is a world which is dominated not by modern problems, but by ancient hatreds. Look around the world and see how much trouble is being caused by people who dislike each other because of their racial or their religious or their ethnic differences -- whether it's in Bosnia, or the conflict between the Indians and the Pakistanis, or in the Middle East or the tribal continents in Africa. You look all over the world, you see these kind of problems. Young people are more open to others who are different, more interested in people who are different. And I hope young people in China and young people in America that have a good education will be a strong voice in the world against giving in to this sort of hating people or looking down on them simply because they're different. Thank you. (Applause.)
Q: Mr. President, with regard to the question of democracy, human rights and freedom, actually this is an issue of great interest to both the Chinese and American peoples. But, to be honest, our two countries have some differences over these issues. In your address just now you made a very proud review and retrospection of the history of the American democracy in human rights. And you have also made some suggestions for China. Of course, for the sincere suggestions, we welcome. But I think I recall one saying, that is we should have both criticism and self-criticism. So now I'd like to ask you a question. Do you think that in the United States today, there are also some problems in the area of democracy, freedom, and human rights, and what your government has done in improving the situation? (Applause.)
THE PRESIDENT: I do, and, first of all, let me say, I never raise this question overseas in any country, not just China, without acknowledging first, that our country has had terrible problems in this area -- keep in mind, slavery was legal in America for many years -- and that we are still not perfect. I always say that, because I don't think it's right for any person to claim that he or she lives in a perfect country. We're all struggling toward ideals to live a better life. So I agree with the general point you made. Now, I will give you two examples. We still have some instances of discrimination in America -- in housing or employment or other areas based on race. And we have a system set up to deal with it, but we have not totally eliminated it. And in the last year, I have been engaging the American people in a conversation on this subject, and we have tried to identify the things that government should do, the things that the American people should do either through the local government or through other organizations, and the attitudes that should change the minds and hearts of the American people. So that's one example. Now, let me give you another example. We have -- when I ran for President in 1992, I was in a hotel in New York City, and an American immigrant from Greece came up to me and he said, my son is 10 years old and he studies the election in school and he says I should vote for you. But he said, if I vote for you, I want you to make my son free, because my son is not really free. So I asked this man, what do you mean? And he said, well, the crime is so high in my neighborhood, there are so many guns and gangs that my son does not feel that he -- I can't let him walk to school by himself, or go across the street to play in the park. So if I vote for you, I want you to make my son free. I think that's important, because, you see, in America, we tend to view freedom as the freedom from government abuse or from government control. That is our heritage. Our founders came here to escape the monarchy in England. But sometimes freedom requires affirmative steps by government to give everyone an equal opportunity to have an education and make a decent living and to preserve a lawful environment. So I work very hard to try to bring the crime rate down in America, and it's now lower than it has been at any time in 25 years, which means that more of our children are free. But the crime rate is still high; there is still too much violence. So we Americans need to be sensitive not only to preserve the freedoms that we hold dear, but also to create an environment in which people can build a truly good and free life. That's a good question. (Applause.)
Q: Mr. President, you are warmly welcome to Beida. You mentioned a sentence by Mr. Xu Jiyu, but our former president once said that when the great moral is in practice, the morals, they will not contradict each other. And I don't think the individual freedom and the collective freedom will contradict each other. But in China the prosperous development of the nation is actually the free choice of our people, and it's also the result of their efforts. So I think that freedom, real freedom, should mean for the people to freely choose the way of life they like and also to develop. And I also think that only those who can really respect the freedom of others can really say that they understand what freedom means. (Applause.) I don't know whether you agree with me or not.
THE PRESIDENT: First of all, if you believe in freedom, you have to respect the freedom of others to make another choice. And even societies that have rather radical views of individual freedom recognize limits on that freedom when it interferes with preserving other people's rights. For example, there's one of our famous court cases which says we have freedom of speech, but no one should be free to shout the word "fire" in a crowded movie theatre where there is no fire, and cause people to stampede over each other. There's another famous court decision that says my freedom ends where the other person's nose begins, meaning that you don't have the freedom to hit someone else. So I agree with that. People have the freedom to choose and you have to respect other people's freedom and they have the right to make decisions that are different from yours. And there will never be a time when our systems and our cultures and our choices will be completely identical. That's one of the things that makes life interesting.
Q: Mr. President, I have two questions. The first question is, the U.S. economy has been growing for more than 18 months, so I'd like to ask, apart from your personal contribution to the United States, what other factors do you think important for the success of the U.S. economy? Maybe they can serve as good reference for China. The second question is, when President Jiang Zemin visited Harvard University last year, there were a lot of students outside the hall demonstrating, so I'd like you, Mr. President, if you are in Beijing University, and if there were a lot of students outside protesting and demonstrating, what feeling would you have?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, first of all, on the United States economy, I believe that the principal role of government policy since I've been President was to, first of all, get our big government deficit -- we had a huge annual deficit in spending -- we got that under control. We're about to have the first balanced budget in 30 years. That drove interest rates down and freed up a lot of money to be invested in creating jobs in the private sector. Then the second thing we did was to expand trade a lot, so we began to sell a lot more around the world than we had before. And the third thing we did was to attempt to invest more in our people -- in research, development, technology, and education. Now, in addition to that, however, a lot of the credit here goes to the American people themselves. We have a very sophisticated business community; they were investing money in new technologies and in new markets and in training people. We have an environment where it's quite easy for people to start a business, and perhaps this is the area that might be most helpful to China. I know that my wife has done a lot of work around the world in villages, trying to get credit to villagers so they could borrow money to start their own businesses, to try to take advantage of some skill they have. And we have seen this system work even in the poorest places in Africa and Latin America, where opportunity takes off. So we have tried to make it easy in America for people to start a business, to expand a business, and to do business. And then we have also tried very, very hard to get new opportunities into areas where there were none before. And all these things together -- but especially, I give most of the credit to the people of my country. After all, a person in my position, we're supposed to have correct policies so that we create a framework within which the American people then create the future. And I think that is basically what has happened. Now, you asked me an interesting question. Actually, I have been demonstrated against quite a lot in the United States. I told President Jiang when he was there, I was glad they demonstrated against him, so I didn't feel so lonely. (Laughter and applause.) I'll give you a serious answer. If there were a lot of people demonstrating against me outside, suppose they were demonstrating over the question that the first gentleman asked me. Suppose they said, oh, President Clinton is trying to interfere with the peaceful reunification of China and Taiwan, and he shouldn't be selling them any weapons whatever. Well, I would try to find out what they were demonstrating against and then I would ask my host if they minded if I would go over and talk to them, or if they would mind if one or two people from the group of demonstrators could be brought to see me and they could say what is on their minds, and I could answer. Remember what I said before about what Benjamin Franklin said -- our critics are our friends, for they show us our faults. You have asked me some very good questions today that have an element of criticism in them. They have been very helpful to me. They have helped me to understand how what I say is perceived by others -- not just in China, but around the world. They have helped me to focus on what I can do to be a more effective President for my people and for the things we believe in. And so I feel very good that we have had this interchange. And from my point of view, the questions were far more important than my speech -- I never learn anything when I'm talking, I only learn things when I'm listening. Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause.)
END
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President Clinton gets some tough questions at Peking University
BY TIM MORRISON
People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones -- especially when they're standing in someone else's house. That was the message Bill Clinton got from students at Beijing's Peking University on Monday.
Responding to Clinton's themes for the trip -- the benefits of human rights and freedoms, his policy of "constructive engagement" with China -- the students asked him probing questions on U.S. policy and the shortcomings of democracy.
"Many students may agree with Clinton's criticisms," says TIME Beijing bureau chief Jaime Florcruz, "but they don't like to be lectured." No kidding. As one student asked, "Do you think that in the U.S. today, there are also some problems in the area of democracy, freedom and human rights, and what has your government done in improving the situation?" Regarding U.S. policy on Taiwan, which China considers a renegade province, another asked bluntly how Clinton would feel if China started sending missiles to Hawaii. All of this was greeted with applause.
A visiting graduate scholar told TIME that she hadn't expected so many challenges, but the opinions behind them were less than surprising. "Remember that these kids know a lot -- from TV, from the Internet," says Florcruz. Even students who greatly admire the American political system are far from convinced that the U.S. should be acting the part of role model. And when Clinton talked about his efforts to "free" poverty-stricken Americans from the drugs and crime that plague their neighborhoods, he only reinforced the idea in many Chinese minds that lawlessness is a natural complement to American-style democracy. Regardless, the President was received warmly by the crowd of 800 inside the hall, and enthusiastically by the 2,000 more who climbed trees, statues and buildings to greet him outside.
Interestingly, both Peking University and the U.S. government refuted suggestions that the students may have been planted or fed questions to ask the President. Admission to the auditorium was decided by lottery, and the U.S. Embassy says it is satisfied that the questions reflected the students' true opinions.
True opinions? Questioning received wisdom? Chalk up another foray into China's brave new world of public debate. This one, too, was broadcast live on nationwide television. No matter where Clinton decides to cast his stones, the Chinese monolith is looking a lot more transparent.
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Clinton Remarks in Book Presentation at Beijing University
Following is a transcript of remarks by President Clinton in presenting collection of American books to the American Studies Reference Collection of the Beijing University Library:
Library Lawn Beijing University Beijing, People's Republic of China
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Thank you very much. Well, first, let me thank all of you for coming out to see us on such a nice, warm day. (Laughter and applause.) I thank President Chen, Vice President Ren, Professor Chi, Senator Akaka, and the members of Congress who are here, and all the members of the university community, who have made my wife and our daughter and our whole delegation feel so very welcome today. Thank you very much. (Applause.) Now, when Senator Akaka said that some people thought of Beida as the Harvard of China -- (laughter and applause) -- all of us Americans who did not go to Harvard were thinking, perhaps, Harvard was the Beida of the United States. (Applause.) You know, political leaders of my generation talk a lot about the future and the 21st century, but it is you, the students who are here, who will live in it and who must build it. A child born today will not even remember the 20th century. Indeed, a child born today may think of people like me as relics of an ancient dynasty. (Laughter.) Americans -- including that one -- (laughter) -- want to work with China to help build this future -- a future of security and prosperity, a future in which we clean up the world's environment instead of destroy it, a future in which we advance education and dignity and freedom for all people. As a small token of our respect and in honor of your centennial, we are donating over 500 reference books to the library of Beida. (Applause.) Thank you. Xie xie. (Laughter an applause.) Through the U.S. Information Agency, we have selected some of the best volumes in our history and literature, along with encyclopedias and dictionaries on every subject related to the United States. And my wife and I have added personally two books which we wrote: her book, "It Takes A Village," and mine, "Between Hope and History." And I'd like to present them to the President at this moment. (Applause.) Now, if you're trying to decide which one to read first, I should tell you that in America her book sold a lot more copies than mine did. (Laughter and applause.) We are proud of our historic relationship with this university. I hope these books will help to further our friendship for another generation. I hope, too, that more and more Americans will come to China to study and more and more young Chinese will go to America to study. (Applause.) Every day, I must be preoccupied with the world's problems, but I believe a lot of the world's problems would be quickly solved if the world's young people were permitted to live together and learn together and serve together. You can set the standard, and I hope you will. (Applause.) Next week, our young country will celebrate its 222nd birthday. (Applause.) It is a time of year when we Americans stop to reflect on the many blessings we enjoy, on the ideals of our founders to provide life, liberty, and the opportunity to pursue happiness to all people. It is a time when we measure our progress and try to honestly assess our continuing problems; when we take pride in our history, but also resolve to keep working on it. For history is not just something to be studied at university. History is always unfolding. Here it is unfolding. And I believe a large part of the next chapter in America's history will be its partnership with the new China. (Applause.) China, too, is always rebuilding itself. Of course, your foundations are deeper than ours; our entire history could fit into one of your longer dynasties. (Laughter.) But from different starting points we are working toward a common destiny of peace and prosperity, and, I hope, of lifting the level of freedom and dignity not only for all our own people, but for others throughout the world. China is a very old country, But, thanks to you --to your idealism, to your spirit and to your future -- it will remain forever young. Thank you very much. (Applause.)
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"Ever since the Tiananmen massacre of 1989, many in the U.S. have viewed China as an "evil empire." Just how fair are Washington's complaints about Beijing's behavior?"
BY JOHANNA McGEARY
How Bill Clinton must pine for the days when America had an enemy clearly identified and a cause righteous beyond doubt. Foreign policy then was so fundamental a case of us-against-them that "bipartisan consensus" actually worked. When survival was at stake, national interests, not special interests, had a fair chance to prevail.
Well, forget that when China, not the Soviet Union, is the other big boy on the planet. The U.S. has always had trouble figuring out what cubbyhole to stick the world's most populous communist nation into: a geostrategic card to play? Someone we can do business with? The next evil empire? Now, by one of those sudden confluences of the political stars, the off-and-on debate over how to handle China is at a high boil just as Clinton sets forth on the first presidential visit to the People's Republic since Beijing's tanks mowed down the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square nine years ago.
Ever since then, there's been a difference of opinion between Main Street and the Beltway. American citizens turned their back on a nation they judged morally and politically beyond the pale, and public opinion has yet to recover. But policymakers couldn't quite do the same, recognizing that the U.S. had no option but to deal with China. Its rising power made it a force to be reckoned with, like it or not. And so Clinton, after some I'll-do-it-different demagoguery of his own, became the sixth President since Richard Nixon opened the way in 1972, to practice "constructive engagement" with China.
No country today brings out more of the passions--or the hypocrisy--in Washington politicians. Every time they get the chance, those who see profit in it pummel the "butchers in Beijing" about all manner of failings, aiming their blows as much at Clinton as at China's communist die-hards. Antiabortion activists rail at China's forced abortions. Exiled crusader Harry Wu charges China with harvesting human organs from executed prisoners for sale. Human-rights advocates complain that Clinton is ignoring systemic repression; partisans of the Dalai Lama call for a free Tibet; labor advocates bang the drums about unfair competition. Even businessmen courted by Clinton complain that China's markets are still closed. It makes for great sound bites when they all clamor to know what Clinton's brand of engagement has brought them.
Of course it is Beijing's bosses who are responsible for making their nation what former U.S. diplomat Chas. W. Freeman calls a "uniquely credible miscreant," guilty of behavior that deserves to be picked on. But the natural suspicion and swings in sentiment that always affect U.S. attitudes toward China have been hyperamplified by a convergence of election-year politics, Republican interparty fissures, and a string of unfortunate events, like the allegations of illicit Chinese campaign contributions, Indian and Pakistani nuclear blasts and reports of a possible national-security breach in U.S. satellite sales to China. Some of the steam in Washington rises from real issues, but a lot is the hot air of partisan politics.
At the moment, those playing the emotive chords have captured the debate. Clinton's fairly cogent defense of his policies in a speech two weeks ago would never fit on a bumper sticker, though the bombast of a lot of critics allowed him to cast the terms as a choice between foolish isolation and practical engagement. No one who knows foreign policy thinks the U.S. should turn China into a pariah state, and only a handful called for Clinton to cancel his trip.
So how bad is China? The simple answer is there is no simple answer, just ambiguous facts. Like dual-use exports for civilian or military purpose, China's behavior can be benign or malign, better or not good enough. There's plenty to worry about if you're worried about China.
HUMAN RIGHTS
The Clinton Administration repeats over and over to Beijing that its relations with the U.S. cannot reach "full potential" without "significant" improvement in human rights. For years, China's leaders turned a deaf ear, insisting that such issues as freedom of expression, due process, the imprisonment of dissidents, prison labor and religious tolerance were none of Washington's business. "We were talking to a wall," says a senior official. "Now we can, and we do, talk seriously about these matters."
Of such small steps is progress made. Beijing's leaders seem immune to bullying, but dogged dialogue and economic advancement are persuading them to allow more personal liberties. Chinese citizens today lead remarkably free lives, as masters of their own fates and fortunes. Satellite dishes and the Internet beam in unauthorized information undreamed of a few years ago. Beijing has slowly been enshrining into law such individual perogatives as property protection and the right to sue. The Chinese can even mock their leaders and criticize government policies--in the privacy of their homes. Beijing, in theory, opened itself up to international monitoring when it signed one of two key U.N. covenants on human rights last October and pledged to sign the other soon. "The unanswered question is whether to take their commitments seriously," says Mike Jendrzejczyk, Washington director of Human Rights Watch/Asia.
Although the record is improving glacially, Administration officials and human-rights observers agree it is still quite bad. "By world standards, they're woefully short," says a White House official. What is distorting the picture is the tendency of some activists to narrow the focus to the most sensational charges, like forced abortions. Human-rights experts in and out of government have found some anecdotal evidence that these abuses happen but no proof that the government promotes them.
Such allegations, the experts say, should not crowd out attention to China's main sin: a system that does not permit any freedoms that might challenge the control of the ruling Communist Party in word or deed and arbitrarily punishes anyone who tries to do so. These issues are most directly antithetical to American values but do not lend themselves to quick, dramatic solutions. China's government does not allow freedom of expression or association, peaceful demonstration or independent labor unions; it does employ detention, torture, the denial of due process. Western experts and the Chinese government agree that there are about 2,000 prisoners incarcerated for "counterrevolutionary" crimes, and 158 Beijing residents are still in detention for their roles in Tiananmen. Of the 230,000 Chinese who have been in labor camps for "re-education" for up to three years without trial, a number are thought to be prisoners of conscience rather than ordinary criminals, the incidence of this decidedly extrajudicial form of punishment has increased more than 50% in the past four years. The crime of "counterrevolution" was abolished a year ago, but the new crime of "endangering state security" has proved to be an even better catchall provision. "They have made a hard-nosed decision to maintain political stability at all costs," says Jendrzejczyk.
While the religious right has tarred Beijing with a reputation for wholesale repression, religious freedom is officially guaranteed, and millions of Chinese eagerly embracing Christianity and other faiths can pray at thousands of houses of worship. The freedom is qualified, however, by a requirement that all religious organizations register, so authorities can keep a watchful eye lest activism stray too far. "If it's anything but pure worship, the Chinese get very nasty," says a White House official. Religious groups that refuse to register, such as openly pro-Vatican Roman Catholics and energetically proselytizing Protestant sects, invite harassment, interrogation, sometimes even arrest and fines from overzealous local officials. A handful of major organizers and outspoken leaders are known to have been jailed for lengthy terms.
Persecution of Tibet's Buddhists is another matter. Along with restive Muslims in Xinjiang province, followers of the Dalai Lama are regarded as dangerous "splitists" who must be ruthlessly suppressed to keep the nation together. It is not their religion but their nationalism that is worrisome to Beijing, driving the government to clamp harsh controls on the monasteries where the independence drive is strongest. China--and the U.S.--regard Tibet as an integral part of China, giving Clinton the tricky task of pushing to end Buddhist repression without supporting separatism.
The increasingly powerful Dalai Lama lobby in the U.S. calls Tibet an "occupied country" and presses vociferously for independence, accusing China of a deliberate campaign to wipe out the Tibetan religion and Sinicize the region by flooding it with ethnic-Chinese migrants. Barry Sautman, a Hong Kong law professor deeply involved in Tibet-related issues, says between 600 and 1,200 people are imprisoned for various political offenses that boil down to preaching separation. He insists "there is no evidence" independent demographers can find that Beijing deliberately masterminded any planned program of population transfer.
Administration officials feel that political slanging over human rights is not helping them in Beijing. They reject the hard-line right's argument that the U.S. should isolate China to get better results, dispute the liberals' charge that engagement without human-rights content is giving Beijing a free ride, and get exasperated with the simplistic tone of the debate. As a high-ranking official explains, "The fact that you make different progress on different issues does not mean the slow issues have got to guide the rest."
WEAPONS
For most of the past 20 years, China has exported dangerous weapons to countries the U.S. distrusts. Beijing makes strategic calculations that run against U.S. interests, and it is not sufficiently self-regulating to police its leaky, corrupt munitions system. By most accounts, at a minimum China has supplied Pakistan with nuclear-reactor and bomb designs, ring magnets to enrich uranium, and technical know-how to produce nuclear weapons, and with short-range M-11 missile components and equipment to make their own. And China has sold nuclear reactors and uranium-enrichment equipment to Iran, along with Silkworm ground-based antiship missiles and precursor chemicals for weapons of mass destruction.
But China's calculus of its interests has been evolving as it tallies what it must give up to win international acceptance. The U.S. has hammered hard on proliferation and levied sanctions on key companies when China has flagrantly disobeyed. As a result, most experts agree, Beijing has grudgingly but measurably cleaned up its act, virtually halting nuclear proliferation and cutting back on missile sales. Says a senior defense official: "In the past couple of years, there has been steady progress."
China, agrees Douglas Paal, president of the Asia Pacific Policy Center and a former Bush White House official, is not now at the top of the list of world proliferators. Beijing has signed or acceded to key control treaties, including the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention. China says it will observe the Missile Technology Control Regime, which effectively blocks sales of high-tech weapons to bad-boy nations, but won't sign it. Of course, the U.S. will not know until it knows if China is cheating. Beijing "works harder to hide its exports," warns Gary Milhollin of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control. "They've shifted to stealth exports of components so the U.S. won't see."
The more troubling proliferation question is not what China sells abroad but what the U.S. sells to China. Congress has been delving into the details of the Loral satellite deal to uncover whether the company leaked damaging technical know-how in the course of investigating why the Chinese launch rocket exploded on take-off. That information allegedly could help Beijing improve the reliability and accuracy of the 13 nuclear missiles it keeps aimed at U.S. cities. Loral has admitted committing a possible procedural violation of export-control laws in forwarding a report of its investigation to the Chinese but denies that sensitive information was passed along. A senior Pentagon official makes this assessment of the situation: "In the worst case, it might help them improve their missiles marginally, but the military balance with us would not shift much."
The controversy does open to fresh scrutiny a very difficult issue: To what extent do all U.S. sales of dual-use technology (items for legitimate civilian purposes that can also be turned to military use) help China modernize its military and improve its nuclear and missile arsenal? The question is hardly new, and scientists have been arguing back and forth for years whether China should be allowed to buy a whole array of items, from supercomputers and centrifuges to clean rooms and ground-positioning systems. "They don't just want our hardware," says Henry Sokolski, a former Bush proliferation specialist. "They want our know-how and know-why, so they can do it themselves."
All these items require export licenses, and each satellite sale must win a waiver from sanctions imposed after Tiananmen. Every waiver requested has been granted: nine by former President Bush, 11 by Clinton. Critics are asking whether Clinton made the process dangerously easier by transferring responsibility from the security-minded State Department to the sales-eager Commerce Department two years ago. Such sales, says a Pentagon official, "are a manageable problem," but the U.S. "should err on the side of caution."
COMMERCE
Clinton is regularly vilified by a broad spectrum of critics who charge him with selling out American values in the name of trade with China. The impression they give is that Washington will concede anything to do business deals with Beijing. China is a tough customer when it comes to buying American. There is an enticing market there of 1.2 billion people, but most U.S. trade with China runs the other way. The deficit is running at $4.3 billion because Americans buy 70% of their low-end consumer goods, like shoes, toys and textiles, from China, which has replaced richer Asian nations as the cheapest supplier (which keeps U.S. inflation down). What America mainly sells to the Chinese is high-value-added items like machinery, aircraft and transportation equipment, a few big-ticket sales that don't begin to penetrate to China's exploding consumer class.
The Chinese market remains largely untapped because Beijing works at keeping it closed. The government is genuinely worried about competition at a time when massive reform of its moribund state enterprises is throwing millions out of work, but it is still a locked-down, state-protected economy. By dint of insistent negotiating, the U.S. has since 1993 reached 15 trade agreements that have opened the door somewhat. Included are two very difficult treaties to protect intellectual-property rights. The world's worst pirater, says U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky, "has gotten very serious about this because they have to if they want foreign investment."
The Chinese very much do, but on their own terms. They are eager to join the World Trade Organization, which is an admission ticket to the global economic community. U.S. businessmen keen to expand their sales want China in too. But the Clinton Administration is holding out for "commercially meaningful terms" necessitating wholesale change in the Chinese economy before saying yes. As a result, the complicated negotiations required before China can join have been slow and painstaking and are nowhere near conclusion. Beijing tends to respond only if pressed hard, says Barshefsky, though "not always and not as much as we want." Washington intends to hold up China's membership until Beijing meets its terms. "We're not asking anything from China they can't reasonably do," says Barshefsky. "It might be a stretch, yes, but will we settle for less? No."
Considering all the heavy baggage Clinton is toting to Beijing, it's a good thing summitry involves more symbolism than substance. The Chinese are mainly intent on replacing those ugly negatives of Tiananmen with positive pictures, and so for nine days the American President will star in a series of carefully scripted, made-for-TV encounters with the Chinese people. Out of this voyage, China's spin doctors hope, will emerge a more humane and dynamic image, befitting their nation's role as a 21st century superpower.
Clinton will have to work hard on his own symbolism if he doesn't want to look sandbagged. Much has been made about how he will handle the politically touchy arrival ceremony in Tiananmen Square, but he will need to appear just as surefooted in his talks with China's leaders inside the Great Hall of the People. Little serious business is planned, but the political noise from Washington will sharply limit his ability to show flexibility on many items on the agenda. And it will put pressure on him to say something bold and daring on the hot-button cause of human rights. Clinton may have to choose between doing things that will advance long-term U.S. interests and those that will help him (or avoid hurting him) in domestic politics. He's slick enough so that he may be able to please the home folks without angering the Chinese, but it won't be easy, not even for Bill.
China is neither our enemy nor our ally. There are plenty of things to hate about its behavior, but there is good reason to push it to do better. Its government is not relentlessly inimical to us. Beijing has been constructive in managing the India-Pakistan nuclear arms race and has contributed to global economic stability during Asia's financial crisis. The issue before the U.S. is not whether to engage the Asian giant; it's how. China is a tough interlocutor, and Clinton has got to be--and be seen to be--just as tough. It is not naive but self-interested for the U.S. to use all its clout to make tomorrow's China less of a worry than today's.
With reporting by Jay Branegan/Washington, Sandra Burton/Hong Kong and Jaime A. FlorCruz /Beijing
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As unstoppable as the flow of the Yangtze, currents of change sweep through a nation determined to succeed in the eyes of the world
By TERRY MCCARTHY ON THE YANGTZE
The Yangtze is a raw, uncontrolled and sometimes destructive river sweeping through China, bringing riches to many but drowning others in its floods. And like the river, change is flooding through the nation. Fortunes are being made in private businesses, but millions of workers who depended totally on their jobs with state enterprises are being laid off. More millions are roaming the country trying to find work. Corruption has become malignant, and environmental damage is off the end of the scale.
A two-week trip starting in the town of Yibin down 1,600 miles of the Yangtze, the "Long River" that runs through the heart of China from the highlands of Tibet to the skyscrapers of Shanghai, produced encounters with scores of Chinese obsessed and driven by the desire to improve their lives. Farmers, boat captains, teachers, gangsters, businessmen who work the river and engineers who seek to harness it--all want to share in the new Chinese dream, to become wealthy and regain the self-respect that China lost to colonial powers centuries ago. Political change lags behind, but if few people are ready to defy the one-party system, sneaking admiration for the freedoms Americans enjoy is more widespread than party leaders imagine. In an effort to remove the dead economic hand of the government, which has kept China poor and backward, the new leadership is unleashing the energy and ambition of 1.2 billion people to fend for themselves. It is like opening the floodgates of a dam. It is the force that makes the China that U.S. President Bill Clinton will see this week a much different place from what it was only a few years ago.
Zhong Qizhi is going to make it, whatever the cost. "I am the son of a farmer and a factory worker," he says. "It was impossible for me to get help from anyone." So the 31-year-old from Chengdu taught himself English while working as an elementary school teacher, went off to run a travel agency in Tibet for four years, then set up a computer store in the southern city of Kunming. In 1996 he passed a university entrance exam to study international finance and economics. He paid for his sister to study Japanese; she now works for Sony in Shanghai, and Zhong hopes to join her there very soon, working for a foreign bank or investment house.
"If you take the American Dream, I think the Chinese people have a stronger dream to be successful," says Zhong, sitting in a Nanjing tea shop near the university at which he is studying. He lights a cigarette from the butt he has finished and looks around at the students at the other tables. Most are 10 years younger, from more privileged backgrounds. When Zhong was their age, in the late 1980s, there was no way a peasant's son from rural China could have contemplated hopping between jobs, getting an education and applying for a job with "Goldman Sachs or Citicorp," as Zhong hopes to do. Today, with the economic reform being pressed by Zhu Rongji, the new Premier, the Chinese dream knows no limits. "Making money has become the thing to do in China; people judge you by how wealthy you are," says Zhong. "It is all a search for respect."
Chen Yuancai stands at the beginning of the Chinese dream. At 71, Chen has lived all his life in Shuangliu, a small village north of the Yangtze between the two cities of Luzhou and Chongqing in Sichuan province. In his cottage are three roughly hewn wooden coffins. "That's for my elder brother, that's for my wife," he says matter-of-factly. "Mine is on the bottom." The three coffins cost him $625, all told, including the grave sites on the hill across from his house, not far from where his father is buried. It is a sizable sum, built up over the years from the surplus grain and vegetables he has been able to sell since farmers' markets were legalized in 1979 by Deng Xiaoping. Chen is content: after seven decades of working the soil and being nourished by it, he has made all the arrangements to return to it, in the simplest of life cycles. He represents the first wave of free enterprise in China's long effort to modernize. Now, in the second wave, rural people are heading for the cities and the opportunities they offer.
Chen has two sons and two daughters; his elder son and a daughter work in the provincial capital, Chengdu. His other son has gone south to the booming city of Guangzhou, where he works as a welder while his wife does shift work at a shoe factory. They send back $75 a month to the family. "Just about every family in this village has someone in Guangzhou. They say life is all right there. They have fish and meat to eat every day. Of course it is better to be in the village where you come from, but there is no money here."
The cities have money, but they have problems too. Most are clogged with job seekers; costs are higher than in the countryside; thieves are more plentiful; and pollution is choking. "Sometimes it is so bad the planes can't take off," says Wang Ren, a taxi driver in Chongqing, the first major city on the Yangtze's course. After barely an hour driving through the city, eyes begin to sting and throats get sore from the brown haze that hangs in the air. Wang says he cannot find another job; layoffs from state-owned industries have been heavy in Chongqing, and several times this year the unemployed have blocked traffic in the city center. "But," says Wang, using a time-honored phrase, "Chinese people know how to eat bitterness."
Life was infinitely more bitter under Mao. "My generation had the worst luck," says Zhang Shixun, the 48-year-old captain of Feizhang No. 3, a ferry that makes the daily trip from Chongqing downstream to Wanxian. "When we were starting to build our bodies, there was no food (the famines caused by Mao's Great Leap Forward killed more than 20 million). When we started to study, the Cultural Revolution happened, so we were sent to the countryside and stopped learning. Now as we start to make some money, there are all these layoffs. The younger generation will have it much better."
Zhang sounds the ferry's horn at an oncoming barge. He is in favor of the controversial Three Gorges Dam, which, he says, will deepen the water and allow big ships to sail all the way upstream to Chongqing, bringing economic development in their wake. "We are only half developed compared with the Mississippi, where you have dams that make the water flatter and easier for shipping," he says. Like most Chinese today, he is fascinated by the wealth of the U.S. and by its political system. "Mao started the Cultural Revolution on his own. Even if you want to start a war in the U.S., the President has to go through Congress first," he says admiringly. As he starts talking about China's drive to catch up with the U.S., the ferry draws alongside a large, modern cruise ship. "There, you see! That big cruise ship is America: big, comfortable, but slow. Our boat is like China: dirty, poor, but faster. We are developing more quickly." He gives another triumphal tug on the horn.
From high on the hill in the riverside town of Wanxian, Gu Xiaoli looks out over the boat dock from her kitchen window and sighs. She is cooking a modest dinner of rice soup, pigs' feet and steamed buns. In the past two years, she, her husband and her son have all been laid off from textile factories in the town. With their combined pensions of $100 a month, they also have to support her 85-year-old father. Her biggest worry is for her son. After being laid off, he opened a restaurant that failed; then he got a driver's license but soon discovered the town already had too many taxi drivers. Now he hopes to get a job with a Hong Kong company setting up in the town.
"We hope things will get better for him. He's 30 now, but he can't find a good wife without a job. Right now we are saving all we can." Her son chimes in for the first time: "In China it's like one big experiment now. And we are the test subjects." Gu Xiaoli ignores his bitter tone. "In China things will get better. But there are so many people."
From Wanxian, the river grows narrower, hemmed in by mountain ridges that tower above the boats. This is the start of the famed Three Gorges, a long, picturesque stretch with such place names as the Bellows Gorge, Drinking Phoenix Spring, Witches Gorge and Misty Screen Peak. The rapids that wrecked many wooden junks in the past have been tamed over the years by dynamiting rocks, and are now destined to disappear under 600 ft. of water after the dam is built.
Lei Xia travels through the Three Gorges twice a week. The 22-year-old English and business graduate from Sichuan International Studies University works on the Qianlong cruise ship, a gaudy floating hotel with a prow shaped like a dragon's head. After 18 months making the round trip between Chongqing and Yichang, she is getting tired of the scenery, of life on the boat and of the drunken Taiwanese tourists who make passes at her in the karaoke bar at night. Now she and a friend are planning to move to Beijing, where a travel agent she met on the boat last year has promised them jobs. There is even the possibility of traveling overseas as tour guides, now that Chinese are beginning to take foreign trips.
"My parents are worried," she says about her new mobility, "but they have not forbidden me. Compared with their generation, maybe I am lucky. I can choose for myself." Like many her age, Lei spends little time thinking about politics. When pressed about the reforming Premier Zhu Rongji, she says only, "People around me say he will make China stronger." Her real concern is the slump in tourism from Asia's economic crisis. "But tomorrow will be better," she says cheerfully. "I trust in China."
The Qianlong is moored for the night at Wushan, and next to it at the dock is a large boat with a neon sign for WUSHAN GODDESS ENTERTAINMENT CITY. Gambling is illegal in China, but this is a casino, open all day, with high-low dice games, blackjack and bingo. Laid-off workers crowd the tables, spending their last renminbi on a few rolls of the dice. The casino is run by an overweight Hong Konger who wears expensive jeans and a heavy gold watch but doesn't want to give his real name. Neither do his two formidable-looking bodyguards. "I had to put in a lot of money to get this," he says, watching the flow of chips across the dice table, "mostly to pay off the local officials. And they will probably shut it down in a couple of months anyway. I have done it in a Beijing suburb and in Tianjin already. They shut me down there too." Gambling? "If you want to win, you have to struggle."
The farther from Beijing, the weaker the law. In Dachang, a pleasant farming town up the Daning River, which flows into the Yangtze at Wushan, postmaster Wen Daquan is quick to voice his concerns. Dachang will be completely flooded by the new dam, and the government has said it will pay for everyone to be relocated. "First of all, each person was to get 10,000 renminbi ($1,250) each. Now the local officials are saying it will be just 7,000 renminbi. They will try to keep the rest." The new land is on top of a mountain, so it will not be nearly so good for farming as the rich alluvial soil they till now by the river's edge. "Everyone here is angry," he says.
They are not angry in New Zigui City, half a day's journey downriver. With its shiny new apartment buildings and broad streets, the town looks as if it has been dropped from the sky onto a hilltop above the site of the new dam. It will replace the quaint old town of Zigui, which will be inundated. And good riddance too, according to Feng Wanhu, a local teacher. "It was dirty, cramped. I lived in a house that was just 10 sQ: m [100 sq. ft.]. It had no bathroom, no running water, no kitchen inside... Here is much better." Feng's new home is 900 sq. ft., and he bought it for $5,000, which he borrowed from the bank. He has two bedrooms and all the amenities he lacked before. And now he is giving a banquet in the new hotel to celebrate the birth of his first son. Money is flowing into the town because of all the dam-construction work, and as he circulates among the tables with a bottle of rice liquor and good-luck eggs boiled in red dye, his guests are aglow with dreams for the future. He pauses to offer a toast: "I hope my son will have a happy life."
A hilltop near the town gives a full view of the Sandouping construction site for the new dam. Looking down on the empty expanse between the mountains on either side, one can hardly conceive of a mass of concrete 600 ft. high, stretching 1 1/4 miles across the river valley, to be finished by 2003. Nor is it easy to picture the 360-mile-long reservoir that will back up behind the planned dam, flooding more than 150,000 acres of land and forcing 1.3 million people to relocate to higher ground. The cranes on the site are hundreds of feet high, but they look like matchstick models until they are compared with the minute scale of the boats passing by on the river. This, then, is the size of China's dreams for the future--bigger and more ambitious than outsiders can imagine. Even within China, the dam has its opponents. But no one leaves Sandouping--resounding with trucks in low gear, clanking machinery and the occasional detonation of explosives--without being overawed by the size of the biggest construction site on earth.
The river slows down as it emerges from the Three Gorges onto the plains, but the impatience for wealth and success only increases. Wuhan, China's fifth largest city, is the transfer point for cargo from oceangoing ships to smaller boats heading further upriver, and has long been a center of commerce. Here are department stores with imported brands, stock-trading houses, U.S. fast-food chains--and "Balls," a newly opened NBA theme bar run by a former car salesman from Taiwan. Not so slick as Shanghai, Wuhan still has its pretensions, enough to attract people such as "Johnny" Wang Liang, a hairdresser who left fashion-conscious Guangzhou "because it was already full of people like me." Wang finds Wuhan fairly tame and doesn't like the food, but he is making good money dyeing orange the hair of the local youth at $25 a treatment, to create that Hong Kong fashion look. "It is all about money in China these days, isn't it?" he says with a grin.
Li Mucheng thinks about little else. A "retired" (laid-off) accountant in his 50s, he spends most of his mornings in the hall of the Shengyin Wanguo Securities company in Wuhan's downtown, watching share prices move on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. Li has been lucky recently, usually buying and selling in the same day, "but sometimes I hold shares for longer, even up to two weeks." Li keeps his eyes on the big electronic screen as he talks. "America? A great country, because the President changes every four years. And rich, because it has been developing for 200 years. China has been developing only since Deng Xiaoping. Before that, Chinese were busy fighting each other."
Some significant move in the prices makes him excuse himself for a moment to make a transaction on one of two dozen automated share-dealing terminals spread around the hall. He comes back smiling; another bet has paid off on a fast-moving stock. "China is changing, for sure. Before you could only buy half a jin [pound] of meat every month. Now you can buy as much as you want, if you have the money." Politics doesn't interest him much. "Zhu Rongji? I don't know much about politics, but at least Zhu understands the stock market." At 19 Lin Yan is too young to remember the bad days of meat rationing, but she has a fair idea of what the stock market is. She has already moved from working as a hotel receptionist to a better-paying job selling sports equipment in Wuhan's Galaxy Plaza department store. Three nights a week she goes to private English classes, which she pays for out of her salary of $75 a month, "because if you don't know English, you can't use computers. And if you can't use computers these days, you can't get ahead." Her tone suggests the alternative is too horrible to contemplate.
Sitting outside a cafe in Nanjing sipping tea, Gao Hua shakes his head. "That is all people are interested in now: looking after their own life-styles, doing things for themselves," says Gao, a professor of history at Nanjing University. "The economic reforms are irreversible," he says, but they are also part of something bigger. "Now is a transitional period in China. There is much disorder; people are waiting for something new." Gao chooses his words carefully. He has been in trouble before for being too outspoken politically. "Only a society of diversity contains the seeds of new life. A civil society will emerge, eventually."
The river from Nanjing to Shanghai is wide, one mile across, and the boat traffic has increased exponentially: barges, tugs, dredging boats, passenger ferries, tankers, oceangoing liners and container ships. There are so many vessels that the traffic splits up, as on a highway: downstream vessels keep to the left of the stream, upstream vessels keep to the right-hand side, as the chaos of China's interior inexorably gives way to the more ordered march to prosperity of the coastal regions.
Sally Liu works for Siemens in Shanghai. It was a simple career decision: the state-owned aeronautics factory that she had joined after finishing university studies paid her $250 a month; Siemens recruited her at $875. Her view of her country is simple too: "I hope China will become the strongest in the world. China has been poor for a long time, and no one respects us. If you are the richest, you will be respected."
Her office is in Pudong, the glittering new business district created by municipal fiat across the river from downtown Shanghai. More than 100 high-rises have already gone up in the authorities' bid to turn Shanghai into China's financial capital. Companies that make a large enough investment even get a street named after them--Siemens Street, for example. But walking around Pudong is an eerie experience: at least three-quarters of the office space is vacant. Such is the impatience of Shanghai to become a world-class city: Build it, and they will come.
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Transcript of Remarks by Presidents Clinton, Jiang in June 27 Press Availability
U.S. Newswire
29 Jun 1998 16:09
To: National Desk
Contact: White House Press Office, 202-456-2100
WASHINGTON, June 29 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Following is a transcript of remarks by Presidents Clinton and Jiang at June 27 press availability:
Western Hall of the Great Hall of the People Beijing, People's Republic of China 12:05 P.M.
(L) PRESIDENT JIANG: Ladies and gentlemen, just now I've held official talks with President Clinton. The two sides have held an extensive and in-depth exchange of views on China-U.S. relations and the major international and regional issues. The talks were positive, constructive, and productive. The successful exchange of visits between the two heads of state of China and the United States marks a new stage of growth for China-U.S. relations. This not only serves the common interests of China and the United States, but also will be of important significance to promoting peace, stability, and prosperity in the Asia Pacific and the world at large. Peace and the development are the main themes of contemporary times. In the new historical conditions, the common interests between China and the United States are increasing, not decreasing. The foundation for cooperation between the two countries is reinforcing, not weakening. Both sides believe that China and the United States, as the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, should continue to work together to promote peace and security in the world and the Asia Pacific in particular, to ease and eliminate all kinds of tensions and to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, to strengthen the efforts in protecting the environment, combating international crime, drug trafficking, and international terrorism. Our two sides have agreed to further step up cooperation and the dialogue between the two countries on major international issues. China-U.S. relations are improving and growing. The cooperation between the two sides in many areas has made important progress. President Clinton and I have decided that China and the United States will not target the strategic nuclear weapons under their respective control at each other. This demonstrates to the entire world that China and the United States are partners, not adversaries. I hereby wish to reiterate that since the very first day when China came into possession of nuclear weapons, China has undertaken not to be the first to use nuclear weapons under any circumstances. President Clinton and I have reached a broad range of agreements and consensus on further increasing exchanges in cooperation between China and the United States in all areas in our bilateral relations. We have agreed to take positive steps to promote the growth of the mutually beneficial economic cooperation and trade between China and the United States and to expand the exchanges and the cooperation between the two countries in the energy, environment, scientific, educational, cultural, health, legal, and the military fields; and also to enhance the people-to-people exchanges and friendship. We have also agreed to enhance the consultations and the cooperation between China and the United States on the issues of disarmament, arms control, and non-proliferation. And we have issued joint statements on the BWC protocol on the question of the antipersonnel land mines and on the question of South Asia. The Taiwan question is the most important and the most sensitive issue at the core of China-U.S. relations. We hope that the U.S. side will adhere to the principles set forth in the three China-U.S. joint communiqués and the joint China-U.S. statement, as well as the relevant commitments it has made in the interest of a smooth growth of China-U.S. relations. The improvement and the growth of China-U.S. relations have not come by easily. It is the result of the concerted efforts of the governments and people of our two countries. So we should all the more treasure this good result. As China and the United States have different social systems, ideologies, values, and culture traditions, we have some difference of views on certain issues. However, they should not become the obstacles in the way of the growth of China-U.S. relations. The world is a colorful one. The development parts of the countries in the world should be chosen by the people of the countries concerned. China and the United States should view and handle the bilateral relations from a long-term and strategic perspective. We should promote the growth of China-U.S. relations in the spirit of mutual respect, equality, mutual benefit, seeking common ground while putting aside differences, and developing cooperation. I believe that through the concerted efforts of both sides, we will make constant progress in the direction of building a constructive, strategic partnership between China and the United States oriented towards the 21st century.
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Thank you, Mr. President. And I also thank the Chinese people for their warm welcome to me, to my family, and to our delegation. Over the past five years, President Jiang and I have met seven times. Mr. President, your leadership is helping us to transform our nations' relationship for the future. Clearly, a stable, open, prosperous China, shouldering its responsibilities for a safer world is good for America. Nothing makes that point better than today's agreement not to target our nuclear missiles at each other. We also agreed to do more to shore up stability in Asia, on the Korean Peninsula, and the Indian subcontinent. I reaffirmed our longstanding one China policy to President Jiang and urged the pursuit of cross-strait discussions recently resumed as the best path to a peaceful resolution. In a similar vein, I urged President Jiang to assume a dialogue with the Dalai Lama in return for the recognition that Tibet is a part of China and in recognition of the unique cultural and religious heritage of that region. I welcome the progress we made today in non-proliferation, including China's decision to actively study joining the Missile Technology Control Regime, our joint commitment not to provide assistance to ballistic missile programs in South Asia, and President Jiang's statement last week that China will not sell missiles to Iran. We also welcome the steps China recently has taken to tighten nuclear export controls, to strengthen controls on the export of chemicals that can be turned into weapons, and to work jointly with us to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention. As the President said, we are also working together against international crime, drug trafficking, alien smuggling, stepping up our scientific cooperation, which already has produced remarkable breakthroughs in areas including the fight against birth defects like spina bifida. We're helping to eradicate polio and working to predict and to mitigate national disasters. And perhaps most important over the long run, we are committed to working together on clean energy to preserve our natural environment, a matter of urgent concern to both our nations. I am also very pleased by our cooperation on rule of law programs, from training lawyers and judges to providing legal assistance to the poor. President Jiang and I agree on the importance of China's entry into the World Trade Organization. I regret we did not make more progress on this front, and we must recommit ourselves to achieving that goal on strong terms. We agree that we need to work together to avoid another round of destablizing currency devaluations in the region and to restore economic growth. As you can see, we are working together in many areas of cooperation. We have developed a relationship of openness and candor. When we differ, as we do from time to time, we speak openly and honestly in an effort to understand our differences and, if possible, to work toward a common approach to resolving them. It is well known that the principal area of our difference in recent years has been over human rights questions. America recognizes and applauds China's economic and social transformation, which has expanded the rights of its citizens by lifting hundreds of millions from poverty, providing them greater access to information, giving them village elections, greater freedom to travel and to choose their own jobs, and better education for their children. As I said again to President Jiang, we Americans also firmly believe that individual rights, including the freedom of speech, association, and religion are very important, not only to those who exercise them, but also to nations whose success in the 21st century depends upon widespread individual knowledge, creativity, free exchange, and enterprise. Therefore, we welcome China's decision to sign the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the recent release of several prominent political dissidents, the recent visit China graciously accorded American religious leaders, and the resumption of a human rights dialogue between China and the United States. Earlier this morning, during my official welcome, I could hear and see the many echoes of China's past and the call of its promising future, for Tiananmen Square is an historical place. There, 100 years ago, China's quest for constitutional government was born. There, in 1919, young people rallied against foreign occupation and launched a powerful movement for China's political and cultural renewal. There, in 1976, public mourning for Zhou Enlai led to the Cultural Revolution's end and the beginning of your remarkable transformation. And there, nine years ago, Chinese citizens of all ages raised their voices for democracy. For all of our agreements, we still disagree about the meaning of what happened then. I believe, and the American people believe, that the use of force and the tragic loss of life was wrong. I believe, and the American people believe, that freedom of speech, association, and religion are, as recognized by U.N. Charter, the right of people everywhere and should be protected by their governments. It was to advance these rights that our Founding Fathers in our Declaration of Independence pledged our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor. Fifty years ago, the U.N. recognized these rights as the basic freedoms of people everywhere. The question for us now is how shall we deal with such disagreements and still succeed in the important work of deepening our friendship and our sense of mutual respect. First, we Americans must acknowledge the painful moments in our own history when fundamental human rights were denied. We must say that we know, still, we have to continue our work to advance the dignity and freedom and equality of our own people. And, second, we must understand and respect the enormous challenges China has faced in trying to move forward against great odds with a clear memory of the setbacks suffered in past periods of instability. Finally, it is important that whatever our disagreements over past action, China and the United States must go forward on the right side of history for the future sake of the world. The forces of history have brought us to a new age of human possibility, but our dreams can only be recognized by nations whose citizens are both responsible and free. Mr. President, that is the future America seeks to build with China, in partnership and honest friendship. Tomorrow, Hillary and I will visit the Great Wall. The wall's builders knew they were building a permanent monument, even if they were unable to see it finished in their lifetimes. Likewise, we know we are building a friendship that will serve our descendants well, even if we, ourselves, will not see its full development across the next century and into the new millennium. Our friendship may never be perfect -- no friendship is. But I hope it will last forever.
PRESIDENT JIANG: Now President Clinton and I are prepared to answer your questions, and now I'd like to give the first question to President Clinton.
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Which one -- Chinese journalists, one of you? In the back there, yes? Yes, go ahead.
Q: Thank you. I'm a correspondent with Phoenix TV of Hong Kong. In the recent Asian financial crisis, the Chinese government has pledged to maintain the value of RMB Asian currency and, thus, making positive contribution to stabilizing the situation in Asia. And this has attracted positive reaction from the international community and from the U.S. government. However, yesterday, the exchange rate between Japanese yen and the U.S. dollar dropped again to a low of 143 yen against one dollar, and which was closed at 141 yen against one dollar. So, what specific common measures are the Chinese and the U.S. government prepared to take to stabilize the financial situation in Asia and the world?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, first of all, let me agree with you. I think that China has shown great statesmanship and strength in making a strong contribution to the stability not only of the Chinese people and their economy, but the entire region, by maintaining the value of its currency. The United States, as you know, has worked hard to try to support the stability of the Japanese yen and to help growth resume in Japan. I think that what we have agreed to do is to continue to do whatever we can to promote stability and to support policies within Japan that will restore confidence in the economy, get investment going again, and get growth going. The key here, I believe, is for the plans to reform the financial institutions in Japan and take other steps that will get growth going and get investments going in Japan to be made. I think that, ultimately, President Jiang and I would give anything to be able to just wave a wand and have all of this go away. We are not the only actors in this drama, and a lot of this must be done by the Japanese government and the Japanese people. We can be supportive, but they have to make the right decisions.
Q: My question to President Jiang and also to President Clinton is, we know that there were four dissidents in Xian who were arrested earlier and three were released, and one of them is still under detainment. And I would like to know if you talked about the issue. And what about the rest of the 2,000 dissidents who are being reported as still under imprisonment right now in China? Can both of you elaborate on that? Thank you.
PRESIDENT JIANG: In our talks just now, President Clinton raised this issue. We adopt an attitude of extending very warm welcome to the visit to China by President Clinton. As for the matter you raised, I think you are referring to the incident in Xian, and I think in China there is no question that there is no restriction whatsoever on the coverage and interview by the reporters and the correspondents within the scope of law. But as for some activities that have been detrimental or have prejudiced the security, then the local authorities should take measures to deal with them, and it is also understandable. As for the question you raised, actually, I do not have very detailed information in this regard. But as for the latter part of your question concerning 2,000 dissidents, I think in China we have our laws. And in China's constitution, it is clearly stipulated that the Chinese citizens have the freedom of speech, but any law-breaking activities must be dealt with according to law. I think this is true in any country of rule of law. And I think China's judicial departments will deal with the matter according to law.
Q: I want to ask that I believe that the vast majority of the correspondents and the reporters are willing to promote the friendship between China and the United States through President Clinton's visit to China this time. However, before President Clinton's visit, I read some reports from some media and newspapers saying -- alleging China had been involved in so-called political contributions in the United States. I really think it very absurd and ridiculous, and I think they are sheer fabrications. China can never do such a thing and China never interferes in other country's internal affairs.
PRESIDENT JIANG: Actually, at the talks this morning, President Clinton also asked me of this question. And I told him that after hearing of such an allegation we conducted very earnest investigation into the matter. And the results of the investigation shows that there was never such a thing. Recently, in my meetings with many foreign visitors and visiting leaders of other countries, I often said to them that as countries in the world have different social systems and values, it is something that should be allowed that they may have different understandings about one fact. And this actually, itself, is a representation and the manifestation of democracy. However, what is important is that the fact itself should not be distorted. I'm sorry I've taken up too much of the time, and I now invite President Clinton to say a few words.
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Well, we did discuss the questions you raised. And, of course, I made my views known about the recent detentions yesterday. On the larger question you raised, I actually made a couple of specific and practical suggestions about how we might take our dialogue farther there. There are some people who are incarcerated now for offensives no longer on the books in China, reflecting real progress in present Chinese practice, and the Chinese, in my view -- we should acknowledge that. But the question then arises is there some way that these people might be released? Is there some procedure through which we could move? There are some people imprisoned for non-violent activities in June of '89. Is there something that could be done there? There are some other practical things we discussed, which I think it would be premature to ask the Chinese government to make a statement on now because we just have had these discussions. But I want to say to all of you that the atmosphere -- whatever your position on these issues is, and particularly if you agree with me, I think you should at least appreciate the fact that we now have an atmosphere in which it is possible for us to be open and honest and in great detail about this; and that there are legitimate and honest differences in the way we look at this. But I believe that we are making progress, and I believe that we will make more. I remember the things that I specified in my statement about that. You can see that neither one of us are shy about being strong about how we believe about this. And I think that we have them in the public debate now, we have them in the private discussions, and we just have to keep pushing forward in trying to work through it.
Q: President Jiang spoke of China's position against the first use of nuclear weapons and the policy of the United States does not agree. Was this discussed in the context of negotiations on the detargeting agreement? And what are the U.S. concessions in order to obtain the detargeting agreement?
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Well, the short answer to your question and the accurate one is, no, but I don't want it to be a misleading answer. That is, you well understand that our position on that issue is a product of decades of experience in a former time. We have not changed our position, nor are we prepared to do so on that. But this was a mutual decision we made because we both felt that, number one, if we detargeted, we would completely eliminate the prospect ever of any kind of accidental launch; and, number two, we would take one more step in showing mutual confidence and trust in one another; and, number three, it would be a helpful signal as a counterweight to the recent nuclear tests in India and Pakistan. And so we agreed that it was in both our interests to do this on its own terms.
PRESIDENT JIANG: I would like to make a brief explanation. As I stated just now, President Clinton and I decided that China and the United States would not target the strategic nuclear weapons under their respective control at each other. Full stop -- that's a full stop. And then this demonstrates to the entire world that China and the United States are partners, not adversaries. Full stop again. (Laughter.) And then I said, I hereby reiterate that since the very first day that China came into possession of nuclear weapons, China has undertaken not to be the first to use nuclear weapons under any circumstances. Full stop. That's my view. That's our view.
Q: My question is to President Jiang. At his opening statement, President Clinton expressed appreciation of the achievements made by the Chinese government in respecting human rights. At the same time, he also said that China and the United States also had difference of views over this matter. So my question is, what is the position of the Chinese government on the human rights issue?
PRESIDENT JIANG: China and the United States have differences of views and also have common ground on the human rights issue. More than 2,000 years ago, a great thinker of China's Han Dynasty, Dong Zhongshu, once said, "Of all the living things nurtured between heaven and the Earth, the most valuable is human beings." So the Chinese nation always respects and maintains the dignity and rights of the people. Today the Chinese government solemnly commits itself to the promotion and the protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms. The United States is the most developed country in the world, with a per capita GDP approaching $30,000 U.S. dollars, while China is a developing country with a population of 1.2 billion, with a per capita GDP of less than $700 U.S. dollars. As the two countries differ in social system, ideology, historical tradition and cultural background, the two countries have different means and ways in realizing human rights and fundamental freedoms. So it's nothing strange that we may have some difference of views over some issues. China stresses that the top priority should be given to the right to subsistence and the right to development. Meanwhile, efforts should be made to strengthen democracy and the legal system building, and to protect the economic, social, cultural, civil and the political rights of the people. I listened very carefully to what President Clinton said just now, and I noticed that he made mention of the political disturbances happened in Tiananmen in 1989 and he also told the history of Tiananmen and told of the things that happened in Tiananmen. With regard to the political disturbances in 1989, the Chinese people have long drawn a historical conclusion. During my visit to the United States last year and also on many international occasions, I have stated our position that with regard to the political disturbances in 1989, had the Chinese government not taken the resolute measures, then we could not have enjoyed the stability that we are enjoying today. China is a socialist country in which its people are masters of the nation. The Chinese people can elect their own representatives to the people's congresses through direct or indirect means, and they can fully express their views and exercise their political rights. In the two decades since the reform and opening up program was started, the National People's Congress of China has adopted more than 320 laws and acts; thus, constantly strengthening the legal protection of the democracy, fundamental freedoms, and the various rights enjoyed by the Chinese people. Over the past two decades, another 200 million people in China were lifted out of poverty. No country's human rights situation is perfect. Since the founding of new China, the fundamental changes and the tremendous achievements that have been achieved, that have been scored in the human rights conditions in China are for all to see. I'd like to know whether President Clinton will have anything more to add.
PRESIDENT CLINTON: I would like to add a comment. First of all, I think this debate and discussion today has been a healthy thing and a good thing. Secondly, I think to understand the priority that each country attaches to its own interpretation of this issue of human rights, you have to understand something of our history. The Chinese who are here understand better than I the price paid over time at various moments in history for disruption and upheaval in China, so there is an understandable desire to have stability in the country. Every country wants stability. Our country was founded by people who felt they were abused by royal powers -- by people in power, and they wanted to protect their personal liberties by putting limits on government. And they understood -- they understood clearly -- that any system, because human beings are imperfect, any system can be abused. So the question for all societies going forward into the 21st century is, which is the better gamble? If you have a lot of personal freedom, some people may abuse it. But if you are so afraid of personal freedom because of the abuse that you limit people's freedom too much, then you pay, I believe, an even greater price in a world where the whole economy is based on ideas and information and exchange and debate, and children everywhere dreaming dreams and feeling they can live their dreams out. So I am trying to have a dialogue here that will enable both of us to move forward so that the Chinese people will get the best possible result. I believe stability in the 21st century will require high levels of freedom.
PRESIDENT JIANG: I'm sorry, I have to take up an additional five minutes. (Laughter.) So I'd like to say a few words on Dalai Lama. President Clinton is also interested in this question, in Dalai Lama. Actually, since the Dalai Lama left in 1959, earthshaking changes have taken place in Tibet. First, the system of bureaucracy has forever become bygones. Though it is unfortunate that the disappearance of this bureaucracy was much later than the demise of bureaucracy in Europe before Renaissance. And the more than one million serfs under the rule of the Dalai Lama were liberated. In 1990 when I was in Tibet I went to visit the liberated serfs. And now the system of national autonomy is in practice in Tibet and the people there, they have their Tibetan autonomous region government. Since I came to work in the central government I have urged the rest of the 29 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions to assist Tibet in its development -- even including those provinces that are not very developed, such as Qinghai Province. So altogether, nearly 8 billion RMB-yuan financial resources were raised and already 62 projects have been completed in Tibet. As for the freedom of religious belief, there is fierce stipulations in our constitution for the protection of religious belief and this also includes in Tibet. And we have also spent a lot of money in renovating the lamasis and temples in Tibet. And we have spent $100 million RMB-yuan and one ton of gold in renovating the Budala Palace. Just now President Clinton also mentioned the Tibetan issue and the dialogue with the Dalai Lama. Actually, as long as the Dalai Lama can publicly make the statement and a commitment that Tibet is an inalienable part of China and he must also recognize Taiwan as a province of China, then the door to dialogue and negotiation is open. Actually, we are having several channels of communications with the Dalai Lama. So I hope the Dalai Lama will make positive response in this regard. Finally, I want to emphasize that according to China's constitution, the freedom of religious belief in Tibet, and also throughout China, is protected. But as the President of the People's Republic of China and as a communist member, a member of the communist party, I myself am an atheist. But this will by no means affect my respect for the religious freedom in Tibet. But still, I have a question. That is, during my visit to the United States last year, and also during my previous visits to other European countries, I found that although the education in science and technology have developed to a very high level, and people are now enjoying modern civilization, but still quite a number of them have a belief in Lamaism. So this is a question that I'm still studying and still looking into. I want to find out the reason why. I think President Clinton is a strong defender of the American interests and I am a strong defender of the Chinese interests. But despite that, we still can have very friendly exchanges of views and discussions. And I think that is democracy. And I want to stress that, actually, there are a lot of areas in which we can learn from each other. If you agree, we will finish this. (Laughter.)
THE PRESIDENT: I agree, but I have -- you have to let me say one thing about the Dalai Lama. (Laughter.) First, I agree that Tibet is a part of China, an autonomous region of China. And I can understand why the acknowledgement of that would be a precondition of dialogue with the Dalai Lama. But I also believe that there are many, many Tibetans who still revere the Dalai Lama and view him as their spiritual leader. President Jiang pointed out that he has a few followers of Tibetan Buddhism, even in the United States and Europe. But most of his followers have not given up their own religious faith. He has followers who are Christians -- supporters -- excuse me -- not followers, supporters -- who are Christians, who are Jews, who are Muslims, who believe in the unity of God and who believe he is a holy man. But, for us, the question is not fundamentally religious; it is political. That is, we believe that other people should have the right to fully practice their religious beliefs, and that if he, in good faith, presents himself on those terms, it is a legitimate thing for China to engage him in dialogue. And let me say something that will perhaps be unpopular with everyone. I have spent time with the Dalai Lama. I believe him to be an honest man, and I believe if he had a conversation with President Jiang, they would like each other very much. (Laughter and applause.)
THE PRESS: Thank you.
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Transcript of Clinton Remarks at June 28 Church Service
U.S. Newswire
29 Jun 1998 16:29
To: National Desk
Contact: White House Press Office, 202-456-2100
WASHINGTON, June 29 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Following is a transcript of remarks by President Clinton at a June 28 church service:
Chongwenmen Church Beijing People's Republic of China 10:31 A.M.
(L) PRESIDENT CLINTON: Thank you, Reverend Wu, Reverend Siu, Reverend Yin. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for making me and my family and our party of Americans feel so welcome in your church today. We are a long way from home, but we felt very much at home with you here in this church. We celebrate with you the growth of the practice of our faith in China, and we rejoice to hear Reverend Siu cite the numbers of churches and other places of worship where people are practicing their faith today. The sermon today was on the unity of the church, and our unity with God in the church. I would like to add only one point -- I believe our faith calls upon us to seek unity with people across the world of different races and backgrounds and creeds. In the Book of Acts, the 26th verse, it is said that God has made from one blood every nation to dwell on the surface of the Earth. I believe that is true. Therefore, I believe that Chinese and Americans are brothers and sisters as children of God. We come here in that spirit today, grateful for your welcome. (Applause.)
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06/29/98- Updated 10:37 AM ET
SHANGHAI, China - President Clinton arrived today in Shanghai, the booming commercial capital at the mouth of the Yangtze River, after three remarkable days in Beijing, including close questioning from university students. Clinton had no public events in Shanghai until Tuesday. After an evening arrival Monday he was driven from the airport to his hotel. The president's stop here, the third on this nine-day China tour, is designed to focus on China's economic progress and potential. Clinton on Tuesday is scheduled to deliver a speech on China's future and make an appearance on Shanghai Radio's popular call-in show.
University students peppered President Clinton Monday with polite but critical questions about America's human rights record, Taiwan policy and views on China in an exchange televised live across the vast nation. The president suggested that the discussion, like his lively televised debate with Chinese President Jiang Zemin over the weekend, was the type of open dialogue that might one day lead to fuller freedoms in China. "The struggle for individual freedom is the struggle for the nation's freedom," Clinton said at Peking University. "The struggle for your own character is the struggle for the nation's character." The president later flew to Shanghai, the commercial capital of China and the third stop on his nine-day China tour. His public events there Tuesday will include a speech on China's future and an appearance on Shanghai Radio's call-in show. Peking University has been an incubator for political protest since its founding 100 years ago, including the 1989 pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square. But students who asked Clinton questions seemed more intent on defending China's integrity and questioning America's understanding of China than on questioning their authoritarian system. One young man said Chinese people had learned much about the history, culture and literature of America and even love the box-office hit, Titanic. "But it seems that the American people's understanding of the Chinese people is not as much as the other way around," he said. Clinton said he hoped his nine-day tour of China, including a visit to one of 500,000 villages that have held democratic elections, will give Americans "a full and balanced picture of modern China" and lead to more tourist, educational and business exchanges. Another student asked why the United States continues to sell advanced weapons to Taiwan, which China considers a renegade province. The president said arms sales to Taipei were for defense only and he hoped one day to see "the peaceful reunification of China and Taiwan." Stanley Roth, assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific, said later the students' questions suggest "real evidence of the growing nationalism of the current generation in China." "I think that reflects a genuine trend that is out there," he said. "And that's something that we have to deal with in the future." One young man in Clinton's audience questioned whether the United States really was intent on dominating China instead of improving ties. "Do you have any other hidden saying behind this smile?" the student asked. "Do you have any other design to contain China?" His question was met with laughter and applause and a smiling Clinton said, "If I did I wouldn't mask it behind a smile. But I don't." "I want a partnership," Clinton said. "I'm not hiding another design behind a smile. It's what I really believe." One young woman told Clinton that democracy, human rights and freedom were "of great interest to both the Chinese and American peoples." Then she politely lectured the president, saying, "We should have both criticism and self-criticism" and asking him, "Do you think that in the United States today, there are also some problems?" The audience of some 500 students, sitting in a freshly painted white and gold-trimmed school auditorium, applauded her question. Clinton said the United States does have problems, including racial discrimination - a legacy of slavery - and high crime rates that prevent some people from feeling free. "We are still not perfect," he said. But the president told the students he never raises the question of human rights when he's overseas "without acknowledging first that our country has had terrible problems in this area." One young woman told Clinton that China should be free to choose its own political system. "Real freedom should mean for the people to freely choose the way of life they like and also to develop," she said. Another student noted that when President Jiang visited Harvard University last October, demonstrators met him, whereas Clinton was greeted at Peking University with warmth. The young man asked Clinton how he would feel if protesters had jeered him on campus. Clinton said he would ask to speak with them so "they could say what is on their minds and I could answer." Quoting one of America's founding fathers, he told the students, "Benjamin Franklin said, 'Our critics are our friends for they show us our faults."' Clinton, enlivened by the discussion, thanked the students. "You have asked me some very good questions today that have an element of criticism in them," the president said. "... They have helped me to understand how what I say is perceived by others, not just in China but around the world." "The questions were far more important than my speech," he added. Meanwhile, a group of 125 Chinese dissidents wrote an open letter urging Clinton to meet with former Communist Party leader Zhao Ziyang, who was ousted during the 1989 student-led protests in Tiananmen Square. There was no indication Clinton met with any dissidents before leaving Beijing Monday. In his 30-minute speech, Clinton praised China for its economic transformation over the past two decades as it moves away from state-controlled commerce to a free-market system. But he said China can't reach its full potential without political changes, too. "We do not seek to impose our vision on others, but we are convinced that certain rights are universal - not American rights or European rights or rights for developed nations, but the birthrights of people everywhere," Clinton said. "True freedom includes more than economic freedom. In America, we believe it is a concept which is indivisible."
By The Associated Press
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FOCUS-Clinton urges China to respect human rights
01:20 AM ET 06/29/98
By Steve Holland
BEIJING, June 29 (Reuters) - U.S. President Bill Clinton, addressing the university that gave birth to China's 1989 pro-democracy movement, appealed to Beijing on Monday to grant greater freedom to the Chinese people, arguing that "freedom strengthens stability."
But in a lively question-and-answer period with students Clinton was asked to defend human rights practices in the United States, and he admitted that his own country remains burdened by racial discrimination, crime and other afflictions.
"We are still not perfect," he said.
Clinton's speech at Peking University, hotbed of the dissent that was crushed by Chinese authorities on June 4, 1989 at Tianamen Square, was broadcast live on state television. It was a second remarkable concession by communist authorities, who had allowed millions of Chinese to watch live a post-summit news conference on Saturday where Clinton and Chinese President Jiang Zemin exchanged frank views on a range of subjects from human rights to Tibet.
Applause erupted in the packed hall inside the university library building when Clinton denied -- in response to a question whether he was hiding anything behind his smile -- that he had ulterior motives in seeking a friendlier relationship between the United States and China.
"I want a partnership. I'm not hiding another design behind a smile. That's what I really believe," he said.
Praising China as an ancient culture whose "greatest days are still ahead," Clinton called for a fuller partnership between the United States and China to tackle problems such as the budding nuclear arms race between India and Pakistan and the Asian economic crisis.
He said he had felt the "steady breeze of freedom" emerging in China during his nine-day visit but nonetheless believed deeper changes were needed to ensure individual liberties for China's 1.2 billion people.
"We believe, and our experience demonstrates, that freedom strengthens stability, and helps nations to change," he said.
Jiang had said in the leaders' televised exchanges on Saturday that the Tiananmen Square crackdown was necessary to preserve China's stability.
Clinton insisted the United States was not trying to impose its ideals on China.
"But we are convinced that certain rights are universal, not American rights or European rights or rights for developed nations ... the right to be treated with dignity, the right to express one's opinion, to choose one's own leaders, to associate freely with others, and to worship or not, freely, however one chooses," he said.
Several students were critical and expressed suspicion of the United States.
Clinton denied America was threatening China by selling arms to Taiwan or by maintaining a security relationship with Japan.
"You ask me, does the United States want to contain China? The answer is no,'' he said.
"I believe it would be far better for the people of the United States to have a partnership on equal, respectful terms with China in the 21st century, than to have to spend enormous amounts of time and money trying to contain China..."
China considers Taiwan a breakaway province and is suspicious that the United States supports its independence.
"Our policy is that any weapons sales to Taiwan must be for defensive purposes only. China must not believe we are in any way trying to undermine our own 'one China' policy," Clinton said.
Afterward, White House spokesman Mike McCurry said it was encouraging that China again had allowed a presidential event to be televised live.
"This demonstrates the greater willingness by the Chinese authorities to open this society to political debate," he said.
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Shanghai emerges as capitalist bastion
06/29/98- Updated 02:10 PM ET
SHANGHAI, China - If staid Beijing is the Washington of China, then Shanghai is its New York City - commercial, stylish, cosmopolitan and smug.
Shanghai's history as a base for European, U.S. and Japanese colonialism in China shows in a legacy of Art Deco architecture, tree-lined streets and European-style parks that give it the look and feel of a Western city.
It boasts China's biggest stock exchange, its tallest office building and the tallest structure in Asia - the Eastern Pearl TV Tower.
Its annual income of $3,000 per person is three times the national average.
After dark, streets of restaurants and boutiques ablaze with neon look like Hong Kong in the 1960s.
Once the business capital of the Far East, with more cars and telephones than any other Asian city, Shanghai has retained much of its rapport with Western capitalism and culture and its willingness to embrace change.
Neglected for decades by communist leaders as a suspect capitalist enclave, this sprawling metropolis of 15 million people is enjoying a renaissance as an engine of economic reform.
Policies on private business and how to sell off state-owned housing were fine-tuned in Shanghai before spreading nationwide.
Nearly every block seems to have an office or apartment building going up. A major museum opened two years ago and multibillion-dollar subway and expressway systems are under construction.
A sleek new music hall is scheduled to open this year. A Japanese developer plans to build the world's tallest skyscraper in Pudong, a new financial district created across the Huangpu River from the picturesque old Shanghai waterfront.
All of that building has come at a price: noise, dust and a property market so glutted that landlords have been forced to slash commercial rents by 50%.
Traffic can be so bad that at midday in the business district, pedestrians move faster than cars.
Nostalgia for Shanghai's golden era of the 1920s is booming. Nightclubs put on shows with dancers in sequins and feathers.
The most sought-after homes in town are renovated villas in the old French Quarter that rent for up to $10,000 a month. Much of the money pouring in comes from investors in Hong Kong or abroad who started out in Shanghai and fled the 1949 revolution.
Some Shanghainese say Hong Kong wouldn't be what it is today if this city's capitalists hadn't been driven there by the communists.
Nearly every Shanghainese seems to have a friend or relative abroad. Many speak at least some English, Japanese or other foreign language.
Some cab drivers greet foreign passengers by saying, in English, "Hello. Where to?"
Such an international outlook can make Shanghai feel like a foreign country to Chinese from other regions, who regard Shanghainese as snobbish and obsessed with money.
Yet in a twist on its former pariah status, Shanghai has served as a training ground for the latest generation of Chinese leaders.
Both President Jiang Zemin and Prime Minister Zhu Rongji, the country's top economic official, are former mayors of the city.
So many Shanghai officials have risen to posts in Beijing that a local joke says ministers from elsewhere can't follow Cabinet meetings because they are conducted in Shanghainese dialect, rather than the national language of Mandarin.
By The Associated Press
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Government tells dissident to keep quiet
06/29/98- Updated 12:44 PM ET
LOS ANGELES - A Chinese dissident jailed during the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown was warned not to speak to foreign journalists in Beijing during President Clinton's visit to China, The Los Angeles Times reported Monday. "I was told by the police I have to refuse to give any interview to any foreign journalists," said Bao Tong, who is the highest-ranking advocate for democracy to emerge from the ranks of the Chinese Communist Party. The warning came a day after a joint news conference in which President Clinton and his Chinese counterpart debated, among other things, free speech in China. Angered by the warning by security officials, Bao said he reminded them that Chinese President Jiang Zemin had "confirmed that every Chinese citizen is given freedom of speech by the (Chinese) constitution." Officials told him he had freedom of speech, but added, "You cannot answer any questions put forward by the journalists." Bao told the Times he felt compelled to cancel a meeting in Beijing with one of its reporters. But during a 75-minute telephone interview Sunday night, Bao praised Clinton's performance at the news conference, saying that "he expressed his ideas clearly and properly." Bao said he is skeptical that the Communist Party is nearing significant political reform, but believes it will inevitably reverse its condemnation on the 1989 demonstrations. He also grew cautious when asked to comment on the use of force in Tiananmen Square. "I was warned just this afternoon," he said. "But you do know what is in my mind, I think. Maybe we can talk about it another time." Bao, 65, was released from Qincheng Prison in May 1996 after seven years and placed on probation. In May, he was informed that his political rights were restored. Bao soon began criticizing Chinese leaders and the ruling Communist Party. He said he was warned to stop on June 4 and then again on June 8. On Sunday, security officials told him he was breaking Chinese law.
By The Associated Press
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CLINTON IN CHINA
JUNE 29, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 25
BY TIM MORRISON
Bill Clinton's visit to Xiahe, a village experimenting with a system of electing local officials, gave the President the bright shiny face of China's flirtation with democracy--but it's not the whole story. The President met Friday with some of these voters, from restauranteurs to college students, who praised the grassroots democracy that is beginning to bloom in rural China.
The President shouldn't assume, however, that he is seeing sweeping reform on the hoof here: Xiahe is not your ordinary Chinese democracy. An article in Hong Kong's South China Morning Post noted Friday that the village has an annual income fifteen times the average $240 for the rest of Shaanxi province. The money comes from the tourist trade which has built up around the terra cotta soldiers--an excavation of guardian statues which are part of the tomb complex of China's first emperor, Qin Shihuang. It was Xiahe villagers, in fact, who discovered the tombs in 1974 when digging a well.
Many local farmers have second jobs peddling food and souvenirs to visitors. "We have a saying here," noodle seller Hou Yinyan told TIME Beijing bureau chief Jaime FlorCruz. "For the liberation of China, don't forget the Communist Party; for our own prosperity, don't forget Emperor Qin."
This in itself is a triumph of democracy, although perhaps not for the reasons Clinton envisions. Where twenty years ago all production was controlled by the party, the opportunity for people like Hou to strike out on their own is a huge step forward. The fact that Xiahe's villagers have a leg up on their neighbors, though, puts a lot in their pockets besides ballots. Says Hou: "You don't need politics to sell noodles."
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CLINTON IN CHINA: BEIJING
JUNE 29, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 25
BY JAIME A. FLORCRUZ
Any Chinese who happened to watch national television late Saturday morning would have been startled to see their President, Jiang Zemin, locked in an unprecedented airing of views with President Bill Clinton on issues that are never discussed in the official media: Tiananmen, human rights and the Dalai Lama. Clinton's joint press conference with Jiang turned into a candid debate, carried live on Chinese national television.
The two sides had been haggling over the issue of whether the press conference was going to be telecast live. Chinese officials had at first vetoed the idea, obviously worried that Clinton might say things that could offend the government. Yet cooler heads prevailed, and Clinton was given an opportunity to reach the Chinese public directly. The candid exchange on camera could help Clinton silence critics in Washington who opposed his China visit. That could only help China.
The press conference was packaged to produce one item of major news: the announcement that both sides have decided they won't target each other's territory with strategic nuclear weapons. "This demonstrates that China and the U.S are partners, not adversaries," said Jiang in his opening remarks. He repeated China's long-term pledge "not to be the first to use nuclear weapons in any circumstances." He said Taiwan remains "the most important and most sensitive issue at the core of the Sino-U.S. relations" and called on the U.S. to stick to its "one-China" policy.
Clinton was gracious in praising Jiang's leadership, crediting it for the changes in socio-economic changes in recent years and in helping to transform the bilateral relationship. "A stable, open and prosperous China is good for the United States," he said. Initially, he accentuated the positive: the two sides, he said, agreed to maintain stability in Asia, especially on the Korean peninsula and the Indian sub-continent, and to cooperate in combating international crime, drug trafficking and alien smuggling and to work together on clean energy and on a "rule of law program" by training lawyers and judges. The two sides also agreed to avoid another round of currency devaluation in Asia, even though they failed to make more progress on China's entry into the World Trade Organization. He urged the Chinese to resume dialogue with Tibet's exiled Dalai Lama.
With carefully crafted words, Clinton tackled the human rights issue head-on. He described China's record as the main area of difference. He welcomed Beijing's decision to sign later this year the United Nations covenant on human rights and hailed the resumption of the bilateral dialogue on human rights. He said the success of nations in the 21st century depends on the freedom of speech, association and religion.
Clinton then brought up the sensitive issue of Tiananmen. He said he heard today during the welcoming ceremony across Tiananmen Square the "echoes of China's past and promises of its future" and ticked off the few historical events that took place on the square in recent years. Nine years ago, he said, Chinese citizens raised their voices for democracy, and "we still disagree about the meaning of what happened then." Without mincing words, he said Americans believe that the show of force and the loss of life was wrong and that freedom of speech and association are universal rights. Clinton's strong statements will surely earn him points in Washington.
The press conference turned livelier and less predictable when the two Presidents were asked to respond to questions. Jiang's reply to some of them revealed that Clinton in their closed-door discussions did bring up thorny human rights issues, including the detention of some dissidents in Xi'an. Jiang said the Chinese constitution allows freedom of speech but law-breaking activities must be dealt with.
Without any prompting, Jiang brought up allegations that China had tried to influence American politics by making contributions to U.S. political campaigns. Jiang dismissed them as "absurd and ridiculous" and "sheer fabrication." He said Clinton brought up the issue with him during their talks. "We conducted very earnest investigation about it, and the result showed there was never such a thing," Jiang said. On Tiananmen, Jiang said, "the Chinese people have long drawn a historical conclusion on the political disturbance in 1989 and repeated the official line that "had the Chinese government not taken resolute measures, we could not enjoy the stability we have today."
As the two Presidents took turns in expounding their contradictory positions, Clinton said "this debate is healthy and helpful." He conceded that "we must understand our history" and that "every country wants stability." However, he argued that it is "the better gamble" to have a lot of freedom that some people might abuse because "stability in the 21st century will require a high level of freedom."
The debate would have ended at this point but Jiang asked for an "extra five minutes" to talk about the Dalai Lama. He claimed that Tibet is a booming region not that "theocracy is gone forever" and Tibetan serfs have been liberated. As long as the Dalai Lama acknowledges that Tibet is part of China and Taiwan is part of China, he said, direct talks could be possible. In fact, he conceded that channels of communication with the Tibetan spiritual leader have been open for some time. Clinton replied: "I have spent time with the Dalai Lama. I believe he is a sincere man." He also told Jiang that if the two could meet, they would probably like each other.
The joint press conference went several minutes beyond the three-quarters of an hour it was set for. Looking at his watch after ending the live coverage from the Great Hall of the People, a CCTV (China Central Television) anchor-man intoned: "It seems communication needs time."
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CLINTON IN CHINA: BEIJING
JUNE 29, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 25
BY JAIME A. FLORCRUZ
Forget the fact that Presidents Bill Clinton and Jiang Zemin found virtually no common ground in their press conference on Saturday. And forget the fact that Jiang's comments on national television were so unprecedented that the summit has probably knocked the World Cup off of Chinese TV screens for the rest of Clinton's visit. From Beijing's perspective, Clinton's arrival is in itself already a victory: it marks the virtual end of the Tiananmen curse and Beijing's total rehabilitation from a political pariah to a global power.
And for Jiang, Clinton's trip gives him another chance to boost his image as China's newly minted paramount leader who is at least on par with the leader of the world's only superpower. The week before Clinton's arrival, Chinese national television repeatedly aired a one-hour documentary recapping Jiang's successful visit to America last October. "They've stopped short of deifying Jiang but the documentary is another attempt to start a personality cult on him," says a Chinese political analyst in Beijing.
Actually, the documentary is more subtle than the usual communist propaganda. It shows Jiang's human side: playing the Hawaiian guitar while the wife of the Hawaiian governor sung "Aloha"; singing a Peking opera aria in a dinner with overseas Chinese in Los Angeles and lifting and hugging a cute girl. It shows the Chinese president as a versatile statesman, a renaissance man, and a worthy envoy of the great nation, who can hold his candle with America's pillars of politics and business.
To insinuate that he is now the uncontested new helmsman, the CCTV documentary juxtaposed film clips of Chairman Mao swimming the Yangtze River and of Deng Xiaoping bobbing up and down the Bohai Sea (in the Beidaihe beach resort in Hebei province) with shots of Jiang breast-stroking in the Pacific Ocean. "It implies that Jiang is more open and daring, and therefore greater," says the political analyst. "It makes my hair stand." Two days before Clinton arrived, the People's Daily ran a long piece quoting highly regarded Chinese intellectuals extolling Jiang's successful visit to America. "Due to insistent public demand," said a CCTV announcement early this week, "we are going to re-show the documentary (on Jiang's U.S. tour) in the next few days." Let's see the World Cup try to top that.
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Clinton Remarks at the Great Wall of China
Following is a transcript of President Clinton's June 28 remarks at the Great Wall of China:
Great Wall Mutianyu People's Republic of China
Q: What are your impressions of the wall, Mr. President?
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Quite unbelievable. It's amazing to imagine that it was done so long ago. They've even had bricks here for 400 and some odd years.
Q: Do you see any analogies, sir, to the way China is now and the way it was then?
PRESIDENT CLINTON: No. (Laughter.) I said yesterday that I felt -- I believe this wall now is a symbol that China shows to the rest of the world, not a wall to keep people out. It sort of unifies the country for over 7,000 kilometers.
Q: Mr. President, could you tell us what the woman in the church wanted to talk to you about today?
PRESIDENT CLINTON: She just kept saying how happy she was I was in the church and how she wished I could come to the little village where she was from. She was very emotional. But as nearly as I can tell, there was nothing specific that she was saying. She kept thanking me for being there and saying that she was glad I was there and she wished I could come to her village, her home village.
Q: What do you think, Mrs. Clinton? What are your impressions?
MRS. CLINTON: Magnificent.
PRESIDENT CLINTON: You know, the part -- the steep incline you see up there, we were told, is the steepest part of the wall. So if we had a couple of hours we could walk 10 kilometers and we'd hit the biggest incline and we'd all be in very good shape when we finished. Or we'd be finished. (Laughter.)
Q: Was it a good workout anyway?
PRESIDENT CLINTON: It was a good workout. It was great. Nice cap, Peter.
Q: Thank you, sir.
END
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BY JAIME A. FLORCRUZ
Forget the fact that Presidents Bill Clinton and Jiang Zemin found virtually no common ground in their press conference on Saturday. And forget the fact that Jiang's comments on national television were so unprecedented that the summit has probably knocked the World Cup off of Chinese TV screens for the rest of Clinton's visit. From Beijing's perspective, Clinton's arrival is in itself already a victory: it marks the virtual end of the Tiananmen curse and Beijing's total rehabilitation from a political pariah to a global power.
And for Jiang, Clinton's trip gives him another chance to boost his image as China's newly minted paramount leader who is at least on par with the leader of the world's only superpower. The week before Clinton's arrival, Chinese national television repeatedly aired a one-hour documentary recapping Jiang's successful visit to America last October. "They've stopped short of deifying Jiang but the documentary is another attempt to start a personality cult on him," says a Chinese political analyst in Beijing.
Actually, the documentary is more subtle than the usual communist propaganda. It shows Jiang's human side: playing the Hawaiian guitar while the wife of the Hawaiian governor sung "Aloha"; singing a Peking opera aria in a dinner with overseas Chinese in Los Angeles and lifting and hugging a cute girl. It shows the Chinese president as a versatile statesman, a renaissance man, and a worthy envoy of the great nation, who can hold his candle with America's pillars of politics and business.
To insinuate that he is now the uncontested new helmsman, the CCTV documentary juxtaposed film clips of Chairman Mao swimming the Yangtze River and of Deng Xiaoping bobbing up and down the Bohai Sea (in the Beidaihe beach resort in Hebei province) with shots of Jiang breast-stroking in the Pacific Ocean. "It implies that Jiang is more open and daring, and therefore greater," says the political analyst. "It makes my hair stand." Two days before Clinton arrived, the People's Daily ran a long piece quoting highly regarded Chinese intellectuals extolling Jiang's successful visit to America. "Due to insistent public demand," said a CCTV announcement early this week, "we are going to re-show the documentary (on Jiang's U.S. tour) in the next few days." Let's see the World Cup try to top that.
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China pledge to halt nuke aid to Pakistan-Albright
By Carol Giacomo
BEIJING, June 28 (Reuters) -
U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on Sunday brushed off Indian criticism of a Sino-American statement on South Asian security and said Beijing had moved forward in pledging to halt missile cooperation with Pakistan.
Albright accused the Indians of acting as if an international call for a halt to nuclear testing ``doesn't apply to them, that everybody is out of step with them.''
``They had better stop dismissing statements like this because they are dismissing what is a very evident signal from the rest of the world that what they are doing has not gained them stature and clearly has not gained them security either.''
U.S. and Chinese leaders Bill Clinton and Jiang Zemin issued a two-page statement on the Indian subcontinent after their summit on Saturday, prompting India to accuse the two of hypocrisy.
The two countries asserted that they would ``prevent the export of equipment, materials or technology that could in any way'' assist India and Pakistan's nuclear weapons or ballistic missile programmes.
With that statement, China ``did go beyond what they had specifically said before'' in pledging to curb sales that are a matter of concern, Albright said.
India has accused China of fuelling tensions in the region by transferring technology to Pakistan.
Washington has had similar concerns.
But in recent years, U.S. officials say, China has halted transfers of materials and equipment to Pakistan nuclear programme, although there are still concerns about missile cooperation.
An Indian government statement issued in Beijing on Sunday rejected any attempt by Beijing and Washington to mediate in the nuclear stand-off between the two South Asian rivals.
The idea of the two asserting responsibility for peace and stability in South Asia ``reflects the hegemonistic mentality of a bygone era in international relations and is completely unacceptable and out of place in the present day world,'' India said.
``It is most ironical that two countries that have directly and indirectly contributed to the unabated proliferation of nuclear weapons and delivery systems in our neighborhood are now presuming to prescribe the norms for non-proliferation.''
The U.S.-Chinese statement was the latest attempt by the two nuclear powers to prod India and Pakistan into taking steps to halt a potential nuclear arms race after the two South Asian rivals tested nuclear weapons last month.
Reiterating earlier positions agreed with the three other nuclear weapons states, Beijing and Washington condemned the tests on both sides and reiterated that the blasts would not win India and Pakistan membership in the world nuclear club.
The statement called on Delhi and Islamabad to join the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and to refrain from building nuclear weapons or the missiles to deliver them.
China is alarmed at the prospect of a nuclear arms race on its western border, and is particularly incensed that India cited a threat from Beijing as one reason for its testing.
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Albright calls China trip "remarkable''
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. and Chinese presidents are engaging in a ``remarkable'' series of meetings in which there is no attempt to ``paper over'' thorny issues and discussions are increasingly frank, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said Sunday. Interviewed from Beijing by CBS' ``Face the Nation,'' Albright, part of a large delegation accompanying President Clinton on a nine-day trip to China, said the ``Chinese are being very helpful and important'' on the issues such as tensions on the Korean peninsula, the Asian economic crisis and nuclear testing by Pakistan and India. She also said the uncommonly forthright public exchange between Clinton and Chinese President Jiang Zemin Saturday was ''something nobody expected'' and was important because it was heard by about 600 million Chinese. She said it was an opportunity for vast numbers of Chinese citizens to hear American views about human rights and freedoms. ``I think we'll have to see, frankly, what the reverberations are, but if one could say this, Beijing is talking about the press conference, that's for sure,'' Albright said. She said the closed-door meetings between Clinton and Jiang were even more candid than Saturday's news conference. ``What you saw in the press conference is there in even greater strength when they talk to each other in private and they raise these very difficult issues,'' Albright said. ``The presidents have begun a dialogue in these meetings now, they've seen each other seven times and I was not in the first meetings, but I can tell you in the last three or four there really has been just an incremental increase in the kinds of subjects they talk about, the frankness with which they talk about the subjects and the way that they deal with each other, ''Albright said. She said the two sides are not just holding polite talks. ``We don't agree with the Chinese on everything. They are quite a different society from ours. That is evident in these discussions. What I find interesting is that there is not an attempt to kind of paper over differences or just have polite discussions,'' she said. She said Clinton has pushed forward U.S. views on political dissidence and other human rights issues. ``The president (Clinton) makes very clear what our stands are on freedom and the need to deal with the dissidents, the need to have a political expression in China, as well as obviously the Tibet issue,'' she said. ``In the past they've (the Chinese) said it (dissidence) was an internal issue ...'' she said. But in the current series of meetings, the Chinese have been talking about such issues, Albright said. ``But they listen, they talk at great length, there's quite a lot of conversations about Tibet. And that's why I find it very interesting that President Jiang is the one that came back and actually said 'I need to explain what I mean about Tibet',''she said. Important military and economic issues are also being discussed, she said. ``What I found very important and useful is that they actually had a strategic dialogue. The Chinese are being very helpful and important in terms of dealing with the issue of the nuclear tests in India and Pakistan,'' she said. ``They are very helpful when we talk about what to do on the Korean Peninsula. We also discussed the Japanese financial crisis and the fact that the Chinese are going to keep their money stable, their currency stable,'' she said. She said the United States had not done as well as it had hoped on getting China to free up its trade relationship with the United States. This had been touted as a key objective of the business leaders accompanying Clinton. ``We didn't do as well as we wanted on the trade issue, ''Albright said, without elaboration.
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Great Wall of censorship cracked by China debate
By Scott Hillis
BEIJING, June 28 (Reuters) - The last time China was treated to an uncensored political debate was in 1989 when student leaders and then-premier Li Peng faced off in a frosty exchange over democracy. Less than three weeks later, tanks and soldiers stormed Beijing's Tiananmen Square and killed hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators in an assault that still haunts the nation and has been strictly off-limits for public discussion. So imagine the astonishment of many Chinese when they tuned into state-run television on Saturday and saw U.S. President Bill Clinton denounce the killings to the face of President Jiang Zemin. The surprisingly frank exchange, broadcast live to China's1.2 billion people, was the latest sign that Beijing is pushing back the boundaries of political discussion. But while U.S. officials hailed the debate as 'historic,' analysts said Chinese shouldn't expect to see Communist Party rulers engaging in spirited political debate on American-style talk shows any time soon. "It's not a sign of a sudden change in approach, it's a sort of incremental thing,'' said a Western diplomat. "It's one thing for a foreign president to do that, it's another thing to allow domestic people to get up on TV and start questioning Tiananmen. ''Underscoring the tight grip China's rulers exert on the country's media, evening news reports censored out Clinton's Tiananmen remarks, as well as his criticisms of Beijing's human rights record and its rule over Tibet. The official People's Daily on Sunday buried those issues at the bottom of its report on the summit, saying only: ``While replying to reporters' questions, President Jiang Zemin and President Clinton set forth their stances and viewpoints on human rights, Tibet and other issues. ''Some analysts said they believed the live broadcast was a Chinese concession to Clinton in exchange for his appearing at a welcoming ceremony in Tiananmen Square. Clinton was the first president to go to the square since the massacre, and he has come under intense fire from domestic critics who have said his appearance there diminished the memories of those killed. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhu Bangzao denied there was any deal with Washington to air the debate live. "I do not think that this is a question of concession or compromise, it was a decision taken solely by the Chinese side and was not the result of bilateral negotiations,'' he told a news conference. "This illustrates that we have adopted an open attitude to welcome President Clinton, and we hope that everybody can understand the viewpoints of all sides. "Chinese society is becoming more and more open, and everybody can make their own appraisals and judgments on all kinds of viewpoints,'' he said. Recent developments in China lend credibility to Zhu's words. In March, newly-elected premier Zhu Rongji gave a live news conference in which he defended the Tiananmen crackdown but voiced support for China's grassroots democracy and joked with reporters. Newspapers and magazines engage in lively discussions of economic issues, and television talk shows have become bolder in exposing once-taboo social problems such as corruption, drug use and unemployment. "It is part of a trend of opening-up, and shows that Jiang has become more confident,'' said a retired Chinese diplomat who served in the United States.
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Clinton Remarks at June 28 Church Service
29 Jun 1998 16:29
Transcript of Clinton Remarks at June 28 Church Service
To: National Desk
Contact: White House Press Office, 202-456-2100
WASHINGTON, June 29 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Following is a transcript of remarks by President Clinton at a June 28 church service: Chongwenmen Church Beijing People's Republic of China 10:31 A.M. (L)
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Thank you, Reverend Wu, Reverend Siu, Reverend Yin. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for making me and my family and our party of Americans feel so welcome in your church today. We are a long way from home, but we felt very much at home with you here in this church. We celebrate with you the growth of the practice of our faith in China, and we rejoice to hear Reverend Siu cite the numbers of churches and other places of worship where people are practicing their faith today. The sermon today was on the unity of the church, and our unity with God in the church. I would like to add only one point -- I believe our faith calls upon us to seek unity with people across the world of different races and backgrounds and creeds. In the Book of Acts, the 26th verse, it is said that God has made from one blood every nation to dwell on the surface of the Earth. I believe that is true. Therefore, I believe that Chinese and Americans are brothers and sisters as children of God. We come here in that spirit today, grateful for your welcome. (Applause.)
END 10:34 A.M. (L) -0- /U.S. Newswire 202-347-2770/ 06/29 16:29
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Critics lambaste Clinton over comments
06/28/98- Updated 06:27 PM ET
WASHINGTON - President Clinton's spirited debate with Chinese President Jiang Zemin was unique for being broadcast live to China. But Clinton critics at home denounced it Saturday as a rehash of old Chinese promises that never were kept, and an American president too eager to please his hosts. In the 70-minute news conference broadcast into millions of Chinese homes, Clinton and Jiang debated the Tiananmen Square crackdown of nine years ago, other human rights issues and China's wish to enter the World Trade Organization. The exchange netted no immediate breakthroughs on American human rights complaints, including authoritarian Chinese control over Tibet. Clinton specifically said he and Jiang disagreed over the brutal use of force at Tiananmen Square in 1989. The debate "represented a rehashing of old promises not kept," complained Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., a major critic of Clinton's China policy from within his party. She said Clinton's remarks played down alleged human rights violations by China by placing the Tiananmen incident "in the past instead of a current nightmare for the Chinese people." "It's not over for anyone in China who cannot speak freely without being arrested," said Pelosi. Rep. Chris Smith, D-N.J., deplored Clinton's treatment of China's human rights situation, especially Tiananmen, as simply a "disagreement." "In cold blood, people were gunned down on the streets," he told WTOP radio in Washington. "There's a time when you cross from talking about a disagreement to an outright condemnation." Pelosi also had early criticism on Clinton's plans to worship Sunday at Chongwenmen Church, China's largest Protestant church. Aides have depicted the church visit as a way to bring attention to another area of difference, a lack of religious freedom in China. "At a state-sanctioned church, he will give credit to the regime that there is religious freedom in China," Pelosi scoffed.
By The Associated Press
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Religion makes strides in China
06/28/98- Updated 08:53 PM ET
BEIJING - President Clinton on Sunday prayed alongside Chinese Christians who are part of a dramatic religious awakening that their government is determined to harness and contain. The president, critical in the past of China's restrictions on religion, avoided harsh words on Sunday. He told congregants at Beijing's Chongwenmen Church that the Bible calls on Christians everywhere to "seek unity" with those of different nationalities, races and creeds. Americans rejoice at news of China's growing number of faithful, Clinton told the flock at Beijing's oldest and largest Protestant church. "Chinese and Americans are brothers and sisters as children of God." His decision to attend Sunday services was designed to make clear to China's leaders how important issues of religious tolerance are to U.S. policymakers and the American public. It also was an attempt to mute critics at home, particularly conservative Christians, who say he has not pushed Beijing hard enough to permit worship without government interference. The stop at Chongwenmen "is causing a stir all over the country," said the Rev. Wang Yiming, a Catholic bishop in western Sichuan Province. "The fact that he is including (a church) visit in his busy schedule is of extreme significance for China's believers." Others, however, were infuriated by Clinton's churchgoing. "It was a statement by the U.S. government of approval for the Chinese government's religious policy," said Joseph Kung, head of the U.S.-based Cardinal Kung Foundation, a Catholic group that advocates religious freedom in China. "Religious persecution is very much alive and ongoing." Organized religion in China has undergone a dramatic revival in recent years among Buddhists, Muslims, Taoists and Christians. By the government's count, the country has 100 million faithful, including 10 million Christians. Unofficial estimates place the number much higher. In China, there is no separation of church and state. By law, religion is subservient to the state. Chinese believers can legally worship only at churches, mosques and temples that are registered with "patriotic" religious associations answerable to the State Bureau of Religious Affairs. Members of individual faiths are not allowed to swear allegiance to foreign religious leaders, such as Pope John Paul II. Government bureaucrats in China are deeply involved in spiritual matters that are reserved elsewhere for clergy and lay people. They guide the search for and selection of Tibet's reincarnated Buddhist lamas, oversee Catholic seminaries and demand the right to approve or refuse Protestant and Muslim clerics. Among the top echelons of China's atheist Communist Party and government there are no known religious believers. The government has reacted inconsistently to the religious renaissance. In many parts of the country, the government has jailed clergy and lay people who organized unapproved or underground churches. In other cases, it has tolerated the unregistered prayer groups and services and permitted publication of millions of Bibles.
By James Cox and Antoaneta Bezlova, USA TODAY
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Analysis: Clinton, Jiang forge closer ties
06/28/98- Updated 08:49 PM ET
BEIJING - The crux of President Clinton's historic trip to China boils down to this: Is an imperfect friendship worth continuing in the hope that it becomes less imperfect? Clinton argues that when it comes to the United States and this rapidly evolving nation of 1.2 billion people, the answer is a resounding yes - his policy of engaging China, even when the two countries have serious differences, should continue. Buoyant White House aides pointed to Clinton's remarkable 70-minute press conference with Chinese President Jiang Zemin on Saturday - an unprecedented debate on human rights aired to millions on Chinese radio and television - as a perfect example of the positive power of dialogue. Clinton was to continue his focus on human rights with a speech to students at Beijing University Monday - a speech the White House also hoped would be televised live here. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said the fact that Jiang allowed the exchange with Clinton to be televised marked a positive change by the Chinese regime. The historic nature of the event was not so much "the words that were said but the fact that the words have been said," Albright said. Jiang "took a chance not only with the Chinese people but perhaps even a chance with some of his colleagues in the Chinese government," James Sasser, U.S. ambassador to China, said Sunday on ABC's This Week. "The Chinese people, that's all they're talking about today is what they saw on television yesterday." But Clinton's first-ever trip to this place of many moods and masks and motives also has made abundantly clear just how difficult it is for the United States to manage a relationship with a country poised uncertainly between communism, thousands of years of authoritarian rule and the first fledgling steps toward democracy. Clinton praised China's increasing tolerance of religious freedom Sunday as he and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton attended services at Chongwenmen Church, the largest Protestant church in Beijing. But scores of Protestant and Catholic leaders remain in labor camps or jails and some were arrested as recently as weeks before Clinton's visit. The China that is encouraging village elections and grassroots capitalism Clinton saw examples of near the ancient capital of Xian last week is the same China that enraged the White House by detaining dissidents - subsequently released - even as Clinton touched down on Chinese soil. In one ugly incident, Chinese security officials briefly questioned two Asian-American White House staffers Friday night who were trying to load the Clintons' garment bags aboard Air Force One in Xian. White House spokesman Mike McCurry said the two valets were stopped "only because there was some concern about their ethnicity . . . it looked to (U.S. security officers) like the problem was that these guys looked Asian." The China that clearly cherishes its 5000 years of history - including Beijing's Forbidden City and the Great Wall in nearby Mutianyu, both of which the first family toured Sunday - is the same China whose president glosses over China's recent history as an oppressor of democracy in Tibet and Tiananmen Square. The China that U.S. officials praised in the summit between Clinton and Jiang for its stabilizing influence in the Asian financial crisis and the nuclear arms race in southeast Asia is the same China some members of Congress believe stole U.S. satellite technology to better aim its nuclear missiles. A major goal of Clinton's nine-day, five-city trip - the first visit to China by a U.S. president since 1989 - was to show his U.S. audience how China has changed, how it no longer fits the stereotype of a monolithic, authoritarian regime. In some ways, Clinton has succeeded. The adoring crowds that lined the streets of Xian and Beijing, the regular Chinese citizens that have told him of new political and economic freedoms, tell a story of a new China most Americans have not yet to come to know. The chemistry between Jiang and Clinton, begun during Jiang's state visit to the United States last fall, continues to jell. Sunday night, Jiang and his wife, Madame Wang, entertained the president and first lady at a private dinner at the Zhongnanhai Government Compound. At Saturday night's state dinner, in a banquet hall in the Great Hall of the People, the increasing comfort level between the two nations was perhaps best illustrated by the decision of the People's Liberation Army band to perform "Chelsea Morning - a '60s anthem by Joni Mitchell that Chelsea Clinton was named for. But the old China can be seen here too. It reared its ugly head when dissidents were rounded up in Xian, when Jiang, in his joint press conference with Clinton, dismissed the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen, where hundreds of pro-democracy activists died, as "political disturbances." Clinton's critics at home cringed during his 11-minute welcoming ceremony on the edge of Tiananmen Square, where PLA troops fired a 21-gun salute. And White House aides grimaced Sunday morning after Clinton, during the previous night's state dinner, accepted an invitation from Jiang and stepped up to conduct the PLA band - the musical arm of China's often-brutal military and security apparatus - as they played Hands Across the Sea, a march by John Phillip Sousa. Despite White House protestations to the contrary, the substantive accomplishments of the Jiang-Clinton summit were relatively meager. The two leaders agreed to detarget their nations' nuclear weapons - aiming them away from each other in an important symbolic action - but the missiles can be retargeted in a matter of minutes. As expected, negotiations were not completed to satsify White House demands that China further open its markets in exchange for U.S. support for its admittance to the World Trade Organization, the 132-nation group that sets the rules for world trade. Clinton challenged Jiang to open discussions with the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibet who wants autonomy for the Chinese-ruled region. "I have spent time with the Dalai Lama. I believe him to be an honest man, and I believe if he had a conversation with President Jiang, they would like each other very much" Clinton said at the press conference, as Jiang threw back his head and laughed. But Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhu Bangzao later said no opening to the Dalai Lama should be expected anytime soon because he seemed to be plotting Tibetan independence. "Under these circumstances, the two sides cannot hold a dialogue or talks and the responsibility lies entirely with the Dalai Lama," Zhu said. There also were no developments on two controversies under scrutiny in Washington and of deep concern to members of Congress who have criticized Clinton for coming to China. Jiang dismissed as "sheer fabrications" the allegations that China tried to influence the 1996 elections through illegal campaign contributions to Democrats. And Clinton aides said the issue of whether China gained technological secrets through the administration's policy of granting waivers to U.S. firms to launch their satellites on Chinese rockets was not even raised during Clinton's talks with Jiang. What is perhaps most important for the White House are the images of China that are conveyed back home. Clinton and his senior aides are betting a significant part of his foreign policy legacy that Americans can be convinced that China is an ally in the making, that the Chinese journey to their version of democracy can be eased and quickened by increased contact with the West. The president's critics in Congress thus far seem to feel his trip has not changed their minds. Clinton's exchange with Jiang was little more than "a rehashing of old promises not kept," complained Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. She said Clinton's remarks played down alleged human rights violations by China by placing the Tiananmen incident "in the past instead of a current nightmare for the Chinese people." But Clinton, aides say, remains confident that over the course of his trip - he flies to Shanghai Monday and will continue to Guilin and Hong Kong before returning home July 4 - his constituents at home will be persuaded that this is a new China, a China undergoing an unalterable change. "An ancient Chinese proverb tells us: 'Be not afraid of growing slowly; be only afraid of standing still,' " Clinton said in his toast to Jiang at the state dinner."Let us commit to keep moving forward together, turning small steps into giant strides for our people, our nations and the world."
By Bill Nichols, USA TODAY
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Clinton 'confident' of China's progress
06/28/98- Updated 10:36 AM ET
BEIJING - President Clinton, venturing from a church once shuttered by communists to the Forbidden City and Great Wall monuments of imperial rule, said Sunday he felt confident China was on a path of progress.
"In the last 25 years, it's changed quite a lot," the president said as he toured the vermilion-walled imperial courtyards of Beijing's Forbidden City, adjacent to Tiananmen Square, with first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and their daughter, Chelsea.
Asked if China had changed enough, Clinton said, "After yesterday, I feel quite good about it." On Saturday, Clinton and Chinese President Jiang Zemin engaged in a lively debate televised across China - an open discussion that would have been all but impossible just a few years ago.
For a first-hand look at more of China's imperial past, the Clintons ventured out of the capital Sunday afternoon to tour the Great Wall. To reach the mountaintop wall at Mutianyu they rode in a gondola, joined by Mrs. Clinton's mother, Dorothy Rodham.
In steamy heat, the presidential party strolled atop the wall, where they peered through hazy skies at far reaches of the stone spine, built mostly in the second century B.C. to hold out Central Asian horsemen - first the Huns and later the Mongols.
"It's quite unbelievable, isn't it," Clinton said.
"It's amazing to imagine that it was done so long ago."
Before trading his statesman's coat and tie for a tourist's green polo shirt, Clinton worshipped Sunday with Beijing's largest Protestant congregation and said he felt at home in the old, gray-brick church in central Beijing.
Clinton's presence at the Chongwenmen Church, part of China's nondenominational official church, highlighted his concerns for religious freedom.
Although China's constitution protects religious rights, in practice some church leaders are harassed and jailed.
Meanwhile, a human rights group said Sunday that all four dissidents who were detained in Xi'an, the first city on Clinton's China trip, have been released.
But another dissident, Li Xiaolong, was still being held in southern China, while an activist in Shanghai was forced to leave the city ahead of Clinton's arrival there Monday, the Information Center of Human Rights and Democratic Movement in China said.
Speaking after a sermon about unity in the church, Clinton said: "I would like to add only one point: I believe our faith calls upon us to seek unity with people across the world, of different races and backgrounds and creeds."
He said he felt "very much at home with you here in this church" and was encouraged by the "growth of the practice of our faith in China."
During the Cultural Revolution, from the mid-1960s to late 1970s, churches in China were closed. Many were destroyed. Chongwenmen did not reopen until Christmas 1982. Today, about 2,500 worship there each Sunday.
Many parishioners emerged from the service to say praying with Clinton had been a thrill.
"He's the president of the United States but the moment he stepped into our church, he was a brother. In the face of God, we are all equal," said Liu Yufang.
After the service, Clinton and his family toured the ancient palaces and courtyards of the Forbidden City, the spectacular walled enclave that was the residence for 24 emperors of Ming and Qing dynasties.
On Monday, Clinton will address students at China's elite Peking University, a quiet, leafy campus whose students were some of the leaders of the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square.
Mrs. Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright planned to meet Monday with lawyers running a legal services center on the edge of the campus, the country's only national center helping women seek their legal rights.
At the church, the president spoke briefly in a large round sanctuary with white plaster walls and brown wooden floor and ceiling. The church, built in 1904 in the waning years of China's last dynasty, is tucked in narrow lanes in an old part of Beijing where historic houses are rapidly giving way to modern buildings.
Parishioners were hopeful Clinton's appearance at the government-sanctioned church would promote religious freedom. "Now that he's prayed with us, the Chinese government will greatly relax its policies toward us Christians and our churches," said Liu Suxing.
She complained that churches not sanctioned by the government, where many Christians prefer to worship, often are shut down. The government "says there is freedom of religion but in reality it's not free," she said.
Human rights groups say dozens of Protestant and Catholic leaders are imprisoned or held in Chinese labor camps for refusing to bow to government control. Clinton and Jiang agreed to exchange visits of religious leaders to further understanding on spiritual matters.
In addressing the congregation, Clinton quoted from the Bible, Acts 17:26, "God has made from one blood every nation to dwell on the surface of the Earth," and he added, "I believe that is true."
Christians are a very small minority of China's population of 1.2 billion people. Beijing, a city of 13 million people, has eight churches serving 30,000 members.
There was a brief disruption when a middle-aged woman, unknown to the parishioners, walked up the aisle toward the president's pew. Some members of the congregation tried to grab her, but she shook them off and said she wanted to see Clinton. "Don't throw me out," she shouted. "I'll leave of my own accord."
She was escorted to the rear of the sanctuary and sat silently through the service until she was allowed to see Clinton afterward. She told him she was a charismatic Christian, thanked him for coming to China and expressed hope that China's leaders would become Christians, a White House official said.
Members of the congregation would not allow reporters to talk to the woman, said to be from another province.
By The Associated Press
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Transcript of June 27 White House Briefing
U.S. Newswire
27 Jun 17:54
Transcript of June 27 White House Briefing by McCurry, Berger, Sperling
To:
National and International desks
Contact: White House Press Office, 202-456-2100
WASHINGTON, June 29 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Following is a transcript of a June 27 White House press briefing by Mike McCurry, National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, and National Economic Advisor Gene Sperling: Shangri-la Hotel Beijing, People's Republic of China 4:12 P.M. (L)
MR. MCCURRY: Let me explain what we'll do. I'm delighted to have here the President's National Security Advisor, Samuel Berger; and the President's National Economic Advisor, Gene Sperling. They're going to do a variety of things, so sit back and enjoy yourself for a while. They will -- first, Sandy will provide a readout of the bilateral meetings the President conducted today with President Jiang Zemin. He will then go through elements that are contained in the fact sheet and the agreements that have been reached so you better understand the remarkable substantive achievements that occurred at this summit. And then Mr. Sperling will provide a readout of the working lunch held today with Premier Zhu Rongji and that delegation, talk a little bit about the economic issues that were raised at this summit. And then we will turn to your questions. And we apologize for the lengthy presentation, but it's one that we think is important so that you understand in greater detail the substantive achievements of this summit. With that, Mr. Berger. Delighted to have you.
MR. BERGER: Thank you, Mr. McCurry. I think this has been quite an extraordinary day in the evolution of U.S.-China relations. The summit today and the press conference which followed I believe demonstrate more graphically than anything we could possibly have said that the premise that we have been proceeding along is correct. That is that engagement with the Chinese can advance America's interests and its values. This is a summit that produced substantial results that will make life more secure and improve lives in other ways for the American people and for the Chinese people. We also saw today a truly historic press conference that for the first time witnessed the leader of the United States and the leader of China discussing and debating a range of issues, but most particularly human rights, to a live audience across China and the United States. A President of the United States and a President of China not only speaking to themselves, not only speaking to the press, but speaking to their own people and speaking to each other's people. There were a number of firsts involved in that press conference, and in the events of the past several hours. I think it's the first time that a foreign leader has addressed Tiananmen as directly as the President did in his remarks. It is, as far as we know, the first time a press conference held by a foreign leader has been broadcast live. It certainly was the most extensive public discussion by far between a Chinese leader and an American leader on human rights. And it was extraordinary in other ways as well. President Jiang at various points invited President Clinton to add to his comments, thereby deciding to engage in this discussion rather than seeking in any way to truncate it. I will come back to that and answer your questions about it in a few moments. Let me go to the other side of the equation here, because this was a summit that produced substantial concrete results, and we're very pleased with those results. Let me just go through them, hopefully not in excruciating detail, but in some detail. I think perhaps the most important developments in this summit came, as they have generally in the last few meetings, in the area of nonproliferation, as China increasingly becomes part of the global nonproliferation regime. We have an agreement with the Chinese not to target our strategic nuclear weapons under their respective control at each other. I think this is an important step, as I talked about yesterday as we speculated about its possibility. In the missile area, there are several pieces here. I think the most important piece, one that I am particularly pleased about, is that the Chinese have agreed now to actively study joining the MTCR. Now, what does that mean? The Chinese in the past have said unilaterally that they would adhere to the MTCR guidelines. That is a kind of a general commitment and it doesn't necessarily include all of the technology and components that are part of the annex of the MTCR, and it's not binding in any kind of international way. This is an important towards joining the MTCR, and we have seen in the past -- whether it's been the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights or various other measures -- the Chinese often do these -- jump across the river in two or three steps. And here they have said basically that they are moving towards considering joining the MTCR. That would be a very significant development in terms of the sale of missile technology worldwide. On chemical weapons, we agreed that we would strengthen our controls even further of the export of dual-use chemicals, that is those that can be used in perfectly legitimate commercial uses and those that can be used in weapons. China has just announced that it will expand its list of chemical precursors that will be under those controls. In the area of biological weapons, I think you've heard me and the President, others, talk about our desire, perhaps this year, but as soon as possible, to negotiate an enforcement protocol for the Biological Weapons Convention, which does not have enforcement machinery. And the Chinese have agreed to work with us towards that objective. And finally in this area, the Chinese have agreed with us on practices for end-use visits on U.S. high-technology exports to China. This has been an important issue back in Washington. We will now have a procedure for verifying that exports that are going to a location are at that location through a process of visits and inspection. In the area of the security dialogue, the two Presidents talked considerably about South Asia, and both committed to place heavy priority over the next months to trying to de-escalate the tensions in the region. China has a unique historical relationship both with Pakistan and with India -- asymmetrical relationship -- and obviously can be a very important part of this process. In the area of human rights, in addition to the press conference itself, which I think was a powerful discussion beaming across China about the relationship between freedom and government and the past and the future, we've agreed that we will resume our bilateral dialogue on human rights. The Chinese earlier had indicated they would sign the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, indicated they will do so this fall. And on religious freedom, we agreed that we would continue to exchange among officials, as we had earlier this year with the mission of the three clerics, and that the State Department and the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs will resume its dialogue. I will let Gene talk about the economic area. On energy and environment -- I talked about this yesterday -- I think this is extremely important -- China, growing as fast as it is, will surpass the United States as the largest emitter of greenhouse gases in 10 or 15 years. And we will now intensify substantially our cooperation on clean energy, with American technology, working with the Chinese, working on a nationwide air quality monitoring network, working on power projects and coal bed methane technologies, as well as having an energy finance conference so that we can talk about how China can finance an economic growth pattern that does not replicate the energy -- the wasteful energy pattern of the developed countries in the postwar period. In science and technology, a area where we have been cooperating for 20 years, we will continue that cooperation, emphasizing a number of areas I will mention -- particularly disease, fighting disease. We're going to be cooperating in several areas including child health issues, birth defects, and health hazards due to environmental factors. The President mentioned this in his statement, talked about some of the things that have happened as a result of this cooperation. In the area of rule of law, we will work with the Chinese on a more robust project, working with their judges, with their lawyers, training them on judicial systems, judicial practices. And also we will hold an important meeting with them in November on legal protection of human rights, including international human rights covenants, criminal procedural rights, legal protection of religious freedom and other issues. There are a number of other things that are in the fact sheet, but I think it's a very rich and diverse set of steps which continue the process that has been ongoing now for the last two years at least of strengthening and deepening and widening this relationship. Now, let me just speak for a second about the meeting itself. The meeting started with an extended bilateral -- probably 10 on each side, 12 on each side. The President -- both Presidents exchanged obviously their commitments to the relationship and the President began with South Asia, talked about the role that China had played in the P-5 and chairing that and helping to move towards a common position of the international community with respect to what India and Pakistan need to do to get this process reversed. They talked about Korea, Kim Dae Jong, and the cooperation that we have there, both for trying to move a process of reconciliation between North and South, as well as making sure that the agreed framework that has stopped North Korea's nuclear program is adhered to. The President in his larger meeting raised three economic issues -- Asian financial crisis, trade and the economy and the environment. Again, Gene will talk about those. On the economy and the environment, the President said basically that China can avoid the mistakes that the developed world made over the last 30 years in developing a very high carbon energy base and do so in ways that don't impair its growth, but don't impair its environment. Then we went to a smaller meeting. President Jiang expressed gratitude to President Clinton for coming to China, notwithstanding the criticism of the trip that a few people have raised at home. And the President said that there never was a question in his mind to give in to the critics, that he believes that the United States gains an advantage from engagement -- can gain an advantage from engagement, and the President must do what's in the best interest for the United States; that we can cooperate and it's important that we discuss areas of disagreement. There was a lengthy discussion of trade and WTO. On human rights, the President acknowledged the steps that China has taken with respect to release of dissidents -- some dissidents -- his agreement to sign the Covenant, invitation granted to the religious clerics, and said the question now is where do we go from here; how do we get on the right side of history together. He said that that would have, he thought, enormous impact -- that that, that is, China's opening up and giving greater degree of political freedom, a greater degree of freedom of expression, would have an enormous impact on China's standing, it would be a source of strength for China, not weakness. And as he said in the press conference, it would be a source, ultimately, of stability for China, not instability. He talked about a number of areas he mentioned in the press conference in general terms that China could undertake with respect to prisoner releases, with respect to freedom of access to information. He raised the question of the arrest or the detention of the dissidents over the last few days. He mentioned the question of jamming Radio Free Asia and he said that he looked hopefully to China for improvement. On Taiwan, the President restated our basic policy, one China policy. It continues to be at the heart of our policy, based on the three communiqués. We don't support independence for Taiwan or one China, one Taiwan, or Taiwan's membership in organizations that require statehood; but that it is extraordinarily important to the United States that the issue between China and Taiwan be resolved peacefully. And that was a point the President emphasized. There was some discussion of Tibet. You heard a reprise of that to some degree at the press conference. And the President urged President Jiang to engage in a dialogue with the Dalai Lama based upon a commitment or a statement that the Dalai Lama acknowledging that Tibet is a part of China. The President said he believed that the Dalai Lama would do that. He urged President Jiang to take the step which he said had importance not only for the people of Tibet, but also for people around the world who I think have a particular feeling for the cultural and religious identity of Tibet and want to see it preserved. Let me stop. Let me ask Gene to fill in the economic pieces. And then I will seek to answer your questions.
MR. SPERLING: Clearly, one of the things we are most pleased with during this trip is that both in the meeting yesterday with Secretary Rubin and then again with the working lunch today with the President, Premier Zhu Rongji was very strong and quite unambiguous in his commitment to not devalue the currency in China, and expressed the view that that would be harmful to the region, to Hong Kong, and ultimately, in the long-term, harmful to China; that whatever difficulties and short-term costs, that this was a sound approach for the region. And the President was strong in his praise for the sound judgment and responsible judgment that that showed. As you know, the President had asked Secretary Rubin to go out a day earlier and have a preliminary conversation. That went very well yesterday. And again the President went through many of these issues with the Premier over the working lunch. On the joint -- on accession to the World Trade Organization, there was clearly progress made, but clearly it didn't go far enough. We said before that, as we've always said, we needed a commercially viable package and that that would be our test. I can tell you that over the last several weeks, Charlene Barshefsky and her team, Deputy USTR Fisher and Assistant USTR Cassidy, I think showed tremendous skill in both pushing and engaging their Chinese counterparts and in making some significant progress. We just have farther to go. A new round of talks has been scheduled for the week of July 20th in Geneva. The areas where progress was made was in new tariff cuts across a wide range of products, though not enough, particularly in some of the key export areas that are important to American workers and producers; reductions in some nontariff barriers, such as quotas and licensing procedures; a new financial service offer; and their very first telecommunications market access proposal. I think China got a better understanding of what it would take. I think that it was made clear that while the President would like to see a time when there is permanent MFN, that that could only be done in the context of a strong and commercially viable WTO package. On other fronts -- I won't go through everything in the fact sheet, but Secretary Daley certainly made progress in strengthening our export controls with China. China has agreed to a framework for permitting end-use verification inspections of U.S. dual-use high-technology exports. There is a five-year aviation initiative that will focus on airport infrastructure development, training, management, air traffic control systems. On Monday Secretary Daley will be part of several contract signings. And one thing in particular we're very pleased with due to some very hard work right up to the last minute was that we are announcing the first exchange of Labor Secretaries to go over a broad dialogue of labor issues, including core labor standards, employment creation policies. And I think this is very important in continuing progress and some of the intersection between some of the economic issues and the freedom of association issues. In the meeting with Zhu, it started by him telling the President of some of his previous visits prior to his current job, and the President inviting the Premier to come to the United States. He warmly received that, though obviously any type of dates would have to be discussed. The President had a significant conversation with him on climate change, echoing some of the things that Sandy just went over in his conversation with President Jiang Zemin -- the notion that when the President is trying to bring in China into the Kyoto framework with targets and timetables, that he does not mean them to be targets or timetables that would limit China's growth, and that he believes that with the right type of energy policy earlier, that there can even be potential for reducing the growth of greenhouse gas emissions while encouraging growth. There was also a significant discussion on Japan and the Asian financial crisis. This was at the point where the Premier made very clear to the President that as a matter of their responsibility to the region and to their neighbors and to Hong Kong, as well as economic sense for China, that they would not consider devaluing. There was discussion of the situation in Japan and what the economic challenges were there. The Premier went through some of the issues with their own economic plan, their tremendous challenge in trying to deal with the 300,000 state-operated enterprises and their efforts to create a social safety net to deal with things, the problems and the challenges that result from that. He spoke of the fact that they were focusing very much on infrastructure investment, long-term infrastructure investment as their way of further stimulus, and the President was supportive of the long-term investment focus on that as opposed to a commercial subsidy focus. j On the WTO, the President talked about the importance of making progress. One thing I would say is that at this meeting the President had invited and the Chinese had invited the congressional delegation to be at the meeting. During the discussion in which the President was talking about the importance of making further progress on trade, he asked a few members of the congressional delegation to speak. Senator Rockefeller and Senator Baucus talked about the importance from their perspective in maintaining support for open economic relations with China and for eventually getting permanent MFN or not having to fight such hard battles every year, of having greater open markets and doing more on the export side so as to bring down the trade deficit. Congressman Hamilton also strongly made these points and stressed that the effort of himself and people to continue open trade relations with China. The President echoed that the status quo was not in an acceptable place and that we needed to make further progress. With that -- since I know you are anxious to get to questions -- I will stop, either Sandy or I will be available for any questions you have. Thanks.
Q: Sandy, did we somehow signal to President Jiang that President Clinton would raise the issue of Tiananmen Square in the press conference, that he would, in fact, speak at some length on what that meant to the American people and to him?
MR. BERGER: No, there was no specific conversation with President Jiang about what the President intended to say.
Q: That wasn't the question.
MR. BERGER: Yes, I said no.
Q: Did he signal in any way, not whether there was specific conversation.
MR. BERGER: No, didn't pull his ear, didn't --
Q: And none of you talked to your counterparts at a lower level?
MR. BERGER: No.
Q: Sandy, what message should other governments in Asia -- Japan, India, for that matter, Taiwan -- take from this new relationship that you are forming with China?
MR. BERGER: As far as I know, every leader that we have met with from Asia has encouraged us to develop a good, strong relationship with China. Well, we haven't had a conversation with the new Indian government of great depth, although we look forward to having discussions with them. But certainly, the Japanese, Prime Minister Hashimoto, the Koreans, President Kim Dae Jong. I think that the nations in this region know that we are not forming an alliance with China. They know that we are not -- that an improving relationship with China is not directed against any of them, but that stability in China and bringing China into the global and regional regime is to their advantage. So I think we've tried to make it quite clear to each of them -- we do have, of course, security relationships with a number of those countries -- with Japan, with Korea, with Thailand, with the Philippines, with Australia. Those are qualitatively different relationships. Those are defense security relationships. But I think the others, for the most part, prefer to see a strong, good relationship between the United States and China than a tense and hostile relationship.
Q: Can you help us and point to any particular place in the human rights debate that we watched where President Clinton's stated views on human rights in China moved at all, or where you think President Jiang's position on human rights budged an inch?
MR. BERGER: Well, I think, first of all, the very fact that this happened is a movement on the part of the Chinese. It would have been unthinkable for that to happen even five years ago, perhaps even yesterday. So the fact that President Jiang not only was willing to engage, but seemed almost eager to engage in that dialogue -- there were times when he turned to the President where he could have cut off the discussion, and said, President Clinton, do you want to add anything to that. What you're seeing in that press conference to some degree is a window into what has happened in the evolution of their relationship over the past few years. What I have seen in these meetings, where two leaders now have a level of mutual respect sufficient that they can engage in these discussions with a good deal of honesty and candor. I think there were a number of moments -- I think that when President Clinton said at one point, I'd like to add a comment; first of all, I think this debate and discussion has been healthy and a good thing, and then went into a discussion of the relationship between stability and freedom. What he has been saying in many different ways and now is saying directly to the people of China is that: I understand China's apprehension, at least the leadership's apprehension, about disintegration." China has had historic problems of breaking up. But in the future, stability and freedom are not inconsistent. The better way to get stability in this new world is greater degree of freedom -- I think that's a very strong message to the people of China. And I think the President was aware that this was being broadcast live and I think was speaking to the broader audience in that respect.
Q: Sandy, how was he aware that it was being broadcast live? You didn't know going into this that it was going to be, did you?
MR. BERGER: We knew as we came out of the meeting, I think Mike had received some indication before the press conference that it would be broadcast live. And I think maybe on radio live. We've heard reports from some of our embassy people of cab drivers stopping and pulling over to the side of the street to listen to this. Those are unverified, and they are sourced to the U.S. embassy personnel.
Q: -- mentioned that he would work on helping with people who are being arrested because of the counterrevolutionary law, that they were being arrested and put in jail. But wouldn't it be a matter of semantics, because people are being arrested now for endangering the safety of the country? So what would be your --
MR. BERGER: Well, I think the President made clear that he opposed arresting anybody for the expression of their views, of their political views, and made some suggestions to President Jiang as to concrete steps that might be taken in that direction. But we would oppose, obviously, the arrest for anyone for expression of religious freedom, for expression of their political views. I think part of this dialogue was President Clinton saying to the Chinese people and to President Jiang, let me explain America's values to the Chinese people and why that has made America strong, and why that can make China stronger.
Q: President Jiang Zemin stated very clearly the idea of political contributions to the U.S. was absurd and sheer fabrication. President Clinton didn't say anything about that. Do you know his views on the matter, or what's the White House position?
MR. BERGER: I'm sorry, what was the predicate of -- I just didn't hear the first part.
Q: Political contributions.
MR. BERGER: Oh. This is a matter we have raised before with President Jiang and other Chinese leaders. They have in the past said things similar to what President Jiang said today; that is that they have conducted their own investigation and they have not found anything to bear out the proposition that the Chinese government was engaged in an effort to funnel campaign finances into political parties in the United States. That is as matter for the Justice Department to investigate and we urged, as we always have, the Chinese government to cooperate.
Q: On a related issue, did the issue of satellite export waivers come up in any of the meetings -- past, present or future export waivers?
MR. BERGER: Did not come up. I mean, it certainly has come up in our discussions with the Chinese at other levels; did not come up in the summit. But as you know, I think our view is that while there are some instances of private companies that are being investigated, that our policy with respect to satellite launches on Chinese satellites is one that serves the national interest and has not compromised our national security.
Q: Sandy, can I ask about a couple of pieces of language that came out today -- one, an additional piece of the language and one that was omitted, and I'd like to ask your explanation of what these two things meant. The first one was, in talking about the detargeting, there was an interesting phrase about weapons under their respective control. Is that a reference, for instance, maybe to weapons on NATO bases in Europe? What does it mean -- weapons that are under the respective control? And the second is an omission, or seemed to me to be an omission. After the summit I did not hear a repetition of the Taiwan Relations Act as being one of the pillars of American policy toward Taiwan. Does that Relations Act continue to be a policy of ours?
MR. BERGER: With respect to -- the issue of arms sales did not come up in the press conference. Obviously with respect to that, our template, our guidance is the three communiqués and U.S. law. And with respect to missiles under our control, that means all missiles that are under U.S. control. I'd rather not get into that more specifically.
Q: You said that the President reiterated -- policy with regards to Taiwan to President Jiang. Then why didn't the President make that a part of his statement at the press conference? Was that by mutual agreement?
MR. BERGER: No.
Q: And one more. During the President's stay in China, is he planning to address that issue in public?
MR. BERGER: There is no change here in the policy. Secretary Albright articulated it when she was here. Others have articulated it. I think I answered a question yesterday, answered a question today with respect to the policy. I don't know whether -- it's not inconceivable to me that at some point between now and the end -- there is a lot of speeches to go -- that the President will address Taiwan somewhat more specifically.
Q: Did he specifically mention -- the three nos to President Jiang? Did the President specifically state --
MR. BERGER: He stated what our policy is. It includes those elements -- also the three communiqués, the one China policy, peaceful resolution of the dispute. He restated our policy.
Q: When did the United States begin talking about -- when did the United States start saying that it formally opposes independence for Taiwan?
MR. BERGER: That has been part of our policy I think for quite some time.
Q: That would be the case even if the democratically-elected government of Taiwan chose that, or there was a democratic referendum that overwhelmingly favored it?
MR. BERGER: No, we believe that the status -- the issue of the future of Taiwan and China should be resolved between the two entities and between the two peoples. And it is inherent in the three communiqués that we do not support the independence of Taiwan. That goes back long before we got here.
Q: Can I follow up? Did the President restate the three nos of the one China policy on his own, or he was responding to a request from President Jiang? And also, what was President Jiang's response to the President's point that the pursuit of a cross-strait dialogue is the best way to achieve a final peaceful resolution?
MR. BERGER: I have not in my readout tried to characterize President Jiang's comments. I would suggest that you go to the Chinese government for that.
Q: What about my point --
MR. BERGER: The President stated this in the context of a discussion on Taiwan which President Jiang talked at some length about Taiwan, and the President articulated our policy.
MR. MCCURRY: Our counterparts on the Chinese side, Zhu Bangzao, the spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, very graciously delayed his briefing, their readout, until 5:00 p.m. I wanted to alert everyone of that. That will begin shortly -- those of you who have got responsibility to cover that event as well.
Q: Where is that?
MR. MCCURRY: You can inquire -- Paul, do you know where they're doing that? Up around the corner, very nearby. So I did want to advise you of that. We will continue for a short while here for those of you in the White House press who've got some more questions.
Q: On the environment, I would like to ask you, we all feel like China has a moral obligation to act on human rights. You sounded very strongly on your commitment to environmental dialogue with China. So is there a feeling that we, as developed countries -- America as the richest country -- has a moral obligation to help China do its job on clean energy and the environment?
MR. BERGER: The whole premise of our approach -- maybe we can just actually keep it a little bit down back there so I can try to answer the question. Our whole premise at Kyoto was that developed countries such as the United States had basic obligations to deal with the emissions that are causing greenhouse gases and global warming. And we undertook very substantial cuts in our levels over a period of time. But we also said that if we cut, and the developing world, like China, doesn't cut, the planet doesn't know whether emission comes from Shanghai or San Francisco. So we'll have the same problem. And therefore we asked the developing countries to undertake their own efforts and to participate with us in a emissions control exchange regime whereby investments that are private sector could make clean energy in the developing world would both provide them an investment and provide our companies with credit for emissions control.
Q: Just a quick question, clarification from yesterday. You described China as an authoritarian regime -- communist states are generally regarded as totalitarian. Is this an upgrade or a downgrade? (Laughter.)
MR. BERGER: Any single word doesn't capture I think a regime as complicated as China. This is a regime in transition. In some respects, as I said yesterday, the people in this country have a far better life than they did when I first came here 20 years ago, or 10 years ago or 5 years ago -- not only in their economic life, but also in their ability to choose what they do for work, whether they're educated, whether they travel, whether they have cable television and a whole range -- whether they elect their village mayor. Now, at the same time, this is a one-party state and it has a very tight control on -- certainly on public expression, on political dissent. And in that respect it is authoritarian.
Q: -- clarify the earlier question, what is this phrase, "under their respective control"?
MR. BERGER: Let me have a conversation with you later about that.
Q: Sandy, on the question of transition, the President has now had seven meetings, I think, with Jiang. Do you see him as a transitional figure of sort of the Gorbachevian mold or is it something less than that or is it something more than that?
MR. BERGER: Well, first of all, one has to be humble about predicting the future of American leadership, let alone the future of Chinese leadership. I do not believe that President Jiang is a transitional figure. I think that he has consolidated his support within the government and that has been affirmed by various institutions. I think that he has strong control of the government. Obviously, others in this government are extraordinary important -- for example, Premier Zhu Rongji, who has special influence in the massive economic restructuring going on here. But I think President Jiang is not a transitional figure. I think he is someone who, I would expect -- and I would hope that's he's not a transitional figure, I'd hope that he's a figure that accelerates the transition of China.
Q: But is he a reformational figure?
MR. BERGER: Well, I think we'll have to make those judgments looking backwards. I think that what he did today was rather interesting. I think there are many ways to have reacted to that situation in the press conference. His instinct was not to cut it off. His instinct was to engage in the discussion, in the dialogue, in the debate, even to prolong it. I think that's an interesting instinct. And I hope that he will be a figure that sees the relationship between economic reform and political reform in China.
Q: Did President Clinton directly complain to President Jiang about the recent detention of U.S. dissidents, and did President Jiang indicate that this would cease while President Clinton was in this country for his visit?
MR. BERGER: President Clinton specifically raised it. I'm not -- I don't believe President Jiang specifically responded to it, although others have said that the three individuals, in particular, have been released. Obviously, we don't -- we're not able to verify that independently, although I think there has been some confirmation of that in a few of the cases.
Q: There were reports that people in other parts of the country were picked up, too. It isn't just those three.
MR. BERGER: Well, the President raised it, and not just -- the President raised it in the larger sense of how counterproductive it is for these things to -- and how much of a mistake it is for these patterns to be repeated in connection with official visitors, and urged that it be stopped.
Q: Something on the economy. I just wanted to ask something about the intervention. We've seen that the yen has weakened again, and independent of the words that have been exchanged today, does the U.S. plan or will consider the possibility of a new intervention in the market should the yen weaken further? And was this discussed directly with the Chinese, whether they can participate in that?
MR. SPERLING: Well, I think that what our view is, what the President has communicated is that the main thing that will determine the strength of the yen in the coming weeks and month is going to be the actions Japan takes itself, particularly in the banking and financial restruction area, to restore confidence. It was within the context of serious statements by both Prime Minister Hashimoto and Finance Minister Matsunaga on serious statements foreshadowing significant action that the intervention was taken. So I think that the real test will be -- the real test in the view that currency follows in the long-term fundamentals will be the actions that Japan takes. As Secretary Rubin has said and repeated, currency intervention is a tool that obviously is available and will be used by the Secretary of Treasury when he feels its appropriate, and will not be used when he doesn't feel it's appropriate. The terms of the discussion, there certainly was discussion of currency issues in more depth in the meeting with Secretary Rubin and Zhu Rongji yesterday. It came up a little, the overall issue did, in the meeting with the President today. I don't recall that it did in the meeting with President Jiang Zemin.
Q: So what did they actually talk about regarding Japan? Did they both just kind of -- that Japan isn't taking much action, but will support Japan if they do, or did the Chinese side say, we'd appreciate it if the U.S. put a little bit more pressure on Japan to stimulate its economy and so on? What did they actually talk about?
MR. SPERLING: Well, I don't want to do too much, as Sandy suggested, debriefing on their comments. But I think what was significant is that they were not suggesting that their actions -- that China's actions on devaluation were dependent on Japan or the yen. What they were suggesting was that they felt that regardless of the circumstances it would be nonadvantageous for the region and for China in the long-term to devalue and to risk another wave of competitive devaluations. So, again, they were very reassuring on their pledge not to devalue and they were not hedging that commitment that was given both to the President and to Secretary Rubin on actions by the Japanese government or the movement of the yen.
Q: Can you tell us more about the conversation of yesterday between Secretary Rubin and Zhu?
MR. SPERLING: It was a very in depth conversation. I think it must have lasted an hour and 20 minutes. I think Secretary Rubin did give a readout to some of the reporters who were with him yesterday. There was a lot of conversation simply about what China itself was doing about what the restructuring they were doing, their growth targets. Secretary Rubin praised in the meeting the fact that to the extent they were trying to stimulate the economy, they were not focusing on commercial investments, which they suggested would lead to the kind of redundancy that they were trying to avoid, but rather on infrastructure investments; that they had been growing at 10 percent, 15 percent over this first half of the year in infrastructure investments from highways, railroads, power plant commitments. So it was a very in-depth discussion of what they were doing. Certainly, Japan and currency issues came up. I don't feel I should go into too much more in what -- in their conversation.
Q: Sandy, do you have a take on why the Chinese reversed course on the question of televising the remarks after earlier signaling not a lot of flexibility on that question? And, since is the last question, more broadly, can you speculate on what you think this improved relationship between the two leaders is going to mean over the next six months or year in terms of policy advances or other summits, what have you?
MR. BERGER: I knew you'd ask that question and I've been waiting to say, I told you yesterday, not to make a judgment based on the first day.
Q: I took your advice, Sandy. (Laughter.)
MR. BERGER: Good. I think it's a very interesting decision that they made to televise the press conference. And I'm not -- I think it's a very encouraging decision because in many ways, one had to believe that, given the fact that the arrival ceremony was in front of the Great Hall of the People, adjacent to Tiananmen Square, that the President might address it. There certainly had been a good deal of speculation in the press about that. And so I think, notwithstanding that, they made a judgment -- I mean, we have been encouraging them to give as much access to the President, and in every contact we've had the Chinese -- when Madeleine was out here, when I was out here, Jim's contacts in the last few days, we have said, we want the President -- it's very important for the President to be able to speak to the Chinese people. And I think they realized it was important to us, and I think they want this summit to be successful not just for them, but I think for the relationship. In terms of where the relationship is going, I hope that this puts on a solid and higher level of cooperation. I hope that those who are critical of the relationship at home will see that through engagement you can get a lot of serious things done and promote America's values and maybe even advance the process of change in China all at the same time; that these are not multiple choice, you've got to pick one or the other. I think today proved that premise to be correct. And I think there is a willingness on the part of the President and I think there is a willingness on the part of President Jiang to keep building as we have. We have built on each of these summits -- the October summit, this summit -- substantial achievements in a widening area of cooperation while talking about our differences in increasingly candid and open and honest terms. That can only be good. And I hope that that will continue and I hope that those who saw this back home will realize that this is an important relationship, there is an enormous amount at stake, that you can aggressively pursue your interests and aggressively pursue your values at the same time.
THE PRESS: Thank you.
END 5:10 P.M. (L) -0- /U.S. Newswire 202-347-2770/ 06/29 18:00
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Clinton, Jiang debate human rights
06/27/98- Updated 03:09 PM ET
BEIJING - President Clinton and Chinese President Jiang Zemin engaged in a spirited, televised debate Saturday over human rights and the Tiananmen Square crackdown, and announced a string of agreements on arms control, energy and environmental matters. There were no announced breakthroughs on American human rights concerns, including Tibet, but both leaders accentuated the positive side of an evolving U.S.-China relationship even as they made clear they won't shy away from disagreements. Clinton praised Jiang's government for resisting pressure to devalue its currency, a move many fear would worsen Asia's financial crisis. But they could not agree on terms to allow China entry into the World Trade Organization, which sets global trade rules. President Clinton gestures during a news conference Saturday (AP).It was clear, however, that the most senstive issues were human rights and the continuing controversy over China's decision, nine years ago this month, to use force in putting down student-led democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. "It is important that whatever our disagreements over past action, China and the United States must go forward on the right side of history for the future sake of the world," Clinton said at a joint news conference with Jiang after two hours of talks at the Great Hall of the People. In an animated manner, Jiang said the fact that the U.S. and Chinese leaders can disagree publicly is a healthy sign for relations. "I think President Clinton is a strong defender of the American interest, and I am a strong defender of the Chinese interest," Jiang said. "But despite that, we still can have very friendly exchanges of views and discussion. And I think that is democracy." In warm toasts at a state dinner Saturday night, the presidents each used Chinese sayings to illustrate what they wanted from the relationship. "An ancient Chinese proverb tells us, 'Be not afraid of growing slowly, be only afraid of standing still,"' Clinton said. Jiang quoted the Chinese sage, Mencius, who counseled, "A good citizen of the world will befriend the other citizens of the world." The summit began with a short, solemn welcoming ceremony outside the Great Hall of the People at the edge of Tiananmen Square. It was a spectacle Clinton's critics said he should have avoided in memory of hundreds of pro-democracy students and other demonstrators killed by the Chinese military on surrounding streets during the 1989 crackdown. Clinton reviewed Chinese troops and received a 21-gun salute, the cannon fire echoing across the vast square, site of pro- and anti-government demonstrations throughout Chinese history. It was here that Mao Tse-tung celebrated the victory of his communist government in 1949. At the joint news conference broadcast live across China, including into Tibet, Clinton directly addressed the Tiananmen crackdown. "For all of our agreements, we still disagree about the meaning of what happened then," Clinton said. "I believe and the American people believe that the use of force and the tragic loss of life was wrong. I believe and the American people believe that freedom of speech, association and religion are, as recognized by U.N. charter, the right of people everywhere and should be protected by their governments." Jiang, countering with the long-standing Chinese reponse, said the crackdown was necessary to maintain order and ensure a smooth transition from a still-developing nation to a modern-day economic force. "Had the Chinese government not taken the resolute measures, then we could not have enjoyed the stability that we are enjoying today," he told Clinton during the freewheeling 70-minute exchange reminiscent of their October summit in Washington where Clinton said China was "on the wrong side of history." Among their areas of agreement, Clinton and Jiang highlighted a decision by both countries to stop targeting their nuclear missiles at each other's cities. They also agreed to intensify cooperation on developing cleaner energy sources and on building a nationwide air-quality monitoring network to cut down on the greenhouse gas emissions believed to contribute to global warming. Jiang appeared relaxed, sometimes laughing and smiling. Clinton, who appeared tense when he first brought up Tiananmen, also seemed to relish the back and forth exchange. "I think this debate and discussion today has been a healthy thing and a good thing," he said. The Chinese president didn't appear upset when Clinton complained about the detaining of dissidents during his visit and called on China to release political prisoners, including those from 1989. "In China we have our laws," Jiang said bluntly. He told Clinton that although their countries have different social systems, ideologies, values and cultural traditions, "they should not become the obstacles in the way of the growth of China-U.S. relations." Clinton also had talks over lunch with Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji. Clinton aides said Zhu reassured Clinton of his government's firm resolve not to devalue the Chinese currency, and they agreed Zhu would pay an official visit to Washington. Aides to Clinton said they were pleased by the summit's results, especially China's decision to broadcast the post-summit news conference. Sandy Berger, Clinton's national security adviser, said it was the first time such a news event had been broadcast live in China. "This is a summit that produced substantial, concrete results," Berger said. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhu Bangzao said the broadcast "shows we have adopted an open attitude" in welcoming Clinton. "We would like people to understand the different views of the different sides," Zhu said. "Chinese society is more and more open. People have their own opinons and can make their own judgements." In his remarks, Jiang pointed to the agreement to stop targeting nuclear missile at one another's countries. "This demonstrates the United States and China are partners, not adversaries," Jiang said. Clinton agreed the detargeting pact was an important show of much improved U.S.-China ties for the future. "Our friendship may never be perfect," he said. "No friendship is. But I hope it will last forever." Clinton, perhaps addressing his critics in Congress and at home as much as Jiang, said his policy of engaging China on a wide range of issues is helping the United States as much as the communist country. "Clearly, a stable, open, prosperous China, shouldering its responsibilities for a safer world, is good for America," he said. Clinton also pressed Jiang to start a dialogue with the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibet. Jiang said Chinese control had enhanced conditions in Tibet and, as long as the Dalai Lama was willing to acknowledge that Tibet and the island of Taiwan are both part of China, then "the door to dialogue and negotiation is open." By The Associated Press Go to World news Go to News front page Copyright 1998 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Front page, News, Sports, Money, Life, Weather, Marketplace
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Transcript of Remarks by Clinton, Jiang at Great Hall
U.S. Newswire
27 Jun 1998 11:00
Transcript of Remarks by Presidents Clinton, Jiang at Great Hall
To: National and International desks
Contact: White House Press Office, 202-456-2100
WASHINGTON, June 27 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Following is a transcript of remarks by President Clinton and Chinese President Jiang Zemin today in a photo opportunity at the Great Hall in Beijing:
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT CLINTON AND PRESIDENT JIANG ZEMIN IN PHOTO OPPORTUNITY Great Hall of the People Beijing, People's Republic of China 9:23 A.M.
(L) PRESIDENT JIANG: First of all, I'd like to welcome you, Mr. President, on the state visit to China. And I'm looking forward to an in-depth exchange of views with you on a series of major issues. Last fall I paid a state visit to your country at your invitation, and we made an important decision -- that is China and the United States would work together to establish a 21st century-oriented constructive, strategic partnership. Today your visit is another major event in China-U.S. relations. The exchange of visits between the heads of state of China and the United States represents the common desire of our two peoples, and also marks a new stage of growth for the bilateral relations. Facts have demonstrated that improvement in growth of China-U.S. relations are the inevitable development of the history and are irresistible for any force on Earth. I'm prepared to work together with you, Mr. President, to make your visit a complete success.
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Thank you very much, Mr. President. As you know, this is my first trip to China, the first by an American President in nine years. It comes only eight months after your visit to the United States, which was very successful. I believe that these two visits demonstrate our commitment and our progress in building the constructive, strategic partnership we talked about last October. I know that I speak for the vast majority of the American people when I say that this effort to improve and strengthen our relationship is very welcome. I have been impressed by the progress we have made and by the open and honest relationship we have developed in discussing all matters, and for that I thank you very much. I very much hope this trip will not only help us to expand our areas of cooperation and move toward reconciling our differences, but also will help to increase the understanding of the American people about China and the Chinese people about America, because long after we are gone from the scene our people will have to carry on this partnership and this friendship.
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Transcript of Presidential Radio Address to the Nation
U.S. Newswire
27 Jun 1998 10:06
Transcript of Presidential Radio Address to the Nation
To: National and International desks
Contact: White House Press Office, 202-456-2100
WASHINGTON, June 27 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Following is a transcript of President Clinton's weekly radio address to the nation today:
RADIO ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT TO THE NATION
Beijing, People's Republic of China
THE PRESIDENT: Good morning. I'm speaking to you today from Beijing. In just two days, I've seen some of the rich history and remarkable changes that are taking place in China, home to nearly one-quarter of the world's population. China is the oldest civilization on Earth. In Xian, on Friday, I saw the old and the new China, from magnificent Terra Cotta Warriors sculpted by artisans 2000 years before America was founded, to the beginnings of democracy in a nearby village, where residents soon will hold elections. I've been touched by the warm reception given to me, my family, and the members of Congress traveling with us. Tens of thousands of Chinese families have lined the streets to greet us. For all these people, China is changing. I see cell phones, beepers, new office buildings. China is no longer the same country it was when President Nixon first came here 26 years ago. Never before have so many Chinese had the opportunity to start businesses, lift their families out of poverty, choose where to live, work, and travel, and enjoy the fruits of their labors. But there's also resistance to change -- the legacy of a history that has not always been kind to the Chinese people and has left a deeply-rooted fear of instability. Today in Beijing I am meeting with China's leaders to talk about the future of our two countries and a relationship between us that is essential to a peaceful, stable, and prosperous world in the next century. We talked about the United States and China's mutual interests -- promoting peace in Korea, where 40,000 U.S. soldiers still risk their lives to patrol the Cold War's last frontier; preventing a nuclear arms race between India and Pakistan; restoring economic stability in Asia; stopping the spread of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them; combatting international crime and drug trafficking; preserving the environment; and opening trade. We also spoke frankly about our differences, especially concerning human rights. Over the past year, we have seen some progress in this area, though still far from enough. Some of China's famous political prisoners have been released, but other still languish in prison. The government is loosening its control over many aspects of daily life, yet people still are not completely free to meet, to publish, to speak, to worship according to the dictates of their own hearts. Throughout this trip, I will raise human rights and try to explain how freedom has been at the heart of America's success and prosperity. I will also argue that in this global information age, when economic success is built on ideas, personal freedom is necessary to the innovation and creativity that are essential to the greatness of any modern nation. In dealing with China, we must stay true to a course that is both principled and pragmatic. We must continue to expand our areas of cooperation, even as we deal directly with our differences. China is important to our future, with the largest population on Earth, a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, an economy increasingly connected to our own. Without China, it will be difficult to face the challenges successfully that affect all of us. With China, we can build a safer, more prosperous future for our children, a world of unlimited possibility in the new century. Thanks for listening.
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Clinton itinerary for China trip The president's itinerary for his trip - all dates ET:
06/26/98- Updated 11:46 AM ET
Friday, June 26: Welcomed in state arrival ceremony by President Jiang Zemin at the Great Hall of the People, on the edge of Tiananmen Square, in Beijing; meets with Jiang and senior officials in the Great Hall of the People. Clinton and Jiang hold news conference.
Saturday, June 27: State banquet at Great Hall of the People; attends services at Chongwenmen Church.
Sunday, June 28: Visits Forbidden City and Great Wall of China; addresses students and community of Peking University.
Monday, June 29: Arrives in Shanghai, stays overnight. Meets with community leaders from Shanghai area.
Tuesday, June 30: Mayor of Shanghai hosts reception at Shanghai Museum; Clinton addresses U.S. business leaders; lunches with young entrepreneurs from Shanghai area.
Wednesday, July 1: Meets with new homeowners, builders and mortgage bankers. Flies to Guilin; discusses environment with Guilin residents.
Thursday, July 2: Tours the Guilin Peaks along Li River. Visits village of Yangshou. Flies to Hong Kong; addresses business and local leaders of Hong Kong; holds news conference.
Friday, July 3: Departs en route Andrews Air Force Base.
By The Associated Press
Copyright 1998 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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China increases surveillance of dissidents
06/26/98- Updated 11:43 AM ET
BEIJING - Chinese police detained a fugitive dissident Wednesday and tightened surveillance on other pro-democracy activists on the eve of President Clinton's arrival in China. Li Xiaolong, a dissident in southern Guangxi province who had been hiding from police for fear of arrest, was detained after he went home to see his two children, said his wife, Jiang Hangxia. Chai Ling stands before the well-known photo of a man blocking Chinese tanks during the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989 (AP file).''I'm extremely worried,'' she said in a telephone interview. ''I don't know where they are holding him.'' With Clinton due to arrive Thursday in the southeastern city of Xian - the first stop on his five-city tour - authorities stepped up their monitoring of dissidents across the country to prevent disruptions during the visit. At the same time, activists and human rights groups reminded the president they would be watching to see if his summit meeting with Chinese President Jiang Zemin will do anything to further their cause. Clinton is the first U.S. president to visit China since the military's crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. He has said that during his visit, he plans to criticize China's human rights record and lobby for greater freedoms. But he has no plans to meet dissidents for fear they will be harassed after he leaves. ''I'll be listening to the radio constantly,'' said Xu Wenli, a veteran Beijing-based activist. ''My biggest hope is that they will release some well-known and not well-known dissidents.'' Xu, who has appealed for a meeting with Clinton, said police stationed outside his home detained two friends who came to visit Tuesday. They were held for 8 1/2 hours and then released, he said. Xu also said his police guards insisted he ride in their car when he went out to buy groceries Tuesday, and had another car tail them. Dissident Lin Xinshu telephoned The Associated Press from his home in the southeastern city of Fuzhou to complain that police were watching him. Police also took up residence in a house opposite the Beijing home of veteran democracy activist Ren Wanding. ''They follow me whenever I go out to buy groceries,'' Ren said. ''They're protecting me,'' he added with a sarcastic laugh. Human rights activists also will be watching how Clinton and Jiang deal with the issue of Tibet during their summit. Some say Clinton should urge China to hold talks with the Himalayan region's exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama. China contends the Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet in 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese rule, must first recognize Chinese sovereignty over the region it has occupied since 1950.
By The Associated Press
Copyright 1998 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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Chinese police detain Xi'an dissidents
06/26/98- Updated 11:43 AM ET
BEIJING - With police surveillance of democracy activists remaining tight, a human rights group said Thursday police were detaining two dissidents at the first stop of President Clinton's China itinerary. Yan Jun, a dissident in Xi'an who took part in a letter signed by 70 people asking Clinton to meet dissidents, was taken away from his home Wednesday afternoon, the Information Center of Human Rights and Democratic Movement in China said. Yan's whereabouts are unknown, shortly before Clinton's planned arrival in the north China city, the Hong Kong-based group added. Also detained Wednesday was Li Zhiying, a county official in Chengcheng, about 80 miles northeast of Xi'an, who was in frequent contact with other Xi'an dissidents and had previously signed petitions to the government, the group said. Letters and petitions are among the few recourses for Chinese who take issue with government policy. Even former Communist Party leader Zhao Ziyang, under house arrest since the June 3-4, 1989, crackdown on democracy protests centered on Tiananmen Square, has resorted to penning his grievances. The Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun reported Wednesday that Zhao wrote a letter to party leaders urging them to use the occasion of Clinton's visit to reconsider their condemnation of the protests as ''counter-revolutionary turmoil.'' ''The shadow of the June 4 Tiananmen incident should be cast off. We should face the new century under the light of democracy,'' the newspaper quoted Zhao's letter as saying. One Chinese source with contacts to Zhao's family said he believed the letter was written with Zhao's knowledge, if not by Zhao himself. Zhao is not allowed contact with the media, and former associates of his reached by phone said that while they had not seen any letter, its message was in keeping with Zhao's point of view. ''I certainly believe it represents Zhao's point of view,'' said former aide Bao Tong, who spent seven years in prison for his association with the liberal leader. ''The whole world can understand his point of view,'' Bao said. Zhao wrote at least one such letter before. In September 1997, human rights groups said he appealed to party leaders at the start of their congress to reassess the Tiananmen Square protests. Police informed the wife of another dissident taken from his home Wednesday that he was being held in the southern city of Guilin, one of five cities on Clinton's itinerary. Jiang Hangxia said police told her that her husband, Li Xiaolong, would be freed and allowed to return home in three days ''if there were no problems.'' Police refused to say why he had been detained, she said. Li had previously been on the run from police for fear of arrest for pro-democracy activities but slipped home Tuesday night to see his two children. Meanwhile, veteran Beijing activist Xu Wenli said police on a motorbike and in a car followed him Thursday when he took his wife out for a homecoming dinner following her two-month trip to the United States to visit their daughter. Four of Xu's friends who tried to visit him Tuesday also were detained, questioned and then released, he said.
By The Associated Press
Copyright 1998 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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Dissident arrests embarrass Clinton
06/26/98- Updated 11:49 AM ET
BEIJING - The detention of several dissidents at the outset of his China visit was awkward at best for President Clinton, who hoped to diffuse criticism of his summit here by making a face-to-face push for greater freedoms. For Chinese authorities, detention of dissidents are routine. They underscore China's resistance to Clinton's human rights agenda, as well as Beijing's determination to ensure that no protests mar the president's nine-day tour. According to human rights groups, four dissidents were detained Wednesday and Thursday in and near the city of Xi'an, the first stop on Clinton's China tour. As Clinton left for Beijing, Yang Hai and Zhang Jiankang were released, but the whereabouts of the others could not be confirmed. Clinton said he found reports of the detentions ''disturbing,'' and instructed U.S. Ambassador James Sasser to raise the issue with Chinese authorities. Sandy Berger, the president's national security adviser, later said it was an example of Chinese security forces ''doing what comes naturally for them,'' and added, ''People are not debris to be swept up for a visitor.'' Berger also said the White House did not believe the action against dissidents was intended to embarrass Clinton, but that Clinton intended to raise it in his talks Saturday. Three Xi'an dissidents went to the city police bureau at around midnight Thursday to hand over a letter protesting the arrests and surveillance of other democracy activists, said the Information Center of Human Rights and Democratic Movement in China. Police refused to let them through the door, so they left the letter at a reception desk instead, the Hong Kong-based group said. Human rights groups report arrests in China and other forms of harassment nearly every day, often in statements faxed to foreign reporters. Local officials and police rarely comment. Lu Siqing, who runs the Hong Kong-based monitoring group, said police were following regulations, many of them internal, accumulated over dozens of years of authoritarian rule that tell them how to act when important people visit or at politically sensitive times. ''Police are just acting according to their regulations. They have no concepts of human rights. They think 'I must act according to the rules,''' Lu said. ''It's their habit.'' Officials claim there are no dissidents in China. They allege, as Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan said earlier this week in a news conference, that most people described as dissidents have ''violated China's criminal law.'' Authoritative statistics are lacking on the number of dissidents or political prisoners imprisoned, sent to labor camps, or forced into exile, where many continue to work for political change back home. A 1996 report by Amnesty International, a London-based human rights group, recorded about 2,000 people either jailed or subject to occasional detentions for political or religious activities. Human Rights Watch, in a 1994 book, documented 1,700 Chinese imprisoned for political, ethnic or religious beliefs.
Many political activists who remain in China complain of harassment by police and state security agents, of having trouble running businesses or holding steady jobs. Despite the constant risk of arrest and other trouble, many still dare to publicize their beliefs. In the weeks leading up to Clinton's visit, dozens of dissidents signed appeals and petitions - sent to foreign news agencies - urging him to speak out for freedom and the release of political prisoners and to meet with dissidents during his stay. Tang, other Chinese officials and White House advisers have said Clinton has no such plans. Lin Xinshu, a veteran dissident based in southeastern Fujian province who often gets involved in public appeals for greater freedom, said dozens of police were standing vigil outside his door. ''I called their chief and told him not to put so many out there. One or two would do,'' Lin said. ''After all, I'm old and not very healthy, how could I cause any trouble?''
By The Associated Press
Copyright 1998 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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Clinton steps in on dissident tussle
26 June 1998 00:33
By Steve Holland
XIA HE, China, June 26 (Reuters) - U.S. President Bill Clinton personally raised a human rights issue with China on Friday, saying he was concerned about reports of dissident detentions.
If the reports were true, he said, it would signal "not China looking forward but looking backward."
On the second day of his nine-day state visit, Clinton said he had asked U.S. Ambassador James Sasser to raise the matter with Chinese authorities.
But asked by reporters when he arrived at this tourist village near Xi'an if the incident would undermine his policy of engagement with China, Clinton replied: "No.''
"I found the reports disturbing and I've asked Ambassador Sasser to raise it with the Chinese authorities,'' he said.
"If true, they represent not China at its best and not China looking forward but looking backward.''
Clinton said one of the reasons he traveled to China in the face of some bitter opposition from human rights lobbyists at home was to discuss "both privately and publicly'' issues of personal freedom.
"I think it's very important for me to do that, but I think it makes it all the more important that we continue to work with the Chinese and to engage them,'' he said.
A Hong Kong-based rights group said on Thursday police had detained three dissidents at Xi'an where Clinton began his 2,300-mile (3,700 km) China odyssey, the first visit by a president since the Tiananmen Square massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in 1989.
One of the dissidents, Xi'an-based Yang Hai, was held just hours before Clinton touched down in the ancient Chinese imperial capital, the Information Centre of Human Rights and Democratic Movement in China said.
Human rights was thrust to the fore immediately after Clinton was given a Tang-dynasty style welcome fit for an emperor beneath the ramparts of Xi'an's 600-year-old city walls.
In his first statement on Chinese soil, White House spokesman Mike McCurry said Clinton was concerned that dissidents may have been detained.
He said he had information that one Xi'an dissident was seized shortly before he was due to meet an American reporter traveling with the presidential party. A White House official said on Friday a tussle over human rights was the last thing the Americans wanted. Clinton seeks to focus on a broader "strategic partnership'' between the most powerful nation in the world and the most populous, especially with the rest of Asia embroiled in economic turmoil and a nuclear arms race between India and Pakistan.
The official said the White House believed the detentions may be the work of over-enthusiastic low level officials trying to ensure an incident-free visit rather than a general crackdown on dissent aimed at embarrassing the visitor.
"This is not what we'd like to see,'' the official said.
"We have been in touch with the Chinese government today to express our concerns.
"But by the same token, this is not a crackdown in our view. We think what's going on is that there is a desire by the Chinese that there not be incidents during the president's visit.'' "So we don't believe it is a crackdown with the intent of embarrassing the president. Their desire is that things go well,'' he added.
There was no immediate comment from the Chinese side. Separately, Clinton on Friday ruled out any change in the American position on Taiwan during his visit, which will include a summit in Beijing on Saturday with President Jiang Zemin. Taiwan has been looking anxiously at warming China-U.S. ties for any signs of an American sell-out. "Our position with regard to Taiwan is embodied in the three communiqués and in the Taiwan Relations Act and in the facts of our relationship over the years,'' Clinton said in response to a question about whether he would support Taiwan independence. "So I think it's obvious there will be no change in our position one way or the other on this trip.'' The United States is committed to a policy that recognizes Beijing as the sole legitimate government of China. But China is pressing for a new communiqué that would explicitly rule out U.S. support for Taiwan independence in any form and oppose Taiwan's membership of international bodies, including the United Nations.
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Clinton chides China for arrests
06/26/98- Updated 01:38 PM ET
XIAHE, China - In a dusty village square, President Clinton on Friday celebrated local elections as ''a window for all the world to see'' the progress democracy can bring to China. En route to Beijing for a state visit he rummaged among the excavated ruins of an ancient emperor.
On the second day of his China tour, Clinton delivered a message of democracy in a brick-walled dirt plaza, brushed and bannered for the occasion, with schoolchildren in blue and white waving bouquets and singing songs. It was a stark contrast to the reported detention of several Chinese dissidents, and Clinton was quick to express his unease.
From Xia He, Clinton went to the nearby excavations of the Terracotta Warriors, an army of more than 7,000 pottery soldiers and horses, created and buried 2,200 years ago to guard the tomb of Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi.
They were unearthed beginning in 1974, when Xia He villagers found one while digging a well, and now are displayed in their burial pits in giant archeological museums. ''I kept thinking how interesting it was that this emperor thought so much about his death,'' Clinton told reporters accompanying him.
He described the experience of wandering through the ruins of an emperor's resting place ''a good argument for a little humility.'' During his tour, Clinton stopped often and looked intently into the faces of some of the warriors.
At one point he made his Chinese guides laugh when he mugged for the official photographers, standing next to one of the warriors to show his nearly identical height.
The informality was a contrast to his coming state welcome in the vast, haunted splendor of Tiananmen Square in Beijing, where Chinese troops bloodily repressed democracy demonstrators nine years ago. Clinton arrived in Beijing this evening and was spending the night at a government guest house.
President Jiang Zemin greets him Saturday morning by the Great Hall of the People. The Tiananmen setting stirred protests in Congress in advance; the House adopted a resolution saying Clinton shouldn't go there. He defended it as protocol, and said he was more concerned about the substance of his promised effort to promote human rights in China.
But his nine-day visit was marred on that score as it began, by the denial of visas to three reporters for a U.S. government Asia broadcasting operation, and by reports that dissidents were being detained. There was no reliable account of the number, but a handful was enough to make trouble for Clinton.
A White House official said Ambassador James Sasser had expressed U.S. concern to senior Chinese officials. The White House official, who spoke on condition that he not be named, said the U.S. view is that the arrests did not represent a wholesale crackdown or an effort to embarrass Clinton, but a situation in which Beijing instructed local governments to avoid incidents during the president's visit and they responded by picking up known dissidents.
''I found the reports disturbing,'' Clinton said in Xia He. ''And, if true, they represent not China at its best and not China looking forward, but looking backward.'' He said one reason he came was to discuss issues of personal freedom, and dissident arrests emphasize the need for his message. ''... It makes it all the more important that we continue to work with the Chinese and to engage them,'' he said. Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger, told reporters later that China's response so far to U.S. concerns were disappointing, and that Clinton planned to raise the matter in his talks in Beijing on Saturday.
''People are not debris to be swept up for a visitor,'' Berger said. ''We have expressed our concern about this to the Chinese government. Their response so far has not been terribly satisfactory. They dispute the facts, or otherwise explain these incidents away.''
Berger called China an authoritarian nation whose security forces are more interested in control than in respecting individual rights.
''I think China's human rights record is terrible,'' he said, adding that he did not expect to see Clinton's discussions in Beijing on human rights, including repression in Tibet, bear fruit immediately.
He also talked down the possibility of reaching a U.S.-China agreement not to point nuclear missiles at each other's territory. Back home, public opinion appeared to be mostly with Clinton.
A new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed 60% favored his trip, 48% approving of his decision to be welcomed at Tiananmen Square. Half of those surveyed, however, also said Clinton should meet with dissidents, which officials say he will not do.
At Xia He, Clinton, in a dark green sport shirt and khaki slacks, and Mrs. Clinton sat in the scarce shade of a sweltering Friday morning, among six villagers, to talk about their changing lives and the economic progress of their community.
One of them asked Clinton why. ''For two reasons,'' Clinton said. ''First of all, I think it's important that people who are in positions like mine. . . . understand how people live at what we call the grassroots level, and understand how the policies we make affect the lives that people live. . .
''And secondly, because the American people are very interested in learning more about Chinese people as a result of my trip.''
Then, addressing villagers in the square, he praised the efforts and progress he said have brought the standard of living in Xia He and in much of China to the highest point in history, linking that to fledgling democracy in local elections.
''I know what it is like to run for office,'' he said. ''I have won elections and I have also lost two. I like winning better than losing. ''But whenever there is an election and the people decide, everyone wins,'' he said.
''Your achievements are a window for all the world to see what local democracy has brought to China and what a brighter future you are building,'' he said.
By The Associated Press
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China has many rules, rule breakers
06/26/98- Updated 11:47 AM ET
Editor's Note: James Cox, chief of USA TODAY's Asian bureau, has covered the region for four years.
BEIJING - Publishing is tightly controlled in China, so a visit to a typical Beijing newsstand can be a shock. The hot sellers include bodice-ripping novels with titles like A Passionate Monster in a Sea of Sexual Desire. Discreetly out of view are cheap porn magazines and political histories such as The Leftist Disaster, a catalog of Communist Party mistakes. Such publications are outlawed. The China that President Clinton visits this week will be orderly, stable, law-abiding, prudish - and largely a fantasy woven by China's Communist leaders. His trip may do little to soften the views of American skeptics that China is an authoritarian monolith that wields a vast security and propaganda apparatus to maintain a police state. But that portrait is mainly fantasy, too. What's remarkable about China today is not how much Clinton's hosts in Beijing control, it's how little. From top officials to the poorest peasants, the 1.2 billion people of the world's largest nation bend, break, circumvent and ignore the laws meant to hem them in. They routinely cheat on their taxes, pad expense accounts, skim from government coffers and generally display a rule-breaking gusto. "Today's China is a society without any ethics or values to balance self-interest, greed and venality - things that are all normal human forces," says Orville Schell, a China watcher at the University of California-Berkeley. "Anything is acceptable if it works." What clearly doesn't work is China's legal and regulatory framework, which most people here find petty, intrusive and impractical - but no particular obstacle. "There are many rules I don't intend to follow because many rules are against reason," says Beijing bank officer Yao Fang. China's cheating culture is pervasive. Determined young couples get around the minimum legal age for marriage (22 for men, 20 for women) by amending their hukou, the cradle-to-grave identity cards carried by all Chinese. Students who fail to score high enough on university entrance exams slip in under rules that admit lower-scoring minorities and residents of remote provinces. Applicants change I.D. cards to show that they come from places like far-off Xinjiang, or switch their ethnic identity to Mongolian or Tibetan. Workers at state-run companies make extra money by renting out their government-provided apartments. And singles missing nightly curfews at state-run dormitories simply climb through the ground-floor bathroom windows left open or deliberately broken for just that purpose. Travel to many Western countries is still politically sensitive, so travelers know to get the official OK for Thailand or Singapore, then switch to the USA or Europe. For centuries, Chinese have been practiced at defying the dictates of their rulers, shrugging off mandates from above with the old saying: "The heavens are high, and the emperor is far away." Or, in the language of post-1949 Communist rule, "Policies from the top, countermeasures from the bottom." To some China watchers, all this seemingly aberrant behavior is evidence that China's people have a healthy dynamism not found in their political system. "The violations of the state's rules are what has made the market flourish and made Chinese people so much richer," says Lynn White, a China specialist at Princeton University. The exception to the rule breaking, of course, is in the political arena. The government remains effective at smashing dissent. "The state has the fist to suppress, but no fingers to tackle anything else," says Yang Dali, a mainland-born China scholar at the University of Chicago. Signs of Beijing's impotence are everywhere. Despite a three-year crackdown, pirated software, CDs and videos flood the country, swamping available supplies of hard-to-find and more costly legitimate goods. The government itself is riven with defiance. Hidebound ministries have resisted Premier Zhu Rongji's plan fire half of all bureaucrats in a restructuring. They simply refuse to submit the lists of departments to be consolidated and cadres to be dismissed. One reason there is little regard for the law is that it is applied arbitrarily and abused. After seeking a divorce, Wang Xianfeng says, she found herself expelled from college and sent to prison on a trumped-up assault charge. The sole piece of evidence in her trial was a statement from her angry husband. Wang, who was beaten by her fellow prisoners, now lives in Denmark. "If you get into a dispute with a person in power, that person can have incredible sway over your life," says Sophia Woodman of Human Rights in China. Many Chinese appear to long for the chance to settle scores with the authorities. "Breaking the rules is a way for people to vent their grievances," businessman Shi Jin says. Outside politics, almost anything is fair game. Smokers gather for a puff in no-smoking areas. Individuals cheat their employers; branches of work units scheme against the larger enterprise; provincial leaders scoff at orders from the central government. The Clinton administration, eager to see Chinese leaders improve their human rights record, has made rule of law a centerpiece of its China policy. The two governments have initiated exchanges of lawyers, judges and scholars, in hopes of strengthening China's legal framework and encouraging a more just, consistent application of the law. But before ordinary people in China change their ways, the authorities will have to change theirs, Woodman says. "The fact that officials don't obey the law and disregard it whenever they please means nobody feels they have to abide by it."
By James Cox, USA TODAY
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China's pro-democracy movement lives
06/26/98- Updated 11:44 AM ET
WASHINGTON - Chinese tanks crushed the pro-democracy movement that brought thousands of students and workers to Tiananmen Square in 1989. But it thrives underground and overseas with hundreds of "exiles" in the United States and elsewhere pressing for political change from the outside. Even as President Clinton departed for Beijing, Chinese police detained a dissident who had been on the run: Li Xiaolong left his hiding place to see his two children and was picked up by police. Here are the stories of four exiles: Wei Jingsheng Wei Jingsheng (AP file).Last November, Wei Jingsheng was spending his 18th year in prison, caged like the animals at the Beijing Zoo, where he once worked as an electrician. His Chinese jailers had erected a glass wall to keep him under 24-hour watch. Lights shone in his face, making sleep difficult. Age 47, Wei had lost teeth, had high blood pressure, heart and stomach ailments. He had been beaten, force-fed, held in solitary confinement for years at a time. But China's most famous dissident said he never lost faith. "If you are convinced what you're doing is correct, your heart is at ease and you can continue in the struggle," Wei says now. Since his medical parole last year, Wei has traveled the world, 13 countries so far, urging the United States and other nations to get tough with Beijing on human rights. He plans a fall trip to Japan and Taiwan. "Without the involvement of the international community, no one can guarantee that a country will simply become democratic," he said. Wei met with Clinton in December after his release, but he said Clinton wouldn't meet with him again to discuss his China trip. Wei thinks Clinton should not honor Chinese leaders such as President Jiang Zemin with a visit. "If America, as leader of Western democracy, is willing to cozy up to China, that will have an impact on other western democracies around the globe." Richard Long Richard Long's first memories are of hunger. Desperate for food, one day his mother, a poor farmer, gave him his first bit of meat in weeks. "She caught a mouse and she burned the mouse and gave it to me," he recalled. "That was so delicious to me. Can you imagine that?" More recent images haunt him from Tiananmen Square in 1989. There he is on the night of June 3, a 26-year-old teacher, taking a photograph of the "Goddess of Democracy," modeled after the Statue of Liberty. Within hours, Chinese military tanks would crush her and the movement. Long helped carry away bodies from surrounding streets. "We got a boy's body, maybe age 10," Long said. "We carried that body to a (military) leader's feet. We said, 'Look at this. Is this guy a criminal? You soldiers who shot this boy to death. You are the criminals."' Long was never jailed. Instead, the Chinese government let him go to graduate school in the United States in 1991 - another dissident exiled. He joined the Independent Federation of Chinese Students and Scholars, founded in 1989 to fight for human rights and democracy in China. Last September, Long, who uses an alias to hide from Chinese authorities, started two Internet magazines to spread news and commentary inside China, where an estimated 1 million people have access to the World Wide Web. "While Jiang was visiting this country, Bill Clinton told him he was on the wrong side of history" on human rights, Long said. "He should say this again on Tiananmen Square." Wang Bingzhang As a medical student, Wang Bingzhang learned how the communist system really worked. "We turned away cancer patients, heart patients, people with severe problems" because they were peasants who couldn't pay, he said. "Since childhood we were educated that the Communist Party works for the people. However, the reality is the opposite. The reality is terrible." Wang, 49, began speaking out against the system at the start of the Cultural Revolution and was jailed in 1966 and 1967. From Canada in 1979, he became a leading exiled dissident. In the early 1980s, he moved to New York and started a magazine, China Spring, that circulated to students and activists around the Asian nation, and he launched the Chinese Alliance for Democracy. He made headlines this year when he sneaked into China to organize an opposition Chinese Democracy and Justice Party to press for free elections and civil liberties. After three weeks, he was caught and deported. The secretive political party - the first organized by dissidents - operates underground with 16 branches across China, Wang said. Wang said Clinton "should put pressure on the Beijing government to legalize opposition political parties in China. The people need freedom and justice. We cannot live in an unjust system forever." Lian Shengde Lian Shengde was a leader at Tiananmen, a 20-year-old who never imagined Chinese leaders would give the order to shoot to kill. "We were so naive," said Lian. An elected captain of student demonstrators, he negotiated with the government for withdrawal from the square, but gave up in frustration. Lian remembers random shootings as tanks streamed toward Tiananmen. "We saw an old man on the streets killed. He was an old man just taking a walk," he said. During two years in jail, Lian endured beatings and a diet of rice and sour cabbage soup, dropping from 120 pounds to 85 or 90, he said. Tired of being monitored by Chinese police, Lian left in 1994 to study at Harvard University. He's now at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. On June 4, Lian helped form the "Free China Forum," a coalition of U.S.-based dissident groups to fight for political reform together. "Clinton should go to China and ask for the liberty of all political prisoners," said Lian. "If one man is not free, no man is free."
By The Associated Press
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Village gets ready for its close-up
06/26/98- Updated 11:45 AM ET
XIA HE, China - This tree-lined hamlet where President Clinton gets his first taste of Chinese village life Friday has had brushes with fame before. In 1984, locals glimpsed President Reagan when he came to marvel at archaeological wonders unearthed at the village outskirts. Earlier, one of Xia He's abundant pomegranate bushes was uprooted and placed in Mao Tse-tung's mausoleum after he died in 1976. But officials in China leave nothing to chance when it comes to visiting VIPs. They used to clear out whole villages and truck in model ''peasants'' to greet Mao and Deng Xiaoping when the two old revolutionaries came to the countryside on inspection tours. And so it goes in Xia He (pronounced shyah-huh). On Wednesday, the tiny cluster of 400 modest brick homes and shops teemed with police, soldiers, township officials, provincial muckety-mucks and Communist Party operatives. The outsiders swarmed over the village, supervising its beautification, coaching residents on their preparations and ejecting foreigners who dropped in for a peek at what will greet the U.S. president. Clinton's visit to Xia He is meant to draw attention to China's rising rural living standards and decade-old experiment with village-level elections. But on Wednesday, every topic presented a minefield of political sensitivity. How do you feel about the visit by the leader of the free world? ''Happy,'' said a uniformed schoolboy before he was shushed by a classmate. A woman rushed to close her courtyard door to the prying eyes of two visiting journalists. A township party official brusquely insisted that Xia He wasn't ready to be seen by outsiders. A municipal secretary hurried by to say that even idle villagers were too busy to talk. Finally, plainclothes police tracked down and rousted the intruders. ''You must leave here. Now we have warned you,'' said a policeman named Mr. Zhou. Xia He residents got the message. They stood back as soldiers shoveled out the shallow cement trenches that serve as the village sewers. They watched from a distance as workers put new windows in the two-story school and fixed a long-dry ornamental rock fountain in its dirt forecourt. They steered clear of the police who cruised the thin, shaded strip of concrete that is Xia He's only paved street. Few expect trip to improve rights A USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup poll found that most Americans believe President Clinton's trip to China won't improve that country's treatment of its citizens. 70% of the 1,016 adults polled believe the visit won't significantly improve treatment of citizens; 20% say it will; 10% had no opinion. 51% of those surveyed believe that while Clinton is in China, he should not publicly criticize its human rights policies; 43% say he should; 2% say they weren't familiar with the subject; and 4% had no opinion. The poll was conducted June 22-23; the margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points. - Shannon Tangonan In an effort to guard against a slip of the tongue, Xia He appears to have been salted with tou er (bosses) from outside. A man named Shang Ye identified himself Wednesday as deputy principal of the primary school, but he couldn't say how old the school was and he gave a far different student count than others did. ''I don't understand these things,'' Shang explained hastily, ''I'm only acting on orders from above.'' Dirt yards that stood empty Tuesday were occupied Wednesday by vendors selling brightly colored embroidered handicrafts. Residents of a nearby town said Clinton's visit prompted the government to install telephones in some Xia He homes for the first time. Indeed, a new phone cable ran through the trees. China Telecom trucks puttered about, and a shop displayed a sparkling new telephone. Those in Xia He denied that they had been given a new link to the outside world. ''It's quite natural for households to have phones. China is modernizing very fast,'' high school student Zhang Tao said. Xia He is comparatively well-off next to many Chinese villages. It owes much of its prosperity to its proximity to China's famed Terra Cotta Warriors. The hamlet abuts a site where, in 1974, farmers digging a well broke through an underground vault filled with 6,000 life-size clay soldiers in full battle dress. The kiln-fired army was buried to protect its dead emperor, the feared Qin Shihuang, who ruled from 221 to 209 B.C. Today, the site, to be toured Friday by Clinton, is an ongoing archaeological dig and one of China's most popular tourist attractions. Xia He's village businesses have capitalized on their connection to the massive tomb. The village owns a gas station and small factories that turn out miniature warrior replicas, vinegar and bricks. ''Our living standards are much higher than before the economic reforms. We've had lots of improvements in the way we eat, what we wear and our houses,'' said Yang Xueyuan, a pensioner playing mah-jongg with his friends. And the village election? Well, that was good too, Yang said. The village chief elected by Xia He residents saw to it that they got a new irrigation system for their fields.
By James Cox, USA TODAY
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Clinton hails democracy in Chinese village
06/26/98 02:35 AM ET
By Steve Holland
XIA HE, China, June 26 (Reuters) -
School children waved bouquets of flowers and a slightly off-key youth band greeted U.S. President Bill Clinton on Friday at a Chinese village symbolic of the country's move toward democracy.
"I have come to China to strengthen the ties between our two nations,'' Clinton declared on the first full day of his nine-day visit to the Asian power.
"Your achievements are a window for all the world to see what local democracy has brought to China,'' Clinton told the more than 1,000 people gathered in a dusty school yard.
As Clinton stood on a school a balcony above them, children waved the flowers they were clutching as members of the student band blared an off-key greeting to their visitor.
Clinton, who a short time before complained to journalists that he was troubled by reports that dissidents were being rounded up, praised village reforms that have allowed its residents to elect local leaders and school officials.
"I know what it's like to run for office,'' Clinton declared.
"I have won elections and I have also lost two ... but whenever there is an election and the people decide, everyone wins.''
Clinton, who was elected to his second term as president in 1996, was defeated when he ran for U.S. Congress in the 1970s.
He also was defeated in his bid for a second term as governor of Arkansas, returning to the statehouse two years later.
Clinton visited the village to underscore a quiet revolution in villages across China.
In addition to electing their own officials, many villagers turning to small business to either add to their farm incomes or replace it entirely.
To illustrate that point, Clinton and his wife Hillary sat down with a group of six people to hear how their lives had changed in recent years. All of them told how their lives were much better -- none of them mentioned any problems.
Yang Dongyi, an ex-farmer who now runs a small company, said that in China ``we have a better policy in our country now.''
"In the past, no matter what your abilities were, you were told what you were supposed to do. But after the reform, you can have space to show your own talent and work very hard.''
"The reason now why production is so good is that people can do what they're good at,'' he told the Clintons.
Primary school teacher Liu Lan told the president and his wife that she feels ``the whole society now respects the teacher a whole lot more.''
Noting that 70 percent of teachers are women, she said ``females might be more suited for this job.''
Xi'an restaurateur Sie Liming said that in the last few years he had been able to expand his Cantonese eatery from 80 seats to 500.
He invited Clinton to come back after he leaves the White House and said one of his big goals was to "make more American dollars.''
Clinton chuckled and replied, "This is very nice. You know, most people in my position wonder if you will want us to eat with them after we're not in office any more.''
Clinton, who was to fly to Beijing Friday night, first planned to spend several hours touring the fabled terracotta warriors -- thousands of life-sized clay soldiers ordered sculpted by China's first emperor, Qin Shihuang. Arrayed in precise battle formations, the figures, meant to guard the eastern approach to the Qin Emperor's tomb, now draw hundreds of thousands of visitors.
On Saturday, Clinton holds a summit with President Jiang Zemin to follow up on talks they held last October in Washington.
Officials of both nations expect no dramatic agreements during the trip.
Clinton is only the fifth sitting U.S. president to visit China, and the first since Chinese leaders ordered tanks and demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
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06/26/98- Updated 10:44 PM ET
BEIJING -With a ceremony heavy in symbolism, President Clinton and Chinese President Jiang Zemin opened summit talks Saturday (Friday night EDT) after a solemn review of troops and a 21-gun salute at Tiananmen Square, the sprawling plaza haunted with memories of China's bloody crackdown against freedom nine years ago. "I know I speak for the vast majority of Americans when I say that this effort to improve and strengthen our relationship is very welcome," Clinton told Jiang. Clinton thanked the Chinese leader for "the open and honest relationship that we have." He said he hoped his trip would help American and Chinese people understand each other better because "long after we are gone from the scene, our people will have to carry on this partnership and friendship." Jiang said closer U.S.-China relations "are an inevitable development of history and are irresistible by any force on Earth." The two leaders met in the Maoist-era Great Hall of the People after standing at the edge of Tiananmen Square in an 11-minute welcoming ceremony. Dozens of human rights groups, as well as a House-passed resolution, urged Clinton not to step foot in Tiananmen because of the symbolism. As the human rights drama played out, U.S. and Chinese negotiators reached an agreement to no longer aim long-range nuclear missiles at one another. It was a largely symbolic step, since missiles could be retargeted in a matter of minutes. China also agreed to move toward imposing stiffer export controls on missile technology to third-world nations with nuclear ambitions, according to an administration official. The official said the Chinese would adhere to guidelines of the Missile Technology Control Regime and consider formally adopting the arms-control measure. Jiang called this "another major event in China-U.S. relations" and said his exchange of visits with Clinton would open "a new stage of growth." The Chinese leader visited Washington last October. Clinton's wife, Hillary, stood with Jiang's spouse during the controversial arrival ceremony. To Americans, the square is a reminder of the military's 1989 killings of hundreds - if not thousands - of democracy advocates. But to China, it is the country's spiritual and political heart, where Mao Tse-tung declared victory in the communist revolution of October 1949. Clinton's arrival in the capital marks the final step in a gradual process of ending America's post-Tiananmen diplomatic isolation of China. It is a personal victory for Jiang, who made it a priority to arrest the downward spiral in U.S.-Chinese relations and bolstered his diplomatic stature in the process. But the occasion was marred by China's arrest of several dissidents, acts that clearly upset the White House. "The Chinese security apparatus (is) doing what comes naturally to them," said National Security Adviser Sandy Berger. "People are not debris to be swept up for a visitor and we have expressed our concern about this to the Chinese government." "Their response so far has not been terribly satisfactory," Berger said. "They dispute the facts." He said Clinton would tell Chinese leaders that "this is thoroughly unacceptable." While China has made dramatic progress in some areas, Berger said, "China's human rights record is terrible. I think China is an authoritarian nation." But he softened his criticism by saying China was trying to make the summit a success and that the action against dissidents was not as harsh as it has been in the past. White House officials made clear that Clinton was not prepared to punish China or pull back from expanding cooperation. "I have come to China to strengthen the ties between our two nations," the president said Friday in the village of Xiahe after criticizing the arrests. Critics in the United States kept after Clinton in the hours before the welcoming ceremony. At a hearing of a House International Affairs panel, Rep. Christopher Smith, R-N.J., asserted that Clinton's "gentle" criticism was not enough. He said, "The tortures are not gentle." In addition to the military agreements, the United States also hoped for progress on energy, pollution control, science and technology issues and a process for improving China's legal and judicial system. On human rights, Berger said it was unlikely any change would be apparent immediately but he noted that some prominent dissidents were released after Jiang's visit to Washington last October. Trade is a contentious issue between the two countries, and Berger said it would be discussed but "I don't expect anything concrete to come out of that." Clinton himself made clear that the United States would not alter its policy toward Taiwan. The United States supports a "a one China" policy that does not recognize Taiwan's claims of independence and holds that the future relationship is a matter to be resolved peacefully between the two parties. Saturday was to be the busiest day of Clinton's nine-day visit. The talks with Jiang were expected to focus on Asia's economic crisis and the nuclear arms race between India and Pakistan as well as U.S.-Chinese differences over human rights, trade and arms control. The two leaders also will meet over dinner Sunday. The president will confer separately with Prime Minister Zhu Rongji, the economic troubleshooter known for his combativeness in fighting conservative opposition to reform of China's ailing state enterprises. White House officials said they still did not know if the government would consent to live television broadcasts across China of Clinton's remarks Sunday or his address Monday to students at Beijing University. "We'd like the most exposure for the president that we can get," Berger said.
By The Associated Press
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Tiananmen Square visit a major step
06/26/98- Updated 12:16 PM ET
BEIJING - President Clinton's nine-day journey to China is a dizzying whirl through 5,000 years of antiquity. Into imperial tombs, up to the parapets of the Great Wall, past the architecture of decadent 1920s Shanghai, through the gorges near Guilin depicted in centuries of art. Yet Clinton's most closely watched step will be the one he takes Saturday into Tiananmen Square, the hallowed ground where many of China's modern political movements were born - and died. The stone plaza in the middle of Beijing is where the ghosts of China's Communist revolutionaries and democratic dissidents still struggle for the last word in history. By agreeing to go there for his official welcome, Clinton has stepped right into the battle. "I don't know if he understands that the red carpet is a symbol for our dead sons," says Ding Zilin, a Beijing philosophy professor whose 17-year-old boy was killed near the square when Chinese troops crushed pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989. "Clinton's decision is wrong." Chinese leaders greet most visiting heads of state, as they will Clinton, at the Great Hall of the People on the west side of Tiananmen. Clinton plans no defiant gesture at the square. He said he would be "speaking honestly" to the Chinese leaders about human rights during his visit. The choice, the president said, was between "making a symbolic point or making a real difference." Clinton's "constructive engagement" policy with China has made a difference, aides say. Rather than place such questions at the forefront, the administration has put human rights on more equal footing with other issues - trade, Taiwan and arms proliferation, to name a few. As a result, China has shown a "somewhat more tolerant response to dissent" in recent months, State Department spokesman James Rubin says. But the Chinese leaders have sent decidedly mixed signals: Increasing surveillance of dissidents and warning them not to go out or speak with foreign journalists during Clinton's visit, while allowing a handful of intellectuals and former officials to call for more political freedom. A human rights group based in Hong Kong said two dissidents living near Xian were detained on the eve of Clinton's visit. "To those who talk about a 'Beijing spring,' one can say only that the snow has thawed, but the winter is still here. How can you talk of a spring if there is no freedom of expression?" says Zhou Guoqiang, a lawyer released in January after three years in a labor camp. Announcing plans to sign a U.N. human rights covenant this fall, but giving no clues how they will interpret the document. Blocking a U.N. Security Council briefing earlier this month on human rights abuses in Rwanda. China's leaders fear it might set a precedent for a look at their conduct in Tibet. Harassing Chinese emigrants back home on visits from the USA. Chinese police have detained, interrogated and threatened dozens of them. Briefly restoring the "political rights" of Bao Tong, a senior Communist official imprisoned after the Tiananmen massacre. Two days after he was interviewed by USA TODAY this month, Bao was told he could no longer speak with foreign reporters. The summit is not expected to produce any breakthroughs on human rights. The administration appears to have failed to get the Chinese government to agree to meet with the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, or to reopen the cases of hundreds of political prisoners convicted of breaking laws no longer on the books. China has acknowledged holding more than 2,000 prisoners for political crimes, but Western human rights experts say the true number is much higher. The State Department's annual report on China lists an array of ongoing abuses: torture of prisoners; arbitrary arrests and forced confessions; lack of fair trials; summary executions; violations of workers' rights; and restrictions on freedoms of speech, association, assembly, religion and privacy. "Average citizens go about their daily lives with more personal freedom than ever," the report concluded. "However, those Chinese who seek to express openly dissenting political and religious views still live in an environment filled with repression." Clinton's critics say his presence in Tiananmen Square legitimizes a dictatorship and allows the regime to act as if the events of 1989 have been put to rest. The president's aides say he will not let his hosts use his trip to wash away the memories of June 4, 1989, when hundreds - perhaps thousands - of unarmed workers, students and bystanders were killed by troops called in to put an end to six weeks of peaceful protests. Clinton faced off against President Jiang Zemin last fall, saying the Chinese government was "on the wrong side of history" with its version of the Tiananmen incident as a "counterrevolutionary riot" that threatened to tip the country into chaos. He is under pressure to make an even stronger statement this time. Unless the trip is seen as producing concessions by China on human rights, Clinton's engagement policy risks looking like a failure, says Orville Schell, a China watcher at the University of California at Berkeley. "There's enough of the old system at work - locking up dissidents, hounding Christians, executing people without due process - that it's hard to sell Americans on the idea something new is going on," Schell says. The people of Beijing are split. "I don't see any reason for a fuss. June 4 is already behind us. And those June 4 people, their behavior has not been respectable since then," factory worker Xie Zhiguo says. Li Zhihui, a salesman, says U.S. pressure is needed if China is to democratize. "It is not proper for him to go to visit Tiananmen Square. It hurts the feelings of Chinese people." Clinton has no plans to meet with dissidents during his trip, despite a letter from 55 Chinese activists who asked him to see dissident Xu Wenli. "Otherwise," they wrote, "we cannot believe there will be any meaning for your China trip other than to help the Chinese government cast off the diplomatic shadow of June 4 and receive political benefits in return." Without a strong symbolic statement from Clinton, they said, the president's first footstep in Tiananmen Square will be "a great honor for you, but a very sad thing for us."
By James Cox and Antoaneta Bezlova, USA TODAY
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Taiwan to 'cry out' if hurt by Clinton visit
06/26/98- Updated 11:48 AM ET
TAIPEI, Taiwan - Taiwan will be watching President Clinton's every step in China for any sign that Washington is sacrificing Taiwanese interests to better its ties with Beijing. At the first sign of trouble, Taiwan promises to kick up a fuss. Meetings of senior U.S. and Chinese leaders always leave Taiwan feeling nervous, and somewhat ambivalent. This time, the Foreign Ministry has set up a 24-hour response center to deal with public fears. Taiwanese officials express confidence Clinton won't give in to demands that he formally reiterate pledges not to support Taiwan's sovereignty - a move that could make it easier for China to control the fate of the island. And they say there are no indications Clinton will agree to stop selling Taiwan advanced weapons. Washington cut diplomatic relations in 1979 with Taiwan, its Cold War ally, in order to recognize China. But unofficial ties remain close, and Washington is legally bound to ensure Taiwan can defend itself. Taiwanese officials do say better U.S.-Chinese ties make Beijing more reasonable. That could speed up resumption of negotiations suspended by Beijing in 1995 on Taiwanese moves to assert itself internationally. Ding Mou-shih, a top presidential aide, said that Clinton's visit, which begins this week, is intended to increase regional stability and bring China more closely into international society. ''The United States has said openly on more than one occasion that the visit will not affect our relations or harm our interests,'' Ding said. Taipei will loudly protest any backtracking. ''We will cry out,'' Foreign Minister Jason Hu said this week. ''We will let you know if we are feeling insecure.'' Taiwanese officials also are reminding Washington of the island's importance. Taiwan imports nearly twice as much from the United States as mainland China, and its economy supports four times as many American jobs, the Foreign Ministry says. Officials argue that after decades of authoritarian rule, the island is a model young democracy and capitalist economy - a flattering contrast with the mainland. ''Whether you consider democracy, freedom, human rights, or economic markets, Taiwan is America's true friend,'' Vice Foreign Minister David Lee said. Taiwan is most concerned about China's effort to extract a pledge from Clinton not to support Taiwan's independence or entry into the United Nations. China considers Taiwan a breakaway province with no right to international recognition. U.S. officials have made such pledges at least three times, but a statement from Clinton would give them more weight. Taiwan fears a written pledge from Clinton would permit Beijing to dictate what defines Taiwan independence. Trying to assuage Taiwan's fears, U.S. officials have pointed out that the last U.S-Chinese summit in Washington inflicted no harm to the island's interests.
By The Associated Press
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FOCUS-Clinton says no change in Taiwan policy (Adds background on Taiwan relations)
12:48 AM ET 06/26/98
XIA HE, China, June 26 (Reuters) -
President Bill Clinton on Friday ruled out any change to the U.S. position on Taiwan during his state visit to China.
"Our position with regard to Taiwan is embodied in the three communiqués and in the Taiwan Relations Act and in the facts of our relationship over the years,'' Clinton told reporters.
"So I think it's obvious there will be no change in our position one way or the other on this trip.''
Taiwan residents fear the United States could betray the interests of the island as its relations with China improve, and they were looking on nervously at Clinton's visit for any hint of a change.
Clinton had been asked by reporters at the start of the second day of his nine-day visit whether he would support any kind of independence for Taiwan, the Nationalist-ruled island that Beijing regards as a rebel province.
Under the communiqués and the Taiwan Relations Act, the United States is committed to a policy that recognizes Beijing as the sole legitimate government of China. China has repeatedly threatened to invade Taiwan if the island declared independence and insists the two sides must eventually be reunified.
Taipei denies any dreams of independence and says it espouses eventual reunion but only if the Communists give up their absolute grip on power and embrace a mutually acceptable democracy.
The Communists swept to power in China in 1949 after winning the Chinese civil war and driving the defeated Nationalists into exile on the island.
During Clinton's visit, Chinese and U.S. officials will discuss issues ranging from nuclear non-proliferation to human rights and trade.
But no other issue has more potential to throw a wrench in newly restored China-U.S. ties than the fate of Taiwan.
Days before Clinton's arrival, China issued a reminder that the potentially explosive issue of Taiwan remained its top priority and that Beijing expected Clinton to acknowledge its concerns.
A Chinese government spokesman made clear on Tuesday that Beijing was looking for assurances from Clinton that Washington would not back independence for Taiwan or the island's bid to rejoin the United Nations.
In Taipei, advocates of Taiwan independence on Thursday launched a three-day sit-in protest outside unofficial diplomatic outpost opposing the ``sellling out'' of Taiwan.
Taipei says it has been given repeated assurances from Washington that Clinton would not trade Taiwan's interests for concessions from China on other issues.
Both China and the United States have ruled out a new declaration on Taiwan following Clinton's summit with Chinese President Jiang Zemin.
Beijing had been pressing for a ``fourth communiqué'' that would tighten the screws on Taiwan by committing the United States in writing to oppose Taiwan independence and its membership of world bodies.
Clinton is the first U.S. president to set foot on Chinese soil since student-led demonstrations for democracy were brutally crushed by the army around Beijing's Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989.
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China cancels Radio Free Asia visas
06/26/98- Updated 11:48 AM ET
WASHINGTON - President Clinton, on the eve of a trip to China, criticized the Chinese government for withdrawing the visas of three Radio Free Asia journalists who had planned to cover his trip. "It's a highly objectionable decision," Clinton said as he prepared to leave Wednesday for the first visit to China by a U.S. president since students were killed in Tiananmen Square in 1989. "We will protest it. We hope they'll reconsider it." Senate Democrats, meanwhile, successfully blocked action on legislation to toughen U.S. policy toward China. Majority Leader Trent Lott delayed debate on proposals to: Deny visas to Chinese officials linked to religious persecution or forced-abortion. Ban further U.S.-backed loans to China. Transfer authority for approving satellite sales to China from the Commerce Department to the State Department. "I'm not going to allow one single vote on China this week," Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., said as Democrats froze action on the bill. "We're not going to embarrass this president." Clinton views his trip as a way to build support for his policy of engagement with China. The dispute over the journalists' visas is a reminder that the relationship remains difficult. In a letter to Clinton, House Speaker Newt Gingrich called China's action "censorship - pure and simple." China has objected to Radio Free Asia broadcasts since the U.S.-funded news service began reaching the Chinese by short-wave radio in 1996. Clinton arrives Thursday evening (Thursday morning ET) in Xian, China's ancient capital. He'll visit Beijing, Shanghai, Guilin and Hong Kong before returning July 4.
By Mimi Hall and Jessica Lee, USA TODAY
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Clinton can only offer China prestige
06/26/98- Updated 11:47 AM ET
XIAN, China - Clinton administration officials have been busy for weeks trying to slay any high expectations about the president's trip to China, sending word that it would yield no major breakthroughs on human rights, Taiwan or trade. By China's calculation, though, the summit is already a success simply because it is taking place. President Clinton's journey to China is brimming with symbolism for the Chinese. It is an affirmation of China's emerging importance by the world's only superpower, a display of respect for its ancient civilization and recent economic progress, and, most important, a chance to begin a new era with relations not defined by the Chinese government's bloody crackdown on dissidents demonstrating in Tiananmen Square in 1989. "Our relationship has been defined by the Tiananmen period," says Chu Shulong, senior fellow at Beijing's China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, a government think tank. "That will end with President Clinton coming here for a state visit. We can say goodbye to the past and welcome the future." China's critics in the USA are not likely to put memories of Tiananmen to rest. But it's no accident that Clinton is spending nine days in China, the same number that Chinese President Jiang Zemin spent in the USA last fall. Nor is it chance that Clinton will not stop in Japan. China insisted on both conditions. Reciprocity - even on the number of days a state visit will last - is important to the Chinese, whose history is filled with real and perceived humiliation at the hands of foreign powers. "Every schoolbook and (Communist) Party document emphasizes these humiliations," says Yang Dali, an expert on Chinese politics at the University of Chicago. "That's why Clinton's visit is such a tremendous boost for China's leaders and for the nation's prestige, from China's point of view." What does China want in concrete terms? Just as the White House scaled back its expectations, Chinese policy-makers appear to recognize that political concerns probably will prevent Clinton from granting much. What China has pressed for: A declaration on Taiwan. China wants the United States to formally restate its continuing opposition to the independence of Taiwan, which broke away from the mainland in 1949. While the United States does not officially recognize Taiwan, it has some limited diplomatic ties with the island. China does not want Taiwan to gain membership in the United Nations or other international bodies. "We fully understand the context of U.S. domestic politics," Chu says. "We are not pursuing something new. We want the Americans to repeat and reconfirm that Taiwan is part of China. It would give us more confidence." The lifting of Tiananmen-era trade sanctions. The administration is considering removing some sanctions that restrict exports of sophisticated technology and prevent U.S. companies from obtaining government-backed insurance and financing for projects in China. A promise of permanent "most favored nation" trade status, which allows it to pay the same low tariffs as most U.S. trading partners. Unwilling to battle Congress, Clinton is highly unlikely to exempt China from the annual review of its trade status. Quick entry into the World Trade Organization. The United States and China are too far apart for this to happen. U.S. negotiators say China's leaders won't agree to genuine market opening until they are sure new economic reforms are working. Credit for its new global role. China wants recognition for its efforts to stabilize the Korean peninsula, cool tensions between Pakistan and India, avoid meddling in Hong Kong, and resist moves that would worsen the Asian economic crisis. China wants the United States to acknowledge that "the road to solving the Asian financial crisis runs through Beijing, not just Tokyo," says Richard Baum, a China scholar at the University of California at Los Angeles. No deeply embarrassing gestures or statements on human rights. Chinese officials initially were warm to requests for liberal air time for the president. Now they are hinting that technical difficulties may prevent live, uncensored TV coverage. Clinton appears in no position to give anything away. His China policy is under siege in Congress. Complicating matters: the inquiry into possible illegal campaign donations from Chinese sources, investigations into whether the White House turned a blind eye to illegal transfer of missile technology to China by U.S. satellite makers, and the Monica Lewinsky matter. "He has no wiggle room," Baum says "This should be a great moment . . . but this is a moment that will pass with nothing being done. Clinton can't afford to do anything bold or risky."
By James Cox, USA TODAY
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U.S. ambassador surprises critics
06/26/98- Updated 11:46 AM ET
When President Clinton nominated James Sasser to be ambassador to China three years ago, people scratched their heads. ''He wasn't a China specialist, he didn't speak Chinese, he probably couldn't even have found it on a map,'' recalls David Shambaugh, a China expert at George Washington University in Washington. But Sasser has proved the skeptics wrong. Today, Clinton begins the first U.S. presidential visit to China since Chinese troops fired on demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Sasser will be at his side nearly every step of the trip. Just after Sasser took over, Chinese missiles were flying over the Taiwan Strait in tests intended to intimidate the island just before its first direct presidential election. The presence of U.S. warships got China to back down. Now there are no more tests. Two prominent political dissidents have been freed and allowed to make new lives in the USA. Cooperation and dialogue between Washington and Beijing are better than at any time in modern history. And many China watchers describe Sasser, 61, as one of the most effective U.S. ambassadors to China ever. His reputation has benefited from a policy shift that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright emphasizes is ''constructive engagement,'' but not an endorsement of China's Communist government. When Clinton picked Sasser, many saw the nomination as a consolation prize for a close friend of Vice President Gore. Sasser, a senator from Gore's home state, Tennessee, had just lost his bid for a fourth term. His intimate knowledge of Washington is one of his main assets in Beijing. He's been visited by more than one in five members of Congress. ''The congressmen who have been to China have a much more nuanced view of China. They understand it's not just an 'evil empire,' '' says Merle Goldman, a Chinese history professor at Boston University who briefed Sasser before he took over in Beijing. Chinese leaders are impressed by Sasser's direct line to Gore and Clinton. ''They know that when they say something to him, it will go to the White House instead of to the State Department. That's important to them,'' Shambaugh says. He also has helped the Chinese leadership understand American democracy. ''Sasser has the ear of the Chinese leaders,'' Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., says. ''He can tell them what the conduct of Congress is, what American policy is all about.'' Some experts dispute his influence. They say an ambassador only conveys what has been decided in Washington. ''I think he's been a fine ambassador,'' says Gerrit Gong of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. But Gong, who was a special assistant to two ambassadors to China in the Reagan and Bush administrations, says, ''Relations are better because both sides have an interest in improving them.'' Shambaugh says: ''He hardly makes China policy. All he does is carry it out.'' Others give him more credit. ''He's been part of the process, not only implementing it,'' Harvard University China specialist Robert Ross says. ''He's been the right man for this particular period in history.''
By Daniela Deane, USA TODAY
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Cultural tips for Clinton trip
06/26/98- Updated 11:45 AM ET
XIAN, China - President Clinton had better read the cultural tips for his China trip. Here's a potential problem for a man like Clinton who is always running behind schedule, even keeping kings, queens and prime ministers cooling their heels. ''Be on time,'' the book instructs visitors. ''Fashionably late is not the custom here.'' There was a lot of advice crammed into the White House reference booklet for the China journey, the first visit by an American president to the world's most populous nation in nine years. The book cautions that Chinese are often very direct in their questions. ''It is quite common to be asked about income or personal matters upon meeting someone in China,'' it says. ''How much do you earn? How much is your rent? Are you married?'' But the tip list also says that ''it is perfectly acceptable to dodge any questions you don't wish to answer.'' At meals and banquets Guests are expected to sample every dish. That caused some squirming when George Bush visited China in 1989 and the presidential party was served boar's penis soup. ''If you finish a dish,'' the booklet advises, ''chances are you will be offered a refill.'' Toasts are a traditional part of banquets and receptions. ''Beware the Chinese toast 'gan bei' (bottoms up), especially if you are drinking ''mao tais,'' the tip list warns. Mao tai is a potent liquor. Tipping has become more common because of the influx of foreigners. But paying the exact amount of bills is still the standard. Some do's and don'ts ''As a foreigner, you may be asked - probably in a market or as you are strolling the streets - to exchange Chinese money for dollars,'' the booklet says. ''Don't do it. It's illegal.'' The guide says safety is generally not a problem but warns that some markets have ''xiao tou'' (little thieves). No worry for Clinton, surrounded by Secret Service agents. It warns that foreigners will no doubt attract attention if they stray off the beaten path. Generally, people will be helpful, it says. ''However, if something doesn't quite happen as you imagined it should, stay calm and polite. As a rule, complaining or shouting only results in mutual loss of face and a deterioration of the situation.'' Just like in America.
By The Associated Press
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Gingrich backs China trade extension
06/26/98- Updated 11:42 AM ET
WASHINGTON - As President Clinton arrived in China, House Speaker Newt Gingrich expressed strong support for extending normal trade relations with the Beijing government and predicted Congress would approve that extension. ''The practical, commonsense reality is the more the American people deal with the Chinese people, the faster we are going to move China to freedom,'' Gingrich said Thursday at a news conference promoting agriculture exports. The speaker also pledged a vote in September on giving the president authority to negotiate new free-trade agreements with Latin American countries and to work with the administration on financing the International Monetary Fund. Gingrich, of Georgia, and other Republican leaders, including Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas, in the past have supported keeping normal trade relations with China, although they have said extending that status will be more difficult this year because of rising anger over China's human-rights and weapons proliferation policies. But Gingrich predicted victory. ''I think it will pass and I think we may have a better vote than people expected.'' Congress must vote this summer whether to disapprove Clinton's decision to extend most-favored-nation status for another year. In the background are allegations the Chinese funneled illegal campaign contributions to the Democratic Party and used U.S. commercial satellite technology to improve the accuracy of their missiles. Gingrich and the House Agriculture Committee chairman, Rep. Robert Smith, R-Ore., also addressed the issues of how the GOP leadership intends to restart stalled debate on providing the International Monetary Fund $3.5 billion for emergency uses and providing help for agriculture exports hit by sanctions to India and Pakistan.
By The Associated Press
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'Friend or foe?' is larger China question
06/26/98- Updated 11:41 AM ET
WASHINGTON - Beyond the raging debates over whether China stole U.S. military secrets, or whether commerce and politics led President Clinton to be ''soft'' on China, lies a simpler question: Is the Beijing government a friend or foe? The wide gulf between the Clinton administration and its critics over this issue goes a long way toward explaining the current furor over the possible leakage of satellite and missile technology to China. ''China and America are suspended somewhere between friendship and rivalry,'' says Peter Rodman, an analyst with Washington's Nixon Center, a foreign policy think tank. Many Republican lawmakers depict China as an incurable weapons proliferator, as a hold-out communist dictatorship - with a penchant for crushing domestic opposition - as a threat to Taiwan and as a budding superpower with the potential to challenge the United States. The Clinton administration sees China as a sometimes troublesome but important collaborator in responding to such crises as the India-Pakistan nuclear rivalry. It seeks a strategic partnership with Beijing through a policy of engagement. With nearly a quarter of the world's population and an exploding economy, China is too big to ignore, in the administration's view. Moreover, China is an important U.S. trading partner and a nation that could be on the verge of a transition to democracy. ''Those who find it in their interest to exaggerate the threat of trade with China seem incapable of defining our relations with this emerging power in any terms but those of military conflict,'' William Reinsch, undersecretary of commerce for export administration, told Congress. ''However, we believe that treating China as a committed adversary is the quickest way to ensure it becomes one.'' U.S.-Chinese relations at times resemble the 40-year standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union, but mixed with a cultural and commercial interaction that was completely missing during the Cold War. The United States broadcasts Radio Free Asia into China in hopes of spreading the gospel of democracy and capitalism, much the way Radio Free Europe was used as a propaganda tool against the Soviet bloc. This despite routine access of U.S. citizens to China for business and tourism, and the absence of anything resembling the Iron Curtain. For its part, Beijing routinely jams the U.S. broadcasts. And the three journalists whose visas China rescinded just prior to Clinton's departure were from Radio Free Asia. Yet China helps Western satellite firms launch new networks of communication satellites into space, some of which will be used to transmit Western broadcasts into China. In a faint echo of the Cold War nuclear tension, China continues to target 13 of its long-range nuclear missiles at U.S. cities. On closer examination, however, the targeting emerges as a Chinese bargaining lever designed to win U.S. agreement to a mutual no-first-use pledge on nuclear weapons, a promise Washington has long refused to make. Much as American presidents pressed the cause of Soviet dissidents, Washington has imposed a raft of economic sanctions in response to China's dismal human rights record. Congress would like to impose still more. ''We have in China today a regime whose brutal repression at home betrays its intentions abroad,'' Sen. John Ashcroft, R-Mo., said recently. ''America should be sounding liberty's bell, not toasting the tyrants who sent tanks to Tiananmen Square and pulled the triggers there.'' U.S. intelligence rates China as a regional rather than global power. China's 18 long-range nuclear missiles compare with thousands in the U.S. arsenal. But the United States, much as it moved defense assets around to keep Soviet expansion in check, has shown a willingness to contain China. In 1996, Clinton ordered two aircraft carrier battle groups to the waters off Taiwan when China conducted menacing military exercises in the area. The fundamental problem is that China remains a totalitarian state. ''Relations between China and the United States will not be normal and a real 'strategic partnership' not possible until the governing values of the two societies become more alike,'' a study by the conservative Heritage Foundation concluded. But whereas during the Cold War the business community remained rock-ribbed in its anti-communism, today's robust trade with China has transformed U.S. business into Beijing's biggest booster. Television spots funded by the Business Roundtable depict two toddlers, one Chinese, the other American, playing together with toy construction equipment. The ad implores the U.S. to remain involved economically with China: ''If we don't, others surely will."
By The Associated Press
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Clinton trip highlights old, new China
06/26/98- Updated 11:41 AM ET
XIAN, China - One of the major goals President Clinton wants to accomplish in his nine-day state visit to China is to show his United States audience how the reality of modern China differs from American stereotypes of a closed, tyrannical society. But while Clinton will spend much time showing off the new China - a communist society slowly trudging toward personal freedoms and a market economy - his visit began with symbols and artifacts from a very old China, allowing Clinton a primer in 5,000 years of Chinese history. Just as Chinese President Jiang Zemin began his U.S. visit last fall with a stop amid the colonial trappings of Williamsburg, Va., Clinton came here, to China's ancient capital, to pay his respects to the roots of one of the world's richest and oldest civilizations. Clinton, first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and daughter Chelsea got their first welcome to China Thursday night in Xi' an, the capital of China at various times for more than 1,100 years and a cradle of Chinese thought and development. And later Thursday (Friday morning in China), the Clintons are to visit Xi' an's most famous attraction - thousands of terra cotta warriors, horses and chariots buried more than 2000 years ago by Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang. Like the rest of Xi' an, the sprawling excavation site of the warriors - they were discovered in 1974 by farmers digging a well - was all but spotless in anticipation of Clinton's visit. Considered one of the most impressive archeological finds of the 20th century, the warriors apparently were buried near the emperor's tomb so they could guide and guard him in the afterlife. Qin is best known for unifying the Chinese empire for the first time. The warriors - 3,000 have been uncovered so far and scholars believe there are several thousand more - are one of China's chief tourist attractions and souvenir hawkers were ready and waiting for the White House entourage. Vendors here expect to barter with customers, with the final price of items sometimes ending up to be half or one-third lower than the starting price. But sellers of small replicas of the warriors found easy marks in some of the White House staff, who found out they'd paid ten times the real value of their souvenirs when they compared notes with colleagues based in China. One chagrined White House aide paid $50 for a tiny statue he later found to be worth about $2.50. And while there was a general sense of excitement in Xi' an about Clinton's visit - hotel employees, for example, gave the White House traveling press a standing ovation when they arrived Wednesday night - some here were put out by the heightened security and hassles. Stores and schools closed early. Curfews were put into place twice last week in Xi'an's Old City to clean up streets for Clinton's visit. Video parlors were shut down, so Clinton wouldn't see pirated U.S. videos being sold. Locals said a steamroller was brought in last week to crush more than 30,000 pirated video discs. As Clinton spoke Thursday night, huge searchlights swept over the area. "There's no need to impose this curfew. We are not at war with somebody,'' said Zhang Long, 31, a security guard. "When I'm off work, I can't even go home. So much inconvenience - why is he coming anyway?'' But others here hoped Clinton's visit would bring in much-needed investment and economic growth. "I hear he's bringing in some investment. I hope this materializes,'' says Chen Lichun, 30, a waitress. "Relations between the U.S. and China? I wish for peace.''
By Bill Nichols and James Cox, USA TODAY
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China starts flexing financial muscles
06/26/98- Updated 12:10 PM ET
Score one for China in its uphill battle to catch up with Japan as Asia's economic leader. By refusing to follow in the footsteps of other Asian nations and devalue its currency, China has won worldwide kudos for providing a bulwark of economic stability in a region awash with financial turmoil. The world's most populous country has succeeded in making a lot out of doing nothing. China has "helped to contain and stabilize the situation in Asia," President Clinton told Business Week in the issue out Friday. "They deserve credit for that," added Clinton, who now is in the midst of a nine-day trip to China. Japan, by contrast, has been heavily attacked from all sides, including China and the United States, for aggravating the Asian crisis by failing to turn around its battered economy and currency. The world's second-biggest economy is being criticized for doing too little despite having a lot. "We are very concerned about Japan's economy and financial situation," U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers says. "It is critical that Japan now act." The shifting financial fortunes of Asia's two longtime rivals have led to breathless talk in Beijing of a partnership between the U.S. and China to manage the world economy. "China replaces Japan as the leading economic force in Asia," blared an article in the China Economic Times last week. "For the basic problems of the world, China and the U.S. should work together." Hold on, experts say. Beijing faces formidable challenges as it tries to shift to a market-dominated economy from a state-run system, and from a rural and agricultural country to an urban and industrialized nation. It still has a long way to go before it's playing in the same financial ballpark as Japan, whose economy is five times larger. "They aren't ready to replace Japan," says former U.S. ambassador to China James Lilley. "They aren't in that league, and they know it." Making its mark But that doesn't stop China from trying to make its mark. At the request of Beijing, Clinton agreed not to stop anywhere else in Asia on his way to and from China in what some Japanese officials saw as an affront to longtime U.S. ally Tokyo. To help redress that slight, Japan's Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto will visit Washington July 21-23 for the first official state visit by a Japanese leader in 11 years. And it was Beijing that led the way in Asia in criticizing Tokyo for not doing enough to halt the headlong fall of Japan's currency, the yen, earlier this month. By hinting that the yen's weakness might force it to devalue its currency to remain competitive, Beijing succeeded in cajoling Washington and Tokyo into taking action last week to prop up Japan's ailing currency. "The rumbling from China was a key motivator behind the (U.S.) Treasury's decision to act now," says Cameron Umetsu, a senior economist at brokerage LTCB Warburg Securities in Tokyo. "It shows how the axis of power in Asia is shifting toward China and away from Japan." China has spread its influence in other ways as well. It's chipped in $4 billion to international efforts to rescue its crisis-hit Asian neighbors. And it's turned down the temperature on a simmering territorial dispute with a variety of nations over ownership of the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. "China's kept its nose clean," says Harvard University China expert Robert Ross. "The region's preoccupation with China's territorial claims has diminished." Like the yin and yang of ancient Chinese philosophy, China's economy is a study of contrasts. It has been the fastest growing in the world for much of this decade. But more than one in five Chinese still live on less than $1 a day, the World Bank says. China looks likely to surpass Japan eventually as the country with the biggest trade surplus with the USA. But its exports are mostly low-tech, labor-intensive goods - toys, clothing and the like - not the high-end consumer products such as cars and electronics merchandise Japan is famous for. Ill-timed crisis The Asian crisis couldn't come at a worse time for China. Its huge state-owned companies are grossly inefficient and are hemorrhaging money. And its banks, which are mostly insolvent, are saddled with about $250 billion of bad loans. "They have a potential for a major meltdown," says Nicholas Lardy of the Brookings Institution think tank. China's no-nonsense Premier Zhu Rongji, who took office three months ago, has promised to tackle China's problems head-on, starting with the bloated bureaucracy, where he's ordered a 50% across-the-board staff cut. He's also determined to overhaul thousands of loss-ridden, state-owned enterprises. But all of that could mean throwing millions of people out of work. Zhu has said the economy needs to grow 8% this year to create new jobs and prevent that from happening. But growth in the first quarter fell short of that, at 7.2%, and some experts forecast it's slowing even further. China had been counting on strong exports and continued foreign investment to help take up the slack as it revamped its domestic economy. But the Asia crisis has changed all that. After rising by 20% in 1997, Chinese exports fell 1.5% in May vs. a year earlier, the first year-on-year fall in 22 months, as the economic troubles elsewhere in Asia sapped demand. Foreign investment in China also has taken a hit as the flow of capital into the country from elsewhere in Asia has dried up. Contracted foreign investment fell nearly 25% last year. Perhaps not surprisingly, China's drive to pursue painful reforms of its domestic economy has flagged as a result. "People in our work unit are quarreling all the time and plotting against each other to keep their jobs," says Liu Juozhen, 31, who recently lost her job with the Ministry of Information in Beijing. "People like me - young and with university backgrounds - are forced to leave while others with high-school-level education and about to retire in five years keep their jobs because they have life-long connections." Zhu's effort to privatize the housing market also is running into difficulty. Beijing decided to delay reforms that would have led to higher rents by phasing out subsidies. The reason: Too many people are unemployed and don't have the money. The Alan Greenspan of China But experts say it would be wrong to count China out despite the problems it faces. The country has a lot going for it. Its market is big and its savings are huge. It has more than $140 billion in foreign currency reserves and about $600 billion in domestic bank accounts. And it's planning to spend roughly $200 billion annually over the next three years on public investment - money that will give a big shot in the arm to the domestic economy. But perhaps most important is the quality of China's leadership, says Joseph Massey of Dartmouth College. Zhu has been called China's Alan Greenspan, after the much-praised Federal Reserve chairman, for his deft handling of the economy. That sobriquet contrasts with that hung on Japanese Premier Hashimoto by some of his country's businessmen, who've derisively labeled him the Herbert Hoover of Tokyo after the U.S. president who presided over the Great Depression. "China has shown a bold example of changing their view of how the economy should develop," says Robert Feldman, chief economist for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter in Tokyo. "Japan is dealing with its problems over time with no plans and no deadline. The intellectual leadership is in China now."
By Rich Miller and Sara Nathan, USA TODAY
Contributing: Barbara Slavin and Antoaneta Bezlova in Beijing
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Clinton urged to prod China on human rights
Thursday, June 25, 1998
By Judy Packer-Tursman, Post-Gazette Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON --
Chinese human rights activist and Democratic congressional leaders yesterday
implored President Clinton to speak out against human rights violations while he
is in China.
"We are very concerned about President Clinton going to China, and especially being received in Tiananmen Square, shaking hands with the blood-stained hands of the Chinese dictators," Ciping Huang, 36, a Chinese citizen who lives in Toledo, Ohio, with her American husband, said on Capitol Hill.
Huang, an engineer, told of her own arrest and detention by Chinese security officers during an April visit to her family in Hefei, on the outskirts of Nanjing. Unsure of her fate until she was driven to Nanjing International Airport, she was deported and told never to return to her homeland.
As Clinton left for the first visit of an American president to China since the June 1989 crackdown on the pro-democracy movement at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, Huang joined exiled dissident Harry Wu and others at an emotional news conference held by Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
Urging Clinton to look beyond expanding business investment and halting arms proliferation in China, they asked him to use his nine-day visit to help end the forced exile of Chinese nationals fighting for human rights, and to meet with various dissidents and families of the 1989 massacre's victims.
Huang also called on the president to urge the Chinese government to apologize to victims and families of the Tiananmen Square crackdown and give them financial assistance.
Huang, vice chair of the Independent Federation of Chinese Students and Scholars, which represents thousands of Chinese in the United States, said the group has received about two dozen reports of people harassed and detained in China -- Chinese and U.S. citizens alike. She blamed reduced U.S. pressure on the Chinese government for the recent crackdown.
Clinton is to be officially welcomed tomorrow during a state ceremony hosted by President Jiang Zemin at the Great Hall of the People, on the edge of Tiananmen Square.
Huang said it would be "especially unthinkable" if Clinton's motorcade drives into the square without his acknowledging an anonymous young man who single-handedly blocked a line of tanks there and who -- after a video image of his stand was broadcast around the world -- came to symbolize popular defiance of a repressive government.
Wellstone dismisses administration claims that the Chinese government has made progress in human rights. The senator has introduced a resolution calling for Clinton to win a pledge from Chinese leaders that they'll remove the names of 50-some Chinese citizens living in the United States from a blacklist, thus letting them revisit their homeland.
"For the president, a trip to China means salutes and toasts and welcoming ceremonies," said Wellstone, noting that his father had fled persecution in Russia. "For the Chinese nationalists who stand in front of you here today, a trip to China means interrogation, harassment, detainment and deportation."
Pelosi sent a letter June 18 to Clinton, signed by about 60 colleagues (none from Southwestern Pennsylvania), calling it a "terrible mistake" for the president to go to Tiananmen Square and asking that he seek unconditional release of imprisoned religious and labor activists in China.
Yet at yesterday's event, both Wellstone and Pelosi backed off from connecting China's human rights violations to an impending vote in Congress on whether to continue China's Most Favored Nation, or MFN, trading status.
The two Democrats also were careful in expressing concern about administration handling of the Chinese government decision to deny visas to three journalists set to cover the visit for Radio Free Asia. Clinton said his Oval Office meeting with the journalists yesterday sent "a clear signal" about the U.S. belief in freedom of the press.
But Wu, a prominent member of China's pro-democracy movement who was imprisoned for nearly two decades, condemned a "shameful" U.S. policy toward China. He said he wished that MFN status "would become another vehicle for human rights in China."
From The Pittsburgh Post- Gazette
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House panel backs Clinton's China trade decision
05:45 PM ET 06/25/98
By Donna Smith
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The powerful House Ways and Means Committee Thursday voted to back President Clinton's decision to renew China's trade status and urged fellow legislators to reject attempts to sever normal trade relations.
The committee decided by voice vote to support Clinton's decision earlier this month to renew China's Most Favored Nation (MFN) trade status for another year.
The vote took place as Clinton began a nine-day trip to China and the White House applauded the panel's decision.
"We welcome this vote as an important validation of the president's policy of engagement with China and we hope the full House follows suit,'' said Jake Siewert, a spokesman for the White House's National Economic Council.
After an unusually short debate on a resolution that would overturn the president's decision, the committee sent it to the full House with a recommendation that lawmakers vote against it and support trade with China.
"I am opposed to this resolution because it essentially would terminate U.S. trade relations with China, and extinguish our ability to improve the human rights situation there,'' committee Chairman Bill Archer, a Texas Republican, said.
He argued that the decision to back China MFN does not give the communist country any special trade privileges but continues a trade status that has been extended to almost every other country in the world.
A measure that would change the designation from Most Favored Nation to Normal Trade Relations (NTR) was approved by the panel's trade subcommittee earlier this week and given expedited treatment when lawmakers agreed to attach it to an Internal Revenue Service reform bill now pending in Congress.
Opponents argued that the United States should not maintain normal trade relations with China because of its record on human rights, forced abortions, religious persecutions and because of concerns about missile and nuclear technology transfers.
Congress is probing the transfer of sensitive missile technology to China by a U.S. company that launched satellites on Chinese rockets. It is also investigating allegations of illegal Chinese campaign contributions to Democrats in 1996.
Supporters of MFN argue that denying normal trade relations with China would be counterproductive and unlikely to achieve the goals advocated by opponents.
"As one of the world's oldest and most influential civilizations, China will not respond to shrill threats from Congress to extinguish trade,'' said Rep. Philip Crane, an Illinois Republican.
House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Georgia Republican, said at a news conference that he thought the House would approve China'a MFN trade status.
There are no practical grounds for cutting off American producers, American agriculture, American companies,'' Gingrich said.
"I would argue that if you believe in democracy it is better to have Americans in China doing business than it is to cut the Chinese off from contact with the American people.''
"I think that it will pass and I think we may have a better vote than people expect,'' he said.
Revoking China's MFN status would mean substantial tariff
increases on goods imported from China. Tariffs would soar to an
percent and prices would likely rise on a number of imported goods including
toys, clothing and small electrical appliances.
It would also wreak havoc on the Chinese economy and likely deepen the financial crisis now gripping Asia. The United States is a major export market for China. About $60 billion in Chinese goods were imported into the United States last year, while U.S. exporters sold nearly $12 billion in goods to China.
U.S. trade with China and the U.S. deficit, which is expected to hit $60 billion this year, is expected to be a major issue on for discussion during Clinton's visit.
The panel also voted to support a decision by Clinton to extend U.S. government credit and investment guarantees to Vietnam available through the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), the Export-Import Bank and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
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Rubin to bolster China resolve to keep yuan stable
06:16 PM ET 06/23/98
By Knut Engelmann
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin joins President Clinton on his trip to China this week, aiming to hammer home the urgency of Beijing keeping its currency stable amid Asia's deepening financial turmoil.
Rubin, making his second trip to China in just nine months, was due to leave for China on Wednesday. After three days in Beijing, he is due to visit Malaysia, Thailand and South Korea before he returns home on July 1.
China, the world's most populous nation and the fastest- growing U.S. trading partner, has so far been an island of economic stability in the crisis-torn Asian region -- and Washington is desperate to keep it that way.
As Japan grapples with a declining economy and ailing currency that has put mounting strain on other Asian economies, the Clinton administration has been keen to back up Beijing's resolve to maintain the value of the yuan, fearing a Chinese devaluation could set off Asia Crisis Number Two.
"There's no question that that issue will be raised," White House economic adviser Gene Sperling told Reuters on Tuesday.
"Holding firm and steady on China's currency is in China's interest. Competitive devaluations do no good for anyone."
The threat of a Chinese devaluation loomed large behind last week's surprise decision by Washington to spend billions of dollars to help the Japanese government bolster the yen's value by buying large amounts of it in the open market.
A senior Treasury official on Tuesday said China's economy should be strong enough to overcome Asia's woes without devaluing.
"We continue to believe that their situation does not require an adjustment of their exchange rate at present," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
A Chinese devaluation could prompt tit-for-tat devaluation in other Asian countries, plunging the region into a renewed round of turmoil that many fear could be even more ferocious than the last financial storm that ravaged Asia.
"China has dodged the biggest bullet, but much still lies ahead," said Nicholas Lardy, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
"They face enormous challenges in continuing to maintain the stability of their currency."
Asia's turmoil has hit China in the midst of a historic transformation that Beijing hopes will cement its status as a key player in the world economy. But the Asian superpower's change from an old-style Communist economy to what China's leaders call a socialist market system does not come easy.
Unemployment is rising as state-owned conglomerates are restructured, banks are burdened by mountains of bad loans, and Beijing still enjoys only limited access international capital markets.
China remains vulnerable to the exact same economic pressures that triggered Asia's financial storm last summer.
Rubin was due to meet Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji, Finance Minister Xiang Huaicheng and central bank chief Dai Xianglong on Friday before taking part in Clinton's official state visit program on Saturday.
Trade issues were expected to feature high on his agenda, but few expect much progress to be made on Beijing's desire to join the World Trade Organization.
The U.S. still feels China has a long way to go to open up its vast domestic market before it can join the 130-member club of free trading nations.
But Asia's woes coupled with concerns about its drive to reform inefficient state firms have made China more reluctant to lift trade barriers. Analysts say Beijing would be ill- advised to expose itself more to world competition now.
"They would be unwise to open up at this point. They read the Asian crisis very well," said Brookings' Lardy.
In April alone, the U.S. trade deficit with China surged 13.7 percent to $4.28 billion.
The total deficit is expected to reach some $60 billion this year.
During his one-night stops each in Malaysia, Thailand and South Korea, Rubin was expected to ask for a first-hand update on the economic reform progress.
The International Monetary Fund has put together rescue deals totaling some $120 billion for Thailand, Indonesia and South Korea, linking disbursement of the funds -- some of the money has been promised by bilateral donors -- to reforms.
"The main purpose of the trip is to get a sense of the state of the crisis in Asia," the Treasury official said.
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Visiting Tiananmen Square is the price of engagement
Wednesday, June 17, 1998
Editorial
President Clinton's trip to China this month was always going to be controversial, but the chorus of opposition in the U.S. Congress and elsewhere is not all about Beijing's lamentable human-rights record.
The context of this visit, the first by an American president this decade, has been amplified by domestic U.S. politics -- in particular the allegations that national security was compromised in dealings between the Chinese and a private U.S. satellite firm, Loral Space & Communications Ltd., whose chief executive office is the largest individual contributor to the Democratic Party.
How else to explain the challenges being raised obliquely against U.S. policy that has been largely bipartisan for years? Of course, critics of Mr. Clinton's trip state their opposition in different terms. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., said Monday: "I'm really worried that the president is being finessed or maneuvered by the Chinese."
When it comes to the official greeting that President Clinton is due to receive next to Tiananmen Square after he arrives in Beijing June 25, it is Sen. Lott and company who are doing the finessing. Earlier this month, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 305-116 for a nonbinding resolution asking that Mr. Clinton not attend the ceremony at the square, scene of the famous pro-democracy protest that the Chinese authorities put down brutally in June 1989.
Indeed, Tiananmen Square will long remain as a symbol of China's authoritarian system and the brave students who challenged it. But, like it or not, that system remains in place, and its reality is what confronts American policymakers. Beginning with President Nixon, who drank toasts with Chairman Mao, a dictator who bore responsibility for the deaths of millions, every American president -- Democrat or Republican -- has seen the wisdom of constructive engagement.
The awful events of Tiananmen Square notwithstanding, President Clinton is right to continue to engage the Chinese and visit Beijing, even if it means that Tiananmen Square is on the itinerary.
In a speech before the National Geographic Society last week, Mr. Clinton underscored the role that the world's most populous nation can play for good or ill -- on issues as varied as arms control, international crime and drug trafficking, the environment, trade barriers, human rights and resolving regional disputes.
Mr. Clinton eloquently rejected the isolationist approach in favor of a course he described as "both principled and pragmatic: expanding our areas of cooperation with China while dealing forthrightly with our differences."
In practice, this means that Tiananmen Square should not be forgotten, but neither should it remain a barrier to constructive engagement. While it would be less uncomfortable if the president were not visiting the square, it is a place of central importance in Beijing, which is why it came to be occupied by the students in the first place. As Mr. Clinton pointed out, "That is where the Chinese government receives visiting heads of state and government, including President Chirac of France, and most recently Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel."
In other words, it would be a studied insult if Mr. Clinton refused to follow the usual protocol. "We do not ignore the value of symbols," Mr. Clinton said, but he suggested that "the choice is between making a symbolic point and making a real difference."
That is the choice. Members of Congress who complain about this visit should recognize a visit to Tiananmen Square is not contrary to policy; rather, it is the logical consequence of a long-standing decision to engage the Chinese positively as a way to influence their behavior for the better. Insulting the Chinese at the outset of this trip would do nothing to advance the cause of human rights.
From The Pittsburgh Post- Gazette
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JUNE 1, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 21
By ERIC POOLEY
If you were a Chinese aerospace kingpin looking for an agent to buy influence at the White House and get American rocket technology into your hands, Johnny Chung would not be your first choice for the job--or your second choice or even your third. Yet Chung, the cartoonish Taiwan-born businessman best known for his role in the 1996 Clinton campaign-finance scandals ($366,000 in suspicious contributions; a plea bargain in which he's cooperating with investigators), was being described in Washington last week as the pivot man in a "China Plan" to do just that. For an influence peddler, he employed an unlikely m.o.--a garish, glad-handing personality that repelled those he wanted to seduce, from top White House aides to their interns. "Johnny was a hassle," an intern named Gina Ratliffe told House investigators in a deposition. Chung often showed up at the offices of Hillary Rodham Clinton, where Ratliffe worked in 1995, and whenever he did "people would roll their eyes and say, 'Oh, Johnny is here,'" said Ratliffe. Chung hired Ratliffe, then 21, as an assistant in what he called his "bridge-building" mission between the U.S. and China, promising that she could live in a $3 million Virginia mansion, ride around Washington in a chauffeured town car, even meet Steven Spielberg. But Ratliffe quit after three months and one trip to Beijing, she said, because Chung never made good on his promises. "He was just this big braggart."
Now Chung is having a second moment of infamy, because he has told investigators that he received $300,000 from Liu Chaoying, a top executive at China Aerospace International Holdings (the subsidiary of a huge Chinese satellite-launching outfit), and funneled at least $35,000 of it to the Democratic National Committee. Here's where it gets sticky: after Chung passed illegal money to the D.N.C., Clinton approved the transfer of commercial satellite-launch technology to China--technology that might have helped China improve the accuracy of its long-range ballistic missiles that threaten the U.S.
Suddenly, the campaign-finance scandals seemed to have serious national-security implications. New investigative bodies sprang up in the House and Senate last week as legislators from both parties made grave pronouncements about the apparent security breach. But TIME's examination of the evidence suggests there may be less to the China connection than meets the eye. Investigative sources tell TIME there's no evidence that anyone in the White House knew Chung was funneling money from Chinese sources or that Chung ever lobbied anyone about the transfer of satellite-launch technology. Chung's lawyer, Brian Sun, insists Liu never discussed satellites or waivers with Chung. At least part of their partnership concerned the prosaic business of trading auto parts and telephone equipment.
Chung and Liu met in June 1996 through mutual business contacts in Hong Kong. It was an easy marriage of interests: Chung, 43, the hustler, was always flashing his Clinton photos and looking for deals; Liu, 39, the daughter of a powerful retired general in the People's Liberation Army, was a lieutenant colonel in the P.L.A. As such, she was a sophisticated member of the elite class of Chinese "princelings"--offspring of communist bosses who are often given control of huge trading companies but who sometimes act independently, not necessarily as agents of a putative China Inc. that masterminds all the nation's investment, trade and political activities worldwide. Liu was looking for a foothold in Western markets. When she visited the U.S. in July 1996, Chung introduced her to Clinton at a Los Angeles fund raiser. She and Chung also paid a call on the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington, a meeting arranged by Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, another recipient of Chung's illegal contributions. On the agenda: the procedure for getting a foreign firm listed on American stock exchanges. Liu had money on her mind, it seems, more than rocket launches. On Aug. 9, Liu and Chung formed Marswell Investment, a Los Angeles corporation that issued 50,000 shares of stock--30,000 for Liu, 20,000 for Chung. And within days, Liu wired $300,000 into Chung's account at a Hong Kong bank, a source familiar with the case told TIME. Most of it was for their new business venture; some went to the D.N.C.
The origin of the funds is murky but important. If the money came from Beijing, its source may have been the P.L.A. or China Aerospace, the outfit that owns Liu's company. That mystery may never be solved because Justice Department investigators do not have access to Chinese banking records. Even the Republican leading the new House investigation into the matter, California Congressman Christopher Cox, says he has no hope of proving that the Liu-Chung payment had anything to do with Clinton's decision to allow an American corporation to send rocket technology to China. "It's going to remain ultimately ambiguous," Cox told TIME. "We will never know."
But if the China connection isn't behind Clinton's decision, what is? The answer may be classic Clinton--another case in which the President decided that the correct global policy dovetailed with his domestic political needs. And what's most surprising is that the risk--massive political embarrassment--was spelled out for him in black-and-white, and he chose to ignore it. Here's what happened:
Clinton's China policy was largely inherited from George Bush. In 1989, as part of a sanctions package meant to punish Beijing for the massacre of students in Tiananmen Square, Senator Al Gore sponsored legislation barring U.S.-made satellites from being launched on Chinese rockets--unless the President declared such a launch to be in the national interest. Under pressure from American corporations desperate to get their satellites into orbit, Bush issued nine such waivers between 1989 and 1992--and Gore denounced him as "an incurable patsy." But after Clinton was elected President, he came under the same pressure from business leaders, who argued that the export controls endangered America's telecommunications primacy. Clinton began signing the same waivers (there have been 11 on his watch). In 1996, an American company, Loral Space & Communications, used a waiver to export a $200 million satellite that was destroyed when the Chinese rocket carrying it into space exploded. In the aftermath, Loral and another firm, Hughes Electronic Corp., gave information to the Chinese that, according to the Pentagon, may have helped China hone its ICBM guidance systems--a possible breach that has been under investigation by the Justice Department for 18 months.
Last February, another Loral waiver request landed on Clinton's desk. The State Department supported the waiver, arguing that it would promote trade with China and enhance America's position as the world telecommunications leader. But Clinton knew that Loral's technology transfer was under investigation. He also knew that Loral's chairman, Bernard Schwartz, was the largest individual donor to the D.N.C. in 1996, responsible for more than $600,000 in soft-money donations. Clinton was warned in a Feb. 18 decision memo that Justice believed that if the Loral investigation ever went to trial, "a jury likely would not convict" the company if it received another presidential waiver: how serious could the breach be if the White House approved yet another technology transfer? By signing the waiver, Clinton would be handing his donor's company what amounted to a get-out-of-jail-free card. Was that an argument for or against the waiver? In Clinton's world, it's hard to tell. But other memos spelled out for Clinton the political "risk" he was taking if he signed.
Clinton signed the waiver; he has called it "routine." But since it was first reported two weeks ago--mixed in with the sensational but apparently tangential Chung-Liu allegations--the embarrassment has mounted beyond anything Clinton could have imagined. A House G.O.P. leader confirmed to TIME that Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate majority leader Trent Lott have met with committee chairmen to discuss ways to highlight Clinton's embarrassing China dealings in advance of the President's visit to Beijing in June. The strategy appears to be working. Though the China connection may have nothing to do with Clinton's decision to grant the waiver, it is giving Republicans a kind of traction the Lewinsky scandal never did.
Last week the White House was alarmed to discover that the President's ratings in internal polls had "fallen through the floor," as a source put it. And a new TIME-CNN survey reveals that almost half those polled believe the Administration favored China in trade decisions because the Chinese government contributed money to the Democrats. Fifty-eight percent say a new independent counsel should investigate the charge. "I expect we'll have to go through another two weeks of this," says White House press secretary Mike McCurry, who notes that the summertime scandal is now a Washington ritual. "It had to be either this or Monica, and I guess I prefer this."
Cox has already decided to ignore the supposed China link and focus his investigation on one narrow point: Did the Loral waiver damage national security, and if so, how did it happen? He will sort through the contradictory advice Clinton was given--State Department in favor, Justice against--and look for signs that Loral lobbied behind the scenes. Before Clinton signed, the company bombarded the White House with calls and at least one letter, warning the Administration that delay would jeopardize Loral's contract. Schwartz says he never raised the issue with Clinton directly. The company's chief Washington lobbyist, Thomas B. Ross, who was once a spokesman for former National Security Adviser Tony Lake, did send a letter to the current National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger, telling him that Schwartz "had intended to raise the issue with you" at a state dinner for British Prime Minister Tony Blair. "But [he] missed you in the crowd."
While Clinton's decision to sign the waiver reduced the likelihood of criminal prosecution for Loral, such prosecutions have been extremely rare. Teledyne paid a $13 million fine after pleading guilty to shipping cluster-bomb material to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, but that was an exceptional case. Even during the cold war, only professional smugglers suffered harsh criminal penalties. And White House officials insist the waiver did not get Loral entirely off the hook. If no criminal charges are brought, the Commerce Department could still impose stiff penalties. But since Clinton always has his eye on Gore's 2000 campaign--and Schwartz remains a go-to guy for the Democrats--nobody expects that to happen. And that little piece of Washington reality is more pungent than anything Johnny Chung and Liu Chaoying ever cooked up.
--Reported by James Carney, Elaine Shannon, Karen Tumulty and Michael Weisskopf /Washington
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