The Lingering Legacy of Tiananmen

James Sasser, President Bill Clinton's ambassador to China, tells a story about a 1997 visit to Beijing by a delegation from the U.S. Congress. Suspicions still simmered from the previous year's tensions in the Taiwan Strait. A senior Chinese official briefed the American visitors on China's domestic and international challenges and then invited questions. "I just want to know," one member of Congress asked, "if you've accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior." His Chinese host, Sasser recalls, looked stunned.

Foreign policy professionals will no doubt sympathize with the Chinese diplomat and write off the incident as yet another bizarre congressional foray into matters better left to the experts. Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss this incident so lightly. To the contrary, this episode (one not recounted in Suettinger's new book) reveals much about the complicated manner in which the United States goes about managing relations with the world's most populous nation.

Beyond Tiananmen details the troubled relationship between the United States and China during the dozen years encompassed by the presidencies of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. These were times of turmoil and tragedy, of dangerous confrontations and bitter recriminations. But paradoxically, it was also a period when both sides came to the conclusion that their bilateral ties were too central to their fundamental interests to permit the relationship to collapse altogether.

Although Beijing welcomed the 1988 election of Bush, whom many Chinese regarded as an old friend, the bloodshed of the Tiananmen "massacre"-as most Americans interpreted the events of June 4, 1989-smashed hopes for cordial ties within months of Bush's assumption of office. Literally overnight, Suettinger writes, the relationship between the two countries went from "amity and strategic cooperation to hostility, distrust, and misunderstanding." In the 12 succeeding years, Suettinger argues, bilateral relations never evolved "beyond Tiananmen," and the legacy of that calamitous affair continues to shape Sino-American relations to this day.

This book builds on earlier accounts of this complex bilateral relationship by, among others, James Mann, Patrick Tyler, and David Lampton. More so than journalists such as Mann and Tyler, who concentrate on the U.S. side of the relationship, Suettinger devotes considerable effort to stripping away the multiple layers of secrecy obscuring Beijing's decision-making process. Suettinger's work is more akin to Same Bed, Different Dreams, Lampton's 2001 study of U.S.-China ties; both focus on the years between 1989 and 2000, and both give extensive treatment to the Chinese as well as the American side.

Unlike Lampton, however, Suettinger writes from the perspective of an insider, who did not merely witness many of the events he recounts but had a hand in shaping them. For 10 of the 12 years covered in this book, Suettinger served on either the National Intelligence Council or the National Security Council and was responsible for relations with China. Although accounts written by former officials always raise questions of balance and personal agendas, Suettinger gives his reader enough detail about the messy process of making and managing policy to set this book apart from its competitors.

HOME GAME

Suettinger's book is also noteworthy in its emphasis on the impact of domestic politics on the policymaking process in both China and the United States. Grand strategy or careful calculations of national interest, Suettinger insists, rarely explained the policies either nation pursued toward the other. Thus, the pervasive Chinese assumption that U.S. policy toward Beijing is directly driven by strategic considerations is "grossly inaccurate," whereas the casual American assumption that domestic politics are unimportant in a one-party state leads to an equally skewed U.S. reading of Chinese policymaking.

After Tiananmen, Suettinger argues, "the bilateral relationship lost its insulation from domestic politics." This is not a trivial insight. Lacking a sophisticated understanding of the forces influencing the policy process of the other, neither country has been very successful at anticipating the other's policies or foreseeing likely responses to its own initiatives. Chinese bellicosity toward Taiwan has only strengthened the hand of those in the United States most eager to expand Washington's defense commitment to Taipei. American lectures on religious freedom have made a Chinese leadership already obsessed with social stability that much more intransigent in dealing with the Falun Gong. The result, Suettinger concludes, has been a bilateral relationship driven by events and susceptible to wild swings of emotion, "without unifying principles or concord . . . the sum of its disagreements and the product of mistakes and misperceptions."

Moreover, domestic political considerations have also prevented both sides from taking actions that might have helped stabilize the relationship. When the Chinese dissident Fang Lizhi sought refuge at the U.S. embassy in June 1989, and it became apparent that the Americans were not prepared to turn him over to Chinese authorities, Beijing might have cut its losses by granting Fang safe passage out of the country. Instead, a besieged Communist Party leadership feared compromising its hard-line policies toward any challenge to the party's monopoly on power, and Fang remained for many months under voluntary house arrest under the protection of the U.S. ambassador-a vivid symbol for Americans of Chinese despotism and a major irritant in U.S.- China relations. Similarly, the fear of appearing "soft" on China in the eyes of his domestic critics kept Clinton from accepting a World Trade Organization agreement with Beijing in April 1999, only to approve a virtually identical deal at the end of the year.