REP 0 R T

THE MANDARINSAmerican foreign policy,brought to you by China

By Ken Silverstein

"E conomic liberalization in China is ulti-mately going to lead to political liberalization.That's an iron law." So said future Secretary ofState Condoleezza Rice, then chief foreign-policyadviser to presidential candidate George W. Bush,to National Review in 1999. During the succeedingdecade, however, this iron law has proved quite pli-able. Beijing remains as brutal as ever: the State De-partment's recently released global human-rightsreport notes such abuses as "extrajudicial killings,torture and coerced confessions of prisoners, andthe use of forced labor, including prison labor."Last September, dissident Hu jia cowrote a publicletter that accused the government of persecutingpolitical activists like Chen Guangcheng, whowas jailed for exposing the practice of forced abor-tion and sterilization; Hu himself was soon trun-dled off to prison, where he is serving a three-yearsentence for "subverting state authority." Beyondits tyranny at home, China has offered unflaggingsupport to even worse tyranniesabroad. Beijing hassold fighter planes to Sudan; peddled small arms toZimbabwe, and is a major economic and diplo-matic partner of Burma and North Korea.

Despite such outrages, China has made hardlya cameo in this year's presidential campaign. Asrecently as 1992, when candidate Bill Clintonattacked President George H. W. Bush for "cod-dling" Beijing, America's relationship with Chinawas a marquee political issue. Today, however,neither candidate seems prepared even to questionthe closeness of U.S. ties to China. On BarackObarna's website, his foreign-policy agenda men-

tions China only once in passing, saying he intendsto ensure that Beijing "plays by internationalrules." John McCain has periodically called for atougher approach to Beijing; yet, like Obama, heis wholly committed to "constructive engage-ment," a policy that in name dates to the Clintonyears but in fact has been our general approach toChina ever since the Nixon Administration. Withthe Olympics beginning this month, China isperhaps likely to receive more American pressscrutiny than usual. But barring turmoil over Ti-bet or unexpected trouble with Taiwan: it is hardto imagine any sequence of events that could se-riously weaken American ties to Beijing.

How did close relations with China become anunspoken tenet of American foreign policy? Theconventional wisdom is so firmly established thatit is hard even to imagine an alternative to con-structive engagement, which essentially argues,per Rice's iron law, that we may forgo the stick (ofeconomic sanctions, or demands for political re-form) in favor of all the carrots Beijing can devour.To be sure, China is an economic superpower,and shunning its government entirely is not a re-'alistic or even a desirable policy. But it isworth not-ing that the arguments made over the years by ad-vocates for constructive engagement have proved ,largely fallacious. During the 1990s, when Chi-na's normal trading status was first granted andthen made permanent, foreign-policy advisers inboth parties insisted that American trade and in-vestment would spark widespread political andeconomic improvements in China. Yet, as the

Ken Silverstein is the Washington editor of Harper's Magazine. His last article for the magazine,"My Lobby, Myself," appeared in the May issue.

50 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / AUGUST 2008

State Department's human-rights report makesclear, advances have been modest to nonexistent.Trade with the United States, far from improvingChina's respect for the individual, seems insteadto have corrupted our own: American companies(such as Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft) haveshaped their policies or products to conform tothe demands of Chinese censors, and many more(GE, Kodak, McDonald's, Coca-Cola, et al.) havesigned on as leading sponsors of this summer'sOlympics, refraining from comment on politicsfor fear of upsetting the regime.One reason why constructive engagement con-

tinues to dominate China policy, despite the mea-ger benefits it has brought, is that support for it hasquite literally been bought-not by the Chinesegovernment but by the overwhelming power ofthe Chinese market. American corporations thatrely on Chinese production, or look hopefully to-ward future Chinese consumption, have madeconstructive engagement a key plank of their lob-bying efforts in Washington. Their money alsofunds think tanks, creates pro-trade business groups,and endows international-finance professorships.Academics and intellectuals who favor engage-

Photographs from Shanghai by Wolfram Ruoff. Courtesy the artist, Ca~oI[ohnssen Gallery, Munich, and Sous Ies Etoiles Gallery, New York City

ment thereby reap career and financial rewards:when they do not hold government posts, theycan revolve into jobs at sympathetic institutes orat high-paid consultancies whose corporate clientsaim to tap the Chinese market. If both facts andethics would push us toward skepticism regardingChina, the entire apparatus of our foreign-policyindustry tilts markedly toward Beijing.Today, most of America's so-called experts on

China, including advisers to Obama andMcCain, have a definite if unacknowledged stakein keeping close ties with Beijing. Constructiveengagement isn't working well for the UnitedStates or the Chinese people, but it is workingquite well for the very individuals from whomwe might hope to see a new approach emerge:namely, America's foreign-policy elite, our ownmandarins. Little wonder that no major politician

in either party is seriously willing to

A rethink the China question.

ne of Barack Obarna's chief advisers onAsia policy is Jeffrey Bader, who frequently writesopinion pieces about China and is regularly quot-ed in the press on Washington-Beijing relations.

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Bader has been a commentator on CNN, FoxNews, ABC's Nightline, and NPR, among other'outlets. He frequently speaks before university,think-tank, and business audiences on the sub-jects of China and East Asia, and has testified onnumerous occasions before various congressionalcommittees. During the Clinton years he held toppositions at the State Department and the Na-tional Security Council; under George W. Bush,he served as an assistant United States trade rep-resentative, leading the team that completed ne-gotiations on China's accession to the World TradeOrganization. In 2005, Bader joined the Brook-ings Institution, and invariably this is the affili-ation cited when he publishes op-eds or deliversspeeches. Hence, teaders and listeners must imag-ine that Bader is a neutral, impartial observer when

he opines, as he has in recent years, that congres-sional opposition to China's bid for Unocal was es-sentially irrational and "vitriolic," or that (as he toldUSA Today earlier this year) "the U.S.-China re-lationship is a very important relationship to theU.S. for political, security and economic terms.It's not in the American interest to see an Olympicgames that turns into a confrontation betweenChina and the rest of the world." .

52 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / AUGUST 2008

When Bader retired from government in 2002,he went to work for Stonebridge International,one of the most sought-after advisory firms inWashington, at which he consulted on behalf ofcompanies looking to do business in China. Asis true of many consultancies, Stonebridge's stat-ed mission seems intentionally hazy: according tothe firm's website, it "works together with topmultinationals to develop and implement tai-loredstrategies to solve critical problems ....Stonebridge understands how governmentsaround the world operate and we are in a positionto help our clients navigate the system to achievetheir specific objectives." Somewhat more canbe gleaned from a few case studies touted on thesite-in one such study, a major metals manu-facturer hoping to purchase factories in Russia ranup against "deep-rooted opposition from the in-fluential Russian scientific community," whichStonebridge helped "to neutralize"; in another, "amajor U.S. chemical company," facing the po-tential ban of one of its products by the EuropeanUnion, turned to Stone bridge for "an overall in-dustry strategy together with white papers out-lining the product's usefulness and safety." (Theunnamed product remains on the market.)

Stonebridge might best be seen as a sort of.one-stop shop for international fixers-a collec-tion of former government officials who repli-cate, in privatized and miniaturized form, theofficial foreign-policy apparatus. Both the clientsand the former officials benefit immensely fromthe exchange: for the latter, Stonebridge servesas a holding pen in which to draw a prodigioussalary while awaiting a return to the State De-partment, say, or the Commerce Department, orthe National Security Council. Stonebridge's co-founder is Sandy Berger, who before joining theClinton Administration (in which he becamethe top national-security adviser) coordinatedbusiness lobbying for China at the law firm ofHogan &Hartson. He was perhaps the foremostarchitect of the administration's dramatic shift inChina policy; which moved in short order fromsolidarity with the spirit of Tiananmen Square tothe promotion of trade above all else.

Given Berger's involvement, it is not surprisingthat Stonebridge has a tremendous and direct stakein greater American engagement with China. Thefirm is a member of the U.S.-China BusinessCoun-cil, which pushes for close American ties withBeijing. Indeed, Stonebridge maintains an entireChinese subsidiary, with offices in Beijing andShanghai, whose purpose is to help transporta-tion, energy, pharmaceutical, and technology firmsto cut deals in China. Four former senior U.S.government officials are listed as holding posts atStonebridge China: Bader, the Obama adviser;Kenneth Lieberthal, who was a top China advis-er to Hillary Clinton and who served as senior

director for Asia at the National Security Coun-cil during her husband's administration; HenryLevine, who was a senior adviser on China tradepolicy during the present Bush Administration;and Amy Celico, who during the Clinton yearsserved as senior director for China affairsat the U.S.trade representative's office.

These officials are almost never identified in thepress as Stone bridge affiliates; instead, they areidentified merely as former government officialsor as representatives of various think tanks-though even at such supposedly independentthink tanks, it should be noted, China policy ishardly less compromised. Brookings, for example,bestowed upon Jeffrey Bader the directorship ofits John L. Thornton China Center, which isnamed after the chairman of the institution'sboard of directors and one of its leading donors;Thornton is also a director not only of corpora-tions with huge interests in China (Ford, NewsCorporation) but also of large Chinese corpora-tions (Commercial Bank of China, China

Netcorn), and is even a professor at

A Tsinghua University.

mericans in general are not nearly as en-amored of China as are their foreign-policy elite.In 1999, a Pew Research Center poll found thatonly one third of the public believed Beijingshould be granted "normal trade relations treat-ment," a viewpoint sharply at odds with that ofboth parties' politicians. A poll in 2002 by theChicago Council on Foreign Relations found that51 percent of the public favored imposing eco-nomic sanctions on China, versus only 22 percentof leaders. On a "feeling thermometer" that mea-sured overall friendliness toward various coun-tries and groups, Americans in 2004 rated Chinaa 44-just four degrees warmer than Cuba and fivedegrees warmer than "the Muslim people."

And yet because politicians and the media de-fer broadly to the opinions of the foreign-policycommunity-as was seen rather embarrassinglyduring the debate leading up to the Iraq War-thatcommunity remains almost entirely unchallengedon the subject of China. In fact, adherence to theconventional wisdom is a basic requirement foranyone who hopes. to get far as a credentialed"Asia expert." Anyone too critical of Beijing iswritten off as a dangerous eccentric, much like allthose naive critics of the Iraq War were. "There isno real alternative to the course we recommend,"Michel Oksenberg of Stanford University and Eliz-abeth Economy of the Council on Foreign Rela-tions wrote in 1999 on the subject of constructiveengagement, with all the certainty that such ad-visers typically have of their own opinions.

In a 2000 essay entitled "The 'Shanghai Coali-tion': The Chattering Classes and China," MarkLagon (now a Bush Administration ambassador-

at-large) discussed the four pillars of "the elitecoalition forging consensus for 'constructive en-gagement' with China." The coalition, he wrote,consisted of four overlapping groups: business ad-vocates for expanded trade with and investmentin China; Carter- and Clinton-era Democrats whocalled for "conciliatory diplomacy" in order to ex-pand business ties, with leading exemplars beingAnthony Lake and Sandy Berger; the communi-ty of academic Sinologists and intellectuals; and Re-publicangeostrategists such as Henry Kissinger(and proteges like Brent Scowcroft and AlexanderHaig) who originally regarded China with favor be-cause they viewed it as a Cold War counterweightto the Soviet Union.

Foreign-policy experts supporting John McCaintend to reside squarely in this last camp, and manyof them are thoroughly compromised by theirfinancial ties to Chi-na. Consider Haig, aformer general whoruns a consulting firmcalled WorldwideAssociates, Inc. TheChinese governmentadores Haig becausehe has been a stead-fast advocate on itsbehalf ever since he led the advance team for Pres-ident Nixon's historic 1972 visit; later, as secretaryof state under Reagan, Haig battled the powerfulTaiwan lobby in Washington. Haig continued tospeak out for Beijing after opening WorldwideAssociates in the mid-1980s. The most strikingexample of his advocacy came when he appearedin Tiananmen Square on October 1, 1989-fourmonths after the massacre there-to join cele-brations for the fortieth anniversary of the found-ing of the People's Republic. Western ambassadorsboycotted the event, but Haig shared the podiumwith Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who con-gratulated him on his courage in appearing. Need-less to say, if a corporation today retains Haig toopen doors in China, it stands an excellent chanceof success.

A person even closer to McCain is Brent Scow-croft, a former national-security adviser for Pres-ident George H. W. Bush and chairman of theForeign Intelligence Advisory Board under thecurrent Bush. (Scowcroft has been a critic of var-ious Bush policies, most prominently the IraqWar, but he is a mentor to various administrationofficials,some of whom have worked for him in theprivate sector.) After Tiananmen Square, Scow-croft was sent off to China on a secret missionaimed at avoiding any serious rupture in theWashington-Beijing relationship. During his yearsout of government, Scowcroft has traveled toChina with Irwin Jacobs, the CEO of Qualcomm,for a meeting with China's prime minister; and,

FOLLOWING THE CONVENTIONAL

WISDOM ON CHINA IS A MUST FOR

ANYONE WHO HOPES TO GET FAR

AS AN "ASIA EXPERT"

REPORT 53

with the CEO of the Chubb Corporation, has metwith Premier Li Pengo (Li "expressed his appreci-ation for the prolonged efforts Scowcroft has madein helping to develop Sino-U.S. relations.")Scowcroft's firm-The Scowcroft Group-s-does

employ a few Democrats, including Kevin Neal-er, a former State Department official and trade ad-viser to Senate Democrats who (says his onlinebio) "develops regulatory a~d government affairssolutions for clients that include the largest Amer-ican investor in China." Nealer helped head up an"independent" task force for the Council on For-eign Relations and co-authored a 2005 report itproduced, "Beginning the Journey: China, theUnited States and the WTO." The· task forceconcluded that "increased trade and investmentwill provide considerable economic benefits toboth nations and thereby improve overall Sino-American relations, thus creating a better contextfor managing security and human rights issues."(Nealer is identified in the report as a senior fel-low at the Forum for International Policy, whichhappens to be a nonprofit "brain trust" of foreign-

policy experts run out of Scowcroft's

A consulting firm.)

s one might expect, the advisory classtends to take an optimistic view of the situationin China. "I lived in China twenty-five years ago,and there is no question that it is a freer, happi-er country today than it was then," Bader told mewhen we spoke by phone. "Of course it's not aWestern-style democracy, but there's a muchgreater ability to travel, to get around the coun-try, to read magazines and newspapers, and toget a job or go to a school of your choice. Therehas been a profusion of choices that people makein their daily lives, and those are the things thatpeople care most about .... I can't predict whetherChina will be more democratic in twenty years-the Communist Party will resist that-but it willbe a freer, more participatory, more pluralisticsystem." For these and other reasons, Bader saidhe was not surprised that China had failed toemerge as a campaign issue thus far. "There hasbeen a general consensus on China dating backthrough seven presidents, since Nixon, and I seeno reason to think that consensus will be broken,"he said. "It would only be a fringe candidate whowould look outside that consensus."Scowcroft agrees with this assessment. "Ever

since Richard Nixon's trip to China, every presi-dent, Republican or Democrat, and no matter howthey started out-and some, like Ronald Reagan,started way off in a confrontational manner-hasdecided to deepen engagement with China, whichis the central thrust of our policy," he told me."The overall course of the current relationship hasless to do with our policy than it does with glob-alization and the increased strength of the Chi-

54 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / AUGUST 2008

nese economy. We have become so intertwinedwith China. They send cheap goods to us, whichbenefits Wal-Mart and U.S. consumers ... andChina has a great stake in the dollar and overallU.S. financial stability. You can't talk anymoreabout retaliation against China. It's a whole newball game."Both Bader and Scowcroft denied that the ad-

visory class was in any way compromised by itsbusiness relationships with China. "My views arenot uncritical," Bader said. "I'm a friend of theDalai Lama and active on the Tibet issue, muchto the irritation of the Chinese government. If myviews were driven by financial interests, thatwouldn't be the case." Said Scowcroft: "For me it'san issue of the bilateral relationship. Whateversmall business I do over there is irrelevant." Headded that he felt the very notion of pressuringthe Chinese government on human rights wasmisguided. "They are extraordinarily sensitiveabout having been treated as a European colony.They bitterly resent that type of interference."

Bader acknowledged that business interestshave become perhaps "the most important part"of the coalition pushing America toward closer tieswith China, but he stressed that there are alsostrategic interests at play. "China is responsible forhundreds of thousands of American jobs," hesaid.' The relationship "generates profits for com-panies with shareholders. Selling into China is anational interest, though of course it does not de-fine the totality of our interests." He felt that onemajor failing of the current administration's pol-icy has been its inability to convince Americanvoters about the importance of the U .S.-Chinabond. "The relationship with China always has afragile domestic base because we have different val-ues," Bader said. "We need to establish a frame-work that explains why we want to have a closerelationship with a country that is repressive."Perry Link, a professor of East Asian Studies at

Princeton University, has a very different take onChina policy and the role of the foreign-policyclass. Long a vocal critic of the Chinese govern-ment, Link has been banned from visiting thecountry since 1996. Until a few years ago, hetold me, he accepted the argument that engage-ment with China would lead, at least in the longterm, to democracy. Today he is not so certain."Now it seems possible that Chinese leaders will

•It is worth pointing out that even this most widely acceptedargument for engaging with China-the economic benefitsfrom doing so--is open to dispute. Robert Cassidy, a for-mer top United States trade representative official who wasinvolved in negotiating China's acceptance into the WorldTrade Organization, now believes that acceptance was amistake. "[I}t is doubtful that the U.S. economy or itsworkers are better off," Cassidy recently wrote; the tworeal beneficiaries, he notes, were "multinational companiesthat moved to China and the financial institutions that fi-nanced those investments, trade flows, and deficits."

establish a model-not just for China itself butfor other countries around the world that admirethe way the Chinese government is structuring itssociety in an authoritarian manner but also mak-ing money, so that the populace is kept happywithout democracy or civil liberties." He saidthat the Chinese middle class "is not a bour-geoisie that naturally fights the rulers for power.Its growing wealth gives it fewer reasons, notmore, to challenge the state, because the pressurefor reform is coming from below, from farmerswho had their land taken away for developmentand from workers who were laid off by state en-terprises." Anger over the growing gap between.rich and poor is a fundamental cause of instabil-ity in China, he said, adding that the political andeconomic elite, and many intellectuals, had unit-ed because of the threat from those at the bottom.

Consulting groups with interests in Chinawould "not come anywhere near a person likeme," Link noted. He worried about how formergovernment officials working for such groups wereselling "the appearance of their connection withthe U.S. government." And, he observed, "Whenthe route to lucrative consultancies after leav-ing office is as clear as it recently has been, offi-cials might be induced to watch their words whilestill on the job." He had seen this firsthand inacademia: "Everyone in the field knows that toomuch frank talk can land one on a visa blacklistor, even if one gets into China, cut off access tokey people or important archives." That, he said,encourages self-censorship. "Senior scholars tumdown media interviews on sensitive topics. Ph.D.students are steered away from dissertation top-ics on political dissidence. Undergraduates tumdown internships with groups like Human RightsWatch for fear of acquiring a taint."

Three years before he was banned by China,Link had started Princeton's summer program inBeijing, in 1993. Today, because of the ban, hecan no longer take his tum as rotating head of theprogram. "It's a nice position, and there's a goodsalary attached to it," Link noted. "If I could stillgo there and run the program and see my Chinesefriends, I would probably be balancing in mymind what I said in public to maintain that priv-ilege. I hate to admit it, but if there were more at

stake for me, I, too, would probably

S be more cautious."

orne years ago I conducted a not-for-attribution interview with a recently retired gov-ernment official who had extensive experience inAfrica. Near Dupont Circle we sat and drank cof-fee as he railed at great length about the generalcrookedness of the leaders of one particular Africannation. He spoke of these leaders with immensecontempt; through their thieving and greed, hesaid, these men were bankrupting their resource-

rich country. Soon, however, my coffeemate be-came edgy. "Remember," he said, "none of thiscan be attributed to me." I asked why he was so ner-vous-after all, he was no longer in government.

"Well," he said, squirming, "I'll probably bedoing a little bit of consulting, and I'm not surewho I'll be working for."

And just as summer follows spring, my sourcebefore long was consulting for American com-panies hoping to do business in the very coun-try whose leaders he had so passionately and vig-orously denounced. His work depended onhaving close relationships with those govern-ment officials. His unwillingness to openly speakthe truth about them had served him well.

Which leads, directly and indirectly, to thefuture shape of U.S. foreign policy. Nearly threequarters of Americans are unhappy with the ad-ministration's approach in Iraq, and the public dis-satisfaction with our direction overseas does notend there. This year's presidential election of-fers Americans an opportunity to reflect on for-eign policy, and to try to change it. John Mc-Cain promises continuity with key parts of theBush Administration's strategy, especially in Iraq,but he has promised to take steps to restore Amer-ica's standing in the world. Barack Obama hasbroadly attacked Bush's foreign policy, callingfor a complete reshaping of America's relation-ship with the rest of the world, from Iraq to Asiato Africa.

Yet either man will find it difficult to revampour foreign policy in any serious way, for one sim-ple reason: a major overhaul would require dis-entangling ourselves from the reality of empire.And those charged with setting our course, our so-called foreign-policy experts (including my sourceon Africa mentioned above, who has informallyadvised one of this year's leading presidential can-didates), are themselves so entangled overseas asto make envisioning fresh ideas unlikely, if not im-possible. When it comes to China, a PresidentObama or a President McCain might periodical-ly hold forth with tough, politically calculatedrhetoric against the regime. But in terms of actu-al policy, Beijing will continue to be treated as abusiness partner-precisely the role that it playsfor our own mandarin class.

"My assumption is that either McCain orObama-and probably Obama more because heis younger-will be under pressure to conformto the China-watching community that surroundsWashington," Perry Link told me. "I'm for en-gagement. But the question is, do you engage ex-clusively with the Communist Party leaders, or isthere a broader engagement? When people likeHenry Kissinger talk about engagement, theymean black-tie affairs with top government andbusiness leaders. But those leaders are not thesame as the Chinese people." _

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