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Tuesday, April 13, 1999
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
SYNDICATED COLUMNIST
WASHINGTON -- After four of the blossoming Japanese cherry trees on the edge of the Tidal Basin mysteriously were hacked down, park police laid in wait at night to catch the vandals.
Sure enough, the midnight marauders reappeared: A band of three beavers, sharp front teeth at the ready, swam up out of the murky shallows to "harvest" the trees again in the furtherance of their unauthorized federal dam project.
This led to a fierce clash of interests between environmentalists ("Save the trees!") and animal-rights activists ("Save the beavers!"). One lesson: In natural struggles for survival, as in political relations between powers, painful priorities must be imposed and ameliorating compromises made.
Another lesson taught in the defense of Beauty (the blossoms in their springtime glory) against the attack of Truth (the beavers instinctively demonstrating the validity of their work ethic) was this: Do not demonize your opponents when they want to let you lose with honor.
Let us consider the way President Clinton handled the visit of China's remarkable prime minister, Zhu Rongji.
Zhu's goal was to gain our support for China's admission to the World Trade Organization. He was willing to make some concessions about opening his protected markets to U.S. exporters, but unwilling to stop the campaign to crush all attempts to form a democracy in Communist China.
Clinton's goal was to accept the commercial easements -- while paying lip service to human rights -- and make the deal. But at the last minute he double-crossed his own trade negotiators and embarrassed Zhu by scuttling the agreement.
Why?
John Sweeney, head of the AFL-CIO, who wants protection from cheap Chinese goods, is why. In years past, Clinton could afford to ignore Sweeney's protectionism, as well as liberal Democrats who have seen how trade has led only to more repression. That's because he had the support of business-dominated Republicans on this issue.
But now that callous business-is-business support is eroding. The stolen nuclear secrets and the funneling of Chinese money into his stolen election make Republicans nervous, thereby giving Sweeney much more leverage on Clinton.
In scuttling the deal, Clinton needed someone to blame. It couldn't be Zhu; he had come a long way on trade. Couldn't be labor or human-rights liberals who saved him from removal. Certainly couldn't be himself, although his easy assumption of GOP dogma that trade would lead to freedom had backfired. He decided to take the vast-right-wing-conspiracy route.
The culprit? "The anti-China crowd in America," he said, had a notion "that if someone wants to have a relationship with us, they should agree with us about everything."
How's that for polarizing rhetoric?
He has now divided Americans who think about China at all into "the anti-China crowd" of simpletons vs. -- who? The mirror image would be "a pro-China crowd in America that thinks that if we want to have a relationship with someone, we should agree with them about everything."
Such foolish oratory makes impossible a realistic American attitude toward China. It invites us back to the who-lost-China, pre-Nixon days of isolation and hostility.
We who are now labeled by our president "the anti-China crowd" are indeed anti-Communist, but believe we must deal with Beijing across a range of fronts, using trade and cultural contacts as levers for diplomatic compromise and political progress. Trade is good, but it is not all, and we have seen in China and Russia how its profits can be misused by a power elite to stunt the growth of freedom.
We can combat China's penetration of our labs without rancor, and expect Beijing to understand an improvement of our surveillance of their military. But we should exhibit outrage at the subversion of our political process with foreign money; that's beyond the pale of national competition, and when added to sustained cultural aggression in Tibet and missile intimidation of Taiwan, causes consequences.
The pro-China crowd disagrees. (See? It's so easy to pin a pejorative label on opponents.) We'll have to await a new president for a subtly realistic approach that China will respect.
Meanwhile, the anti-beaver crowd has humanely trapped two of the predators of our cherry trees. The eager rodents will be released in the wilds of Maryland. Tidal Basin blossoms are now safer. Spring is possible.
William Safire is a columnist with The New York Times.
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