Foul-Weather Friends

Sometimes history repeats itself as neither comedy nor farce. Richard Nixon became the first U.S. President to visit Red China in 1972 in order to create a new global coalition against his enemythe Soviet Union. On Feb. 21, 30 years to the day after Nixon touched down, George W. Bush is arriving to create a new global coalition against his enemyinternational terrorism. It would be grandiose to suggest that Bush’s two-day swing through Beijing will change the sweep of history the way his predecessor’s did. Yet three decades on, China again relishes the chance to build a new relationship with America. “China has become a world power,” says a senior Chinese foreign policy advisor, “and now it wants to show that it can act like one.”

Nothing would please Chinese President Jiang Zemin more than bonding with Bush. He needs America. Jiang faces probably the most bruising power struggle of his career as he tries to secure his legacy by placing his protEgEs on crucial perches before he retires at a year-end Party Congress. Having sold himself as a statesman, he risks tarnishing that image if relations with the world’s only superpower plummet like a downed spy plane. “If Jiang can show that relations with the U.S. are in good shape, it will enable him to appoint more of his own men to the top positions,” says Cheng Li, a political scientist at Hamilton College in New York State.

Bush, for his part, needs China’s support for his war on terrorism. This is no gimme. China is still smarting from damaging incidents involving the U.S. that have fallen with the regularity of hammer blowsthe 1999 bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, American accusations of filched nuclear secrets in 2000 and the Hainan Island spy-plane episode last year. Until Sept. 11, China felt the U.S. was preventing it from attaining its rightful place among the world’s leading nations despite its surging economy and influence. It even tried to create its own regional security bloc last year by expanding an agreement with Russia and four Central Asian republics. With Bush talking about an “evil axis” that includes North Korea, he needs to assure China that the war on terror won’t become a worldwide turkey shoot, destabilizing its borders.

For the past few months, Jiang has impressed the U.S. with his country’s new pragmatism. He has remained mum as the U.S. military overthrew the Afghan government and stationed troops in five neighboring countries. China also quietly suffered a dramatic loss of influence over its closest regional ally, Pakistan, which it had earlier helped build a nuclear arsenal. Smaller signs of cooperation passed virtually unnoticedChina did not protest when three Japanese warships escorted the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Kitty Hawk from its base in Japan to launch assaults on Afghanistan. China has even surprised the U.S. with a new policy on Taiwan: it has downplayed its threats of war to prevent Taiwan’s independence and will instead welcome visits by members of the independence-minded Democratic Progressive Party, once reviled as “splittists”as long as they don’t advocate Taiwan’s sovereignty.

These are not cosmetic changes. “Our foreign policy used to be based on indignity,” explains a Beijing scholar. For decades, the country, which had suffered the humiliating defeat in the Opium War in the 19th century, acted as though barbarian troops were threatening to sweep across its soil imminently. But last year China scored a series of successes not through defensive belligerence but by raising its game, literally and figuratively: it won the right to host the 2008 Summer Olympics, its men’s soccer team for the first time qualified for the World Cup finals and, most significantly, it joined the World Trade Organization. “Now that we feel we are gaining respect, our policy has become more professional, with more give-and-take,” says the scholar.

It’s a message that hasn’t reached most Chinese, who feel ambivalent about America after decades of anti-U.S. propaganda. The mixed emotions are apparent countrywide, even in a market in the city of Kunming, near Burma, where a vendor who usually sells parakeets and potted flowers now offers more contemporary warea ceramic model of the Twin Towers spouting flames and another of Osama bin Laden gripping a Kalashnikov. But he sells another sentiment as well. “Are you American?” he asks. “I’ve got your flag, too.” Sure enough, he points to Old Glory hanging next to a mask of bin Laden with blood streaming from a bullet hole in his forehead.

Jiang, in the marketplace for a payoff from the U.S. to symbolize the new relationship, specifically wants to slap a cowboy hat on his greased-back hair and mosey down to the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas. The prospect has the U.S. State Department in fits. Russian leader Vladimir Putin made the trip, but only after Bush famously took measure of Putin’s soul and called him a man he could trust. Yet Putin is the elected leader of a newly democratic nation. Jiang, for all his cooperation, presides over a communist country that has thousands of political prisoners. “Crawford is for friends,” says James Mulvenon of U.S. research institute Rand. “Many would find the symbolism of that visit hard to justify.”

The Texas photo op is dear to Jiang because he’s had a spate of bad publicity of late. Frustrated proponents of political reform have smuggled abroad an insider’s memoir, believed authentic by U.S. sinologists, called Zhu Rongji in 1999. A hatchet job, the book, thought to be written by a Zhu aide, accuses Jiang of undermining China’s immensely respected Premier by playing petty political gamesdenying him the office space he wanted, for one thingand doing “everything in his power to turn Zhu Rongji into a figurehead.” Then there’s the indignity of revelations by military leaders that someone, probably U.S. spies, loaded Jiang’s new presidential Boeing 767 with some unplanned amenities27 bugging devices hidden everywhere from the bedroom to the commode. The divulgence is widely seen as a criticism of Jiang for ordering such an extravagant machine.

Jiang has more at stake in the succession than ensuring his chosen mandarins get the plum posts. He also needs to protect his allies, including family members, from charges of corruption. Revealing the dirt on a leader’s underlings is a time-honored means of attack in China. Jiang himself signaled his independence from patriarch Deng Xiaoping in 1995 by ousting Beijing party head Chen Xitong, whom Deng had installed, on corruption charges. Then, two years ago, Jiang quelled a corruption investigation when it threatened to implicate his own Beijing party chief. Neither Jiang nor his family members have been linked to corruption cases, but his sons have such extensive business tiesthe elder, Mianheng, is the kingpin of Shanghai’s telecom industrythat they would be vulnerable targets for trumped-up charges without their father’s protection.

Bush has his own reasons for visiting now, among them trying to meet the man Jiang has picked as his successor. Hu Jintao remains a mystery even to the Chinese public and is an enigma to Washington. The first time most Chinese heard Hu’s voice was during a surprise television appearance in May 1999, when demonstrators protested the U.S. bombing of China’s embassy. Hu indicated the protests were good but obliquely urged the participants to return home. More recently he helped conceive the party’s initiative to make itself more inclusive by allowing capitalists to joinand let Jiang take the credit. A newcomer to diplomacy, Hu has traveled only once to the West, visiting Britain, France, Germany and Russia last year. A Bush meeting with the man who could be his co-summiteer for years to come might provide the U.S. President’s first insights into Hu’s soul. If Bush takes his measure and likes what he sees, we might be treated one day to Hu in a ten-gallon and stirrups, riding the range down in Crawford.