Probably not. Hounded at home, Gore and Gingrich flew to China last week, searching for some Heavenly Peace. They didn’t quite get it. On his most important diplomatic mission yet, the vice president and his team wanted to show they were ready for prime time. They weren’t. He was suckered into publicly clinking champagne glasses with Li Peng, the prime minister who’d ordered the assault on student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Gore and his aides also botched their explanation of the one tricky matter on the trip: exactly what Gore said to the Chinese about allegations that their country had tried to funnel illegal campaign cash last year into the United States. Instead of appearing tough on charges of Chinese wrong-doing, Gore came off as inept–and possibly soft on scandal.
The speaker’s trip was more successful, but his political situation at home more parlous. He wanted to show off his strategic boldness (and mollify the right) by bluntly challenging the Chinese on human rights and religious freedom. He did, adroitly–and made Gore’s painfully elliptical comments on those subjects look needlessly cautious. But playing mandarin in the Great Hall of the People won’t explain away his ethical lapses or save Newt from the Republican hordes who want to steal the gavel from him (following story). When American reporters mentioned his GOP foes, he turned shirty. “It’s very difficult in a free society,” he said with a sigh, “to deal with this range of confusion and chaos.”
Still, travel is a tonic, especially for beleaguered pols–and Beijing had the potential to be a good place for recuperation. Eager to keep their booming economy going–and not rock the boat before taking Hong Kong back from the British on July 1–Chinese leaders were accommodating. If anything, the Chinese were too friendly, their embrace too warm, for their guests’ own good. In Gore’s case, a signing ceremony for two new commercial deals turned into a photo op from hell. Without warning, champagne was produced for the morning event, and the resulting picture is sure to appear in a spot for the first Democrat who runs against him in 2000.
Though Gore’s primary mission was not to screw anything up in advance of a U.S.-China summit later this year in Washington, the Chinese took him very seriously. They were just as cleverly friendly to Gingrich. Li and President Jiang Zemin didn’t flinch at Gingrich’s provocative itinerary. They gladly met with the speaker and his congressional delegation even though he visited dissidents in Hong Kong, attended Easter services in Shanghai and planned to stop in Taiwan on the way home. In the past that kind of schedule would have kept Newt out of the Forbidden City–and China. This time, reaction was a Chinese version of. . .“whatever.” But so many smiling pictures with Chinese rulers won’t do Gingrich any good with the GOP right wing.
A generation ago, politicians proved their mettle by jousting with the Sovs in Moscow, and won votes in the big cities by visiting the “three Is”-Italy, Ireland and Israel. But the globe of American politics has spun on its axis. The new center is in the East, located in Hong Kong, Beijing and Tokyo. Asian-Americans are the up-and-coming ethnic group. The Chinese “diaspora” is growing in sophistication–Johnny Chung, John Huang and the Riady family notwithstanding. So forget the Blarney stone. Better to walk a piece of the Great Wall. In the last four months, says U.S. Ambassador Jim Sasser, one fifth of Congress has visited China.
The reason for the traffic jam of dignitaries is obvious: business is booming in the biggest communist country on the face of the earth. Beijing this spring is a cross between Moscow and Dallas. New marble-clad skyscrapers rise between drab, Soviet-style office blocks as desert winds blow construction dust along the Chang ‘an, the main thoroughfare. In the dank alleys of old Shanghai, businessmen mutter into digital cell phones as they pass rows of slaughtered ducks in shop windows.
This is exciting, exotic and very tricky ground. The size of the stakes is almost beyond imagining: the liberty and well-being of 1.2 billion people. Will China become free and prosperous–or just prosperous? Will it become a military threat to the United States, or just the largest profit center in the history of the planet? And will charges that the Chinese tried to funnel money into U.S. elections curtail a very profitable commercial diplomacy?
Gore, having been briefed for his first trip by establishment experts such as Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter and George Bush, spoke for the optimistic “evolution” school. In a speech at the Chinese equivalent of MIT, he said that what’s good for business is good for the growth of democracy–it may just take a while. China is already on the rocky road to freedom, Gore said, citing growing Internet access and the free village-level elections held earlier this year. “They are moving in the right direction,” he said.
Not surprisingly, Gore’s views got a friendly reception in meetings of U.S. chamber of commerce chapters in Beijing and Shanghai. In fancy hotel ballrooms, sleek-suited young entrepreneurs with little more than a laptop and a box of business cards mingled with Fortune 100 managers running billion-dollar investments. Gore did nothing to dampen their enthusiasm. Nor did he give them a sober lecture on the risks of ignoring human rights.
But the upbeat message Gore wanted to beam back to America–that China is an opportunity, not a danger–was obscured by his own mistakes in explaining what he said privately to Beijing leaders about the “China money” issue. The inside story of how it happened is instructive, because it shows how Gore’s entourage was victimized by its own arrogance and fear.
Gore’s staff, worried about the campaign-money issue, limited substantive coverage of his trip, canceling a press charter, declaring most events “closed” or “photo opportunity only,” rationing interviews with their timorous charge. So after Gore spoke with Li about the political cash matter, he refused to talk to reporters, waving them away as he toured the Forbidden City. That night his national-security aide, the taciturn Leon Furth, refused to give specifics. A press aide dragged an embassy staffer before reporters, and he got it wrong, indicating Gore had not told Li that there would be serious repercussions if the allegations turned out to be true.
The next day, back in Washington, Gore chief of staff Ron Klain panicked when he read the resulting AP story, which accurately reflected the briefings–and had Gore taking a dive on the campaign-finance issue. So just before newspaper deadlines in the United States, another more “senior administration official” hurried to tell reporters that Gore had indeed sternly warned of “consequences” if the “China money” story was right. It didn’t take observers in Washington long to figure out who this last “official” was: Gore himself.
Gingrich was far more blunt in putting the Chinese on notice. The crucial issue, he said, was Hong Kong, a place Gore avoided and barely mentioned. Beijing has promised to preserve British-style civil liberties in the former colony. If China treads carefully, Gingrich said in speeches, it will signal its willingness to do so in Taiwan–and make the process of eventual reunification easier. If they crack down in Hong Kong after the “reversion,” all bets are off. Speaking to a diplomatic school in Beijing, Gingrich didn’t mince words. “Mishandling the reversion,” he said, “would endanger China’s relationship with Taiwan, the region and the broader international community.”
But how can China administer freedoms it does not really know? Though there is much more liberty in China than there used to be, there are still 3,000 political prisoners in Chinese jails, according to Human Rights Watch. There is no freedom of worship, and no free press. Foreign reporters are watched. No television news “feeds” can leave the country except through the state-run satellite uplink. China will not be able to rely on propaganda or secret diplomacy in Hong Kong.
In the meantime, the clock is literally ticking: a giant digital clock in Tiananmen Square with orange numerals that count down the days, hours, minutes and seconds to “reversion.” The world will be watching and waiting for the first skirmish, Gingrich declared, in a brand new age of “information diplomacy.” From now on “no government will be able to sustain privately a diplomacy it cannot explain publicly.” Nor, for that matter, will politicians be able to conduct themselves in a way they can’t explain publicly–which is why, in the end, neither the vice president nor the speaker got the mileage he wanted out of the long trek to Beijing.
