Why our China policy?

NEW YORK, OCTOBER 21

The mists of conspiracy have been floating over the discussion of the United States' China policy, but it wasn't until last week that one heard it said out loud. It was spoken by Arianna Huffington at a debate (Firing Line) on the question of trading with China. We have had month after month of public hearings having to do with the financing of the Democratic campaign of 1996, and the stress has been on the Asian presence. All that money directed to the campaign asking for -- what?

Mrs. Huffington says it's obvious. Her debate partners (Sen. Tim Hutchinson of Arkansas, former Gov. Jerry Brown of California, Gary Bauer of the Family Research Council) seated beside her, she suggested that what had been bought was the President of the United States and the Congress. Bought to do what? Bought to ignore the human-rights report of the State Department and to continue trading with China under the Most Favored Nation clause.

Now Mrs. Huffington had intimated her approach early in the two-hour debate by making a most extraordinary accusation. It is that Henry Kissinger argues in favor of continuing trade because his consulting firm does business in China. She cited the Disney Corporation, which retained Kissinger Associates a fortnight ago, allegedly to guide Disney through the Chinese flak over the forthcoming movie Kundum, which dramatizes the Communists' genocidal assault on the Tibet of the Dalai Lama.

Dr. Kissinger was floored by the charge and groped unsuccessfully for appropriate words to meet it in the minute or so left to him in that segment of the debate. He managed to say that a mere 3 per cent of the business done by Kissinger Associates relates to China, but Mrs. Huffington then charged that Kissinger was slow to react to the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 because of his commercial predilections with regard to China.

Dr. Kissinger did say, in the final few seconds, that he thought it wrong to impute greed after forty years of policy analysis under academic and public scrutiny. But the audience (of seven thousand) roared with excitement at the drama -- the striking Greek-American writer/activist charging the former Secretary of State with selling out to Mammon.

Dr. Kissinger, for all his skills as a diplomat, is inexpert at crowd control in public debates. He might have turned to Mrs. Huffington and said: If I reasoned about you as you reason about me, wouldn't I venture that the only reason you married that mindless California millionaire was to latch onto his money, which you did, and then divorce him, which you have done? But I am prepared to assume you had other motives in marrying him. On Tiananmen Square, you are correct that I did not react to the military seizure with astonished indignation. What astonished me wasn't that the army moved into the Square, it was that the protestors were permitted for so long to preside over the Square -- China is not a free society. When I recommend policies on China you should be prepared to assume I recommend them as what I consider to be in the best interests of the United States. If I were a doctor doing an appendectomy I wouldn't start out by cursing the appendix.

That might have slowed Mrs. Huffington down, though she was on a tear. Sen. Trent Lott on the affirmative team asked her whether she really believed that the congressional vote in favor of continuing trade was the result of political money coming in from China. Her answer? "Absolutely."

What hovered over the scene at the University of Mississippi was the question: Is it conceivable that the deployment of Chinese money is responsible for the dispensation under which our trade policies with China are operating?

My own reaction is: Sure; and Vincent Foster did not commit suicide, Lee Harvey Oswald was only one of the assassins and Oliver Stone is right, the lid on the true story was put down with the cooperation of the FBI, the CIA, President Johnson, and the Supreme Court; and yes, Robert Welch was actually correct, President Eisenhower was a clandestine Communist.

The investigating committees have clearly demonstrated that there were a lot of funny-money machinations in the 1996 campaign and that Asian and Asian-related agents were very active. But to suggest that our policy -- to continue to trade with China -- is dictated by commercial greed and Chinese manipulation staggers the mind. We are talking about a policy endorsed by every living ex-President, every living ex-Secretary of State, every living ex-National Security Advisor. To suggest that Henry Kissinger would counsel policy contrary to the interests of his country as he understands them leaves the observer speechless. How to explain such a charge? In the Huffington epistemology, one would have to find a commercial reason for it.