John Shattuck Interview (2004): Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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I would like to ask you now to talk about China. What's interesting about China was that it's a case where there was a lot of hope about how things might change, how human rights could be part of our new emerging relationship with them. It was a topic that Clinton took up in the campaign. But it was also the case of a power that was emerging in a very strategic way among the other great powers. So let's understand the framework that Clinton created at the beginning, what agenda that gave you, and then in the end when push came to shove, where the administration wound up.
To understand China and human rights and the Clinton dilemma, which actually continues to be the dilemma of the Bush administration -- in fact, I think in some ways it's gotten to be more of a dilemma -- you have to look at the events of June of 1989, in China, when the Tiananmen Square massacre occurred, and when the rest of the world was experiencing these outbreaks of democracy and human rights -- the Berlin Wall was about to fall, and it seemed as if there was a democratic revolution sweeping the globe. Well, China was the crackdown country. There were thousands of people killed and hundreds of thousands of people who were affected inside China by that effort to bring about internal change. And many, many of them went to prison. That casts a pall over U.S. - China relations, which, of course, had opened up since the Nixon administration; Nixon goes to China and all that followed. There were also U.S. companies that were engaged in a great deal of business in China in the late 1980s. Many of those economic relations looked as if they were going to come to an end around the Tiananmen Square period.
President Bush I [the first], in order to continue the process of engaging with China, downplayed the Tiananmen Square events to catastrophic effect, both for him politically, because it did become a campaign issue, and also from the internal standpoint in terms of the efforts by many reformers in China to bring about change. He basically said, "Let's keep doing business as usual." Clinton said, "No, we're not going to do business as usual," and in 1992 he argued for a much, much stronger engagement with China on human rights. He thought he could have it both ways. He thought he could have an engagement on human rights and that he could also have economic and political engagement. He put forward a strategy of conditioning the renewal of China's most favored nation (MFN) trading status on improvements on human rights inside China. And I was, along with others, the person who was to carry out this policy by meeting with the Chinese, by laying out for them what they had to accomplish within the next period of time. It was a relatively modest agenda. It involved the release of prisoners from the Tiananmen Square period, visits to prisons by the International Red Cross, a lessening of the oppression in Tibet, and a number of other issues as well.
It became very clear early on that there was going to be a huge tug-of-war within the Clinton administration, and the Chinese were able to take advantage of that. The tug-of-war was between the economic interests that wanted to re-engage with China -- massive market, and certainly very much in the American interest and the European interest to engage with China. China was opening itself up, market economic reforms were being imposed, and many people said, "That's the way for human rights. Let's just open the process economically and the human rights will follow, necessarily."
So it was very, very difficult to carry out the economic pressures that Clinton had imposed by conditioning MFN. And within a year, Clinton backed off his MFN commitments and essentially opened the process up and downplayed, once again, the human rights elements of it. It was a very difficult time for me and for Secretary Warren Christopher, who was the Secretary of State at the time, and had been pushing for the implementation of this Clinton executive order on human rights.
I think, on the other hand, it was probably a policy that was too extreme, in a sense. First of all, it was relatively unilateral. There were no other countries that were willing to take these kinds of human rights risks. Second of all, for human rights to bear the burden of an economic relationship was probably unrealistic in that U.S. economic relations with China were very, very strong, or there were interests in the United States that wanted them to be strong. So it was quite easy for the Chinese to play off both sides of this. And, as I said earlier, President Bush II is having a more difficult time of it. I think we've now seen a complete swing back to the period of laissez-faire, and the Chinese are our allies in the war against terrorism. So essentially nobody is going to pay a whole lot of attention to what they're doing on human rights.
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