China-US relationship from the rapprochement to the Clinton administration: the defeat of human rights

At the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, the Communists led by the leader Mao Zedong established their government on the mainland while the defeated Nationalists departed for the island of Taiwan: the diplomatic separation between the United States and the People’s Republic of China dates back to this event. Thirty years then went by before formal diplomatic relations were officially established among the two countries by US President Jimmy Carter, seven years after the trip of Nixon to Beijing and his meeting with Mao. The events of 1972 and 1979 are of great historical importance but they took place despite the fact that China was under the control of a repressive government lacking respect for human rights, the same rights that after the Helsinki Conference of 1975 were widely debated in Europe and in the United States. Not a critic was made by Nixon to Mao and concerns in the humanitarian field didn’t stop Carter from pursuing the normalization of relations with China. After the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre and nevertheless its condemnation from the US government, Bush will try to bring about a warming of the relations between the two countries: this will finally took place under Bill Clinton, thanks to his decision to renew the MFN status of China. How is it possible that human rights were overshadowed to such a great extent? A careful study of the important historical events of those several years is needed to give a response to this question.

Long years of human rights abuses in the People’s Republic of China of Mao Zedong didn’t prevent the US from searching a rapprochement with that government: when the anti-Communist and right-wing radical Nixon saw it as an opportunity to achieve his political objectives, he decided to “seize the hours and seize the day”, as he said, and to take into consideration only what was important to that end. After the signing of the Helsinki Final Act, human rights diplomacy and human rights movements were reshaping transatlantic relations: meanwhile in China, when Carter proceeded with the normalization of relations, three years after the death of Mao, the People’s Republic was still a repressive government; however, how demonstrated by the Country Reports for 1979, at that time US government emphasized the prospect of a change, along with the hope for a better future. Then the Tiananmen protest of 1989 was a turning point, calling world’s attention to the critical humanitarian conditions of the country and making human rights a core US-China issue; still, if we look at US policy during the following years, a strong cooperation was established after Clinton’s decision to renew the MFN status of the country, a cooperation with the same politicians that brought to that massacre and that led the country to obtain permanent Normal Trade Relations in 2000 and to enter the World Trade Organization in 2001. In 1994 Clinton said “I believe the question, therefore, is not whether we continue to support human rights in China but how we can best support human rights in China and advance our other very significant issues and interests”: the economic motivation of its strategy is clear.

This is what I personally believe: the events that shaped US-China relationship since 1972 sometimes demonstrated how American Presidents’ concerns in the field of human rights made it difficult for them to deal with China, forcing them to hope for the positive effects of compromises; some other times, they demonstrated how these concerns ended to be moved to the backgrounds by more concrete political and economic ones. I doubt that things will ever differ from this kind of pattern.

Georgia C.