Albright Debates Rights and Trade With the Chinese
By JANE PERLEZ
EIJING -- Trying to infuse the troubled relationship between the United States and China with a new sense of direction, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright spoke sternly on Monday to the authorities here about human rights but also encouraged them to move forward on joining the organization that governs world trade.
In a day of meetings, Albright told Prime Minister Zhu Rongji and other senior officials that the United States was disturbed by their government's crackdown on opposition groups and called on them to release a number of political prisoners.
Human rights was "prominent but not dominant," said one administration official, summing up the day.
Albright's visit came on the heels of the annual report by the U.S. government that identifies countries with human rights problems, which was far more critical of China than last year's report.
At the same time, Albright made clear on Monday that the administration was sticking to an approach that separates human rights from trade issues.
"We determined some time ago that it was not a good idea to link human rights and trade," she said, "and that we actually make better progress in both when they are not linked." She emphasized the possibility of membership for China in the World Trade Organization, aides said.
With relations between Washington and Beijing strained by the roundup of dissidents, charges that China is trying to hone the accuracy of its missiles with American technology and a burgeoning trade deficit, the administration has been eager to sound positive about China's chances of entering the WTO. Monday's comments about separating trade organization membership from China's human rights record were the latest in a series of signals Washington is sending in an effort to prompt the Chinese to make serious market-opening offers.
But there are huge obstacles to reaching an agreement. The administration would have to win the backing of a good part of the American business community, which is fractured on the issue of exactly what markets China must open and how fast. Moreover, China wants assurances that Congress will drop the annual review of its "most favored nation" trade status, an annual congressional debate over the nature of the economic relationship between the two countries.
That would require congressional action. And even if the administration separates China's entry into the trade group from its human rights record or its role in weapons proliferation, it is highly unlikely that Congress will separate those issues.
China has continued a recent series of actions to silence internal critics of the Communist government by detaining one dissident late last week and handing down an 18-month sentence in a labor camp to another, without a trial. A human rights group based in Hong Kong said on Monday that another dissident planned to form an independent political party. A recent effort to form such a party brought several arrests.
But the visit also came as other vexing problems with China surfaced, including the arrest last week of a Chinese citizen in California whom federal agents charged with trying to obtain a component vital to missile guidance systems.
Publicly, at least, Chinese government officials did not mention the arrest or other security matters. Instead, they limited their public criticisms of the United States to its human rights stand.
Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan, with whom Albright spent most of her time, obliquely warned the United States at a news conference not to submit a resolution criticizing China's human rights record at the annual meeting in Geneva this month of the United Nations Human Rights Commission. He said such "confrontation" would not solve the problem.
The administration is in the midst of a heated internal debate about whether to go ahead with such a resolution, which is bound to antagonize the Chinese government.
The State Department has characterized Albright's trip as a "business visit," intended to develop a system of regular meetings between the two countries.
It was the highest level of a constellation of visits to Beijing in recent and coming days by American officials concerned with trying to smooth some of the troubled spots in the American-Chinese relationship and in particular to find a way for China to join the World Trade Organization.
Deputy Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers was here last week, discussing China's beleaguered economy and its possible route to membership in the trade organization.
China views membership in the World Trade Organization as a matter of national prestige, and the United States has a virtual veto over membership in the Geneva-based organization, which is the rule maker and arbiter in world trade matters.
In return for membership, Washington has insisted that China provide a detailed schedule for opening its market to foreign goods. But Chinese officials, facing a severe economic slowdown, are loath to allow international competitors to go head to head with decrepit and bloated state-owned enterprises that are laying off millions of workers.
The U.S. trade representative, Charlene Barshefsky, is to meet with Chinese officials in several days to define more closely the possible terms under which China would gain American support for membership.
The Clinton administration sees China's desire for membership as an opportunity for a tangible accomplishment that could move the relationship between the two countries forward. The United States is eager to close a deal in time for a scheduled visit by Zhu to Washington in early April.
An administration official familiar with Washington's efforts to get China into the organization said on Monday that it appeared that Zhu was serious about the talks and understood the positive aspects of membership.
The administration has been contemplating some "imaginative transition" periods for China's entry so that the uncertain economy here, particularly some sectors including agriculture, would not be overwhelmed by the immediate lowering of tariffs, the official said.
In addition to human rights, the main complaint from China during Albright's talks was said to be an American proposal for a missile defense system in Asia.
The Chinese government has said that if such a system embraced Taiwan, its deployment would set off a new arms race and deeply harm Chinese-American relations. A Pentagon study released last week portrayed a growing threat to Taiwan from a buildup of missiles along the Chinese coast facing Taiwan.
Albright countered, according to her spokesman, James Rubin, that the system, which is in the design stage, was intended to protect American troops in the region from threats posed by ballistic missiles.
She told the Chinese, Rubin said, that if they improved relations with Taiwan and stopped their missile buildup near the island, then the enthusiasm in Washington for the theater missile defense system would probably wane.
The Chinese also brought up the Clinton administration's cancellation last week of a satellite sale to China on the ground that the purchasing company had ties to the Chinese military.
But an administration official said the Chinese expressed less anger than puzzlement over the cancellation. The Chinese said that if the United States was interested in reversing its huge trade deficit with China, the administration should allow the Chinese to buy high-technology goods. The deficit, which reached an all-time high of $57 billion last year, is second only to the American trade deficit with Japan.
On a subject that increasingly worries the administration, Albright urged the Chinese to be more helpful in preventing North Korea, with whom China has diplomatic and military relations, from becoming a nuclear power.
The Chinese understand it is not in their interest for North Korea to become a nuclear power, an administration official said, calling the talks on that subject constructive. But another official said the Chinese were fairly coy about how much influence they could or would use with the North Koreans.
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