Over the decades, a gradual shift had taken place. Deng had come to redefine the criteria of good governance in terms of the well-being and development of the ordinary person. A considerable amount of nationalism was also involved in this dedication to rapid development, even if that required adopting methods prevalent in the previously reviled capitalist world. As one of Deng’s children later told the American scholar and head of the National Committee on United States–China Relations David Lampton:

  In the mid-1970s, my father looked around China’s periphery, to the small dragon economies [Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea]. They were growing at eight to ten percent per year and these economies had a considerable technological lead over China. If we were to surpass them and resume our rightful place in the region and ultimately the world, China would have to grow faster than them.8

  In the service of this vision, Deng was advocating many American economic and social principles as part of his reform program. But what he called socialist democracy was vastly different from pluralistic democracy. He remained convinced that, in China, Western political principles would produce chaos and thwart development.

  Yet even as he espoused the need for an authoritarian government, Deng saw his ultimate mission as passing on power to another generation, which, if his development plan succeeded, was bound to develop its own conception of political order. Deng hoped that the success of his reform program would remove the incentive for a democratic evolution. But he must have understood that the change he was bringing about was bound eventually to lead to political consequences of as yet unpredictable dimensions. These are the challenges now facing his successors.

  For the immediate future, Deng, in 1992, stated relatively modest goals:

  We shall push ahead along the road to Chinese-style socialism. Capitalism has been developing for several hundred years. How long have we been building socialism? Besides, we wasted twenty years. If we can make China a moderately developed country within a hundred years from the founding of the People’s Republic, that will be an extraordinary achievement.9

  That would have been in 2049. In fact, China has done much better—by a generation.

  Over a decade after Mao’s death, his vision of continuous revolution was reappearing. But it was a different kind of continuous revolution based on personal initiative, not ideological exaltation; connection with the outside world, not autarky. And it was to change China as fundamentally as the Great Helmsman sought, albeit in a direction opposite of what he had conceived. This is why, at the end of the Southern Tour, Deng sketched his hope for the emergence of a new generation of leaders with their own new viewpoints. The existing leadership of the Communist Party, he said, was too old. Now over sixty, they were better suited for conversation than for decisions. People of his age needed to stand aside—a painful confession for someone who had been such an activist.

  The reason I insisted on retiring was that I didn’t want to make mistakes in my old age. Old people have strengths but also great weaknesses—they tend to be stubborn, for example—and they should be aware of that. The older they are, the more modest they should be and the more careful not to make mistakes in their later years. We should go on selecting younger comrades for promotion and helping train them. Don’t put your trust only in old age. . . . When they reach maturity, we shall rest easy. Right now we are still worried.10

  For all the matter-of-factness of Deng’s prescriptions, there was about them the melancholy of old age, conscious that he would miss the fruition of what he was advocating and planning. He had seen—and, at times, generated—so much turmoil that he needed his legacy to be a period of stability. For all his show of assurance, a new generation was needed to enable him, in his words, “to sleep soundly.”

  The Southern Tour was Deng’s last public service. The implementation of its principles became the responsibility of Jiang Zemin and his associates. Afterward Deng retired into increasing inaccessibility. He died in 1997, and by then Jiang had solidified his position. Aided by the extraordinary Premier Zhu Rongji, Jiang carried out the legacy of Deng’s Southern Tour with such skill that, by the end of his term in office in 2002, the debate was no longer over whether this was the proper course but rather over the impact of an emerging, dynamic China on world order and the global economy.

  CHAPTER 17

  A Roller Coaster Ride Toward Another Reconciliation The Jiang Zemin Era

  IN THE WAKE of Tiananmen, Sino-U.S. relations found themselves practically back to their starting point. In 1971–72, the United States had sought rapprochement with China, then in the final phases of the Cultural Revolution, convinced that relations with China were central to the establishment of a peaceful international order and transcended America’s reservations about China’s radical governance. Now the United States had imposed sanctions, and the dissident Fang Lizhi was in the sanctuary of the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. And with liberal democratic institutions being embraced across the world, reform of China’s domestic structure was turning into a major American policy goal.

  I had met Jiang Zemin when he served as Mayor of Shanghai. I would not have expected him to emerge as the leader who would—as he did—guide his country from disaster to the stunning explosion of energy and creativity that has marked China’s rise. Though initially doubted, he oversaw one of the greatest per capita GDP increases in human history, consummated the peaceful return of Hong Kong, reconstituted China’s relations with the United States and the rest of the world, and launched China on the road to becoming a global economic powerhouse.

  Shortly after Jiang’s elevation, in November 1989, Deng was at pains to emphasize to me his high regard for the new General Secretary:

  DENG: You have met the General Secretary Jiang Zemin and in the future you will have other chances to meet him. He is a man of his own ideas and of high caliber.

  KISSINGER: I was very impressed with him.

  DENG: He is a real intellectual.

  Few outside observers imagined that Jiang would succeed. As Shanghai’s Party Secretary, he had won praise for his measured handling of his city’s protests: he had closed an influential liberal newspaper early in the crisis but declined to impose martial law, and Shanghai’s demonstrations were quelled without bloodshed. But as General Secretary he was widely assumed to be a transitional figure—and may well have been a compromise candidate halfway between the relatively liberal element (including the Party ideologist, Li Ruihuan) and the conservative group (such as Li Peng, the Premier). He lacked a significant power base of his own, and, in contrast to his predecessors, he did not radiate an aura of command. He was the first Chinese Communist leader without revolutionary or military credentials. His leadership, like that of his successors, arose from bureaucratic and economic performance. It was not absolute and required a measure of consensus in the Politburo. He did not, for example, establish his dominance in foreign policy until 1997, eight years after he became General Secretary.1

  Previous Chinese Party leaders had conducted themselves with the aloof aura appropriate to the priesthood of a mixture of the new Marxist materialism and vestiges of China’s Confucian tradition. Jiang set a different pattern. Unlike Mao the philosopher-king, Zhou the mandarin, or Deng the battle-hardened guardian of the national interest, Jiang behaved more like an affable family member. He was warm and informal. Mao would deal with his interlocutors from Olympian heights, as if they were graduate students undergoing an examination into the adequacy of their philosophical insights. Zhou conducted conversations with the effortless grace and superior intelligence of the Confucian sage. Deng cut through discussions to their practical aspects, treating digressions as a waste of time.

  Jiang made no claim to philosophical preeminence. He smiled, laughed, told anecdotes, and touched his interlocutors in order to establish a bond. He took pride, sometimes exuberantly so, in his talent for foreign languages and knowledge of Western music. With non-Chinese visitors, he regularly incorporated English or Russian or even Romanian expressions into his presentations to emphasize a point—shifting without warning between a rich store of Chinese classical idioms and such American colloquialisms as “It takes two to tango.” When the occasion allowed it, he might punctuate social meetings—and occasionally official ones—by bursting into song, either to deflect an uncomfortable point or to emphasize camaraderie.

  Chinese leaders’ dialogues with foreign visitors usually occur in the presence of an entourage of advisors and note takers who do not speak and very rarely pass notes to their chiefs. Jiang, on the contrary, tended to turn his phalanx into a Greek chorus; he would begin a thought, then throw it to an advisor to conclude in a manner so spontaneous as to leave the impression that one was dealing with a team of which Jiang was the captain. Well read and highly educated, Jiang sought to draw his interlocutor into the atmosphere of goodwill that seemed to envelop him, at least in dealing with foreigners. He would generate a dialogue in which the views of his opposite number, and even his colleagues, were treated as deserving of the same importance he was claiming for his own. In that sense, Jiang was the least Middle Kingdom–type of personality that I have encountered among Chinese leaders.

  Upon Jiang’s elevation to the top ranks of China’s national leadership, an internal State Department report described him as “[u]rbane, energetic, and occasionally flamboyant,” and related “an incident in 1987 when he rose from the VIP rostrum at Shanghai National Day festivities to conduct a symphony orchestra in a rousing version of the Internationale, complete with flashing lights and clouds of smoke.”2 During a private visit by Nixon to Beijing in 1989, Jiang had, unannounced, sprung to his feet to recite the Gettysburg Address in English.

  There was little precedent for this brand of informality with either Chinese or Soviet Communist leaders. Many outsiders underestimated Jiang, mistaking his avuncular style for lack of seriousness. The opposite was true. Jiang’s bonhomie was designed to define the line, when he drew it, that much more definitively. When he believed his country’s vital interests were involved, he could be determined in the mold of his titanic predecessors.

  Jiang was cosmopolitan enough to understand that China would have to operate within an international system rather than through Middle Kingdom remoteness or dominance. Zhou had understood that as well, as had Deng. But Zhou could implement his vision only fragmentally because of Mao’s suffocating presence, and Deng’s was aborted by Tiananmen. Jiang’s affability was the expression of a serious and calculating attempt to build China into a new international order and to restore international confidence, both to help heal China’s domestic wounds and to soften its international image. Disarming critics with his occasional flamboyance, Jiang presented an effective face for a government working to break out of international isolation and to spare its system the fate of its Soviet counterpart.

  In his international goals, Jiang was blessed with one of the most skillful foreign ministers I have known, Qian Qichen, and a chief economic policymaker of exceptional intelligence and tenacity, the Vice Premier (and eventual Premier) Zhu Rongji. Both men were unapologetic proponents of the notion that China’s prevailing political institutions best served its interests. Both also believed that China’s continued development required deepening its links to international institutions and the world economy—including a Western world often vocal in its criticism of Chinese domestic political practices. Following Jiang’s course of defiant optimism, Qian and Zhu launched themselves into extensive foreign travel, international conferences, interviews, and diplomatic and economic dialogues, facing often skeptical and critical audiences with determination and good humor. Not all Chinese observers relished the project of engaging with a Western world perceived as dismissive of Chinese realities; not all Western observers approved of the effort to engage with a China falling short of Western political expectations. Statesmanship needs to be judged by the management of ambiguities, not absolutes. Jiang, Qian, Zhu, and their senior associates managed to navigate their country out of isolation, and to restore the fragile links between China and a skeptical Western world.

  Shortly after his appointment in November 1989, Jiang invited me for a conversation in which he cast events through the lens of returning to traditional diplomacy. He could not understand why China’s reaction to a domestic challenge had caused a rupture of relations with the United States. “There are no big problems between China and the U.S. except Taiwan,” he insisted. “We have no border disputes; on the Taiwan issue the Shanghai Communiqué established a good formula.” China, he stressed, made no claim that its domestic principles were applicable abroad: “We do not export revolution. But the social system of each country must be chosen by that country. The socialist system in China comes from our own historical position.”

  In any event, China would continue its economic reforms: “So far as China is concerned the door is always open. We are ready to react to any positive gesture by the U.S. We have many common interests.” But reform would have to be voluntary; it could not be dictated from the outside:

  Chinese history proves that greater pressure only leads to greater resistance. Since I am a student of natural sciences I try to interpret things according to laws of natural sciences. China has 1.1 billion people. It is large and has lots of momentum. It is not easy to push it forward. As an old friend, I speak frankly with you.

  Jiang shared his reflections on the Tiananmen Square crisis. The Chinese government had not been “mentally prepared for the event,” he explained, and the Politburo had initially been split. There were few heroes in his version of events—not the student leaders, nor the Party, whom he described ruefully as ineffective and divided in the face of an unprecedented challenge.

  When I saw Jiang again nearly a year later, in September 1990, relations with the United States were still tense. The package deal tying our easing of sanctions to the release of Fang Lizhi had been slow in implementation. In a sense, the disappointments were not surprising given the definition of the problem. The American advocates of human rights insisted on values they considered universal. The Chinese leaders were making some adjustments based on their perceptions of Chinese interests. The American activists, especially some NGOs (nongovernmental organizations), were not inclined to declare their goals fulfilled by partial measures. To them, what Beijing considered concessions implied that their objectives were subject to bargaining and hence not universal. The activists emphasized moral, not political, goals; the Chinese leaders were focused on a continuing political process—above all, in ending the immediate tensions and returning to “normal” relationships. That return to normalcy was exactly what the activists either rejected or sought to make conditional.

  Lately a pejorative adjective has been entered into the debate, dismissing traditional diplomacy as “transactional.” In that view, a constructive long-term relationship with nondemocratic states is not sustainable almost by definition. The advocates of this course start from the premise that true and lasting peace presupposes a community of democratic states. This is why both the Ford administration and the Clinton administration twenty years later failed in obtaining a compromise on the implementation of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment from Congress, even when the Soviet Union and China seemed prepared to make concessions. The activists rejected partial steps and argued that persistence would achieve their ultimate goals. Jiang raised this issue with me in 1990. China had recently “adopted a lot of measures,” motivated importantly by a desire to improve relations with the United States:

  Some of them are matters that even concern purely Chinese domestic issues such as the lifting of martial law in Beijing and in Tibet. We proceeded on these matters from two considerations. The first is that they are testimony to the Chinese domestic stability. Second, we don’t hide the fact that we use these measures to provide a better understanding for U.S.-China relations.

  These moves, in Jiang’s view, had not been reciprocated. Beijing had fulfilled its side of Deng’s proposed package deal but had been met by escalating demands from Congress.

  Democratic values and human rights are the core of America’s belief in itself. But like all values they have an absolute character, and this challenges the element of nuance by which foreign policy is generally obliged to operate. If adoption of American principles of governance is made the central condition for progress in all other areas of the relationship, deadlock is inevitable. At that point, both sides are obliged to balance the claims of national security against the imperatives of their principles of governance. Faced with adamant rejection of the principle in Beijing, the Clinton administration chose to modify its position, as we shall see later in this chapter. The problem then returns to the adjustment of priorities between the United States and its interlocutor—in other words, to “transactional” traditional diplomacy. Or else to a showdown.

  It is a choice that needs to be made and cannot be fudged. I respect those who are prepared to battle for their views of the imperatives of spreading American values. But foreign policy must define means as well as objectives, and if the means employed grow beyond the tolerance of the international framework or of a relationship considered essential for national security, a choice must be made. What we must not do is to minimize the nature of the choice. The best outcome in the American debate would be to combine the two approaches: for the idealists to recognize that principles need to be implemented over time and hence must be occasionally adjusted to circumstance; and for the “realists” to accept that values have their own reality and must be built into operational policies. Such an approach would recognize the many gradations that exist in each camp, which an effort should be made to shade into each other. In practice this goal has often been overwhelmed by the passions of the controversy.