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By Christopher Hitchens

June 17, 1999 | WASHINGTON -- Why does President Clinton not emulate his role model, Richard Nixon (at whose funeral he was so husky and forgiving), and deflect domestic and foreign criticism by claiming that his administration's incredible generosity to China -- from nuclear proliferation to human rights to free trade to national security to campaign finance -- constitutes a Nixonian "opening to China," the gambit that earned Clinton's almost-impeached predecessor his legacy?

It's not as if there haven't been quite a number of openings. On numerous crucial elements of administration conduct, the footprint of Beijing is so large as to be unmissable. We hear incessantly from the White House and the State Department and the Pentagon that China is now a "strategic partner." Strategy implies coordination and deliberation. Partnership implies concert. Very well, then, let us inquire: Are the different elements of Clinton's China policy all part of the same design? For some reason, the question when phrased in this way is treated as unwelcome by government spokesmen, who would (oddly enough) prefer us to think of China policy as random, or at least improvised, but by no means as something that can be taken as all of a piece.

I recently spent an absorbing evening in the company of Wei Jingsheng, who is probably the most senior Chinese dissident and certainly the most respected. Born into a family that was well-connected in Communist Party and People's Liberation Army (PLA) circles, Wei developed doubts during the Cultural Revolution. In 1978, during the brief moment of Beijing's "Democracy Wall," he posted a manifesto replying to Deng Xiaopeng's proposed "four modernizations" -- of agriculture, industry, science and national defense. There was, argued Wei, a missing "fifth modernization" -- the introduction of democracy and free expression. He signed the poster with his name and address, and for this and other impertinences was sentenced to death in 1979. His sentence was later commuted to 15 years imprisonment, which he served in the most harrowing conditions. Released and rearrested in 1993, he was deported into exile in 1997. He now makes his home in New York, and was recently elected chairman of the umbrella opposition group, the Joint Conference on Chinese Democracy. We met at a commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the Tienanmen massacre.

"In my opinion," he said, "all the aspects of the administration policy towards China are related. The Clinton policy is made more in Beijing than it is in Washington. The multinational corporations have become the vanguard of the Chinese Communist Party." He points to the official "de-linking" of human rights from trade policy; the ease with which China has been able to acquire military sinews from the United States, and the extraordinary way in which money from the Chinese military-industrial complex has been able to enter the American political process.

Is there, then, a connection to be intuited between the Chinese espionage at nuclear laboratories, and the lavish disbursement of off-the-record funds? Wei says that this remains to be proven -- the espionage would have gone on anyway, and so would the funneling of political money, and the two operations would have been directed by different departments of the Chinese state.

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