As spring turned to summer, it was time for my long-planned visit to China. Although the United States and China still had significant differences over human rights, religious and political freedom, and other matters, I was looking forward to the trip. I thought Jiang Zemin had done well on his trip to the United States in 1997 and he was eager to have me reciprocate.
The trip was not free of controversy in either country. I would be the first President to go to China since the suppression of pro-democracy forces in Tiananmen Square in 1989. The charges of Chinese attempts to influence the ’96 election had not been resolved. Also, some Republicans were attacking me for allowing American companies to launch commercial satellites into space on Chinese missiles, though the satellite technology was not accessible to the Chinese, and the process had begun under the Reagan administration and continued during the Bush years in order to save money for U.S. companies. Finally, many Americans feared that China’s trade policies and its tolerance of the illegal reproduction and sale of American books, movies, and music were causing job losses in the United States. On the Chinese side, many officials resented our criticism of Chinese human rights policies as interference in their internal affairs, while others believed that, for all my positive talk, American policy was to contain, not cooperate, with China in the twenty-first century. With a quarter of the world’s population and a rapidly growing economy, China was bound to have a profound economic and political impact on America and the world. If at all possible, we had to build a positive relationship. It would have been foolish not to go.
In the week before I left, I nominated UN Ambassador Bill Richardson to succeed Federico Peña as secretary of energy, and Dick Holbrooke to become the new UN ambassador. Richardson, a former congressman from New Mexico, where two of the Energy Department’s important research labs were located, was a natural for the job. Holbrooke had the skills to solve our UN dues problem and the experience and intellect to make a major contribution to our foreign policy team. With trouble brewing in the Balkans again, we needed him.
Hillary, Chelsea, and I arrived in China on the night of June 25, along with Hillary’s mother, Dorothy, and a delegation that included Secretary Albright, Secretary Rubin, Secretary Daley, and six members of Congress, including John Dingell of Michigan, the longest-serving member of the House. John’s presence was important because Michigan’s dependence on the automobile industry made it a center of protectionist sentiment. I was gratified that he wanted to see China firsthand, to make his own judgment about whether China should join the WTO.
We began the trip at the ancient capital of Xi’an, where the Chinese put on an elaborate and beautiful welcoming ceremony. The next day we had the opportunity to walk among the rows of the famous terracotta warriors, and to have a roundtable discussion with Chinese citizens in the small village of Xiahe. We got down to business two days later, when President Jiang Zemin and I met and held a press conference that was televised live all over China. We frankly discussed our differences as well as our commitment to building a strategic partnership. It was the first time the Chinese people had ever seen their leader actually debate issues like human rights and religious liberty with a foreign head of state. Jiang had grown more confident in his ability to deal with such issues in public and he trusted me to disagree in a respectful way, as well as to stress our common interests in ending the Asian financial crisis, advancing nonproliferation, and promoting reconciliation on the Korean peninsula. When I advocated more freedom and human rights in China, Jiang responded that America was highly developed, while China still had a per capita income of $700 a year. He emphasized our different histories, cultures, ideologies, and social systems. When I urged Jiang to meet with the Dalai Lama, he said the door was open if the Dalai Lama would first state that Tibet and Taiwan were part of China, and added that there were already “several channels of communication” with the leader of Tibetan Buddhism. I got a laugh from the Chinese audience when I said I thought that if Jiang and the Dalai Lama did meet, they would like each other very much. I also tried to make some practical suggestions to move forward on human rights. For example, there were still Chinese citizens in prison for offenses no longer on the books. I suggested they be released.
The main point of the press conference was the debate itself. I wanted Chinese citizens to see America supporting human rights that we believe are universal, and I wanted Chinese officials to see that greater openness wouldn’t cause the social disintegration that, given China’s history, they understandably feared. After the state dinner hosted by Jiang Zemin and his wife, Wang Yeping, he and I took turns conducting the People’s Liberation Army Band. The next day my family attended Sunday church services at Chongwenmen Church, Beijing’s earliest Protestant church, one of the few houses of worship the government had sanctioned. Many Christians were meeting secretly in homes. Religious liberty was important to me, and I was pleased when Jiang agreed to let me send a delegation of American religious leaders, including a rabbi, a Catholic archbishop, and an evangelical minister, to pursue the matter further.
After we toured the Forbidden City and the Great Wall, I held a question-and-answer session with students at Beijing University. We discussed human rights in China, but they also asked me about human rights problems in the United States and about what I could do to increase the American people’s understanding of China. These were fair questions from young people who wanted their country to change but were still proud of it.
Premier Zhu Rongji hosted a lunch for the delegation in which we discussed the economic and social challenges facing China, as well as the remaining issues we still had to resolve in order to bring China into the World Trade Organization. I was strongly in favor of doing so, in order to continue China’s integration into the global economy, and to increase both its acceptance of international rules of law and its willingness to cooperate with the United States and other nations on a whole range of other issues. That night President Jiang and Madame Wang invited us to dine alone with them at their official residence, which lay beside a placid lake inside the compound that housed China’s most important leaders. The more time I spent with Jiang, the more I liked him. He was intriguing, funny, and fiercely proud, but always willing to listen to different points of view. Even though I didn’t always agree with him, I became convinced that he believed he was changing China as fast as he could, and in the right direction.
From Beijing we went to Shanghai, which seemed to have more construction cranes than any other city in the world. Hillary and I had a fascinating discussion about China’s problems and potential with a group of younger Chinese, including professors, businesspeople, a consumer advocate, and a novelist. One of the most enlightening experiences of the entire trip was a radio call-in show I did with the mayor. There were some good but predictable questions for me on economic and security matters, but the mayor got more questions than I did; his callers were interested in better education and more computers, and worried about the traffic congestion as a result of the city’s growing prosperity and expansion. It struck me that if citizens were complaining to the mayor about traffic jams, Chinese politics was evolving in the right direction.