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Bush's New Focus Requires a Shift in His China Policy

Bush's New Focus Requires a Shift in His China Policy

Author: David E. Sanger
Publication: The New York Times
Date: October 18, 2001

President Bush, who came into office just months ago talking of China as a "strategic competitor," departed for Shanghai today on a trip expected to complete a significant shift in his policy toward Beijing as he seeks to build, maintain and expand a global coalition against terrorism.

The importance attached to Mr. Bush's appearance at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, where he will meet with the leaders of both Russia and China, was clear simply from the fact that the president was taking the trip while his nation was at war and coping with spreading anthrax attacks. When President Bill Clinton was ordering the bombing of Iraq three years ago, he skipped the meeting.

But Mr. Bush made plain that his focus would not be the trade issues that traditionally dominate the Asian gathering.

"Of course we'll talk about economics and trade," he told Air Force personnel and their families during a stopover visit here. "But the main thing that will be on my mind is to continue to rally the world against terrorists," and to remind other leaders "that evil knows no borders."

The events of the last five weeks have made it critical for Mr. Bush to develop ties with China that more closely resemble the "strategic partnership" envisaged by President Clinton and once openly disdained by President Bush.

All talk of strategic competition has been omitted from Mr. Bush's comments, officials say, and his aides have quietly sanded away all the hard edges from the message he will deliver to his Chinese hosts in his visit, starting on Thursday.

"You won't hear much about dissidents, or Taiwan, or the dust-up with the spy plane," one close adviser to Mr. Bush said this week, referring to the incident last spring when a Chinese fighter hit an EP-3 surveillance plane, forcing it to land. "He can't afford that now. The Chinese have never been in a better mood to rebuild their relationship with Washington, and they know that now the president needs them, too."

James Steinberg, the deputy national security adviser under Mr. Clinton, said, "You'll never hear the words strategic competitor again."

While conservative Republicans called for a far tougher stance against China and a shift favoring Taiwan earlier this year, they have been silent in the weeks leading up to the Asian trip, mainly, some say, because their focus is elsewhere.

Mr. Bush, on his first trip to Asia since visiting China when his father was envoy to Beijing a quarter century ago, will meet President Jiang Zemin on Friday.

The breadth of Mr. Bush's plans for the months ahead will provide the subtext of that meeting and others during three days of intense diplomacy with 20 nations.

While many Asian and Pacific governments have supported his counterterrorism plans - Australia even said it would send troops, and Japan has offered logistical support - a backlash is already taking place on the streets of several countries.

The Chinese want to redefine terrorism to provide a further justification for their crackdown on Muslim Uighur separatists and Tibetan independence supporters - people who might have been known in Mr. Bush's Washington, until a few weeks ago, as dissidents.

Russia's president, Vladimir V. Putin, who will meet with Mr. Bush on Sunday, also sees his new cooperation with the president as leverage. He has already won a change of wording from the White House, which noted the participation of Al Qaeda terrorists in Chechnya, and he hopes to beat back the administration's plans to abandon the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty.

Another leader in attendance will be the new president of Indonesia, Megawati Sukarnoputri, leader of the world's most populous Muslim nation. She has made clear to Washington that while she condemned the Sept. 11 attacks, she cannot sign any declaration endorsing the war in Afghanistan.

Other leaders, led by Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia, who has his own problems with resurgent hard-line Muslims, have been highly critical of the American military action.

Mr. Bush's aides are scrambling to find a middle ground at the summit meeting with a declaration against terrorism that leaves every country free to define how it pursues that mission. Mr. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, acknowledged recently that Mr. Bush had to be careful about giving other nations too much rope.

"It is clear our job is to make certain that we continue to draw a line in all of our discussions between legitimate dissent or legitimate movements for the rights of minorities," Ms. Rice said, "and the fact that there may be international terrorists in various parts of the world."

The diplomatic task facing Mr. Bush is complex. Internal divisions run deep in a grouping that embraces countries as suspicious of American intentions as Vietnam, as eager to join the fight as Australia and as jittery as Taiwan.

Overarching all of this political dissonance is a problem Mr. Bush has rarely discussed but will have to confront here: a global economic downturn that has gained speed since Sept. 11 and has yet to be met with a coordinated response.

It is hard to overestimate how the twin economic downturns in Japan and the United States affect Asia's export-oriented fortunes. Many of Asia's weakest economies are reeling, including some that never fully recovered - and never really reformed - after the economic crisis of 1997 and 1998.

This might be the first economic summit meeting in memory for which an administration did not offer a briefing about its economic strategy - another sign that Mr. Bush's focus was almost entirely on terrorism.
 


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