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.