The Americans burst out laughing–a win for Zhu on his home turf. But will his charms work in Washington, where many politicians now cast China as a devious and powerful rival? Zhu was China’s economic czar and chief central banker before he became prime minister. He is at his weakest on disputes beyond the realm of economics–or precisely the issues that will confront him in Washington. Chinese leaders last week pondered canceling his trip to protest the NATO air war against Yugoslavia, which they cast as an American grab for global “hegemony.” Even if all goes as planned, Zhu will arrive amid U.S. allegations that China is trying to steal American technological secrets, and to intimidate Taiwan with a massive missile buildup. In recent weeks, says a visiting American VIP in Beijing, Zhu has been far from his usual comfortable self: “He seems to be carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.”
In a way, he is. Zhu and other leaders have publicly blamed growing tension between the United States and China on a cabal of right-wing American extremists. In response, American officials have repeatedly warned Beijing that the anti-China mood is not limited to a “bunch of lunatics,” as Daley puts it. Zhu and his reform-minded camp have always understood that. In private, they are “genuinely concerned” that even liberal types who “listen to National Public Radio see the ‘China Threat’ coming back,” says a Western diplomat in Beijing.
So, after a brief stopover in Los Angeles and a meeting with Clinton in Washington, Zhu will head off on a national tour designed mainly to win over the American people. In Denver, Zhu has asked to meet with John Elway and other stars of the Super Bowl champion Broncos football team. He’ll schmooze with media moguls in New York, tour Motorola headquarters in Chicago, and address students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. One unofficial adviser even wants the prime minister to appear on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” America’s most famous platform for softball questions.
Even there, Zhu would have to answer cautiously. Though hailed abroad as the face of the new China, he has real weaknesses at home. He has little base of support in the military, which makes it difficult for him to deviate from the party script on security issues like NATO’s war in Kosovo. Publicly, he supports hard-liners who see the war as a dangerous precedent for Western interference in Tibet or Taiwan. While Zhu was meeting Daley, anti-NATO protesters shattered a window at a McDonald’s restaurant in Beijing. According to the state-run China Daily, Zhu delivered a lengthy demand that NATO bombing must cease immediately.
Zhu’s personal sense of priorities might be quite different, however. As one American recalled the Daley meeting, Zhu offered only a brief, “desultory and totally cover-your-ass” admonition against the airstrikes. “I was reading [the China Daily] and I said, ‘Maybe I fell asleep and missed that’,” Daley later recalled. “Then everybody else in the group was asking, ‘Zhu didn’t say that, did he?’ No, he never said it.”
Zhu’s vow to tell the plain truth is not so simple to deliver in a diplomatic environment many Chinese officials now liken to the cold war. Zhu must tread carefully. At a press conference last month, he responded to charges that China had moved more than 150 missiles to the coast facing Taiwan by asking, “How do you know how many there are if even I don’t?” He dismissed charges that China stole U.S. nuclear-warhead secrets as “a fantasy, like something out of the Arabian Nights.” As one Western diplomat saw it, Zhu’s remarks were aimed at placating his hard-line critics at home, but at the risk of further alienating Washington: “He needs to remember that the whole world is watching,” said the diplomat.
What can Zhu possibly say to satisfy hawks in both Beijing and Washington? He has no more room for verbal maneuvering on human rights. Beijing is widening a crackdown against dissidents, hoping to impose calm on the 10th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre this June. In response, Washington has said it will revive a resolution critical of China at the annual meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva, which began March 22. As usual, Beijing screamed that America was meddling in its affairs, and Zhu can do no less than reiterate those protests. “The topic is difficult for Zhu because human-rights policies are so sensitive they’re handled directly by President Jiang Zemin, not Zhu,” observed one Chinese America-watcher, “Zhu can only focus on economic policies while he’s in the U.S.”
He can’t expect dramatic progress on the economic front, either. Both sides had hoped to cap Zhu’s visit with a grand deal allowing China to enter the World Trade Organization in return for opening its market to more U.S. goods. In last-minute haggling, Beijing so far had not gone far enough to satisfy Washington, partly for fear of provoking a backlash from Chinese workers. Already unemployment and labor unrest are on the rise, and many officials fear that opening the economy to foreign owners would make matters worse. After police in Hunan shot a labor protester this February, Zhu ordered security forces not to open fire on civilians again, says a Chinese official. But who knows what will happen next time? “Zhu is considering all these concessions… which are going to have an incredible impact on state-owned enterprises,” observed Daley. “He’s making himself politically very vulnerable right now.”
Zhu built his reputation as Asia’s savviest economic manager by whipping inflation in the mid-’90s, then steering China through the Asian currency crisis relatively unscathed. But recently, he had to admit that the regional environment remains “quite grim.” Hard-line rivals in the Politburo have seized on the signs of weakness, ridiculing Zhu’s ambitious target of 7 percent growth in 1999. With China’s banks among the most troubled in Asia and its heavy industries awash in red ink, Zhu is in a poor position to press ahead with reform. In private, Zhu’s U.S.-educated son Levin has told acquaintances: “If you think my father can singlehandedly save the country, you’re dreaming. Things are so much worse than you think.”
Things will be even worse if Zhu ends up personifying the image of a big, bad China that is now catching hold in the American popular imagination. Xue Mouhong, an expert on American affairs at Qinghua University, adds a plea to Washington Republicans to tone down the anti-China rhetoric. “Please let our premier have a successful trip,” he says. That’s a nice thought, but Zhu needs luck as well as charisma to make it happen.
