U.S., China ‘Let Off Steam’ in Talks

BEIJING —  Secretary of State Madeleine Albright paraphrased Charles Dickens on Tuesday in assessing the perilous state of affairs between Washington and Beijing.

“All told, it’s fair to say that in our relations with China, these are neither the best of times nor the worst of times,” Albright told reporters at the close of two days of turbulent meetings with China’s ruling elite.

But the former professor also could have cited Shakespeare, for this surely has been a winter of discontent between the world’s most powerful nation and the world’s most populous one.

Albright’s meetings were overshadowed by sharp U.S. criticism of the Communist regime’s latest attempts to crush any organized political opposition, and by Beijing’s angry complaints about accelerated American plans to develop and possibly deploy advanced missile-defense systems on China’s periphery.

The result was less a calm meeting of minds than “both sides letting off steam,” said a U.S. official who took part in the talks. “We had some very rough moments. . . . We’re in a rocky period.”

After weeks of harsh headlines in the United States about China’s human rights abuses, a ballistic-missile buildup, the country’s attempts to buy satellite technology and other irritants, Albright said her “central message” was to reassure Beijing that the United States “remains strongly committed to principled and purposeful engagement with China.”

The unstated agenda called for lowering anxiety levels on both sides before Premier Zhu Rongji visits the White House next month. But even if no new accords or breakthroughs were expected during Albright’s visit, there was still little visible progress on issues of key U.S. concern.

Albright failed, for example, to win a pledge from Zhu to bring what a U.S. aide called “deliverables” when he comes to Washington.

Albright specifically urged Zhu to halt the suppression of dissent and to release political prisoners--especially the more than 250 students and others imprisoned in the wake of the bloody crackdown on protesters around Tiananmen Square 10 years ago--as a goodwill gesture before his trip to Washington.

She also suggested that Zhu put into Chinese law guidelines listed in the Missile Transfer Control Regime, an international effort to curb proliferation of missiles capable of delivering weapons of mass destruction. China has pledged to abide by the regime but has not formally joined.

In both cases, said a senior Clinton administration official, Zhu “paid attention but made no commitments.”

China also did little to ease U.S. concerns about North Korea, Beijing’s longtime ally. Albright urged China to assume a greater role in efforts to stop Pyongyang’s ballistic-missile tests and exports, as well as to persuade North Korea to allow U.S. inspection of a suspected nuclear facility.

“They sort of straddled the line,” a senior administration official said. He said the Chinese neither denied any influence with the Kim Jong Il regime, as they have in the past, nor claimed that they could turn the situation around.

For their part, the Chinese bitterly complained about U.S. plans to develop still-unproven technology for a missile-defense system in northeast Asia. “They are furious about [it],” another U.S. official said. “They are very, very concerned, and they took every opportunity to tell us so.”

Albright also tried to set the stage for the visit today of U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky. The chief trade negotiator will bring a proposal in what appears to be a do-or-die attempt to craft a compromise to allow China into the World Trade Organization, which sets global trading rules.

“There is not a game plan for additional steps to take after Ambassador Barshefsky’s visit,” a senior U.S. official said. “We’ll just have to see where we are. . . . There’s no specific plans for follow-up meetings.”

China has been unwilling to lower tariffs and make other market concessions necessary for WTO membership, frustrating Washington’s efforts to reduce the U.S. trade deficit with China, now running more than $1 billion per week. Unless a deal is struck soon, changes in WTO application rules and the cyclone of U.S. presidential election politics will make China’s accession far more difficult.

Albright said the most difficult topic in her discussions was human rights. She said the Chinese leaders “expressed unhappiness” with what they called U.S. interference in their internal affairs, as well as a State Department report Friday that detailed widespread abuses last year.

“The United States will never apologize for speaking or publishing the truth,” she said firmly.

But Albright also sought to put a positive spin on her visit. She noted that President Clinton and Chinese President Jiang Zemin agreed at their Beijing summit in June to engage in a candid dialogue on human rights.

“In the last two days, we have seen what a candid dialogue looks like,” Albright said with a grin.