Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, July 12, 1990 TAG: 9007120407
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-15 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ROBERT BENJAMIN
DATELINE: BEIJING LENGTH: Long
Consider from their vantage this rough chronology of major events here the past two months:
Archrival Taiwan gave up its four-decade-long policy of no direct contact with the mainland in proposing talks on direct communication and transportation links - catching up to the reality of cash-flush Taiwanese businessmen stampeding to invest via Hong Kong hundreds of millions of dollars into China's coastal provinces.
The Bush administration recommended renewing for one year China's favorable trade status with the United States, thereby supporting low tariffs for China's $12 billion of annual exports to America.
The June 3-4 anniversary of last year's brutal military crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators passed with some tension in the capital but hardly a sign of substantive dissent here or elsewhere in China.
Inflation - the historically feared nemesis of China's economic life - has hit a two-year low. And recently released foreign trade statistics for the first three months of this year show an 11.6 percent increase in China's exports over the same period last year and a 13.7 percent decrease in its imports. These trends reaffirm to a great degree the regime's austerity campaign of the last 1 1/2 years.
Fang Lizhi, China's best-known dissident and a major problem for relations with the United States since he took refuge in the U.S. Embassy here more than a year earlier, was allowed to leave for Britain - in a slick arrangement that American diplomats considered a victory but that also does not appear to have resulted in much loss of face for China.
Indonesia, the world's fifth most populous nation and an international political player of growing importance, agreed last week to restore diplomatic relations with China after almost 23 years without official ties. The small but economically powerful nations of Singapore and Brunei are likely to follow in developing formal ties with the Chinese.
Just before the economic summit of seven major industrialized nations got under way this week in Houston, the United States agreed that it would not interfere in Japan's plan to resume a multibillion-dollar lending program desperately needed by China. At the summit, Western leaders agreed to slightly ease restrictions on aid to China.
While this list ignores some decidedly negative realities from the point of view of the regime at China's helm - not the least of which are a profound loss of legitimacy as a result of last year's killings and wide discontent spawned by rising unemployment - it nonetheless adds up to a far more successful political picture than that proffered by many Western-oriented observers.
And in many ways, it represents real testimony to the efficacy of a set of high-level policies adopted over the last year by China's leadership, policies neatly subsumed by the Chinese phrase "nei jin, wai song," meaning roughly "internal hardness, external softness."
In Western terms, these policies boil down to a cynical, two-faced stance, one that strikes a stern, Stalinist-style posture with respect to China's people while adopting a relaxed, welcoming pose in China's external relations.
But in Chinese terms, "nei jin, wai song" is as single-minded as another, related Chinese notion - the more-than-100-year-old concept of taking technology and capital from the more advanced Western nations while erecting barriers to incursions of Western political and cultural life.
Thus daily calls in China's official media for tight internal control, absolute supremacy of the Chinese Communist Party and strict adherence to the socialist road are easily accompanied by regular statements underscoring China's openness to the world's businessmen and its solemn desire for friendship with other nations that happen to be avowedly capitalist.
Thus there is no contradiction here between a stepped-up public security drive that has led to the execution of at least 1,000 criminals in the last 10 months, at times for relatively petty crimes, and the "lenient" and "humanitarian" treatment that China claims it has accorded Fang and other released dissidents, who have remained the focus of Western political concerns.
More such "presents" - as Chinese Premier Li Peng recently characterized the release of Fang to a visiting West German Parliament member - and more friendly statements to the West are likely to be forthcoming from the Chinese in the near future. Beijing and Hong Kong are rife with rumors that certain other political prisoners either have already been released or will shortly be freed.
From the perspective of China's leaders, such leniency is now feasible because they have succeeded in bringing back to their society a form of internal social stability, albeit such a fragile, fearful form that it must be continually blared from every media outlet in the land and may once more have to be enforced by military might.
Indeed, having at least temporarily cowed more than a billion people into a state of submission that translates into virtually no human rights save for some quiet expressions of free speech among only the most trusted friends and colleagues, the remaining test of the power of "nei jin, wai song" seems only to be how it will play with other nations.
Already, there are more than enough signs here for China's old men to believe that much of the world is well on the way toward forgiving them their internal hardness in exchange for their external softness.
The annual rate of increase of foreign investment in China remains down in comparison to the boom years of the 1980s, but arrivals of large trade delegations from West Germany and from Taiwan, Japan and other Asian neighbors have become commonplace once again.
A few weeks ago, a Japanese bank reportedly broke an unofficial national ban by lending the Chinese $126 million to buy a Boeing 747 airplane. A British foreign minister plans to confer here with his Chinese counterparts later this month, breaching the European Community's suspension last year of high-level visits. South Korean reports say that country's president, Roh Tae Woo, will make an unprecedented visit to China later this year.
The Beijing representative of a Western public relations firm says her company has had more inquiries in the last few weeks from American companies wanting to do business in China than during the entire previous year.
Slowly but perceivably, the world is coming around to China again.
by CNB