29 July 2001
Chinese Unswayed as Powell Pushes U.S. Missile Shield
By JANE PERLEZ
The New York Times

The secretary met separately with President Jiang Zemin and Prime Minister Zhu Rongji in the administration's highest-level talks yet.

The meeting, intended to lay the groundwork for a visit by President Bush in October, came after months of tension over the emergency landing of an American spy plane in China, American weapons sales to Taiwan, and China's arrest of several scholars with ties to the United States.

But with release of two of those scholars, who were convicted of espionage, as Mr. Powell headed toward China, Beijing had paved the way for seemingly pleasant encounters today.

After their meeting both sides, using nearly identical language, said they looked forward to building "constructive" relations. But the administration's plans for a missile shield, which Beijing fears could undercut its small nuclear arsenal, clearly remained a big obstacle.

"I tried to make a comprehensive case of the president's strategy," the secretary said at a news conference after his day of meetings. "They listened carefully. I'm sure we will have many more conversations on this subject because they have a different view of it."

The secretary said he had tried to offer assurances that the missile defense system would not negate China's status as a nuclear power. "I told them that our plans with respect to missile defense are for a limited missile defense," he said. He also tried to persuade the Chinese that such a shield would not undermine the arsenals of either China or Russia.

The secretary's explanation was the highest-level presentation of the issue that China's leaders have heard.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Sun Yuxi, who attended all the meetings, did not repeat China's outright opposition to the plan, but said that if Washington was ready to continue with consultations, China "is open to hearing U.S. views." China's goal, he said, was for "constructive, cooperative relations."

The secretary himself helped set the stage for today's generally positive atmosphere in the last few weeks by conspicuously dropping references to China as a "strategic competitor."

He said today that he represented the "advance party" for President Bush in October, when Mr. Bush is to attend an economic conference of Asian-Pacific leaders in Shanghai, and then proceed to Beijing.

Mr. Powell received a warm welcome from Mr. Jiang, who greeted him at the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square by saying, "Your reputation goes before you."

But he chided his visitor for staying only a day and not visiting Shanghai and Xian, where terra-cotta warriors created in 221 B.C. are a major attraction.

But any discomfort the Chinese felt about the brevity of the visit may have been overcome by the secretary's enthusiasm for all the new buildings he saw from his limousine window as he sped up and down a highway on his round of appointments. The buildings, he said, illustrated the strides China has made since he last visited in 1983, and the "gifted, skilled political leadership that would move the country in that direction."

In another warm note, the secretary said he congratulated Mr. Jiang on China's successful effort to be host for the 2008 Olympics. "The United States looks forward to seeing the changes in the next seven years that this historic event is bound to stimulate," he said.

Along with congratulations, the statement implied the administration's hope that the Beijing government would feel impelled to improve its human rights record as the world's attention focused on China.

The secretary said he brought up human rights at every meeting, and had made a point of introducing his Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, Lorne W. Craner.

But he said he did not raise the specific cases of people in detention, preferring to deal with the subject generically. It was more important, he said, to raise the broader question of the rule of law. "I don't think that message was missed by my interlocutors," the secretary said.

The scope of the differences on human rights will be discussed in a formal dialogue that will be resumed in the coming months, Secretary Powell said. Such talks were held for a while during the Clinton administration and then suspended several years ago after the NATO bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during the war with Yugoslavia.

Human Rights Watch said today, however, that it was unimpressed by the resumption of the talks, saying that in the past the dialogue had been "pro forma."

On China's sale of missiles and weapons technology to other nations - another major issue on which the secretary was looking for progress - the two sides agreed to hold more talks among experts on both sides. Mr. Powell said the administration was holding up the licensing of the sale of American communication satellites to China until Beijing improved its record on the issue.

Officials traveling with the secretary said specifically that China had failed to live up to pledges last November to curb sales of missile components and technology. Once it did so, Washington would move forward with the satellite sales.

Secretary Powell said that he raised "specific transfers" of missiles and technology today, but declined to say which sales concerned him most. Previously, administration officials have said they were most concerned about sales of missile components to Pakistan.

The top Chinese leadership has insisted that it is committed to ending the sales but appears unable or unwilling to carry through on its pledges, a senior Bush administration official said before the secretary left Washington for Beijing.

The perennial question of Taiwan and American arms sales there was raised, too, officials said, with the two sides reiterating their opposing positions.

The secretary said that the sales gave Taiwan the "confidence" to engage China and that "hopefully, with that confidence, they can restart dialogue and discussions on cross- straits issues."

The Chinese spokesman, Mr. Sun, said, "The sales of weapons, especially sophisticated weapons, will inevitably benefit the Taiwan independence forces."

The secretary said a bilateral economic commission would meet in Beijing in September. Additionally, a joint military committee, which was used by the administration to defuse the crisis over the American spy plane earlier this year, will hold a special meeting in August, the secretary said.

"So in the course of the day we have come to quite a few agreements on how we can move forward with our dialogue on a full range of issues that the two nations are interested in from trade, proliferation, to human rights to commerce," Mr. Powell said.

The one area notably absent from that list, however, was the administration's plan for a
missile shield.

As the secretary embarked on his trip this week, influential Democrats on Capitol Hill suggested that the distance between the two sides could push China toward an aggressive buildup of its long-range ballistic missiles.

The chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, argued that if China feared that its small arsenal would be undercut, it would rapidly begin expanding it.

A recent unclassified Central Intelligence Agency report said China could respond by multiplying tenfold its number of long-range ballistic missiles. It estimated that China currently had 18 such missiles.

Mr. Biden too warned of a similar outcome this week if the administration rushed forward with an "unproven missile defense program." He said the administration "must work much more closely with China" to ensure that it understood the White House's approach to building a new strategic framework.

Secretary Powell's visit today appeared to be a first step in that direction.