bodyType

customContents

entityId

entityUuid

articlePageQuery

filter

article

articleBaseAdvertisingInfoArticle

articleListArticle

articleSeoArticle

helpersCheckIsPostiesArticle

hooksArticleAcknowledgementGateOverlayArticle

hooksTrackPageViewArticle

hooksContentInterestArticle

articleLinkingDataContent

hooksAmpRedirectArticle

articleSchemaContent

liveArticle

advertZone

sentiment

contentLock

topics

types

sections

moreOnThisArticles

urlAlias

commentCount

authorLocations

authors

paywallTypes

corrections

sponsorType

displaySlideShow

multimediaEmbed

printHeadline

seriesContainer

socialHeadline

headline

flag

firstTopic

glossary

flattenTypeIds

publishedDate

additionalInfoBoxes

images

image

relatedLinks

relatedNewsletters

__typename

createdDate

sponsor

pdfFiles

seriesReverseOrder

series

disableOffPlatformContent

published

updatedDate

summary

subHeadline

body

keywords

readingTime

customTimezone

liveContents

Harvey Stockwin

FORMER US President Richard Nixon has added his voice to the rising conservative lobby pushing for the retention of Most Favoured Nation (MFN) status for China.

  Fresh from his recent tours of Russia,Korea, Japan, and China, Mr Nixon engrossed his audience with his views on Asia after the Cold War at a conference in Los Angeles on US-Japan relations.

  ''The communists have lost the Cold War but the West has not yet won it,'' said Nixon as he outlined the different ways in which the four Great Powers - Russia, China, Japan and the United States - could weaken or destabilise the prospects for peace in East Asia.

  When it came to China, Nixon first recounted its ''fantastic progress'' - ''China's GNP growth was last year the highest in the world, 12.8 per cent, while over the last 10 years per capita income has tripled.

  ''But there is a downside to this which we have to consider. While there has been substantial and very great economic reform in China, there has been hardly any political reform.

  ''The question is - what shall we do about it? The answer is, what we should not do is to revoke China's MFN status''.

  Senate majority leader George Mitchell and California Representative Nancy Pelosi had just introduced before the US Congress another bill making MFN renewal strictly conditional, and Mr Nixon took aim in their direction.

  ''President Bush vetoed several attempts to do this. He was right to do so and President Clinton should do exactly the same if a bill comes to his desk''.

  President Nixon then carefully outlined why MFN should not be revoked.

  Look around (Asia) . . . economic progress inevitably leads to political progress because with economic progress you must open up, and as you open up, freedom is very very explosive.

  ''(Former British Prime Minister Winston) Churchill once said that 'Russia fears our friendship more than our enmity'. That applies to the hardline leaders in China today. As far as they are concerned the dictatorship cannot survive without secrecy . . .

  ''If you have the free market, and contact with the outside world, that contact makes it impossible for the dictatorship to survive . . . The economic and diplomatic isolation of China is not in China's interest - but it is not in our interests as well.''    From the Hongkong viewpoint, Mr Nixon's words on China raised the question - did they implicitly confirm assertions by left-wing sources in Hongkong that Mr Nixon played a quiet role, in Beijing, encouraging the resumption of Sino-British negotiations and talks over the political future of Hongkong?   Mr Nixon visited Beijing during the week before the resumption of talks was announced, but diplomatic sources have been sceptical of the assertions of a Nixon role.

  Since the New China News Agency in Hongkong received only two hours notice of Beijing's change of policy on the talks, it is suggested that the theory of a Nixon role has been advanced as a face-saver for the NCNA.

   It is also suggested that since China abhors any image of giving in to Mr Patten, deferring to the wishes of an old friend of China like Mr Nixon is preferred as a substitute.

  Against this, Mr Nixon has been uncommonly reticent on his most recent China trip, in contrast to his 1989 visit soon after the Beijing massacre when he was more publicly forthright.

    Clinton Administration officials and US diplomats in Hongkong paid much more attention to the Nixon trip to China than was admitted at that time - even down to the point of one US diplomat getting very angry when the South China Morning Post printed that Mr Nixon would be staying at the Mandarin Hotel. The concern was unusual, suggesting that something of substance was expected as a result of it.

  On his record, Mr Nixon would be only too willing to contribute to the Anglo-American alliance if quietly approached by the British.

  While it has been so far impossible to get complete confirmation of what left-wing sources assert, Mr Nixon's words in Los Angeles are highly suggestive. It is inconceivable that the former President would have said one thing in Los Angeles, and something else again in Beijing.

  From what we already know about Mr Nixon's China diplomacy, he would have told the Chinese leaders that they could only ignore political reform at their own peril.

  In that context, it would have been only a short, easily taken step, for the former President to point out that China risked making itself look foolish in the outside world, and risked losing MFN as well, if it continued to create a diplomatic impasse over modest, not to say minute, democratic reforms in Hongkong.



Beijing may benefit from Nixon's favour