As a presidential candidate in 1992, Bill Clinton certainly talked a big game about confronting the communist regime in Beijing. He accused the incumbent, President George H. W. Bush, of sending “secret emissaries to raise a toast with those who crushed democracy” in Tiananmen Square.46
After Clinton’s election as president, the tough talk continued, at least for a few months. Writing in 1998, Carl M. Cannon of the National Journal reviewed the sad history of Clinton’s attempts to hold China’s communists to account: “In March of 1993, Clinton dispatched a letter to Beijing listing 14 areas in which he wanted to see improvement in return for his Administration’s support for continued Most-Favored-Nation trading status for China. Incensed, Chinese leaders fired back a letter listing seven areas in which they wanted to see changes in American policy.” In May of that year, Clinton announced that he would extend MFN for another year even though his conditions hadn’t been met.47
The following year Clinton again made a series of requests tied to the renewal of China’s most-favored-nation trading status. China’s communist regime rejected those, too, but once again Clinton approved the trade relationship. Cannon observed: “A pattern had been established for the Clinton era. Washington gives Beijing a shove, Beijing shoves back, harder. Washington says: Let’s shake hands and be friends.”
By 1996 the relationship had gotten scandalously friendly when a Chinese arms dealer named Wang Jun attended a fundraising coffee with Clinton at the White House. Clinton later blamed the White House vetting system, and Democrats had to return various illicit contributions tied to the People’s Republic.
After a 1998 visit to China, Clinton imagined or pretended—like so many other U.S. politicians from both parties—that democracy and freedom were just around the corner in China: “I visited a village that chooses its own leaders in free elections. I saw cell phones and computers carrying ideas, information, and images around the world. I had the opportunity to talk directly to the Chinese people through national television about why we value human rights and individual freedom so highly. I joined more than 2,000 people in worship in a Beijing church. I spoke to the next generation of China’s leaders at Beijing University; to people working for change in law, academia, business, and the arts; to average Chinese during a radio call-in show.”48
What now seems an especially bitter irony is that Clinton was sharing his happy talk about his visit to the Chinese mainland in a place that is currently being relentlessly pulled under the yoke of Beijing’s tyranny. The president said, “Here in Hong Kong we end the trip where I hope China’s future begins, a place where free expression and free markets flourish under the rule of law.”49
Clinton also had plenty of kind words for the Chinese leadership and their wisdom and intellect. A year later a declassified version of a top secret report from the U.S. House Select Committee on U.S. National Security/Military Commercial Concerns with the People’s Republic of China was released. The report from Chairman Christopher Cox’s committee reads in part:
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has stolen design information on the United States’ most advanced thermonuclear weapons.
The Select Committee judges that the PRC’s next generation of thermonuclear weapons, currently under development, will exploit elements of stolen U.S. design information.…
The stolen U.S. nuclear secrets give the PRC design information on thermonuclear weapons on a par with our own.…
The stolen information also includes classified design information for an enhanced radiation weapon (commonly known as the “neutron bomb”), which neither the United States, nor any other nation, has yet deployed.…
The W-88, a miniaturized, tapered warhead, is the most sophisticated nuclear weapon the United States has ever built. In the U.S. arsenal, it is mated to the D-5 submarine-launched ballistic missile carried aboard the Trident nuclear submarine. The United States learned about the theft of the W-88 Trident D-5 warhead information, as well as about the theft of information regarding several other nuclear weapons, in 1995.50
After all the misplaced hopes about China among U.S. politicians over the years, the United States fortunately remains in a strong competitive position. JPMorgan Chase chairman Jamie Dimon’s firm serves clients in more than one hundred countries. In December 2019 the Chinese government gave JPMorgan Chase permission to hold majority ownership of its Chinese securities business. U.S. banks will receive more freedom to operate there if the Chinese government honors the Phase One deal it signed with Trump. Dimon cautions against overstating the challenge presented by China, telling us, “We should want China to grow peacefully and for it to prosper. It’s good for the world and good for China’s people if they do succeed. But keep in mind, and I don’t say this disrespectfully, that they don’t have enough food, water, or energy right now. They don’t have our transparency. They don’t have our financial markets. There is a significant amount of corruption. They don’t have our peaceful neighbors and the security of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Their neighbors are very, very tough and complicated, including Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Vietnam, Pakistan, India, Russia, Japan, North Korea, Mongolia. Their demographics are tough.”
On this last point he’s referring to China’s rapidly aging citizenry. The regime brutally enforced a one-child-per-family policy for decades in an attempt to control its population. The result is that China’s working-age population peaked several years ago and will continue to decline.
Is he concerned about Chinese banks stealing JPMorgan Chase’s tech and taking market share? “The Chinese banks will be global competitors. They’re around the world now. But banks like ours still lead in terms of capability—the ability to move money, research, technology, advice, [artificial intelligence], machine learning. But as long as the Chinese compete fairly, I think that that’s fine. I’m one of those people who thinks America shouldn’t be afraid of the competition from China or anywhere. It makes us all better.”
Dimon adds, “Our infrastructure, our schools, our military, our economy—this country is far ahead in terms of innovation, growth, and capability;
