Beijing Needs to Face Reality : Its policies irritate the world, and Taiwan isn’t going away

President Bush, faulted by congressional critics and others over the last three years for being too kind and gentle with China, has now suddenly toughened his stance toward the Beijing regime.

On the friendliest turf he could pick, Bush announced approval in Ft. Worth for the sale of up to 150 F-16 fighters to Taiwan. The $6-billion deal will keep thousands of General Dynamics workers on the job in a state whose electoral votes are crucial to Bush’s reelection hopes. The Bush campaign hardly troubles to deny the political gain sought from this decision. But Bill Clinton, Bush’s Democratic challenger, immediately endorsed the arms sales, effectively removing the issue from the arena of partisan controversy.

CHINA’S ANGER. What outrages Beijing is not that it fears a better-armed Taiwan will threaten its security, but that its view of Taiwan as simply a wayward province now seems to have been implicitly questioned. By dealing with Taiwan, in Beijing’s view, the United States has interfered in China’s internal affairs and strengthened Taiwan’s separatism. This violates two understandings, the first U.S. acceptance 20 years ago of the idea that there is only one China, of which Taiwan is a part, the second in 1982 to phase out U.S arms sales to Taiwan.

Beijing’s argument is not without some substance. Those understandings were reached, and Washington has never retracted its hope that at some point China and Taiwan will peacefully resolve their differences. What vitiates Beijing’s complaint is that both morally and politically it is in no position to accuse others of acting unfaithfully or irresponsibly. As the record so clearly shows, China has not been behaving either at home or abroad in ways calculated to win approval or inspire confidence.

In 1989 it brutally crushed a popular movement that sought only to have stifling intellectual and social restraints eased. Since then--ignoring U.S. and other international human-rights protests--it has continued to imprison and brutalize many who supported that effort.

CHINA’S PROBLEM. China’s behavior in various world trouble spots has similarly left much to be desired. Over the last decade it has helped fuel the fires of regional instability by providing missiles to such countries as Iraq, Iran and Syria. Now, sulking, it threatens to pull out of talks with the other permanent U.N. Security Council members on limiting arms transfers to Third World countries. At the same time China is moving to upgrade its own armed forces. It is this expensive modernization program, particularly the recent purchase of sophisticated Sukhoi 27 fighters from Russia, that provided the strategic rationale for Bush’s decision to sell the F-16s to Taiwan. The argument, for which a respectable case can be made, is that modernization of Taiwan’s wheezy U.S.-supplied air force is needed now to maintain stability in the area.

Bush’s decision was no doubt eased by knowledge that while Beijing might protest loudly, there is little it can effectively do if it wants to avoid further jeopardizing relations. U.S. markets are vital to China; the trade balance this year could be $15 billion in its favor. But China has already been warned that if it doesn’t ease its barriers on the entry of certain U.S. goods by Oct. 10 it faces punitive tariffs on nearly $4 billion of its own products. Meanwhile, strength is gathering in Congress to remove China’s most-favored-nation status unless it acts promptly to improve the human rights of its citizens.

The decision on the F-16 sales, however heavily loaded down with domestic political content, was an overdue signal to China that it would be unwise to take its relationship with the United States for granted. Good relations are of course desirable. No less so is the need for good behavior, and it is not out of line to take measures to emphasize that need.