It was a short list. Mexico, of course, and often; a couple of South American countries during his days in the oil business; the U.K. during his student years; a trip to China with his brothers and sister when his father headed the U.S. mission there in 1974-75. “And Japan,” Bush added. Japan?
“Yeah,” he said, “on the way to China.”
Of course he had a point: You can tell a lot about a country by changing planes there.
A year and a half later, George W. Bush is still the man he was then: a guy who knows Texas like the back of his hand, his own country reasonably well, but the rest of the world hardly at all.
Now, of course, he’s facing a diplomatic crisis complex enough to make a Henry Kissinger squirm: the standoff with China over the downed American spy plane. His lack of driving curiosity about the world could be a problem now. Bush has little independent knowledge to use in judging what could well be conflicting advice from his aides.
As he has throughout his career, Bush will look to the lessons and example of his own father for guidance in how to handle the first crisis of his presidency. Is he burning up the phone lines to Dad? He should be. His father is the most knowledgeable China hand in the Bush inner circle. The challenge is daunting. Cut a deal with the Chinese without looking weak in the world, and without alienating the right wing of his own party here at home.
Ironically, Bush probably has spent as much time in China as in any other single foreign country, but there’s no evidence that he made any real effort there to study that ancient land or that his visit made a particularly deep impression. Bush is just that kind of fellow: He only wants to know as much as he needs to know at any given moment.
And in the fall of 1975, he didn’t feel the need to know a lot about China. He had just graduated from the Harvard Business School, and he was on his way back to Midland, Texas, to plunge into the oil business. He joined his brothers and sister in Beijing for a July 4 picnic and family reunion at the U.S. mission, where his father had been posted by President Ford in the fall of 1974.
For W, the ultimate homebody and family loyalist, the point of the trip was not to see China but to see his parents and his siblings. There were daytrips and hikes and a trip to a seaside resort. Bush was less interested in ancient dynasties than in playing tennis or pingpong. Plus, the dusty Beijing climate made him sick, and he had to have a tooth drilled in a Chinese hospital. He was 29 and single, starting (finally) a real career. “He is able,” he father wrote in his diary. “If he gets his teeth into something permanent or semi-permanent, he will do just fine.”
Bush the Elder, of course, was paying close attention to China. And what he found both impressed and disturbed him. He was drawn to the Chinese ceremoniousness and courtesy, and, above all, to their love of family. He was repelled by their penchant for harshly antagonistic propaganda and the savage treatment of political dissenters. “What is their real heartbeat?” he asked himself in his diary.
Overall, Bush Senior fell into the “engagement” camp, which argued then and now that the Chinese will be set free by the forces of free trade and that the Chinese need to be left to their own devices to decide what to do about Taiwan. That theory had the additional advantage of being popular with the Big Business wing of the Republican Party, which in the intervening years has turned China trade into big cash. “I don’t think the United States has anything to fear from China,” Senior wrote in 1975. A quarter century later, there may be much more to fear. It’s up to his son to figure out how much more.
W, in all things, has sought to benefit from his father’s standing and ties–and to avoid his mistakes. One lesson: stay on good terms with the GOP right. So far, Bush has been more than accommodating. Conservatives now are lauding Bush as the most conservative president of modern times, and liberals are more than eager to agree.
Now comes the first big test for Bush and the right, which views China as the locus of evil on the planet, now that the Soviet Union is gone. They loathe its repression of religion and speech, its encouragement of abortion, its communist economic doctrines. During the GOP primaries last year, Bush easily swatted away criticism that he came from a soft-on-China family tradition. The only foe who made a big deal of the issue was Gary Bauer, an earnest guy but no political colossus.
Bush argued, as his father once had, that trade and “engagement” is the best way to free China. But now the right will watch Bush closely, looking for signs that family ties run deeper than policy. So far, Bush is talking tough. He’s a fan of the Texas Rangers (both the team and the state police force). “One riot, one Ranger,” is their law-enforcement slogan, and Bush is proud to wear a silver belt buckle given to him by that unique unit of officers. Bush has sought to project the Texas Ranger image, striding alone into the Rose Garden to issue warnings to the Chinese leaders over in the Great Hall of the People.
But is he talking too tough?
His father’s example could be instructive. After the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein, Bush the Elder did no public sabre-rattling. Instead, he used a lifetime of contacts to assemble one of the biggest military alliances in modern history, and blasted the Iraqis back to Baghdad. This is obviously a far different situation but the same lesson might well apply: Don’t talk the talk if you can’t walk the walk. Do we really want to set U.S.-Chinese relations back a quarter century? You have to be prepared to make good on the threat. I’m no China hand (I spent a week there three years ago), but I did hang around the Great Hall long enough to grasp the obvious point that the Chinese may well be the most nationalistic, prickly and saving-face-obsessed people on the planet.
They have seen dynasties come and go, for eons. Like Mafia dons, they want Respect. They do not respond well to being publicly backed into a corner by someone they don’t know, someone who hasn’t really spent any time getting to know them.
