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The Bush Administration's point man on China is Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, a fierce and sometimes combative moderate who was handed the job largely by default. Last week in Beijing he wrapped up the first round of a bilateral dialogue that puts him in the driver's seat of one of Washington's most crucial relationships. But Zoellick has the backing of George Bush, a fellow pragmatist--at least on China--who kids Zoellick for being something of a nerd.
Zoellick can be as imperious as he is intelligent and bookish. His appointment in January by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was applauded by foreign-policy realists as a counterweight to the White House ideologues. With the rest of the President's inner circle focused on the war in Iraq, Zoellick has made several trips to Asia during the last several months, where his aggressive engagement of China and pro-free-trade gospel jars with an increasingly protectionist Congress. Just last week, as Zoellick assured his hosts in Beijing that Washington was eager to strengthen U.S. -China ties, Chinese energy giant Cnooc withdrew its bid for California-based Unocal Corp. under pressure from lawmakers, which cast Cnooc's move as a plot to corner precious U.S. energy resources. Never mind that Unocal's oil and gas assets account for little more than 1 percent of U.S. reserves; the congressional attack was a clear signal of battles to come. "This is the first phase of what will be a prolonged war," says Jeffrey Bader, a China specialist at the Brookings Institution and a close adviser to Zoellick. "Zoellick is an intellectual firepower but he's hard-nosed. You'll see him manage the U.S.-China relationship so it doesn't go over the cliff."
Colleagues say Zoellick frequently attends cabinet meetings in Rice's place and is known to defend his moderate and nuanced views on China against administration hawks respectfully but forcefully. It was Zoellick who pushed the White House to commit larger packages of aid and generous trade concessions for tsunami-afflicted Southeast Asia in December, his colleagues say, and he is credited with preventing a trade war with China last year over Beijing's alleged unfair subsidies of state-owned firms. The bow-tied and pedantic Zoellick offers a stark contrast to the anti-intellectual Bush, who occasionally ribs Zoellick for his mastery of wonkish detail. "Bush regards Bob as kind of a geek," says a former colleague of Zoellick's. "But they respect each other." (Zoellick declined requests for an interview.)
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They are also in tune geopolitically. For all his Wilsonian pretensions, George Bush has faithfully preserved the doctrine of engagement with authoritarian China as applied by his predecessors. Under Bush, the White House has kept commercial rows with China from erupting into the kind of public rancor that characterized similar disputes between the United States and Japan in the 1980s and early 1990s. Last month the White House outmaneuvered congressional calls for punitive tariffs on China-made goods in response to Chinese currency manipulation by persuading Beijing to declare a revaluation. In late 2003, Bush openly admonished Taiwan against declaring independence from China, which regards the island state as a renegade province, in one of the sternest such warnings from a U.S. president. While Bush has publicly welcomed human-rights activists from such countries as North Korea, he has carefully avoided hosting dissidents from China. "For whatever reason, Bush is a pragmatist when it comes to China," says Banning Garrett, director of Asia programs at the Washington-based Atlantic Council. "He is very much interested in the subject and is up on its details."
Zoellick, who was steeped in East Asian affairs as the U.S. trade representative during Bush's first term, arrived as Rice's No. 2 with a deeply held view that U.S. and Chinese interests are not incompatible. In a lengthy address he delivered to the Asia Society in February 2004, he emphasized the need for "win-win" solutions to trade disputes and stressed how China, despite its huge trade surplus with the United States, is a huge importer that runs only a small surplus globally. "China," Zoellick said, "is not another Japan Inc. an export-driven machine that shunned imports and the participation of foreign businesses. China sells, but it also buys."
Zoellick's predecessor as deputy secretary of State, Richard Armitage, spent considerable time working with Beijing. But this post became even more Sinocentric last November when Chinese President Hu Jintao and Bush, meeting at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Santiago, agreed to set up a regular series of bilateral trade talks at the deputy-secretary level. By the time Zoellick had settled into his new office, he was on his way to becoming America's unofficial China czar. The Pentagon, with its hands full, conceded authority for China policy to Zoellick, who quickly added to his brief such nontrade issues as security affairs, antiterrorism and Taiwan.
"Bob is an empire-builder," says an ex-colleague, who requests anonymity because he is now involved in U.S.-China trade, and doesn't want to get on Zoellick's bad side. "He's learned he can make a lot of policy before someone tells him to stop and he's three steps ahead of everybody else." Adds a senior national-security official with responsibility for Asia: "Bob Zoellick is someone who is interested in capturing the momentum of China. He enjoys the trust of Rice who enjoys the trust of the president."
One thing Zoellick apparently lacks is a soft political touch. A protege of the shrewd but ruthless James Baker, secretary of State to Bush's father, Zoellick has clinically winnowed his staff of anyone he judged to be a shallow thinker. As the top U.S. trade envoy, his often dismissive handling of Congress led to bitter exchanges with such senior Democratic lawmakers as New York Rep. Charles Rangel and West Virginia Sen. John D. Rockefeller.
Zoellick will need all the diplomatic skills he can muster to sell his nuanced view on China at a time when Beijing's growing economic muscle is emerging as a key midterm-election issue. In June, for example, senior lawmakers made it clear they would vote against the Central American Free Trade Agreement if the administration didn't take a tougher line on China. In response, the White House effectively stood by while Congress railed against the Cnooc bid and CAFTA narrowly passed last month.
Meanwhile the Pentagon's hawkish views on Beijing can play into the hands of congressional factions wary of China. A Defense Department report issued last month on China's military preparedness, for example, is already being used as a club for China bashers. "The Pentagon study," says Minxin Pei, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, "is not so important to China as how it will be used by Congress. There are significant numbers of people who would use it to sabotage the U.S. -China relationship." Zoellick would do well to deploy as much moderation and nuance at home as he does with China.
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