644 { China’s Quest
China received its quid pro quo for Clinton’s broad media access when
the US president publicly affirmed “the three noes” during his session at
Fudan University in Shanghai. Clinton’s representatives had bargained down
the profile of that statement. It came in Shanghai, not Beijing; in a talk with
community leaders, not with China’s national leaders; and it was not in the
form of a written, much less a joint statement—all the things Beijing really
wanted. Yet Clinton, in response to a preplanned question by Fudan professor
Wu Xinbo, publicly reaffirmed the “three noes” as US policy. China’s media
touted this as further evidence of the skill and success of Jiang in defending
China’s interests while managing ties with the Americans.
Conservatives on the Politburo Standing Committee were probably not
impressed by the wisdom of allowing the American president to spread his
subversive bourgeois liberal poison among the Chinese people. Li Peng had
emerged since 6-4 as one of the PBSC members most opposed to concessions
to the United States and most resolute in countering nefarious US moves
against China. Li deeply resented the moral stigma assigned him by Western
leaders and media for his role in 6-4.^15 In spite of Qian Qichen’s best efforts
to burnish Li’s image by frequent foreign jaunts, Li still had considerable
odium. From Li’s perspective, this was simply unfair. Li’s role in 6-4 had been
secondary; the elders, including Deng Xiaoping, had been the prime mov-
ers of that event. Yet Western leaders avoided Li like the plague. While US
leaders fell over themselves receiving Chinese leaders in 1996–1997, they con-
spicuously avoided Li. Perhaps in response, Li Peng was confrontational and
acerbic in his denunciations of US transgressions. Many within the Chinese
bureaucracy saw Li as a defender of China’s national dignity.America again “Attacks China”: Falun Gong
and the Embassy BombingWithin a year of Clinton’s mid-1998 visit, a powerful anti-US animus in Chinese
policy re-emerged. In part, this was a reaction to a revival of dissident activity
within China in the wake of the relaxation associated with the Jiang-Clinton
exchanges. Hard-liners in the CCP saw this eruption of autonomous activ-
ity as evidence that engagement with the United States fostered oppositional
activity within China. Within a year of the US president spreading his bour-
geois liberal poison via China’s media, the CCP confronted a powerful chal-
lenge from a group holding up the banner of religious freedom.
The most dramatic expression of the post-summit revived civil society
activity was a large and very disciplined protest by the new religious group
Falun Gong. This new religion combined an unusual synthesis of tradi-
tional Chinese qi gong (a type of slow motion and breathing exercise simi-
lar to the better-known taiqi) and novel beliefs. It had become popular over