Constraining Unipolarity } 533
firms in Kohl’s entourage were awarded eighteen contracts worth over $2 bil-
lion. The news stories about the commercial success of Kohl’s visit appeared on
the same day Clinton arrived in Seattle for his meeting with Jiang Zemin. In
April the next year, French Prime Minister Édouard Balladur visited Beijing,
again with a large group of businessmen. Li Peng told the French guest that
China planned to import $1 trillion in goods through the end of the century.
“France may get some of the expanded trade,” Li said.^14 The message to the
Americans was clear: if they did not sell things to China, their European and
Japanese competitors would. US businessmen, of course, conveyed this prop-
osition to their representatives in government.
China’s tactics were successful. A large part of the US business community
mobilized to lobby against Clinton’s linkage policy. That lobbying soon af-
fected elected representatives in the US Congress and in state governments.
Leading US corporate leaders undertook speaking tours as well as lobbying
Clinton directly, not failing to mention their financial support during the
1992 campaign. In Washington State, for example, a statewide coalition of
businesses was formed to lobby and conduct public education about the ad-
verse economic impact of MFN revocation. In Washington, DC, agencies of
the executive branch—Treasury, Commerce, Justice, the Pentagon—each of
whom had issues on which they hoped for Chinese cooperation also began to
find fault with the linkage approach.
By early 1994, it was clear that Clinton would not be able to follow through
on his threat, even though China had not delivered “significant overall
progress” on human rights. This set the stage for the public humiliation of
Secretary of State Warren Christopher, one of the leading US advocates of
“linkage” within the administration. Christopher’s three-day visit to Beijing
in March 1994 was intended to tell China’s leaders precisely what they must
do to achieve “significant overall progress” on human rights and thus en-
sure extension of MFN. An assistant secretary of state for human rights had
done some advanced spadework for Christopher’s visit, meeting with prom-
inent dissident Wei Jingsheng in the process. Wei, one of the most radical
advocates of democracy dating from the 1978 period, had just been released
from fourteen and a half years in prison. Upon release, Wei remained an out-
spoken critic of CCP rule, advocate of democracy, and supporter of Clinton’s
“linkage” policy. Shortly after his release, Wei met with the US diplomat and
expressed these views. Wei, along with fifteen other prominent dissidents,
was promptly arrested. Those arrests were made on the day Christopher left
Washington for China and were intended as a signal that China would not be
receptive to Christopher’s message.^15
The meetings between Christopher and Li Peng were angry and con-
frontational, perhaps the worst meetings between Chinese and US leaders
since the beginning of Sino-American rapprochement in 1971. Christopher
laid out US expectations in each of the specified seven areas. Li Peng firmly