Quayle to Attack U.S.’ China Policy

Treading on tricky but theoretically lucrative ground, Republican presidential candidate Dan Quayle planned to spear President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore today for their administration’s handling of China, using some of the very tools that Clinton and Gore used against President Bush and then-Vice President Quayle when they were in charge.

In remarks prepared for delivery at a World Affairs Council lunch in Los Angeles, the former vice president accused the administration of “a policy of appeasement” toward China, the same charge leveled by Clinton in 1992. And he cast particular aspersions on the administration’s support of favored trading status for China, a policy for which Quayle once lobbied.

“We should make clear to the People’s Republic of China that we will not barter away the cause of human liberty and security among nations in return for increased sales,” he said.

As a presidential candidate in 1992, Clinton suggested the same connection between human rights and trade status--only to be vehemently opposed by the Bush administration and Quayle.

Quayle indirectly acknowledged the reversal but defended his present criticism on the grounds that China has changed for the worse in the last six years. He also implied that the Bush administration’s own approach to China--one with a “minimum of sanctions and sanctimony”--was flawed.

“I think it was a worthy objective, but upon reflection it is clear to me that the Chinese took advantage of that opportunity,” he said.

The speech to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council--the same group before which Clinton blasted Bush and Quayle on China in 1992--is part of Quayle’s attempt to forward himself as the sole experienced foreign policy hand amid the burgeoning Republican presidential field. It also serves as a device to bludgeon Gore, the leading Democratic presidential contender, during a swarm of GOP criticism about the administration’s handling of the alleged theft of U.S. nuclear secrets by China.

In the prepared remarks, Quayle threaded between the isolationist views of some in his party, like fellow candidate Patrick J. Buchanan, and the Republicans in Congress who have studiously avoided impinging on the chances of U.S. firms to do business with the behemoth nation.

“I reject isolationism,” said Quayle. “I believe in American leadership.”

Still, the accusation that Clinton and Gore have ignored human rights abuses in China opens Quayle himself up for criticism, since he was touting improved trade status for China on the heels of that nation’s most publicized abuse: the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. In the 1992 presidential campaign, Clinton said the Bush administration had “coddled” tyrants.

This time around, the viewpoints are reversed. Quayle, in his prepared remarks, blasted Clinton for participating in a Chinese-dictated ceremony at Tiananmen in 1998. Teaming that visit with what he called Clinton’s “slyly changed” American policy toward Taiwan, Quayle said the current administration is guilty of “profoundly harmful acts.”

“And we need to call this what it is: a policy of appeasement,” he said, deliberately invoking a foreign policy criticism redolent with rebuke. “American resolve and American will are treasures built up over decades. We cannot continue wasting them for photo-ops.”