Japan's Miyazawa Showed Skepticism about China to Clinton
Tokyo, Dec. 26 (Jiji Press)--Then Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa expressed his skepticism about China's democratization in a summit with then U.S. President Bill Clinton in 1993, Japanese diplomatic documents showed Thursday.
Miyazawa showed the view when Clinton asked him about the future of China in their meeting in Washington on April 16, 1993, according to the documents declassified by the Foreign Ministry the same day.
Meanwhile, Miyazawa called on the U.S. government to continue to give the most-favored-nation trade status to China.
During the 1992 presidential election, Clinton criticized the then President George H.W. Bush's attitude toward China as weak.
After China's Tiananmen Square bloody crackdown against protestors in 1989, Clinton was taking the position that it was necessary to improve the country's human rights situation in order to continue the most-favored-nation treatment of the country.
At the summit, Clinton asked Miyazawa what he thought of China. Miyazawa replied, "If China's economy develops, there will be plenty of room to show military ambitions."
"There is a theory that democracy will take root as living standards rise, but I am skeptical," he told Clinton.
Miyazawa also said that China would not be a threat for the time being but that it had the potential to become one.
Around that time, China was taking a full-scale reform and opening-up policy. While the focus was how Western countries would treat China, there was a growing expectation that economic development would lead to Beijing's democratization.
Miyazawa's statement denied such an expectation. It can be said that to some extent, he predicted China's behavior up until now.
Meanwhile, Miyazawa told Clinton: "I am in favor of granting the most-favored-nation treatment to China without any conditions. It is also important for the development of Hong Kong."
In the end, the Clinton administration extended the most-favored-nation status to China for one year conditionally in May 1993 and renewed it unconditionally the following year.
It is already known that the United States' most-favored-nation treatment of China became an issue at a Japan-U.S. summit held on the sidelines of the Group of Seven summit in Tokyo in July 1993, and that Miyazawa advocated continuing the treatment. "It's done everywhere in the world," he said, according to his memoirs published in 2005.
The ministry regularly declassifies diplomatic records 30 years after they were created. This time, 11 files for 1993 were made public.
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