President Clinton's policy of constructive engagement with China is so well established that it is difficult to dispute in principle his visit there to review progress in their relationship. The question of timing is a different matter. It has become subject to tactical considerations on President Clinton's domestic political agenda and disagreements on substance between him and opponents in the Republican-dominated Congress. His nine-day visit to China beginning tomorrow will test his foreign policy skills at a time when US relations with Asia are attracting much greater attention. China showed last week it is a serious player in regional economics. Senior officials warned Washington about the need to shore up the sinking Japanese yen if the Chinese currency was not to succumb to another round of Asian devaluations, making the crisis much more severe. China is pressing for membership of the World Trade Organisation, despite the painful choices it faces over trade and investment liberalisation and economic restructuring. China has also been willing to enter a dialogue on nuclear weapons issues with the US following the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests. It is an indispensable interlocutor with North Korea and will face pressure on transfer of weapons technology to Iran and on the development of chemical and biological weapons. In all these respects there is an active foreign policy agenda for Mr Clinton to pursue. But clearly his freedom of manoeuvre will be constrained by the need to address human rights and political issues that have been central to the US-China relationship for nine years since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. He is the first president to visit China since then. Despite having adopted the policy of constructive engagement - which he inherited from President Bush, whom he had criticised during the 1992 campaign for being too soft on Beijing - Mr Clinton finds the current Republican leadership attacking him with some of the same vocabulary he had used himself.
He cannot avoid visiting Tiananmen Square as a guest of the Chinese government. His very presence there and what he says will attract worldwide attention to whether engagement makes a substantial difference in the Chinese treatment of political dissidents, freedom of speech, political and trade union organisation, and China's treatment of Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Precisely because China needs Washington's support on economic matters and to facilitate its development and access to international institutions, there is a legitimate expectation that progress can and should be made on all these issues. China has to play by the international rules if it wishes to participate more fully, especially as President Jiang Zemin wants to put the Tiananmen events behind him. Mr Clinton must bear in mind that China has still a long way to go before its economy becomes the second largest in the world, a position now occupied by Japan. China's annual output is only a fraction of its neighbour's; it too has very large indebtedness concealed in its protected banking system and decaying State-owned utility companies. It is highly vulnerable to shifts in competing Asian currencies. All the more reason for Mr Clinton to manage the relationship sensitively, and for his hosts to reward him with genuine reciprocal action on his political and human rights agenda. It takes two states to run a successful policy of constructive engagement.