One Billion Customers - James McGregor [28]
When the U.S. business community saw the details of the proposed agreement, they, too, went berserk. They had never expected such broad concessions and somehow Clinton had let the deal slip away. American CEOs lit up the switchboards in Congress and the White House. Realizing how badly he had screwed up, Clinton ordered his assistants to track down Zhu by phone as he toured America. When the American president finally got through to Zhu at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, he told the premier that they could still strike a deal before he left North America. Zhu declined. Negotiations could resume in Beijing when China was ready.
Getting negotiations started again wasn’t easy. When Zhu and Long returned to Beijing, Communist party conservatives accused them of selling out China’s interests. On May 7th, exactly one month after Clinton rejected Zhu’s deal, the situation worsened when U.S. jets bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. The United States called it a tragic mistake, the result of an outdated map, but nobody in China believed that. U.S.-China relations hit their lowest point since the Tiananmen Massacre.
Leaders of both countries still wanted the WTO deal. Both Clinton and Jiang Zemin saw China’s entrance into the WTO as a legacy issue for their leadership. Zhu and Clinton had learned a lesson from the April debacle. Zhu knew he needed to drum up support for the WTO agreement among those who would benefit in China: the Chinese business community and local officials who constantly had their economic initiatives knocked down by Beijing bureaucrats. Zhu dispatched his former trade minister, Wu Yi, to travel around the country explaining to local officials the “win-win” of the WTO deal. After talking by phone to Clinton and meeting the president’s emissaries in person, Jiang Zemin made a political decision to reopen negotiations to begin healing the deep political rift between the United States and China.
Barshefsky returned to Beijing in November, prepared to strike a deal. She argued loudly and long with Zhu over myriad details, often to the embarrassment of her USTR officials who thought perhaps the premier should be shown a little more deference. Zhu pushed to discover the U.S. bottom line. Barshefsky told him in no uncertain terms that it was the failed agreement that had been published on the Internet. After an initial round of talks with Zhu, Barshefsky found herself across the table from Trade Minister Shi Guangsheng, a sixty-year-old risk-averse Jiang Zemin loyalist who wasn’t familiar with the details in the WTO agreement. Unbeknownst to Barshefsky, he served as little more than a mailbox for the leadership, taking messages from the negotiations back to the National Economic Work Conference, the annual meeting at which government officials reviewed the past year and set goals for the next. Zhu had shrewdly organized the confab to coincide with the WTO talks so that the entire Communist party hierarchy could be hectored and cajoled by Zhu and Jiang to support an agreement with the United States that would pave the way for WTO membership. Shi spent a lot of time telling old stories and wasting time. Long Yongtu, seated next to Shi, would frequently look at the ceiling and roll his eyes in boredom.
Barshefsky’s patience ran out on November 14. She announced that she was leaving for Washington the next morning; she had booked her flight. The announcement set off a busy night. Long Yongtu knew that China had a historic deal in its hands, so he committed a grievous political sin: He went over the head of his boss and called Zhu Rongji at home in the middle of the night. Long acted because he feared that Shi was