By Tom Kidd ’08

 Clark T. Randt, Jr. has been intimately involved with China for over 30 years. His first experience in China came while at Harvard Law School, where he received an East Asia Legal Traveling Fellowship to China. After receiving his Juris Doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1975, Ambassador Randt returned to China where from 1982 to 1984 he worked in Beijing as first secretary and commercial attaché at the U.S. Embassy. He then moved to Hong Kong, where for 15 years he worked as a partner at the international law firm Sherman and Sterling. In 2001, President Bush appointed his fellow 1968 Yale College graduate ambassador to the People’s Republic of China. Today, Randt stands as the longest-serving U.S. ambassador to that nation.

Having lived in Asia on and off for three decades, Ambassador Randt tends to take a long-term view with regard to China’s development. While many in the U.S. focus on China’s human rights abuses and its authoritarian government, he makes the point that in the past 30 years, China has seen tremendous economic liberalization and, to a lesser extent, a growth in political freedom. For example, newly appointed Minister of Health Chen Zhu is only the second person in his position not to have been a member of the Communist Party, perhaps a symbol of China’s growing political openness. Ambassador Randt also points toward the democratic elections that are occurring on a small scale in rural China. While these elections have been criticized as being essentially meaningless in the face of the Communist Party’s strict central control, they again represent a trend toward political freedom in China that did not exist even a decade ago. While these changes may be, as Ambassador Randt says, “occurring at a glacially slow rate by congressional standards” they are occurring and are changing the face of Chinese politics. While he does not envision full-blown democracy any time soon, he would not rule out a “China-style” democratic system. For instance, the Chinese government has studied democratic governments around the world, and Ambassador Randt believes Chinese officials could tolerate a one-party democratic system such as the one currently in place in Singapore.

China’s recent economic and political growth gives credence, in Ambassador Randt’s mind, to the policy of engagement that has governed U.S.-China relations since the 1970s. He said of China’s 1.2 billion people, “They aren’t going anywhere. … If we want to treat them as enemies, then they will be our enemies.” He credits the United States’ relatively open policy of helping China along a path of economic growth and overall liberalization.

Yet, despite China’s spectacular economic growth in recent years, Ambassador Randt advises caution when dealing with the Chinese government. While China may be a one-party state, its government is filled with vying factions just like any other nation. He noted, for example, that China’s much-publicized test of space weaponry earlier this year was administered by People’s Liberation Army officials without the knowledge of other Communist higher-ups such as the foreign minister. Just as the United States has a political faction warning against the power of a rising China, China has a relatively small, if vocal, group of political figures that view the United States primarily as a potential threat. In Ambassador Randt’s mind, it is important for the U.S. government to foster a relationship with China that promotes the policies of the more moderate side of the Chinese Communist Party.

In many ways, China stands at a tipping point in its political development. While the outlook for its booming economy remains bright, many wonder whether political rights will accompany China’s economic growth. Having seen firsthand the tremendous strides the Middle Kingdom has made in the past few decades, Ambassador Randt has a relatively hopeful view of future political development in China. It is a path he believes the U.S. and China must travel together, firmly maintaining that for China to move toward political liberalization, the U.S. must foster an active and healthy relationship with the government of the People’s Republic of China.

Tom Kidd is a senior History major in Yale’s Trumbull College from Greenwich, Connecticut. He serves as National section editor for The Politic.

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