One often learns the most when politicians are forced to speak from least immediate knowledge about a subject with greatest long-term implications. The release last Tuesday of Rep. Christopher Cox’s House select committee report on recent Chinese military espionage against the United States is a classic example.
At ten o’clock in the morning, the committee made public an unclassified version of its work, in three volumes totalling more than 900 pages. By day’s end, it is fair to say, hardly anyone in America had finished looking at the color pictures, let alone fully digested the thing. And yet the report was highly newsworthy. So within hours, nearly every major elected official in the country, operating from previously published accounts of what Cox’s committee was likely to conclude, had rushed out a formal reaction. They said the most revealing and — by the admittedly low standards of current American thinking about China — even encouraging things.
Not all of them, of course.
The Clinton White House — intent as always to deflect bad news and eager to protect the reputation of its “strategic partner,” the People’s Republic — rather sheepishly denied having done anything wrong, quickly endorsed the report’s modest recommendations for improved counterintelligence and technology control, and then went silent.
Away from the direct line of fire, the administration’s most dogged congressional and corporate partners in China-engagement fetishism felt freer to dismiss Cox’s revelations as so much workaday boredom. It’s just the old spy story, Republican congressman David Dreier told the Wall Street Journal. By pilfering classified information about the world’s most sophisticated nuclear warheads, missile guidance systems, and jet-fighter engines, the Chinese were just “doing their jobs” in an appropriate and necessary bilateral “business relationship” like any other we enjoy in the world. What’s a little espionage between strategic partners? Anyone who says different is making a “gross mistake.”
At the opposite extreme, implacable Clinton critics like House majority whip Tom DeLay used the Cox report to mutter darkly about “whether the president and vice president deliberately ignored the reality of Chinese spying and theft because they had ulterior economic and political motives.” DeLay was alluding here, without much evidence, to the Democratic party’s illegal foreign campaign contributions in the 1996 election cycle — which seem to us a real but probably unrelated scandal and, in the geostrategic context of the Cox report, a significantly less important one.
All of which was rather predictable. What was not so predictable was reaction to the Cox report from the vast middle of American political opinion. The bipartisan select committee’s final recommendations were unanimous, of course, so it was almost inevitable that the report would be widely praised as “solid” and “fair.” But how to explain the fact that the report was just as widely dubbed “alarming” — by a full spectrum of Democrats and Republicans alike?
Rep. Dreier was quite correct, after all, that even friendly countries spy on one another all the time and that many nations now boast thermonuclear capabilities. We may not like it in theory. But we don’t tear our hair out over it on the front page of the New York Times, either. Israel and France do not “alarm” American politicians. Why, suddenly, should China?
Unless, that is, there is something fundamentally different about the People’s Republic. Could it be that in their “alarm” over the Cox report, our elected officials — perhaps without even realizing it — are at last expressing long-buried doubts about the very basis of their bipartisan “engagement” orthodoxy? Could it be that China isn’t, and cannot be, any kind of meaningful “friend” to the United States?
Here, the actual text of the Cox report is most suggestive. Its first chapter opens with a beautifully condensed description of the structure and nature of the Chinese state, with its absolute dominance by overlapping cadres of Communist party and People’s Liberation Army officials. The report moves then to a review of the Communist party’s 1997 “16-character policy” announcement, clearly establishing that China’s economic initiatives are of a piece with — and totally subordinate to — its plan for military modernization and expansion. Finally, in its “all volume overview,” and in notably deadpan fashion, the Cox report explains what Beijing’s true goal is. Why it is, in other words, that the Chinese have been spying on us:
The PRC has vigorously pursued over the last two decades the acquisition of foreign military technologies. These efforts represent the official policy of the PRC and its Chinese Communist Party leadership. The PRC seeks foreign military technology as part of its efforts to place the PRC at the forefront of nations and to enable the PRC to fulfill its international agenda. The PRC’s longrun geopolitical goals include incorporating Taiwan into the PRC and becoming the primary power in Asia.
The PRC has not ruled out using force against Taiwan, and its thefts of U.S. technology have enhanced its military capabilities for any such use of force.
The PRC has also asserted territorial claims against other Southeast Asian nations and Japan, and has used its military forces as leverage in asserting these claims.
These PRC goals conflict with current U.S. interests in Asia and the Pacific, and the possibility of a U.S.-PRC confrontation cannot be dismissed.
This is, indeed, alarming. But until the very recent past, only a relative handful of American politicians, in either party, have been sufficiently clear-eyed and conscience-bound to voice alarm. House members like Democrat Nancy Pelosi and Republican Frank Wolf have long understood that “engagement” is a fool’s illusion; that the Chinese government’s oppression of its people and saber-rattling throughout Asia are not “irritants” in the Sino-U.S. relationship, but represent the very essence of the Communist regime. Yes, when they spy on the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, the Chinese are just “doing their jobs.” The job in question is the wholesale displacement of American ideas and influence from an entire, pivotal part of the globe. The People’s Republic of China is an ideologically committed, hostile, dangerous power.
The day the Cox report was publicized, no less thoroughly mainstream an American figure than Governor George W. Bush of Texas saw fit to issue a press release. Bush is surrounded by some of the most experienced foreign policy hands in the Republican party, many or most of whom are themselves quite implicated in modern “engagement” doctrine. Bush, at least, can be assumed to have chosen his language carefully. U.S.-China trade remains of “mutual benefit,” he allowed. But the only kind of trade he mentioned was “food.” And, citing “the balance of power in Asia” and “the rest of the world,” Bush went on to announce his conclusion that “China is not America’s ‘strategic partner.” Instead, “China is a competitor, a competitor which does not share our values, but now, unfortunately, shares many of our nuclear secrets.”
These are altogether remarkable words. Perhaps the ice is finally beginning to break on America’s sappy, self-destructive “friendship” with Beijing. If the Cox report inspires a long overdue, fullscale rethinking of China policy, it will deserve even more praise than it’s already received.
David Tell, for the Editors
