A SCANDALOUS SUMMIT

We’ll call the first of them “Chung-gate.” This scandal is about the attempted use of foreign money to corrupt American politics. Johnny Chung has admitted to acting as a bag-man for the Chinese military-industrial complex, passing on hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Chinese military aerospace industry to the Democratic National Committee. Did Bill Clinton know at the time where the money was coming from and did Chung’s illicit contributions directly influence U.S. foreign policy? If the answer to either question is yes, then Clinton deserves to be impeached.

But even if Clinton knew nothing, Chung-gate remains a scandal. For the administration now knows what happened and still plans to do nothing about it. A year ago, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said, “If these allegations are true, they would be very serious.” Well, they are true, and it’s clear the administration doesn’t take them very seriously. This administration is refusing to hold the Chinese government accountable for what Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan has called an “attack” by a foreign government on the American political process.

Thus the White House has scorned the reasonable demand of Newt Gingrich and 151 other House members that the president cancel the Tiananmen Square summit, planned for late June. Remember, the summit was originally scheduled for later this year, and it was expected that China would be only one among several presidential stops in Asia, including visits to close allies like Japan. But the Chinese government demanded that the summit be moved up and that China be the only country Clinton would visit. The president kowtowed to this demand. That was shameful enough. To go ahead with the Tiananmen Square summit now, in light of what we know, tells the Chinese that nothing they do will ever derail the administration’s determination to appease.

The second scandal is “Commerce-gate,” and it involves the broader subordination of American foreign policy to narrow commercial interests. This scandal goes beyond the Clinton administration. Last year, for example, the Republican Senate voted to okay the unlicensed sale of advanced super-computers to China. These computers can be used to improve the reliability and accuracy of China’s intercontinental ballistic missiles. Members of both parties have been all too willing, in the last few years, to elevate immediate business interests over U.S. national security and the requirements of American global leadership.

But the Clinton administration has been the worst offender. The president’s decision in 1996 to transfer oversight of dual-use high-technology exports from the State Department to Commerce was the culmination of the Clinton administration’s decision, in the words of former Clinton Commerce official Jeffrey Garten, to “use all its foreign-policy levers to achieve commercial goals.” To reverse this selling of American foreign policy, Republicans will need to do more than document influence-peddling by Democratic donors — though they should certainly do that. They will need to take another look at their own approach to “doing business” with China. The good new is, they have made a start: The current defense-authorization bill bars further sales of certain technology to China. We would hope that Christopher Cox, the newly appointed chairman of the special House investigative committee, will look into all cases where “doing business” with China has done harm to U.S. national security, and will recommend policy changes to prevent further damage.

But the biggest China-related scandal of all is the most obvious and the most massive one: the Clinton administration’s China policy. Let’s call it “Appeasement-gate.” Readers of THE WEEKLY STANDARD are familiar with our longstanding criticism of engagement with China, which has always looked to us like a fancy form of appeasement. The particular scandals we are now witnessing are the logical consequence of that policy. Every questionable sale of sensitive technology has been justified as part of this overall approach: We need to cooperate with China, the engagers say. We need to provide inducements to the Chinese so they will behave better. Administration officials have even cheerily suggested that the sale of advanced technology, which can improve China’s ability to target nuclear weapons on American cities, actually enhances U.S. security by fostering Chinese cooperation on nonproliferation. That these arguments are consistently falsified by events never deters the proponents of engagement from advancing them. The policy of engagement means never having to say you’re sorry.

It also means never having to say there’s anything wrong with the Chinese dictatorship. In the last week alone, Clinton made the astonishing comment that “Russia and China . . . are moving to join the thriving community of free democracies.” Has the president noticed that Russia is no longer a Communist dictatorship and China is? Has he noticed that Russia has free elections and a free press, or that China has not yet admitted it did anything wrong nine years ago when it drove tanks over student demonstrators in Tiananmen Square? Meanwhile, Mike McCurry responded to a suggestion that the president not go to Tiananmen Square by saying that this would be “as if someone visiting here said, Well, we don’t want to be greeted on the South Lawn of the White House, even though that’s where people are greeted when they arrive for a state visit.” That analogy would be fine if U.S. tanks routinely ran over demonstrators on the South Lawn of the White House. McCurry went on to say that refusing to go to Tiananmen Square would be to “dis” the Chinese, and therefore contrary to “the purpose of the trip, which is to foster better relations with China.” What “better relations” means, apparently, is unilateral moral disarmament by the United States.

Last week, Congress began to take steps to staunch the flow of technology to China; it has begun to undo some of the damage done by this administration’s eagerness to sell anything and everything to China. But this should just be the beginning of a wholesale reversal of U.S. policy — a policy that claims to seek to change China, but that has succeeded only in corrupting us.