The China Threat
How the People’s Republic
Targets America
by Bill Gertz
Regnery, 280 pp., $ 27.95
Last February, Washington Post reporters Robert Kaiser and Steven Mufson uncovered the existence of the “Blue Team,” an especially alarming and alarmist element of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy dedicated to undermining the Clinton administration’s policy of “engagement” with China and preventing a lasting detente between Washington and Beijing. In their thirty-five-hundred-word expose, Kaiser and Mufson described the guerrilla activities of the Blue Team, which “attaches riders to legislation in Congress,” “promotes fears of a Chinese takeover of the Panama Canal,” and “harasses China’s biggest oil company, complicating its efforts to sell shares on the New York Stock Exchange.”
Most damning of all, “Members of the Blue Team initially drafted and then helped push through the House of Representatives” — Just think of it: Not only drafting, but passing legislation! — “the Taiwan Security Enhancement Act, a measure designed to strengthen U.S. military ties with Taiwan that has angered China.” In Bill Clinton’s post-Cold-War world, there are few graver sins than placing national security concerns over trade, or than angering Beijing. Who in his right mind would wish to prevent China’s biggest oil company from trading on the Big Board? Why should we worry about who runs the Panama Canal?
And there’s more. Blue Teamers have concluded — perhaps an understandable mistake if one spends too much time reading what the Chinese government and Chinese strategists write — that China considers itself in a long-term strategic competition with the United States for power in East Asia and elsewhere.
The best-known Blue Team scribe is the reporter Bill Gertz, across town at the Washington Times. With his impeccable sources inside the intelligence community, the Defense Department, and on Capitol Hill, Gertz has routinely broken stories about the China scandals surrounding the Clinton administration. He also is well informed about the new directions in Chinese military strategy and technology that pose a large portion of the Blue Team’s worries.
Gertz’s new book, The China Threat: How the People’s Republic Targets America, is a comprehensive summary, discussing both events and developments inside China and the effects they have in the United States. Because the Pentagon, alone of all the agencies of the government, has begun to accumulate a growing body of Chinese strategic writings, many of them simply from open sources, and because Gertz is well known and respected among American military officers and defense officials, he can draw upon materials other reporters miss.
Nonetheless, The China Threat is likely to be ignored by the conventional-wisdom types in Washington. And, unfortunately, part of their ability to ignore it derives from the book itself. Gertz’s prose mirrors its author: blunt and bold, substituting exposition for nuance. Gertz insists on describing China as “communist China” at nearly every point — which, though certainly true, serves only a hortatory purpose and obscures some larger truths. The Communist party rules in Beijing, but it has long ago and permanently renounced Communist economic theory. In place of Communist ideology it is now increasingly substituting a mercantilism and a virulent, quasi-racist form of Chinese nationalism; the result is more nearly fascist than Communist. And it will surely keep Beijing a dangerous adversary.
The China Threat is especially strong in piecing together the larger pattern of modernization in the Chinese military and the looming U.S.-China confrontation over Taiwan. In a chapter on “Flashpoint Taiwan,” Gertz reveals how China’s rapidly growing fleet of ballistic and cruise missiles will soon greatly complicate the defense of the island. “Beijing is working on an over-whelming theater missile advantage over Taiwan and is adjusting its doctrine to focus on launching massive, no-warning attacks,” Gertz reports. A future American president may face a difficult choice: to intervene at great potential risk and cost, or to permit China to bully Taiwan into reunification on Beijing’s terms. Not only would the budding democracy in Taipei perish in the bargain, but so would America’s position as the leading power in East Asia.
As the lopsided 83-15 vote in the Senate to grant China permanent normal trading status demonstrates, the Clinton policy of engagement is now accepted by almost all American politicians. George W. Bush repeated the Republican line when, during the fall campaign, he argued that the mediating habits of trade would moderate China’s political ambitions and aggressive policies.
But Gertz makes a compelling case that balancing engagement with a policy of military containment is necessary for economic development to work its liberating magic. And if Gertz lacks the sophistication and slickness possessed by the advocates of engagement, he more than makes up for that with his clarity.
Tom Donnelly is deputy executive director of the Project for the New American Century.
