Interesting bit from the Washington Post op-ed page:
The China Muddle
By Fred Hiatt
Through history America has veered from demonizing China to
romanticizing it. Last week, Washington seemed to be doing both
at the same time. Underlying the confusion was a U.S. policy
toward China that has been muddled since the end of the Cold
War.
But the immediate catalyst for last week's rumpus was the release
of the Cox report on Chinese espionage. The 872-page report of
the House Select Committee chaired by Rep. Christopher Cox, a
California Republican, maintained that China has successfully
stolen every U.S. nuclear warhead design as well as important
classified technology relating to missiles, submarines, space
weaponry and more.
It said that China has a massive and continuing campaign to collect
high-tech information from the United States by methods licit and
illicit. Republican and Democratic administrations alike have failed
to respond adequately to this campaign, the committee found;
U.S. aerospace companies have been at times complicit.
What was remarkable about the report was that nine members of
Congress, ranging from conservative Republicans to liberal
Democrats and from enthusiastic China-engagers to true
China-skeptics, unanimously endorsed its conclusions. Even the
Democrats who seemed to be backpedaling under political
pressure once it was released -- not one of them had dissented or
even filed additional views.
Nonetheless, critics quickly accused the Cox panel of seeking to
ignite a new Cold War. Republicans saw a juicy campaign issue
and demanded the resignations of President Clinton's national
security adviser or attorney general, or both.
Cox, taking a break from the furor to talk in his Capitol hideaway
last week, was quick to point out in an interview that the
committee report recommends no particular U.S. China policy.
"There is nothing in the report itself that requires a change in
anything except our security policy and our counterintelligence
policy," he said.
But Cox the Republican foreign policy leader -- as opposed to
Cox the bipartisan committee chairman -- has definite views on
what's gone wrong in U.S. policy toward China. To a large extent,
his analysis mirrors that of "About Face," a valuable new history of
U.S.-China relations by journalist James Mann.
Both Cox and Mann point out that from the time that Richard
Nixon established relations with Communist China until 1991,
U.S. policy had a specific goal: the isolation and weakening of the
Soviet Union. The United States was willing to indulge China,
strengthen its military, share intelligence and encourage U.S.
investment in order to forestall a China-Soviet alliance.
The Chinese regime's execrable treatment of its own people and
its dangerous proliferation of nuclear and missile technology were
generally viewed as irrelevant.
"It was a logical strategy," Cox said. "It sacrificed human rights to
strategic aims, but at least it was logical."
When the Soviet Union collapsed, so did the rationale of U.S.
China policy. But that policy just kept going -- "out of habit," Cox
says.
Mann believes it wasn't just inertia. China's growing economy, and
the U.S. investment that Washington had encouraged, created a
powerful business lobby that opposed any rethinking of U.S.
policy. That more than anything moved Clinton from his 1992
campaign opposition to "coddling" Beijing's dictators to his 1998
willingness to slap down the aspirations of democratic Taiwan
while traveling in Shanghai. "Under Clinton, commerce became the
dominant motivating force behind American policy," Mann writes.
The result, Cox says, is an Asia policy too focused on China. "If,
as Nixon said, it's hard to ignore a billion people, we're proving
him wrong in India," Cox said.
Nixon was talking about China, of course, not India. But Cox
points out that India is a market with nearly as much potential, with
English speakers and a legal system "transparent to a degree China
doesn't even approach." And India is a democracy, while China's
Communist regime regularly cites the United States as its chief
enemy. Yet Clinton, who took his longest foreign trip ever to
China, pays attention to India only when it does something the
United States disapproves of.
If you make these arguments, "you're always fighting against the straw man" that you want to isolate China, Cox said, or that by
showing a certain wariness toward China you will be responsible
for it turning hostile.
showing a certain wariness toward China you will be responsible
for it turning hostile.
"If you read the People's Daily, you see that is their line -- 'If you
want to make China an enemy, treat us as an enemy,' " Cox said.
"As if states don't have interests, as if they are personalities that get moody."
From the start, Mann's book shows, China has pursued its
national interests in its relations with the United States with
remarkable adeptness; the Cox report is just one more piece of
evidence. The United States, meanwhile, slighting the democracies
of Asia for fear of offending the Beijing regime, has yet to sort out
where its interests lie.
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