...China is scared shitless that we don't pull the plug on them...
but heres some old news for ya- abcnews.go.com
Clitons team--Q: Has Clinton's China policy put U.S. national security at risk?
Yes: Under lax export controls and reckless sharing of information, Clinton/Gore have armed a new enemy.
When Bill Clinton and A1 Gore came to power in January 1993, the United States was at the apex of its power. The People's Republic of China (PRC) was then a minor player on the world's stage, both militarily and diplomatically. The Chinese Communist leadership had shocked the world by ordering the People's Liberation Army (PLA) to open fire on pro-democracy students in Tiananmen Square in June 1989 and was still reeling from the international isolation that followed. President Bush, harshly criticized by then-Arkansas governor Clinton for "coddling dictators from Baghdad to Beijing," had in fact issued an executive order cutting off military sales to Communist China following the Tiananmen Square massacre, much to the chagrin of major U.S. defense contractors. The Bush administration also tightened export controls on dual-use technologies, which have both civilian and military applications.
China's inability to gain free access to advanced U.S. technologies after 1989 had a direct impact on China's military hardware. When Clinton and Gore came to power, the PLA had no modern air-defense systems; it lacked a military communications network; it had no modern command-and-control systems; it had no imaging or electronic eavesdropping satellites; its strategic rockets were unreliable and its theater missiles were at a nascent stage of development, hampered by technology bottlenecks. And in all of these areas, there was no solution on the horizon.
What a difference seven years have made. In this interval we have seen dramatic changes brought about by the Clinton/Gore administration in the way the United States manages its national-security export-control system. Unbeknownst to voters, or even to most policy experts, the new administration came to Washington in January 1993 with a coherent plan for gutting the entire export-control system, which it called a "wasting asset" left over from the Cold War.
The plan was devised by William Perry, Ashton Carter and Mitchel Wallerstein and published with little fanfare in 1992 by the National Academy of Sciences. Perry, Carter and Wallerstein were appointed to the Defense Department during the first weeks of the new administration and given responsibility for putting the plan into action.
Among the critical technologies the Chinese needed -- and the administration wanted to give them -- were U.S. supercomputers. At the time, no other nation on earth save Japan had computer capabilities even remotely approaching those developed by U.S. companies such as Cray Computer. To protect our technological advantage, and to keep militarily critical supercomputers from falling into the wrong hands, the United States had a bilateral agreement with Japan to review each export before it occurred. The Clinton administration progressively ramped up the limits on what could be exported to Communist China and eventually did away with the agreement with Japan. By the end of 1998, the bilateral commission headed by Rep. Christopher Cox, R-Calif., and Norman Dicks, D-Wash., found that more than 600 military-grade supercomputers had been shipped to China, many of them directly to PLA-controlled military enterprises or weapons-design centers.
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Clitons team--U.S. Trade Agreement With China Is Lopsided.
Insight on the News, Jan 24, 2000, by Kenneth R. Timmerman
As President Clinton makes his pitch to Congress for allowing Communist China to enter the World Trade Organization, he faces a powerful coalition of liberal and conservative groups who believe the deal negotiated by U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky should be rejected.
On the left, the AFL-CIO argues that Communist China uses prison labor, does not allow nongovernment labor unions to operate and pays workers pennies on the dollar compared to workers in the industrialized world. Human-rights activists argue that the communist regime systematically imprisons its political opponents and occupies by military force three formerly sovereign republics (Tibet, Eastern Turkestan and Inner Mongolia), which comprise fully one-half the land mass generally known as the People's Republic of China, or PRC. Environmentalists are aghast at China's high-polluting ways, its rust belt industries that spew chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, into the atmosphere at alarming rates and the total lack of any environmental standards.
On the right, antiabortion activists argue that China's practice of forced sterilization and forced abortion merits U.S. sanctions. Conservatives angered at the sell-off of U.S. high technology to Communist China by the Clinton-Gore administration believe that U.S. national security interests warrant a cooling-off period to slow down this administration's efforts to increase China's access to U.S. military technology.
Clinton will summon his own coalition of Silicon Valley exporters, Republican free traders and liberal Democrats who believe the United States has no right to impose its vision or values on other countries through trade restrictions or national legislation. They will argue that free trade creates American jobs, fuels economic expansion and even promotes democracy by raising the living standards of Chinese workers.
Added to this already volatile mix is the increasing uneasiness of many Americans with the globalization of our national economy, as evidenced by the riots last month in Seattle during the World Trade Organization, or WTO, ministerial conference. While some critics of globalism would like to turn back the clock to shelter American workers from foreign competition, not all critics of the WTO reject globalism, despite efforts by editorialists such as Tom Friedman of the New York Times to so taint them.
Clearly, there is a lot of passion on all sides of this issue. What is needed is some coolheaded analysis of what was actually accomplished by Barshefsky in her trade negotiations with the Chinese in November, and what was not.
Fact No. 1: U.S. markets already are wide open to imports from the PRC, yet the WTO agreement negotiated by Barshefsky is being touted for lowering U.S. as well as Chinese trade barriers.
U.S. tariffs on Communist Chinese goods entering this country average 5 percent, according to Alan Tonelson, who heads the U.S. Business and Industry Council, a conservative group that opposes the WTO deal. This compares to China's average import tariff, which stood at 42.1 percent in the mid-1990s. |
