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Strategies & Market Trends : Asia Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ramsey Su who wrote (8679)	6/3/1999 8:26:00 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 9980

Ramsey, Thanks for linking the article. I am copying it below in case it gets pulled from the ABC site at some point. I can hardly believe that Mr. Cox's crew got such simple facts of history wrong. Such a nice looking young man, too, and obviously sooooo righteous. Errors Mar Cox Report Mistakes Can Undermine Conclusions (A.Shepherd/ABCNEWS.com) By James Oberg Special to ABCNEWS.com The Cox report on Chinese nuclear spying inundates readers with detail — about history, missiles, payloads and so on — all to buttress claims of widespread Chinese espionage against America's strategic weapons programs. Trouble is, many of those details about space technology are simply wrong. While the evidence for the illicit transfer of American aerospace technology is broad and persuasive, such critical conclusions depend on details. How credible is the Cox report? Since the report's release, experts and hard-core amateurs around the world have taken a close look. The result: dismay and concern over the large number of factual errors. “Evidently,” says one expert, “the committee never had its final report edited by real experts.” Aside from the factual errors is a bigger question: Are these erroneous facts the basis for the report's conclusion? Or are they just window dressing to make the report seem more credible? Either we must consider the conclusions questionable or be told the true basis for the report's conclusions. Mistakes range from substantial misrepresentation of Chinese aerospace technology, to minor mistakes in dates and hardware designations. Other errors span from long-ago events to future plans. For example, we know that China is preparing to launch astronauts into space in the next year or so. The Cox report states that these astronauts “will use Soyuz capsules purchased during Yeltsin's visit” to Beijing in 1996. This is dead wrong. The Chinese are building their own manned spacecraft, with some systems such as the escape tower, spacesuits, docking mechanisms purchased from Russia. It's largely a home-grown spacecraft. Flubbing History There are also historical errors. The report spends several pages on the career of rocket scientist Qian Xuesen (once spelled Tsien Hsue-Shen), who worked in the U.S. rocket program in the 1940s. After he expressed sympathy for the new Chinese regime in the early 1950s, his security clearances were cancelled. He left for China in 1955, where he headed up the Chinese rocket and space effort for the next several decades. The report alleges he tried to bring “classified documents” with him, including secrets of the Titan missile program he had been working on, which the Chinese later copied. But Qian Xuesen's story is much less criminal than the report suggests. Space historians laugh at the allegation he “copied” the Titan missile for China. “The contract for the Titan was not even let until October 1955,” noted space historian Matthew Bille, citing the Encyclopedia Astronautica, the authoritative Internet space history reference. “(That was) over five years after Tsien's security clearance was revoked, on 6 June 1950.” Dubious Allegation Fred Durant, former deputy director of the Smithsonian's National Air & Space Museum in Washington, knew Qian personally. He says the “classified documents” that Qian allegedly tried to steal were papers Qian himself had written before his security clearance was suspended. A Chinese engineer named Chen Lan, who lives in Singapore and runs a highly-respected Web site on the Chinese space program, has also criticized the Cox report. “These low-level errors should have been avoided if they did the work a little more seriously,” he posted recently. Chen Lan reported that flight statistics and payload capabilities were often in error. One “fact” about the U.S. Delta 3925 payload (in pounds) gets attributed to Encyclopedia Astronautica, which cites it in kilograms. But it differs by 60 percent, which makes one wonder if the report's authors know how to convert kilograms to pounds. Blatant Boo-Boos Jens Lerch, a German amateur space historian, also posted criticisms on the Internet. “I've easily found a few more blatant mistakes,” he wrote. Lerch listed half a dozen cases in which missile and spacecraft designations were erroneous. He concludes, “It's quite disturbing that such a report contains dozens of factual errors, which are easy to spot by amateurs.” Some mistakes are unimportant to the report's conclusions, but reveal that the authors didn't have any deep understanding of the historical and technical issues they wrote about. Chen Lan pointed out that the report gave 1971 as the date of the first Chinese satellite launch (it was 1970), and 1963 as the date of the “Great Leap Forward” campaign (it was 1958). The report refers to the Challenger shuttle disaster in 1987 (it was 1986). This kind of nit-picking has often been dismissed as “fly specking,” making minor marks on an overall report. Still, if so many other “facts” turn out to be erroneous, the question must arise as to how these errors may have affected the report's conclusions.