China Concerns

Dear WSN:

The article I have appended below discusses the rising
influence of a group of 'hard-line' US policy makers who
forecast that China will emerge as the key geopolitical
challenger to US hegemony in the coming decades.
This 'alliance of members of Congress... Republican political
operatives, conservative journalists, lobbyists for Taiwan,
former intelligence officers and academics' is apparently
carrying out a somewhat successful campaign
to turn China into the next great 'Red?' demon.
   Now, many of readers of this list (as well as many
in the progressive community in general) have serious
problems with China's human rights, labor, environmental, etc.
record (I certainly include myself here).  For these very
reasons, it seems at the moment that there is little motivation
within the progressive US community to try to counter-act
the campaign that is beginning to be mounted against China.
This, in my mind, is a very dangerous political/cultural situation --
especially when viewed in the context of contemporary
geopolitical dynamics.
   As some of the readers of this list know, Chris
Chase-Dunn and I (amongst others) have written about
possible future dynamics of geopolitical rivalry (see
'The Future of Global Conflict,' ed. Bornschier &
Chase-Dunn 1999).  Our analysis is motivated by
progressive (anti-imperialist, anti-war) concerns, and yet
it reaches a similar conclusion as do the hard-liners. That is,
we acknowledge that China is one country which may
mount a serious challenge to US hegemony in the not too
distant future (see the chapter by Weede in the book cited
for a more in-depth analysis of China).
   My questions are: Does our world-systems analysis
of potential US-Chinese rivalry merely serve to strengthen
the argument of the hard-liners discussed below?  Are
progressives in the US and elsewhere unwittingly allowing
a right-wing political/cultural campaign against China to move
forward unchallenged?  How might a world-systems analysis
of these issues be used to fortify an anti-war agenda?
I welcome any ideas regarding these questions.  The
article itself is attached below.

Bruce Podobnik
Dept.of Sociology and Anthropology
Lewis and Clark College
podobnik@lclark.edu

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Kaiser, Robert and Steven Mufson. 2000. “US Hard-Liners Paint
Beijing as Big Menace,” International Herald Tribune, Feb. 23.

WASHINGTON - While working as an aide to Representative
Christopher Cox, Republican of California, Richard Fisher collected
dozens
of photographs and sketches of China's latest weaponry: the
Russian-built
Sovremenny destroyer, advanced ballistic missiles, pilotless drones and
Su-27 fighters.
     Mr. Fisher is grimly confident that someday these weapons could be
aimed
at Americans. ''This is shaping up to be a major military disaster for
the United
States,'' he said. Mr. Fisher, who moved last month to a Washington
research
organization, describes himself as a member of the ''Blue Team'' - a
loose
alliance of members of Congress, congressional staff members, research
organization fellows, Republican political operatives, conservative
journalists, lobbyists for Taiwan, former intelligence officers and a
handful of
academics, all united in the view that a rising China poses great risks
to
America's vital interests.
    These hard-liners on China advance the view that China's steady
military
buildup will soon put it in a position to threaten the United States,
most
obviously by bullying Taiwan.
    The Blue Team and its sympathizers think the United States should
recognize that conflict with China is probable if not inevitable.
   ''Where the U.S.-China relationship is going is, frankly, toward
conflict,''
said Frank Gaffney, a former congressional aide and Defense Department
official in the Reagan administration who now runs a research
organization
called the Center for Security Policy.
   Mr. Gaffney compared America's current China policy to its relations
with
Japan and Germany before World War II. ''In many ways,'' Mr. Gaffney
said, ''this is a time not dissimilar to the 1930s.''
   Though little noticed, the Blue Team has had considerable success.
   By attaching riders to legislation in Congress, it has restricted the

scope of Chinese-American military relations, forced the Pentagon to
report
to Congress in detail on the China-Taiwan military balance and compelled

the State Department to take a harder line on China's abuses of human
and
religious rights.
    Some Blue Team allies have promoted public fears of a Chinese
''takeover''
of the Panama Canal; several congressional offices report a deluge of
mail
about Panama's choice of a Hong Kong company to operate shipping
installations at both ends of the canal. Allies of the Blue Team have
harassed China's biggest oil company, complicating its efforts to sell
shares
on the New York Stock Exchange.
   Members of the Blue Team initially drafted and then helped push
through
the House of Representatives this month the Taiwan Security Enhancement
Act, a measure to strengthen U.S. military ties with Taiwan that has
angered
China. A legislative rider compelled the Pentagon's National Defense
University to establish a center to study China's military.
   For a time last spring, the Blue Team thought the publication of the
Cox
committee report on Chinese espionage - which its allies helped draft -
might lead to irresistible pressure to alter the Clinton
administration's policy
of ''constructive engagement'' with Beijing. Administration officials
feared
the same result.
   The Blue Team has no membership cards or formal meetings. Its
sympathizers collaborate around particular causes but sometimes disagree

with one another. Some, for example, ridicule fears about the Panama
Canal.
    The core of the alliance consists of Capitol Hill aides who draft
China-related legislation and try to operate as anonymously as possible.

Several of the congressional aides were brought together last year with
like-minded academics and media commentators in a study group run by a
small research group, the Project for the New American Century, and
financed by Richard Mellon Scaife, the Pittsburgh billionaire who has
given
hundreds of millions of dollars to conservative causes.
    The study group was organized by Mark Lagon, a political scientist
who
recently joined the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Its

primary purpose was to discuss China policy and help produce a book,
tentatively titled ''China's Rise and America's Response.''
   According to a participant, these meetings sometimes took on the
flavor of
Blue Team strategy sessions as two dozen Hill aides, scholars, former
Reagan administration officials and others ate lunch once a month and
discussed chapters of the book, due out this year.
  While Blue Team members usually work behind the scenes to urge a
harder U.S. line on China, their cause has been taken up publicly by a
few
politicians. Gary Bauer, the former Reagan White House aide and leader
of
the Family Research Council, used stinging anti-Chinese rhetoric in his
recently abandoned presidential campaign and said it regularly won a
powerful response from voters.
    In a speech a year ago to the Republican National Committee, Mr.
Cox,
chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee, denounced the
Clinton administration for, he said, cuddling up to Beijing, accusing
President Bill Clinton of giving Chinese leaders ''the full Lewinsky.''
But
none of the four major candidates for president has embraced the Blue
Team view.
    Strong language and with-us-or-against-us judgments are becoming
common in the struggle between the Blue Team and those it sees as its
rivals, whom it calls the ''Red Team.'' Blue Team allies speak
derisively of
''panda-huggers'' and ''the Relationship Police,'' referring to those
who seek
a close and cooperative U.S. relationship with Beijing.
   Scholars who have been targets of Blue Team scorn say there is an
increasingly politicized atmosphere among Sinologists. ''It's not as
much fun
as it used to be,'' said Ronald Montaperto, a professor at the National
Defense University whom the Blue Team considers soft on China. ''Debate
has become very personal and very political, and frequently generates
more
heat than light.''
    For nearly three decades after Richard Nixon's opening to China in
1972, a
''domestic consensus used to sustain China policy,'' observed Peter
Rodman, an assistant to Henry Kissinger in the early days of China
diplomacy and now a scholar at the Nixon Center here in Washington. That

consensus, Mr. Rodman said, ''was shattered by Tiananmen Square'' in
1989, when the Chinese ruthlessly suppressed a student uprising.
   ''The Soviet threat used to hold the U.S. and China together,'' he
added.
No longer.
   Officials and scholars who disagree with the Blue Team's view that
conflict
with China is perhaps inevitable still generally dominate U.S. policy,
but
they seem less organized and less cohesive than the Blue Team. The
Clinton
administration, which might have provided an alternative vision of
China,
instead has offered a series of different China policies over the last
seven
years.
   Mr. Clinton campaigned for the presidency denouncing the ''Butchers
of
Beijing'' and, once elected, flirted with denying China trade benefits
because
of its human rights abuses. But he abruptly abandoned any such linkage
and
decided instead to warm up to China's leaders, eventually embracing
President Jiang Zemin's suggestion that China and the United States
could
be ''strategic partners.''
   The Blue Team and its allies see China as a rising power run by a
dictatorial
regime that suppresses ''the Chinese people's yearning for freedom and
democracy'' and is determined to challenge the United States, in the
words
of William Triplett, an aide to Senator Robert Bennett, Republican of
Utah,
and a former staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
   Mr. Triplett coined the term Blue Team. It comes, he said, from the
terminology of China's own military exercises, which often feature
battles
between red and blue teams. Mr. Triplett, a former China analyst at the
CIA, and Edward Timperlake, a former Republican foreign policy aide in
Congress, have teamed up to write two books - ''Year of the Rat'' and
''Red Dragon Rising'' - promoting their views. Among them: ''a series of

Faustian bargains and policy blunders'' by the Clinton administration
has
played into China's ambitions to acquire military capabilities.
   China experts of all stripes acknowledge that China is buying and
building
more modern weaponry, and some say they are worried about the
long-term implications of this modernization, which will increase
China's
ability to threaten Taiwan.
   Most China experts agree that rising nationalism in a democratic
Taiwan
combined with a frustrated China could create dangerous problems.
   Critics of the Blue Team's image of China argue, however, that the
country
is much too complex and still much too weak to describe in the Blue
Team's
stark terms.
   ''I don't have my head in the sand,'' said Paul Godwin, a China
military
expert who recently retired from the National Defense University. But he

deplored analysts who treat ''every rumored Chinese acquisition as a
reality'' and ''tend to see every weapon as the silver bullet'' for the
People's
Liberation Army.
   Some who disagree with the Blue Team say its members suffer from
nostalgia for the Soviet threat.
   ''You don't need to go searching for a new enemy,'' replied Jim
Doran, an
aide to Senator Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina, who began his

career as a Soviet analyst and lived in Russia in the early 1990s.
''Look at
the propaganda in the Chinese papers. Look at the vitriolic
anti-American
attitude of that. ''It's there for all to see.''
   Like nearly all the congressional aides who collaborate on the Blue
Team
agenda, Mr. Doran is not a China expert. He made his first visit to
China
last month. Very few of the other Washington-based activists concerned
about the Chinese threat have degrees in Chinese studies or speak
Chinese.
   But expertise on China is not essential to take a principled view of
U.S.
policy, argued William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard magazine,
which along with The Washington Times daily newspaper is a primary
outlet
for Blue Team views. ''I'm not a China expert at all. My view of China
flows from my view of what you think U.S. foreign policy should be,''
Mr.
Kristol said. ''American weakness is really the danger."
   One prominent China scholar whose views are embraced by the Blue Team

is Arthur Waldron, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania. While
many
Sinologists favor constructive relations with China's leadership, Mr.
Waldron bluntly asserts that U.S. interests would be better served if
China's
Communist leaders were displaced.
   ''I worry that if China continues on its current trend, which is
repressing at
home and building up armaments, that becomes very dangerous,'' he said.
''I agree with people who think regime change is key to a really stable
peace.''
   For a brief time last winter and spring, anti-China sentiment in
Washington
was sharply ascendant. Some Republicans saw an opportunity to create a
political issue over the Clinton administration's ''embrace of Jiang and
the
Communist Party,'' as Representative Cox said in a speech.
  Newt Gingrich, then a Republican representative from Georgia and the
House speaker, established the Cox committee in 1998 to investigate what

he called ''a profoundly deeper question than any other question that
has
arisen in this administration'' - charges that China got U.S. missile
technology from Loral Corp., whose chief executive was the largest
individual contributor to the Democrats in 1996.
   That charge had disappeared by the time the Cox committee's report
was
published last May. The final report focused on China's efforts to
acquire
secrets about missiles and nuclear weapons, and all the Democrats on the

committee signed it, although on the day of its release two key members
distanced themselves from the most alarming conclusions about Chinese
copying of U.S. weapons.
   Critics found much to fault in the Cox report. One of its most
frightening
assertions - that China could be expected to build a nuclear warhead
based
on the American W-88 model, thanks to stolen secrets - was challenged by

the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.
  Its accusations of spying got nearly all the attention, but the Cox
report also
embraced a dark view of China's broad intentions. The Chinese Communist
Party's ''main aim for the civilian economy is to support the building
of
modern military weapons and to support the aims of the PLA,'' the report

said.
  Professor Alastair Iain Johnston of Harvard University, a
specialist on the Chinese military, criticized this analysis, arguing
that
Chinese policy for more than 20 years has been ''to subordinate military

modernization to the development of the overall civilian economy.''
   Mr. Johnston pointed to several errors, including footnotes to
sections of
the Chinese Constitution that did not say what the Cox report reported
they
said and a misrepresentation of comments by President Jiang.
   The Cox report said that in 1997 Mr. Jiang ''called for an
'extensive,
thoroughgoing and sustained upsurge' in the PLA's acquisition of high
technology.'' The article the committee quoted, Mr. Johnston noted,
actually
said Mr. Jiang had ordered an ''extensive, thoroughgoing and sustained
upsurge of studying high-tech knowledge in the whole army.''
   Asked about Mr. Johnston's critique, Mr. Cox said, ''The facts as
reported
in the committee report, are indeed the facts.''
   The Jiang quotation showed that the PLA had an ''accelerating
interest in
high technology,'' which was ''precisely the point the report makes,''
Mr.
Cox said.
   When the lobbying intensifies this spring or summer on the
congressional
vote to grant China permanent ''normal trade relations'' status - the
key step
toward membership in the World Trade Organization - the Blue Team's
opponents will be out in force.
   Business groups, farm groups, the Clinton administration and
pro-trade
members of Congress will probably produce a well-greased lobbying effort

for passage. All will argue that by opening its markets to foreign
competitors, China will have to advance its own free-market reforms,
strengthen the rule of law and, over time, moderate its policies.
   ''It will pass,'' predicted Robert Kagan, who worked in Ronald
Reagan's
State Department and has written eloquent denunciations of America's
China policy in The Weekly Standard. Mr. Kagan, who also writes a
monthly column in The Washington Post, said, ''You can't block business
interests and free-trade ideology in the Republican Party short of
war.''
   In fact, some members who have been Blue Team supporters on issues
such as Taiwan - the House majority leader, Representative Richard
Armey, Republican of Texas, for example - will work for approval of
permanent normal trade status for China.
  ''I consider the government of China to be dangerous not only to the
people
of China but at least to all the peoples of that region,'' Mr. Armey
said in an
interview. But, a staunch free trader, he also said he hoped to extend
''freedom through commerce to the Chinese people'' by bringing China
into
the WTO.
   The impact of the Blue Team still ''isn't nearly what this community
of
hard-liners, desires,'' lamented Mr. Fisher, the former congressional
aide
who collects photographs of Chinese weaponry.
   But he noted with satisfaction that the Blue Team ''strikes terror
into the
heart'' of Washington's policy establishment, adding: ''We are going to
continue to have problems in our relationship with China and they
require
that America remain vigilant.''