U.S. Links With China’s Military Raise Concerns

In the last two months, the Pentagon has moved quietly but rapidly to develop military ties with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, raising questions in the United States and among Asian governments about what the new relationship means and where it is headed.

Two months ago, in a private ceremony, a top Chinese general received the same sort of honor cordon at the Pentagon that Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide recently received on nationwide television. Last month, Gen. Merrill A. McPeak, U.S. Air Force chief of staff, visited Beijing for talks and a banquet with the Chinese army’s air force commander.

The new ties bear the personal imprimatur of Defense Secretary William J. Perry, who has been active in promoting cooperation between the U.S. and Chinese defense industries since his days as a senior Pentagon official in the Jimmy Carter Administration.

Perry, who has maintained personal ties with some senior Chinese military leaders, will cement the new relationship with the Chinese army next week, when he pays his own visit to Beijing and establishes a U.S.-China commission to discuss possible cooperation between the two countries’ defense industries.

“I think it is important for our government to have a good working relationship with a country as important as China. I think that should include a defense-to-defense relationship,” Perry said in an interview with The Times last week.

He said his ties with Chinese leaders “will be an asset in developing a good relationship. The Chinese are very strong . . . for what they call old friends.

“We’ve got some hard problems to work out with them,” the defense secretary said, citing China’s sales of missiles to Pakistan and other countries and the U.S. effort to secure more Chinese help in stopping North Korea’s nuclear program. And on Friday, China conducted its second nuclear test this year, defying pressure to join an international nuclear-testing moratorium.

A number of observers, including some U.S. government officials, believe that the new links will pave the way for the sale of military-related technology from American companies to China.

“It’s inevitably going to lead to that,” one U.S. government official said.

Michael D. Swaine, a RAND Corp. specialist on the Chinese army, observed of U.S. policy-makers: “They seem to be trying to find a way to create some kind of sales without raising all kinds of reactions from Congress. The logic of the situation . . . is that the Clinton Administration is going to want to provide further assistance to U.S. businesses in China, including in areas that are defense-related.”

But Perry categorically denied that there will be any discussion of arms sales, American technology or any other American help for China’s military during his trip.

“Nothing that I will be doing (in China) will be designed to enhance China’s military capability,” he said. “It may be that the Chinese Defense Ministry will make proposals to us that could involve a strengthening of their military activity. That’s not what we’re there to do.”

Although Pentagon officials say they have no intention of opening the way for direct government-to-government arms sales, they leave open the possibility of American sales of civilian technology with military applications--such as computers, radar and advanced electronics.

Perry acknowledged that the United States might someday--but not on his forthcoming trip--seek to establish a military cooperation program with China.

“I never say never,” he said, “but I don’t now conceive of the circumstances in which I would see it as in our security interests to be taking actions to deliberately plan to strengthen the military capability of China. That’s not what we’re there to do.”

Pentagon officials also portray the new effort as a way of trying to deal with China as a future military superpower. They say they want to find out what the Chinese military is doing and to reassure its leaders, through direct contact, that the Pentagon does not view China as an enemy.

Yet the military links between the United States and China have begun to raise eyebrows in places such as Russia, India, Taiwan and Southeast Asian countries, all of which are wary of China’s growing military power and loath to have the United States do anything that would make China any stronger than it is.

Perry said that top leaders of other Asian countries “have all urged me to form a strong relationship with China, and have been at times critical of our government for not working more closely with China.”

But he acknowledged that none of the other Asian leaders “would propose today that we be involved today in arms sales to China or cooperative weapons development programs with China.”

The ties are controversial in Washington, where critics worry about the moral implications and the impact inside China of dealing with its army.

In 1989, although apparently with some reluctance, top military leaders carried out the orders of China’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, to remove pro-democracy demonstrators from the streets of Beijing.

“We always say this (relationship) doesn’t give credibility to the PLA. But you’ve got to be realistic about it,” said Rep. Patricia Schroeder, the Colorado Democrat and a member of the House Armed Services Committee. “They (Chinese army leaders) are going to say at home, ‘The Americans come here because we’re such a great power.’ ”

William C. Triplett, former chief counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and author of a forthcoming book about the Chinese military, said the Pentagon should have “the same kind of relationship (with China’s army) that we would have had with Hitler’s general staff in 1938. Correct, yes, but the idea of cooperation with them is insane. . . . This is not France or Belgium here. We’re talking about a government which has used its military to enforce totalitarian rule.”

Until 1989, the Pentagon and the Chinese army had extensive military links, based on their shared interest in counteracting Soviet military power in Asia.

The ties included high-level visits, technology transfers, arms sales and strategic cooperation on issues such as Afghanistan and Cambodia.

But after the bloody Tian An Men Square crackdown, then-President George Bush suspended all official contacts with the Chinese army and all U.S. military sales to China. To China’s irritation, not only were new American sales prohibited, arms transfers already in process were held up for nearly four years. For both the Pentagon and the Chinese, the events of 1989 were a watershed.

“There is no intention to go back to pre-1989 days,” one Pentagon official said.

China, however, is now lobbying hard to have the Clinton Administration lift the 1989 ban on direct arms sales to China and to open the way for transfers of technology with military applications.

The ban on arms sales “shows there is still a shadow over our relations,” Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qichen told a news conference here last week. “If we want to remove this shadow, we must work to lift these sanctions.”

He urged the Administration to open the way for sales of military equipment, including spare parts.

Other governments believe that, whatever the Pentagon says publicly, it is maneuvering to become a supplier of military technology to China.

“The two countries’ interests converge,” one European intelligence source observed. “The United States has defense industries that need new sales, and China wants Western technology, because it doesn’t want to rely entirely on what it can buy from Russia.

“But there are also some difficulties,” the source added. “The Americans want to sell off-the-shelf systems for quick income, and the Chinese want transfers of technology so that they can be able to make things on their own over the long term.”

On Perry’s trip to China, he will hold the first official meeting of what will be called the U.S.-China Commission on Defense Conversion.

Officially, the panel is supposed to talk about ways of helping defense industries change over to civilian production. But Perry’s new panel will also open the way for broader exchanges between the U.S. and Chinese defense industries.

U.S. officials on the panel will include representatives of the State and Defense departments, the National Security Council, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and, of particular note, the Commerce Department--the lead agency in promoting U.S. exports.

Perry said he hoped the commission will help to establish “business partnerships” between U.S. companies and the Chinese defense industry. One possibility, he said, is that U.S. companies can help supply designs and marketing for low-technology products made by Chinese enterprises.

Perry served as undersecretary of defense in the Jimmy Carter Administration, when the United States was just opening the way for transfers of military-related technology to Beijing.

“He was closely involved in making more sophisticated technology available to the Chinese,” said one career U.S. official, recalling Perry’s efforts then. “He was in the vanguard of liberalizing U.S. export controls for China.”

In particular, Perry led the way in changing the export rules so China would be treated more leniently than other Communist countries.

Perry said he is proud of the work he did in trying to help China’s military in 1980, but he is not trying to revive those efforts.

“There’s been a lot of history that has changed in the past 14 years,” he said.

One of the friends Perry made on that 1980 trip was Gen. Liu Huaqing, who is now one of China’s top military leaders. And in the early 1990s, while teaching at Stanford University, he met Gen. Ding Henggao, who is now minister of the State Commission for Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense. The commission supervises the Chinese defense industry, and Ding will be China’s top leader on the joint commission.

Defense Department officials say one of the main purposes of the high-level contact with the Chinese army is to avoid having the two sides drift into some sort of new Cold War.

“We don’t think of them as an enemy, and they shouldn’t think of us as an enemy,” one Pentagon official said.

Ronald N. Montaperto, a China expert at the National Defense University who escorted four Chinese military officials on a recent trip to the United States, said he found leaders of China’s army to be “much less trustful, much more suspicious than they were two years ago.”

“The PLA senior leadership is very taken by the notion that this Administration sees China as a future hostile peer competitor, and that U.S. policies reflect an attempt to prevent China from completing its program of economic development. They need to be disabused of this incorrect notion,” Montaperto said.

Some Pentagon officials argue that the Chinese army will get stronger with or without help from the United States.

Over the last two years, for example, China has made big buys of military technology from Russia.

“This is not a military you can keep down on the farm,” one Defense Department official observed.

But critics of the new links say the United States should do as little as possible to help China’s army.

“What are we doing?” asked Jeff Fiedler, who works on China issues for the AFL-CIO. “Why do we want to strengthen the Chinese military? It could change the balance of power in Asia, to the detriment of the Japanese, who are a democracy without a large army.”

“I get nervous when we trade items with high technology,” Schroeder added. “How far will this go? I don’t know. I find it really kind of dangerous.”