Fears of Chinese Spying Only Deepen U.S. Mistrust

Today’s controversies over Chinese espionage and acquisition of American defense technology, though anchored in recent revelations about China’s conduct, are merely surface reflections of a deeper, longer-term hardening of American attitudes and policy toward the world’s most populous country.

The American government, many scholars and officials are saying, has become far more mistrustful of China than at any time since the Nixon administration carried out its opening to the world’s most populous country more than a quarter of a century ago.

“Let’s call a spade a spade,” said David Shambaugh, a China scholar at George Washington University here. “We have a relationship of strategic competition with China.”

America’s current uneasiness with China dates at least to the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown in which hundreds, perhaps thousands, of demonstrators were killed. Many American officials believe that the crackdown exposed the Chinese regime as fundamentally anti-democratic.

Since then, the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 removed the underpinnings of the anti-Soviet partnership between America and China. A brief military confrontation over Taiwan in 1996 made the U.S. military still more suspicious of China.

The symptoms of America’s growing wariness are evident in many small ways:

* Over the last few years, U.S. military planners have conducted more than 20 war games practicing how to handle a conflict with China, according to a Pentagon source--more than for any other major power in the world, including Russia.

* Republican candidates for political office are discovering that the specter of a national security threat from China provides them with a way to tell voters: “It’s not the economy, stupid.”

“China is a red-meat Republican issue now,” said Bob Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “For Republicans who go off on the hustings, there are few applause lines on foreign policy, but one sure applause line is a denunciation of China and Clinton’s China policy.”

* Defense Department officials have become increasingly skeptical about the value of military exchanges with China, because American visitors to China’s defense installations are allowed to see far less than Chinese visitors to American military facilities.

Not Forthcoming About Defense Center

Although visiting Chinese officials have been welcomed into the Pentagon, Chinese defense officials rebuffed Defense Secretary William S. Cohen’s request to see China’s national military command center on a planned trip to Beijing. In fact, some Chinese officials refused to acknowledge that such a building exists, according to two sources familiar with the negotiations.

Frustrated Pentagon officials “wanted to give them overhead photographs and say, ‘Right here!’ ” said one U.S. defense specialist.

The suspicions are mutual. Ever since U.S. warplanes mistakenly bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade on May 8, China has been moving to scale back ties with the United States.

It suspended military exchanges with America--preempting, for the time being, the Pentagon’s reevaluation of what to do about these ties. Chinese officials quietly told the Clinton administration that the suspension would last only through May--but no one seems sure to what extent the military exchanges will revive after that. Cohen’s visit to China had been planned for June but, privately, U.S. officials doubt that it will take place until the North Atlantic Treaty Organization war with Yugoslavia ends.

The threatened ruptures extend beyond military exchanges. Six weeks ago, China and the United States were moving toward a milestone agreement for China’s entry into the World Trade Organization.

President Clinton put off the deal, at least in part because he feared that Congress was not yet ready to support it. And now opposition to a WTO agreement seems to be rising in China, although Chinese officials have signaled a willingness to resume the talks.

Likewise, after the president’s tour of China, Clinton administration officials believed last summer that they finally would be able to get China’s agreement to join the Missile Technology Control Regime, the international accord governing the export of missile know-how. Now administration officials admit that there is no chance China will enter such a deal any time soon.

Conversely, after Clinton’s visit, Chinese officials hoped that the United States would ease controls on American high-technology exports to China and lift all sanctions imposed after Tiananmen Square. Those hopes, too, have been dashed and, if Congress moves on export controls, it will be to tighten them, not to relax them.

Experts Disagree on Strategic Approach

With U.S. policy toward China in flux, disagreements persist about where China fits into America’s strategic calculations.

Despite the Cold War’s end, some American scholars and officials still base their views on China’s strategic importance to the United States. Michel Oksenberg of Stanford University, who helped run American policy toward China during the Carter administration, warned that the United States must be careful not to lose local support for maintaining its military bases in South Korea and Japan.

“The underlying strategy of the United States should be to nurture the triangular relationship among Japan, China and the United States,” Oksenberg said.

But increasingly, other analysts and officials are urging the government to hedge its bets on China by forging stronger ties with other Asian countries, particularly Japan.

“The best way to deal with China is to create a security structure in Asia based on shared democratic values, one that is robust enough to weather any storm having its origins in China,” said Arthur Waldron, a China scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. “Japan has to be at the center of such a structure, and [South] Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan and India are all important, too.”

Such views of China have gained currency since the Taiwan Straits crisis of 1995-96. On the eve of Taiwan’s first presidential election, China fired a series of missiles into the waters near Taiwan, and the United States responded by sending two aircraft carriers.

Although the Clinton administration moved quickly to ease the tensions, the Taiwan crisis “may have been more of a turning point than we thought,” said Jonathan Pollack of the Santa Monica-based Rand Corp. think tank.

“The Chinese didn’t know the half of what they did” by firing missiles at Taiwan, said one Pentagon official. Within the American military, he said, “colonels and lieutenant colonels and defense intellectuals in uniform, people who had never before focused upon China, began paying attention.”

Since then, American policy toward China has been dogged by what seems like an unending series of scandals. Disclosures that Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign raised money from donors with ties to the Chinese regime and that American satellite companies gave China data that could improve the accuracy of its rockets were followed by this year’s scandal over China’s alleged spying at U.S. nuclear labs.

“The fund-raising scandal seemed like a blip,” said one U.S. official who asked not to be identified. However, he said, the more recent satellite and spy controversies “have helped create a community of believers in the United States about China as a national security threat, and that will itself have political consequences.”

Indeed, others claim that these scandals are kept alive by politics. “Last year and the year before, the furor died down after a few months,” said Robert Sutter of the Congressional Research Service. “This year, it’s not dying down. Part of the reason is that these scandals fit into people’s partisan political agendas.”

Issue Offers Gains for Republicans

For the Republicans, the recent spy scandal offers a tailor-made issue. They can attack Clinton’s China policy on national security grounds, without threatening the U.S. business and corporate interests on which many Republicans depend for campaign funds.

Many Democrats--even those who have long opposed Clinton’s China policy--are cynical about the continuing Republican-led investigations.

“The overriding principle is that America’s China policy is dominated by money,” Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) said. “The question now is this: Will the Republicans try to exploit the espionage issue and criticize Clinton’s China policy and still cater to the business community by voting for China’s trading benefits? I think, at the end of the day, the Republican votes will be there for the business community. They always have been.”

Although relations are souring, few inside or outside the U.S. government view China as a foe in the image of the Soviet Union. “There’s a change in the mood of the country, but that doesn’t mean China is our enemy,” said Peter Rodman, director of national security affairs for the Nixon Center on Peace and Freedom.

But former U.S. ambassador to China James Lilley, like many other present and former U.S. officials, rejects the idea that cooperation is the hallmark of U.S.-Chinese relations.

“They have put their money on increasing their economic base as their first priority,” Lilley said. “They need stability to achieve this. They need Taiwan to achieve this. They need Middle East oil to achieve this. And the U.S.-Japan security treaty is the prime obstacle to the achievement of their destiny.”