Report Sharpens Edginess With China

The authors of the House report on Chinese espionage released Tuesday focused their blame on the U.S. government’s lax stewardship of military secrets, not on China’s efforts to steal them. But in the long run, the Cox committee’s greatest impact may be on an issue much broader than its narrow official mandate: the premises and tone of America’s relationship with China.

For years, foreign policy experts have debated how Americans should think of China: as a friend that happens to own nuclear weapons, as an adversary bent on reducing U.S. power in Asia or an uncomfortable combination of the two.

President Clinton declared that China was slowly becoming democratic and so could become America’s “strategic partner” in Asia. Skeptics like Reps. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach) and Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) insisted that China is still a one-party dictatorship and a potential U.S. adversary.

Score this one for the skeptics.

Cox, who has thundered against “China’s communist dictatorship” in the past, was deliberately mild Tuesday on the implications of his work. “There is nothing in our report that foreordains a particular policy toward the People’s Republic of China,” he said--although he added briskly that if we catch any spies, “they should be executed.”

A Smart Bomb Meant for Clinton

Other Republicans sought to concentrate the report’s fire on the White House, targeting it like a smart bomb on Clinton and his closest comrades on China policy, Vice President Al Gore and national security advisor Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger.

But as with most smart bombs, some collateral damage was unavoidable. The report landed on a China policy battlefield already scarred by earlier bombshells, from human rights and Taiwan to abortive trade negotiations and the actual smart bombs that mistakenly hit the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade.

Foreign policy experts said that the Cox report could accelerate a trend in both the United States and China to view the other in adversarial terms. “Relations between the two countries are authentically in crisis,” said Arnold Kanter, a top State Department official in the George Bush administration. “The domestic politics of U.S. policy toward China are bad and getting worse. The Cox Committee report will intensify that, rightly or wrongly.”

“Even more worrisome is what appears to be going on inside China: a kind of mirror-image, where hard-liners are using their problems with the United States as a club to bash their opponents in domestic debates, just as is happening here,” Kanter said. “Each country’s policy toward the other is almost becoming an afterthought to domestic politics. And it’s going to become worse as we play off each other.”

On Capitol Hill, the Cox report’s impact was most visible on Rep. Doug Bereuter (R-Neb.), a scholarly moderate who has made China policy something of a specialty--and may qualify as a bellwether among Midwestern Republicans.

“We need to completely reevaluate our relationship with the People’s Republic of China,” said Bereuter, who served on Cox’s panel. “We have been acting, until now, based upon the expectation that China would evolve in the direction of democracy and human rights and that time was on our side. But it’s now clear that the weapons technology gap has been reduced so much . . . [that] we can no longer act based on that expectation.”

Bereuter said that he still supports a deal to let China join the World Trade Organization, “because it’s in both our short-term and long-term interest.” But he now favors far more stringent limits on exports of U.S. technology to China and a more skeptical view of Beijing’s intentions as a whole.

A second Cold War still seems unlikely. Most Republicans, like Bereuter, still favor expanding trade with China--despite their increasingly hawkish views on Beijing as a potential military and diplomatic threat.

And the American public has not decided that China is the same kind of mortal adversary the United States faced in the Soviet Union during the Cold War--not yet, at least. A Newsweek poll in mid-May found that Americans did not consider China to be “an enemy” by a wide margin, 64% to 30%, even though a 57% majority did consider the loss of nuclear secrets to China “a major threat to our national security.”

But the full impact of the Cox report’s findings may not have sunk in. And a series of potentially bruising U.S.-Chinese confrontations lie ahead: on trade, technology transfer rules, missile defense, Taiwan, Chinese weapons proliferation, Kosovo, the June 4 anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre--and, alongside each substantive issue, both countries’ internal political warfare.

“We’re in for a very long 18 months,” said Kanter, referring to the U.S. election campaign. Already, on Tuesday, Texas Gov. George W. Bush denounced Clinton as soft on China--the same charge that Clinton used against Bush’s father in 1992.

Inside China, experts say, a mirror-image debate is underway.

In addition to cementing the position of conservatives hostile toward China in Washington, analysts fear that the Cox report could have the same effect in Beijing: bolstering the case of hard-liners within the Beijing leadership who are deeply suspicious of the United States, while undermining moderates who advocate closer ties.

“The Chinese have been engaged for some time in a debate over the American threat,” said Andrew J. Nathan of Columbia University. “For us, China is a potential military problem, 15 or 20 years down the road. For them, the United States is a very pressing problem, right now. . . . They seem to have decided that the Clinton administration is simply too damaged to achieve any more progress in the relationship and their only hope for the next 18 months is to try to minimize any further damage.”

That may be a challenge for both sides. As early as this week, the Senate will debate new controls on technology exports to China as part of a military spending bill.

Beijing Hard-Liners Become Louder

In Beijing, hard-liners have become louder of late after a series of events that have pushed U.S.-Sino relations to a perilous low less than a year after Clinton’s visit to China.

Premier Zhu Rongji was seen in some circles as selling out Chinese economic interests by agreeing to deep trade concessions to get China into the World Trade Organization. After the bombing of China’s embassy in Belgrade, many Chinese criticized Zhu and President Jiang Zemin--who have staked their foreign policy agenda on building a “strategic partnership” with the United States--for cozying up to a country that they believe is eager to keep China down.

So far, Jiang and Zhu appear to have kept their grip on power within China’s communist leadership. But analysts said that it is too early to forecast exactly what the long-term fallout of such events will be in Beijing.

Some time this summer, Congress will stage its annual debate over renewing normal trade relations with China, known as “most favored nation” status. The renewal appears likely to pass but administration officials said that their hopes of making the trading status permanent--and admitting China to the WTO, a major goal for Beijing--have been dealt a setback.

Most explosive, down the road, is the issue of Taiwan. China views the island republic as a rebellious province that should be returned to the motherland. The United States agrees that Taiwan should rejoin China some day but has pledged to defend the newly democratic republic against any attempt by Beijing to take over by force.

In Congress, China skeptics on both right and left have warmed to the cause of Taiwan. An odd couple, Sens. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and Robert Torricelli (D-N.J.) have introduced a bill directing the president to establish closer links between U.S. and Taiwan armed forces, including a direct communications link from the U.S. Pacific Command in Hawaii and Taipei.

“Taiwan is the wild card,” said Robert A. Manning, director of Asian Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. “I haven’t found anybody who can describe a real conflict scenario between China and the United States--other than Taiwan . . . and the Taiwan issue is manageable.”

“We have to have some kind of working relationship with China,” Manning said. “It doesn’t have to be a strategic partnership. The strategic partnership never existed. It can be something more circumscribed.

“Both sides need to put some kind of floor under the relationship,” he said. “The floor may turn out to be our trading relationship. . . . Building that floor will take some work but that’s what the next year or two will be about.”

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China’s Missile Threat

The stolen technology could be of enormous value to China, giving its intercontinental ballistic missiles more punch.

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Map shows range of China’s CSS-4, from reported launch point. Mileage based on probable trajectory.

Approximate distances to selected U.S cities within range of China’s CSS-4 misssile..

Chicago: 6,982 miles

Detroit: 7,006 miles

Boston: 7,096 miles

New York: 7,200 miles

Wash. D.C.: 7,301 miles

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CSS-2

Strong Soviet design influences; fired from mobile launchers.

Range: up to 1,926 miles

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CSS-3

China’s first intercontinental missile.

Range: 3,417 miles; cannot reach U.S.

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CSS-4

China’s main ICBM threat against U.S. Range: over 7,457 miles, able to hit most U.S. cities.

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During the 1990s, China has deployed approximately 20 CSS-4s in silos, most of which are targeted at the U.S. An improved version of the CSS-4 known at the CSS-4 Mod2, could deploy multiple warheads.

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Sources: “Missile Systems of the World”; Select Committee of the U.S. House; Times Washington Bureau