Hong Kong’s still-independent press is having a field day with an
unusual PDA (public display of aggressiveness) by the new master of the
former British colony: China’s President Jiang Zemin. Evidently, Jiang
was upset at the impertinence of a journalist who asked whether
Beijing’s endorsement of a second term for the highly unpopular shipping
magnate it had installed to run Hong Kong amounted to “an imperial
order.”
According to Monday’s Washington Post, the Communist emperor —
furious that someone had accurately described the nature of his clothes
— “flew into a rage. ‘You media need to raise your general knowledge
level, got it? You should not say we have an imperial order and then
criticize me. Got it? Naive. I am so angry.'”
Tung Chee-wha, the chief executive of Hong Kong in question,
subsequently demonstrated his subordination to China by telling the
press that “President Jiang actually loves you all very much. He merely
gave you a kind of encouragement.” Like their journalists, the people
of Hong Kong are under no illusion: the kind of “encouragement”
Beijing’s emperor has in mind would give “tough love” a whole new
meaning.
Americans — journalists, politicians and the public alike — should
take to heart Jiang’s call for “raising (the) general knowledge level”
about his government and what it is doing. Yet there is strong
resistance to any such educational effort, as was evidenced by the
reaction from both the two presidential campaigns and the Fourth Estate
to the one, fleeting focus on China in the entire 2000 campaign.
Last week, a mysterious group had the temerity to run a television ad
suggesting that viewers vote Republican because Al Gore had received
illegal campaign contributions from Communist China and the PRC had,
under the Clinton-Gore administration, secured access to sensitive
military secrets that have greatly increased the Chinese threat to the
United States. It concluded by reprising one of the most effective
political spots in the history of television advertising — the “Daisy”
ad employed against Barry
Goldwater’s 1964 presidential bid that showed a little girl whose
enumeration of flower petals morphs into a countdown to a nuclear
detonation.
The Gore campaign denounced it; the Bush campaign asked that it be
pulled; and the press gave it huge quantities of free air time in the
course of expressing its shock, shock that someone would run such a spot
— often sneeringly declaring that the ad’s allegations had never been
proven.
This episode is a terrible indictment of the “general level of
knowledge” about China. The American people are entitled to be reminded
that Al Gore did indeed raise money from illegal Chinese sources, as did
his mentor, Bill Clinton. To be sure, he maintains that he did not know
he was doing so. Yet, e-mails from his office, conveniently unavailable
until very lately, suggest that he did.
Neither is there any doubt that Communist China secured highly secret
information about U.S. weapon systems and militarily relevant technology
during the Clinton-Gore years. An indication of just how much has
become evident now that the U.S. intelligence community has finally
gotten through the laborious process of translating 13,000 pages of
information about Chinese nuclear and missile programs provided
unsolicited in 1995 by a so-called “walk-in” — an individual whom it
had dismissed, until very recently, as a Chinese double-agent.
Information in the public domain makes clear that some of what China
received was transferred with the explicit permission of President
Clinton (for example, supercomputers that wound up in China’s nuclear
and military-industrial complex). Other equipment and know-how was
either stolen or diverted. How much the administration knew about the
latter may never be fully known. There can be no doubt, however, that
the cumulative effect of this hemorrhage of high technology was very
detrimental to American security interests.
(Now that the secret agreement Vice President Gore signed in 1995
with then-Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin to conceal from
Congress information about Kremlin weapons deals with Iran that, under
U.S. law, would otherwise have triggered sanctions, the question must be
asked: Was a similar agreement forged between the Clinton White House
and Beijing to withhold documentation about technology transfers to
China from the legislative branch that would have adversely affected
bilateral relations?)
The “general knowledge level” about China could also be usefully
raised with respect to two other items:
- On Oct. 10, one of the most influential members of the United
States Senate on national security matters, Republican Senator Jon Kyl
of Arizona, placed in the record 14 pages of quotes — which he
described as “but a small sample of the bellicose statements that
China’s government has made recently.” On that occasion, he remarked,
“Time and time again, Chinese officials and state-sponsored media have
made bellicose and threatening statements aimed at the United States and
our long-standing, democratic ally, Taiwan. They have even gone so far
as to issue implied threats to use nuclear weapons against the United
States. The question is, will we take them at their word on these
defense matters as we did when they made trade commitments?” - Even as China is making such threats, it is displaying the
vulnerability of its economy by mounting a renewed effort to secure
billions of dollars in largely undisciplined, non-transparent stock and
sovereign bond offerings on the U.S. capital markets. As former NSC
official, Roger Robinson, who now chairs the Center for Security
Policy’s William J. Casey Institute, has observed, there is reason to
believe that Beijing is coming to Wall Street to fund technology theft,
espionage, proliferation and repression of human rights and religious
freedom at home and in places like Sudan and Tibet. Since the
Securities and Exchange Commission has declined to date to insist on
full disclosure of the uses to which such proceeds are being put,
American institutional and other investors may actually unwittingly wind
up subsidizing these activities.
It has been reported that Communist China prefers that Al Gore,
rather than George W. Bush, be the next American president. It would
help raise the standards of the American people’s understanding of what
China is about if, in remaining days of the campaign, the Texas governor
would help explain why.
Frank J. Gaffney Jr. held senior positions in the Reagan Defense Department and is currently the president of the
Center for Security Policy in
Washington.
