11/21/00 12:15 p.m.
Forewarned About China
The next administration must take the threat seriously.

Frank Gaffney Jr., president of the Center for Security Policy, held senior positions in the Reagan Defense Department.

ccording to press reports, Russia has agreed to sell four advanced Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft to China for $800 million. Even for the Clinton-Gore team — whose foreign-policy record has been characterized by fecklessness and failure — this transaction represents a signal setback.

For one thing, the Administration had earlier this year expressed adamant opposition to the PRC's purchase of a similar system outfitted with sophisticated electronics from Israel. The United States government had concluded that, in the hands of the Chinese, an AWACS would represent a powerful force-multiplier — allowing Beijing to make far more effective use of its growing inventory of modern fighter aircraft to counter American battle groups and other units in East Asia.

The Israeli government was understandably reluctant to give up a lucrative sale if the result would not be to deny the Chinese AWACS capabilities but simply to give the deal to foreign competitors. In the end, for an as yet undisclosed — but presumably high — price to be paid by the United States, Prime Minister Ehud Barak announced last July that he was deferring the sale indefinitely. (It remains to be seen if Barak will stay bought, however, now that the only question is whether there are Russian or Israeli electronics aboard an aircraft China will be purchasing in any event.)

The larger problem, though, is Washington's failure to dissuade Moscow from selling China virtually anything it wants in the way of offensive weapons, most of which have been designed by the former Soviet Union's military-industrial complex for one purpose: to kill Americans. These include destroyers armed with deadly, nuclear-armed "Sunburn" sea-skimming cruise missiles, jet fighters, helicopters, main battle tanks, and surface-to-air missile systems.

The Sino-Russian "strategic partnership" is particularly worrisome insofar as China is increasingly brazen about the use to which it intends to put such weapons. For example, on Sunday, Agence France Presse reported that one of China's top military officers — Zhang Wannian, vice chairman of the Central Military Commission — declared in Guangzhou that "a war is certain to break out in the Taiwan strait within the coming five years."

The Chinese are equally frank about the adversary they would expect to fight in such a war: the United States, as well as the Taiwanese. An article published last Wednesday (N.B. safely after the election and the vote on Permanent Normal Trade Relations for China) on the front page of the Washington Post reported that: "In government pronouncements, stories in the state-run press, books and interviews, the United States is now routinely portrayed as Enemy No. 1."

As it happens, on the same day the Post article appeared, the Washington Times published an excerpt from the new book entitled The China Threat by its crack national-security correspondent, Bill Gertz. Particularly noteworthy was a quote from "an internal military document obtained by dissidents in China…known as 'Document 65'…dated August 1, 1999…[and] signed [by the] 'General Political Department of the People's Liberation Army'": "Taking into account [the] possible intervention by the U.S., and based on the development strategy of our country, it is better to fight now than in the future — the earlier, the better. The reason being that, if worst [sic] comes to worst, we will gain control of Taiwan before full deployment of the U.S. troops."

Even more extraordinary than the fact that the Chinese government sees conflict with the United States as inevitable and that it is preparing for war by arming itself to the teeth is a dirty little not-so-secret: The PRC is obtaining help in this regard not only from the Russians and America's allies but from technology diverted, purloined, and even legally purchased from the United States itself. Machine tools, supercomputers, ballistic-missile-related components and know-how, and even nuclear-weapons designs are among the Made-in-America gear now in the service of those in China preparing to inflict death and destruction on this country and her armed forces.

Less well understood is what is, arguably, the most ambitious aspect of China's military build-up. The PRC hopes to get American investors to provide a substantial percentage of the financial resources it seeks to acquire the required means to threaten and, perhaps, to attack "Enemy Number 1." This gambit takes the purported Leninist quote about Western capitalists selling the Communists the rope with which to hang them to a new, even more absurd height: The Chinese leaders hope the capitalists will unwittingly underwrite the purchase of such "rope," as well.

Fortunately, there are signs Communist China may yet be foiled in its bid to penetrate the U.S. capital markets for the purpose of securing tens of billions of dollars in largely undisciplined and non-transparent funds for malevolent purposes. Two state-owned enterprises, PetroChina and Sinopec, have recently suffered significant financial costs when their respective Initial Public Offerings encountered vehement opposition from the "PetroChina Coalition." The Coalition is made up of American non-governmental organizations, drawn from across the political spectrum, that share a common determination to prevent the proceeds from such IPOs from being used to underwrite not only China's military modernization but its technology theft, espionage, proliferation, regional hegemony, support for oil-producing rogue states, despoiling of the environment, repression of human rights and religious freedoms in Tibet and elsewhere, labor-related abuses, etc.

These same forces appear most recently to have discouraged China from offering, at least for the time being, a sovereign bond valued at approximately $1-2 billion that was expected to come to market in New York sometime this month.

Also, for the first time, the California Public Employees Retirement Fund (CalPERS) — the most influential public pension fund in the United States — has made human rights, environmental, and labor standards part of its "due diligence" process in evaluating which emerging market debt and equity offerings it will hold in its portfolio.

Greater transparency about the hostility towards the United States being systematically expressed by official Communist Chinese sources can only serve to reinforce concerns about the wisdom of Clinton-Gore administration policies that have served to increase the PRC's ability to do grave violence to American interests and citizens. It behooves the next President to chart a new course, sensitive not only to the threat posed by Communist China but to the contribution ill-advised technology transfers and unwitting and uninformed investors might make to its intensification.