'China apologists' are in full bloom

By Edward Neilan
Special to World Tribune.com

TOKYO--The "China apologists" are in full bloom, even ahead of the cherry blossoms this year.

The "China apologists," mainly representing newspapers and academic haunts in Los Angeles, New York and Boston, claim the rest of us are beating up on China merely because Beijing is into heavy duty spying on the U.S, stealing high tech secrets and deploying enough missiles opposite Taiwan to blow the island off the map.

The "China apologists" say "everybody does it" about the spying charge, claim the stealing of high tech secrets is overdrawn and that missile deployments are China's right. Publicizing these facts will promote an anti -Chinese hysteria, they say.

"What is extraordinary," comments Richard Baum, a China scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles, "is not the fact that some Chinese nationalists snoop around American research labs trying to pick up technical information on the cheap, but that some American journalists, politicians and congressional aides seek to portray such activity as a massive, coordinated Chinese government assault on American security. They whip up a Red scare that is far out of proportion to the problem's actual dimensions and then use the resulting, self-generated hysteria as a club with which to attack the Clinton presidency."

Don't worry, adds a Los Angeles-based columnist because "Beijing can field only a handful of missiles against a phenomenal U.S. arsenal that includes a full fleet of nuclear submarines, strategic bombers and 500 long range missiles."

A Chinese analyst ripped that analysis to shreds, saying it only takes one nuclear missile to make a big dent in Los Angeles.

Yi Yen wrote in Sing Tao Jih Pao that "In terms of nuclear power, the United States can destroy China 16 times while China can destroy the United States only once. There is no actual difference between them."

It used to be Japanese commentators who were conspicuous as the great "China apologists." But they have been replaced--after coming to grips with the reality of Sino-Japan relations-- by squishy American thought and writing that disregards reality and has more to do with politics than with political science.

The latest sprouting of the "China apologists" came after London's Financial Times ran a story pointing to a massive deployment of missiles by China opposite Taiwan. Taipei became worried. The Pentagon said the deployment was not new, even though some 100 of the missiles had been upgraded. Then the China spy story broke; Beijing had gotten away with stealing U.S. nuclear secrets that were costly to the American security strategy.

The backdrop was the talk of a U.S. missile defense system known in Asia as Theater Missile Defense(TMD).

TMD is still on the drawing boards, 10 years away from any deployment. China's missile deployment is a reality; the published doctrine of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) says they are in place for the recovery of Taiwan.

Are we "demonizing" the world's most populous nation, as the apologists say, by talking about TMD and criticizing China's own missile build-up? Some academicians might be worried that a strain in US-China relations would mean they wouldn't be invited back to Shanghai or Chengdu to finish research papers.

These are the same "opinion-leaders" who have been saying that China deserves special treatment on trade, looking the other way on human rights and dissidents and forgiving crackdowns on the press, just because "someday China is going to become a great power."

The way to encourage China to become a great power in the best sense is to hold it to account for its actions today.

The significance of the U.S. sending a second aircraft carrier battle group, the U.S.S. Nimitz, toward Taiwan to augment the presence of the carrier U.S.S. Independence, in March 1996 after China had fired intimidating missiles toward Taiwan is immense, a watershed event in American security policy in Asia.

The "China apologists" should add to their reading lists "Crisis In The Taiwan Strait," edited by James R.Lilley and Chuck Downs, published by the National Defense University Press, Fort McNair, Washington D.C. in cooperation with the American Enterprise Institute (1997).

The book analyzes U.S and China missile potential, tactics and strategy from every perspective imaginable.

Edward Neilan (eneilan@crisscross.com) is a veteran journalist, based in Tokyo, who covers East Asia and writes weekly for World Tribune.com.