Sinapologists

...Thomas M. DeFrank is a veteran White House correspondent and was the collaborator on James A Baker III's The Politics of Diplomacy...

...A questionable title," one bureaucrat complained...

...Perhaps the Sinapologists' real problem was that the passage suggested George Bush had been tougher on the Chinese than candidate Clinton repeatedly alleged in the 1992 campaign...

...But it wasn't the exception...

...Thus, the more the Sinologists complained about classified sources, the more they gave away their true intent: to avoid offending the Chinese at all costs...

...It is simply a polite but firm warning from Bush to an old friend, stating that more was necessary from Beijing to prevent further deterioration in an important bilateral relationship...

...But the Sinologists at State- Deputy Assistant Secretary Kent Wiedemann and China desk officer William Stanton, now at the U.S...

...And on page 592 of the book, Baker had originally included a quote from the letter from Bush to Deng mentioned above...

...It is not helpful to criticize in public an acting head of government .") After intensive consultations with State, the Baker team deservedly rejected virtually all of these complaints...

...And in virtually every instance, their objections were aimed less at guarding national security than at protecting the feelings of Beijing's hypersensitive gerontocrats...

...When were the U.S...

...But it should be noted that the secretary bent over backwards to accommodate the censors...

...When Baker speculated that some government and Communist party officials "in all probability" might have a financial interest in the sale of missiles to Pakistan, the response was unequivocal: "These lines are insulting . . . and would harm relations . . . ." And in a breathtaking attempt to cover up the obvious, the reviewers sought to get Baker to delete Chinese Premier Li Peng's defense of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre...

...Baker cheerfully ignored the gripe...

...embassy in Beijing-pushed the national security argument beyond reason...

...As a journalist, I was particularly intrigued by the department's willingness to allow Baker to disclose private comments by heads of state about one another...

...This lament, of course, had no connection whatever to safeguarding classified information, the stated purpose of security reviews, customary for former high officials writing books...

...In several instances, they even tried to muzzle Baker's personal opinions about the regime, on the dubious ground that the musings of a former official no longer involved in foreign policy might somehow damage ongoing diplomacy...

...But any dispassionate reader would wonder what was so objectionable...

...They were bothered that Baker had called the section "China: Saving a Troubled Marriage...

...Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak implies King Hussein of Jordan was bought off by Saddam Hussein and jokingly calls his friend Hafez al-Assad of Syria a "rug merchant...

...Their rationale, helpfully noted in the margin: "He might have been ill at 87 years...

...He is still head of government and we must deal with him," one reader objected...

...As a result, I am unable to quote from the Bush-Deng letter here...

...At another, Baker says he tried to deliver personally a letter from President Bush to Deng Xiaoping, "only to be rebuffed...

...The China hands objected to more than two dozen passages-far and away the most extensive demarche by any agency or bureau looking over his manuscript...

...This might improve Li's position within the leadership...

...Obviously, diplomacy is serious business, fraught with sensitivity and often requiring the balancing of somewhat contradictory objectives and interests...

...Books Sinapologists By Thomas M. DeFrank With the galleys of former Secretary of State James A. Baker III's diplomatic memoirs literally hours away from final deadline, I knew we were in trouble when the Sinologists at the State Department began their security review of the China portion of Chapter 31 by carping about, of all things, the subhead...

...All these barbs, taken from classified memoranda of conversations ("memcons"), were okayed for publication by less nervous specialists at State...

...Fran?ois Mitterrand, for instance, calls Saddam Hussein a "brute" and suggests the Emir of Kuwait is a sexist...

...A superior disagreed: "But it will have negative impact on our continuing efforts through diplomacy to bring about progress...

...he gushed...

...In a few instances, he eliminated material even when he was convinced they were blowing smoke...

...The crux of their demarche, which was at least intellectually defensible, was that Baker should not reveal information from highly classified documents...

...China ever married...

...This was the worst case of clientitis we encountered," recalls a member of Baker's team...

...Saddam is also described as a "rabid dog" (the Emir of Bahrain), a "thug" (Mikhail Gorbachev), and a "crazy man" (Mubarak...

...In return for putting up with second guessing of this kind, authors are given access to tens of thousands of pages of their official documents...

...Baker writes, for instance, that, while hardly a soft-liner, party chief Jiang Zemin was "the only interlocutor who seemed the slightest bit reasonable...

...Should we be quoting confidential exchanges only four years later...

...That didn't sit well at all with the reviewers...

...At one point, for example, Baker notes in his memoir that his Chinese counterpart Qian Qichen was "predictably noncommittal" during a meeting...

...The China hands screamed bloody murder, asserting the confidentiality of the exchange, so Baker deleted it-even though State allowed him to publish similar passages from confidential Bush letters to other world leaders elsewhere in the text...

...He agreed to remove a reference to his own skepticism about a particular Chinese pledge...

...This won't help Jiang," one noted ominously...

...In the process, the Sinologists reinforced an impression widespread in diplomatic circles: that this administration, despite some recent positive movement in the relationship, still thinks that covering for Beijing passes for a China policy...

...Sullies the character of sitting foreign minister," a reviewer fumed...

...Their objections ran the gamut from factual and occasionally appropriate to intellectually dubious, frivolous, and utterly absurd...

...But the China hands at State-considerably more concerned with the reaction of their Chinese clients than with the safety of classified information- abused their clearance authority in the interest of political expedience...

...Lest anyone doubt that politics was at least as important as diplomacy to these reviewers, a mildly self-congratulatory comment on Bush administration policy toward North Korea elicited this remark: "Does he mention the major triumph of the Clinton administration in getting agreement for DPRK's shutting down their dangerous nuclear weapons program...

...Never mind that the book is crammed with juicy exchanges from classified documents-all approved by the State Department...

...But when Baker's commentary suited their purposes, objections to quoting from classified memcons magically evaporated...

...one asked of a colloquy between Baker and Qian Qichen that he wanted excised "due to continuing sensitivity of diplomatic efforts to resolve problems...

...In the interest of producing a more accurate and interesting historical record, a security review was a small price for Baker to pay...

...One reviewer seemed thrilled that Baker called Li Peng a "hard-liner who made absolutely no apologies . . . totally unreconstructed...

...This was too much for the Sinologists, who wanted the language changed to "but was unable to meet with Deng...

...Unlike the rest of the department, whose experts behaved like professionals and asked for only a handful of quite reasonable changes, mainly concerning intelligence, the censors of the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs repeatedly went over the top...

...In doing so, they also demonstrated that they still haven't figured out how to deal with Beijing...

...The head of state . . . out," another commanded...