Will China Pay No Price?
EDITORIALS Will China Pay No Price? On April 1, a Chinese pilot, pursuant to the Chinese government policy of harassing U.S. surveillance planes, knocked an American EP-3 from the sky. The Chinese...
...Though Chinese rhetoric was often belligerent, Beijing ultimately yielded without the apology for the collision that it had demanded...
...The Pentagon study concluded that Taiwan badly needs a new fleet of submarines and P-3 aircraft to hunt for subs and conduct patrols...
...It has already come and gone...
...Unless Taiwan improves its air defenses, the Pentagon found, "the balance of air power . . . could begin to shift in China's favor...
...It's that simple...
...We have already begun hearing from the China engagers that giving Beijing the Olympics is good idea because it will encourage better behavior by Chinese leaders both at home and abroad—just like the Berlin Olympics in 1936...
...In the meantime, selling Taiwan several Kidd-class destroyers will serve as a stopgap—but not as a substitute for Aegis...
...There was even a recommendation from within the military to send the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk into the South China Sea as a show of resolve...
...The Chinese government then held the American aircrew hostage for 11 days, and extorted a letter of apology from the Bush administration...
...Shortly after the last issue of this magazine went to press, China finally released the hostage crew of that now-famous U.S...
...Nor does there appear serious reason to fear imminent genocide on the Asian continent...
...I know in these days of 'realism,' principles are considered as rather eccentric and ideals are identified with 'hysteria,' " he replied...
...Human Rights Commission in Geneva last week asked the organization to express "concern" about certain "reports" of brutality, reports that might otherwise obscure the "significant transformation that Chinese society has undergone since the introduction of the reform policies...
...Leung was co-founder of a U.S.-based dissident group, the China Democratic Unity Federation, and was Hong Kong representative of its principal publication, China Spring—at least when he was not busy acting Last week, Hong Kong police finally located Leung Wah, co-founder of a U.S.-based dissident group...
...Since then, if you know where to look for it, news has emerged on an almost daily basis of other recent—and graver—Chinese assaults on American citizens or residents or refugee visitors...
...If and when they do resume, Pentagon officials suggest, U.S...
...It could also serve in the future as a platform for a theater missile defense system...
...It would hardly have been worth bragging about had it succeeded...
...But it is craven...
...He had been roasted alive...
...The pending decision on U.S...
...Leung Wah had been roasted alive...
...draft resolution was defeated...
...It needs new submarines...
...China, in short, remains a tyranny...
...commitment to Taiwan's ability to defend itself...
...Trying to collapse the Chinese regime overnight," Friedman explains, "would produce a degree of chaos among one-fifth of the world's inhabitants" that would have a most unfortunate effect on American living standards, even— somehow—the quality of "the air that we breathe...
...All you have to do is ask the Pentagon...
...planes will stay out of the South China Sea for a while, to give the Chinese some breathing room and to avoid provoking Beijing...
...Almost immediately after he returned to Hong Kong, he received an unsolicited phone call from a stranger who promised lucrative business opportunities in the mainland city of Shenzhen...
...Trade...
...Last week it was revealed that a naturalized U.S...
...Some of our conservative friends who supported the Bush administration's handling of this matter have expressed confidence that the answer is yes...
...You don't have to take our word for it...
...It is the closest thing we have to an objective assessment of what Taiwan needs to defend itself against China...
...Its conclusions aren't Democratic or Republican, conservative or liberal, hawkish or dovish...
...Bush outlined a reasonable approach after the release of the American crew members when he said the United States and China "have different values, yet common interests" and that both nations "must make a determined choice to have productive relations...
...Sir Harold Nicolson, with Winston Churchill one of the few prominent Englishmen bold and brave enough to repudiate appeasement before the German invasion of Poland, was jeered in the House of Commons for his criticism of Neville Chamberlain's Munich Agreement...
...One of them is to base yourself upon the view that any sort of friendly relation, or possible relations, shall I say, with totalitarian states are impossible, and that the assurances which have been given to me personally are worthless, that they have sinister designs...
...It needs new destroyers...
...A decision to go ahead with the Aegis sale now would represent a serious and long-term U.S...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...For one thing, we have not abandoned our modern democratic ally, Taiwan, as the British gave up Czechoslovakia...
...So far, it's going ahead as scheduled...
...The president should overrule these advisers and follow the recommendations outlined in the Pentagon study...
...Bush administration officials have said that the recent crisis with China should not and will not affect the president's decision on what arms to sell Taiwan...
...American University sociologist Gao Zhan, wife and mother of U.S...
...The Aegis system, the Pentagon review concluded, offers the best and, indeed, the only answer to this panoply of missile and air threats...
...Neville Chamberlain, three days after Munich, October 3, 1938 Yes, of course, we know the analogy is imperfect...
...The U.S...
...So what's left...
...The 2008 Olympics...
...Otherwise, Taiwan will be the one paying the price for Beijing's aggressive behavior...
...Should the mere fact that Jiang Zemin is not Adolf Hitler be sufficient to qualify him a "statesman...
...But the people who control and propagandize current American policy toward China disagree...
...The U.N...
...They'd had to use dental records to identify the corpse...
...The administration opposes any linkage between trade and other aspects of Chinese behavior, and brave congressional talk about voting against China's most-favored-nation status when it comes up for renewal this year has melted away since the return of the American crew...
...military surveillance plane...
...The United States is not England in the 1930s, and mainland China is not Nazi Germany...
...An honest decision on weapons sales, based solely on an objective assessment of what Taiwan needs, would provide Taiwan all of these...
...The Pentagon study was conducted long before the recent collision over the South China Sea...
...I know that those of us who believe in the traditions of our policy, who believe in the precepts which we have inherited from our ancestors, who believe that one great function of this country is to maintain moral standards in Europe, to maintain a settled pattern of international relations, not to make friends with people who are demonstrably evil...
...Bush's desk, he and his aides should settle on a long-term strategy that protects American interests while encouraging China to play a constructive role as it assumes its natural place as a great power...
...Robert Kagan and William Kristol An Engagement with Tyranny Before the next series of important decisions about China tumble onto Mr...
...And should the United States be eager to conduct "productive relations"—or even imagine it can—with the regime Jiang leads, properly understood...
...Also last week, Hong Kong police finally located Leung Wah...
...China, in addition to building up its naval and submarine force, is rapidly improving the quality of its air force, acquiring large numbers of Russian fighters and fighter-bombers...
...success in persuading other nations to join with us than in previous years...
...Meanwhile, China is engaged in a massive build-up of its missile forces—both supersonic anti-ship missiles and ballistic missiles...
...But China has warned that the sale of Aegis to Taiwan will lead to a rupture in Sino-American relations...
...Today they aren't...
...Navy's Aegis battle management system...
...citizen, Wu Xianming, had been detained April 8 on similarly unspecified "spy" charges...
...Will China now pay a price...
...Indeed, the review began under the Clinton administration...
...Thus, when Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times worries about China, he worries that . . . democracy could arrive in China too quickly...
...resolution calling for a review of China's human rights record was voted down last week, with no greater U.S...
...Engagement is much the more sensible course...
...For the United States to court such ruin by responding in kind to Beijing's occasional provocations would be "utterly, utterly foolhardy...
...That would be fine with us...
...And they continue to maintain their gigantic archipelago of laogai—concentration camps, nothing less—into which thousands of Chinese who dare think illegal thoughts disappear each year...
...Human rights...
...But they continue in power...
...Then there is the matter of American military activities in the South China Sea...
...I cannot believe that such a program would be rejected by the people of this country, even if it does mean the establishment of personal contact with dictators, and of talks man to man on the basis that each, while maintaining his own ideas of the internal government of his country is willing to allow that other systems may suit better other peoples...
...Far from paying a price, therefore, China has so far won a small victory...
...And worse...
...It needs new missiles for its jet fighters...
...In this respect, at least, the analogy between Sinophile "engagement" and old-fashioned appeasement is nearly exact...
...That makes the choice for President Bush fairly straightforward...
...Before the crisis, American surveillance planes were routinely flying in international waters over the South China Sea...
...And Taiwan needs the U.S...
...China now has 300 short-range ballistic missiles targeted on Taiwan and is adding 50 new missiles every year...
...The Aegis radar can, in all kinds of weather, track more than 100 targets, and direct ship-fired missiles at them...
...Because selling our democratic friends in Taiwan only what they need to defend themselves against China would by itself be a significant step toward repairing the damage done to the U.S...
...As this magazine goes to press, surveillance flights off China's coast remain on hold...
...position in East Asia this month...
...In response to this latest round of assaults on people with institutional or legal connections to the United States, our State Department last week managed only to suggest that Americans might want to "carefully evaluate" such incidents before "deciding whether to travel to China...
...And they indignantly recoil from—no, mock—any suggestion that this malignancy might impose certain practical and moral obligations on the world's leading democracy...
...China's Communists concluded the last of their orgiastic mass murders a quarter century ago...
...Forget it...
...We hope they're right...
...Pacific fleet reviewed Taiwan's defense needs and came to these conclusions...
...China, which in recent years has purchased advanced Soviet-made destroyers and submarines, now threatens to overwhelm Taiwan's outmoded naval arsenal...
...We don't think so...
...Any weapons package that does not contain submarines and P-3s will deal a fundamental blow to Taiwan's ability to defend itself in the event of a Chinese naval blockade or other form of naval attack...
...I know that those who hold such beliefs are accused of possessing the 'Foreign Office mind.' I thank God that I possess the Foreign Office mind...
...For the moment, it's easier to list the areas where China will not pay a price...
...The Aegis won't be ready for delivery for several years...
...New York Times editorial, April 15, 2001 As regards future policy, it seems to me that there are really only two possible alternatives...
...In the end, Mr...
...A "Cliveden set" mentality now dominates American opinion about China, one as naive, self-righteous, and insensible to the demands of honor as that which suffused Lady Astor's tea parties before World War II...
...China's sub fleet outnumbers Taiwan's 65-4 (and two of Taiwan's subs are World War II-era Guppies...
...Would that such a mind existed in the United States today—in our diplomatic offices or anywhere else...
...Working backward from theoretical abstraction to adduce a promising "reality" that suits their wishes, they deride as so many solitary trees that forest of evidence that the People's Republic is a political malignancy...
...residents, Tan Guangguang and Xu Zerong, had been arrested by the Chinese state security service—the first man last December, the second last August—and both, again, accused of espionage...
...The Pentagon study also concluded that Taiwan needs the Aegis system...
...Late last year officers from the U.S...
...arms sales to Taiwan...
...President Bush's trip to Beijing this fall...
...So no real confrontation with China's rulers, please...
...What does Taiwan need...
...citizens, detained in Beijing since February 11, has been formally accused of "espionage," a crime to which the Chinese foreign ministry ominously reports she has "confessed...
...For several days in mid-November last year, Leung was in Los Angeles to attend a pro-democracy meeting of Chinese exiles...
...The United States and China need not become enemies...
...And according to press reports, top administration officials are recommending that the president defer the sale of Aegis...
...Jiang acted as a statesman, not an ideological combatant...
...In response to the Beijing regime's ongoing assault against its own population, the State Department's delegation to the U.N...
...But the administration has apparently decided to proceed more cautiously...
...He was seen in Shenzhen, by several accounts in police custody, on November 22...
...Last week it was confirmed that two permanent U.S...
...Leung was not seen again until April 13, when officials in Hong Kong announced that his had been the body dumped outside Shenzhen's hospital on November 23...
...The Pentagon report represents the best judgment of American military professionals...
...During and immediately after the hostage crisis, we heard a lot of bold talk about how the United States would not be deterred from continuing to fly its surveillance planes over the South China Sea and that the flights would resume immediately...
...Or] we should seek by all means in our power to avoid war, by analyzing possible causes, by trying to remove them, by discussion in a spirit of collaboration and good will...
...The Kitty Hawk, meanwhile, is steaming away from China...
...as a financial courier to underground democracy activists on the mainland...
...Chinese strategy is clear: They hope to build a missile force capable of dealing a paralyzing blow against Taiwan—long before American forces could arrive on the scene...
...Apparently not...
...Is there no atrocity base enough to interrupt our "productive relations" with China's dictatorship...
Vol. 6 • April 2001 • No. 31
