The Fallout
It seems absurd that the fate of nations could hang on the sale of a Pentium III chip. "It's an illusion that we can draw a bright line in the sand," says Jeffrey Garten, a Commerce official during Clinton's first term and now dean of Yale's School of Management. "So it's healthy that we have a national debate over what we transfer and what we hold back." Engagement with China rests on scores of such decisions, and virtually no one, not even in the white heat of the Cox report, is seriously calling for Washington to disengage.
Republican presidential candidates, including the junior Bush, are out in force bashing Clinton as soft on China--just as the President did when he ran against the senior Bush. But they don't want to dry up campaign contributions or cut off their constituents' trade. And once in office, every President since Richard Nixon has come round to the same realization. If not engagement, what? Cold war? Hot war? Those are hardly practical choices. And so for 20 years, there has been little daylight visible between the basic ways that Republicans and Democrats have approached the rising power of the world's most populous country, pursuing the effort to foster political reform and global stability by encouraging China's economic development.
Now the danger is that Clinton's implacable critics, armed with the Cox report, will vent their outrage on the entire Sino-American relationship. They are right to slam the door on Chinese spying, but a sizable number sound ready to turn China into the New Enemy. Washington hardheads talk of holding up the annual renewal of China's normal trade relations (the new bureaucratic label for most-favored- nation trading status) or blocking its entry into the World Trade Organization.
The report catches China in an even more sour mood. Long resentful that the West never treats them as equals, the Chinese are hungry to control their own military destiny. They want to match the U.S. on the world stage and dominate their hemisphere in the same way Washington dominates its own. China's approach to international relations may seem crude, but it underpins the deep anger with which China has greeted the recent string of American embarrassments. Charges of campaign-financing corruption, Premier Zhu Rongji's rebuffed concessions to win WTO endorsement, NATO's assault on a sovereign Yugoslavia, the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, which no Chinese citizen believes was accidental--all these add up to frightening confirmation that the U.S. is bent on "containing" China from achieving its rightful place in the world. The Cox report not only buttresses the public tilt toward tension and mutual distrust but also strengthens Beijing's own hard-liners as they call on China's leaders to get tough.
Chinese and American diplomats continue to agree in private that the two countries have too much to lose to let the relationship rupture. For now, Beijing is still dedicated to catching up to the U.S. economically, and a military buildup isn't its top priority, "unless we help change it," says a Clinton aide. Whether China chooses to exploit the secrets it has already stolen to embark on a superpower arms race may depend on how Washington manages this dangerous rift. The Cox report offers a stark warning. If we get hostile, they will get hostile. If both China and the U.S. give in to extremists in their capitals and let their relationship unravel, the worst-case scenario the report presents just might come true.
Reported by Jay Branegan, Elaine Shannon and Douglas Waller/Washington and Jaime A. FlorCruz/Beijing
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