How Bad Is China?

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Administration officials feel that political slanging over human rights is not helping them in Beijing. They reject the hard-line right's argument that the U.S. should isolate China to get better results, dispute the liberals' charge that engagement without human-rights content is giving Beijing a free ride, and get exasperated with the simplistic tone of the debate. As a high-ranking official explains, "The fact that you make different progress on different issues does not mean the slow issues have got to guide the rest."

WEAPONS

For most of the past 20 years, China has exported dangerous weapons to countries the U.S. distrusts. Beijing makes strategic calculations that run against U.S. interests, and it is not sufficiently self-regulating to police its leaky, corrupt munitions system. By most accounts, at a minimum China has supplied Pakistan with nuclear-reactor and bomb designs, ring magnets to enrich uranium, and technical know-how to produce nuclear weapons, and with short-range M-11 missile components and equipment to make their own. And China has sold nuclear reactors and uranium-enrichment equipment to Iran, along with Silkworm ground-based antiship missiles and precursor chemicals for weapons of mass destruction.

But China's calculus of its interests has been evolving as it tallies what it must give up to win international acceptance. The U.S. has hammered hard on proliferation and levied sanctions on key companies when China has flagrantly disobeyed. As a result, most experts agree, Beijing has grudgingly but measurably cleaned up its act, virtually halting nuclear proliferation and cutting back on missile sales. Says a senior defense official: "In the past couple of years, there has been steady progress."

China, agrees Douglas Paal, president of the Asia Pacific Policy Center and a former Bush White House official, is not now at the top of the list of world proliferators. Beijing has signed or acceded to key control treaties, including the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention. China says it will observe the Missile Technology Control Regime, which effectively blocks sales of high-tech weapons to bad-boy nations, but won't sign it. Of course, the U.S. will not know until it knows if China is cheating. Beijing "works harder to hide its exports," warns Gary Milhollin of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control. "They've shifted to stealth exports of components so the U.S. won't see."

The more troubling proliferation question is not what China sells abroad but what the U.S. sells to China. Congress has been delving into the details of the Loral satellite deal to uncover whether the company leaked damaging technical know-how in the course of investigating why the Chinese launch rocket exploded on take-off. That information allegedly could help Beijing improve the reliability and accuracy of the 13 nuclear missiles it keeps aimed at U.S. cities. Loral has admitted committing a possible procedural violation of export-control laws in forwarding a report of its investigation to the Chinese but denies that sensitive information was passed along. A senior Pentagon official makes this assessment of the situation: "In the worst case, it might help them improve their missiles marginally, but the military balance with us would not shift much."