Dealing With China (Part 2 of 3)

[This article is part two of a three-part series called Dealing With China. Part one tackled the question of Chinese money in American politics. This article deals with sales of military technology to China, from missile guidance systems to missiles to rental of US territory. Part three will deal with the question of Clinton's proposed anti-ballistic missile system, and what effect it will have on US-China relations, as well as providing a synthesis for dealing with China in the future.]

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Reported attempts by China to influence trade policy with campaign contributions is serious enough. A far more serious accusation is that Chinese money changed American policy toward the sale of military technology. The disbursement of military hardware is a touchy subject as it is, given that American weaponry has helped Saddam Hussein invade Kuwait, as well as assisted several Latin American right-wing dictators to overthrow several Latin American left-wing dictators. Some American export businesses are (and ought to be) encouraged: personal computers, financial services, colas, Green Day t-shirts. But some export business need serious thought, military hardware chief among them.

In a floor statement on May 15, 1998, Senator James Inhofe, a Republican member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, basically accused President Clinton of sharing missile guidance technology with the Chinese military. His theory is this: by 1995, China had the capability to reach anywhere in the US with their CS-4 missiles, which have a range of 8,000 kilometers, and can easily be nuclear-equipped. However, in 1995, their guidance systems were not yet particularly accurate, so that a launched missile could be aimed at, say, Oklahoma (Inhofe's home state), but "it could not pinpoint any particular city like Oklahoma City or Tulsa or Fort Sill or any of our military establishments." In other words, a Chinese missile launched at Washington, D.C., could land anywhere from Philadelphia to Raleigh, making them useful enough for a doomsday-type attempt at mutually assured destruction, but fairly useless if the Chinese had any other aim but suicide in mind.

Inhofe observed that from 1990 to 1995, the Bush and Clinton administrations had given various "waivers" for certain technologies, most of them presumptively secret, but approved without much difficulty or concern, such as permission for US commercial satellites to be launched on Chinese rockets. So, if a media company wanted to launch a communications satellite into space in order to start a satellite TV service, these waivers allowed it to hire the Chinese space agency to launch it quicker and cheaper than America's NASA. One company that took advantage of the waiver was the Loral Corporation, which as Inhofe observed, was the single largest contributor to the Democratic party in 1992 and 1996.

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