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	May 28, 1999	atimes.com

China

EDITORIAL: Cox report - reality check required

''This information is obtained through espionage, rigorous review of U.S. unclassified technical and academic publications and extensive interaction with U.S. scientists and Department of Energy laboratories,'' said a report prepared several months ago by a U.S. congressional committee headed by Representative Christopher Cox (R-Calif.) and partially released to the public on Tuesday. (Thirty percent of it remains classified.)

The information referred to concerns nuclear warhead designs and a whole raft of other weapons technologies allegedly acquired by China over the years. China is also said to have obtained high-speed computers, and all manner of other machinery and gadgets with military applications, by way of ordinary commercial transactions.

And now, of course, all hell is breaking loose in Washington and throughout the U.S., with calls to punish China, impose restrictions on trade in micro-processors and abandon President Clinton's ''strategic partnership'' policy with Beijing. But before you get sucked into this hysteria to the point of assuming that where there is so much smoke there must be fire, and that China will soon pose a new strategic threat on a world scale previously thought unlikely, please subject the Cox report allegations and policy recommendations to a simple reality check.

Look back at the first paragraph. What China is alleged to be doing - is it the same thing being done by the U.S.? By Israel? By France? Or in the non-nuclear fields by just about anyone with the capability to do so? Of course it is, and all perfectly well documented.

Is China now engaged - as the result of having obtained the knowledge and some gizmos to do so - in a massive new military-strategic effort to become a full-blown strategic nuclear power? Definitely not, said a recent CIA report on the subject.

Will export controls akin to the old NATO Cocom regime prevent high-speed computers and high-tech gadgets from falling into Chinese hands? It didn't work in the 1970s and '80s regarding the Soviet Union. It has even less chance of working now, when you can buy through the Internet just about anything of any desired degree of sophistication in the information technology field.

The principal threats implied by the Cox report are the following two:

* Anti-China red scare hysteria in the U.S. Congress and parts of the U.S. public has a better than even chance if not to derail then to delay implementation of policies mapped out under the Clinton administration strategic partnership concept, which was designed to bring China as a respected and responsible member into the community and councils of leading world economic and political powers. The potential side effect would be to undermine the Chinese reformers at home.

* Main negative effects of the report's export control recommendations will almost certainly fall upon U.S. businesses that are the technology leaders in the fields targeted. There is a perverse logic to such controls: The highest speed micro-processors in which U.S. companies excel, sales of which give them a competitive advantage, won't be exportable. Gadgets just below that performance level, production of which is now commonplace elsewhere, will not be restricted. End result: U.S. companies lose overall market share, profitability and commensurate ability to make new investments. That's what happened to Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) in the '70s and '80s under Cocom - and it nearly sank the firm.

So, again: think twice before jumping on that Cox bandwagon. Peace with China and a peaceful China in world affairs are not assured by paranoid reactions to a largely imaginary threat, but precisely by the strategic partnership relationship Clinton has sought.

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