GOP’s China Card Is a Red Joker

The attempt by Republicans to make a big deal out of military technology transfers to China is pathetically partisan and wholly bogus. It represents a desperate recycling of Cold War rhetoric that riles old fears but denies the new world reality.

Ever since Richard Nixon played the China card, Beijing has had free access to Western technology on the assumption that trade was the best defense against China reasserting a belligerent foreign policy. It’s too late to shut that door.

The Chinese do not need U.S. expertise to be able hit an American city with a nuclear-armed missile. They were already quite expert at rocket technology back in 1988, when Ronald Reagan authorized the launching of made-in-America satellites atop Chinese rockets. These rockets are cheap and sufficiently reliable to attract satellite manufacturers from throughout the industrial world.

That’s why, as recently as May 30, a Chinese Long March 3B rocket blasted into space, launching a satellite built by the Lockheed Martin Corp. which, incidentally, has contributed money to House Speaker Newt Gingrich and is a major employer in his district. That “ChinaStar” satellite will be operated by a Chinese telecommunications firm run by the Chinese military. Yet despite the hullabaloo in Congress about technology transfers to China, the latest launch went all but unnoticed.

Another satellite, built by Loral Space and Communications Ltd., approved by the Clinton administration for launching above a Chinese rocket in November, has caused the ruckus. It is designed to provide video, digital voice and data communications and is without encryption capability. It’s no more threatening than the Fox programs that it might end up carrying if Rupert Murdoch, a huge Republican contributor, continues his success in wooing Beijing. But because Loral’s chairman contributes to Democrats, a minor transgression quickly revealed by his company has been blown all out of proportion.

In 1996, a Chinese rocket carrying a Loral satellite, in a launch initially approved along with eight others during the Bush administration, exploded. The Chinese rejected outside help in investigating the causes of the explosion until required to by international insurance companies.

Consequently, the Chinese reluctantly accepted review of their report of the accident by a team led by a Loral scientist, which included experts from its chief competitor, the Hughes Corp., as well as from England and Germany. A Loral employee may have violated federal guidelines by faxing an unedited draft of that evaluation to the Chinese, although the CIA recently issued its report concluding that no sensitive information was leaked.

That there was no Chinese plot to get the Clinton administration to help Beijing with its rockets has been verified by Brent Scowcroft, Bush’s national security advisor. In an article he wrote with Arnold R. Kanter, Bush’s undersecretary of state, published last week in the Washington Times, the two state unequivocally:

“What does seem clear at this point is that the Chinese government never requested information or other assistance from our government to improve the space boosters they use to launch satellites. What is even more clear is that in 1996 the U.S. government did not provide, or approve Loral and Hughes providing, information which would improve Chinese space launch or missile capabilities.”

Nor does the administration-approved launch of another Loral satellite next November in any conceivable way threaten a transfer of technology of any sort. Both the Defense and State departments approved the November launch.

There’s no Clinton administration culpability or threat to national security, despite lurid claims by Republicans. The House ban on approving new launches of American-made satellites on Chinese rockets is political grandstanding. If implemented, the losers will be U.S. companies and their workers. French and German companies have been actively courting the Chinese, and three dozen Chinese rocket technicians are in France working with the leading French satellite company preparing for future launches from China.

There are no longer enforceable national boundaries to this trade. Even the great U.S. contender for satellite launching, the Atlas III rocket being built by Lockheed Martin, is powered by a Russian-designed engine now being tested in the heart of the once-evil empire--further proof that the Cold War is over and that those who now attempt to use fear of China to smear Clinton are lost in time.

Welcome to George Bush’s New World Order.