Critics of U.S. China policy have been enjoying unprecedented
attention lately. Between those who want to get tough with China and
those who want to be more accommodating, the Clinton administration's
second-term project to consolidate and expand cooperative Sino-U.S.
relations has been vastly complicated. Advocates of nearly every
stripe have had a hand in distorting China's impact on American
interests and Washington's policy record since the late 1980s, which,
despite its bad press, has had important successes. Character
assassination has been so rampant and policy critiques so politicized
that the normal rules of evidence used to evaluate a serious,
complicated set of policy choices have been among the first
casualties. Lost, too, in many cases, has been any sense of the
geopolitics of the problem--that cool-headed assessment of
capabilities and motives that ought to be our first task, not an
emotionally exhausted afterthought.
Particularly egregious have been many of the claims of those neo-cold
warriors in their efforts to persuade Americans to abandon engagement
and follow a policy of "containing" the "China threat." As an example
of the hostile hyperbole that has become quite common, consider this
statement of June 9 from the Washington-based William J. Casey
Institute of the Center for Security Policy: "The nature of the
threat posed by China is in key respects of a greater magnitude and
vastly greater complexity than that mounted by the Soviet Union at
the height of the Cold War." It is a rousing statement, to be sure,
but by no reasonable or objective measure is it even remotely true.
