China Policy: Bipartisan & Bipolar

Q. How does a Republican president get a college professor to show him some love?

A. He appeases Communist China.

“China policy was comparatively successful during most of the Bush administration—an assessment that is widely shared, including among many who will make or influence China policy under Obama,” Jacques deLisle wrote in a paper for the Foreign Policy Research Institute on February 15, 2009. “Early tensions hadbecome relatively distant memories by the end of an administration that closed with President Bush’s attendance at the Beijing Olympics opening ceremonies and China’s muted reaction to the eleventh-hour consummation of a long-pending package of arms sales to Taiwan.”

“The Obama administration begins with significant good will in China.” Professor deLisle is the Stephen A. Cozen Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania.

One of his duo of ratemyprofessors.com ratings describes him as “absolutely horrible.” While that is probably too harsh a description of the professor, it might be an entirely appropriate characterization of Communist China and U. S. policy towards the dictatorship under both the Republican who just exited the White House and the Democrat who replaced him there.

For one thing, every available human rights report shows new abuses occurring and old ones unresolved. For another, it is clear from the extant evidence that Red China sees trade as a weapon of war, not a means to a better life.

“China made scant progress in reining in the rampant counterfeiting and piracy
that deprive legitimate foreign businesses operating in China of their intellectual property, while they provide an effective subsidy to Chinese companies that make use of stolen software and other advanced technology,” the U. S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission reported in its report for 2008. “Chinese regulators failed to prevent the domestic sale and export of consumer goods tainted with industrial chemicals and fraudulent ingredients.”

“In one case examined by the Commission, China’s lax controls on the production and handling of its seafood exports led to a partial U.S. ban for health reasons
on imported Chinese seafood. Yet, thanks to artificially low prices partly resulting from an array of subsidies to its seafood industry, China has become the largest exporter of seafood to the United States.”

The China Commission was formed by Congress as a response to scandals in the Clinton Administration that the media largely ignored and that the Republicans who then ran the national legislature failed to investigate. Since it has been in existence, the Commission has catalogued Red China’s abuses in chapter and verse in hundreds of pages submitted to congressional committees annually.

The Bush Administration largely followed the benign neglect policies of the Clinton years although the 43rd president did not embrace the Beijing regime quite as warmly as the 42nd chief executive did. “Since 2001, the Bush Administration has continued the policy of engagement with China, while the Pentagon has skeptically reviewed and cautiously resumed a program of military-to-military exchanges,” Shirley Kan wrote in a report for the Congressional Research Service in a report updated on February 1, 2008.

Out of office, President Reagan’s defense secretary Caspar Weinberger characterized the latter of these activities as “a license to steal.” Indeed, it is hard to find an endeavor in which Red China as changed.

“China continues to repress religious and human rights, and intimidate our Asian allies while expanding their influence in areas like South America and Africa,” Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., warned his colleagues on April 5, 2005. “The recent Taiwanese ‘anti-secession’ bill passed in China is further evidence of this hegemonic outlook.”

“Apparent dual use of legitimate U.S. Exports once delivered in China being converted for military or surveillance applications.” Red China is engaged in “industrial espionage” as well as the old-fashioned kind, Sen. Inhofe showed.

“Also, according to the FBI, cases of Chinese espionage in the United States are increasing at thirty percent annually in some places,” Sen. Inhofe noted. He also pointed out that China has been busily arming Iran, which makes the suggestion of policy wonks that the People’s Republic aid the United States in pressuring the rogue regime a curious one.

You may not have to wait long for the Great Leap Forward.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.

Malcolm A. Kline
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia. If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail contact@academia.org.