Page 1 of
2 SPEAKING
FREELY Washington's China policy turns
psychotic By Donald Alford
Weadon and Carol A Kalinoski
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
Late last year, we
surveyed what passed for US policy toward China
(Washington's schizophrenic China
policy, Asia Times Online, December 5,
2006) and observed that the United States
was
not capable of creating a consistent and
sustainable position on trade issues where there
is a glimmer of "mutual benefit", and, as a
result, the Chinese will in essence go through the
motions of dialogue, providing the US a scintilla
of dignity but absolutely no tangible results.
Now, there is evidence that the US has lost its
grip on strategic and economic reality.
The US-China policy Apache dance has
adversely affected a remarkable number of
high-level governmental delegations. In December,
US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal
Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke led an unprecedented
pride of cabinet secretaries to Beijing for a week
of high-level, high-stakes consultations termed
the Strategic Economic Dialogue, addressing topics
including market access, intellectual-property
protection and the remarkable US trade deficit
with China. Little, if anything, was accomplished
save for the scheduling of another meeting in
Washington, DC.
This second meeting, held
last month, concluded with similar results. By
that time the atmosphere had grown more toxic,
leading the head of the Chinese delegation, Vice
Prime Minister Wu Yi, to suggest darkly that she
might not participate in the meeting at all. But
she came and, predictably, the concluding
communique was empty save for only another direct
air route to China being approved. And yes,
another high-level meeting was scheduled for next
December in Beijing.
These past weeks,
however, saw the many opponents of engagement with
China busily seeking to disrupt the evolving
US-China relationship. Many cold warriors sought
to blow on the dying embers of a failed
post-communist US trade and security policy in
their efforts at threat-mongering. As "threat"
means funding in Washington, DC, there is no end
of experts and consultants offering to gauge the
Chinese threat (if not creating it out of whole
cloth) for the US government - for a fee, of
course. There are few takers for those who seek to
lay out a long-term, informed strategy for
engagement with the emerging economic engine of
China, or its global political consequences (see
China eroding US
dominance, Asia Times Online, December
8, 2005).
Whether from the dubious pulpits
of certain Washington "think-tanks" known for
their record of incitement and hostility to China
(American Enterprise Institute) to the
congressional US-China Economic and Security and
Review Committee (whose objective is to highlight
the Chinese "threat", and which hosts regular
hearings featuring "experts" whose viewpoints are
considered one-sided at best among respected US
China scholars), there are many voices who urge
that the US maintain distance from this burgeoning
"enemy". But internally, there are elements of the
US administration and Congress who through word
and deed express their hostility to the new China
and indicate that the divide between pragmatic
policy and the "ideology as usual" is growing
wider.
Nowhere is this more evident than
in several self-contradictory elements of US
policy formulation with respect to the Chinese
defense establishment. The well-documented
military-modernization effort by China, which has
spanned a decade, only recently was "discovered"
by US neo-conservative military fabulists and
their acolytes, notably at the US Bureau of
Industry and Security (BIS), which was widely
discredited when it sought to restrict engineers,
academics and high-technology experts who were
born in China (but may have lived their lives as
citizens of allied countries) from having access
to US-controlled technology or related employment
(New US export controls threaten
China trade, Asia Times Online, January
11, 2006).
Ostensibly prompted by a
superseded Department of Defense annual study on
Chinese military modernization, BIS stunned US
industry and the Chinese alike in 2005 by
proposing unilateral control on previously
multilaterally decontrolled commodities and
technologies, which would roll back US
export-control policy to China to pre-1981 levels.
Uniformly panned by the exporting community and
China alike, BIS continued to maintain the
importance of the proposed rule (US blunders on with China
military-export rule, Asia Times
Online, September 23, 2006) and its "significant
benefits" to US-China trade. BIS published on June
19 the "Final Rule", and in wondrously optimistic
pronouncements portraying the Rule as a "passport
to prosperity", or so said new BIS under secretary
Mario Mancuso at a recent roll-out event at the
Washington-based US China Business Council. "The
Rule is the beginning of new, enhanced
opportunities for trade ... to win, to compete and
to prosper in the hyper-competitive China market,"
noted Mancuso.
Strangely, however, Defense
Secretary Robert Gates appears not to have gotten
the word, and is probably wondering why the
Chinese think he may have been speaking out of
both sides of his mouth when he recently called
for the elimination of "distrust and secrecy" at
the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore. Gates'
conciliatory statements echoed a softened Defense
Department
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
