Spy Hysteria

In a sensational article on its front page, the New York Times reported March 6 that China had made “a leap in the development of nuclear weapons” by stealing nuclear secrets from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, operated by the University of California under contract with the U.S. Department of Energy.

According to the article, China in the mid-1990s unexpectedly built and tested small warheads that could be launched from a single missile at targets. Such accelerated advances, according to unidentified American “experts,” could only have come from theft—specifically, that of America’s most advanced miniature warhead, the W-88, developed at Los Alamos.

Two days later through a leak to the paper, Taiwan-born computer scientist Wen Ho Lee, was identified as the suspect. Under intense media and Republican pressure, he was summarily dismissed based on his alleged failure to report a trip he made to Hong Kong and China in 1988 and on the assumption, unproved, that espionage had occurred during his trip.

No evidence against Lee has been produced. He has not been arrested. Yet the man, nevertheless, was convicted in the court of public opinion and lost his job in two days.

The news media and Republicans, having just set aside their obsession with impeachment, immediately went into a feeding frenzy, grinding out stories and op-ed pieces in manners reminiscent of the breaking stories of John Huang and James Riady in the 1996 campaign finance scandal. (Incidentally, after more than two years of nonstop investigation and hearings, which included allegations of their close ties with China, neither Huang nor Riady has been arrested or indicted).

Predident Bill Clinton is now accused of gross negligence for ignoring warnings from investigators. Some even tried to link his recklessness to political contributions he allegedly received from China in 1996. Even though the Lee case lasks Monicagate’s sexiness, it taps into a rich, ever-ready reservoir of anti-Chinese racism and national security obsession by suggesting that communist China not only had infiltrated America’s top-secret weapon labs, but also succeeded in stealing nuclear secrets capable of striking all American cities.

Never mind the fact that the alleged incident took place more than 10 years ago during the Reagan-Bush watch. Never mind the fact that there is no credible evidence against Lee, after three years of intensive investigation. Never mind the fact that Lee had volunteered in the past few months to be interrogated by the FBI with a polygraph, but without the presence of his attorney. Never mind the fact that the New York Times story had come from a leak from a 700-page classified report prepared by a Republican-controlled committee set up last year by former Speaker Newt Gingrich to determine whether the Clinton administration had traded technology for political contributions.

The news media and the Republicans seem bent on exploiting a fearful, jittery public and feeding it with rumors, hearsay, racial innuendoes and flights of fancy, instead of rules of law and evidence.

For example, Jim Mann, the Los Angeles Times reporter on China, this month dug up a 1987 story by James H. Geer, former FBI assistant director for intelligence, to illustrate the difference between Soviet and Chinese spies. The story, as related by Mann, goes like this: “If a grain of sand were a piece of information, the Soviets would bring a submarine offshore in the dead of the night and send a dinghy with men in it dressed in dark wetsuits, who would fill a bucket of sand and go back to the submarine and steal away in the dead of the night.

“The Chinese, on the other hand, would send 100,000 bathers to the beach in broad daylight and during the course of the day, each bather would pick up one grain of sand and bring it home with him ... That’s pretty much what’s happening.”

The point of retelling the story is to suggest that Chinese spies are everywhere and, by extension, can only be everywhere in the United States, given the two million Chinese Americans and thousands of foreign students from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. It also insinuates that ethnicity ultimately determines loyalty. This recalls immediately the racist and indiscriminate evacuation and incarceration of 110,000 Japanese Americans immediately after the bombing of the Pearl Harbor, based on the government-fabricated excuse of “military necessity.”

Likewise, during the 1950s and 1960s, when China was declared enemy No. 1, being Chinese American was synonymous with treason and espionage. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover routinely reminded Congress to keep Chinese Americans under surveillance with more funds for his agency in the 1950s. In the 1990s, racist paranoia and national security obsession, not proof and due process, have found Lee already guilty.

Behind the sensational headlines and accusations loom two very important issues: the debate over Clinton’s China policy and the 2000 presidential campaign. Unfortunately, the two are inseparable. A policy of “strategic cooperation” with China has become central to Clinton’s foreign policy. China, in Clinton’s view, has become too powerful and important to be ignored or treated with disrespect. Besides, Clinton sees China playing a constructive role in regional and global stability.

Even though most moderate Republicans share his view, the conservative wing of the Republican party and some in the left wing of the Democratic party do not. They see China as an emerging anti-American “evil empire,” whose potential threat to U.S. interests worldwide must be curbed before it becomes too late. Instead of cooperation, they advocate confrontation with China over issues ranging from human rights and labor standards on the left to abortion, religion, capitalist democracy and trade protectionism on the right. Besides, the Lee story helps justify the Republican proposal to increase defense spending and isolate, if not suppress, advocates of engaging China. What they advocate is nothing short of a new Cold War around a China containment policy backed by defense build-up and suppression of domestic dissent.

Whether we like it or not, the debate over Clinton’s handling of China is tied up already in the race for the White House in 2000. Vice President Al Gore appears to have the Democratic nomination in the bag. He will have to either defend Clinton’s China policy or backpedal under fire by putting on a different spin.

But on the Republican side, the struggle for the party nomination has just begun—and it promises to be a nasty brawl among the moderate and right-wing candidates. The conservative Republicans are determined to capture the nomination with the help of their and anti-China stand.

Premier Zhu Rongji will walk into a snake pit next month when he visits the United States. He will get a first-hand experience of a partisan struggle for the presidency can be.