Trading in Irony
By Emil Guillermo

Last week, while House Republicans like Dick Armey and Tom DeLay were celebrating their new friend—China—how many of you were even thinking about Wen Ho Lee?

Lee is the 62-year-old nuclear scientist held without bail since December. He’s currently in solitary confinement at a prison facility in Santa Fe, N.M.

I don’t imagine they’d let him watch CSPAN in solitary confinement. Too bad. He might have found it pretty entertaining to see the House agree to open its arms to China as a trading partner.

Lee, you’ll recall, is the Los Alamos nuclear scientist suspected of passing secrets to China. If he had passed a container of widgets, or crops, or high tech goods, he’d be hailed today as some harbinger of free trade, a veritable hero. Instead, he’s a guy who downloaded some material that was considered highly classified some time AFTER he downloaded it.

Timing is, as they say, everything.

But is he a spy? Essentially, Lee is accused of being one, though there’s been no conclusive evidence that he’s ever passed on any secrets to anyone, period.

What we have in the Lee case, as nostalgia buff will recognize, is one of the last remaining vestiges of our Cold War sentiment toward China. It is an example of our current state of thinking toward China, which can be categorized charitably as being “mildly schizophrenic.”

On the one hand, we now seem headed toward a full embrace of China and its huge mass of 1.2 billion consumers. We tear down “The Great Wall” and see them now as the “Great Mall.” They are our friends and moneybags, I mean partners.

On the other hand, there is still an old-style “Red” fear deep in the heart of America, enough of it to remind us that when in doubt, or if convenient, China is our enemy. Sure, it’s warmer now. But we have a better Cold War now, through air-conditioning.

That’s what you get when you let politicians play with the thermostat. The temperature’s variable.

Even before Wen Ho Lee, how can we forget the campaign finance scandal of ’96. Al Gore and his Buddhist monk friends were but a sideshow. The main conspiracy scenario favored by House and Senate Republicans was that China was out to steal our elections. After months of Senate hearings, no one could prove anything conclusively. Ultimately, to do so was deemed to endanger “national security interests.” In other words, they could tell us, but then they’d have to kill us. The end result: the whole dog and pony show wasn’t much more than some good old-fashioned China bashing. They’re communists, remember.

Fast forward to today. It’s so warm, the Cold Warriors are practically in their “Made-in-China” Bermuda shorts. National security? They’re capitalist-communists remember? The green light’s on and the House is ready to sell it all to China. What’s a good xenophobe to do now? If you heard Tom DeLay talk the other day, you got the message: if China’s the enemy, they can just keep shooting those dollars over our way.

Amid this Clinton-led Republican victory in the House, just keep reminding yourself that inconsistency is not necessarily hypocrisy.

It all puts us in a strange “not since Nixon went to China” type of “lovey-dovey” Asian/Pacific mood right now. The United States is willing to throw aside labor issues (We could lose 875,000 jobs in the deal, China up to 10 million), human rights issues (what about that prison labor?), and the environment (never was put on the negotiation table). We’ve even looked aside issues like the trade deficit. Already at nearly $70 billion, even using the government’s estimated growth figures, the trade deficit actually keeps growing for the next 50 years according to some analysts. Someone’s profiting, and no doubt it will be the big corporate interests. Will any of it trickle down to the American public? Just keep those cheap goods flowing our way and nobody gets hurt.

As long as we’re willing to look aside all these key issues to make this trade deal with China work, is it too much to ask a little consideration for our community’s cause célèbre Wen Ho Lee?

Lee is accused of mishandling secrets. He’s not the villain of some Cold War caper. Besides, that’s over. Wal-mart and high-tech won.

So why are we treating him this way? It’s been suggested that officials picked on Lee first because he looked like an “actual” Lee, instead of say, a DeLay or an Armey. This is a nice way of saying his accusers saw him as a “foreigner,” not Asian American, which he is. He’s American as they come. In fact, the only un-American thing about him is the way we’ve treated him.

Wen Ho Lee deserves to be out on bail while awaiting trial. The man deserves the pleasure seeing the Senate on CSPAN complete this strange deal with China. What could be better than seeing Tom DeLay and Bill Clinton on the same side? How about Ralph Nader and Jesse Helms?