Double Standard As A Function Of Time

Pundits in the pre-Lewinsky days seemed obsessed over “the China connection,” a label covering a fund-raising scandal within the Democratic Party. Although that controversy never gripped the public’s attention, it hasn’t gone away.

In fact, it could step to center stage once the Clinton impeachment mess is concluded. Journalistic muckrakers and Republican poohbahs have alleged the Chinese government illegally contributed funds to President Clinton’s 1996 campaign to influence U.S. policy.

Beijing, it was said, used a few Chinese-American fund raisers as go-betweens, hoping they would sway the Clinton administration to loosen restrictions on passing along sensitive technology. Along with continuing criticisms of China’s human rights record, the spotlight on the technology exchange issue paints China as an amoral, manipulative nation interested only in stealing our precious technology to enhance its nuclear weapons capabilities.

Mine is not a knee-jerk defense of Chinese government actions, for I have no inside knowledge of China’s motivations - or Washington’s. A simplistic good-vs.-evil plot line works well in comic books and sci-fi thrillers. In real life, geopolitical relationships are almost aways murkier. Before we assume a new Evil Empire is looming in East Asia to supplant the old Soviet Union’s threat to world peace, it is instructive to consider the actions of American companies and the government, now and a generation ago.

If China was eager to acquire U.S. technology at almost any cost, legally or illegally, then who on our side was equally willing to sell it? Hughes Electronics, a unit of General Motors, and Loral Space and Communications, that’s who.

One reason the American companies have sold technology to China is to save money. Both Hughes and Loral build satellites for various commercial and military operations. It is an expensive proposition to launch them into space. The Chinese can do it more cheaply than American companies. So, to save a few million dollars, Hughes and Loral have hooked up with Chinese rocket launching concerns.

It is obviously in Hughes and Loral’s best interests that Chinese companies have capable technology to get their satellites into space. When some Chinese launches haven’t worked, Hughes and Loral have helped the Chinese fix the problem. In so doing, according to Pentagon and House investigators, the two American companies improperly passed along technology that could be used to enhance China’s military capabilities - altering, some feel, the strategic military balance between the United States and China.

If some American leaders are wary of China now, they weren’t a generation ago, when Washington leaders like former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger regarded China as a strategic partner against the then-dreaded Soviet Union, whose nuclear arsenal more than matched ours.

According to Kissinger documents assembled by the National Security Archive, an independent research center, the United States worked with China in the early 1970s on what the Washington Post called “a broadening security relationship that has included providing the Chinese sophisticated computer technology, setting up electronic listening posts along the Chinese-Russian border and using Chinese rockets to launch U.S. satellites.”

In other words, it was OK for us to share advanced technology with China when we wanted to use China for our own purposes. But today we don’t need China to offset a bigger threat. China, in the imagination of some American leaders, is now the potential threat, so technology relationships begun by us more than 25 years ago are now highly suspect, if not potentially treasonous.

Friendship is a fickle concept on the world stage.