Behind the spurious spy scandal
U.S. conflicting interests in China
By Fred
Goldstein
Recent hysterical accusations that the People's Republic of
China carried out nuclear spying, coming on the eve of Chinese
Premier Zhu Rongzi's visit to Washington, are a sequel to the
cancellation of a Hughes Electronics satellite system deal just
before Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's trip to
China.
Both are political intimidation and pressure calculated to
force the Chinese leadership to make more concessions to U.S.
imperialism.
This latest anti-China campaign is the result of the
convergence of otherwise disparate political forces--including
the Republican Party, the wing of the Democratic Party led by
Rep. Richard Gephardt, the Pentagon and the elite mouthpieces
of the liberal imperialist establishment. The New York Times
led the attack with a major headline and detailed story on
March 5. The Republicans then ran with the story and called for
investigations.
The Pentagon got the immediate benefit from this attack.
On March 17, amidst this so-called national security crisis,
the Senate voted 97 to three to approve the
anti-ballistic-missile system long sought by the Pentagon and
the military-industrial complex but long opposed by President
Bill Clinton and the Democrats. The Clinton administration
dropped its threat to veto the bill.
The Democrats, who had previously denounced it, did a
complete about-face when the Republicans threw them a cover of
two amendments: one gave Democrats input on the spending and
the other stated that the ABM system would, in effect, "only"
be directed at China, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea
and Iran--not Russia.
Of course, approval for the $10 billion plan to develop a
so-called limited ABM system lays the technological basis for
later expanding it against Russia or a
reconstituted Soviet Union. And the promises of limitation are
not worth the paper they are printed on.
But the system even as now projected would bring Taiwan and
south Korea under the ABM nuclear umbrella of the U.S. war
machine. This is a dangerous escalation of military tension in
Asia. The Chinese leadership has repeatedly denounced it.
Nuclear spy hysteria
The nuclear spy hysteria has been manufactured to strike at
both China and the Clinton administration. The Times account is
based on a supposed document, said to have been handed over to
the CIA in 1995 by a Chinese official, that mentions the design
of the W-88. This advanced system of miniaturized nuclear
warheads allows multiple warheads to be launched from ballistic
missiles and small warheads to be launched from submarines.
The entire case for spying is based on a trip by
Taiwanese-born scientist Wen Ho Lee of the Los Alamos, N.M.,
laboratories to China in the 1980s, a CIA document, and the
similarity between Chinese and U.S. warheads.
The Chinese government has denounced and categorically
denied the charges. Premier Zhu Rongji characterized them as "a
tale from the Arabian Nights," according to a March 22 Reuter
report. Li Deyuan of the Institute of Applied Physical and
Computational Mathematics said that Lee had attended an
international physics symposium in Beijing in the late 1980s
and delivered a speech that was "fundamentally basic science
and nothing to do with secrets."
Xinhua, the Chinese news agency, said the accusations were
"exaggerated to an absurd extent ... indicating their hopes for
a confrontation," according to Reuters. Premier Zhu also said
the U.S. charges were based on "two underestimations"--the
underestimation of security at Los Alamos and the
underestimation of Chinese scientists' ability.
The U.S. case is based on the chauvinist assumption that if
the Chinese developed a weapon similar to the Pentagon's, it
could only be due to spying. Yet even the CIA knows there are
other explanations. Asked for alternative scenarios to
espionage, the agency said it could have been aid from the
Russians or "the ingenuity of Chinese scientists." (New York
Times, March 6)
This case is similar in character, although so far on a much
smaller scale, to the charges that the Rosenbergs "gave the
atomic bomb" to the Soviet Union. Somehow the Soviet scientific
establishment, which only a few years later gave the world
Sputnik and space travel, was incapable of the same scientific
accomplishments as U.S. imperialism. Of course, European
scientists like Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr and others helped
the United States make the atomic breakthrough.
The progressive movement should honor the Chinese
government's explanation of the events. But in any case, it
goes without saying that all governments engage in espionage,
and the attitude towards espionage should be based strictly
upon class allegiance.
China is a socialist country, notwithstanding all the
inroads of the multinationals and the damage caused by market
reforms. As such, the United States and world capitalism always
regard China as an enemy country, regardless of the current
state of commercial and diplomatic relations.
China is struggling to survive in a world dominated by
imperialism, which holds sway by virtue of its economic,
technological and military dominance. This dominance is based
on centuries of plunder--not only of the working class but of
the oppressed countries of the world, including 150 years of
colonial robbery and plunder in China.
The government of the People's Republic of China has the
right to protect itself against the aggression of U.S.
imperialism by any means necessary. It has the right and
responsibility to do whatever it can to diminish the military,
technological and economic gap between itself and the United
States--as a matter of self-defense and self-determination.
This inevitably involves espionage, if only to keep from
falling too far behind the espionage committed by the United
States against China.
The entire U.S. intelligence machine swung into overtime to
aid and abet the counter-revolutionary uprising at Tiananmen
Square in 1989. U.S. intelligence is doing all it can to
penetrate China, particularly from its bases in capitalist Hong
Kong.
U.S. spy machine outdoes all others
It is the height of imperialist arrogance to denounce the
PRC for spying. Through the CIA, the National Security Agency,
the Defense Intelligence Agency, Army Intelligence, Naval
Intelligence, and a host of other spy departments, the United
States has the biggest espionage establishment known to human
history.
It includes not only weapons, communications systems,
electronic warfare and cutthroat agents, but experts in every
field of academic accomplishment, from psychology to
anthropology.
The U.S. espionage establishment not only spies on
governments but overthrows them. It assassinates leaders and
carries on perpetual operations in every corner of the globe to
maintain the dominance of Washington and the U.S. multinational
corporations.
The recent revelation about the CIA's role in the massacre
of thousands of Guate ma lans is only the latest in the long
list of crimes committed by U.S. espionage agencies.
It is impossible to tell how far the ruling class will allow
this latest surge of anti-China hysteria to go. The big bosses
are constrained by the fragile international capitalist
economy, despite the U.S. boom. They need the Chinese market to
absorb surplus capital that is overflowing the treasuries of
the Fortune 500. And they have their historic dream of selling
to China's vast population.
They are further constrained by the fear of a major rupture
with China, which could have dire consequences for the U.S.
perspective of dominating Asia.
Right-wing Sens. Jesse Helms of North Carolina and Ernest
Hollings of South Caro lina are calling for China to be kept
out of the World Trade Organization on principle--just weeks
before Zhu's visit. His trip will undoubtedly revolve around
China's demand that the United States allow the PRC into the
WTO without demanding dangerous inroads for U.S. big business
in areas where China is vulnerable.
But as Business Week put it in its March 29 issue, "Even
Administration critics don't want to hobble the likes of Intel,
IBM, and Unysis, the kind of companies that sell
billions of dollars worth of goods to China--and provide
Americans jobs."
Even the Republican head of the House committee accusing
China of espionage, Christopher Cox of California, is opposed
to the anti-China trade regulations flowing out of the
technology transfer hysteria. "Cox," wrote Business Week,
"fears that tighter controls will crimp U.S. exports without
doing much for national security. `The lion's share of stuff
should be fast-tracked,' he says."
Pushing for political concessions
The New York Times and others pushing the anti-China
hysteria want the Clinton administration to extract more
counter-revolutionary concessions in return for trade and
investment. Neither the Times nor the Washington Post--the
mainstream capitalist political establishment--wants to break
with China. Rather, they want to gain more political space for
counter-revolutionary bourgeois elements, in the name of
defending human rights.
They want to drive a wedge between the PRC and the
Democratic People's Republic of Korea. They want to force the
Chinese market to open even wider to multinationals.
In a March 14 editorial, "China Without Illusions," the
Times wrote of the Clinton policy of engagement: "Engagement
should not be viewed as an end in itself. It makes sense only
as a way to advance American interests."
Then the editorial accused Clinton of being too easy on
China--forgetting to mention how he sent the Seventh Fleet into
the Taiwan Straits in 1996, threatening war, after provoking
China by bringing Taiwan's separatist president to Cornell
University.
Ruling class politics in flux
Given the constraints on the ruling class, it would seem
that the current crisis is likely to subside before rising to a
dangerous level. However, there are important points to keep in
mind.
First of all, the constellation of forces momentarily
aligned against China closely resembles the unholy alliance of
the big capitalist media with the Republicans and the Pentagon
that spent years undermining the Clinton administration in a
struggle that
finally led to his impeachment--a result that practically no
one in the ruling class or the political establishment really
wanted or intended, except for the right wing of the
Republicans.
The internal struggle is a symptom of the fragmentation and
lack of coherence in ruling-class politics since the collapse
of the USSR. The struggle to destroy the USSR was central to
U.S. ruling-class
politics for most of this century. It gave a focus and
cohesiveness to the politics of the bourgeois parties and led
to clear and predictable alignments.
The impeachment struggle and now the extraordinary
alignments in the struggle over China--and over Kosovo, for
that matter--show the floundering character of U.S.
ruling-class politics. Driven by factionalism, they can veer
wildly in different directions, and can drift into a
crisis.
The struggle against the USSR also built up strong political
traditions of anti-communism as an axis of politics in both
bourgeois parties. It was the raison d'etre for the monumental
growth of such institutions as the FBI, the CIA and, above all,
the Pentagon. The sudden flurry of anti-China hysteria over
so-called nuclear spying shows the anti-communist reflex of a
political, military and secret police establishment that yearns
for an enemy.
With regard to China, this potentially explosive reflex has
been muted in the commercial interest of U.S. big business, but
also in favor of the slow, long-term subversion that
automatically accompanies imperialist economic penetration. The
Chinese government is both inviting and resisting the
relationship at the same time, out of need for economic
development.
China is not just a potential rival economic power to the
United States, like Japan. It is also a socialist country.
Despite the inroads of market forces and multinational
corporations--leading to social dislocation, unemployment and
alienation of the workers and peasants--the commanding heights
of the economy are still centrally guided by the Communist
Party of China and the People's Liberation Army. Although
weakened in their communist elan and their connection to the
masses by the market reforms, they still stand as barriers to
full-scale counter-revolution and imperialist takeover.
Right now relations between the United States and China are
based on a common struggle over who can gain the economic
advantage. This binds them both to sustain some semblance of
cordiality and diplomatic engagement.
Should the international capitalist economic crisis overtake
them, things could drastically shift and the antagonism between
the two social systems could flare up in an open manifestation
of the class struggle.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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