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 The
China Threat
by
Bill Gertz
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The
B-2 stealth bombers took off from Whiteman Air
Force Base, Missouri, around 9:00 am. It was Friday,
May 7, 1999. Flying nonstop and refueling in midflight
over the Atlantic Ocean near Britain, the aircraft
were nearly invisible to Serbian air defense
radar as they approached the Balkans. One of the
aircraft reached the skies over the capital of
Belgrade around midnight and launched five Joint
Direct Attack Munitions, or JDAM, bombs. The 2,000-pound
high-explosive weapons are among the most advanced
precision-guided bombs in the U.S. conventional
arsenal. The JDAMs maneuvered precisely to their
targets with the help of signals sent by satellites
that are part of the Global Positioning System,
the navigation system used by boaters and military
alike. Three of the bombs slammed into a building
in downtown Belgrade that U.S. and NATO targeters
believed was a key Yugoslav army weapons-buying
facility.
In
fact, the bombs rocked the embassy of the People’s
Republic of China.
Ten
days later, a top secret report was completed
by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
The report was based on intelligence from the
headquarters of the Ministry of State Security,
China’s civilian intelligence service,
and was sent to what remained of the Belgrade
embassy’s intelligence station. “Chinese
embassy personnel in Belgrade were instructed…
to collect missile fragments from the bombed embassy
building and send them back to China, probably
aboard the aircraft chartered to evacuate
injured embassy personnel,” the report said.
Three Chinese nationals were killed in the
bombing, and about twenty-seven others were injured.
The
DIA report went on to state: “Separately,
an internal Chinese ministry level document revealed
that the secure communications area and the defense
attaché office within the Chinese embassy
received the most damage from the NATO attack....
[The Chinese] also believed that NATO had intentionally
hit the embassy as part of a larger conspiracy
to drag China into the crisis.”
The
report also indicated that a Chinese news organization
“relayed guidance for reporting on the situation
relating to the bombing.”
“The
guidance, probably sent nationwide, instructed
reporters not to report that NATO’s attack
was accidental and to focus on the U.S. government,
citizens and investors,” the report said.
“Reporters are forbidden from covering demonstrations
targeting any NATO countries except the United
States.” The intelligence exposed how China’s
communist leaders were using the state-controlled
news media to focus public anger on the United
States, which China views as the “world hegemon”
to be stopped by less powerful states led by China.
Riots by Chinese were orchestrated by government
officials, and the American ambassador, James
Sasser, was forced to remain holed up in the embassy
while mobs of people stoned the consulate building.
This
was just a small, visible part of a new Cold War
against the United States on the part of the communist
government in Beijing.
A
day after the bombing, an official Chinese Foreign
Ministry spokesman issued a statement condemning
the blast: “This act by NATO is a gross violation
of China’s sovereignty and a willful trampling
on the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations
as well as the basic norms governing international
relations. This is rarely seen in the history
of diplomacy.”
The
statement also included a not-so-subtle threat
that received virtually no attention from the
U.S. news media. “The U.S.-led NATO must
bear all responsibilities arising therefrom. The
Chinese Government reserves the right to
take further actions on the matter.” In essence,
the communist government in Beijing viewed the
attack as deliberate and tantamount to an act
of war. The reference to “further action”
was a sign that Beijing would not allow the action
to go unanswered.
Inside
the Pentagon, military planners working on the
Kosovo operations around the clock had to consider
the worst possible outcome of the errant bombing:
retaliation. China’s options ranged from
providing diplomatic support to Yugoslav leader
Slobodan Milosevic all the way to conventional
and possibly even nuclear conflict with the United
States. Vociferous and repeated public apologies
by Bill Clinton and other high-ranking administration
officials appeared to be enough to mollify China’s
communist rulers temporarily. No troop movements
or preparations for launching long-range nuclear
missiles were ever detected. It was unlikely
that China even contemplated the action, but under
the circumstances no one could be certain, especially
given the portrait of an aggressive China that
was emerging from top secret intelligence
intercepts.
Communist
China Plan
Three years earlier, in May 1997, a U.S. Air Force
RC-135 intelligence-gathering jet took off from
Kadena Air Base, Japan. The reconnaissance aircraft
bristled with electronic spying equipment sensitive
enough to pick out individual telephone conversations
from the millions of signals in the airwaves over
China. The jet flew along a flight path parallel
to the coast of China about fifty miles offshore.
The ultrasensitive electronic eavesdropping equipment
on the militarized Boeing aircraft swept the airwaves
during the nine-hour flight. In secret reports,
the flights are given code names like “Bachelor
Warrior,” “Beggar Hawk,” and “Distant
Wind.” The plane’s electronic ears can
hear as far away as western China, into the remote
Xinjiang region, where Beijing conducts nuclear
testing. This spring mission produced a rare intelligence
gem. No Chinese interceptor jets diverted the
plane, and a wealth of intelligence was recorded
and passed on to analysts at the Pentagon.
The
analysts began the task of separating the valuable
material from mundane military information. The
intelligence was polished and given a code word
that assigned it a rank within the “Top Secret”
designation. “Moray” is the first level
of Top Secret. Then comes “Umbra.” The
most sensitive data is “Gamma.”
Within
a few days, the intelligence analysts had discovered
that a senior Chinese Communist official
had had a secret meeting with Sean Garland, managing
director of a Dublin, Ireland, company identified
in the intelligence report as GKG Comms International
Ltd. But Garland is more than a businessman. He
is well known to American and British intelligence.
A
summary of the report was distributed to the highest-ranking
officials in the Clinton-Gore administration
in early June 1997. Among the items it contained
were details of North Korea’s first launch
of a new antiship cruise missile, Russia’s
launch of a new generation spy satellite, and
a warning from a Mexican drug lord about an upcoming
raid by Mexican troops on a farm suspected of
housing drug production equipment.
But
it was the following passage that caught the eye
of senior intelligence officials:
Suspected
Supernote Distributor Meets with Chinese to
_Discuss Undisclosed Business Deal (TSC
OC)
(TSC OC) Sean Garland, Managing Director of GKG
Comms International Ltd., in Dublin, met
recently with Cao Xiaobing, Bureau Director-General
within the Central Committee, to discuss unidentified
business opportunities according to late May 1997
information. (COMMENT: Garland is suspected of
being involved with counterfeiting U.S. currency,
specifically, the Supernote, a high quality counterfeit
$100 bill.) (W9B2, 3/00/18224-97, ILC)
Aside
from his business interests, Garland was secretary
general of the Workers’ Party in Ireland.
A telling document obtained from Soviet archives
revealed that Garland wrote to the secretary of
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on September
15, 1986. In the “dear comrade” letter,
Garland stated that the Workers’ Party of
Ireland had developed a five-year program and
asked Moscow to provide one million pounds to
help. The cash would be “of benefit to the
world struggle for Peace, Freedom and Socialism.”
The document was posted on the Internet by Vladimir
Bukovsky, the well-known Russian dissident who
spent years in the Gulag Archipelago.
The
meeting between Cao and Garland in 1997 showed
how China had become the ideological leader of
what was left of the world communist movement.
U.S. intelligence officials saw Communist China
clandestinely supporting international communists,
including those involved in international criminal
activities-even those suspected of developing
counterfeit $100 bills.
The
intelligence was unwelcome news for the Clinton-Gore
administration and was suppressed, as so many
reports exposing the Chinese threat have been
suppressed under Bill Clinton’s pro-China
foreign policy. The reports have always been handled
the same way. The standard procedure has been
to dismiss such secret intelligence as “unconfirmed.”
When it could not be dismissed, it was simply
hidden or ignored. Among those covering up
for China were White House National Security Adviser
Samuel “Sandy” Berger, a former trade
lawyer who worked to establish joint ventures
in China for U.S. corporations, and Secretary
of State Madeleine Albright, a liberal Georgetown
University professor whose views of Communist
China are extremely favorable. The Pentagon intelligence
report and others like it contradicted the political
line laid down by President Clinton: China is
not a threat, and China must be “engaged”
at all costs-even if U.S. national security
and interests are harmed.
The
reality today is that China is a major threat
to the United States, and a growing one. China’s
rulers-from its president to the general in charge
of the all-powerful Central Military Commission-remain
communists, and the fifty years of communist rule
are replete with brutal repression, mass
murder, and border wars with China’s neighbors.
But communism seeks to change not only external
political conditions but also the internal nature
of human beings-hence its emphasis on mass indoctrination
and its hatred for anything that might offer a
contrary view of man. It is this feature of communism
that accounts for its most dangerous characteristic:
its failure to value human life. In the twentieth
century, tens of millions perished under communist
persecution.
Harry
Wu, a Chinese democracy activist, has documented
Chinese Communist excesses at their worst. Wu,
now a scholar at the Hoover Institution on War,
Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University in
California, obtained documents that reveal how
the rulers in Beijing allow the body organs of
executed prisoners to be sold for medical transplantation.
Outside of a few international human rights groups,
this ugly practice has drawn little outrage.
Many
American political leaders have sought to downplay
or ignore the ideology behind Communist China.
An observer listening to the opinions of American
government officials, business leaders, academics,
and many in the news media would find it hard
to discern that China’s rulers today are
communists at all. The pervasive view is that
China’s leaders have embraced capitalism,
that communism in China is dead. Even many intelligence
officials deny a “China threat.” A senior
Pentagon military intelligence officer who requested
anonymity told me that “statements”
by China’s leaders belied any threat from
China. “We aren’t trying to portray
China as an enemy,” he said. “We are
within the context of our professional work trying
to portray our concern over the direction China
may go in future years.” The official said
there was a penchant among some in the press,
government, and the private sector to portray
China in “the most contentious terms.”
Relations could become confrontational, he acknowledged,
but they are not now. “It’s hopeful,
positive, productive,” he added. “I
visited there, met a number of my counterparts.
I think we have the beginnings of a positive relationship.”
The
assertion showed how deeply China is misunderstood,
even-or perhaps especially-at high levels of the
U.S. government. In the military, the threat a
foreign country poses is based on that nation’s
power and capabilities: its hardware and weapons
systems. Statements by leaders, especially communist
leaders, are what intelligence analysts term “intentions”;
because these can change, they should never be
used as the basis for threat assessments. As President
Ronald Reagan said years ago, to much ridicule
from his critics, communists will do anything,
including lie and cheat, to accomplish their goals.
So it is in the case of China.
But
the prevailing political orthodoxy in the Clinton-Gore
administration was a continuation of the “anti-anticommunism”
of the Cold War Left that sees McCarthyism, not
communism, as the central problem, something that
should be discredited, marginalized, or dismissed
as extremist, part of what Hillary Rodham Clinton
denounced as the “vast right-wing conspiracy.”
The Clinton-Gore policy on China was called “engagement”
and held that China’s transformation was
inevitable and could be impeded only by critics
of “engagement” and Communist China.
If
President George Bush envisioned a New World Order,
President Clinton had in mind an even newer world
order, such as saying that the conflict in Kosovo
was not a mere regional conflict but rather was
fought by NATO for “the future of the world.”
The young people of America, he said, “are
likely to live in a world where the biggest threats
are not from other countries.” Cold War visions
of communists clashing with Western supporters
were outdated, he insisted. The real threats to
world peace would come from racial, ethnic, and
religious fighting, organized crime, drug traffickers,
and terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction.
In
reality, pro-China policies of earlier administrations
were based on realpolitik and Chinese concessions,
such as China’s permitting the United States
to use electronic eavesdropping posts near its
borders, which allowed U.S. intelligence agencies
to spy on Moscow’s strategic nuclear weapons.
By
contrast, the pro-China policies of the Clinton-Gore
administration were a disaster for America’s
national security interests, which were not even
considered in the rush to enhance China.
Quite
the opposite: The Clinton-Gore administration’s
loosening of trade restrictions with China vastly
improved China’s military power with transfers
of strategic high technology. All the while the
administration insisted it was doing nothing to
enhance China’s military power. Some Clinton
officials even went so far as to state, privately
of course, that it was a good thing that China
had obtained nuclear weapons secrets from the
United States. After all, they said, why should
the United States be the only nation with advanced
warheads and missiles? With that astonishing
rationale, the Clinton-Gore administration brushed
aside all worries about the Chinese gaining information
on every deployed nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal
and improving their own nuclear weapons.
The Growing Threat
In 1998 I visited the PLA museum in Beijing. Entering
the huge, fortress-like hall, visitors are greeted
by thirty-foot statues of such communists as Marx,
Engels, Lenin, and Stalin. Stalin, let it be remembered,
is credited by historians with causing the deaths
of millions of people through repression, execution,
forced labor, and government-induced famine.
Michael
Pillsbury, a senior Pentagon planner during the
Reagan administration who specializes in
Chinese affairs, revealed much of the continuing
hostile nature of China and its national strategy
against the United States in his book China Debates
the Future Security Environment. Using original-language
sources, Pillsbury discovered a deep hostility
toward the United States on the part of Chinese
Communist Party leaders and military officers.
One confidential Chinese government report
leaked to the Hong Kong press in 1997 predicted
a future war between China and the United
States over Taiwan:
With
the return of Hong Kong and Macao to Chinese
rule, the Taiwan issue will inevitably become
China’s major event around 2010. If the
United States uses force to meddle in China’s
sovereignty and internal affairs, China will
certainly fight a war against aggression, thus
leading to a limited Sino-U.S. war. China must
be prepared for this. With the change in the
international situation, the United States will
make use of islands, maritime space, and resources
and will encourage and support Japanese militarists
in provoking a war against China.... China is
the U.S. number one political adversary at the
turn of this century. China must make systematic
preparations against the invasive war and military
attacks unleashed by the United States under
any pretext.
Examples
of official Chinese government hostility can be
found in the People’s Daily, the official
Communist Party newspaper. On June 22, 1999, for
example, the newspaper, which is strictly controlled
by top Party leaders, stated that the United States
and Nazi Germany are “exactly the same”
in “their self-centeredness and ambition
to seek hegemony.” According to China, the
United States engages in mass extermination on
the same scale as the Nazis. Written a month and
a half after the bombing of the Chinese embassy
in Belgrade, the article noted that the “utilization
of advanced technology to slaughter peaceful citizens
is by no means less barbaric.... Hitler not only
used in war what were considered to be the most
advanced weapons of the time, such as airplanes,
tanks, and long-range artillery, to massacre peaceful
citizens in anti-Fascist countries, but also
built concentration camps in Auschwitz and in
other areas to slaughter Jews and prisoners of
war with ‘advanced’ technology. Executioners
drove hundreds and thousands of people into gas
chambers and poured cyanide through air holes
in the roof, killing them all. Today, the U.S.
hegemonists use high-tech weapons to attack FRY
[Federal Republic of Yugoslavia] civilian facilities
several hundred miles away from the battlefield,
or, with laser and global position systems several
thousand meters above the sky, treated innocent
and peaceful citizens as live targets. The flagrant
use of missiles by the U.S.-led NATO to attack
the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia was a barbaric
atrocity that the then-Nazi Germany had not dared
to commit.”
Such
comments were almost never refuted by the Clinton-Gore
administration, which simply tried to ignore
them. Defense Secretary William S. Cohen, the
only Republican in the Clinton cabinet, mildly
chastised the Chinese during a visit to China’s
National Defense University in July 2000. He said
Chinese media characterizations of the United
States as a hegemon seeking to dominate the world
were “not only unhelpful, but... untrue.”
The vitriol against America in the Chinese press
continues unabated, however.
The
Chinese government is not shy about its communist,
anti-American ideology. In a December 1999
speech during Beijing’s takeover of
the Portuguese colony of Macao, Chinese leader
Jiang Zemin said: “We must assess the trends
in the world and envisage our country’s destiny
with Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, and
Deng Xiaoping Theory in particular, never
deviate from the reality of China, unswervingly
keep to our own road and carry the socialist reform
and socialist modernization through to the
end so as to constantly open up new spheres for
China’s development and prosperity. The bell
is ringing for the advent of the 21st century.
Political multipolarity and economic globalization
are the two major trends in the future world.”
“Multipolarity” means knocking
the United States off its perch as the world’s
sole superpower.
Many
Chinese government statements and reports can
be viewed through the CIA’s Foreign Broadcast
Information Service, which produces scores
of translations every day. The People’s Republic
of China makes official statements available from
the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s Internet site
(http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/english/dhtml).
Read enough of these statements and you will know
that China is not a friendly power.
China’s
communists believe world socialism is inevitable.
As Pillsbury says, China asserts that “the
new Chinese-style world system of the Five Principles
will be much better than systems of the past and
present, because there will be harmony, no ‘power
politics,’ and no more ‘hegemony.’
This harmonious world requires a transition away
from capitalism in the major powers toward some
type of ‘socialist market economy.’
Just as China has modified the doctrines of Marx,
Engels, Lenin, and Stalin to produce what
Deng Xiaoping called ‘Socialism with
Chinese Characteristics,’ so will the United
States, Germany, Japan, and Russia ultimately
develop their own socialist characteristics.”
When Chinese tanks rolled through Beijing’s
Tiananmen Square to crush democratic protests,
they did so under the watchful gaze of a large
portrait of Mao Zedong above the main building
in the square. It is Mao’s communism that
justifies, sustains, and guides China’s government
even as it enriches itself with Western investment.
In
a December 1998 speech, Jiang Zemin affirmed that
“without Comrade Mao Zedong’s leadership,
there would not be New China; and without Comrade
Deng Xiaoping’s leadership, there would not
be the path of building socialism with Chinese
characteristics!”
Such
socialism “with Chinese characteristics”
means a communism that fulfills China’s sense
of its own superiority. China considers its culture
to be the oldest in the world. It refers to itself
as the Middle Kingdom-the place between heaven
and earth. And to restore its former grandeur
through modernizing communism, it will pay any
human price.
The
editor of 1999’s Black Book of Communism,
scholar Stephane Courtois, notes that the total
number of people killed under communism is 100
million. Of these, between 44.5 million and 72
million deaths resulted from communism in China
alone.
The worst communist slaughter of the Chinese people
was in the “Great Leap Forward,” when
between twenty million and forty-three million
people died, mostly due to the government-induced
famine.
Another
factor is labor camps, known as the Laogai, that
have claimed as many as twenty million Chinese
lives and continue to operate today. But under
the Clinton-Gore administration’s policy
of “engagement,” public discussion
of this repression is frowned upon in the United
States.
French
historian Jean-Louis Margolin, who wrote the Black
Book’s chapter on China, notes that “whatever
happens to ‘real socialism’ now depends
on the development of Communism in China”
because it is by far the leading communist power.
Margolin
says Beijing has become “a second Rome for
Marxism-Leninism,” and it is in this context
that the secret meeting between Sean Garland and
Cao Xiaobing should be viewed.
Veteran
China watcher Willy Wo-Lap Lam, whose columns
for the South China Morning Post are often based
on inside information from Beijing, says that
China’s communist rulers are clinging to
the idea that “the great renaissance of the
Chinese race is only possible under the party’s
leadership.” So they have created a new propaganda
campaign saying that the Communist Party is the
institution that will advance China’s economy
and culture, as well as the interests of “the
people.” Lam writes, “Under the pretext
of concentrating the nation’s energy and
resources on enhancing patriotism and gearing
up ‘military preparedness,’ the leadership
has dragged its feet on real liberalization measures
such as expanding village-level elections.”
Much
also is made of China’s shift toward a market
economy. The reality remains that China permits
no political freedom and even its tolerance of
capitalism is limited. Jiang Zemin, the Chinese
president, announced in May 2000 that the
Chinese Communist Party would increase its
control over businesses by installing party “cells”
within every enterprise. Party commissars in the
cells were directed to “work hard to unite
and educate entrepreneurs to advocate various
policies of the party, run businesses according
to law, and protect the employees’ interests.”
The new directive contradicts the claims of the
Clinton-Gore administration that economic liberalization
will lead to democratization in China.
During
his eight years in office, Clinton rarely if ever
called for democracy in China, despite the official
policy of his administration outlined in the annual
National Security Strategy report that called
for enlarging democracy throughout the world.
For
those who think China is not a threat to the United
States, General Chi Haotian, vice chairman of
the Communist Party Central Military Commission,
is proof they are wrong. In December 1999 General
Chi gave this chilling assessment of China’s
future relations with the United States:
Seen
from the changes in the world situation and the
United States’ hegemonic strategy for creating
monopolarity, war is inevitable. We cannot avoid
it. The issue is that the Chinese armed forces
must control the initiative in this war. We must
make sure that we win this local high-tech war
against aggression and interference; win this
modern high-tech war that [the] military bloc,
headed by U.S. hegemonists, may launch to interfere
in our affairs militarily; and win this war ignited
by aggressor countries’ sudden offensives
against China. We must be prepared to fight for
one year, two years, three years, or even longer.
To
the Communist Chinese, we are the enemy, the one
barrier to Chinese greatness. With that understanding,
Beijing devised its strategy that became known
as “the Plan,” which, as we’ll
see, had catastrophic results for American security
during the Clinton-Gore administration.
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