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The Rediff Special/Seema Sirohi

For Clinton, China Can Do No Wrong

The sun was shining bright and the White House looked utterly hospitable for Zhu Rongji, the Chinese Premier, who was strolling the lawns with President Bill Clinton last week. The bonhomie between the two leaders was evident.

It seemed to matter little that yet another report of stolen nuclear secrets by the Chinese had hit the news, another compendium of American high-tech sales to Beijing collated for the record, another story of how the Chinese military routed funds to the Democratic Party told. Zhu denied all charges at a lengthy press conference and went on to enjoy the splendour of a White House banquet.

From India’s perspective, the picture looked distorted, even skewed. No matter how much China violated international norms, proliferated nuclear technology or used its spies against the United States, it was the guest of honour at the party. As if to rub it in, Clinton, who granted China the status of "overseer" in South Asia during his visit to Beijing, publicly thanked Zhu for helping "curb" proliferation in South Asia.

Zhu completed his summit meeting with Clinton without the agreement he most sought – US support for China’s entry into the World Trade Organisation. He also received mild rebukes for China’s human rights record and uncomfortable questions on Taiwan. But the underlying message was one of working together as Clinton continues down the course of "constructive engagement" with the superpower-in-waiting.

Sino-US relations may pass through minor convulsions from time to time but they stand on a solid foundation of mutual interest, trade and respect.

In addition to both governments working hard to smoothen wrinkles, a variety of private groups work tirelessly to promote the relationship. Friendship societies with a roster of who’s who of former ambassadors and policy makers and eminent persons groups are the reason why US stakes in China are vast and will not be easily threatened.

The depth of the engagement policy was most evident in a report timed for release with Zhu’s arrival. The report showed that China received $15 billion worth of strategically sensitive US exports, ranging from super computers to oscilloscopes, over the past 10 years. The array of high-tech equipment legally exported to China could be used for designing nuclear weapons, processing nuclear weapons material, building missile parts and transmitting data from missile tests.

The endless list of export licenses granted to China presents a sharp contrast to the "deny, deny, deny" policy toward India. While sophisticated technology is sold directly to the Chinese military, even paper clips are denied to the Indian defence department after last May’s nuclear tests. The restrictions against India, already many-layered because of New Delhi’s refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, multiplied after Pokhran-II, effectively choking the flow of technology.

China, meanwhile, enjoys American trust and buys cutting-edge equipment despite its record of supplying nuclear technology and missile components to Pakistan, Iran, Syria, Iraq and other countries over the years. The buying spree continues even in the face of at least two serious instances of Chinese nuclear espionage which recently came to light. Chinese moles allegedly stole the design of W-88, the most advanced American nuclear warhead, and data on the neutron bomb from US government labs.

The W-88 theft from Los Alamos laboratory was detected in the early 1990s but no action was taken until 1998 despite detailed briefings by investigative agencies to the White House. Analysts say the theft helped improve China’s capability to mount multiple warheads on a single missile, enhancing its strength to devastate.

The data about the neutron bomb was allegedly pilfered in the mid-1990s after China’s 1988 neutron bomb test did not fully succeed. It was detected in 1996 when a Chinese spy working for the United States told Washington of the leak. National Security Adviser Samuel Berger was almost immediately informed but failed to take action until a year later.

But what China allegedly stole pales in comparison to what it legally bought through regular channels under Clinton’s "trade-first" policy. The report prepared by the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, a Washington-based think tank, said that lax Commerce Department rules allowed China’s military establishment to purchase dual use items, many of which later turned up in Pakistan and Iran. The damage to US national security from such legal largesse was far greater than China’s nuclear espionage.

China bought more than 11,000 computers on the restricted list worth $7.7 billion after 1993 when the definition of what constitutes a "supercomputer" was changed by the Clinton administration. The bar was raised, allowing for a seven-fold relaxation in supercomputer export controls.

By February 1994, the Clinton administration leaning under industry pressure and trying to promote trade, defined a supercomputer as a machine performing 1.5 billion operations per second from the earlier 195 million operations per second. By 1996, the controls were relaxed even further, allowing export of computers performing 2 billion operations per second.

"If a Chinese buyer did not admit to being a nuclear, missile, or military site, it could import computers performing up to 7 billion operations per second. Such computers are used, among other things, to encode and decode secret messages, to design and test nuclear warheads and to simulate the performance of missiles from launch to impact," the report says.

Gary Milhollin, the Wisconsin Project’s director, has been long in the forefront of curbing US nuclear technology exports, often timing his reports and op-ed articles for maximum impact. He is a stringent critic of India’s nuclear programme and opposes any policy accommodation with New Delhi on the issue. But he admits that US sales to India are a drop in the bucket compared to the high-tech flow to China.

His report, which details more than 250 license approvals to China, condemns Clinton’s engagement policy as an "abstraction" connoting friendly visits by scholars. "The reality of this policy includes a deadly trade in the means to make weapons of mass destruction. Unless this policy is changed, American equipment will continue to increase China’s military strength into the next century."

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