China and Her Dupes. - Review - book review

National Review, Dec 4, 2000 by John Derbyshire

The China Threat: How the People's Republic Targets America, by Bill Gertz (Regnery, 280 pp., $27.95)

In the middle 1930s, as Hitler consolidated his power in Germany and began rearming in earnest, the facts were duly reported to the British foreign secretary, Sir John Simon. However, Sir John, as one of his underlings later remarked, did not want to know "uncomfortable things." Still less did he want to trouble the British people with them. Many in Britain's diplomatic and intelligence services, angry and frustrated, took their information to the one person they could be sure would understand-Winston Churchill, then idling in the political wilderness- although by making themselves Churchill's informants they were undoubtedly risking their careers.

There is no Churchill in America today. Where are they to turn, then, those patriots in our security services who understand what the fecklessness, stupidity, and corruption of the Clinton administration are costing us? It would not be very surprising if they were to seek out a sympathetic journalist, in the slim hope that the American public might take their eyes away from Hollywood and Wall Street long enough to pay attention. If so, their contact of choice would be Bill Gertz, defense reporter for the Washington Times. In 1999, Gertz published Betrayal, a wide-angle look at the many follies of Clintonian diplomacy. Betrayal came complete with a lengthy appendix of U.S. government documents stamped TOP SECRET, CLASSIFIED, CONFIDENTIAL, or even more dramatically, pulled at the last minute to leave a blank page. This opened Gertz and his informants to accusations of disloyalty and illegal activity in divulging things that should not be divulged, and of alarming the American public when there is no real cause for alarm.

In The China Threat, Gertz concentrates on our country's relations with China, bringing the story up to date to mid 2000. Supported by a similar appendix of leaked or purloined secret reports, he argues that China has a master plan to increase her international stature and influence. The first phase will concentrate on getting the U.S. out of Asia, in furtherance of which, says Gertz, the Chinese have five active efforts under way: military, geostrategic, espionage, propaganda, and U.S.-political.

* The military effort is concentrated on taking control of the western Pacific, beginning with a fast and decisive strike against Taiwan. As preparations for the subjugation of Taiwan proceed (see below), military air bases on the Paracel and Spratly Islands in the South China Sea are being expanded, to give China control of the air and waters up to a thousand miles from her coasts.

* On the geostrategic front, China has taken control of the Panama Canal. Key facilities at both ends of the canal are now owned and operated by Hutchison Whampoa, a Hong Kong firm whose chairman, Li Ka- shing, is closely associated with the Beijing regime. China has also cozied up to Cuba, and now broadcasts eight hours daily of Radio China programming into the U.S.-a traditional method of communicating with clandestine intelligence officers.

* Chinese espionage agents have penetrated U.S. defense labs and agencies. Documents provided by a Chinese defector in 1995 show that China possessed classified data on seven U.S. thermonuclear warheads, including the very sophisticated W-88 warhead used in the Trident submarine D-5 missile and the W-70 "neutron bomb."

* Propaganda aims to fix in Western minds the image of China as nonthreatening, opening up and liberalizing under commercial pressures, and militarily ill-prepared.

* China has involved herself in U.S. politics by buying those who are for sale and gulling the gullible, both of which categories are legion in the Clinton administration.

The reader must make up his own mind about the credibility of Gertz's thesis. I record myself as entirely convinced-though, to be sure, this is from a starting frame of mind that needed little convincing. Bill Gertz is never going to win any prizes for elegant writing, but his is not the style of the obsessive crank. He does not leap to any unjustified conclusions. On Wen Ho Lee, for example, he does not leave us with any conclusion at all. Was Lee spying for China or Taiwan? Was he trying to fortify his resume at a time of employee cutbacks in the lab? Or was he just a careless idiot? We do not know, and Gertz has sufficient respect for the facts to admit this, while laying out in devastating detail how the Lee investigation was compromised from the highest levels of the Departments of Justice and Energy.

He is particularly good on the psychological warfare being skillfully waged by the Chinese government. Have you heard the expression "million man swim"? This little propaganda gem refers to the only way by which, according to the China-is-not-a-threat crowd, the undersupplied Chinese army could cross the Taiwan Strait. The term seems to have been coined by Rear Admiral Eric McVadon, a leading shill for the Chinese Communist party. In fact, the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency has deduced, in internal reports quoted by Gertz, that China will attack Taiwan with massive barrages of short-range missiles, aiming to disable the island's military defenses and control the surrounding seas, before launching special-forces attacks to seize key points. At present rates of buildup, all the elements of this strategy will be in place by 2005.