Rumsfeld demands China reciprocity: as Beijing builds forces for attacks against Taiwan, the Pentagon sends Peter Rodman to talk sense to the hard-line Maoists of the People's Liberation Army

Insight on the News, July 15, 2002 by Kenneth R. Timmerman

Military ties between the United States and the People's Republic of China (PRC) came screeching to a halt in April 2001 when the Chinese air force attacked a U.S. Navy EP-3E surveillance aircraft in international airspace and forced it to land on Hainan Island in China. But now, 14 months later, the Bush administration has agreed to dispatch Assistant Secretary of Defense Peter Rodman to Beijing to revive those ties at a time when the PRC appears increasingly isolated and its much-touted strategic alliance with Russia may be on the rocks.

In remarks released prior to the trip, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said Rodman was going "to talk about the principles on which we can get our military-to-military relationship on a more solid framework, which will be of mutual benefit." A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Cmdr. Jeff Davis, added that Rodman would be seeking Chinese assurances of "transparency, consistency and reciprocity" before the United States would consider restoring the military-exchange program.

The spark for the Rodman trip came during a sharp exchange at the Pentagon on May 1 between Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and visiting Chinese Vice President Hu Jintao over China's nuclear and missile proliferation. "Rumsfeld said we are perfectly willing to have contacts with you, but only if we get as much out of it as you do," a defense official tells INSIGHT. Ultimately, the Rodman visit could lead to a restoration of the annual Defense Consultative Talks (DCT), a high-level meeting that formalizes a schedule of military-to-military exchanges for the coming year, if the Chinese agree to transparency and reciprocity. "But that's a big if--a huge if," the official says. "We hope the Chinese don't think Rodman is carrying the DCT in his hip pocket, because he's not."

U.S. critics question the timing of the announcement and its intent. "I'm not in favor of these contacts," defense consultant Stephen Bryen tells INSIGHT. "The military exchanges with China are a one-way street. We give away stuff and the Chinese promise to behave, and these exchanges are being organized in the middle of a Chinese missile buildup that threatens Taiwan and the U.S. fleet. It's amazing to me that the Bush people, who know better, would pursue a course the Clinton people invented." Bryen is a former deputy undersecretary of defense and a member of the congressionally mandated U.S.-China Security Review Commission, which during the last 18 months has been assessing U.S. policy goals and options. The commission will release an 11-chapter report in July that will include a series of "concrete proposals" aimed at better controlling the sale of strategic technology, commission members tell INSIGHT.

Larry Wortzel, Asia policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation and a commission member, tells INSIGHT that he favors a military-to-military dialogue with Communist China as "a component of our foreign policy," but that the content needs to be closely focused. "We need to have exchanges on things such as freedom of navigation, international airspace, proliferation, China's military buildup against Taiwan and how the PRC might create a threat that under the Taiwan Relations Act could oblige the United States to get into a conflict against China to defend Taiwan."

Neither Wortzel nor Bryen believe the United States should engage in the type of open-door policy toward the Chinese military that became a hallmark of the Clinton administration, when PRC generals and intelligence officers were invited into the heart of the U.S. defense establishment. "The Clinton people took a hell of a risk by letting them into our military facilities and inviting them to participate in our military exercises," Bryen says. "The Chinese look at it as a spying operation, which I believe it was."

But inviting the PRC military to visit top-secret U.S. bases, ballistic-missile submarines and joint-forces operations does not appear to be the Bush administration's intent, at least for now. Indeed, administration envoy Rodman, who headed the State Department's Office of Policy Planning during the George H.W. Bush administration and has worked in White House jobs under four Republican presidents, was a stern critic of Beijing's aggressive behavior toward Taipei and of PRC weapons sales to Middle East trouble spots before returning to government last year from his position as head of strategic studies at the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom in Washington.

So why bother approaching the PRC at all? One reason may be to calm Chinese nerves as the United States gears up for a future battle with Iraq. "The Chinese responded very badly to Sept. 11," says professor Stephen Blank of the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pa. "The day of the attack on America, a Chinese delegation was in Kabul to sign a trade agreement with the Taliban. Afterward, they publicly expressed doubt at U.S. accusations that al-Qaeda was behind Sept. 11 and demanded that the U.S. refrain from any unilateral response that was not sanctioned by the United Nations."