China eyes U.S. ports: concerns are being raised about the involvement in a Pentagon-funded port-security program of a company linked to the Chinese Communist Party leadership

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Nov 26, 2002 | by J. Michael Waller

Some China watchers are worried that the Chinese government, or elements therein, could exploit the assets of the firm and even apply leverage to utilize the port company as an intelligence-collection or operations asset. INSIGHT spoke to British and American employees of Hutchison Whampoa, who call the idea preposterous.

Sen. Murray's office appeared to be unaware of the DIA-reports.

Western policymakers and business leaders have little or no idea of China's grand strategy and how Beijing's leaders want to situate their country for the next century. When, in 1999, Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) sent INSIGHT's report, "China's Beachhead at Panama Canal," to then defense secretary William Cohen, he called for a full national-security appraisal of the problem. Lott told Cohen, "U.S. naval ships will be at the mercy of Chinese-controlled pilots and could even be denied passage. It appears we have given away the farm."

At Lott's request, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing in which four Clinton-administration witnesses testified that Hutchison Whampoa posed no security challenges to the United States [see "PC Answers on Panama Canal," Nov. 22, 1999]. But not one of the witnesses could answer the fundamental question, posed by Sen. Robert Smith (R-N.H.): "Do you believe the People's Republic of China uses commercial enterprises to advance their military interests?"

Bill Clinton's assistant secretary of defense, Brian E. Sheridan, who had issued a defense of Hutchison Whampoa, confessed, "I don't know." Alberto Aleman Zubieta, whom Clinton had appointed to run the Panama Canal until 2005, didn't answer either. Neither did Joseph W. Cornelison, the deputy administrator of the Panama Canal Commission, nor Lino Gutierrez, then principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere Affairs. All had contradicted their testimony. Only Marine Gen. Charles E. Wilhelm, then chief of the U.S. Southern Command, answered affirmatively to whether Beijing uses commercial enterprises to advance its military interests, saying only: "I think so."

That was it. And apparently the government has learned little since. "Many of those who are engaged in China policy or who invest there remain blithely ignorant of Chinese goals to replace the United States as the reigning world power," says Thomas Woodrow, a former senior China analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, who authored a recent Jamestown Foundation article arguing that China's future energy needs likely mean its development of a blue-water navy capable of projecting power around the world.

To advocates, the involvement of a Chinese company may be a necessary evil. "The administration, in the war on terrorism, is cooperating with a number of countries who might not be the best people on the planet, but their cooperation is necessary to ensure American security and the safety of the American people," says Sen. Murray's spokesman Webster. "I think the administration has been willing to make that trade off."