Get ready for yet another China fright to come

Tom Plate, Asia Pacific Media Network, Los Angeles, USA

America's love-hate relationship with China proceeds apace. The latest bump in the bilateral road is yet another China scare. The U.S. political psyche seems to need a good China scare from time to time to get the juices flowing.

An almost perfect storm swirled around the 1997 book The coming conflict with China. The polemic was anything but optimistic about the Sino-U.S. relationship, bulking up China's military buildup and melo-dramatizing the truth that China's strategic aims in Asia do not perfectly mirror those of the United States.

Two years later, a different scare came from the Cox Commission Report, alleging widespread Beijing spying in America. But that fizzled after the U.S. media exhausted itself in its hysteria -- and when the U.S. government's case against alleged spy Wen Ho Lee fell apart. And after the federal judge not only invalidated all but a single charge but also blasted the government for even filing the case, suddenly it seemed as if all those Chinese spies had simply gone home.

This time the scare issue is China's economic development, which now, it seems, is a major economic menace. Instead of being, on balance, an overall blessing for all concerned, China's rapid growth is being pitched as a rapacious force undermining other Asian economies and eating away at America's, as well.

The political pitchmen come from within U.S. lobbies fearful of competing with lower-priced Chinese imports that American consumers (not all of them Communists!) find in growing numbers a good buy.

President Bush "continues to facilitate the transfer of money, industrial capacity and technology to China in ways that will aid its development as a threat to the U.S. and its Asian allies," charges William R. Hawkins, a protectionist pundit for the U.S. Business and Industry Council, adding: "The Bush administration must choose between the need to protect American security from a rising China and its desire to please corporate supporters who are helping China rise."

Then there's the dogmatic argument that China's gain is everyone else's loss. An increasingly globalized and modernized nation of 1.3 billion is not a win-win for almost everyone; it's a losing proposition for everyone but China. That's absurd. Sure, China's neighbors in Asia -- from Indonesia and Taiwan to Singapore and Japan -- are understandably worried about Chinese competition, and know they are going to have to work harder.

Indeed, any doomsday scenario of greatly reduced growth, devastated domestic stock markets and destabilizing levels of unemployment is unnecessary fear-mongering. Certainly, China's economic progress will produce some tense moments, just as the Japanese economic miracle of the 1980s roiled economies in America, as well as Europe. But Asia and the rest of the world was far more enriched by Japan's success than undermined; and that will be the case, too, as China rises economically.

And, surely, China's entry into the World Trade Organization and its concomitant acceptance of globalization will not be smooth as silk when the mainland's own protectionist lobbies kick in to slow down market openings and frustrate Premier Zhu Rongji's reform program.

For all countries have domestic lobbies trying to bar the way of foreign economic competition. Just look at the extraordinary worldwide row over the Bush administration's apparent decision to cave in to the U.S. steel industry and union by slapping regressive import quotas on foreign steel.

That decision has our strategic and economic allies in Asia, and in Europe, angrier at the U.S. than at anything China has done lately. And Los Angeles Times reported last week that Russia, where steel sales to the U.S. count for a tenth of its total bilateral trade, is so furious, it might just pull out of the anti-terrorism campaign, not to mention trade agreements with the U.S.

Who is the greater threat -- China or the U.S. -- to world economic equanimity? What's continually needed in America's relationship with China is not another over-hyped Red Scare, but the three ingredients all too often missing: Common sense, political maturity and intellectual honesty.