The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present

by John Pomfret

The Chinese government released a map, based on one first drawn up by the Nationalist Chinese government in 1947 with the help of the US Navy, that showed nine dashes around the totality of the one-million-square-mile South China Sea. The map stretched as far south as the southern tip of Vietnam and the coast of Borneo. One dash was just 50 miles from the Vietnamese coast; another was 24 miles from Malaysia; a third was 35 miles from the Philippines. All were well within the two hundred mile exclusive economic zone of other countries.

Then, in 1995, China occupied the appropriately named Mischief Reef, a speck of rock 130 miles west of the Philippines’ island of Palaw...

It wasn’t only the Monroe Doctrine that had inspired the PRC. Chinese strategists looked to another American, the nineteenth-century naval theoretician and champion of American imperialism Alfred Thayer...

Think tanks called on the Chinese to embrace an “oceanic perspective” and hailed China’s navy as a “strategic service.” Liu was bitten by the martial version of this bug and turned to Mahan’s writings for guidance.

Mahan argued that global commerce mandated a powerful navy, which in turn demanded more commerce to keep it afloat.

The Influence of Sea Power upon History, as a cudgel against those who wanted to keep China isolated. He argued that now that China was relying on trade and investment to modernize, it needed to police its seas as well. China needed to go out, Liu argued, stake its claims to the oceans around it, and back them up with a modernized navy.

By the end of the 1980s, Liu had convinced the party’s senior leadership that China needed to upgrade its fleet. “Without an aircraft carrier, I will die with my eyelids open,” Liu told an interviewer in 1987. A year later, Beijing bought an old Ukrainian hulk and soon began refurbishing it into the Liaoning,

The Chinese, he told Liu, who had a good grasp of English, faced “grave consequences” should one of their missiles strike Taiwan. “Grave consequences” is international code for war. China was shooting rockets at the island; one had passed directly over the capital, Taipei, and splashed down in the ocean nineteen miles away. For the first time since the Quemoy and Matsu crises of 1958, China and the United States risked bloodshed.

Lee sought to upgrade Taiwan’s ties with the United States. In the spring of 1994, while heading to Central America, he had asked for US permission to spend the night in Hawaii while his plane refueled. The State Department agreed to the refueling, but skittish about China’s reaction, it denied Lee’s request to leave the airport. Lee was livid at what he felt to be shabby treatment from an old friend.

In late 1994, Taiwan launched a campaign to get Lee a US visa, this time to attend a reunion at his alma mater, Cornell University. The Clinton administration turned him down. On April 17, Secretary of State Warren Christopher assured Chinese foreign minister Qian Qichen that no visa would be issued. But a democratizing Taiwan had made new allies in Washington. Helped by a $5 million PR campaign, the Senate voted 97–1 to grant Lee a visa on May 3, 1994. The administration was forced to reverse itself, and as David Rothkopf, a former Commerce Department official, later told the Washington Post, “Christopher’s credibility with the Chinese, at that moment, was over.” Communist China withdrew its ambassador in protest.

Then, in July 1995, soon after Lee had returned home, the People’s Liberation Army began firing missiles near Taiwan, followed by a mock invasion off the coast of Fujian, just opposite Taiwan.

On March 10, three days after Perry’s dinner with Liu Huaqiu, the United States dispatched two aircraft carrier battle groups near Taiwan to put China on notice that its war games were out of line. It was the largest deployment of American firepower in Asia since the end of the Vietnam War. China had thought it could intimidate Taiwan’s voters into voting against Lee and for candidates that favored unification. It was wrong. Lee won reelection in a landslide.

The crisis concentrated minds in Washington. Clinton administration officials summoned one of President Lee’s senior advisers to a New York hotel in April to warn him to cool Taiwan’s drive for more international space. Discussions with Liu Huaqiu continued. Tony Lake, Clinton’s national security advisor, took him to the Virginia estate of heiress Pamela Harriman for talks on the future of Sino-American relations.

The tough talk presaged a return to another thread in the relationship: the American desire to turn China into a global power and a partner.

Having failed in its attempt to change China’s behavior by first ignoring it and then dispatching the Seventh Fleet, the Clinton administration decided that the only way to transform China was by elevating it into the ranks of the great powers. The idea was to bind China in a web of international agreements and make it an international player with a seat at all the world’s tables so that it would have a stake in maintaining the status quo—the global financial and economic system dominated by the United States.

The Clinton administration redoubled its efforts to convince China to halt its proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. China’s behavior on that front had not advanced much since the 1980s. China had conducted a nuclear test for Pakistan in May 1990, had secretly sold Algeria a nuclear reactor with military applications, and aided North Korea’s nuclear program, too.

It had signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1992. But in January 1996, news reports revealed that China’s National Nuclear Corporation had sold ring magnets, an essential component in the enrichment of weapons-grade uranium, to Pakistan. The

The MacArthur Foundation poured $260,000 into the China Foundation for International and Strategic Studies, a think tank set up by the People’s Liberation Army. The United States and China exchanged numerous secret visits of scientists from US weapons labs and their Chinese counterparts. On September 24, 1996, China signed the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, which John F. Kennedy had once hoped would slow China’s rush to build the Bomb.

The Taiwan crisis was a turning point for China just as it was for the US. For decades, American presidents had soothed China’s leaders with the promise that Taiwan would be theirs. But when Beijing tried to intimidate the island, the United States had not only failed to step aside, it had dispatched the Seventh Fleet. Under orders from President Jiang Zemin, China shifted resources toward its navy, air force, and rocket forces, focusing almost exclusively on a potential war with America over Taiwan.

In 1996, the Chinese ordered the first of four Sovremenny-class destroyers from Russia. The ships came equipped with the most advanced antiship missiles in the world, designed specifically to hit aircraft carriers—America’s strength. China’s rocket scientists were also launched on a mission to develop a missile to take the giant vessels out of action. (During a parade to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War II, in September 2015, China unveiled the East Wind DF-21D, the world’s first antiship ballistic missile.)

The Chinese government had adopted a position that more headaches for America meant less pressure on China. One example was North Korea. In March 1993, North Korea announced its intention to pull out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty rather than submit to inspections that would have revealed a substantial nuclear weapons program.

But China’s cooperation was ambiguous. Though it insisted that it was against the development of nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula, Chinese officials acknowledged privately that their primary goal vis-à-vis North Korea was to ensure that the North did not collapse.

needed a buffer between itself and the pro-American South. North Korea was China’s East Germany. If it fell, the party worried that China could be next.

1996, a team of five Chinese journalists wrote a book called China Can Say No.

China had amassed a list of grudges against America. There was the Yinhe chemical weapons incident with Iran. In 1993, the US Congress had passed a resolution opposing China’s bid for the 2000 Summer Olympics, leading, some argued, to China’s loss to Sydney. In 1995, the US had granted Taiwan’s president a visa.

China Can Say No depicted America as a morally corrupt nation on the decline. With the help of Japan and some “disgusting Chinese” in Taiwan, it charged, America was plotting to constrain China’s rise. The chapter headings—“Burn Down Hollywood,” “I Won’t Board a Boeing 777,” and “Prepare for War”—revealed a floridly emotional form of nationalism.

interviews, the writers acknowledged that they, too, had suffered from that disorder but had cured themselves by studying history. One of the writers had spent time in jail in the 1980s for his involvement in pro-democracy demonstrations; two others had participated in the protests around Tiananmen Square. But for them, those days were over.

The collapse of the Soviet Union removed the ballast from the relationship between China and the United States. The two nations had come together to confront the Soviet threat, and successive American administrations had placed security at the center of Washington’s ties with Beijing. Now that Russia was a shell of its former self, the relationship between China and America listed on a dangerous sea of distrust and competition.

His move to protect Taiwan, the one piece of China that embraced American values, resulted in a huge military buildup by the Communists. His idea of linking human rights and trade with China failed. Clinton then sold his new policy—“constructive engagement”—on the promise that it would benefit both America’s businesses and consumers and China’s prospects for freedom and democracy. This claim again inflated American expectations for China as a new century dawned.

Tall and bony (his classmates dubbed him “grasshopper”), Chin never looked the part of a spy. But his bespectacled demeanor hid the fact that Chin was an avowed gambler, a womanizer with a fondness for sex toys, and an enormously successful mole for the People’s Republic

Chin was just one of dozens the Communists directed to obtain classified information from the United States. Whether they did it for money, sex, love of country, or bragging rights, China’s Communist agents, friends, and contacts were remarkably successful in penetrating the inner sanctums of the US government and US industry.

From Korea, Chin was posted to a US installation on Okinawa, where he worked for the CIA’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service, which monitored Chinese radio broadcasts.

The case of Larry Wu-tai Chin was only the first in an avalanche of American intelligence failures and scandals involving Chinese espionage in the United States. No sooner had the CIA got this black eye than the FBI followed it into the ring. In the summer of 1983, an FBI counterintelligence officer named J. J. Smith started a sexual relationship with a Chinese woman named Katrina Leung.

May 12, 2004, the FBI said that Smith had been allowed to plead guilty to a single count of making false statements. He received three years’ probation and was fined $10,000 although he kept his pension. Cleveland was neither prosecuted nor punished.

The biggest China book in a generation appeared in 1991. Jung Chang’s Wild Swans told the story of three generations of Chinese women and detailed the human toll of the Communist regime. Wild Swans arrived as Americans were looking for an approach to help them make sense of China’s troubling complexities, and the book reinforced a growing apprehension about the Chinese system. Translated into thirty languages, it sold ten million copies worldwide.

but in America as well. Starting in September 1996, the American press began reporting on a series of dubious campaign donations to the Clinton reelection campaign. On February 13, 1997, the Washington Post revealed that the Justice Department was investigating whether the Chinese government was involved. Taking a cue from Taiwan’s old China Lobby, the People’s Republic of China appeared to be behind efforts to influence domestic American politics.

Paraded before the American public was a cast of characters that included restaurateur Charlie Trie, fund-raiser John Huang, businessman Johnny Chung, immigration consultant Maria Hsia, entrepreneur Ted Sioeng, and more. Congress and the Justice Department undertook investigations and Trie, Huang, Chung, and Hsia were convicted or pleaded guilty to fund-raising–related crimes.

The American press goosed the campaign finance story for all it was worth. In its March 1997 issue, the National Review depicted President Clinton, First Lady Hillary Clinton, and Vice President Al Gore on its front cover decked out in Chinese garb, with ear-to-ear grins, buckteeth, and slanted eyes. “The Manchurian Candidates,” the headline read. Critics charged the magazine with racism. The Review was unrepentant. Cartoons “required exaggerated features,” its editor said.

“The Communist dynasty is collapsing in China,” declared New York Times Pulitzer winner Nicholas Kristof in the pages of the New York Review of Books on June 24, 1994.

It wasn’t simply China’s double-digit growth rate that sparked alarm. China’s defense budget had grown by double digits as well. China was preparing for war with America, but the United States was asleep at the switch, the story went.

By the early 1990s, China’s intelligence collection in the US had expanded far beyond Spy vs. Spy subterfuge to include industrial and trade secrets, inventions and technology, the pilfering of which threatened American competitiveness and prosperity.

To be sure, the Chinese miracle—the sky-high growth rates, hundreds of millions of people lifted out of poverty, and a revamped military—involved many factors: better policies, the hard work of the Chinese, and a demographic sweet spot that swelled the ranks of the Chinese labor force at the right time. But cheap and unrestricted access to Western, particularly American, technology played a key role, too.

From 1998, China was the principal destination for illegal technology exports from the West Coast. Those technologies ran the gamut from paint formulas, to Ford Motor Company documents, to cellular phone technology, details on oil and gas field bids, and information on organic light-emitting diodes.

Kingstone was just one of many American victims of China’s way of doing business. In a 2013 book, William C. Hannas, James Mulvenon, and Anna B. Puglisi described China’s industrial espionage as a vast operation devoted to identifying foreign technologies, acquiring them by any means possible, and converting them into weapons or competitive goods.

China felt compelled to do anything to get its hands on American technology. But just as important, they wrote, China’s government opted to spy because the Communist Party feared the political ramifications of a society where American-style innovation could flourish. * * *

The Clinton administration tried to hold the consensus for engagement together, and despite a long list of problems, the two countries exchanged summits in 1997 and 1998. For the Chinese, President Jiang Zemin’s trip to the United States in October 1997 represented the last mile in its diplomatic marathon to expunge the stain of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

Clinton indicated that the two had a freewheeling debate during a private meeting about “how much change and freedom China could accommodate without risking internal chaos.” After the discussion, Clinton wrote, “I went to bed thinking that China would be forced by the imperatives of modern society to become more open.”

The crown jewel, however, was a list of all of China’s nuclear weapons tests. This list and other intelligence that Stillman gleaned from his visits confirmed Washington’s suspicions. China had proliferated nuclear weapons technology to Pakistan in the 1980s; it had tested a nuclear device for Pakistan and even one for France after Paris had signed the comprehensive Test

In 1881, the New York Times had predicted that “China cannot borrow our learning, our science, and our material forms of industry without importing with them the virus of political rebellion.” The Chinese Communist Party understood that challenge and tried to use espionage to avoid the challenge of a free society.

Americans reacted to the espionage slowly because at heart they were confident that China would evolve into a society like their own. This confidence led the US government and