[NYT]To Work With or Against China

Hayesfan · Nov 20, 2008

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/to-work-with-or-against-china/index.html?partner=rss

To Work With or Against China?

By Graham Bowley

China is stepping up its computer espionage attacks on the American government, on defense contractors and on businesses, according to a report by a congressional advisory panel published Wednesday.

“China is stealing vast amounts of sensitive information from U.S. computer networks,” said Larry Wortzel, chairman of the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which was created by Congress in 2000 to review bilateral relations between the two countries.

The commission also said in its annual report that China’s military modernization and its “impressive but disturbing” space and computer warfare capabilities “suggest China is intent on expanding its sphere of control even at the expense of its Asian neighbors and the United States.”

Alarming stuff, and the rising power of China will certainly be one of the tricky foreign policy challenges faced by President-elect Barack Obama, along with Iran, Russia and a list of other worrisome global issues. But any report from this commission brings its own set of complications.

Still, The Guardian says the findings of the report “may have a chilling effect on relations between the two Pacific powers.” Last week, there were reports that Chinese hackers may have broken into the computer systems of the Obama and McCain campaign teams during the election. And in September, China launched the Shenzhou VII spacecraft, carrying three Chinese astronauts into space on its third manned space mission in five years. (The Times’s David Barboza reported that the Chinese government has spent billions of dollars building up a space program that it hopes will help China establish a space station by 2020 and eventually put a man on the moon.)

But the commission’s report carries some of the overtones of the early years of the first presidency of George W. Bush, around the time when the commission was set up and when the fear of an ascendant China was high on the foreign policy agenda, before America’s attention by diverted by 9/11 then Afghanistan and Iraq.

Indeed the commission has a history of anti-China criticism and comes from that part of the foreign policy field that sees China more as a rival and something to be feared, rather than as a partner to be engaged. (For example, in 2006, it was among those who criticized the purchase by the State Department of more than 15,000 computers built by the Lenovo Group of China, amid unease about the role of foreign companies in the American economy, and it has criticized China’s censorship of its own Web users as “the most sophisticated Internet control system in the world.”

The congressional report goes on to say that China “has amassed nearly $2 trillion in foreign exchange and has increasingly used its hoard to manipulate currency trading and diplomatic relations with other nations.”

In addition, Beijing’s “continuing arms sales and military support to rogue regimes, namely Sudan, Burma, and Iran, threaten the stability of fragile regions and hinder U.S. and international efforts to address international crises, such as the genocide in Darfur.”
Click to expand...

Forums

[NYT]To Work With or Against China

Hayesfan Member
Supporting Member

Share This Page

About ClutchFans

Rockets Content

Support ClutchFans!

[NYT]To Work With or Against China

Hayesfan Member Supporting Member

Share This Page

Hayesfan Member
Supporting Member