Red Dragon Rising

 

 

Every Communist must grasp the truth: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. -- Mao Tse-Tung

Chapter 1, Red Dragon Rising

On a crisp autumn evening in 1997, guests at a White House state dinner listened as President William Jefferson Clinton warmly welcomed President Jiang Zemin, the leader of the People's Republic of China (PRC), the Communist regime that holds a fifth of the world's population in its grasp. That day, the American president had forged a strategic partnership with the Chinese Communist government, a totalitarian regime that has been responsible for enormous evil. Clinton's effusive, almost fawning toast celebrated peace and prosperity between the United States and the PRC.

It would take a year and a half for the House of Representatives, the people's body, to begin stripping away the Clinton administration's camouflage disguising the truth about Communist China. In May of 1999 a select congressional committee, in a unanimous, bipartisan vote, identified President Clinton's betrayal of his most sacred trust--safeguarding the national security of America. This is President Clinton's legacy.

At last the report was made public. On May 25, 1999, Representatives Christopher Cox (R-California) and Norm Dicks (D-Washington) delivered their committee's unanimous findings. After a five-month struggle with the Clinton White House over the report's declassification and release, Cox and Dicks revealed the central conclusion of their committee's six-month investigation: The PRC has stolen America's most advanced nuclear weapons secrets, and Chinese espionage "almost certainly continues today."

The Cox Report was a stunning document. It made headlines across the country and dominated television and radio news programs. For the first time, many Americans began to consider that Communist China--armed with nuclear weapons--might target the United States.

But inevitably, as one news cycle ended, another began, and America's focus shifted away from the Cox Committee's shocking findings.

Still, the larger implications of the Cox Report cannot safely be ignored. In fact, the congressional committee told only a small part of the story. Communist China poses an extraordinary military threat to the United States and the rest of the world.

The thesis of this work is simple: The democratic countries are about to be unpleasantly surprised by the emergence of a hostile, expansionist, nondemocratic superpower armed with the most modern weapons...and it will be our fault.

In short, through a misguided foreign policy that has sacrificed national security for money and personal political power, the Clinton-Gore administration has materially assisted Beijing's military ambitions.

The PLA: Communist Power at the Point of a Bayonet

For a half-century the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has ruled China. Its administrative apparatus is known as the People's Republic of China, but essential to the party's survival is its military arm, the People's Liberation Army (PLA), which enforces the CCP's power.

When one asks, "Is China a threat?" the real question should be, "Is the PLA a threat?" To answer that question, consider that the PLA:

  1. Is targeting the American people with nuclear weapons and is developing entirely new generations of land-, sea-, and space-based strategic weapons systems capable of threatening any location on the planet;

  2. Is preparing for computer warfare ("information warfare") against the American homeland, putting all Americans at risk;

  3. Is selling the critical equipment necessary to make nuclear weapons, poison gas, biological weapons, and ballistic and cruise missiles to the most brutal terrorist regimes--Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and North Korea--posing a direct strategic threat to the United States and its allies, including Israel, Japan, India, and even southern Europe.

  4. Conducted a ballistic missile blockade of Taiwan and intends to end democracy on the island--by force, if necessary;

  5. Murdered thousands of its own people during the June 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in order to maintain the Chinese Communist regime in power;

  6. Has an unparalleled history of aggression, including, since 1949, unprovoked military attacks on South Korea, India, Vietnam, and the Soviet Union, as well as armed subversion against Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, and other Asian and African countries;

  7. Has invaded and seized control of one of its neighbors, Tibet, and is slowly taking control of another, Burma;

  8. Is, largely in secret, building a vast war machine based on the most modern weapons and tactics to support the PRC's plans for regional domination;

  9. Is financing its military modernization program by its arms sales to terrorist nations--the PLA and its related industries are willing to sell any weapon to any person, group, or country, no matter what the consequences, to support the silent military buildup; and

  10. Is gathering military technology by spying, colluding with Western high-tech firms, and perhaps gaining influence within some Western governments.

Based on this horrifying record, we believe that the PLA is a very real threat. First and foremost, the PLA, the ultimate enforcer of Communist rule in China, is a threat to its own people, as it demonstrated when PLA troops shot down thousands of innocent Chinese demonstrators at Tiananmen in June 1989. But the PLA also threatens neighboring Asian countries that stand in the way of its drive for dominance, as well as nations around the world that could be victimized by PLA arms sales to terrorist nations. We further believe that unbridled PLA modernization is fast making it a threat to the rest of the world, especially the United States, which must aid those who are threatened.

These threats--to the Chinese people themselves, to all of Asia, and to the United States and democratic countries around the globe--make continued Communist Party domination of China today's leading national security concern.

Ignoring the Record

Our first book, Year of the Rat, presented the results of our investigation into the most successful case of high-level bribery in Washington. A hostile foreign power penetrated the American government with money and influence to an extent never before seen in the history of the country. Millions of dollars in illegal campaign contributions originating from Communist Chinese sources flowed into the Clinton-Gore campaign coffers. In return, President Clinton and Vice President Gore made a number of policy decisions that directly promoted their benefactors' ambitions, to the ultimate detriment of the American people. Although the results of our investigation have been confirmed by the Cox Report and subsequently news accounts, we concluded that the consequences of these acts could not be understood properly without an appreciation of Communist China and its military.

Red Dragon Rising is a Bill of Indictment against the Chinese People's Liberation Army and the Clinton-Gore administration for helping the Communist Chinese regime move closer to its dangerous goals.

The Clinton-Gore administration refuses to see Communist China for what it is: a brutal, expansionist regime that will go to any length to fulfill its territorial ambitions. The PLA's fifty years of armed aggression and subversion against China's neighbors have accounted for the deaths of millions and for devastation throughout Asia. And today, the Tiananmen Square killers infest the highest ranks of the Chinese military establishment. Having butchered young Chinese people without hesitation, they would have no reluctance to do the same to foreigners.

But on President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore's watch, the PLA's image has been rehabilitated, despite the atrocities it committed just a decade ago at Tiananmen. The Clinton-Gore administration has gone so far as to welcome to Washington six of the seven uniformed general directly responsible for the massacre. In one case, the American taxpayers even paid for the Hawaiian vacation of a Tiananmen Square general and his party. Under ordinary circumstances, a foreign army general known to have the blood of his countrymen on his hands cannot safely travel to a democratic country, as General Pinochet of Chile discovered in the winter of 1998-1999, when Britain stripped him of his diplomatic status and arrested him. But if the blood on the hands of the general comes from young Chinese, the result, it seems, is entirely different--at least under Clinton and Gore, as long as they're receiving Chinese campaign contributions.

In the United States, none of this is made public. But photos of Chinese generals smiling with President Clinton in the Oval Office have run on the front page of almost every major Chinese and Hong Kong newspaper, sending a clear message to Chinese patriots: The United States government at its highest level endorses the Chinese people's oppressors.

Moreover, by seeking to form a "strategic partnership" with the PRC, President Clinton and Vice President Gore have disregarded fundamental national security concerns. Under the Clinton-Gore administration democratic Taiwan has been bullied with nuclear-capable missiles, the Philippines has lost some of its territory, PLA weapons of mass destruction have gone to terrorist nations, and the PLA has developed a computer warfare capability that threatens to turn American cities into infernos.

In documenting the crimes of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, its bloody history, its ambitions, its burgeoning capabilities, and the risks it poses unless Americans and their democratic allies can stop it, Red Dragon Rising will reveal how Bill Clinton and Al Gore abetted the leading national security threat of our time, including:

  1. How secret Oval Office meetings with senior PLA generals rehabilitated the murderers of Chinese young People at Tiananmen and discouraged the democracy movement in China;

  2. How the failure to support America's democratic allies in Asia makes war in the region more likely;

  3. How the coverup of Chinese arms sales to terrorist countries puts the entire world at risk; and

  4. How the presidentially authorized release of six hundred American supercomputers at the beginning of the 1996 presidential campaign led directly to an unprecedented threat to America.

If the United States and the other great democracies do not move quickly to counter Communist China's military ambitions, America and its allies will soon suffer the devastating consequences of having ignored the dragon rising in the East.

Edward Timperlake & William C. Triplett II, Red Dragon Rising, Regnery, 1999, Pp. 11-17.

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Chapter 4, A History of Aggression

China is potential threat No. 1...The potential threat from China is greater than that from Pakistan and any person who is concerned about India's security must agree with that fact. --Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes, 1998.

In the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, a stone obelisk erected in AD 823 features a treaty between China and Tibet:

Tibet and China shall keep the country and frontiers of which they are in possession. All to the east is the country of Great China; and all to the west is, without question, the country of Great Tibet. Henceforth on neither side shall there be waging war nor seizing of territory. There shall be no sudden alarms and the word "enemy" shall not be spoken...This solemn agreement has established a great epoch when Tibetans shall be happy in the land of Tibet and the Chinese in the land of China.

The treaty has been ignored by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Tibet is a nation under Chinese military occupation.

In the fall of 1950 the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) invaded and occupied Tibet. The PLA remains there today. The country has been dismembered, with half its territory assigned to Chinese provinces. Central Tibet is an armed camp that the PLA and its paramilitary police hold only by sheer weight of numbers. At least a million Tibetans--one out of every five or six--have lost their lives to Communist Chinese terror.

The Tibet of 1950 saw no communal violence or civil war between rival claimants for power, no streams of pathetic refugees throwing themselves on the mercy of neighboring countries. Contrary to fifty years of Communist propaganda, Tibet was not in need of "liberation." The PLA launched an unprovoked attack on defenseless people.

The PLA began with border raids, probing Tibet's defenses, followed by a full-scale invasion with eighty-thousand battle-hardened troops. As His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama noted in a personal letter to one of the authors:

Tibetans could not possibly resist such an onslaught. The Tibetan army, totaling 8,000 officers and soldiers, was poorly trained and equipped. It was no match the the PLA, who quickly encircled the Tibetan army and smashed the entire defense line.

Communist China's continued human rights violations in Tibet--executions, imprisonment, torture, rape, forced abortions, and cultural annihilation--are all well documented. Assaults on Buddhist nuns with electric cattle prods seem to be a particular amusement for the Chinese People's Armed Police. Of more than six thousand religious sites existing in 1950, only a handful remain. Thousand-year-old libraries were put to the torch by Chinese mobs during the Cultural Revolution, an entire cultural history of a people, lost.

Unfortunately, the executive branch of the American government does not recognize Tibetan independence. Congress, however, does--and Congress is right. In 1987 Congress passed the first modern policy statement on Tibet, accurately declaring that the PLA had "invaded and occupied" Tibet...

Why did the CCP send its military arm, the PLA, to inflict such punishment on an innocent neighbor? Probably a combination of reasons--some Communist revolutionary fervor, some Chinese chauvinism--but most likely because control of Tibet gives the Chinese the high ground from which they can threaten all of South Asia. Historic Tibet bordered on a wide sweep of territory from Burma to Pakistan. From Tibet's heights, the PLA can mount direct military attacks and armed subversion almost at will.

The PLA's seizure of Tibet was not an isolated phenomenon. In the fifty years since PRC was established, the PLA has engaged in armed aggression or subversion against almost every one of China's neighbors--Tibet, South Korea, India, the Soviet Union, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, the Philippines, Indonesia, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Singapore. Victims count in the millions; pain and destruction have been widespread.

It is a frightening record of insatiable territorial aggression--a record the Clinton administration has ignored as it has sought to form a "strategic partnership" with the PRC.

Edward Timperlake & William C. Triplett II, Red Dragon Rising, Regnery, 1999, Pp. 53-57.

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Chapter 6, A Present for Saddam

There is nothing more important to our security and to the world's stability than preventing the spread of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.--William Jefferson Clinton

...Based on satellite inspection, allied intelligence had come to a startling conclusion: A Chinese government arms maker was building nothing less than a clandestine nuclear weapons facility in the Algerian Desert. According to French intelligence, "It is simply not feasible to use this reactor for civilian purposes." Based on its size, allied specialists estimated that at the very least the facility could produce, every three years, the nuclear materials for two bombs the size of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. The Chinese arms makers were moving at a rapid pace, and the first bomb-grade materials would have been ready by 1995.

But China was not merely producing bomb-grade nuclear materials. Early in its investigation American intelligence had concluded that Chinese scientists were "supplying nuclear weapons technology and military advice on how to match nuclear weapons to various aerial and missile delivery systems." Later, British intelligence prepared a top-secret report for the British cabinet accusing the Chinese of transferring "warhead design technology"--that is, the triggering mechanism for missiles--to the Algerian project.

...The Algerian government's decision to embark on this project seemed mysterious...the Algerians had no ballistic missile delivery system, not even Soviet-build Scuds. So why had Algeria embarked on this venture? Because someone else was paying for it--someone who could launch missiles.

The PLA Helps Saddam

Flash back ten years earlier to 1981, not Algiers or Beijing, but Baghdad, the capital of Iraq. On the morning of June 7, 1981, Israeli pilots flying American-made F-16s dropped a series of bombs on a forty-megawatt research reactor under construction by the French. Within moments, Saddam Hussein's dream of an Iraqi bomb, and his investment (reputed to be $750 million), went up in smoke.

From this setback, the Iraqis decided that any future advanced weapons programs would be based on two principles: deception and redundancy. They went to elaborate lengths to disguise buildings and other weapons facilities so that they could not be identified or targeted from the air. This was enormously expensive, but they felt it was necessary to create duplicates and multiple back-ups so that the loss of one element would not jeopardize the entire program. There was not a single nuclear program or a single missile program but rather multiple nuclear and missile programs operating simultaneously.

Saddam also needed to replace the bombed-out reactor. But after the Israeli bombing experience, the Iraqis knew that a new nuclear reactor would have to be hidden carefully. According to a now-declassified report prepared for the United States Defense Nuclear Agency, "Between 1982 and 1986, Iraq opened three sets of discussions on the purchase of an underground nuclear reactor: with the Soviet Union, a French-Belgian consortium, and China." A 1986 U.S. Army intelligence report indicates that the Iraqis were insisting that the underground rector be defendable "from possible attacks" and that it should have an "ability to camouflage from satellites."

After the 1990-1991 Gulf War, United Nations inspectors in Iraq found the negotiation documents on the underground reactor but not the facility itself, leading some to speculate that the "facility has not yet been discovered."

The reason the facility was not discovered is, we believe, simple: Saddam's nuclear weapons reactor was indeed constructed, but above ground in the Algerian desert, not underground in Iraq.

A major nuclear reactor is extremely difficult to hide. The large cooling towers cannot be disguised, and its heat signature is easily visible from space. Even China's secret reactor project in a quiet corner of the Sahara Desert of Algeria was discovered long before it became operational. Given the intense and sophisticated intelligence scrutiny Iraq was under during the 1980-1981 Iran-Iraq War, a nuclear reactor, even underground, would have been discovered quickly. And once discovered, it would have been destroyed....

After Iraq's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Algeria proved to be a willing co-conspirator with Iraq in an elaborate effort to keep Saddam's Iraq-based nuclear weapons program away from United Nations inspectors. French intelligence reported that much of Iraq's nuclear equipment and material was secretly flown to Algeria a few days after the United Nations Security Council passed its first resolution imposing a naval and land blockade, and another significant shipment went to Algeria in early May 1991, just before the first United Nations inspectors were to arrive in Iraq. Britain's supersecret eavesdropping organization, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) at Cheltenham, intercepted crucial telephone conversations among senior Iraqi leaders in Baghdad discussing ten tons of Iraqi natural uranium that had been sent to Algiers. This uranium transfer occurred at precisely the same time Chinese and Algerian officials were trying to divert allied attention from the reactor in the Sahara. With the Iraqi natural uranium in hand, the Algerian reactor would have enough fuel to run well into the twenty-first century.

Armed and Ready

A nuclear weapon is, of course, useless without a delivery system, and the Chinese were just as willing to help Iraq develop its missiles. A full year before they found the Chinese reactor in Algeria, American satellite reconnaissance specialists had found and identified Saddam's missile base in an even more remote corner of the Sahara--Mauritania.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) describes the Islamic Republic of Mauritania as "desert, constantly hot, dry, dusty, sparsely populated."--an ideal place to hide a missile test range and related equipment. Increasing desertification in the late 1980s combined with economic mismanagement left the Mauritanian government with a heavy foreign debt load similar to Algeria's, and Saddam's financial inducements proved to be as attractive to Mauritania's rulers as they had been to the Algerian government.

In the Mauritanian missile base, allied intelligence had discovered Iraq's grand scheme to create, in total secrecy and with the willful aid of the Chinese, a complete Iraqi offshore strategic weapons system--bomb-grade nuclear materials, warhead design and assembly, and a long-range ballistic missile. At least two-thirds of the system--nuclear materials and warhead development--should be stamped "Made in China." This was Saddam's ace-in-the-hole, complementing all his in-country strategic weapons programs.

The security threat from a long-range, Iraqi missile-delivered nuclear weapons system would have been massive. Saddam was known to be developing a 1,200-mile missile. From Iraqi territory Saddam would have been in position to threaten all the oil-rich countries of the Middle East (and Israel) with nuclear annihilation. Based in Algeria, such a weapons system could have reached Paris. Had his plans not been stopped, Saddam would have enlisted nuclear weapons to support his territorial ambitions.

And the PLA companies were in it up to their necks.

In the case of Iraq's indigenous arms programs, Chinese companies have been active for decades, especially in the nuclear program. The IAEA reports that sometime in the 1970s Iraq came into possession of almost two tons of enriched uranium recovered from a Chinese military reactor. By the 1980s Iraqi scientists had turned to high-speed centrifuges as one method of producing bomb-grade material, and for a fee (presumably large) the PRC clandestinely supplied Iraq with the special samarium-cobalt magnets that are crucial to the centrifugal process and are extremely difficult to obtain or manufacture. This sale remains so politically sensitive that the United States Defense Intelligence Agency has refused Freedom of Information Act requests for any information in its possession. After the Gulf War, United Nations inspectors inventorying Iraq's nuclear weapons program found other "sensitive" Chinese equipment being used for uranium enrichment and actual weapons detonation.

At the time of the invasion of Kuwait, August 2, 1990, Chinese arms companies were deeply engaged in Iraq. Wanbao Engineering, an engineering and construction arm of Norinco, had more than five thousand Chinese nationals working on important projects, some of them military-related. Three days after the invasion the Chinese government joined the United Nations arms embargo on Iraq, but allied intelligence soon learned that Wanbao was secretly trying to sell Iraq seven tons of lithium hydride, a chemical compound essential to hydrogen bombs, missile fuel, and nerve gas.

In spite of the international outcry over the lithium hydride deal, and in spite of the continuing arms embargo, China has never ceased trying to deliver military equipment to Iraq. In December 1990, on the eve of the air war in the Gulf, allied intelligence discovered Chinese leaders searching for third countries willing to serve as conduits and arms and smuggling operations. By late 1991, after the end of the ground fighting, the Chinese found individuals in Singapore and Jordan willing to pass military spare parts and ammunition to Baghdad...As recently as September 1994 German authorities confiscated a shipment of ammonium perchlorate (rocket fuel) bound for Iraq from the Chinese Chemical Import-Export Corporation. United Nations inspectors who were responsible for dismantling Iraq's weapons programs in 1996 privately report that Chinese companies are still trying to evade the arms embargo by fulfilling pre-Gulf War contracts.

The PRC has been careful to conceal its aid to Iraq's missile programs. For example, in the course of its investigation of the shadowy South African arms company Armscor, an official South African government commission, discovered that in the late 1980s, under the apartheid regime, Norinco had used Armscor as a conduit to illicitly transfer American missile technology to Iraq. In return, South Africa received Chinese long-range missile technology. The Chinese may have incorporated the American missile technology they received from this complex deal into the Scud missile production facility they built near Baghdad. This facility may have produced the extended-range Scud missile that hit a U.S. Army mess hall outside Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, during the Gulf War, killing twenty-eight Americans and wounding ninety-eight others--the most casualties the United States suffered in any single episode in the Gulf War.

Similarly, the Chinese made a secret deal with the Brazilian aerospace firm Centro Technico Aeronautico (CTA). As part of its civilian space-launch program, CTA had legally obtained solid rocket propellant technology from the United States, and in 1986 it swapped this American technology for Chinese assistance on missile guidance and liquid rocket fuel. Fairly promptly, the U.S. technology made its way to an Iraqi laboratory.

Algeria Revisited

With the Chinese nuclear plant in the Sahara under IAEA safeguards and Saddam bottled up, one would think the Algerian problem would be solved. But Spanish intelligence warns that Algeria could be producing military plutonium by the middle of the year 2000. For what purposes, no one knows. As one of America's leading think tanks, the RAND Corporation, notes dryly, "Many of the world's leading WMD [weapons of mass destruction] proliferators are arrayed along Europe's southern periphery, and WMD risks are transforming the security environment in the Mediterranean as well as in Europe's regions. Every one of those proliferators is a Chinese customer.

In short, the danger of nuclear, chemical, and biological annihilation being spread by Chinese arms dealers is now everyone's problem. System after system has been transferred, totally in secret, to the most depraved tyrannies of the late twentieth century. Every democratic country in the world is at risk.

It is only a matter of time before one of these weapons is put to use.

Edward Timperlake & William C. Triplett II, Red Dragon Rising, Regnery, 1999, Pp. 85-95.

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Chapter 13, The View Toward the Future

"Keep the Profits"--The name of the PLA's leading arms smuggling company.

No regime poses a greater threat to global security today than Communist China. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the internal disarray of the Russian Federation, the People's Republic of China see itself as the sole Communist superpower in the world. With its strategic military buildup--aided by stolen and acquired American weapons technology--the Communist Chinese leadership has sought to make the world's most populous country one of its most powerful.

As we've seen, the PRC's territorial ambitions are immense. Now, armed with the most modern weapons of mass destruction and sophisticated instruments of information warfare, the Communist Chinese military threatens to take the lands it has historically coveted. We have already witnessed the PLA's recent incursions into Japanese territory as well as its strategic power projection in the Spratly Islands, territory of the Philippines. The island of Taiwan, just a hundred miles from the Chinese mainland, is in the PRC's sights; now that Beijing has the military might, the Communist regime wants to finish off the Chinese Civil War, half a century later.

Communist China sees but one major roadblock to achieving regional hegemony--the Pacific stretch of the United States. Consequently, the PRC's military buildup has been tailored to counter America's military capabilities--from its nuclear missiles, to the Sovremenny destroyers, to its information warfare program. America is now a target.

Faced with this threat, what has been the response of the Clinton-Gore administration? It has:

  1. Permitted the sale of hundreds of supercomputers to the Communist Chinese, exposing America to the threat of destructive information warfare;

  2. Failed to enforce American anti-proliferation laws, so that it is only a matter of time before some PLA weapon is used by a rogue state in the Middle East or South Asia, raising the spectre of germ or nuclear warfare;

  3. Allowed PLA rockets to be made more reliably by technical assistance of Loral, an American corporation whose president, Bernard Schwartz, was the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign's leading donor;

  4. Referred to Taiwan as "the turd in the punchbowl" of U.S.-China relations, essentially selling out a democratic government to a tyrant and making war in the Taiwan Straits much more likely;

  5. Watched as a Communist Chinese company gained control of the Panama Canal;

  6. Encouraged nuclear proliferation by refusing to crack down on North Korea or recognize that it is a surrogate for PLA ambitions, leaving countries like Japan to consider building their own nuclear weapons for self-defense;

  7. Shown so little interest in our Pacific allies that the South China Sea might become a Chinese Communist lake; and

  8. Exposed the United States to derision and distrust by the way Communist Chinese agents have so easily been allowed to buy influence at the White House.

As the Communist Chinese sold weapons of mass destruction to rogue states and terrorist regimes and used American military technology to enhance their own weapons systems, the Clinton-Gore administration turned a blind eye. The White House failure to act has placed Americans directly in the line of fire.

All the while, President Clinton hollowed America's military. Now, an overextended United States military--the only deterrent to Chinese aggression--faces an increasingly dangerous People's Liberation Army.

By ignoring the PRC's fifty-year history of naked aggression and the threats to the United States and its democratic allies, Clinton and Gore have abetted Communist China's military ambitions. Perhaps most odious has been how the administration has rehabilitated the image of the PLA, a brutal army responsible for tens of millions of dead civilians in China, Korea, Tibet, and elsewhere. Under Clinton and Gore, six of the seven active-duty uniformed generals directly responsible for the June 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre have been welcomed to Washington.

It is a policy of appeasement that has failed to halt Communist China's military buildup and territorial aggression.

To Slay the Dragon

The future does not have to look like this--a future of war and Communist expansion abetted by Clinton-Gore corruption.

With honest, competent, and determined leadership, we can restrain, inhibit, and even perhaps de-fang Communist China as we shore up American security.

China policy isn't hard. Our greatest allies are in China itself--among the Chinese people. The spirit of the brave men and women who gave their lives at Tiananmen Square has not been extinguished, and rather than rolling out the red carpet for the butchers of Beijing, as the Clinton-Gore administration has done, we should offer constant encouragement to China's embattled democrats.

Moreover, we should, as far as we can:

  1. Suppress the PLA's modernization efforts--we should not be sharpening the sword that could be used against the Chinese people, our regional allies, or even ourselves;

  2. Stop PLA companies from selling missiles, poison gas, germ warfare equipment, and nuclear technology to the world's foulest tyrannies; and

  3. Recognize the Communist Chinese threat for what it is--the greatest national security danger to America as we open a new century.

And finally, the nub of the issue is this: We need to restore to the White House leadership that does not put America's foreign policy and security, and that of our Allies, and the issue of human rights, on the auction block for campaign donations and commercial favors to cronies.

America needs to put its own house in order by choosing a foreign policy based on honesty, principle, and a defense of freedom  and democratic values--from brutalized Tibet, to the fanatical Communist regime of North Korea, to the bloodstained regime in Beijing itself. If we stand up for freedom, so too can China's patriots, and so too can too the peoples of Asia and the Pacific Rim.

As for us, our thoughts are never far from the dead patriots at Tiananmen Square. It is they who have been betrayed by the Clinton-Gore administration, and it is to them that the new, free China will look for inspiration when it bursts free from the murderous PLA.

Edward Timperlake & William C. Triplett II, Red Dragon Rising, Regnery, 1999, Pp. 197-201.

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