One Billion Customers - James McGregor [96]
For Gareth Chang and other leaders of the Chinese American business community, and new Mainland Chinese immigrants to the United States, the Chinese spy mania was a wakeup call to become more active in U.S. politics. In California, the home state of Congressman Cox, the Chinese business community already had significant clout. Many Chinese Americans there were disgusted with Cox for using racism as a political tool. Cox paid the price in May 2001. President Bush decided not to nominate Cox to the federal bench after Chinese American leaders let friends in Congress know that they would vehemently oppose his nomination.
Cox tried to bury the hatchet. His staff arranged off-the-record meetings in late 2002 and early 2003 with Chinese American business leaders. Cox told them he was sorry that his committee’s report had fueled anti-Chinese racism. He blamed the CIA and the Clinton White House for introducing distortions in the final declassified report. He said he realized that China was changing through economic reforms and hinted that being in the China-bashing camp in Congress was no longer a politically profitable place to be.
The Chinese Americans were invariably polite and respectful to Cox. But Cox had already made his bed; as one attendee said later, “We didn’t buy any of it.”
What This Means for You
Since the United States reestablished diplomatic relations with China in 1979, the relationship between the two nations has been schizophrenic. When a Chinese fighter jet collided with an American EP-3 spy plane off the coast of China, I was one of three former chairmen of the American Chamber of Commerce in China asked by the membership to determine the political repercussions of the incident.
In Beijing, we saw Chinese of all ages, including our own U.S.-educated employees, condemning the accident as another example of the American policy of trying to keep China weak. Since the Tiananmen Massacre, the Chinese government fostered a spirit of nationalism focused not on China’s many achievements but on the resentment of “foreign elements”—chiefly the United States—who were conspiring to keep China poor and weak. When the U.S. Congress railed about Chinese human rights abuses, opposed China hosting the 2000 Olympics, or threatened trade sanctions, the Chinese press adeptly framed the actions as American attempts to “contain” China. The May 1999 U.S. bombing strike on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade that killed three Chinese journalists was a tragic gift to Chinese propagandists. The United States blamed it on a CIA targeting mistake, but I have yet to meet one Chinese who believes that. The spy plane incident added more fuel to anti-American nationalism.
The situation in Washington was little different. Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California angrily pulled out a news article accusing her of being a “China sympathizer” because her husband had business interests there. A former top Defense and State Department official told me that the spy plane accident happened after the United States increased the number of patrols along the Chinese coast from several times a month to almost every day. The spy planes’ mission, he said, was to briefly, but deliberately, violate Chinese airspace to set off Chinese radars and other electronic defenses. The spy planes mapped them to find blind spots for U.S. bombers and fighters in the event of war with China. We were told that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had a “get the Reds” attitude toward China. A White House official told us that the Bush administration considered China a “second-priority country” in Asia, and that Japan, South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, and Australia—all of which shared America’s “goals and priorities”—would get more attention. An intelligence official told us that the Belgrade embassy bombing had been a watershed. Before that, he said, China had bought weapons to look resolute. Now, he said, “they are putting together operational