The Blue Team, China, etc.

Washington Post
February 22, 2000

'Blue Team' Draws A Hard Line On Beijing

Action on Hill Reflects Informal Group's Clout

By Robert G. Kaiser and Steven Mufson, Washington Post Staff
Writers

While working as an aide to Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.),
Richard
Fisher collected dozens of photographs and sketches of China's
latest
weaponry: the Russian-built Sovremenny destroyer, advanced
ballistic
missiles, pilotless drones and Su-27 fighters. Fisher is grimly
confident that someday, these weapons could be aimed at
Americans.
"This is shaping up to be a major military disaster for the
United
States," he said.

Fisher, who moved last month to a Washington think tank,
describes
himself as a member of the "Blue Team"--a loose alliance of
members
of Congress, congressional staff, think tank fellows, Republican
political operatives, conservative journalists, lobbyists for
Taiwan,
former intelligence officers and a handful of academics, all
united
in the view that a rising China poses great risks to America's
vital
interests.

Though little noticed, the Blue Team has had considerable
success. By
attaching riders to legislation in Congress, it has restricted
the
scope of Chinese-American military relations, forced the
Pentagon to
report to Congress in detail on the China-Taiwan military
balance and
compelled the State Department to take a harder line on China's
human
rights and
religious rights abuses.

Some Blue Team allies have promoted public fears of a Chinese
"takeover" of the Panama Canal; several congressional offices
report
a deluge of mail about Panama's choice of a Hong Kong firm to
operate
shipping facilities at both ends of the canal, a cause taken up
by
conservative radio talk show hosts. Allies of the Blue Team have
harassed China's biggest oil company, complicating its efforts
to
sell shares on the New York Stock Exchange.

Members of the Blue Team initially drafted and then helped push
through the House of Representatives this month the Taiwan
Security
Enhancement Act, a measure to strengthen U.S. military ties with
Taiwan that has angered China. A legislative rider compelled the
Pentagon's National Defense University to establish a new center
to
study China's military.
For a time last spring, the Blue Team thought publication of the
Cox
committee report on Chinese espionage--which its allies helped
draft--might lead to irresistible pressure to alter the Clinton
administration's policy of "constructive engagement" with
Beijing.
Administration officials feared the same result.

The Blue Team has no membership cards or formal meetings. Its
sympathizers collaborate around particular causes but sometimes
disagree with one another. Some, for example, ridicule fears
about
the Panama Canal.

The core of the alliance consists of Capitol Hill aides who
draft
China-related legislation and try to operate as anonymously as
possible. Several of the congressional aides were brought
together
last year with like-minded academics and media commentators in a
study group run by a small think tank, the Project for the New
American Century, and funded by Richard Mellon Scaife, the
Pittsburgh
billionaire who has given hundreds of millions of dollars to
right-wing causes.

The study group was organized by Mark Lagon, a political
scientist
who recently joined the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee. Its primary purpose was to discuss China policy and
help
produce a book, tentatively titled "China's Rise and America's
Response." According to one participant, these meetings
sometimes
took on the flavor of Blue Team strategy sessions as two dozen
Hill
aides, scholars, former Reagan administration officials and
others
ate lunch once a month at the Tabard Inn on N Street NW, and
discussed chapters of the book, due out later this year.

While Blue Team members usually work behind the scenes to urge a
harder American line on China, their cause has been taken up
publicly
by a few politicians. Gary Bauer, the former Reagan White House
aide
and leader of the Family Research Council, used stinging
anti-Chinese
rhetoric in his recently abandoned presidential campaign and
said it
regularly won a
powerful response from voters. In a speech a year ago to the
Republican National Committee, Cox, chairman of the House
Republican
Policy Committee, denounced the Clinton administration for
cuddling
up to Beijing, accusing President Clinton of giving Chinese
leaders
"the full Lewinsky." But none of the four major candidates for
president has embraced the Blue Team view.

Strong language and with-us-or-against-us judgments are becoming
common in the struggle between the Blue Team and those it sees
as its
rivals, whom it calls "the Red Team." Blue Team allies also
speak
derisively of "panda huggers" and "the Relationship Police,"
referring to those who seek a close and cooperative U.S.
relationship
with Beijing.

Scholars who have been targets of Blue Team scorn say there is
an
increasingly politicized atmosphere among Sinologists. "It's not
as
much fun as it used to be," said Ronald N. Montaperto, a
professor at
the National Defense University whom the Blue Team considers
soft on
China. "Debate has become very personal and very political, and
frequently generates more heat than light."

For nearly three decades after Richard M. Nixon's opening to
China, a
"domestic consensus . . . used to sustain China policy,"
observed
Peter Rodman, an assistant to Henry A. Kissinger in the early
days of
China diplomacy and now a scholar at the Nixon Center here. That
consensus, Rodman said, "was shattered by Tiananmen Square" in
1989,
when the
Chinese ruthlessly suppressed a student uprising. "The Soviet
threat
used to hold the U.S. and China together," he added. No longer.

The end of consensus has created opportunities for hard-liners
to
advance the view that China's steady military buildup will soon
put
it in a position to threaten U.S. interests, most obviously by
bullying Taiwan. The Blue Team and its sympathizers think the
United
States should recognize that conflict with China is probable if
not
inevitable.

Officials and scholars who disagree with those views still
generally
dominate U.S. policy, but they seem less organized and less
cohesive
than the Blue Team. The Clinton administration, which might have
provided an alternative vision of China, instead has offered a
series
of different China policies over the last seven years,
reflecting the
disagreements over China that followed Tiananmen.

Clinton campaigned for the presidency denouncing the "Butchers
of
Beijing" and, once elected, flirted with denying China trade
benefits
because of its human rights abuses. But he abruptly abandoned
any
such linkage and decided instead to warm up to China's leaders,
eventually embracing President Jiang Zemin's suggestion that
China
and the United States could be "strategic partners."

The Blue Team and its allies see China as a rising power run by
a
dictatorial regime that suppresses "the Chinese people's
yearning for
freedom and democracy" and is determined to challenge the United
States, in the words of William Triplett, an aide to Sen. Robert
F.
Bennett (R-Utah) and former staff member of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee.

Triplett coined the term Blue Team. It comes, he said, from the
terminology of China's own military exercises, which often
feature
battles between red and blue teams. Triplett, a former China
analyst
at the CIA, and Edward Timperlake, a former Republican foreign
policy
aide in Congress, have teamed up to write two books--"Year of
the
Rat" and "Red Dragon Rising"--promoting their views. Among them:
"a
series of Faustian bargains and policy blunders" by the Clinton
administration has played into China's ambitions to acquire
threatening military capabilities.

"Where the [U.S.-China] relationship is going is, frankly,
toward
conflict," said Frank J. Gaffney, a former Hill aide and Defense
Department official in the Reagan administration who now runs a
think
tank called the Center for Security Policy. Gaffney compared
America's current China policy to U.S. relations with Japan and
Germany before World War II. "In many ways," Gaffney said, "this
is a
time not dissimilar to . . . the 1930s."

China experts of all stripes acknowledge that China is buying
and
building more modern weaponry, and some say they are worried
about
the long-term implications of this modernization, which will
increase
China's ability to threaten Taiwan. Most China experts agree
that
rising nationalism in a democratic Taiwan combined with a
frustrated
China could create dangerous problems. The United States has an
informal commitment to protect Taiwan through its insistence on
a
peaceful resolution of Taiwan's differences with Beijing, but
the
United States also recognizes China's claim that, ultimately,
Taiwan
is part of
"One China."

Critics of the Blue Team's image of China argue, however, that
China
is much too complex, and still much too weak, to describe in the
Blue
Team's stark terms. "I don't have my head in the sand," said
Paul
Godwin, a China military expert recently retired from the
National
Defense University. But he deplored analysts who treat "every
rumored
Chinese acquisition as a reality" and "tend to see every weapon
as
the silver bullet for the PLA," the People's Liberation Army.

Peter Brookes, an Annapolis graduate, spent part of his Navy
career
as an intelligence officer in Nicaragua and El Salvador, helping
the
contras fight Soviet-backed Sandinistas. Later he spent three
years
in Japan, flying EP-3 surveillance aircraft that sucked up
electronic
communications from the eastern-most regions of the Soviet
Union.

More than a decade later, Brookes is still on guard against
threats
to American security, but he has shifted his sights toward
China. In
1997, he became an adviser on East Asian affairs to the House
International Relations Committee.

"When I left Asia in May 1989, it was before Tiananmen Square.
China
was not a significant threat to American interests. Our main
concerns
were the Soviet Union," Brookes recalled. That changed forever,
he
said, when China fired missiles near Taiwan in 1996 to try to
intimidate Taiwanese voters casting ballots in their first
democratic
presidential election.

Like Brookes, many of those who share the Blue Team's view see
the
Chinese threat through Cold War lenses. Gaffney built his
Washington
career on his anti-Soviet convictions. Fisher, who saves photos
of
Chinese weapons, was once a student of the Soviet navy. He moved
last
month from Capitol Hill to the Jamestown Foundation, a think
tank
founded in 1984 as an anti-Soviet institution that has extended
its
interests to China.

Some who disagree with the Blue Team say its members suffer from
nostalgia for the Soviet threat.

Rep. Doug Bereuter (R-Neb.), chairman of the International
Relations
subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, said that "a significant
amount
of support exists in the Congress, especially in my party and
especially in the House," for the theory that China is America's
new
enemy. "I don't think you would find anybody who would admit
that
they need an enemy--they may not see it themselves--but they do
see
the benefits" of having one, he added.

"You don't need to go searching for a new enemy," replied Jim
Doran,
an aide to Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) who began his career as a
Soviet
analyst and lived in Russia in the early 1990s. "Look at the
propaganda in the Chinese papers. Look at the vitriolic
anti-American
attitude of that. . . . It's there for all to see."

Like nearly all the congressional aides who collaborate on the
Blue
Team agenda, Doran is not a China expert. He made his first
visit to
China last month. Very few of the other Washington-based
activists
concerned about the Chinese threat have degrees in Chinese
studies or
speak Chinese.

But expertise on China is not essential to take a principled
view of
U.S. policy, argued Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard,
which along with the Washington Times is a primary outlet for
Blue
Team views. "I'm not a China expert at all. My view of China . .
.
flows from my view of what you think U.S. foreign policy should
be,"
Kristol said. "American weakness is really the danger."

One prominent China scholar whose views are embraced by the Blue
Team
is Arthur Waldron, a historian at the University of
Pennsylvania.
While many Sinologists favor constructive relations with China's
leadership, Waldron bluntly asserts that American interests
would be
better served if China's communist leaders were displaced. "I
worry
that if China continues on its current trend, which is
repressing at
home and building up . . . armaments, that becomes very
dangerous. I
agree with people who think regime change is key to a really
stable
peace," he said.

A chronic frustration for the Hill aides who make up the
backbone of
the Blue Team is their lack of access to raw intelligence about
China. Many suspect that the administration holds back data that
might put Chinese developments in a more ominous light. Several
of
the legislative riders passed in recent years have compelled the
executive branch to provide
more information to Congress, particularly on the military
balance
between China and Taiwan. But the Blue Team has a strong
appetite for
more.

Last year Congress enacted a little-noticed requirement that the
administration create a Center for the Study of Chinese Military
Affairs at the National Defense University, headed by "a
distinguished scholar . . . of Chinese political, strategic and
military affairs."

The anonymous authors of this idea--members of the Blue Team who
don't seek any public credit for their handiwork--want the
center to
have access to the full range of intelligence reporting on
China.
Because it will be dependent on annual appropriations from
Congress,
one Defense Department official said, the Blue Team hopes the
center
will be more willing than traditional intelligence agencies to
share
raw intelligence with congressional staff.

Although President Clinton signed the defense authorization bill
that
included this provision, he also called the creation of the
center
"troubling" because it seemed to assume that "China is bent on
becoming a military threat to the United States," a conclusion
Clinton rejected. Under the legislation, the administration is
supposed to send Congress its plan for the center by March 1.

For a brief time last winter and spring, anti-China sentiment in
Washington was sharply ascendant. Some Republicans saw an
opportunity
to create a political issue over the Clinton administration's
"embrace of Jiang and the Communist Party," as Rep. Cox put in a
January speech.

Then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) had established the Cox
committee in 1998 to investigate what he called "a profoundly
deeper
question than any other question that has arisen in this
administration" --charges that China got American missile
technology
from Loral Corp., whose chief executive was the largest
individual
contributor to the Democrats in 1996.

That charge had disappeared by the time the Cox committee's
report
was published last May. The final report focused on China's
efforts
to acquire secrets about missiles and nuclear weapons, and all
the
Democrats on the committee signed it, although on the day of its
release two key members distanced themselves from the most
alarming
conclusions about China copying U.S. weapons.

Critics found much to fault in the Cox report. One of its most
frightening assertions--that China could be expected to build a
nuclear warhead based on the American W-88 model, thanks to
stolen
secrets--was challenged by the President's Foreign Intelligence
Advisory Board.

Its accusations of spying got nearly all the attention, but the
Cox
report also embraced a dark view of China's broad intentions.
The
Chinese Communist Party's "main aim for the civilian economy is
to
support the building of modern military weapons and to support
the
aims of the PLA," the report said.

Harvard Prof. Alastair Iain Johnston, a specialist on the
Chinese
military, criticized this analysis, arguing that Chinese policy
for
more than 20 years has been "to subordinate military
modernization to
the development of the overall civilian economy."

Johnston pointed to several errors, including footnotes to
sections
of the Chinese constitution that did not say what the Cox report
claimed they said, and a misrepresentation of comments by
Chinese
leader Jiang. "called for an 'extensive, thoroughgoing and
sustained
upsurge' in the PLA's acquisition of high technology." The
article
the committee quoted, Johnston noted, actually said Jiang had
ordered
an "extensive, thoroughgoing and sustained upsurge of studying
high-tech knowledge in the whole army."

Asked about Johnston's critique, Cox said "the facts as reported
[in
the committee report] are indeed the facts." The Jiang quotation
showed that the PLA had an "accelerating interest in high
technology," which was "precisely the point the report makes,"
Cox
said.

When the lobbying intensifies this spring or summer on the
congressional vote to grant China permanent "normal trade
relations"
status--the key step toward Chinese membership in the World
Trade
Organization--the Blue Team's opponents will be out in force.
Business groups, farm groups, the Clinton administration and
pro-trade members of Congress will likely produce a well-greased
lobbying effort for passage. All will argue that by opening its
markets to foreign competitors, China will have to advance its
own
free-market reforms, strengthen the rule of law and, over time,
moderate its policies.

"It will pass," predicted Robert Kagan, who worked in Ronald
Reagan's
State Department and has written eloquent denunciations of
America's
China policy in the Weekly Standard. Kagan, who also writes a
monthly
column in The Washington Post, said, "You can't block business
interests and free-trade ideology in the Republican Party short
of
war."

In fact, some members who have been Blue Team supporters on
issues
such as Taiwan--House Majority Leader Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.),
for
example--will work for approval of permanent normal trade status
for
China.

"I consider the government of China to be dangerous, not only to
the
people of China but at least to all the peoples of that region,"
Armey said in an interview. But the majority leader, a staunch
free
trader, also said he hoped to extend "freedom through commerce
to the
Chinese people" by bringing China into the WTO.

The impact of the Blue Team still "isn't nearly what this
community
[of hard-liners] desires," lamented Richard Fisher, the former
congressional aide who collects photographs of Chinese weaponry.
But
he noted with satisfaction that the Blue Team "strikes terror
into
the heart" of Washington's policy establishment, adding: "We are
going to continue to have problems in our relationship with
China . .
. and they require that America remain vigilant."