China is no paper dragon

China is no paper dragon

April 12, 2001

STRAIGHT TALK
By Muriel Sluyter

Greetings, Gentle Readers,

When Westerners become involved with oriental countries, they are babes in the woods.

After the Massacre at Tiananmen Square, a Chinese woman explained the difference between occidental and oriental thought. She said everything the Chinese do is predicated on power. Both the students and the Chinese government worked from a determination to either gain or retain power.

That is how they are dealing with us at present. Power is everything, as we are seeing.

Neither do we understand their absolute obsession with saving "face." It appears those two fighter planes were attempting to force our reconnaissance plane out of international airspace and onto Hainan. Our plane was flying on auto pilot, which would assure its staying out of Chinese airspace, and couldn’t take evasive action, so their fighter plane ran smack into our aircraft.

But if the Chinese admitted that, they would lose face, so they are determined to force us into an apology, which would be an admission of guilt on our part, and a successful power-grab on theirs.

We know now that their fighters have been "hot dogging" our planes for some time, and our reconnaissance planes are lumbering oxen compared to their fighters, So, could we just drop the malarkey about our plane turning into the path of their fighter?

This mess is a result of Russia’s having sold a destroyer to China that is designed to attack our carriers. It fires a missile against which our carriers cannot de-fend; our plane was trying to see that destroyer.

If it makes us feel better, the Chinese do their best to watch our military, but they’re not as well equipped as we. But we should remember that their spies stole every nuclear secret we have, or rather, had.

They have been astonishingly successful at spying on us, especially since Clinton was eager to sell them the entire "nuclear store," delivery systems included, if they coughed up the cash he demanded, which they did.

Before we shed any tears over a loss of friendship with China, let’s remember that these are the gentle souls who threatened to bomb Los Angeles if we sold defensive arms to Taiwan. That would the equivalent of our threatening to bomb Beijing, if they were to sell defensive weapons to North Korea of Iran. China has, in fact, sold components of nuclear weapons with delivery systems to those very nations, not defensive weapons, and we have done nothing.

The Chinese government is incredibly paranoid, as is common to Communist governments. They don’t respect a peaceful stance, such as America is inclined to take. They interpret that as weakness, just as Russia did when President Carter determined to show them that we were not a threat. Russia’s response was to invade Afghanistan, and our good president was sunned. He hadn’t understood Communist governments, so he signaled that we were pussycats who would do them no harm.

Where are we now? If we appease China, they will become more aggressive. If we attack them, our crew members will be lost. Besides, Clinton gutted our military, so this is not the time to challenge a nation that brags they can lose half their people and still have multiple millions left with which to wage war.

The only weapons we have are: China’s getting the Olympics in 2008, and we can stop that;

Stopping their selling vast amounts of Chinese-made goods in America;

Finalizing defensive arms sales to Taiwan.

Personally, our family chooses to buy no more Chinese-made goods. I would encourage all others to do the same.