Bush vs. China, and himself

By Camille Paglia

May 11, 2001 | Read the story.

Your portrayal of President Bush in your last column regarding the affair with China was inaccurate and premature. Why can't critics wait for the conclusions of political events before lambasting our leaders (Republicans as well as Democrats)? I don't pretend to believe Bush is omnipotent, but surely he is not the bumbling person you suggest.

-- Bob Arnoldini

I have been impressed with President Bush so far. It is true that he may not be the actor or performer that his predecessor was, but then most actors make a living to be someone they are not. I had grown quite tired of our president as a lip-biting feeler-in-chief. I much prefer a president who gets things done and is more about us than about himself. Bush has done a very good job of bringing together a very impressive team to head his administration. I do not expect him to know all and be all. In fact, I would rather he did not. Just manage the big picture, and things will be quite fine, thank you very much.

-- Alan K. Sandersen, Sugar Land, Texas

You need to know something I learned working in the jungles of Southeast Asia during the late lamented and lost war. Just because a person can't articulate in English doesn't necessarily mean he can't out-think, out-plan and out-fight you. And that includes inarticulate presidents.

-- Anonymous

I'm of the opinion that Bush did a great job with China. We got our soldiers back and they've got an airplane that is useless to them. They've already got the hardware, the students we train in our university and then go to work for Litton or Raytheon can give them the software. It's like copying the Mona Lisa rather than making it on your own. They can't produce the metals or circuit boards for the radar and eavesdropping antenna. They've also got a problem with supporting the equipment. Very expensive and complicated. Ask any pilot -- he owes his life to his crew chief and worker bees.

-- Frank Colunga, Maryland

What was the rush to get the airplane crew back? George Bush seems to have a desire (and ability) to get bad news off the table as quickly as possible, as demonstrated by his handling of Linda Chavez, the carbon dioxide decision and other events.

-- John Jorsett

The "big rush" was appeasement of the many U.S. multinational corporations and U.S. global trade profiteers who want business relations with China to remain unobstructed and escalated. It should be clear to anyone that the Chinese could have stripped and mutilated the crew, even televised the atrocity, and there would still have been an army of Armani suits declaring the usual statements, e.g., "we must not be too hasty to punish the long journey of progress China has trudged in the last 20 years," or the Clintonian "China will become freer and more open with more and more trade and exchange."

I don't need to tell you, I am sure, how numbingly barbaric China remains, in every imaginable way. Furthermore, it is the height of hypocrisy for us to sustain a trade embargo against the relatively benign Cuba while rationalizing all the persecutions, enforced slavery, assembly-line abortions and genocide of women that are routine in China.

-- Dave Hickey

There is a reason the U.S. must provide arms to Taiwan and create genuine uncertainty in Chinese minds regarding the level of direct military assistance the U.S. would provide. Almost 40 percent of the world's semiconductor chips are manufactured in a massive industrial park located on the outskirts of Taipei. Strategically and economically, that park is more crucial to the world economy than any Kuwaiti oilfield. While some might see that as added incentive for the Chinese to annex Taiwan, it very nearly does require an Einstein to run a modern chip fabrication plant, or fab.

Making chips is not like making T-shirts. The air in the fabs has, on average, 100 parts per billion of contaminants per cubic foot (whereas the air in your office may well have over 5 million ppb contaminants per cubic foot). Pretty tiny particles, to be sure, but Taiwan's fabs produce chips having transistor widths 1/400th the width of a human hair. And if the Chinese had any Einsteins, they wouldn't have needed to grease Clinton and Gore for our technology in everything from satellites (remember when Bernie Schwartz, CEO of Loral Communications, and mega Clinton contributor, sold satellites illegally to China?) to supercomputers (how about IBM, Sun and HP, all contributors, pushing for Clinton/Gore to get fast-track approval for sales to China?).

Why do the Chinese care whether we get our chips? Because many of the chips made in Taiwan are shipped to China for use in the consumer electronics that constitute a good bit of China's trade with the world. The Chinese must have that cash flow to have any chance of staying in the race with us. Thus the only rationale supporting a Chinese invasion is: "We've been here 5,000 years. What's a little world economic depression to us?" All that adds up to a lot of heated gibberish from Beijing, but no invasion of Taiwan.

-- Daniel Burns

Next Page: "All hat and no cattle"

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