Military-To-Military

Additional documented information about military to military transfers from the United states to Communist China (an addendum to Viewpoint article "How President Clinton betrayed America to the Communist Chinese").

By Les Freeman (ARIZONA)

In the 20th century, the world has had negative experiences with rising militaries directed by non democratic governments, Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany being the most obvious examples. Today, China is an occupied country, under the boot of homegrown thugs who go by the title of the CCP and its military arm, the PLA. The United States policy toward the PRC should be quite simple: To the extent possible, we should be promoting democracy and human rights in China while doing everything we can to hold back the modernization of the PLA. This is a common sense approach to a potential adversary that threatens us and our friends. We owe this to the region, to those threatened by proliferation, to the long-suffering Chinese people, and to ourselves.

The Clinton-Gore administration has adopted the very opposite policy -- discourage Chinese patriots struggling for democracy in their own country and promote the prestige and capabilities of the PLA. Nowhere do we see this more clearly than in the Clinton-Gore military-to-military policy toward the PLA. On June 4, 1989, the PLA made a major assault on China's capital city that involved as many as 12 divisions. Colin Nickerson of the Boston Globe wrote,

"Chinese troops massacred unarmed civilians this morning, cutting a bloody swath through Beijing and rolling into student-occupied Tiananmen Square with tanks and armored personnel carriers. Just west of the square, young students from 4 of Beijing's most prestigious universities-Beijing University, Beijing Agricultural College, the Beijing Institute of Aerospace Engineering, and Beijing People's University-and the Nanjing Medical College died with their school banners flying. Something on the order of 4,000 to 6,000 Chinese people died. Unknown numbers of others were wounded. Survivors who were not arrested fled into exile."

Congress reacted immediately, forcing President Bush to cut off all military-to-military exchanges with the PLA. There matters stood for the next 4 years-until reversed by the Clinton administration. Assistant Secretary of Defense Chas Freeman led a military team to Beijing in the fall of 1993. When Dr. Perry became secretary of defense in the spring of 1994, the exchanges really took off, until by 1997 there was one major delegation going to China or coming from China almost every month. We do not oppose every single U.S-China military-to-military exchange. But such exchanges should be guided by 2 standards:

• Do not rehabilitate those senior PLA officers with personal responsibility for murdering their own people.

• Do not assist the PLA to project force.

The Clinton administration has violated both of these principles. While Dr. Perry was secretary of defense, almost every senior PLA officer in a command position at Tiananmen Square made a triumphal tour of Washington. Typically they received a 19-gun salute from an honor guard at the Pentagon, a tour of American military facilities, and meetings with top American officers. General Chi Haotian, who was in operational command on June 4, even had his picture taken with President Clinton in the Oval Office. All this was covered with maximum propaganda at home and served to bewilder Chinese patriots. The United States military also has something useful to impart to mid-level Chinese officers, such as good military citizenship, the implications of the use of force in a democratic society, and environmental cleanup of abandoned military facilities. Instead of these kinds of limited but useful exchanges, the administration seems to have deliberately chosen to educate the PLA in modern warfare. The Clinton-Gore administration has:

• Shown senior PLA officers our most modern military facilities.

• Shown PLA air force officers one of our "Red Flag" exercises [similar to the navy's "Top Gun" school for fighter pilots].

• Shown them a Marine amphibious landing exercise.

• Given the PLA chief of staff a tour of the Blue Ridge, our national military command center in the Pacific.

• Escorted the PLA chief of staff around an American nuclear attack submarine.

The administration's biggest mistake in military-to-military relations is its obsession with training the PLA in logistics. During the American Civil War the United States army and navy developed modern logistics. We're very good at this -- the world's best. Logistics is the basis for maintaining a deployed force and power projection. Any analysis of the PLA will show that modern logistics is one of its major weakness, a weakness we should not want to see fixed. Logistics is real war fighting capability. But the Clinton administration has quietly welcomed a number of PLA logistics teams to the United States.

Example:

The PLA was told that FedEx's system of package distribution at the Memphis, Tennessee, airport is about 95% similar to the U.S. military's wartime logistics system. Senior PLA officers have been to Memphis repeatedly since the fall of 1996. What is the purpose of all this? Dr. Perry may have let the cat out of the bag in early 1998. Although he resigned in 1996, former Defense Secretary Perry has been active, at this time leading a team of retired officials to the PRC and Taiwan. The idea would be for the officials to serve as mediators between the 2 sides. For this, the team would have needed some credibility on both sides of the Taiwan Straights. But a number of the participants were either in business on the mainland or known to be hostile toward Taiwan's democracy. Perry didn't help his case when he was quoted in his Beijing stop by the PRC's mouthpiece, Xinhua, as saying that he hoped "that the United States would be able to assist the modernization drive by China's army. Taipei's diplomats received the Perry delegation politely and sent it on its way.

Sources: Boston Globe, June 4, 1989. Amnesty International, "Peoples Republic of China: Preliminary Findings on Killings of Unarmed Civilians, Arbitrary Arrests and Summary Executions since June 3, 1989.". Michael Fathers and Andre Higgins, Tiananmen: The Rape of Peking [Doubleday, 1989] 112. Eastern Express [Hong Kong], June 11, 1996. Interview with administration official, spring 1998. Xinhua News Agency, January 12, 1998.