Thread: Technology Sales to China

Technology Sales to China: Good Business or Bad Foreign Policy?

Guest Column | By Michael Cutler | January 7, 2008


The People's Republic of China is a Communist nation that has demonstrated an abject disregard for basic human rights. While China suffers from no clear military threat, it has embarked on a frenzy of modernization of its military, building nuclear submarines and other such high tech assets. Last year, Chinese engineers launched a manned spacecraft into orbit, making China the third nation to have developed that capability. Also last year, China demonstrated its ability to shoot down a satellite orbiting the earth by destroying and old satellite. In the process, a cloud of potentially deadly space debris was spewed into orbit around the earth that might, one day, inflict damage to other satellites � including the space station and other manned orbital vehicles.

China is the most populous nation on earth, and its rapidly growing economy has caused it to develop a nearly insatiable appetite for petroleum � while instability in the Middle East and actions taken by Hugo Chavez of Venezuela have caused the price of a barrel of petroleum to hit the unprecedented $100 mark this week.

Greedy multinational corporations have moved many of their factories to China, where cheap and exploitable labor provides great opportunities for those corporations to fatten their bottom lines (while the value of the American dollar plummets). This New York Times article describes how corporations have been selling high tech devices to China and yet the Bush administration has failed to act to prevent such exportation of high technology to a nation that may ultimately provide this technology to Iran and Syria. (Both nations have been identified as being state sponsors of terrorism.)

Why, just six years after 9/11, is this being allowed to continue?

The only conclusion I can come to is that trade trumps national security! While corporations seemingly have no moral rudder where the quest for more profit is concerned, it is the federal government's responsibility to make certain that corporate greed does not harm the security of our nation. Yet the Bush administration is refusing to carry out what is arguably its most important mission: to secure our nation. Our country went to war in Iraq purportedly to confiscate weapons of mass destruction that could have fallen into the hands of terrorists who would use those weapons against our nation or our allies. Yet now it appears that components of military hardware may be making their way from the United States to countries that sponsor terrorism! Should that happen, would the President and his advisors then claim we need to go to war with those countries to retrieve the technology that they allowed corporations to sell to China?

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin is quoted as having said, "The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them!" Perhaps President Bush should have paid more attention when he presumably studied history in college.

When I contemplate the direction in which our nation is headed, and has been headed for the past several decades, I sometimes wonder if I haven't somehow fallen into a wormhole and have landed in a parallel universe.

"We the People" must make certain our voices are heard by those who purport to represent us. The Americans who rose to the challenge to defend the United States when our nation was attacked on December 7, 1941, have properly been given the nickname "The Greatest Generation." I fear that our generation may be remembered by historians as "America's Last Generation!"

Democracy is not a spectator sport!

Lead, follow or get out of the way!

http://www.aim.org/guest-column/technol ... gn-policy/

I fear that our generation may be remembered by historians as "America's Last Generation!"

Or America's surrender generation.

Excerpt:

[quote]Duncan Hunter’s record of opposition to China has been as consistent as his opposition to abortion. He was nearly successful in stopping Permanent Most Favored Nation status from being gifted to China by Bill Clinton and the US congress in 2000. As Hunter mentioned in an August 13 interview on the Free Republic website:

“All of the Senators presently running for president, including Mr. Thompson, Brownback and McCain voted for Permanent Most Favored Nation status for Communist China, which I strongly oppose. I voted against PMFN with Red China because the Chinese are clearly using US trade dollars to buy ships, warplanes and missiles, some of which are clearly targeted on American forces and interestsâ€