Inexhaustible Sinofilia

As long as I live, I will never understand why the entire foreign policy establishment of both major American political parties stopped being the slightest bit skeptical of the "People's Republic" of China three and a half decades ago.

Here's just the latest example:

China presents a golden opportunity for energy business with the United States, according to Senator Norm Coleman, R-MN.

Coleman, appearing Thursday on Fox News Channel, said China and the United States could work together to "avoid Middle Eastern oil dependence” and establish strong business and technology relationships for alternative energy.

"China has great oil needs and a demand for oil and alternative energy” Coleman said. "If the U.S. and China could somehow team together on some of the renewables, such as ethanol fuel, you’d have a huge market for corn growers and soybean growers and you’d be able to meet the oil needs without a greater dependence on foreign oil.”

Coleman’s home state would be an ideal source of business for China’s energy needs, Coleman said.

Well, of course it would. And while I suppose that Senator Coleman is doing his job in the most parochial sense, his gopher focus is blinding him to bitter facts about the ChiComms that both disserve his country and undermine his pro-Minnesota sales pitch:

The "message" Chinese President Hu Jintao most want[ed] the American people to come away with as he visit[ed] the U.S. [last] week and me[t] with President Bush [wa]s: Although China is a rising global power, there is no need to fear its ascendance because Beijing is committed to being a responsible international player.

At first blush that may appear to be true — at least on the trade front. Chinese leaders spent weeks in the U.S. before Hu's visit buying billions in Boeing airliners and legal copies of Microsoft software. It even hinted at revaluing the yuan to ease the U.S.'s $200 billion trade deficit with China.

But there is another, dark side to Chinese foreign policy that is grossly underreported. That is China's cozy relationships with a string of rogue states that aids and abets such vexing problems as political repression, human-rights abuse, poor governance, WMD programs, and, even, conflict.

Beijing's close ties with some of the world's most repressive regimes in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia call into question the credibility of China's assertion that its rise to global prominence will be a wholly positive evolution in international politics.

Regimes like North Korea, which without ChiComm support would collapse like a K-Mart deck chair; Sudan, whose Islamist rulers continue to inflict genocide on the country's Christian minority; Zimbabwe, whose marxist dictator Robert Mugabe has transformed into a reverse-racist nighmare orders of magnitude worse than apartheidist South Africa ever was; and, of course, jihadist Iran, which Beijing is protecting both as a reliable source of petroleum (Sorry, Norm) and as another catspaw with which to make trouble for us and keep us distracted from their Machiavellian machinations to gain decisive influence over key strategic areas of the global chessboard.

From a historical perspective, the irony is twisted. Americans have had a weakness for China for a century and a half; the only time that fondness lapsed is in 1949 when the Truman administration pulled the plug on Chiang Kai-shek and allowed the Chinese communists to take over. After President Nixon "opened up" the Dragon, and President Carter applied lipstick to it, and President Reagan kept that ball rolling, and not even a repressive massacre on worldwide global television (Tianenman Square) could dissuade the first President Bush from toasting the butchers of Beijing almost literally on the corpses of their victims, and President Clinton sold them virtually every strategic military secret we had for campaign cash, well, is it any wonder that President Hu (a name that must have had Bud Abbott and Lou Costello muttering in their graves) was grinning so broadly at the side of Bush the son?

Twenty-six years ago the Russian dissident Alexander Solzhyenitsyn wrote the following in an essay for Time magazine:

In expectation of World War III the West again seeks cover and finds Communist China as an ally! This is another betrayal, not only of Taiwan, but of the entire oppressed Chinese people. Moreover, it is a mad, suicidal policy: having supplied billion-strong China with American arms, the West will defeat the USSR, but thereafter no force on Earth will restrain Communist China from world conquest.

Thanks to Ronald Reagan, we defeated the USSR without the ChiComms' help. So they are simply following in Lenin's footsteps - indeed, raising his classic subversion strategy to an art form Lenin himself would scarcely have recognized - by selling us the rope with which they will one day hang us.

And pols like Norm Coleman cannot contain their enthusiasm for cornering the noose market.

If we somehow survive the looming war with Iran that will settle the GWOT one way or the other, the ChiComms will be waiting to pick off the winner, mark my words.