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Thursday, May 12, 2005
Another Canadian history lesson
While researching the current cover story for the Western Standard, "Puppets of Beijing," (on news stands now--online in a couple of weeks) I came across a copy of The Coming Conflict with China by Ross Munro and Richard Bernstein. (I found it at the same time and in the same used bookstore that I discovered the Trudeau book which led to this post.) When I started flipping through the book, an news clipping pressed between the back page and cover fluttered to the floor. (Verily, like a captured moth released from your uncupped hands! I don't know why, but I really love it when I find junk like this: bonus material, like hectic notes scribbled by some exhausted college student along the margins of a poem "swan equals sex".)
The clipping which I assume by the typeface is from The Globe and Mail, has no date on it, and I can only guess it is from 1997, the year the book in question was published (coincidentally the same year that the "Sidewinder" report was produced--you can get a copy of that report near the bottom of this page). The Globe article concerns the reaction to The Coming Conflict by the various powers that be, particularly from China's official news agency Xinhau, which tried to cast the authors as racists.
It came to mind a while back when Joe Volpe was making a complete butthead of himself pretending to be outraged at the Western Standard's "Libranos" cover, comparing us to the Ku Klux Klan. I guess I should have posted it then, but I was pretty busy at the time.
Here is the text of the article:
Canadian's book on China ruffles feathers
Author criticized Alexander Haig for cashing in on role in preventing (two-Chinas' policy
BY GRAHAM FRASER
Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON - Author Ross Munro set out to analyze the secretive and powerful Chinese lobby operating' in the United States, but he may have ended up becoming a victim of it himself.Mr. Munro, who co-wrote The Coming Conflict With China, has been fired from his Job at a U.S. think-tank where one of the major players described in the book, former secretary of state Alexander Haig, holds a position of influence.
The recently published book includes criticism of what Mr. Munro, a former Globe and Mail correspondent in Beijing, and Richard Bernstein, who has served as Time's correspondent in China, call "the new China lobby," a group of former U.S. officials who act on behalf of companies with interests in China.
It was criticism that clearly enraged the Chinese government. The state-run Xinhua news agency described the book as a defamation, fabrication and deception, accusing the authors of having ''made up a story about the 'China threat' and imagined military contacts between the United States and China in the future.
''Leading a secluded and comfortable life in the diplomatic residential quarter of Beijing for years, the two were keen to keep close contact with so-called Chinese dissidents rather than ordinary Chinese people,'' Xinhua said.
"Driven by the racial superiority of 'white supremacy,' the two authors are extremely domineering and concocted. As foreigners living in China, they could neither understand spoken Chinese nor read Chinese books. . . . The authors were eager to strangle China's socialist system in the cradle."
One of the men named by Mr. Munro and Mr. Bernstein as a key figure in the group they say has defended China's interests In the United States is Mr Haig, who served under former president Ronald Reagan from 1981 to 1982.
“Haig is perhaps the figure who, after (former secretary of state Henry Kissinger has most clearly mixed public positions of the sort that Beljing likes with business dealings in China on behalf of corporate clients,'' the authors wrote.
''Haig was the key Reagan administration official responsible for the 1982 Chinese-American Joint Communique that is one of the three key statements guiding relations between the two countries."
The communique concerned a statement in which the U. S. agreed never to pursue a ''two-Chinas'' pol- lcy, and agreed to limit and then reduce arms sales to Taiwan.
"Beijing was grateful for his role in undermining Taiwan. Haig was soon cashing in On that gratitude,'' the book says. ''For example, in the mid-1980s, as reported In The Wall Street Journal, Haig was paid $600,000 in fees and retainers by the International Signal & Control Group PLC, in part for help in selling weapons fuses to China. ''
The authors note that Mr Haig also was a senior consultant to United Technologies of Hartford, and frequently accompanies senor executives of the company to Beijing.
In addition, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported last week that Mr Haig, who is a paid adviser to a giant shopping company owned by the Chinese government, contacted at least three Republican offices during the crisis last year when China staged war games in the Straits of Taiwan during the Taiwanese elections, urging them not to take any trade action against Beljing.
The book does not mention that Mr. Haig is on the board of trustees
of the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute, where Mr. Munro had worked as director of the Institute's Asia program for the past six months, and that the president and director of the institute, Harvey Sicherman, is a former assistant to Mr. Haig.The book's acknowledgments say that the options it offers are the authors' alone ''and in no way represent the opinions of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, or any other institution's.”
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on March 6 that Mr. Munro was fired by the Institute. "The departure was occasioned by many differences on the management, philosophy and direction of the Institution that developed over the last year and a half,'' Mr. Sicherman said. ''That's as much as I'm prepared to say "
It was a comment that several former colleagues found plausible.
But Mr. Munro's wife, Julie, tells it differently ''Ross was asked to resign, and he refused,'' she said in an interview recently. ''He was not given a reason, he refused to resign, and he was fired. The fact that this occurred just after the book was published may or may not have been a coincidence. There was some arbitration, and as a result of that settlement, no one can comment.”
The New Republic magazine, in taking note of the firing, commented that ''the episode suggests that Munro may have become a victim of the very phenomenon he describes In his book: The new China lobby "
Mr. Munro, reached in Ottawa yesterday, said simply: "I have no problem with the Inquirer story, or what The New Republic said." He was more upset about the attack on the book by the Xinhau news agency ''What is really, really troubling is the reference to white supremacy,'' he said ''The message is, to attack the Chinese leadership is to attack all China, is to be anti-Chinese it's outrageous. They're playing the race card."
Posted by Kevin Steel on May 12, 2005 in International Affairs | Permalink
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