BY MAURICE WILLIAMS
"China Stole Nuclear Secrets for Bombs, U.S. Aides Say," blared the front page of the New York Times March 6. Since then the big-business press and politicians - Republicans and Democrats alike - have worked to whip up a scare over the alleged spying for Beijing. The propaganda blitz is not only part of Washington's bipartisan moves against China, but is aimed against the rights of working people in the United States.

The Times article claimed "espionage is believed to have occurred in the mid-1980s," but "it was not detected until 1995, when Americans analyzing Chinese nuclear test results found similarities to America's most advanced miniature warhead."

Two days later U.S. energy secretary William Richardson dismissed Wen Ho Lee, a computer scientist who worked in the nuclear weapons design area of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The Taiwan-born scientist was fired "for failure to properly notify Energy Department and lab officials about contacts with people from a sensitive country, specific instances of failing to properly safeguard classified material and apparently attempting to deceive lab officials about security matters."

There is bipartisan agreement among the U.S. rulers to try to prevent Beijing from becoming the dominant power in Asia. The Clinton administration has floated plans to deploy a network of missile systems in Japan, south Korea, and Taiwan that would effectively give Washington the capacity to launch a first nuclear strike against China.

But conservative politicians and rightists who led the failed impeachment campaign against Clinton have also seized on the charges of "Chinese spying" to attack the Democratic administration for not being tough enough on Beijing.

"This could well be one of the most serious security breaches in the nation's history," declared Sen. Richard Lugar, top Republican in the Senate Foreign Relations and Intelligence committees. He claimed the United States may be at significantly greater risk from a Chinese ballistic missile attack.

"The allegations surrounding the transfer of atomic secrets to a potential enemy are the most serious since the Rosenbergs went to the electric chair in 1953," asserted ultrarightist presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan. He called for the resignation of National Security Adviser Samuel Berger, accusing him of "dereliction of duty" for not pursuing the charges more vigorously.

No evidence presented by FBI
So far, Lee has not been charged with committing any crime. After being questioned by FBI agents, Lee "continued to insist he had done nothing wrong," the Washington Post reported March 9. In recent months FBI agents administered two polygraphs (so-called lie detector tests) to Lee. The FBI was "unsatisfied" with the results of the first test, conducted last December, the New York Times reported. They claimed the second test in February indicated Lee was being deceptive. A two-and-one-half year investigation by the government snoops has yielded no concrete evidence against Lee. The spy agency states the case against him may be "unprosecutable."

But the big-business press is barreling ahead to paint Lee up as a spy. A March 15 Wall Street Journal news article, headlined "U.S. Scientist in Secrets Flap Sought Invitations to China" tries to cast a sinister light that in the 1980s the scientist requested to attend two conferences in his field held in Beijing. There Lee presented theoretical papers that had been cleared by his bosses at Los Alamos. His laboratory colleagues described him as "baffled" by the FBI probes and interrogation linking him to espionage.

Bejing called Washington's spy allegations a "farce" and "fabrication." The New China News Agency described the Times article claiming Chinese espionage as launching a "smear campaign against China."

According to the press accounts, the only evidence of spying is the assertion by U.S. officials that scientists in China could not have developed the supposed small bombs on their own. "I think the question of China's theft of military secrets from the United States is a tale from The Arabian Nights," said Chinese prime minister Zhu Rongji at a press conference March 15. "China is fully capable of developing any military technology," he asserted.

An earlier "China spy case" now receiving a lot of coverage involved the 1997 arrest of another Taiwan-born physicist, Peter Lee. He was charged with giving "classified national defense information" to Chinese scientists during a trip to Beijing in 1985. He plead guilty and was sentenced to one year in a halfway house, ordered to pay a $20,000 fine, and to do 3,000 hours of community service. The information Peter Lee (no relation to Wen Ho Lee) supposedly released was declassified by the time of his arrest. He was among dozens of scientists in the United States authorized by Los Alamos laboratory officials to travel to China.

In another probe against democratic rights, a federal grand jury in Boston indicted Yao Yi from China and Collin Shu from Canada March 10 on charges of conspiracy to violate export control laws. They tried to ship fiberoptic gyroscopes to China. Yao was arrested in late February at a scientific conference in San Diego.

Recalling the Rosenbergs' execution
New York Times writer William Safire asserted the "stolen nuclear secrets" were the "most damaging atomic spy coup since the Rosenbergs" in his March 15 column. This comparison is becoming a familiar refrain.

In 1951 Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were sentenced to death on charges of violating the Espionage Act, based on cooked-up evidence of supplying atomic "secrets" to the Soviet Union. They were electrocuted two years later. The Rosenbergs were framed-up and executed during the McCarthy witch-hunt era, which was an extension of the government assault on constitutional liberties that had begun at the end of the 1930s under the administration of Democrat Franklin Roosevelt. In the name of vigilance against subversives, Roosevelt greatly expanded the powers of Washington's political police in an effort to tame the labor movement and stifle opposition to the U.S. rulers' impending entry into World War II against their imperialist rivals.

The U.S. government's propaganda campaign against "Chinese spying" coincides with the Pentagon's recent proposal to set up a domestic military command and the increased prominence of Clinton's "counterterrorism" chief, Richard Clarke. U.S. rulers have increased the budget of their counterterrorism program to $11 billion a year.

Clarke's post on the National Security Council involves coordinating the Pentagon program for military action with local police forces throughout the continental United States. He played a prominent role in Washington's decision to launch cruise missiles at Afghanistan and Sudan last August.

In a profile interview with New York Times reporter Tim Weiner, Clarke pointed to the White House campaign to gain assent for the increasing use of military might against "rogue states," while the encroaching on civil liberties to attack "rogue groups" at home. He spoke of the "threat of cyberwar," as one pretext for using military firepower and curbing democratic rights. "There is a problem convincing people that there is a threat," Clarke said, referring to a hypothetical attack on the computer network of a telephone or transportation system.

"An attack on American cyberspace is an attack on the United States, just as much as a landing on New Jersey," Clarke declared. "The notion that we could respond with military force against a cyber-attack has to be accepted."

Combining this "cyberwar" propaganda with the anti-China campaign, the March 16 London's Financial Times headlined an article "China studies computer warfare." It reported on Pentagon claims that Beijing is researching how to penetrate "into US military networks which control deployments in the Asian region."

Washington-Beijing tensions heighten
The U.S. big-business media and ruling-class figures are using their espionage concoction to press a military campaign against Beijing. "With or with out the [advanced nuclear] warheads, China is able to threaten the United States," said former defense secretary William Perry in early March after returning from a visit to China.

Over the past two months incipient fascist politician Buchanan has campaigned for military action against China. His presidential campaign website declares, "Communist China... now uses our currency to expand its military, steal our technology and buy weapons to target U.S. Marines on Okinawa and the sailors of the Seventh Fleet."

Tensions have been escalating between Washington and Beijing, especially since Clinton announced the plan to deploy a "missile shield" in countries that surround China. As part of this scheme, the U.S. government is considering plans to sell a fleet of Aegis destroyers to the Taiwan government, which the Pentagon would equip with anti-missile systems with the capacity to shoot down Beijing's ballistic missiles. The missile system is purportedly designed to protect U.S. bases in Asia from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK).

This military encirclement of China and north Korea by Washington is preparation for attempting to overturn the gains of the workers and farmers in China and north Korea, who overturned the rule of the capitalists and landlords through revolutionary struggle. It is also aimed in the longer run against the workers state in Russia, as is the move to expand the U.S.-dominated NATO military alliance into Eastern Europe.

An unnamed Chinese official was quoted in the March 8 Washington Post saying Washington and Tokyo were exaggerating military threats from north Korea as a pretext to implement the missile system, "strengthen their military alliance," and maintain their imperialist domination in the region.

Any effort to deploy the U.S. missile system in Taiwan "would amount to an encroachment on China's national sovereignty and territorial integrity and also be an obstruction to the great cause of reunification with the motherland," stated Tang Jiaxuan, China's foreign minister at a March 7 news conference. Tang said Washington should butt out of China's affairs. "Whether we should deploy missiles on our own territory is our own business," he added.  
 
 
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