April 29, 2001

China Lacks Faith In U.S. Good Intentions

By MICHAEL R. GORDON

BEIJING — Fearful that an antimissile defense could embolden the United States to intervene in crises on China's doorstep, Beijing is focusing on low-cost ways to thwart the plan, including ways to attack the defense system itself, China's top arms control official said.

"We have seen that the United States wantonly bombed Yugoslavia and that Yugoslavia had no means to retaliate," the official, Sha Zukang, said in an interview. "Once the United States believes it has both a strong spear and a strong shield, it could lead them to conclude that nobody can harm the United States and they can harm anyone they like anywhere in the world. There could be many more bombings like what happened in Kosovo."

Mr. Sha, a veteran arms-control official famous for his blustery style, spoke in English at the hourlong interview. He made plain that China's fear was not that the United States would launch a surprise attack on China, but that a missile shield would lead American politicians to believe that the United States was so powerful and well protected that it could act with virtual impunity.

"Even when national missile defense was not there they bombed the Sudan, they bombed Afghanistan and they bombed Iraq," he said. "It could lead to the development of a tendency of the use or threat of use of force, more often than is necessary by the United States, in the conduct of international relations."

April 30, 2001

Bush Reassures China of U.S. 'Good Intentions'

By CANDELABRA VON GOHAN (Special to the NY Times)

WASHINGTON, DC — In a wide-ranging discussion backed by a well reasoned summary indicating a remarkable grasp of history and an impressive command of facts President designate George W. Bush reassured China's rulers that, "...only the bad guys need worry" about "...our ability to bomb a nybody back into the stone age." He took particular pains to allay Chinese fears about a recent "spate of problems" and with hardly a glance at his mobile Teleprompter was able to recite the bombing of the aspirin factory in the Sudan, the downing of an Iranian airliner by a U.S. warship, the sinking of the Ehime Maru off Diamond Head by the U.S. nuclear submarine U.S.S. Greenville, the bombing of the observation building on a practice range in Kuwait, the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and the downing of a missionary Cessna 158 float plane in Peru as "growing pains" associated with the implementation of new sophisticated information processing technology.

Showing a dazzling grasp of the underlying technical issues President Bush was able to pinpoint the cause of all these "incidents" as being due to the U.S. military being in the process of converting to metric units and hexadecimal numbers and, in one instance, of using an outdated Michelin Travel Guide. Momentarily bringing himself down to the level of the press corps to make this understandable he compared this to the problem of comparing "a fifth" and "a quart" of whiskey. Even at this level of simplification the press corps was still arguing about which was the better buy.

With typical modesty the President of the United States, known affectionately to his fellow Americans as "Dubya", was able to say that these problems could not recur because

1. his solution of open toed military shoes for enlisted personnel and officers below flag rank was already in the process of being implemented,

2. all Generals, Admirals, and Secretaries of State with military rank were being issued calculators with color coded buttons for the necessary conversions,

3. a regulation was being added to the Uniform Code of Military Justice making it a court martial offense for enlisted personnel to use outdated Michelin Travel Guides when selecting bombing targets,

4. the Michelin management had been informed by the CIA that they would "get the Milosevic treatment" from the U.N. War Crimes Tribunal if they did not keep their Guides current.

The President said that as soon as Secretary of State General Colin Powell got his new color coded calculator he would summon the representative of the ruling regime on the mainland of China for a demonstration, a lecture on human rights, and autographed copies of official photos of Hiroshima taken before and after August 6^th 1945.