U.S.-CHINA SECURITY REVIEW COMMISSION

PUBLIC HEARING ON SECURITY ISSUES: STRATEGIC PERCEPTIONS

Friday, August 3, 2001

9:07 a.m.

Room 124 Dirksen Senate Office Building
First and Constitution Avenue, N.E.
Washington, D.C.

P R O C E E D I N G S

OPENING REMARKS

MR. LEWIS: The Commission will come to order, please. Today, the Commission's focus is on national security matters. It is an important hearing as it will assist us to better understand multilevel and significant national security issues inherent in the U.S.-China relationship. We have assembled today two extremely competent panels and we hope to learn what these experts believe are the critical national security issues associated with the very complex U.S.-China relationship. The two panels are, in the morning, Dr. Michael Pillsbury and Timothy Thomas, and in the afternoon, Larry Wortzel, Bates Gill, and Richard Fisher. We will hear what these experts believe are Chinese perceptions of the United States and how these perceptions color the broad-based U.S.-China relationship.

We know that China's military, like the military of nearly every major power, paid close attention to the U.S. state-of-the-art weapons systems in the Gulf War and particularly their role in defeating the Iraqi forces with their largely Russian and Chinese equipment. That probably also occurred in the Kosovo War. It has been widely reported that China has made important breakthroughs in some areas of the so-called revolution in military affairs, e.g. missile program. We hope to further understand the Chinese views of asymmetric warfare and what the Chinese military and defense establishments are doing to implement the 21st century programs, policies, and procedures.

We thank Dr. Pillsbury and Mr. Thomas for

being here, for taking time to share with us their

thoughts about Chinese views of future warfare,

particularly in the area of information warfare,

which poses not only a military but an economic

threat.

As I said earlier, this afternoon, we have

invited three additional experts, Larry Wortzel,

who is Director of the Heritage Foundation's Asia

Studies Center; Bates Gill, who is Director of
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Brookings Institute's Center for Northeast Asian

Policy; and Richard Fisher, Senior Fellow at the

Jamestown Foundation. We have asked these

gentlemen to share with us their views on Chinese

perceptions of the United States, China's

relationship with various rogue states, and China's

very important relationship with Russia.

By the end of the day, we should have a

better understanding of what measures the U.S. and

China should undertake in the future to manage its

relationship and to build confidence in each other

for a future peaceful relationship.

I will chair the morning session of this

hearing today and Michael Ledeen, who's the Vice

Chairman of this Commission, will chair the

afternoon session of today's proceedings.

The procedure we will use is Commissioners

will be given seven minutes for each round of

questions, which includes the time taken by the

answers given by the witnesses. A timed light

system will be administered, which will go from

green to yellow when there are two minutes left and
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flash red at the end of the allotted seven minutes.

When the light flashes red, the person answering

the question will be allowed to finish his sentence

and that will be the end of it. Then the next

person will ask a question. You'll each have ten

minutes for your opening statements.

Thank you very much. Let us proceed. Who

would like to go first, Dr. Pillsbury?
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PANEL 1

DR. MICHAEL PILLSBURY, PROFESSOR

NATIONAL DEFENSE UNIVERSITY

MR. PILLSBURY: I've been elected to go

first. May I ask the Commission's help. I'm

somewhat of a professor, so I get long-winded and

go over time. If you'd be so kind as to warn me,

I'd be very grateful.

MR. LEDEEN: Take all the time you want.

MR. PILLSBURY: I get sort of wrapped up

in these materials--

MR. LEDEEN: You can take an hour and a

half.

MR. PILLSBURY: --and sometimes

emotionally involved, as well.

MR. BECKER: I'm warning you right now

with the yellow light.

[Laughter.]

MR. PILLSBURY: And that concludes my

statement, members of the Commission.

MR. LEWIS: The time constraints won't be

as important today as they were yesterday when we
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had more people, so you'll be given leeway.

MR. PILLSBURY: Thank you. Why don't I

begin by describing the two books I've written in

terms of their origins, why they were sponsored by

the Defense Department, what the Defense Department

office wanted to have done as my first subject.

Then, number two, why don't I get into the

substance of what the books say.

And finally, I'd like to suggest how these

materials I have translated or assembled and

translated might affect our own national debate on

China, and as part of that, I want to commend the

Commission and thank them, of course, for inviting

me, but also point out that part of your mandate in

this report due next March seems to be to

specifically write about what Chinese views are

from these open source materials. So I hope to, by

covering these topics, specifically help the

Commission with its report for March, because it's

not an easy job.

The reason the Defense Department's Office

of Net Assessment commissioned these two books, the
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main reason, I believe, is that our national debate

on China suffers from a lack of specificity about

which Chinese are saying what about which issues.

As Exhibit A, and I mean that, I suppose, as a kind

of praise, I want to show you a couple books. One

is called Red Dragon Rising by Bill Triplett, a

Senate staffer today, and coauthor Ed Timperlake.

I'm going to get into this book in a second. The

second is The China Threat by Bill Gertz.

These two books and others don't do what

open source research on Chinese articles can do.

That is, they don't drag the reader through

hundreds and hundreds of boring quotations from

Chinese sources. They reach their conclusions

pretty much on the first page and the book jacket

and the press attention the books draw lead with

the conclusions, and those conclusions are, in the

case of these two books, that China has decided

upon both subversion in the United States, theft of

technology, as well as a program of conquest in

Asia. And the authors' tone, I would say--now,

this is my personal view--the authors' tone is that
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these findings are pretty obvious. One person joked, if you just look out the window, you'll see the storm troopers marching across the Rhine, to mix metaphors. There's nothing wrong with taking this point of view, except there are another set of books, which are too many to bring today, but there are probably 20 or more, that say pretty much the opposite. They're professors, they're think tank researchers who say that China only wants peace, that China is focused almost completely on internal development. They imply that China will do almost anything to avoid conflict or conquest. They essentially say China has suffered grievously at the hands of the West the last 150 years and, therefore, China is to be, in some sense, forgiven or understood for being especially touchy about various foreign policy issues, but there's no need to go into the details of that because it's sort of a psychological reaction that the poor Chinese have had to this tragic history of 150 years. These books also tend to suggest that the

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