August 20, 2002, 10:05 a.m.

As war with Iraq nears, a slightly modified version of the popular phrase "What would Jesus do?" is undoubtedly on the minds of Bush-administration officials and Pentagon strategists: What will China do?

Of all the many wild cards in the wartime deck -- whether Saddam has weapons of mass destruction and how he'll use them, what role Israel will play, how Turkey, the Gulf states, and Europe will react -- China is the wildest, and probably the most dangerous.

China views itself not as America's strategic partner, but as America's strategic competitor. In Asia and around the world, China is vying to replace the old Soviet Union as the next challenger to what it sees as America's ambitions toward hegemony. To this end, China's People's Liberation Army (probably the most misnamed military in the world -- it neither belongs to the people nor liberates them) issued an annual white paper predicting war with the United States within ten years. An American war with Iraq might just offer China the opportunity to test our resolve as well as our ability to deal with multiple threats simultaneously. It might even offer China the chance to invade Taiwan.

Since 9/11, China has made a public show of supporting the war on terror. As it turns out, this support has mostly been a gambit to justify cracking down on dissident groups at home. Late in 2001 China declared [peaceful] Falun Gong a "terrorist group." If the horror stories can be believed, since then China has been ruthless in seeing to the group's extermination:

AP recently reported a young female Falun Gong practitioner beaten to near death and then thrown from the fourth floor so police could avoid responsibility for her beating. Her death was labeled "suicide" and her husband told "try suing us if you can." Over 40% of recorded Falun Gong deaths are claimed as "jumping" or "falling" from high places or moving vehicles.

When 18 women were stripped of their clothes and thrown into a male criminal cell to force them to give up Falun Gong, the guards responsible were asked to travel to other labor camps to share this idea. 300 deaths ranging from eight-month-olds to senior citizens have been reported. Sources in the Chinese government admit the true number is over 1000.

The same may well happen to Christians and others not worshipping in China's government-sanctioned churches. It's similar to the old Soviet canard of dubbing dissidents "insane," and it will be similarly effective -- if the Chinese government comes and pulls a citizen out of bed and calls him a terrorist, he'll never be seen or heard from again. Whether he is in fact a terrorist is irrelevant, because he'll become a nonperson.

But calling local [groups] terrorists isn't what has the Pentagon's war planners staying close to the Maalox. That is a terrible human-rights abuse, but not of strategic interest for the moment.

[...]

-- Bryan Preston is a writer and television producer. He is also the author of Junkyardblog.

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