A New Red Scare

Tom Plate writes:

It might almost seem like a game of geopolitical chicken -- how far can we go in creating monstrous fears about China?

We only have to turn the clock back a few years to realize what is happening. The year was 1999, and the now forgotten Cox Report on Chinese espionage made red-letter headlines. The Chinese were (allegedly) spying on the United States, stealing technology for warheads and nuclear weapons from here, there and everywhere. Why -- that China-born (or maybe just Chinese) lab assistant is probably working for Beijing intelligence. Better get an FBI man on him!

And the U.S. news media on the whole went for the scare big time. It took longer than I expected for cooler heads to prevail. But today, thankfully, even some of the marquee members of the Cox Commission that produced the overblown report sadly realize they were being used for crass political purposes and the whole deal was the hype of all hypes.

To read more:

http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/columns.asp?parentid=77418