BY CHRISTOPHER COX
AMERICAN POLICY toward the People's Republic of China should proceed from this central premise: It is our sincere hope for the Chinese people that they will no longer live under a communist government.
To this end, America's -- and California's -- world leadership in high-tech enterprise promises far more than economic benefits. The export of these products to the Chinese people can be a great democratizing and liberating force.
In January, the People's Republic sentenced Lin Hai, a 30-year-old software executive and Web page designer, to prison for supposedly ``inciting subversion of state power.'' His so-called ``crime'' consisted of exchanging e-mail addresses with an anti-communist group in America.
But if Lin Hai had been able to keep the contents of his computer messages away from the prying eyes of the Ministry of State Security -- using strong encryption in commercially available software -- he would be a free man today.
That is why America's companies, the leaders in encryption technology, must be able to export their products to China and around the world.
Strong encryption is -- as Beijing's communist leadership is well aware -- a massive threat to totalitarian regimes and their government-maintained monopoly on information, because it permits individuals to communicate privately without fear of government eavesdropping or interception.
In this and the previous Congress, I have sponsored the Security and Freedom through Encryption Act, together with a broad coalition of Republican and Democratic lawmakers. I disagree with the Clinton-Gore administration, and with Sen. Dianne Feinstein, that the current prohibition on American businesses exporting encryption software is necessary for our national security.
Yet the Clinton-Gore administration would go beyond the current prohibition, endorsing not just restrictions on encryption exports, but also requiring every encryption program sold -- even within the United States -- to have a secret key to permit eavesdropping by law enforcement officials or foreign governments.
The Clinton-Gore administration seems to place a higher priority on stopping the export of encryption software to the Chinese people than on preventing the theft of our nuclear weapons technology by the People's Liberation Army.
This is exactly backward. Rather than control commercially available computers, software and technology, we should safeguard our most critical military secrets.
Transfer of technology
For the past nine months, I've chaired a congressional select committee investigating the transfer of militarily sensitive technology to the People's Republic of China. The committee's classified report, unanimously approved by all five Republicans and four Democrats, found overwhelming evidence that such transfers -- including theft through espionage -- have caused serious harm to U.S. national security, and continue to this day.
But some have inferred that this should mean clamping down on commercial exports. To the contrary: The committee found that the current export-licensing process is riddled with errors and plagued by delays. It often does very little to protect our national security -- while frequently doing a great deal to damage America's competitiveness in world markets.
The committee has therefore recommended streamlining export rules. The United States should provide a new ``fast track'' for most items, while focusing greater resources and expertise on the limited targets that we know from our intelligence are the subject of specific collection efforts by the People's Republic of China and others.
Trade in innovative technologies, goods and services can help undermine inefficient state-run industries and bring hope of a better life to the Chinese people.
In areas like transportation, telecommunications and financial services, it is the means by which communist China -- whose economy is smaller on a per capita basis than Guatemala's -- can become a developed nation.
In fields such as medicine, biotechnology and farming, U.S. trade offers hope for the desperately poor millions who are still China's majority that they will be able to eat and survive.
Encouraging exports to China that promote individual freedom and well-being is in the United States' national security interest. For this reason, in addition to allowing the export of encryption software, U.S. policy should focus on unleashing the Internet as an engine of freedom in China.
Among the 1.2 billion people in the People's Republic of China, only one in a thousand is an Internet user. But Internet use is growing at a rate that threatens the Communist Party's grip on China.
As Chinese journalist Sang Ye has observed: ``New ways of thinking, of communicating, of organizing people and information -- the Net takes aim squarely at things that since Mao's earliest days have been the state's exclusive domain.''
Today, China's communist dictatorship is working hard to re-route its citizens away from the information superhighway and onto the state-controlled ``Intranet.'' This new Intranet allows communication only among approved users who share communist-approved content. The Ministry of Post and Telecommunications supervises and approves all networks, and it screens virtually all news and even financial information that citizens may receive from foreign sources.
While the Chinese Communist Party argues, on the Internet home page of the People's Daily, that the open flow of communications would be destabilizing, Americans know from our own experience that technology is best used as a means to an end: a promise of greater freedom.
The United States should move aggressively to frustrate the Chinese government's censorship of the Internet by condemning it as a barrier to free trade, an impediment to joining the World Trade Organization, and a violation of the several human rights covenants it has signed. And we should encourage the construction of an expanded Internet architecture that frustrates censorship and control by repressive states.
At the same time, the United States should work with all nations for the establishment of the Internet as a global free-trade zone, which not only will make it increasingly difficult for governments including China's to choke off access but also will pressure them further to reduce protectionist trade barriers.
Finally, we should recognize that while our currently limited trade with China's protectionist government may be better than nothing, the object of U.S. policy must be a liberalization of trade that is fundamentally at odds with the nation's communist system.
Truly free trade
Despite America's free-trade policy, we still sell less to the billion-plus People's Republic of China than to the 22 million people of Taiwan. Instead of business ventures being approved one at a time by the Communist Party's Politburo, truly free trade means a billion Chinese interacting independently with a quarter-billion Americans.
A policy toward the People's Republic of China that frustrates this objective is both shortsighted and cruel.
The recent public attention to espionage raises proper concerns about our lack of security, but it should not distract us from our objective of freedom for China's people -- a result that American technology exports can help bring about.
Today, we have the worst of both worlds: Military technology that the communist government can use to hold the Chinese people in terror is being stolen, while commercial technology that can liberate the Chinese people is delayed in the export-licensing bureaucracy.
It's time to focus not on whether to engage -- we should all be agreed on that -- but rather on the terms of engagement. We should have no illusions about with whom we are dealing. We should have no doubt about where our policy is taking us. Freedom -- not engagement and possibly marriage to a communist dictatorship -- is what our policy toward China should be seeking to achieve.
U.S. Rep. Christopher Cox, R-Newport Beach, is chair of the House Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People's Republic of China. He wrote this article for the San Jose Mercury News Sunday Perspective section.