Booknotes

Mr. RICHARD BERNSTEIN, AUTHOR, "THE COMING CONFLICT WITH CHINA": Well, Winston Lord was a adviser to Henry Kissinger. He was then the American ambassador to China up until just a few months before the Tiananmen incident--the massacre at Tiananmen. He then, in the Bush administration, was the main person on China and counseled the Carter adminis--in the Clinton administration--excuse me--and counseled Clinton to take a very tough line on human rights and, in particular, to link most favored nation trade status with improvement in China's human rights record.

This was a disastrous policy that the Chinese beat back with ease thanks to their ability to organize a good deal of counterveiling support especially among other foreign policy analysts and American businessmen. Lord, then around 1964--1994, reversed his policy and admitted that the linkage had been a mistake, and the Clinton administration dropped its efforts to pressure China on human rights.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: I imagine that it was hard; it's hard for all of us to admit a mistake, isn't it? But, clearly, the policy wasn't working. There was tremendous opposition to it in the foreign policy establishment of this country. China also, I think, behind the scenes, was giving some assurances to the administration that if it did delink MFN with human rights, that we could expect some improvement in human rights. And I think some good sense prevailed. You know, we take a tough line on China in this book and we feel that we have been--the nation--the United States has been somewhat sentimental and unrealistic about China in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. But we do--but we ourselves do not favor the linkage of trade status with human rights. So it was a bad policy to begin with. It was a policy that was bad for the United States and it was bad for China.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: Well, they're pretty terrible. They are probably the worst human rights violators in the world today, certainly the only large country that is still controlled by the old methods of Communist control, Communist tyranny. It's a complicated picture because in--in some respects, of course, China is much better off than it was 10 or 20 years ago; certainly 20 years ago or 30 years ago under the Maoist period.

I first went to China in 1972, just a month after the Nixon trip. I was a kind of a semi-Maoist graduate student going to China with a group of graduate students that were opposed to the Vietnam War. And it took me about a day or two in China to make my own Maoism pretty much a thing of the past. I had never seen--until I visited North Korea some years later anyway, I had never seen the reality of the cult of the personality, the absolute and total control of every aspect of the individual's life and the kind of terror that you could see in somebody's eyes. If you just stopped them on the street to ask for directions, they were afraid that somehow, by being seen talking to a foreigner, they were going to be accused of spying for the capitalist enemy.

Well, China, in terms of everyday life, has improved enormously. People have the right to move around. They have the right to shape their lives and their careers in a way that they didn't have before. And the Chinese government deserves credit for having loosened up to that extent. But where they haven't changed is in the area of political control, the dissemination of ideas, the press, television, the cultural apparatus. Here, the old communist control apparatus still functions so that about six weeks ago the State Department's annual report on human rights in China said that China had basically locked up every dissident at large. There's not a single dissenting figure who is either not in exile or not in prison in China today.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: Well, I used the word a little loosely. I mean, a Maoist in the sense that I believed--I mean, we're talking about the '60s now.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: I was at Harvard in graduate school studying Chinese-in a--actually, it was a joint-degree program called History in East Asian Languages with the legendary historian of modern China, John K. Fairbank--died a few years ago, but really created Chine--modern Chinese studies in the United States. And it was the--it was the late '60s, early '70s. I belonged to a student group with the rather boring name, The Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, that was opposed to American involvement in Vietnam. But more than that, it had, you know, kind of starry-eyed ideas about the ability of a nation to use revolutionary power to sweep away centuries of injustice, to create new democratic forms--you know, kind of the standard silly stuff that people believe in when they're students, especially in those days.

It was a little dose of reality in 1972 and then, of course, a heavier dose of reality when I actually lived in China I lived there from '80 through '82, about three years altogether--that I came to see what totalitarianism was really all about and didn't like it very much.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: Well, the government acknowledges 3,000 political prisoners; that is people in jail for what they loosely call counterrevolutionary crimes. These inc--the most famous of them is Wei Jingsheng, who, as you know, spent a 15-year prison sentence because of his expression of opinion in 1978, '79 during what's come to be called the Democracy Wall period; then was let out of prison, met with the--with the assistant secretary for human rights in the State Department in Peking a few months after he was released from prison--He served his full term--and then was rearrested and resentenced to, I think, 14 more years in prison, largely because he embarrassed China with this meeting with the State Department official.

Wang Dan, one of the leaders of the student movement in Tiananmen, is another one of the most famous political prisoners. Almost all the free labor union activists are in jail. There have been--there's been quite an interesting movement in some of China's big cities, people who want to create independent labor unions in China. Kind of ironic that in a supposedly socialist country, they're put in jail for those efforts. Many human rights activists feel that the figure is a lot higher than 3,000, more like 7,000 or 8,000, but I don't think that we really have any hard information on that.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: Right now, for a living, I work for The New York Times, and I'm a full-time book critic. I review books for the daily culture pages.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: Well, probably something over three years altogether, but over a fairly long period of time. As I said, I went for the first time in 1972 as a student. We had a five-week tour through China; still a very memorable experience. I then went to China two or three times after I became the Time magazine correspondent in Hong Kong in--from about 1975 through 1978 and I went to China a couple of times then. I went to China in 1979. Then I was stationed there from September 1980 until the end of--I--I'm sorry, April 1980 until the end of 1982 when I was the Time magazine bureau chief there. And I've been back four times since then.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: I was there in June, this past June, while I was looking around and collecting impressions and trying to talk to people in connection with this book.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: The message is that, in the foreseeable future, China and the United States are going to be rivals in the world, rivals for influence, rivals for prestige, rivals in the balance of power in Asia, and that this rivalry is going to be the most important rivalry in the world.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: We make it very clear in the book that we think that's very unlikely. We're not talking about that kind of rivalry and this is not a scare book. In fact, I've been a little bit upset by some of the inte--I've seen some reviews saying that, `Bernstein and Munro predict that there will be war between the United States and China,' when it's simp--you know, plainly cl--it's clear in black and white that we are not predicting that we're going to go to war. In fact, we're predicting that we're not going to go to war. But in the li--in the next to the last chapter, we do outline a scenario where, if the relationship is managed very poorly and if certain conditions prevail in China and also on Taiwan, that it's not inconceivable that the United States and China could go to war over Taiwan or over some other issue.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: I--well, second question first. My co-author is Ross Munro who was a--he was the Toronto Globe and Mail correspondent in Beijing in the late 1970s. In fact, that was before there were American journalists based in Peking. And he was the only North American journalist in China. He was expelled in '78--'77 or '78 when he wrote a series on human rights in China, the first journalistic effort to penetrate the veil on human rights in China. China had really been let off the hook on human rights violations up until that point.

I wrote a piece about Ross in Time magazine, because I was in Hong Kong then, for Time magazine, and we became friends and we've been friends ever since. A year or so ago, when I started talking with my publisher about writing the book, I called Ross up to ask him what he thought of the idea. And I actually wanted to steal some ideas from him, and during the course of that conversation, it became clear that we really ought to collaborate. He's been following China, frankly, more closely than I have over the last 10 years. Until very recently, he was the head of research for the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: Well, to some extent, it was an act of imagination, although imagination grounded in--in reality. The best way to answer the question is to go back to the origins of the book. I was having dinner with my publisher a few weeks after the Taiwan Strait crisis when you'll remember...

Mr. BERNSTEIN: Yeah. Alfred Knopf. You'll remember that China was carrying out military exercises in the Taiwan Strait in an effort to intimidate Taiwan during a presidential election there. It amounted to an informal blockade, a short-lived blockade of Taiwan, which is--you'll note from having read the War Game chapter--is they way we think China would most likely go about actually trying to use military force to take Taiwan would be by not a part-time blockade, but by a full-time blockade, which is defined in international law as an act of war. We realized --I realized at that time that the United States then sent two aircraft carrier task forces to the region, which is a formidable force. I mean, it's maybe about half the American naval capacity. It was the biggest military mobilization in Asia since the end of the Vietnam War and the biggest mobilization involving China and the United States since the Korean War. So I said to myself that this is--this is a very precarious and dangerous situation.

Who knows, really, how far from war we actually were at that time, whether a reckless move by China, a feeling that they needed to achieve the glorious task of reunification as a great patriotic duty and that they had to face down the Americans and they decided to step up the blockade on Taiwan or to take some action against--to try to take casualties, because they probably know that the United States' public opinion will not tolerate large casualties in the defense of this faraway island. If they had done something like that, it could have come to war between the United States and China.

So that remained the scenario that we built on and we did some stud--I went to Taiwan, I talked to people there about what their military experts think is the most likely unfolding of events if China were to try to use force to accomplish the aim of reunification. We talked to people in the United States. We did some reading about China's military build-up and its capacity and what it's projected to be over the next 10 or 12 years. And then, as you say, we imagined a situation that--we come to the--to the point where the United States--China has mounted a blockade. It's taken some serious military action to--against Taiwan to try to wipe out some of its major military installations. We got that, frankly, from people on Taiwan trying to figure what they would do if they did attack.

And then we leave it with the president in the situation room in the White House having to decide how to respond, whether to get into a war-what cou--are the various options that the United States faces, and then also trying to decide what is the--what if the United States does not intervene? What is the loss that the United States suffers by just sitting back and letting China use military force to take Taiwan?

Mr. BERNSTEIN: 1.3 billion, roughly.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: Give or take 100 million or so.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: Twenty-one million.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: Oh, gee, I don't know exactly. I think it's about 60 million to 70 million in Thailand. Might be--might be a little less. I'm not sure, but something--I mean, certainly far, far smaller than China itself.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: Well, Hong Kong on midnight, June 30th, becomes, once again after 150 years, part of the Chinese mainland. Hong Kong, as you know, was taken by the British in 1840 as a result of the Opium War, so-called because the British were trying to get the right to import opium into China freely and the Chinese were resisting; not a--on--not a hard thing to imagine the Chinese wanting to do. But this was the era of imperialism. The British took control of this small, uninhabited island off the coast of China, which happen to have the greatest deep-water port in all of Asia, and over the last 150 years it became a great commercial, intellectual, industrial center.

This is all going to--it has the third highest foreign exchange reserves in the world. It has six and a half million people. It's the--it has a higher per-capita income than Britain. It's the most laissez-faire economy in the world about to be taken over by the least laissez-faire government of the world.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: Well, technically, Hong Kong was divided into two parts basically. There was Hong Kong Island, which was theoretically ceded to the British in perpetuity, forever. As a result of the Boxer Rebellion of 1898, the Chinese gave a 99-year lease to a much larger portion on the mainland called the New Territories. The lease expires this year on June 30th, 1997. So it was a convenient, a logical time for the Chinese and the British to start talking about how to turn over the new territories with the expiration of the lease in accordance with the law--with the agreement that they had signed many generations ago.

At the same time, it was pointless to hold on to just Hong Kong Island and the little tip of Hong Kong called--of mainland called Kowloon without the New Territories. It's also politically inconsistent with the spirit of the era. So the British and the Chinese conducted negotiations in the mid-80s that resulted in a--in an agreement between the two sides that Hong Kong would revert to mainland control, but that it would retain its separate system and way of life for 50 years.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: Yeah.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: That goes back next year. The Portuguese actually have been trying to give Macao back for a long time. But the Chinese didn't want the headache of absorbing it. They want to take care of Hong Kong first, which is a much bigger issue. Macao is only a fraction the size of Hong Kong, a few hundred thousand people, and Macao much less developed than Hong Kong, much easier to absorb. Macao is really almost a--just a footnote to the final end of colonial control in China.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: Mm-hmm.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: Well, actually, I wished you hadn't asked me that, but--not because I don't want to talk about it, but I feel since Ross is the one who is involved, that he should be the one who mainly talks about it. But let me not avoid your question.

The chapter that The Weekly Standard is referring to is a chapter called The New China Lobby, in which we are quite critical of the business community and of a number of very important, highly former senior American foreign policy officials, including Al Haig, who have maintained a pr--a privileged relationship with China and have profited from that relationship by being--by serving as consultants to American business, and at the same time then in op-ed articles and on--and commentary on television and so forth have advocated a policy, which they may very well believe in sincerely. We don't accuse anybody of insincerity here. But it happens to be the policy that China wants them to advocate, so that the vision--the image of China as a largely peaceful country, which will move towards integration into the world economy and a more democratic system, can be achieved through a policy of full engagement.

We call Larry Eagleburger, a former secretary of state and a member of Kissinger Associates, which does a lot of business with China, to the effect that full engagement is the only way--is the best way to get China "back on the road to freedom." That part, "back on the road to freedom," is a direct quote. We think that's a kind of sentimental and silly way of looking at China's domestic political development. We disagree with it.

Apparently--I don't know whether the China lobby put pressure on the Foreign Policy Research Institute to fire Ross or whether PRI, which has a relationship with Haig, undertook that measure by itself. Other than that, I can't find any fault with The Weekly Standard account of the event that you just read.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: Well, having written the book, I would wonder whether Kissinger was going to be presented as an expert on foreign affairs, as a former secretary of state only, or if he was also going to be identified as a businessman who makes hundreds of thousands and probably millions of dollars consulting on China and whether he would be asked whether he feels that the statements that he makes on China are in any way influenced by his need to continue to have access to the regime at very high levels. That--that's what I would ask myself when I--when I see Kissinger. Then I would listen to what he has to say, because I think that what he has to say is also interesting and--and valuable.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: Well, I would ask the same question. I would want to ask Haig why when the--within months of the Tiananmen massacre, he was in China clinking glasses and friendly toasts with Li Peng, the prime minister who engineered the military crackdown on the students in Tiananmen and whether he doesn't think that that was sucking up to the dictators in Beijing, whether--at least he could have let a decent interval go by.

I'd want to know whether t--how much their access to top leaders is important for the money that they make. The New York Times reported--sorry, I forgot the name of-he--Haig represents United Technologies and another company that--whose name I don't remember. It's in there. The other company, according to The New York Times, paid him $600,000 as a consultant.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: Yeah. That's it. Signal and Control Group PLC paid him $600,000. You know, one of the things that we did in this chapter, which I am quite pleased with, is compare the c--the current China lobby with the old tradition of the Friends Of China--what were always called the Friends Of China.

In the old days, even before the Communists under Mao took power, there was a small group of ideologically committed American journalists, mostly journalists, who had again special access to the top Chinese leadership. Edgar Snow is the most famous of them; wrote a really quite important book called "Red Star over China" in the late 1930s, was able to visit the Communists in their base area--the revolutionary base area in the northwest of China. There are other people who are in that same category: Agnes Smedley, Han Su Yen, a few others.

All the way up through the '60s these were the people who had practically a monopoly on access to China. They were the only people who really could even--only Americans and in some cases the only We--Western journalists who could go to China at all. And, obviously, their continued ability to get visas and to get meetings with the top leaders was contingent on what they said about China. China continues to use this system of rewards and punishments. It punishes those people who don't say what they want them to say or who--or especially who criticize them on the key issues like human rights or Taiwan or Tibet. It denies those people visas.

We have good examples of important scholars of China who have been denied visas because they have spoken out critically of the regime on human rights. And then it rewards people who do--I don't want to say tow the line, but who--who speak in a way that--that reflects favorably on the government. And those people in the old tradition of the Friends Of China continue to get that kind of privileged access. Privileged access in the old days meant careers in journalism. It meant the ability to write and publish about China that was largely denied to other people because they didn't have the ability to go to the country.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: No. I think that Kissinger--and this is not Kissinger's fault. This would be the fault of the identifying organization, the LA Times or the syn--or the--whoever runs the syndicated column. I think that he should be identified as a former secretary of state who is now a business consultant on China.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: That was an organization that he created actually sometime before Tiananmen. It--on its board of directors is a list of very important former American government officials that basically promoted the idea of good relations with China; normalized--fully normalized relations with China. They would host visiting Chinese, introduce them to people in the United States. Presumably that would happen the other way around.

There was something else that Kissinger was in the process of setting up and cul--in conjunction with Reng Ye Ren, who is the president of the China investment--China International Trust and Investment Corporation, which is the state-owned merchant bank and which controls a great deal of the foreign investment or guides a great deal of the foreign investment in China so that Kissinger---I've--again, I'm sorry, I don't have all the details in my head. I--some of these names tend to slip out of my mind, but I forget the name of that initiative that Kissinger was involved in creating so the China-American Society was more on the kind of friendly relations--promoting friendly relations between the two people's side, and then the other was a more purely investment opportunity. It di-it never--it fell apart after Tiananmen.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: Right.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: No. And I'm a little uncomfortable with the way you just put that. I mean, they don't receive money from the Chinese as far as I know.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: They receive money from the bi--American companies for whom they perform consulting services. So it isn't a matter of anybody receiving--that I know of, receiving payoffs from the China--in exchange for op-ed pieces or commentary favoring full normalization of relations. By full normalization of relations, by the way, I'm talking about permanent most favored nation treaty status, advocacy of China's entry into the World Trade Organization, a loosening of some of the technology controls that prohibit American companies from exporting certain kinds of items to China. These are the things that the--that--what we call the new China lobby generally favor. Peking also favors those things.

They also tend to portray China as a--still a rather weak defensive country, one whose interests co--coincide with those of the United States and is, therefore, in no way a threat to American interests. And they also portray China as a country that is most likely to change and become more democratic as we engage it more fully, especially as we engage it more fully economically. They may not, in fact, be wrong. We're talking about the future here.

I think that they're wrong, and I think that they ignore a great deal of evidence about what China has been up to, what China's historic ambitions are, what China's nature is, what the very nature of great power rivalry is. So I disagree with them on that. But I don't think that their--that their point of view is illegitimate. I think that what's illegitimate or what's troubling is the way China rewards those people by giving them the kind of access that then enables them to make profits by consulting with American companies that wish to do businesss in China.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: The K Street--the street here in Washington where a lot of the lobbying organizations have their offices. There's--again, we mentioned several of the organizations in the book, most importantly something called the China Normalization Initiative, which operates out of the Boeing Corporation's lobbying office in--in Washington and includes companies like Motorola, Allied Signal, a couple of others. Again, I don't have the full list in my-- head, but it's in there--in the book.

This is a--these are people who--groups that have mobilized money and resources to influence Congress and the public along the lines that I just mentioned--permanent delinking of most favored nation status, entry into the World Trade Organization for China--and the general view that the United States cannot sacrifice its economic interests in this very important market in the future.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: James Lilley is a former high-ranking CIA official and a former ambassador to China in the Bush Administration.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: Right. I mean, that's--we knew independently how it works, but Lilley had given such a wonderfully succinct description of the way the system works that we wanted to quote him--he's a--as a former ambassador to China, a high-ranking official in the Bush administration, we felt that he gave our own argument more credibility. But basically, he's just confirming --what I've said. Access is the name of the game in China. Getting into the country, getting to see the people that have power is the name of the game. And those people who can provide that sort of access to American corporations that want to do business in China are worth the high consultancy fees that they get.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: Well, actually, in a couple of ways. First of all, the truth is that when we started to write the book we thought that we were going to be so far ahead of the curve on this subject that I was a little nervous about it. We thought that by describing the Chinese-American relationship as one of rivalry rather than one of essential cooperation with a few areas where we have some problems that we were going to so defy the conventional wisdom that we would be attacked by the China experts, by the upholders of what has come to be the conventional wisdom on China.

In the year that's gone by since we started with this, though, so much has happened. Public opinion has shifted so much, there's so much-there have been certain events, you know, like the Chinese involvement-or potential--possible Chinese involvement in the campaign finance scandal, more and more information about the--about China's activities in the United States, bad publicity for China on human rights, on Tibet--a subject that we haven't talked about yet but which I think is going to become more important in the next couple of years--that, in fact, we now find ourselves really kind of squarely in the middle of the debate with some people really --a good deal more frightened of China than we are and more alarmed about the China threat than we think it's reasonable to be. I mean, I--an anti-Chinese hysteria is not the proper response to this fundamental shift in the global balance of power.

And yet, in Congress and in some--I've heard in--I've been interviewed on some--you know, radio talk show hosts who will say something like, you know, `Richard, it's not only that China is a threat to the United States and the Pacific and Asia, a threat to American interests, but China wants to dominate the world, doesn't it?' And I have to find myself saying, `Well, no. No, we don't see any signs that China wants to dominate the world. And if it did dominate the world, it would probably be about 200 years before it had the ability to do so.' So we don't think we have to worry about that. There's plenty of real stuff that we have to worry about without inventing paranoid fantasies about China.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: Four.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: This is his first, actually. He's written a lot of articles, but he'd never written actually gotten to a book before this.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: We did it kind of in the old Time magazine way. I didn't tell you that when Ross was thrown out of China in '77 or '78 he joined the staff of Time magazine and sort of--when I went to Peking to open up the Time bureau there, he moved down to Hong Kong to take basically what had been my job in Hong Kong before. So we were both experienced at Time magazine journalism. We felt that one person had to do the writing, from beginning to end, in order to maintain stylistic consistency. So Ross provided sort of correspondence files--long, detailed files. He--as I said before, he actually has been covering the subject more closely than I have over the last decade or so, and had his hand and mind on data that I only knew about vaguely or, in some instances, didn't know about at all.

So he basically provided the information. I used that information and some of my own information to actually write the text from beginning to end. And then, you know, as chapters would come out I would send them down to Ross and Ross would send me back his often annoyingly long list of comments and corrections or complaints or suggestions for improvement, and then we would fight it out over the phone or over e-mail. Without e-mail we wouldn't have been able to do this book so quickly.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: I was in New York--and I still am--and Ross lives in Philadelphia.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: Yeah. I would certainly do it again with Ross. I think that the product is better--a lot better than--and certainly it was a lot faster than I would have been able to do on my own. I f--I believe that Ross agrees with me that, you know, the two of us working pretty much cooperatively and challenging each other was generally a constructive and a good process, produced a, I hope, pretty good book.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: That I've been for about two and a half years now.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: Well, when I very first joined the Times after--I--I left China for Time magazine and I went to work for the Times. I was on the metropolitan desk, where--where most people have to start at the Times. Even if they've been bureau chiefs in a couple of bureaus abroad, they start on the metropolitan desk, and then--with the hope of going abroad. And I was given a kind of minibeat, which was covering intellectual life in America. When I was in graduate school, I did a field of European and American intellectual history under H. Stewart Hughes, the famous historian--European historian. And so I sort of had the reputation in the Times of being somebody who could handle ideas and who knew about books and that sort of thing.

I then was sent to Paris and I spent three years in Paris as a Times correspondent there. And when I came back I--to the States I became something called the national cultural correspondent, which basically meant the person who covered debates in academia, I did author interviews, I wrote about controversies--political controversies, cultural controversies. And that eventually led to--that led to a book called "Dictatorship of Virtue," which was my--a book on multiculturalism and political correctness published in 1994. And then I had a leave of absence from the Times to do that. And when I came back, a slot in the book review section--there were three book reviewers and one of them retired, and I asked for and was given the job to replace him.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: They are generally about 1,000 to 1,050 words. A column and a quarter is...

Mr. BERNSTEIN: A year? I do mostly two a week, occasionally only one a week.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: The reviewers themselves do. I mean, we--we look at the catalogs that come in from publishers, we look at review copies and galleys that are sent our way, and draw up lists of books that look interesting to us, that each of us wants to do. And then we have a monthly meeting to adjudicate any overlap that might occur. And there's actually surprisingly little overlap because I think each of us has a sense of what the other one wants to do and there are plenty of books to go around.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: Oh, yeah. I mean, I--listen, having been reviewed a--for four books now and having, in some instances, been reviewed by people who I suspect didn't read the whole book, I know how important it is to give a book its fair shake. And the author wrote the whole thing, you have to read it. I won't say reviewing two books a week that I necessarily will read every word of every book. Sometimes it would defy the laws of physics to be able to do that if I have two fairly long books. But my eyes have been on every page of that book, and I think I have a pretty thorough understanding of what the book has tried to do and how well it's--it's managed that attempt.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: Basically, I think my theory is that I the reader ha--should know whether I liked it or not, that it shouldn't be-- just a description of the contents of the book. I should-- have some notion that this is a good book or this is not a good book, or this book has these virtues and these faults, and why I--why I feel the way I do about it--to make a case, one way or another, for the book while, at the same time, giving the reader a sense of what he or she is going to get if-- they read it themselves.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: No, I've never done that. It--that's sort of not done, generally, in the book review business. No author--no book reviewer has ever talked to me either before reviewing one of my books. You don't want to give anybody the impression that you are being influenced one way or the other.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: Yeah. I mean, the whole philosophy is different, in fact. The Sunday review is--the reviews are sent out to outsiders--novelists, people at the universities, other journalists. And usually the choice is made because the book review feels that they are--they have some expertise on the subject or they have some kind of literary expertise. When it comes to non-fiction, we are--the daily reviewers are very different. We are not reviewing books necessarily from--grounded in some knowledge of the subject, but we are people who presumably have some critical abilities and some experience about what makes a book good or not. Of course, when it comes to fiction, that's a little bit different. We all have some knowledge of literary history and probably have much of the same expertise as other people who review fiction. But--in other words, in non-fiction especially, it's the critical non-specialist in the daily vs. the specialist in the Sunday book review.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: I do a mix. I probably do about two-thirds or a little more non-fiction and the rest fiction. I--my own experience is in non-fiction. One of my colleagues, Michiko Kakutani, is one of the great specialists on fiction, a person with tremendous background and knowledge of the literary world so that I--I do feel that she's better at fiction than I am and my area of expertise really is in non-fiction. So I do prefer non-fiction. And I also, frankly, prefer to read history or books on public policy or essays to--to--we're not in a great moment in fiction in the United States, but I think that there's a lot of very interesting non-fiction being done.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: I work at home mostly. Sometimes I go to Starbucks coffee, sometimes I go to Barnes & Noble and sit at one of those tables that they have. Sometimes I go to the library at the--at the Harvard Club in Midtown just to get out of the house. But probably about 80 percent of my work I do at home.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: I've always been a pretty fast writer. I mean, you--have to be in journalism. I probably don't read any faster than anybody else, any person who does not review books for a living. I find that I-especially when it's a book that I like that I'm just reading it as a reader does, maybe in longer periods because I do have to read a book in two or three days and then write a review. But I don't read it faster than other people.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: Very rarely. I mean, I suppose on some occasions I'll just--somebody will have written a review and I'll have noticed it without really wanting to, but I try not to do that because I don't want my own judgment to be influenced by what somebody else has said. And often, probably at least half the time, it's impossible to do that anyway because, with the exception of some of the trade publications like Publishers Weekly or Kirkus Reviews, my review is going to be the first one that I could have read. We-I try to review these books pretty soon after publication. So often, we're out ahead of the Sunday book review and I don't read the book reviews in other papers. And usually when they come out, they come out after the Daily Re-the Daily Times reviews come out anyway.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: Well, I mean, that...

Mr. BERNSTEIN: This is not entirely a hypothetical. This happens. Well, it's not easy for people to get to me and most people don't try. I think most writers in the big leagues know that an--and it's the same for me--when I write a book, I--you know, I, with sweaty palms and pounding heart, put it out there on the market and hope for the best like anybody else. But I certainly am not going to call people up and call book reviewers up and say, you know, `Try to call attention to this book,' or something like that. And it's rare that people do that with me. Occasionally, an author will write me a letter. I get the occasional call on my voice mail. Of course, publishers send a lot of publicity material and they send copies of the books.

I have to try not to be influenced. I try to just review books on the basis of whether I think that they're going to be of interest to the reader, whether they're of--written by authors that are important and need to be reviewed as a matter of a newspaper's duty, whether they're on important subjects that the readership should know about. I try to make the decision on that basis and not on the basis of anybody who's managed to call me up or get me on the phone or put a letter into my hands for me to read.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: I was born in New York and...

Mr. BERNSTEIN: Yeah. Well--yeah, I was born in Manhattan on--my-my grandparents lived in Jackson Heights, Queens, where I lived for the first year and a half of my life. My father was a soldier in--in the Army in World War II, so he was gone until I was almost two years old. Then we moved to a little town in Connecticut called East Haddom, where we were poultry farmers. My father actually started a chicken farm mostly for eggs. And so I grew up in a little town in Connecticut, went to the local public school.

I'm reminded once--Fairbank, my professor at Harvard when I went--where I was--I went to the University of Connecticut as an undergraduate and then I went to Harvard and then graduate school to do Chinese and history. And Fairbank used to talk about how when somebody asked him how did he--how did he happen to go to China in the 1930s--late 1920s and early '30s and become interested in China, he used to say, `Well, I guess it's because I'm from North Dakota,' so I don't know. I suppose--people ask me how did I become interested in China, I tell them, `Well, I guess it's because I grew up in a small town in Connecticut.'

Mr. BERNSTEIN: I am not, no.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: No. No.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: Mm-hmm.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: Mm-hmm.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: Well, one of the things that we noticed and, in fact, that Ross Munro had already noticed even before we embarked on the project, was the pervasiveness and the ferocity of anti-American sentiment in China i-that China, in its state-controlled propaganda machinery and also in a lot of closed-door meetings in the top leadership, was treating the United States already as the strategic adversary. China wa--whereas the American-China lobby was talking about China as a long-term friend and partner with the United States, China's strategic leaders were presenting both to themselves and to the public the United States as a ri--as a strategic rival in the future.

And there are some, I think, really quite amazing quotations that we were able to find from the tex--from speeches that were made in closed-door meetings and Beijing in 1993, 1994. We go ahold--through a Hong Kong source, we got ahold of a letter that was signed by 116 Army officers to Deng Xiaoping, criticizing Deng Xiaoping for maintaining a kind of soft attitude towards the United States and calling for a tougher attitude towards the United States. And into that context comes this book "The China That Can Say No"--I think it was 1994--a big best-seller in China that was written by five young intellectuals who, in an apparent paradox, had been activists in the Tiananmen pro-democracy movement and had, after the crushing of that movement, taken on a kind of Chinese knavery--strongly nationalist, xenophobic position-somewhat quite paranoid about the United States--and had published this anti-American diatribe in--in that book.

We took it to be a sign of the strength of what we call a kind of nationalism of grievance in China, a sense that China's time has come. And the United States and the West are hectoring China, unfriendly to China, arrogantly lecturing to China about human rights and political values, lecturing to this 3,000-year-old great and glorious civilization which has a distinguished body of political philosophy and political thought of its own. Now there's an anger at the United States that's connected with China's sense of humiliation in the past and with China's ambitions to be a great power in the future.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: Yeah.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: Well, a majority of them. You know, it's kind of a glass full, glass empty--half--half-full, half-empty question. What I wanted to show in that sense--and I remember very well what was on my mind when I wrote that sentence--was that China is still, in many respects, a poor, backward and struggling nation, and that that has two implications. One implication is the one that China needs economic development and that its priority needs to be economic development because it still is very poor and that we shouldn't exaggerate the extent to which China has transformed itself economically, even though it has been growing at more than 10 percent a year for the last 10 years or so.

The other element of that is to show, really, how close to the edge a lot of people in China live. There's one of the misu--understandings of the book that we've seen in reviews and in questions has been the idea that China's prosperity and China's continued, fabulously successful economic transformation and economic growth rate is what--it will lead it into conflict with the United States. We think, actually, that it may be more likely and more dangerous that China's growth will falter and that there'll be social disorder in China--armies of unemployed vagabonds roaming the countryside and the cities une--homeless people, angry people looking to the government for something better. There's been a ro--a revolution of rising expectations in China.

China is the most unsettled great country in the world with a po--possibly, I think, even more unsettled than Russia, although the competition in that category would be pretty stiff between the two countries. It is that unsettled state, the possibility that things could go dramatically wrong in China that could lead the regime to ex--emphasize its nationalist sentiment, the idea of an outside enemy as the source of China's problems. And we think that they prepared a lot of the ground for this with the anti-American propaganda that is--that we noticed becoming very virulent and pervasive in 1993, 1994, and that continues to be so even today. Even when the relations looked like they're warming up and there's an exchange of visits that is publicly announced to be a sign of relaxation of tensions between the two countries, the propaganda, nonetheless, continues to depict the United States as the enemy.

Mr. BERNSTEIN: Thank you.