2. The US-China security realm, already the home of a large and growing army of analysts, gamers, and congressional staffers on the US side and similar legions in China, is multidimensional. It grapples with technological change. It is beset by critical inadequacies of information that nurture unfettered speculation that sometimes feeds on itself.

3. The politically pregnant implication that because US economic engagement with China is beneficial to China it is bad for US security (leave aside that it is also good for the United States) is not going to go away, either. Those who take China's economic advancement as dangerous per se to the United States perceive thriving two-way business as a clear and present danger. They do not concern themselves any more today with the broader implications of its disruption than they did in the old days when they opposed Most Favored Nation or Permanent Normal Trade Relations on similar grounds.

4. Most of the research and analysis in this burgeoning field is unconcerned with US-China commercial and economic relations; primarily military, it sometimes touches on national economic strength as a strategic factor, but it does not spend time on the substance of US-China trade and investment, let alone on the benefits to the United States arising from that commerce.

5. Given the opacity of China's policymaking, politics, and military affairs to most American observers, creative speculation about China's ultimate motives and its most fundamental behavioral traits flourishes in this literature. This is the realm of pop Sinology, of high-sounding quotations from the fifth-century BC classic of military strategy the Sunzi Bingfa, of easy references to "Chinese culture." A typical example would be the familiar but unsupported assertion that China in the twenty-first century is bent on restoring the world-subduing grandeur of its imperial dynasties.

6. In the security dialogue, based as it seems almost always to be on the identification and assessment of threat, there is little analysis of the complex cycles of action and response between the United States and China that even a serious newspaper reader can discern. Analysis concentrates on what the other side does, with little acknowledgment of what the analyst's own side does. To their credit, some researchers have faulted such analyses for this very omission, but the habit of ignoring the interactive dimension of US-China (and US-Taiwan-China) security dilemmas persists.

7. In the United States, some of the security dialogue on China takes place in environments to which most business and other lay people have no access. But a lot of it is in the newspapers, the magazines, the think tank reports, and the Worldwide Web. In these publicly available materials, two characteristics stand out. First, duplication and repetition: one can read essentially the same article over and over again, especially if one stays within the closed circuit of analysts lashed to the same ideological moorings. Second, a paucity of authoritative consensus as to what the data mean and what the future holds. (One aspect of this is the divergence between the study of "capabilities" and the study of "intentions," in which some argue that, because intentions can always change from benign to malignant, only capabilities count, and others argue that all the hardware and software in the world won't amount to much if the political, administrative, and human resource systems behind them don't conduce to its effective use.)

8. This yields interesting results. Much of the security dialogue, including the USCC report for the most part, appears to take the form of conversations among the faithful: apocalyptic analyses cite the same experts as their sources, and are in turn cited by those experts in the next round of the cycle. Contrary argument, or testimony that fails to conform to the predispositions of the analysts, is ignored or disregarded. Looking in on this realm from the outside, one senses that before there are facts there is received truth. In that may lie genuine peril.

Does all of this mean that every US maker of plywood or tea kettles, or seller of auto insurance, or developer of office software should establish an in-house Department of US-China Security Research? Of course not. But on the basic question of the confluence of economic engagement and the national security debate, the very existence of the USCC report is a wake-up call.

The suggestion that American companies?whose $100-plus billion dollars' worth of annual merchandise trade alone is a central and fundamentally positive component in the overall US-China relationship?might have a legitimate interest not only in the outcome of the US-China security dialogue but in the way the dialogue is constructed will not be well received in many quarters, including some within business itself. It is a standard axiom in what I call "attack circles" that American companies, in the search for profits, will do anything?including disregarding US national security concerns?in order to make China's "bad actors" happy and to sell-sell-sell to them. The crisis of public confidence in corporate ethics in 2002 gives too-easy credence to that axiom, and opportunists have already seized on it.

At the same time, some polemicists and journalists will regard business expressions of concern, interest, or opinion on security topics as another "crossing of the Rubicon"?another case of business overstepping its bounds and trashing the barriers separating the commercial zone of legitimate concern from the non-commercial fields it has no right to inhabit.

But it is not business that has declared these demarcation lines null and void. While we should not inflate the significance of a single report that largely recapitulates hoary polemics, the broad policy issues at stake in US-China relations will endure indefinitely, and Americans in business have just as real a right to be concerned with them as do other Americans who make their livings measuring military sealift capacity or expounding on China's "Assassin's Mace Weapons," or deciding for the laity what the real size of China's opaque military budget is. If we are lay people on such topics, so be it; the issue is too important to be left to the priesthood alone.

China Business Review, Volume 29, Number 5, September-October 2002