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China Blasts Cox Report as 'Prejudice,'
Suggests Data Are Available on Internet

By MATT FORNEY
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

BEIJING -- In its most detailed response to allegations it stole U.S. atomic secrets, China blasted a U.S. Congressional report as "typical racial prejudice" and went on to show another way anybody could snoop without spying: surfing the Internet.

The Cox Report, released on May 25 by a bipartisan Congressional panel headed by Rep. Christopher Cox of California, asserted Beijing stole secrets from top-security U.S. weapons laboratories, perfected guidance systems for its missiles with information from commercial-satellite launches and used a network of scientists, students and sham executives to filch technology.

"This is a great slander against the Chinese nation and is typical racial prejudice," said Zhao Qizheng, spokesman for the State Council, China's cabinet. Mr. Zhao argued that the Cox Report is so riddled with qualifiers -- "seemingly," "presumably," "if," "perhaps," "probably" and "perhaps in the future" -- that its "sensational conclusion does not hold water."

Daily Broadsides

Sino-U.S. relations are at their lowest ebb since the two countries established relations two decades ago. China's state-controlled media issue daily broadsides against U.S. "imperialism" for NATO's May 7 bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, which Washington says was a mistake. In an effort to remove positive images of the U.S., censors have removed U.S. television programming from the airwaves. Titles such as "The American Conspiracy," about Washington's actions in the Balkans, now crowd book kiosks. U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen has canceled a trip to China, and touchy negotiations over China's entry into the World Trade Organization, which sets global trade rules, are on hold.

The coming 10th anniversary of the bloody suppression of demonstrators in Beijing's Tiananmen Square will likely aggravate relations. China's parliament on Sunday deplored a resolution passed by the U.S. Congress last week calling on Beijing to investigate the decade-old crackdown. U.S. lawmakers were "trying to undermine China's stability" and "wantonly distorting historical facts," said a statement read by TV news presenters.

Mr. Zhao, the cabinet spokesman, left little room for patching up relations with the U.S., China's largest trading partner. He linked the Cox study with the attack on China's embassy in Belgrade by forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and argued that the report is part of a concerted U.S. effort to spoil relations with the world's most populous country. Both events, he said, "fan anti-China feelings, defame China's image and try to hold back Sino-U.S. relations so as to stop China's development."

Self-reliance was a common theme. Mr. Zhao insisted that China didn't steal U.S. technology in large part because spying is unnecessary. China developed atomic and hydrogen bombs by itself, he said, and doesn't need U.S. secrets to build smaller warheads that can fit on advanced missiles, as the Cox Report alleges.

Internet Demonstration

He then called upon the manager of a local Internet content provider to show how much information on U.S. weapons is readily available. "We were just having fun on the Net last week and found a lot of information" about U.S. weapons, said Fang Nan, project manager at the China Internet Information Center. He contacted the government with the information, he said, and the spokesman "invited us to help at the press conference."

Mr. Fang clicked to information on the W-88 warhead, which is a U.S. miniaturized nuclear bomb that the Cox Report says China developed after stealing the means of simulating its explosion on a computer. He also showed diagrams of the W-80 and W-81 warheads, including explanations of their fissile material.

Much of the demonstration took place on the home page of the American Federation of Scientists, a nonprofit organization created by scientists once involved in the Manhattan Project, which produced the first U.S. atomic bomb during World War II. The site does not provide enough information to build a nuclear device, despite such headings as "Bombs for Beginners."