CIAO DATE: 04/01

The Cox Committee Report: An Assessment

The Cox report has attracted a great deal of public attention since its release in May 1999.This attention has mainly been due to its dramatic claims about the “theft” of U.S. nuclear warhead and missile technology, and the implication that this theft will allow China to build a far more modern nuclear force that will threaten the continental United States. A number of scientific experts have critiqued the Cox report precisely for these claims, arguing that the evidence presented in the report is insufficient even to reach what one member of the Cox Committee himself called a “worst—case” analysis. I am not a nuclear or missile scientist, so I happily leave the assessment of the scientific accuracy of the Cox report to my scientist colleagues, Pief Panofsky and Lew Franklin.

However, overlooked in all the press attention to the alleged “theft” of nuclear—related technology have been those parts of the report that deal with China’s politics and foreign/ security policy. These parts of the report, found mainly in the first chapter, are actually quite important to the overall message of the document. They establish a conceptual framework with which to analyze the long-term political and strategic relevance to the United States of all the other claims about stolen military technology. There has been no effort in the press or among pundits, however, to examine the accuracy of these parts of the report. So as part of our collaborative effort to assess the factual claims of the report, my role in this division of labor is to look at the description and analysis of Chinese politics and policy—making, particularly as it pertains to the Cox report’s claims about the relationship between economic development and military modernization in China. I also touch on the Cox report’s discussions of Chinese nuclear doctrine as this topic is one of the most difficult analytical issues for those who study PRC security issues. The bottom line is that the Cox report presents a highly distorted and poorly researched picture of the nature of politics and policy—making in China.

  Full Text of Paper (pdf)