Amazon.com Review
As it flexes its diplomatic and military muscles, China is becoming an increasingly powerful player on the world stage. Richard Bernstein and Ross Munro's flawed but important The Coming Conflict with China analyzed the implications for American policymakers. Edward Timperlake and William Triplett also believe that a confrontation between China and the U.S. is inevitable. In Red Dragon Rising, they describe a series of worst-case scenarios, such as a bloody invasion of Taiwan. If the situation is as dangerous as they indicate, however, they have done America a disservice by the extreme political spin they give their arguments. They attempt to associate the Clinton administration with every evil of which China's unsavory Communist regime is capable. Photographs of Clinton and Gore talking with Chinese leaders are illustrated to prove their complicity with butchers--but what should we make of photos of Bush doing the same? A reference to Chinese New Year as Tet, a purely Vietnamese term, suggests the parameters of the authors' experience. In a disclaimer on the cover, they state that their details of the Tiananmen massacre are necessary to show the true nature of Communist China's government, but their lurid descriptions are gratuitous. This work is not balanced analysis or serious contemporary history but party-political poison. Red Dragon Rising is a cheap book, full of cheap shots (it is simplistic to hold China, for all its faults, responsible for "two million Cambodians killed"), whose political bias cheapens its important subject. Right-wing conspiracy theorists will love this book; others will not. --John Stevenson