In a front page article, the New York Times reported on March 6 that China had made "a leap in the development of nuclear weapons" by stealing secrets from the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Two days later, in a leak to the paper, Chinese American computer scientist, Wen Ho Lee was identified as the suspect, and under intense media and Republican pressure was summarily dismissed. No evidence against Lee has been produced to date, nor has he been arrested or charged. PNS associate editor Ling-Chi Wang chairs the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of California-Berkeley.

The China spy scandal currently hounding President Clinton involves neither money nor sex -- but it has apparently tapped into a rich reservoir of racism and national security obsession: communist China has not only infiltrated America's top-secret weapon labs, but stolen secrets allowing it to destroy all American cities.

Never mind the fact that the alleged incident took place more than ten years ago, on the Reagan-Bush watch. Never mind the lack of any credible evidence against the alleged spy, computer scientist Wen Ho Lee, after three years of intensive investigation. Never mind that Lee volunteered to be interrogated by the FBI with a lie-detector, without the presence of his attorney. Or that the leak behind the New York Times story came from a 700-page classified report prepared by a Republican-controlled committee specifically to see if the Clinton administration traded technology for political contributions.

The news media and the Republicans seem bent on feeding rumors to a jittery public.

For example, the Los Angeles Times reporter on China, Jim Mann, dug up a 12 year old story told by James H. Geer, former FBI assistant director for intelligence on the difference between Soviet and Chinese spies.

"If a grain of sand were a piece of information, the Soviets would bring a submarine offshore in the dead of the night and send a dinghy with men in it dressed in dark wet suits who would fill a bucket of sand and go back to the submarine and steal away in the dead of the night.

"The Chinese, on the other hand, would send 100,000 bathers to the beach in broad daylight and during the course of the day, each bather would pick up one grain of sand and bring it home with him... That's pretty much what 's happening."

The point of re-telling the story now is to suggest that Chinese spies are everywhere. By extension, they must be everywhere in the United States, with the help of the two million Chinese Americans and thousands of foreign students from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. In the context of all the "news" about Chinese espionage, Mann's story can only be intended to suggest that ethnicity ultimately determines loyalty.

This brings to mind immediately the indiscriminate evacuation an incarceration of 110,000 Japanese Americans immediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. In the same fashion, during the 1950s and 1960s, when China was declared enemy No. 1, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover routinely reminded Congress of the need to keep Chinese Americans under surveillance when requesting more funds for his agency.

So Lee has been judged guilty by racist paranoia and national security obsession, not proof and due process.

The sensational headlines and accusations obscure two very important issues: the debate over Clinton's China policy and the 2000 presidential campaign. The two cannot be separated. In his second term, "strategic cooperation" with China has become central to Clinton's foreign policy. China, in Clinton's view, has become too powerful and important to be ignored or treated with disrespect -- and can, in addition, play a constructive role in regional and global stability.

Most moderate Republicans share this view, but the party's conservative wing and some on the left of the Democratic Party see China as an emerging anti-American "evil empire." They advocate confrontation with China over issues ranging from human rights, Taiwan and Tibet independence, and environmental protection on the left and abortion, capitalist democracy, and trade on the right.

The Lee story also helps justify Republican proposals for massive increases in defense spending. They seek to isolate, if not suppress advocates of the China engagement policy. They advocate in short a new cold war consensus around a China containment policy.

This debate is already tied up in the race for the White House in 2000. Vice President Al Gore, who appears to have the Democratic nomination in the bag, will have to defend Clinton's China policy or back-pedal under fire.

But the struggle for the party nomination on the Republican side promises to be a nasty brawl. Conservatives are determined to capture the nomination with the help of their anti-abortion and anti-China stands.

When he visits the U.S. next month, China's Premier Zhu Rongji will walk into a hornet's nest -- a partisan struggle with no rules of engagement and no respect for truth. It is hard to see how U.S.-China relations can be improved when mud-slinging and gutter politics rule the day.