ABSTRACT
Critics of U.S. China policy have been enjoying unprecedented attention lately. Between those who want to get tough with China and those who want to be more accommodating, the Clinton administration's second-term project to consolidate and expand cooperative Sino-U.S. relations has been vastly complicated. Advocates of nearly every stripe have had a hand in distorting China's impact on American interests and Washington's policy record since the late 1980s, which, despite its bad press, has had important successes. Character assassination has been so rampant and policy critiques so politicized that the normal rules of evidence used to evaluate a serious, complicated set of policy choices have been among the first casualties. Lost, too, in many cases, has been any sense of the geopolitics of the problem-that cool-headed assessment of capabilities and motives that ought to be our first task, not an emotionally exhausted afterthought.
