"China apologists," mainly representing newspapers and academic haunts in Los Angeles, New York and Boston, claim that the rest of us are beating up on China merely because Beijing is into heavy-duty spying on the United States, stealing high-tech secrets and deploying enough missiles opposite Taiwan to blow the island off the map.

The China apologists say "everybody" spies, that the stealing of high-tech secrets is overblown and that missile deployments are China's right. Publicizing these facts will only promote an anti-Chinese hysteria, they say.

"What is extraordinary," comments Richard Baum, a China scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles, "is not the fact that some Chinese nationalists snoop around American research labs trying to pick up technical information on the cheap, but that some American journalists, politicians and congressional aides seek to portray such activity as a massive, coordinated Chinese government assault on American security. They whip up a Red scare that is far out of proportion to the problem's actual dimensions and then use the resulting, self-generated hysteria as a club with which to attack the Clinton presidency."