China Syndrome

Sister publication Inside U.S.-China Trade is reporting this week that a senior House lawmaker wants to pass legislation on satellite export controls to prevent the space industrial base from losing its export market share to foreign competitors. In a hearing, House Foreign Affairs terrorism, nonproliferation and trade subcommittee Chairman Brad Sherman (D-CA) signaled such a bill could ease controls on satellites going to countries other than China, but contain language blocking China from benefiting:

“We do have, I think, a need to legislate,” Sherman said in an April 2 subcommittee hearing. “One way is to kick this back to the executive branch” to decide whether satellite components should remain subject to the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), or be moved to the dual-use Export Administration Regulations (EAR), he said. Existing statute requires satellite components to remain on the ITAR’s U.S. Munitions List (USML), unlike most USML articles, which can be removed at the discretion of the State and Defense departments.

Sherman suggested he might allow the Satellite Industry Association (SIA) to draft most of the new bill, while permitting Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) to draft one chapter, “because I know what he’d write -- don’t let the Chinese do anything.”

Rohrabacher in the hearing stated that in order to be “really effective,” a bill reforming satellite export controls “has got to be a two-tiered approach” that treats China more harshly than the rest of the world. “If you don’t want export control reform to focus on China ... and you want to focus on how we can reform export controls generally, well, then you take China right off the table right off the bat,” Rohrabacher said.

Allowing satellite industry ties with China “will increase the potential of a country which is the world’s worst human rights abuser who looks at us as their most likely potential enemy,” Rohrabacher said. “Until that changes, we should have them regulated on a different level than we are regulating how we deal in the relationships that we establish with Brazil or England or Italy or any of these other countries like that.”

Rohrabacher argued that the industry’s cooperation with China, when it was allowed during the 1990s, resulted in China improving its Long March launch vehicle, which used to be “relatively ineffective and inefficient” due to frequent explosions. He argued the U.S. helped China improve its success rate from 10 percent, enhanced gyroscope technology on the Chinese rocket and allowed China to increase the number of payloads on each vehicle from one to three.