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Is sodomy with a stick worse than death?
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And this is only the beginning. The release of the Cox Report on Chinese espionage is certain to open a season of political jousting between Democrats and Republicans, which may well last through the 2000 elections. The report (most of which had already been leaked to the New York Times) details how three decades of spying has allowed the People's Republic of China to acquire all sorts of American technology for uses ranging from missile guidance to nuclear weaponry. The saving grace for the Clinton administration is that whatever the Chinese have been doing, they seem to have been doing at least since the Reagan years, and probably since the U.S. and China normalized relations in the mid-1970s.

The White House has been holding onto that fact like a life preserver in stormy waters. Notwithstanding the Clinton administration's efforts to save face, the issue is playing into the GOP's hands. For years Republicans have been looking for a way to make national security issues once again a central axis of American politics -- and the Chinese "threat" looks like a good way of doing that.

What makes the situation more complicated -- both for the Clinton administration and its more rabid political opponents -- is that, by all accounts, Rep. Chris Cox, R-Calif., and the committee's senior Democrat, Norm Dicks of Washington, ran their investigation in a laudably non-partisan manner. The final report eschews the wackier conspiracy theories linking Clinton administration campaign finance irregularities to weapons technology transfers. Instead, it provides a detailed account of how China successfully acquired American technology through a combination of old-fashioned spying and aggressive efforts to import so-called "dual use" technologies that can be put to use for military means.

Without a thorough knowledge of the various weapons technologies involved and the current state of U.S.-China relations, it is difficult to untangle the hype from the reality. This is particularly so since the waters have already been deeply politicized. Has the balance of power between the two countries really changed? Or is this just a bump in the road -- the normal process by which every country seeks to gain the latest technology by hook or by crook?

The answer turns on how you imagine the future of U.S.-Chinese relations over the coming decades. If the United States and China really are military opponents contesting future strategic dominance in East Asia, then every loss of American military technology really is a disaster. But if you imagine the future relationship to be more mixed -- with as much cooperation as confrontation -- then the picture looks different. Analysts like Korb, who downplay the importance of the technology transfers, point to the overwhelming American superiority in nuclear weapons and argue that any weapons technology gained by China must be seen in this light. At present the United States has an arsenal of some 7,000 nuclear warheads, while China has fewer than 25. After all, as Korb told me on Monday, the Chinese "have fewer nuclear weapons than the French."

Not everyone is as sanguine as Korb. Elizabeth Economy, a China Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who is a strong proponent of engagement, nevertheless calls the extent of the technology transfer "terrible."

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