Um, I did NOT use the word treason. Loral and the others DID violate laws (hence the multimillion dollar settlements). That's all I said. In fact, you can read my post as opposing Russ' claims of treason. I wouldn't even say that about Clinton, who I feel is a reasonably intelligent man who allows himself to be distracted by selfish trivialities and blinkered ideologies. In other words, he's just like everyone else.

As for the Chinese students you met, good for you. I went to college, too, and got to know Chinese students (especially in engineering). I still remember a tense week when a guy in our study group was awaiting word of a family member who was near Tiananmen Square when that whole mess went down (it turned out OK- just general communications breakdown).

Then you are ignoring what the pundits and policy wonks gleefully call The Big Picture. Loral ignored it, too, and paid a record $20 million fine. I don't think they were treasonous. I think they were naive and more than a little stupid.

As much as I wish it were, this is not a game or a science fiction novel (unless James P. Hogan wrote it :wink or movie with Bad Astronomy. This is a harsh reality with Bad Ideology. I would love to see a world where we all are cooperating, abandoning the fairy tales and hereditary hatreds of the past, and, say, terraforming the Moon or building space elevators something. But that's not the world, and it's not going to be the world for a very long time, if ever.

One thing to never forget is that their government is, shall we say, not quite as representative as others. I know our seems that way at times, but, well, that's silly even in the current climate. High ranking Chinese officials are on record as stating that "war the US is inevitable". This is their attitude while their counterparts in the West bend over backwards to talk of trade and friendly relations. This cannot be brushed off or ignored. They are a giant, powerful anachronism that the best and most educated minds of the West, at think tanks devoted to this kind of antiquated balderdash, are frequently unsure how to properly handle.

OK, maybe they'd develop all the tech on their own anyway. Fine. That's no excuse to sit back let people just hand it over to them. It's not the trivial textbook thing you claim. The basics are in a book, but the reality is a lot trickier (like exploding nosecones). A lot of it requires results derived from a huge amount of hard won empirical data - never forget that our vaunted physical laws are mostly approximations based on observational results. Let them do their own work. Maybe they'll gain more wisdom that way and really decide to use it for purely peaceful purposes.

But, hey, I still think open trade and normalized relations is the best thing. It might even be good if we went for some sort of cooperative effort.

That way we can build the secret autodestruct commands right into their systems should the need ever arise.