The Justice Department's announcement that it was indicting five Chinese military officers on charges of stealing commercial secrets is, in one way, welcome. It shines a light on the vast problem of Chinese espionage directed against not only the U.S. government but U.S. corporations.
In another way, it is bizarre. In theory, these five Chinese officers might be nabbed in a country with an extradition treaty with the United States. But unless they inexplicably intend to visit the U.S., nothing will ever happen to them as a result of these indictments. The more likely outcome is a boomerang of some sort. The Chinese may choose, for example, to similarly target five prominent American intelligence officials, whom we might actually want to visit China.
Attorney General Eric Holder's news conference announcing these indictments went beyond the facts of the case to a parallel universe in which foreign governments hand over their spies because we think they should. Either the attorney general is an idiot, which is highly unlikely; or he thinks anyone listening to the news conference is an idiot, which is only slightly less unlikely; or he knows, but does not care, that anyone watching this charade will realize it was a purely symbolic gesture. Therein lies the most troubling feature of his remarks.
A hard problem like this poses two great temptations. One is the politics of gesture. To stamp one's foot, shake one's finger, glower and threaten are alternatives to hard things — banning some Chinese companies from the U.S. market, for example, or sabotaging information networks of Chinese companies that benefit from stolen American information. And they are cheap alternatives, to boot — unless one considers the seeping away of U.S. credibility a cost.
Americans are peculiarly prone to the second temptation: to focus on individuals rather than states and rely on law rather than policy. The problem is not five bad actors in the People's Liberation Army: It is Chinese policy.
Which is why the law is not the best instrument here. This is about coming to terms with an unscrupulous mercantilist state of unprecedented size, wealth and power. It does not accept our legal norms — and given Edward Snowden's revelations, we sound foolish standing on those grounds. That being so, action that inflicts some pain on sizable Chinese companies that benefit from stolen information, for example, makes a lot more sense than pretending that U.S. jurisdiction is both universal and legitimate. Even the attorney general cannot believe that it is.
Eliot A. Cohen teaches at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and was counselor to the State Department from 2007 to 2009.
