WITH A FATHER who went to school with President Jiang Zemin and later worked for Tung Chee-hwa's family shipping company, the extensive Hong Kong and Chinese connections of United States President George W. Bush's Labour Secretary, Elaine Chao, are facing fresh scrutiny.
A recent issue of the centre-left The New Republic magazine has used Ms Chao's background, her fund-raising and relationship with husband Republican Senator Mitch McConnell in a bid to portray an American right-wing now too close to China in the wake of the recent Hainan Island spy-plane stand-off.
Central to the magazine's claims are Ms Chao's failure to disclose a seat on the board of a California company running a joint venture with a mainland state partner and Mr McConnell's shift from the Republican right to the more moderate pro-trade stance that has long pervaded the party's thinking on China. It extends the troika to the Heritage Foundation, a prominent right-wing Washington think-tank that Ms Chao joined in 1996 and that the magazine claims has softened its views towards China in recent years.
The article by John Judis, one of the magazine's senior editors, appeared amid a welter of opinion following the Hainan impasse. And although it has yet to generate much heat in Washington, it has stirred up a storm in Mr McConnell's home state of Kentucky. Apparently outraged, the Senator publicly warned of an outbreak of 'yellow fever'. He complains of a racist political vendetta linked to his marriage to a 'well-known American woman with a Chinese last name'.
Heritage Foundation President Edwin Feulner claimed the article was 'so full of holes it looks like defective Swiss cheese' and denied the think-tank had adopted a softer stance towards Beijing over the spy-plane stand-off and other issues. 'We didn't suggest dropping a 100,000-megaton letter of apology on downtown Beijing. But we did suggest a hardline US position,' Mr Feulner retorted, in a letter to The New Republic. 'Sure, we have toned down our rhetoric over the years . . . but that doesn't mean we're any less concerned about China's military'.
Acknowledging sources from 'conspiracy-minded' right-wing Web sites, Judis raises questions rather than confirms allegations on crucial points. 'Their shift toward accommodation with Beijing has happened quietly, with care to make sure connections between money and ideology are virtually impossible to trace,' he notes.