China Policy Shift
The Bush administration's China policy is shifting noticeably to the left through several key appointments. First, President Bush announced Sept. 1 he was permanently appointing National Security Council staffer Dennis Wilder, a longtime CIA analyst with a record of leading mistaken analyses on China, as the senior director of East Asian affairs. Mr. Wilder had been acting senior director.

In another politically suspect move, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., the former Goldman Sachs executive, recently appointed Deborah Lehr as the lead staffer in charge of the new "economic strategic dialogue" with China. Mr. Paulson has been dubbed China's man in the Bush Cabinet by columnist Frank Gaffney because of his pro-China stance.

The White House announcement on her appointment described Miss Lehr as a well-known China specialist but failed to mention that she will be leaving the consulting firm of Clinton administration National Security Adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger to take the new Treasury post.

Mr. Berger, now head of Stonebridge International, was the architect of the disastrous Clinton administration China policy that gave us Chinese missiles with improved accuracy based on illegally transferred U.S. space technology, not to mention Chinese government payoffs to the 1996 Clinton re-election bid. Mr. Berger also pleaded guilty last year in his mishandling of classified documents from the National Archives.

"It is the most outrageous mistake by White House personnel I have ever seen," one administration official said. "She used to be at [the U.S. Trade Representative's Office] in charge of getting China into the [World Trade Organization], so she is a perfect panda hugger."

She also has worked at the National Security Council and was involved in export-control and trade-policy issues at the Commerce Department.

White House press secretary Tony Snow said in an e-mail that Mr. Bush makes China policy and that it is markedly different from President Clinton's.