IMPORTING FEAR VILIFYING CHINA SERVES NO END AND ALIENATES A USEFUL ALLY.

Byline: TOM PLATE

IT might almost seem like a game of geopolitical chicken: How far can we go in creating monstrous new fears about China?

We only have to turn the clock back to realize what is happening. The year was 1999, when the Cox Report on Chinese Espionage made red-letter headlines. The Chinese were (allegedly) spying everywhere, stealing U.S. technology for warheads and nuclear weapons from here, there and everywhere.

Why, that China-born (or maybe just Chinese) lab assistant is probably working for Beijing intelligence. Better get an FBI man on him!

It was a pretty good gig of a story for a while. The U.S. news media went for the scare big time. It took longer than I expected for cooler heads to prevail. But today, thankfully, even some of the marquee members of the Cox Commission that produced the hyped report sadly realize they were being used for crass political purposes and that the whole deal was the hype of all hypes.

Yes, "Red" China does spy on us -- and we spy on "Red" China, and the French spy on us and we spy on the French and Israel has been known to spy on us and we spy on Iran -- and every nation in the whole world is spying on someone or other. Let's grow up, children.

The latest China scare has been of a less technological and a more family-oriented nature. People can easily understand toys lathered over with lead paint -- not good of Santa (notice Santa always wears a red suit) to come down the chimney with those goodies, right?

Then there's foul seafood that isn't fit to be eaten even by fish. And then there are allegations about Chinese tires that are bummers and toothpaste that's not fit for human gums -- and so on.

Alas, we haven't arrived at the end of the allegation-stream yet. Earlier this month came reports of Chinese hacking into Pentagon computers. Exactly who the alleged hackers were in China and what the hack attacks were designed to garner for their country remains vague, to say the least.

And what else are they hacking into these days? Your very private e-mail to a loved one -- my Visa and Mastercard accounts (God forbid, speaking of red ...)?

You see, the thing about a scare is that it is almost always all scare and very little fact or perspective. Whether it's the Red Scare under McCarthy or the Cox Commission spy scare or the seafood and Mattel scare today, there is so much media smoke, you can barely breathe, much less think clearly.

Before long, sensible observers will point out that every country tries to hack into the computers of perceived enemies and even friends. We should accept as a given the fact that the Pentagon and/or the National Security Agency has been doing a nifty number of Chinese military and government computers. (If they haven't been, someone should be fired tomorrow!)

Don't get me wrong. Product safety and national security are important issues, not jokes for a comedy show. Every effort -- on both sides of the Pacific Ocean -- must be made to ensure acceptable quality standards. But tension always exists, especially in market societies, between the cost of manufacturer, shipment and sale, and the price tag that goes on the product. Safety specialists want the quality as high as possible. Big companies want the profit margin to be as big as possible. There is always going to be a conflict of interests between these two goals.

That's where government should come in. The private sector -- the retailers in the U.S. for instance, and the manufacturers in China, for example -- should practice ethical business conduct, and many of them do. But not all will. What's essential, therefore, is good governance -- we will always need it, for there is no free lunch or bargain toy, if the toy is going to give up little parts that your kid can choke on and the lunch is inedible.

Price is not everything. The Chinese, in their enormous export effort of the past 10 years, have made a significant contribution not only to their own economy (by creating jobs) but to ours (by keeping prices and thus inflation down). But now is the time to add quality control, and that is going to entail new costs.

There is no free government inspector, there is no free lead-free paint, and there is no nicely priced catfish if it is unfit to eat. The days of the near-free Chinese lunch is coming to an end.

The Chinese, for their part, seem to have recognized the grave stakes involved in looking unconcerned. They are reacting, but they could use more help, more sympathy and more cooperation from the U.S. side. This means less politicking, less hysteria, less hack politics.

It would be very sad to see the superpower of the 20th century and the potential next superpower of the 21st century going separate ways because of yet another unneeded China scare.