Science & Tech Quote by Charles Foster Bass

Bass’s line is a neatly weaponized accusation: not that China stole, but that Washington practically held the door. The specific intent is political and prosecutorial. By pairing “knew” with “instead of,” he frames the issue as a willful dereliction, not an intelligence failure or a bureaucratic gap. The phrase “all but gave them an invitation” does the heavy lifting rhetorically: it converts a messy chain of export controls, corporate incentives, and interagency compromise into a single, damning image of hospitality toward a rival.

The subtext is aimed as much at domestic elites as at Beijing. Bass implies a government captured by complacency, ideology, or business interests - the familiar critique that globalization blurred the line between trade and strategic leakage. “Sensitive U.S. technology” stays conveniently broad, letting listeners supply whatever scares them most: military applications, dual-use semiconductors, aerospace, telecom. That vagueness is strategic; it widens the coalition of outrage while sidestepping the evidentiary burden of naming programs, agencies, or timeframes.

Contextually, the quote sits in the post-Cold War-to-post-9/11 era when engagement with China was sold as inevitable modernization and mutual gain, even as warnings about IP theft and technology transfer piled up. Bass is arguing that the problem wasn’t an adversary’s cleverness; it was America’s own policy choice - a choice that now looks, in hindsight, like strategic naivete. The line works because it flips the script from “they took” to “we enabled,” turning national security into a story of self-inflicted vulnerability.