| |
Russia joins the China
game
By Francesco Sisci
BEIJING - Over the past couple of weeks China
has signed multibillion-dollar deals with Russia,
bringing it economically and militarily closer to Russia
than it has been since the 1960s. And this has happened
with the tacit or active participation of the United
States.
First came the arms deal. On June 25 the
Washington Post reported that China was negotiating to
buy eight submarines from Russia worth some US$1.6
billion. It was part of a larger deal worth $4 million
that would include the delivery in four to five years of
two more Sovremenny-class destroyers (China already has
two), a new batch of S300 PMU2 anti-aircraft missiles
and 40 Su-30MKK fighter-bombers, among other items.
China has already purchased four Kilo-class subs from
Russia. The new weapons would significantly increase
China's ability to blockade Taiwan and challenge US
naval supremacy in the seas near China.
The deal
should settle Beijing's qualms over the US pledge in
April to provide Taiwan with billions of dollars' worth
of weapons, including eight diesel submarines, 30 AH-64D
Apache Longbow attack helicopters, 12 P-3C
submarine-hunting aircraft, four Kidd-class destroyers,
long-range radar systems and Patriot-3 missiles.
Yet, as Post journalist John Pomfret noted, the
Beijing-Moscow deal underscored "serious troubles within
China's domestic submarine-manufacturing program,
especially the multibillion-dollar program to develop
the Song-class guided-missile submarine. China tried to
develop the Song to replace its Romeo-class, called Ming
class in Chinese, attack submarines, introduced in
1962."
The Song submarine was first tried in
1995 but proved a failure. A new design came out in
early 2000 but it is incomplete and far behind schedule.
China was well aware of those problems but it
rejected the idea of buying more subs from the Russians
because it wanted to develop its own military industry
and the purchase of foreign subs would inevitably cut
resources from the development of its own arms.
Furthermore, China had problems in operating and
maintaining both the four Kilo-class subs it had already
purchased as well as its Su-27 fighters. The plane
pilots and the sub crews experienced serious problems
running these sophisticated weapons, and complaints
about the training received, as well as maintenance,
popped up.
To top it all, China cannot use these
subs to their full potential. They have no ability to
see "over the horizon", that is, the Chinese subs are
not hooked up to a system of satellites, planes or ships
that would convey information and allow them to see
their targets.
The Americans knew all this and
thus made no great fuss over the deal, but announced
early this month that they were toying with the idea of
providing extra missiles to Taiwan.
So why would
China give $4 billion to Russia to buy something it can
hardly use and that could put it on the spot with the
United States? The answer may lie in a second recent
development.
On Thursday
PetroChina Co signed joint-venture agreements with Royal
Dutch/Shell Group, ExxonMobil Corp and Russia's
Gazprom for a 3,900-kilometer pipeline linking
gas fields in western China with Shanghai
in the east. The companies are to
cooperate for 45 years, investing a total of $8.5 billion
in both the pipeline and in exploration and production.
The pipeline alone will account for $5.2 billion of
the total investment. It is expected that it
will eventually extend into Siberia.
At first glance
the rationale for the deal is apparent. China predicts
that its oil consumption in 2005 will be 243 million
tons, in 2010 it is expected to reach 296 million tons
and in 2015 it will reach 360 million tons. This would
leave China with a yearly oil deficit of some 200
million tons within 13 years. Other estimates say that
by 2020 China will need to import 400 million tons a
year.
At present half of its oil imports are
from the Middle East, but this can't go on if imports
are to grow at the pace being forecast. Therefore
Beijing needs to decrease its dependency on foreign oil.
In a forthcoming paper, Professor Zhang Xiaodong of the
Chinese Academy of Social Science argues: "One of the
effective strategies to decrease dependency on the
Middle East oil is to diversify suppliers of crude oil.
But the question is, where and who will be a potential
supplier that can steadily export oil to China at an
acceptable price? It is very likely to be in the Caspian
Basin."
This picture has been clear for years,
and for almost a decade Moscow has been wooing Beijing
about its plans to sell it oil and gas, but Beijing
resisted the temptation. Plans for a $10 billion oil and
gas pipeline from Kazakhstan were announced in 1996 but
saw no further development.
Now,
however, it is no time for hesitation. Russia last month
entered a political agreement with the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO) and thus its political
balance came to lean heavily toward the US and Europe
(see the Asia Times Online articles Mega-NATO:
China out in the cold, May 24, and How
China dropped the ball, May
31). China saw
itself being contained on the north by Russia and on the
east by Japan and Taiwan. Beijing therefore needed some
leverage to push Russia more toward China. The recent
gas and arms deals could be the first of such actions,
with others possibly in the cards, such as purchasing
electricity and oil from Siberia, something Moscow has
been pushing for years.
These deals do not
compromise in any sense Russia's political agreement
with NATO, and in fact give Moscow more weight in the
political alliance. While these are small bargaining
chips for China, which can't use arms deals as leverage
against US concerns about Beijing's rearmament, they
provide Russia the opportunity to claim to its NATO
friends that it holds the keys to China's security and
energy sufficiency.
In other words Russia is now
stronger vis a vis both NATO and China and is gaining a
central role if not as a great power, then as great
power broker.
However, there is a factor that
does not fit easily into this new formula: Taiwan.
The energy deal, and naturally even more so the
arms deal, puts pressure on Taiwan. While militarily
these weapons do not constitute a serious threat to the
US, certainly they open a new chapter in the rearmament
program in the Far East and create great tension between
mainland China and Taiwan. In other words Moscow, newly
acquired in the US allies' court, has helped deepen the
strategic tension around Taiwan, which is also linked to
the US.
One can look at this picture in another
way: the Russian arms in Chinese hands are not a great
threat, but justify the US arms sales to Taiwan. But
even if we were to choose this warmongering scenario,
the question remains what effect more weapons in the
region will have on local tension. In any case, whether
or not the arms are pointed at Taiwan, the Taiwan issue
is a solid argument for China to pursue its rearmament
program, which is ultimately worrisome for the US and
the West.
The message China might be sending the
US through these deals is that Taiwan is the great
divider on its relations with Washington, and if this
issue were to be resolved, Beijing need not rearm. In
other words, if the Taiwan issue were to be solved, the
whole construction of alliances surrounding China
including Russia and Japan could take a different shape,
and might not even need to exist.
So the Taiwan
issue and the general fear of China play in tandem, but
bring about a situation where confusing agendas are on
the same level: on the one hand Russia is part of the
NATO alliance, but helps an arms buildup versus Taiwan,
another US ally. Is Russia being a traitor? Hardly so -
the punishment would be rejection from its recently
acquired status in NATO. Is the US then playing both
ends of the table by turning a blind eye to Russia,
while selling its own weapons to Taiwan? But this would
be a dangerous game for the US that could lead to
escalation of tension in a region difficult to control
because of the complex balance of power in Asia, where
no precise fault lines around China exist, as Henry
Kissinger explained in his book Does America need a
Foreign Policy (New York 2001, pp 145-149).
The most likely scenario is a lack of
coordination in US policy, but with the new arrival of
Russia in the China picture, the rub falls on Taiwan. It
could be in Washington's best interest to favor a
dialogue between Beijing and Taipei that would pre-empt
the tension brought about by these arms deals, but here
the ball goes back into the Taiwan court. Is the
leadership in Taipei willing to stop playing
brinkmanship and start talking? And what else can
Beijing give to Taipei?
(©2002 Asia Times Online
Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
