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CHINA'S
MILITARY MIGHT
Security report: Caution or confusion?
By David Isenberg
On July 15
the other shoe dropped. That was when Washington's
US-China Security Commission (USCSC) issued its first
annual report, The National Security Implications of the
Economic Relationship Between the United States and
China, to the US Congress. Coming just three days after
the Pentagon released its annual congressional Report on
the Military Power of the People's Republic of China,
this constituted No 2 in the one-two punch of those
seeking to position China as a growing threat to Taiwan
and US security interests in Asia.
In language
similar to that in the Pentagon report, the USCSC found,
"It appears the Chinese buildup is designed to forestall
pro-independence political movements in Taiwan and help
bring about an eventual end to the island's continued
separate status." Going even further than the Pentagon
report, it said, "Even now, at considerable cost and
with substantial losses, the PLA [People's Liberation
Army] Air Force could establish the air and sea
superiority needed for a successful invasion."
It is, however, unclear what impact either
report might have on either US government policy or
congressional lawmaking.
The report by the
12-person USCSC warns that China has become a leading
provider of missile technology to terrorist-sponsoring
states, despite pledges to the United States to stop
such activities.
Among the key findings of the
USCSC report:
China provides technology and components for weapons
of mass destruction and their delivery systems to
terrorist-sponsoring states such as North Korea, Iran,
Iraq, Syria, Libya and Sudan.
China's cooperation with terrorist-sponsoring states
is helping to create a new tier of nations with the
capability to produce weapons of mass destruction and
ballistic missiles.
The report also features
warnings about China's huge trade surplus with the US
and the damage the mainland's economic expansion could
do to the rest of Asia - hardly what members of Congress
or the US business community who voted in favor of
China's entry to the World Trade Organization want to
hear.
Indeed, one of the strongest condemnations
of the report is in the "dissenting view" of
commissioner William Reinsch, president of the
pro-business National Foreign Trade Council. He says the
report "adds to the level of paranoia about China in
this country and contains recommendations that could
make that paranoia a self-fulfilling prophecy".
The commission voiced concern over growing US
dependence on China for high-tech imports and notes that
China raised more than US$14 billion on US capital
markets over the past three years.
The report
called for giving the president the authority to impose
sanctions against countries that proliferate weapons of
mass destruction and for efforts to ensure that Chinese
companies involved in weapons proliferation are denied
access to funding in the United States.
One
might understand if the Chinese leadership is, to put it
politely, confused by this report. From Beijing's
viewpoint, the US administration of President George W
Bush must seem schizoid. One day Bush refers to China as
a "strategic competitor" and his national security
adviser, Condoleezza Rice, calls Beijing a "problem".
Then, after September 11, Bush announces that China
stands "side by side with the American people" in the
war against terrorism, while Secretary of State Colin
Powell insists that the US-China relationship "is back
on an improving track".
Indeed, last month the
president's father, on a trip to China sponsored by
Business Week, said, "I know I speak for our president,
his cabinet, and many more in the United States when I
say that we welcome the chance to move in the same
direction and make up for lost opportunities in the
past."
The commission did not mention events
that have had profound effects on Chinese military
doctrine, such as the 1998 US bombing of the Chinese
Embassy in Belgrade. That event, according to an article
in the autumn 2001 issue of Parameters, the journal of
the US Army War College, led to intense study of how the
inferior can defeat the superior. Or Presidents Bush's
statement in April 2001 that the United States had an
obligation to defend Taiwan, thus abandoning a long-held
policy of strategic ambiguity on the subject.
And considering that during the past year and a
half the US has pulled out of the treaty creating the
new International Criminal Court, withdrawn from the
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, scuttled an important
protocol to the biological-weapons ban, ousted the head
of the organization that oversees the chemical-weapons
treaty, watered down an accord on small-arms trafficking
and refused to submit the nuclear test-ban treaty for
Senate ratification, the Chinese might rightfully ask
who the United States is to criticize China for not
keeping "numerous multilateral and bilateral promises to
stop proliferation".
In contrast, the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace says China made
notable strides in non-proliferation in the 1990s by
joining formal arms control and non-proliferation
regimes, beginning with its accession to the Non
Proliferation Treaty in 1992, its signing (1993) and
ratification (1997) of the Chemical Weapons Convention,
its ending of nuclear weapons testing and signature of
the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1996. China has
also supported negotiation on a fissile-material
production cutoff convention, and it acceded to the
Biological Weapons Convention.
Some of the USCSC
report's assertions are questionable, such as the
statement that "China poses an increasing threat to the
region with its acquisition of Russian Kilo-class
submarines and the indigenously produced Song-class
submarines". Independent analysts say that the
acquisition of the Kilos is evidence that the Song
program is a failure.
(©2002 Asia Times Online
Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
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