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THE STRUGGLE FOR
HARMONY
Part 2: Imagined
danger
By Henry C K Liu
Part 1: Myths and realities about China
In East Asia, Aaron L Friedberg, who recently
joined US Vice President Dick Cheney's staff as a deputy
national security advisor and director of policy
planning, thinks that China may seek to execute the
diplomatic equivalent of a pincer movement, applying
pressure from the north (the Korean Peninsula) and the
south (the South China Sea) in order to gain its primary
objectives at the center: reunification with Taiwan and
the neutralization of Japan.
After the success
of an initial gambit in the spring of 2000, the Chinese
will probably continue to press North Korea to negotiate
with the South, while at the same time attempting to
build themselves up as the indispensable intermediary.
In return for its continued help in delivering North
Korea, China may hope to gain some assurances from South
Korea about the role of the United States on the
peninsula. Even if Chinese strategists cannot extract
much in the way of concrete promises, they may
nevertheless come to believe that progress toward
reunification of Korea will unleash popular forces in
the South that will lead irresistibly to a US
withdrawal. Continued improvement in North-South
relations would also help to lull Japan and undermine US
efforts to build support for theater missile defenses in
Korea.
Yet recent events seem to suggest that
Friedberg's scenario of a Chinese threat appears to be
precisely what US official policy is moving toward in
its dealing with North Korea, particularly US dependence
on China to help resolve the Korean nuclear crisis. The
final outcome may well be the denuclearization of the
Korean Peninsula and a phased reduction of US troops in
Korea. Already the US is pulling troops out of the
Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) to farther south where they
would be out of North Korean artillery range.
In
his November 2000 article in the neo-conservative
magazine Commentary, "The Struggle for Mastery in Asia"
- a play on the title of a book by British historian A J
P Taylor - Friedberg suggested that while these events
are unfolding, the People's Republic of China (PRC) will
use a variety of tactics to aid the further extension of
its influence in Southeast Asia. Here, in contrast to
its role as peacemaker in Korea, it may show a harder,
tougher face. An increase in piracy (Friedberg suggests
perhaps supported covertly by China - a conspiracy
theory totally off the deep end) could provide the
justification for an expansion of naval activities in
the South China Sea, enabling the PRC to assert its
territorial claims in the area. Yet China's approach to
territorial dispute has been conciliatory and based on
the principle of fair sharing of mineral rights among
the parties of dispute.
Friedberg suggests that
China might support ethnic and religious separatist
movements in Indonesia and the Philippines in the hope
that, if these countries become racked by civil unrest,
they will be much less capable of acting to oppose the
growth in Chinese power. Such a suggestion is pure
fishing in troubled waters. Recent history has shown
that Chinese ethnic groups in Southeast Asia have
suffered state persecution in the name of Cold War
anti-communism at US urgings and approval.
Friedberg also thinks that after years of
tolerating Singapore's military cooperation with the
United States, China might begin to press that country
to choose sides or, at the very least, abandon its tilt
toward the US. Yet Singapore's increasingly contentious
problem with the United States comes from US moral
imperialistic intolerance on Singapore's Confucian
governance.
Friedberg thinks that if Chinese
leaders feel the need to flex their muscles, and perhaps
also to demonstrate the limits of US power and
commitment, they might pick a fight they think they can
win, most likely by provoking and then pummeling Vietnam
in what their military planners have called a quick
"local war with high-tech characteristics". Friedberg
should be reminded that China's 1980 punitive incursion
into Vietnam did not fare too well.
Friedberg
feels that the consolidation of China's position to its
north and south will set the stage for the final
resolution of the core strategic issues of Japan and
Taiwan. With regard to Japan, China's goal must be to
detach it from the United States without at the same
time stimulating a resurgence of Japanese assertiveness
and militarism. Despite their oft-expressed fears,
Chinese strategists may become less worried about Japan
as the country's population ages, its political system
continues to founder, and its economy fails to regain
its former luster. A Korean settlement that results in a
greatly reduced US role on the peninsula could yield a
corresponding increase in Japanese discomfort at being
the last major remaining outpost of US military power in
Asia. If so, the moment may have arrived for China to
offer Japan some kind of "grand bargain", perhaps
involving a mutual non-aggression pact and a pledge to
maintain freedom of navigation in the South China Sea in
exchange for a sharp curtailment or outright abrogation
of the US-Japan alliance. At this point, if not before,
Taiwan would have little choice but to accept the PRC's
terms for reunification.
By placing Japan and
Taiwan in the same security category, Friedberg blinds
himself from any insight with which to turn what he sees
as a struggle for mastery to a struggle for harmony in
Asia. If the United States ceases and desists in
interfering in China's internal affairs with its posture
on Taiwan, most of what Friedberg envisages as an
inevitable struggle for mastery in Asia between the US
and China would become manageable.
Friedberg
calculates that if the PRC is impatient, if it
underestimates the impact of its action on its
opponents, if it is excessively high-handed or overly
brutal, it could well wind up stimulating precisely the
kind of determined, unified response that could foil its
plans and blocks its ambitions. On this score, he has
nothing to worry about. Chinese leaders has been nothing
but patient. They took almost five decades after coming
to power before they took back Hong Kong from British
colonialism. Even then they allow Hong Kong autonomous
rule with a capitalist system for another 50 years. On
Taiwan, Chinese leaders have repeatedly said it may take
50 years to achieve peaceful reunification, provided
Taiwan independence remains a forbidden possibility.
Friedberg suggests it is conceivable that China
will mellow with the passage of time, or suffer from
domestic weaknesses that will prevent if from pursuing
its objectives in a consistent and effective way. And
most important of all, the United States could either
adjust its current policies so as to make an open
Sino-US confrontation less likely or, if conflict cannot
be avoided, prepare for its eventuality while
simultaneously preserving America's own position in
Asia.
Friedberg purposely refrained from
dwelling on US strategic options in the coming decades,
not because he thinks the United States is without
economic, military, or political policy options. Rather,
he thinks it is because the first order of business is
to see the situation plainly. Yet Friedberg's view is
that nations have more to gain by resorting to obsolete
struggle for mastery rather than harmony, that US-PRC
strategic competition, allegedly already under way,
could not be redirected toward strategic partnership for
the world's benefit. To sow more paranoia among US
policymakers, Friedberg claims that in recognizing these
dark realities, the Chinese are well ahead of the United
States.
Friedberg is the author of In the
Shadow of the Garrison State, in which he argues
that anti-statist inclinations prevented Cold War
anxieties from transforming the United States into the
garrison state it might have become in their absence. He
concludes that the "weakness" of the American state
served as a profound source of national strength that
allowed the United States to outperform and outlast its
supremely centralized and statist rival: the Soviet
Union.
Friedberg offers an analysis of the
challenges facing the United States in Asia. He thinks
the PRC will emerge as the major threat to US interests
there and will become, implicitly, the focal point of US
strategy not only in the region but in the world. As an
analyst with a long-range perspective, Friedberg plays
down the huge disparity in power between the United
States and China, a gap likely to continue in the
foreseeable future. He sees hostile strategic
competition as inevitable between the two nations.
This is understandable for an American analyst
to whom Spencerian Social Darwinism forms a pathological
basis for a world view in which hostile political
competition is considered as natural between nations.
Yet the history of China's foreign relations cannot be
fully understood within the context of Western political
thought. True, for the past century and a half, China
has been a victim of intrusive Western imperialism and
its modern history has been one of combating Western
imperialism to restore mastery of its own fate. But the
idea that a strong and prosperous China would also take
on imperialistic intentions is an exclusively Western
notion. Napoleon Bonaparte, who thought war was the
purpose of civilization, was reported to have warned
that China was a sleeping giant that would be much
feared by the world if awakened. Yet there is little in
Chinese history that would support the thesis that a
strong China would be an imperialistic China.
Between 1405 and 1433, a period when China
possessed the world's most advanced seafaring
technology, the navigator/sailor Zheng He explored the
seas not for imperialistic expansion but to satisfy the
Ming Court's demand for exotic commodities from distant
lands. Zheng even brought back from Africa giraffes,
ostriches and zebras. But the Ming Court abruptly
stopped Chinese navigational adventure in 1433, after
the death of Zheng. This history baffles Western
observers, whose later experience in the West associates
navigational adventure with empire-building.
Zheng He, a Muslim Chinese, was born as Ma He in
1371 to a poor ethnic Hui (Chinese Muslim) family in
Yunnan province, southwestern China. His grandfather and
father once made an overland pilgrimage to Mecca. Zheng
sailed throughout the Indian Ocean, retracing some of
the same routes taken by Ibn Battuta, the Arabic
geographer, whose historic visit to China in 1346 during
the Mongol Yuan Dynasty appeared in court records. Zheng
went to East Africa, Mecca, the Persian Gulf, and
throughout the Indian Ocean decades before Christopher
Columbus sailed for America in 1492 and Vasco da Gama
made his first voyage to India in 1497.
For 28
years (1405-33), Zheng commanded seven fleets that
visited 37 countries, through Southeast Asia to faraway
Africa and Arabia. In 1420 the Ming navy dwarfed the
combined navies of Europe. A great fleet of big ships,
with nine masts and manned by 500 men each, set sail in
July 1405, almost a century before Columbus's voyage to
America. There were great treasure ships more than 90
meters long and 45m wide, the biggest being 134m long
and 57m across, capable of carrying 1,000 passengers.
Columbus's Santa Maria was only 26m long. Most of the
ships were built at the Dragon Bay shipyard near
Nanjing, the remains of which can still be seen today.
Zheng He's first fleet included 27,870 men on
317 ships, including sailors, clerks, interpreters,
artisans, medical men and meteorologists, but only a
small number of soldiers. On board were large quantities
of cargo including silk goods, porcelain, gold and
silverware, copper utensils, iron implements and cotton
goods and books. The fleet sailed along China's coast to
Champa close to Vietnam and, after crossing the South
China Sea, visited Java and Sumatra and reached Sri
Lanka by passing through the Strait of Malacca. On the
way back it sailed along the west coast of India and
returned home in 1407. Envoys from Calcutta in India and
several countries in Asia and the Middle East also
boarded the ships to pay visits to China. Zheng He's
second and third voyages taken shortly after followed
roughly the same route.
In the autumn of 1413,
Zheng He set out with 30,000 men to Arabia on his fourth
and most ambitious voyage. From Hormuz he coasted around
the Arabian boot to Aden at the mouth of the Red Sea.
The arrival of the fleet caused a sensation in the
region, and 19 countries sent ambassadors to board
Zheng's ships with gifts for Emperor Yong Le. In 1417,
after two years in Nanjing and touring other cities, the
visiting foreign envoys were escorted home by Zheng. On
this trip, he sailed down the east coast of Africa,
stopping at Mogadishu, Matindi, Mombassa and Zanzibar
and may have reached Mozambique. The sixth voyage in
1421 also went to the African coast. Loaded with Chinese
silk and porcelain, the junks visited ports around the
Indian Ocean. Here, Arab and African merchants exchanged
spices, ivory, medicines, rare woods, and pearls so
eagerly sought by the Chinese imperial court. Zheng He
died in the 10th year of the reign of the Ming Emperor
Xuande (1433) and was buried in the southern outskirts
of Bull's Head Hill (Niushou) in Nanjing. Inscribed on
top of the tomb are the Arabic words "Allahu Akbar"
("God is Great"). Unlike Columbus and Vasco de Gama,
Zheng He did not found any colonies for a Chinese
empire.
China never had an empire structure in
the Western concept of the term as exemplified by the
Roman Empire or the British Empire. Chinese territorial
expansion was more along the line of the European Union,
where the eager peripheral aspired to join a reluctant
center for obvious benefits. Much of the historical
expansion of China took place when China was under
foreign occupation, such as the Mongolian Yuan Dynasty
and the Manchurian Qing Dynasty. The ruling dynastic
houses of foreign origin were inevitably assimilated
into Chinese culture, much like the way the House of
Windsor in Britain adopted British culture. In this
respect, the Chinese Empire was different than the
Austro-Hungarian Empire in which the diverse population
was never homogenized and the ruling house remained
exclusively Germanic in both ethnicity and culture. Nor
was it similar to the British Empire, for the same
reason. Whenever China was strong and prosperous in
history, Chinese foreign policy tended to be
isolationist, fending off intruders, rather than
expansionist for conquest. Whenever China was weak and
poor, foreign partition plots took the form of thinly
disguised separatism movements.
Friedberg touts
the George Schultz line of viewing Japan as central to
US policy in Asia. Unlike Richard Nixon and Henry
Kissinger, whose balance-of-power realpolitik world view
focused on China along the line of Franklin D Roosevelt,
Ronald Reagan and Schultz favored Japan in anticipation
of a future conflict between that country and China.
They point to postwar history when the US sided with
China until 1949, and with Japan thereafter, yielding
dramatically preferable results from the US perspective.
Of course, they ignore the argument that less paranoia
in US policy toward communism in Asia, and in China
particularly, would have yielded very different and
preferable outcomes. After all, Friedberg himself built
his academic reputation by developing the theme that the
absence of a garrison-state mentality in the United
States was largely responsible for its ultimate success
in the Cold War. By the same logic, if the US had not so
relentlessly imposed a garrison-state mentality in
global communism, it might have led to the success of
socialism in much of the world and would have
contributed positively to the security of the US.
Friedberg believes that China can intimidate
Japan, forcing it to be cooperative or at least neutral
toward China. Yet he does not explain why this should be
such a danger to the United States. US policy aims at
rearming Japan against China. But this is a double-edged
sword. In the triangular economic relationship, there is
more fundamental trade conflict between Japan and the US
than between Japan and China or the US and China. In
fact, Japan and the US are competing headlong to build
bilateral trade relations with China at the other's
expense. During his first visit to China as secretary of
state after replacing Al Haig, Schultz dismissed
complaints from US executives in Shanghai that
Washington did not provide comparable support for US
businesses in China as Japan did for its corporations,
by telling them to move to Japan if they did not like US
policy on China.
Postwar China has not been
acting in its own best interest with its fixation on
historical Japanese militarism. With China evolving as a
legitimate power, Japanese military revival will find US
dominance in Asia a more ready target. Japan has more to
settle with the United States, which defeated this proud
rising nation, occupied it and dominated it for half a
century. The US torpedoed Japan's East Asia
Co-Prosperity Ring. Japan's historical relationship with
China is one of apologetic guilt while its national
psyche toward the US is one of latent contempt, a
sentiment narcissistic Americans find easy to overlook.
There is a preponderance of objective basis for
symbiotic cooperation between Japan and China. Japanese
attitude toward China's semi-colonial status under
Western imperialism had much to do with its aggression
toward China. From Japan's point of view, it was merely
fulfilling its destiny as a modern power and claiming
its share in the de facto partition of a weak, decrepit
China. Japan's World War II aggression is Asia was based
on a Western imperialist model that Japan adopted
beginning with the Meiji Restoration. Once China threw
off the yoke of Western imperialism, Japan restored its
historical respect for China as its cultural
fountainhead. The logic for symbiotic cooperation
between China and Japan is so strong and obvious and the
cultural affinity between the two nations so pervasive
and natural that only US self-indulgence would support
any fantasy that Japan is a natural ally of the United
States. Japan is not Britain. The future of Asia will be
determined in Northeast Asia, where power is
concentrated, not in South and Southeast Asia, where
Friedberg has assigned excessive weight. It certainly
will not be determined in Washington. Taiwan is an issue
entirely manufactured by US policy. Friedberg rightly
sees Taiwan as a possible fuse for US-China conflict.
The United States hopes that a pro-Japan foreign policy
can strengthen US capabilities in its potential military
confrontation with China over Taiwan. Yet Japan may take
a similar position as Turkey, which refused the use of
US bases in Turkey to open a northern front in the
renewed Iraq War, or the position on US bases taken by
Saudi Arabia. Japan will reinforce its insistence that
US bases in Japan be use only to defend Japan proper,
and not for supporting or expanding US interests in
Asia.
Part of the blow-back of economic
globalization is the divergence of the interest of
US-based multinational corporations and financial
institutions from US national interest and
foreign-policy objectives put forth by US statism.
Whereas the state apparatus of the United States sees
globalization in terms of geopolitical power politics,
the private sector is working hard to purge its
globalization efforts of a neo-imperialistic tinge.
US-based multinationals see Washington as obstructionist
in free trade, not much different from any other foreign
government pursuing economic nationalism. From IBM to
GM, from CitiGroup to Loral Space and Communications, a
hostile view toward US high-tech sanction toward any
country, particularly China, and a benign view of China
as a huge market dominate. To the private sector, huge
market exceptionism is basic gospel. For neo-liberals,
trade is a weapon to disarm potential enemies, not the
denial of trade. Further, the current neo-con cooption
of US foreign policy may well be a merely temporary
distortion of traditional US values. The Bush
administration came to power through a contested narrow
victory decided by the judiciary. There is much evidence
that this is a government that represents a minority
extremist position taking advantage of a new paranoia
generated by the attacks of September 11.
Friedberg overstates China's economic challenge
to the United States. China has committed itself to
participate in globalization and worked overtime to
prepare for and accommodate membership in the World
Trade Organization. China's trade surplus with the US is
in fact strengthening the dollar economy at the expense
of the yuan economy, a fact of dollar hegemony that
Chinese economists have been slow to understand. A
sudden halt in US-China trade would adversely impact the
US more severely than China. It might produce the
salutary effect of forcing China to focus more on
domestic development through state credit rather than
through foreign capital and to shift from its excessive
dependence of export. Friedberg's understanding of
international economics is less than profound.
A
war with China will not remain a regional war. The
painful lessons of the Korean and the Vietnam Wars have
not been forgotten by the US military, yet a war with
China may be put an end to the post-Cold War Pax
Americana.
Timing is crucial in military
balance. China's technological capacity is advancing,
but Beijing has other priorities and is not investing
heavily in its military. It has far to go to realize
most of the capabilities Friedberg postulates - except
in the realm of missiles. There, China has long been
able to strike the US with nuclear weapons and can
easily offset the proposed NMD system.
Friedberg
also correctly observes that Chinese missile tests in
the Taiwan Strait in 1995-96 heightened the perceived
threat posed by missiles with non-nuclear warheads.
Because of the short distances involved (90 miles),
China has many technical options, and it is unclear that
Taiwan's acquisition of TMD would be very effective
against them. Friedberg sees an opening for arms control
to deal with this problem. An agreement by Taiwan not to
deploy missile defenses if the mainland restricts the
number of missiles deployed against it might be backed
up by an ability (with US help) to put such defenses
quickly in place. Yet the three communiques that form
the basis of US-China rapprochement already include
arms-reduction clauses for Taiwan, which the United
States has not observed in recent years.
According to Lawrence Korb, formerly assistant
secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, the
United States should understand that Beijing's ambition
to build a powerful military to complement its growing
economy and strategic positions in Asia is not
necessarily to America's detriment. In an article in
Insight magazine in 2000, he wrote: "China remains and
will remain too weak to challenge US power even in its
own neighborhood. Consider the gap between China's
acknowledged $20 billion defense budget (or even the
estimated $45 [billion] to $150 billion) and the US
defense budget of about $400 billion. And this does not
even take into account the immense and growing
technological gap between the militaries of the two
countries or the strength enjoyed by the United States
because of its multiple alliances. China is not, and is
extremely unlikely to be, a strategic military threat
the way the Soviet Union once was."
Personal and
political liberties in China have greatly increased as
the economy improves and as the nation feels more
secure. Friedberg says it is "conceivable" that a richer
China might not become more benign, but many other US
analysts suggest that it will be. The essence of China
politics is Confucian benevolence, not force. The Tang
Dynasty of the 7th century, generally recognized as the
height of Chinese culture, was known for its religious
tolerance at a time when the idea of religious freedom
was still heresy in Europe.
China hopes to be
able to reunite Taiwan through peaceful means. Even the
official Taiwan position envisages an eventual voluntary
return to the motherland under mutually acceptable
political conditions. A more democratic China is
inevitable, though it may not be in the US mode, as soon
as the US ceases its imposition of a garrison-state
mentality on China. A conflict initiated by the United
States to address the effects of a garrison-state
mentality imposed by its policies would be an enormous
tragedy of self-defeatism, and would also fail to
achieve its perverted purpose.
Other US policy
analysts, such as Michael Swaine of Stanford University,
disagree with Friedberg that the existing competitive
aspects of the Sino-US relationship now constitute a
nascent military rivalry for continental dominant. It is
quite possible, perhaps even likely, that China will not
acquire the capabilities or develop the focused intent
to struggle with the United States for mastery in Asia.
This possibility - and the consequent need for a US
policy that is designed both to encourage a cooperative
China and to cope with a more assertive one - is one
that Friedberg should have more fully acknowledged and
assessed.
Friedberg insists that deserving
closer scrutiny is the notion that only by taking a soft
line can the United States discourage aggressive
external behavior and promote desirable domestic change.
He argues that acknowledging real dangers is a necessary
first step to avoiding them, as well as in preparing to
cope with them if they should nevertheless come to pass.
Refusing or neglecting to do so, according to Friedberg,
is a far more likely formula for disaster.
Yet
there is a clear line between reality and paranoia.
Friedberg needs to rethink his proposition by borrowing
another quote from historian Taylor: "Once men imagine a
danger, they soon turn it into a reality."
Henry C K Liu is chairman of the New
York-based Liu Investment Group.
(Copyright
2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved.
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