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The real 'China
threat'
By Chalmers Johnson
I recall 40 years ago, when I was a new
professor working in the field of Chinese and
Japanese international relations, that Edwin O
Reischauer once commented, "The great payoff from
our victory of 1945 was a permanently disarmed
Japan." Born in Japan and a Japanese historian at
Harvard, Reischauer served as US ambassador to
Tokyo in the administrations of presidents John
Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Strange to say, since
the end of the Cold War in 1991 and particularly
under the administration of George W Bush, the
United States has been doing everything in its
power to encourage and even accelerate Japanese
rearmament.
Such a development promotes
hostility between China and Japan, the two
superpowers of East Asia, sabotages possible
peaceful solutions in those two problem areas,
Taiwan and North Korea, left over from the Chinese
and Korean civil wars, and lays the foundation for
a possible future Sino-American conflict that the
United States would almost surely lose. It is
unclear whether the ideologues and war lovers of
Washington understand what they are unleashing - a
possible confrontation between the world's
fastest-growing industrial economy, China, and the
world's second-most-productive, albeit declining,
economy, Japan; a confrontation that the United
States would have caused and in which it might
well be consumed.
Let me make clear that
in East Asia we are not talking about a little
regime-change war of the sort that Bush and Vice
President Richard Cheney advocate. After all, the
most salient characteristic of international
relations during the last century was the
inability of the rich, established powers - Great
Britain and the United States - to adjust
peacefully to the emergence of new centers of
power in Germany, Japan and Russia. The result was
two exceedingly bloody World Wars, a 45-year-long
Cold War between Russia and the "West", and
innumerable wars of national liberation (such as
the quarter-century-long one in Vietnam) against
the arrogance and racism of European, US and
Japanese imperialism and colonialism.
The
major question for the 21st century is whether
this fateful inability to adjust to changes in the
global power structure can be overcome. Thus far
the signs are negative. Can the United States and
Japan, today's versions of rich, established
powers, adjust to the re-emergence of China - the
world's oldest continuously extant civilization -
this time as a modern superpower? Or is China's
ascendancy to be marked by yet another world war,
when the pretensions of European civilization in
its US and Japanese projections are finally put to
rest? That is what is at stake.
Alice
in Wonderland policies
China, Japan and the
United States are the three most productive
economies on Earth, but China is the
fastest-growing (at an average rate of 9.5% per
annum for more than two decades), whereas both the
US and Japan are saddled with huge and mounting
debts and, in the case of Japan, stagnant growth
rates. China is today the world's sixth-largest
economy (the US and Japan being first and second)
and America's third-largest trading partner after
Canada and Mexico. According to Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) statisticians in their
Factbook 2003, China is actually already
the second-largest economy on Earth measured on a
purchasing-power-parity basis - that is, in terms
of what China actually produces rather than prices
and exchange rates. The CIA calculates the United
States' gross domestic product (GDP) - the total
value of all goods and services produced within a
country - for 2003 as US$10.4 trillion and China's
as $5.7 trillion. This gives China's 1.3 billion
people a per capita GDP of $4,385.
Between
1992 and 2003, Japan was China's largest trading
partner, but in 2004 Japan fell to third place,
behind the European Union and the United States.
China's trade volume for 2004 was $1.2 trillion,
third in the world after the US and Germany, and
well ahead of Japan's $1.07 trillion. China's
trade with the US grew some 34% in 2004 and has
turned the California cities of Los Angeles, Long
Beach and Oakland into the three busiest seaports
in the United States.
The truly
significant trade development of 2004 was the EU's
emergence as China's biggest economic partner,
suggesting the possibility of a Sino-European
cooperative bloc confronting a less vital
Japanese-American one. As the Financial Times
observed, "Three years after its entry into the
World Trade Organization [in 2001], China's
influence in global commerce is no longer merely
significant. It is crucial." For example, most
Dell computers sold in the US are made in China,
as are the digital-video-disc players of Japan's
Funai Electric Co. Funai annually exports some 10
million DVD players and television sets from China
to the United States, where they are sold
primarily in Wal-Mart stores. China's trade with
Europe in 2004 was worth $177.2 billion, with the
United States $169.6 billion, and with Japan
$167.8 billion.
China's growing economic
weight in the world is widely recognized and
applauded, but it is China's growth rates and
their effect on the future global balance of power
that the US and Japan, rightly or wrongly, fear.
The CIA's National Intelligence Council forecasts
that China's GDP will equal Britain's in 2005,
Germany's in 2009, Japan's in 2017, and the United
States' in 2042. But Shahid Javed Burki, former
vice president of the World Bank's China
Department and a former finance minister of
Pakistan, predicts that by 2025 China will
probably have a GDP of $25 trillion in terms of
purchasing power parity and will have become the
world's largest economy, followed by the United
States at $20 trillion and India at about $13
trillion - and Burki's analysis is based on a
conservative prediction of a 6% Chinese growth
rate sustained over the next two decades. He
foresees Japan's inevitable decline because its
population will begin to shrink drastically after
about 2010. Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs
reports that the number of men in Japan already
declined by 0.01% in 2004; and some demographers,
it notes, anticipate that by the end of the
century the country's population could shrink by
nearly two-thirds, from 127.7 million today to 45
million, the same population it had in 1910.
By contrast, China's population is likely
to stabilize at approximately 1.4 billion people
and is heavily weighted toward males. (According
to Howard French of the New York Times, in one
large southern city the government-imposed
one-child-per-family policy and the availability
of sonograms have resulted in a ratio of 129 boys
born for every 100 girls; 147 boys for every 100
girls for couples seeking second or third
children. The 2000 census for the country as a
whole put the reported sex ratio at birth at about
117 boys to 100 girls.) Chinese domestic economic
growth is expected to continue for decades,
reflecting the pent-up demand of its huge
population, relatively low levels of personal
debt, and a dynamic underground economy not
recorded in official statistics. Most important,
China's external debt is relatively small and
easily covered by its reserves; whereas both the
US and Japan are approximately $7 trillion in the
red, which is worse for Japan, with less than half
the US population and economic clout.
Ironically, part of Japan's debt is a
product of its efforts to help prop up America's
global imperial stance. For example, in the period
since the end of the Cold War, Japan has
subsidized America's military bases in Japan to
the staggering tune of approximately $70 billion.
Refusing to pay for its profligate consumption
patterns and military expenditures through taxes
on its own citizens, the United States is
financing these outlays by going into debt to
Japan, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and
India. This situation has become increasingly
unstable as the US requires capital imports of at
least $2 billion per day to pay for its
governmental expenditures. Any decision by East
Asian central banks to move significant parts of
their foreign-exchange reserves out of the US
dollar and into the euro or other currencies to
protect themselves from dollar depreciation would
produce the mother of all financial crises.
Japan still possesses the world's largest
foreign-exchange reserves, which at the end of
January stood at around $841 billion. But China
sits on a $609.9 billion pile of dollars (as of
the end of 2004), earned from its trade surpluses
with the US. Meanwhile, the US government and
Japanese followers of George W Bush insult China
in every way they can, particularly over the
status of China's breakaway province, the island
of Taiwan. The distinguished economic analyst
William Greider recently noted, "Any profligate
debtor who insults his banker is unwise, to put it
mildly ... American leadership has ... become
increasingly delusional - I mean that literally -
and blind to the adverse balance of power
accumulating against it."
The Bush
administration is unwisely threatening China by
urging Japan to rearm and by promising Taiwan
that, should China use force to prevent a
Taiwanese declaration of independence, the US will
go to war on its behalf. It is hard to imagine
more shortsighted, irresponsible policies, but in
light of the Bush administration's Alice in
Wonderland war in Iraq, the acute anti-Americanism
it has generated globally, and the politicization
of America's intelligence services, it seems
possible that the US and Japan might actually
precipitate a war with China over Taiwan.
Japan rearms
Since the end of
World War II, and particularly since gaining its
independence in 1952, Japan has subscribed to a
pacifist foreign policy. It has resolutely refused
to maintain offensive military forces or to become
part of America's global military system. Japan
did not, for example, participate in the 1991 war
against Iraq, nor has it joined collective
security agreements in which it would have to
match the military contributions of its partners.
Since the signing in 1952 of the Japan-United
States Security Treaty, the country has officially
been defended from so-called external threats by
US forces located on some 91 bases on the Japanese
mainland and the island of Okinawa. The US 7th
Fleet even has its home port at the old Japanese
naval base of Yokosuka. Japan not only subsidizes
these bases but subscribes to the public fiction
that the US forces are present only for its
defense. In fact, Japan has no control over how
and where the US employs its land, sea and air
forces based on Japanese territory, and the
Japanese and US governments have until quite
recently finessed the issue simply by never
discussing it.
Since the end of the Cold
War in 1991, the United States has repeatedly
pressured Japan to revise Article 9 of its
constitution (renouncing the use of force except
as a matter of self-defense) and become what US
officials call a "normal nation". For example,
last August 13, then secretary of state Colin
Powell stated baldly in Tokyo that if Japan ever
hoped to become a permanent member of the United
Nations Security Council it would first have to
get rid of its pacifist constitution. Japan's
claim to a Security Council seat is based on the
fact that, although its share of global GDP is
only 14%, it pays 20% of the total UN budget.
Powell's remark was blatant interference in
Japan's internal affairs, but it merely echoed
many messages delivered by former deputy secretary
of state Richard Armitage, the leader of a
reactionary clique in Washington that has worked
for years to remilitarize Japan and so enlarge a
major new market for US arms. Its members include
Torkel Patterson, Robin Sakoda, David Asher and
James Kelly at the State Department; Michael Green
on the National Security Council's staff; and
numerous uniformed military officers at the
Pentagon and at the headquarters of the Pacific
Command at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
America's
intention is to turn Japan into what Washington
neo-conservatives like to call the "Britain of the
Far East" - and then use it as a proxy in
checkmating North Korea and balancing China. On
October 11, 2000, Michael Green, then a member of
Armitage Associates, wrote, "We see the special
relationship between the United States and Great
Britain as a model for the [US-Japan] alliance."
Japan has so far not resisted this US pressure
since it complements a renewed nationalism among
Japanese voters and a fear that a burgeoning
capitalist China threatens Japan's established
position as the leading economic power in East
Asia. Japanese officials also claim that the
country feels threatened by North Korea's
developing nuclear and missile programs, although
they know that the North Korean standoff could be
resolved virtually overnight - if the Bush
administration would cease trying to overthrow the
Pyongyang regime and instead deliver on US trade
promises (in return for North Korea's agreement to
give up its nuclear-weapons program). Instead, on
February 25, the State Department announced that
"the US will refuse North Korean leader Kim
Jong-il's demand for a guarantee of 'no hostile
intent' to get Pyongyang back into negotiations
over its nuclear-weapons programs". And on March
7, Bush nominated John Bolton to be US ambassador
to the United Nations even though North Korea has
refused to negotiate with him because of his
insulting remarks about the country.
Japan's remilitarization worries a segment
of the Japanese public and is opposed throughout
East Asia by all the nations Japan victimized
during World War II, including China, both Koreas,
and even Australia. As a result, the Japanese
government has launched a stealth program of
incremental rearmament. Since 1992, it has enacted
21 major pieces of security-related legislation,
nine in 2004 alone. These began with the
International Peace Cooperation Law of 1992, which
for the first time authorized Japan to send troops
to participate in UN peacekeeping operations.
Remilitarization has since taken many
forms, including expanding military budgets,
legitimizing and legalizing the sending of
military forces abroad, a commitment to join the
US missile defense ("Star Wars") program -
something the Canadians refused to do in February
- and a growing acceptance of military solutions
to international problems. This gradual process
was greatly accelerated in 2001 by the
simultaneous coming to power of President George W
Bush and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. Koizumi
made his first visit to the United States in July
of that year and, in May 2003, received the
ultimate imprimatur, an invitation to Bush's
"ranch" in Crawford, Texas. Shortly thereafter,
Koizumi agreed to send a contingent of 550 troops
to Iraq for a year, extended their stay for
another year in 2004 and, on October 14,
personally endorsed Bush's re-election.
A new nuclear giant in the
making?
Koizumi has appointed to his
cabinets over the years hardline anti-Chinese,
pro-Taiwanese politicians. Phil Deans, director of
the Contemporary China Institute in the School of
Oriental and African Studies, University of
London, observes, "There has been a remarkable
growth of pro-Taiwan sentiment in Japan. There is
not one pro-China figure in the Koizumi cabinet."
Members of the latest Koizumi cabinet include
Defense Agency chief Yoshinori Ono and Foreign
Minister Nobutaka Machimura, both ardent
militarists; Machimura is a member of the
right-wing faction of former prime minister
Yoshiro Mori, which supports an independent Taiwan
and maintains extensive covert ties with Taiwanese
leaders and businessmen.
Taiwan, it should
be remembered, was a Japanese colony from
1895-1945. Unlike the harsh Japanese military rule
over Korea from 1910-45, it experienced relatively
benign governance by a civilian Japanese
administration. The island, while bombed by the
Allies, was not a battleground during World War
II, although it was harshly occupied by the
Chinese Nationalists (Chiang Kai-shek's
Kuomintang) immediately after the war. Today, as a
result, many Taiwanese speak Japanese and have a
favorable view of Japan. Taiwan is virtually the
only place in East Asia where Japanese are fully
welcomed and liked.
Bush and Koizumi have
developed elaborate plans for military cooperation
between their two countries. Crucial to such plans
is the scrapping of the Japanese constitution of
1947. If nothing gets in the way, Koizumi's ruling
Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) intends to
introduce a new constitution on the occasion of
the party's 50th anniversary this coming November.
This has been deemed appropriate because the LDP's
founding charter of 1955 set as a basic party goal
the "establishment of Japan's own constitution" -
a reference to the fact that General Douglas
MacArthur's post-World War II occupation
headquarters actually drafted the current
constitution. The original LDP policy statement
also called for "the eventual removal of US troops
from Japanese territory", which may be one of the
hidden purposes behind Japan's urge to rearm.
A major goal of the Americans is to gain
Japan's active participation in their massively
expensive missile defense program. The Bush
administration is seeking, among other things, an
end to Japan's ban on the export of military
technology, since it wants Japanese engineers to
help solve some of the technical problems of its
so-far-failing Star Wars system. The United States
has also been actively negotiating with Japan to
relocate the US Army's 1st Corps from Fort Lewis,
Washington, to Camp Zama, southwest of Tokyo in
the densely populated prefecture of Kanagawa,
whose capital is Yokohama. These US forces in
Japan would then be placed under the command of a
four-star general, who would be on a par with
regional commanders such as Centcom commander John
Abizaid, who lords it over Iraq and South Asia.
The new command would be in charge of all US Army
"force projection" operations beyond East Asia and
would inevitably implicate Japan in the daily
military operations of the American empire.
Garrisoning even a small headquarters, much less
the whole 1st Corps made up of an estimated 40,000
soldiers, in such a sophisticated and centrally
located prefecture as Kanagawa is also guaranteed
to generate intense public opposition as well as
rapes, fights, car accidents and other incidents
similar to the ones that occur daily in Okinawa.
Meanwhile, Japan intends to upgrade its
Defense Agency (Boeicho) into a ministry and
possibly develop its own nuclear-weapons
capability. Goading the Japanese government to
assert itself militarily may well cause the
country to go nuclear in order to "deter" China
and North Korea, while freeing Japan from its
dependency on the US "nuclear umbrella". Military
analyst Richard Tanter notes that Japan already
has "the undoubted capacity to satisfy all three
core requirements for a usable nuclear weapon: a
military nuclear device, a sufficiently accurate
targeting system, and at least one adequate
delivery system". Japan's combination of fully
functioning fission and breeder reactors plus
nuclear-fuel reprocessing facilities gives it the
ability to build advanced thermonuclear weapons;
its H-II and H-IIA rockets, in-flight refueling
capacity for fighter bombers, and military-grade
surveillance satellites assure that it could
deliver its weapons accurately to regional
targets. What it currently lacks are the platforms
(such as submarines) for a secure retaliatory
force in order to dissuade a nuclear adversary
from launching a preemptive first strike.
The Taiwanese knot
Japan may
talk a lot about the dangers of North Korea, but
the real objective of its rearmament is China.
This has become clear from the ways in which Japan
has recently injected itself into the single most
delicate and dangerous issue of East Asian
international relations - the problem of Taiwan.
Japan invaded China in 1931 and was its wartime
tormentor thereafter as well as Taiwan's colonial
overlord. Even then, however, Taiwan was viewed as
a part of China, as the United States has long
recognized. What remains to be resolved are the
terms and timing of Taiwan's reintegration with
the Chinese mainland. This process was deeply
complicated by the fact that in 1987 Chiang
Kai-shek's Nationalists, who had retreated to
Taiwan in 1949 at the end of the Chinese civil war
(and were protected there by the US 7th Fleet ever
after), finally ended martial law on the island.
Taiwan has since matured into a vibrant democracy
and the Taiwanese are now starting to display
their own mixed opinions about their future.
In 2000, the Taiwanese people ended a long
monopoly of power by the Nationalists and gave the
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), headed by
President Chen Shui-bian, an electoral victory. A
native Taiwanese (as distinct from the large
contingent of mainlanders who came to Taiwan in
the baggage train of Chiang's defeated armies),
Chen stands for an independent Taiwan, as does his
party. By contrast, the Nationalists, together
with a powerful mainlander splinter party, the
People First Party headed by James Soong (Song
Chuyu), hope to see an eventual peaceful
unification of Taiwan with China. On March 7, the
Bush administration complicated these delicate
relations by nominating John Bolton to be the US
ambassador to the United Nations. He is an avowed
advocate of Taiwanese independence and was once a
paid consultant to the Taiwanese government.
Last May, in a very close and contested
election, Chen Shui-bian was re-elected, and on
May 20, the notorious right-wing Japanese
politician Shintaro Ishihara attended his
inauguration in Taipei. (Ishihara believes that
Japan's 1937 Rape of Nanking was "a lie made up by
the Chinese".) Though Chen won with only 50.1% of
the vote, this was still a sizable increase over
his 33.9% in 2000, when the opposition was
divided. The Taiwanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
immediately appointed Koh Se-kai as its informal
ambassador to Japan. Koh has lived in Japan for
some 33 years and maintains extensive ties to
senior political and academic figures there. China
responded that it would "completely annihilate"
any moves toward Taiwanese independence - even if
it meant scuttling the 2008 Beijing Olympics and
good relations with the United States.
Contrary to the machinations of American
neo-cons and Japanese rightists, however, the
Taiwanese people have revealed themselves to be
open to negotiating with China over the timing and
terms of reintegration. On August 23, the
Legislative Yuan (Taiwan's parliament) enacted
changes in its voting rules to prevent Chen from
amending the constitution to favor independence,
as he had promised to do in his re-election
campaign. This action drastically lowered the risk
of conflict with China. Probably influencing the
Legislative Yuan was the warning issued on August
22 by Singapore's new prime minister, Lee
Hsien-loong: "If Taiwan goes for independence,
Singapore will not recognize it. In fact, no Asian
country will recognize it. China will fight. Win
or lose, Taiwan will be devastated."
The
next important development was parliamentary
elections on December 11. President Chen called
his campaign a referendum on his pro-independence
policy and asked for a mandate to carry out his
reforms. Instead he lost decisively. The
opposition Nationalists and the People First Party
won 114 seats in the 225-seat parliament, while
Chen's DPP and its allies took only 101. (Ten
seats went to independents.) The Nationalist
leader, Lien Chan, whose party won 79 seats to the
DPP's 89, said, "Today we saw extremely clearly
that all the people want stability in this
country."
Chen's failure to capture
control of parliament also meant that a proposed
purchase of $19.6 billion worth of arms from the
United States was doomed. The deal included
guided-missile destroyers, P-3 anti-submarine
aircraft, diesel submarines, and advanced Patriot
PAC-3 anti-missile systems. The Nationalists and
James Soong's supporters regard the price as too
high and mostly a financial sop to the Bush
administration, which has been pushing the sale
since 2001. They also believe the weapons would
not improve Taiwan's security.
On December
27, mainland China issued its fifth Defense White
Paper on the goals of the country's national
defense efforts. As one longtime observer, Robert
Bedeski, noted, "At first glance, the Defense
White Paper is a hardline statement on territorial
sovereignty and emphasizes China's determination
not to tolerate any moves at secession,
independence or separation. However, the next
paragraph ... indicates a willingness to reduce
tensions in the Taiwan Strait: so long as the
Taiwan authorities accept the one-China principle
and stop their separatist activities aimed at
'Taiwan independence', cross-strait talks can be
held at any time on officially ending the state of
hostility between the two sides."
It
appears that this is also the way the Taiwanese
read the message. On February 24, President Chen
met for the first time since October 2000 with
chairman James Soong of the People First Party.
The two leaders, holding diametrically opposed
views on relations with the mainland, nonetheless
signed a joint statement outlining 10 points of
consensus. They pledged to try to open full
transport and commercial links across the Taiwan
Strait, increase trade, and ease the ban on
investments in China by many Taiwanese business
sectors. The mainland reacted favorably at once.
Astonishingly, this led Chen to say that he "would
not rule out Taiwan's eventual reunion with China,
provided Taiwan's 23 million people accepted it".
If the United States and Japan left China
and Taiwan to their own devices, it seems possible
that they would work out a modus vivendi.
Taiwan has already invested some $150 billion
in the mainland, and the two economies are
becoming more closely integrated every day. There
also seems to be a growing recognition in Taiwan
that it would be very difficult to live as an
independent Chinese-speaking nation alongside a
country with 1.3 billion people, 9.6 million
square kilometers of territory, a rapidly growing
$1.4 trillion economy, and aspirations to regional
leadership in East Asia. Rather than declaring its
independence, Taiwan might try to seek a status
somewhat like that of French Canada - a kind of
looser version of a Chinese Quebec under nominal
central government control but maintaining
separate institutions, laws and customs.
The mainland would be so relieved by this
solution it would probably accept it, particularly
if it could be achieved before the 2008 Beijing
Olympics. China fears that Taiwanese radicals want
to declare independence a month or two before
those Olympics, betting that China would not
attack then because of its huge investment in the
forthcoming Games. Most observers believe,
however, that China would have no choice but to go
to war because failure to do so would invite a
domestic revolution against the Chinese Communist
Party for violating the national integrity of
China.
Sino-American, Sino-Japanese
relations spiral downward
It has long been
an article of neo-con faith that the US must do
everything in its power to prevent the development
of rival power centers, whether friendly or
hostile. After the collapse of the Soviet Union,
this meant they turned their attention to China as
one of the United States' probable next enemies.
In 2001, having come to power, the
neo-conservatives shifted much of the US's nuclear
targeting from Russia to China. They also began
regular high-level military talks with Taiwan over
defense of the island, ordered a shift of US Army
personnel and supplies to the Asia-Pacific region,
and worked strenuously to promote the
remilitarization of Japan.
On April 1,
2001, a US Navy EP-3E Aries II electronic spy
plane collided with a Chinese jet fighter off the
south China coast. The US aircraft was on a
mission to provoke Chinese radar defenses and then
record the transmissions and procedures the
Chinese used in sending up interceptors. The
Chinese jet went down and the pilot lost his life,
while the US plane landed safely on Hainan Island
and its crew of 24 spies was well treated by the
Chinese authorities.
It soon became clear
that China was not interested in a confrontation,
since many of its most important investors have
their headquarters in the United States. But it
could not instantly return the crew of the spy
plane without risking powerful domestic criticism
for obsequiousness in the face of provocation. It
therefore delayed for 11 days until it received a
pro forma US apology for causing the death
of a Chinese pilot on the edge of the country's
territorial airspace and for making an
unauthorized landing at a Chinese military
airfield. Meanwhile, the US media had labeled the
crew as "hostages", encouraged their relatives to
tie yellow ribbons around neighborhood trees,
hailed the president for doing "a first-rate job"
to free them, and endlessly criticized China for
its "state-controlled media". They carefully
avoided mentioning that the United States enforces
around the country a 200-mile aircraft-intercept
zone that stretches far beyond territorial waters.
On April 25, 2001, during an interview on
national television, President Bush was asked
whether he would ever use "the full force of the
American military" against China for the sake of
Taiwan. He responded, "Whatever it takes to help
Taiwan defend herself." This was US policy until
September 11, 2001, when China enthusiastically
joined the "war on terrorism" and Bush and his
neo-cons became preoccupied with their "axis of
evil" and making war on Iraq. The United States
and China were also enjoying extremely close
economic relations, which the big-business wing of
the Republican Party did not want to jeopardize.
The Middle East thus trumped the neo-cons'
Asia policy. While the Americans were distracted,
China went about its economic business for almost
four years, emerging as a powerhouse of Asia and a
potential organizing node for Asian economies.
Rapidly industrializing China also developed a
voracious appetite for petroleum and other raw
materials, which brought it into direct
competition with the world's largest importers,
the US and Japan.
By the summer of 2004,
Bush strategists, distracted as they were by Iraq,
again became alarmed over China's growing power
and its potential to challenge US hegemony in East
Asia. The Republican Party platform unveiled at
its convention in New York in August proclaimed
that "America will help Taiwan defend itself".
During that summer, the US Navy also carried out
exercises it dubbed "Operation Summer Pulse '04",
which involved the simultaneous deployment at sea
of seven of the United States' 12 carrier strike
groups. A US carrier strike group includes an
aircraft carrier (usually with nine or 10
squadrons of planes, a total of about 85 aircraft
in all), a guided-missile cruiser, two
guided-missile destroyers, an attack submarine,
and a combination ammunition-oiler-supply ship.
Deploying seven such armadas at the same time was
unprecedented - and very expensive. Even though
only three of the carrier strike groups were sent
to the Pacific and no more than one was patrolling
off Taiwan at a time, the Chinese became deeply
alarmed that this marked the beginning of an
attempted rerun of 19th-century gunboat diplomacy
aimed at them.
This US show of force and
Chen Shui-bian's polemics preceding the December
elections also seemed to over-stimulate the
Taiwanese. On October 26 in Beijing, then
secretary of state Colin Powell tried to calm
things down by declaring to the press, "Taiwan is
not independent. It does not enjoy sovereignty as
a nation, and that remains our policy, our firm
policy ... We want to see both sides not take
unilateral action that would prejudice an eventual
outcome, a reunification that all parties are
seeking."
Powell's statement seemed
unequivocal enough, but significant doubts
persisted about whether he had much influence
within the Bush administration or whether he could
speak for Vice President Cheney and Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Early in 2005, Porter
Goss, the new director of the CIA, Defense
Secretary Rumsfeld, and Admiral Lowell Jacoby,
head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, all told
Congress that China's military modernization was
going ahead much faster than previously believed.
They warned that the 2005 Quadrennial Defense
Review, the every-four-years formal assessment of
US military policy, would take a much harsher view
of the threat posed by China than the 2001
overview.
In this context, the Bush
administration, perhaps influenced by the election
of November 2 and the transition from Colin
Powell's to Condoleezza Rice's State Department,
played its most dangerous card. On February 19 in
Washington, it signed a new military agreement
with Japan. For the first time, Japan joined the
US administration in identifying security in the
Taiwan Strait as a "common strategic objective".
Nothing could have been more alarming to China's
leaders than the revelation that Japan had
decisively ended six decades of official pacifism
by claiming a right to intervene in the Taiwan
Strait.
It is possible that, in the years
to come, Taiwan itself may recede in importance to
be replaced by even more direct Sino-Japanese
confrontations. This would be an ominous
development indeed, one that the United States
would be responsible for having abetted but would
certainly be unable to control. The kindling for a
Sino-Japanese explosion has long been in place.
After all, during World War II the Japanese killed
approximately 23 million Chinese throughout East
Asia - higher casualties than the staggering ones
suffered by Russia at the hands of the Nazis - and
yet Japan refuses to atone for or even acknowledge
its historical war crimes. Quite the opposite, it
continues to rewrite history, portraying itself as
the liberator of Asia and a victim of European and
US imperialism.
In - for the Chinese - a
painful act of symbolism, after becoming Japanese
prime minister in 2001, Junichiro Koizumi made his
first official visit to Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo,
a practice that he has repeated every year since.
Koizumi likes to say to foreigners that he is
merely honoring Japan's war dead. Yasukuni,
however, is anything but a military cemetery or a
war memorial. It was established in 1869 by
Emperor Meiji as a Shinto shrine (though with its
torii archways made of steel rather than
the traditional red-painted wood) to commemorate
the lives lost in campaigns to return direct
imperial rule to Japan. During World War II,
Japanese militarists took over the shrine and used
it to promote patriotic and nationalistic
sentiments. Today, Yasukuni is said to be
dedicated to the spirits of approximately 2.4
million Japanese who have died in the country's
wars, both civil and foreign, since 1853.
In 1978, for reasons that have never been
made clear, General Hideki Tojo and six other
wartime leaders who had been hanged by the Allied
Powers as war criminals were collectively
enshrined at Yasukuni. The current chief priest of
the shrine denies that they were war criminals,
saying, "The winner passed judgment on the loser."
In a museum on the shrine's grounds, there is a
fully restored Mitsubishi Zero Type 52 fighter
aircraft that a placard says made its combat debut
in 1940 over Chongqing, then the wartime capital
of the Republic of China. It was undoubtedly not
an accident that, in Chongqing during the 2004
Asian Cup soccer finals, Chinese spectators booed
the playing of the Japanese national anthem.
Yasukuni's leaders have always claimed close ties
to the imperial household, but the late Emperor
Hirohito last visited the shrine in 1975 and
Emperor Akihito has never been there.
The
Chinese regard Yasukuni visits by the Japanese
prime minister as insulting, somewhat comparable
perhaps to Britain's Prince Harry dressing up as a
Nazi for a costume party. Nonetheless, Beijing has
tried in recent years to appease Tokyo. Chinese
President Hu Jintao rolled out the red carpet for
Yohei Kono, Speaker of the Japanese Diet's House
of Representatives, when he visited China last
September; he appointed Wang Yi, a senior moderate
in the Chinese foreign service, as ambassador to
Japan; and he proposed joint Sino-Japanese
exploration of possible oil resources in the
offshore seas that both sides claim. All such
gestures were ignored by Koizumi, who insists that
he intends to go on visiting Yasukuni.
Matters came to a head in November at two
important summit meetings: an Asia-Pacific
Economic Cooperation (APEC) gathering in Santiago,
followed immediately by an Association of
Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) meeting with the
leaders of China, Japan and South Korea that took
place in Vientiane. In Santiago, Hu Jintao
directly asked Koizumi to cease his Yasukuni
visits for the sake of Sino-Japanese friendship.
Seemingly as a reply, Koizumi went out of his way
to insult Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in Vientiane.
He said to Premier Wen, "It's about time for
[China's] graduation" as a recipient of Japanese
foreign-aid payments, implying that Japan intended
unilaterally to end its 25-year-old financial-aid
program. The word "graduation" also conveyed the
insulting implication that Japan saw itself as a
teacher guiding China, the student.
Koizumi next gave a little speech about
the history of Japanese efforts to normalize
relations with China, to which Wen replied, "Do
you know how many Chinese people died in the
Sino-Japanese war?" Wen went on to suggest that
China had always regarded Japan's foreign aid,
which he said China did not need, as payments in
lieu of compensation for damage done by Japan in
China during the war. He pointed out that China
had never asked for reparations from Japan and
that Japan's payments amounted to about $30
billion over 25 years, a fraction of the $80
billion Germany has paid to the victims of Nazi
atrocities even though Japan is the more populous
and richer country.
On November 10, the
Japanese navy discovered a Chinese nuclear
submarine in Japanese territorial waters near
Okinawa. Although the Chinese apologized and
called the sub's intrusion a "mistake", Defense
Agency director Ono gave it wide publicity,
further inflaming Japanese public opinion against
China. From that point on, relations between
Beijing and Tokyo have gone steadily downhill,
culminating in the Japanese-American announcement
that Taiwan was of special military concern to
both of them, which China denounced as an
"abomination".
Over time this downward
spiral in relations will probably prove damaging
to the interests of both the United States and
Japan, but particularly to those of Japan. China
is unlikely to retaliate directly but is even less
likely to forget what has happened - and it has a
great deal of leverage over Japan. After all,
Japanese prosperity increasingly depends on its
ties to China. The reverse is not true. Contrary
to what one might expect, Japanese exports to
China jumped 70% between 2001 and 2004, providing
the main impetus for a sputtering Japanese
economic recovery. Some 18,000 Japanese companies
have operations in China. In 2003, Japan passed
the United States as the top destination for
Chinese students going abroad for a university
education. Nearly 70,000 Chinese students now
study at Japanese universities, compared with
65,000 at US academic institutions. These close
and lucrative relations are at risk if the US and
Japan pursue their militarization of the region.
A multipolar world
Tony Karon of
Time magazine has observed, "All over the world,
new bonds of trade and strategic cooperation are
being forged around the US. China has not only
begun to displace the US as the dominant player in
the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation organization
(APEC), it is fast emerging as the major trading
partner to some of Latin America's largest
economies ... French foreign-policy think-tanks
have long promoted the goal of 'multipolarity' in
a post-Cold War world, ie, the preference for many
different, competing power centers rather than the
'unipolarity' of the US as a single hyperpower.
Multipolarity is no longer simply a strategic
goal. It is an emerging reality."
Evidence
is easily found of multipolarity and China's
prominent role in promoting it. Just note China's
expanding relations with Iran, the European Union,
Latin America and the Association of Southeast
Asian Nations. Iran is the second-largest OPEC
(Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries)
oil producer after Saudi Arabia and has long had
friendly relations with Japan, which is its
leading trading partner. (Ninety-eight percent of
Japan's imports from Iran are oil.) On February
18, 2004, a consortium of Japanese companies and
the Iranian government signed a memorandum of
agreement to develop jointly Iran's Azadegan
oilfield, one of the world's largest, in a project
worth $2.8 billion. The US has opposed Japan's
support for Iran, causing Congressman Brad Sherman
(Democrat, California) to charge that Bush had
been bribed into accepting the Japanese-Iranian
deal by Koizumi's dispatch of 550 Japanese troops
to Iraq, adding a veneer of international support
for the US war there.
But the
long-standing Iranian-Japanese alignment began to
change in late 2004. On October 28, China's oil
major, the Sinopec Group, signed an agreement with
Iran worth between $70 billion and $100 billion to
develop the giant Yadavaran natural-gas field.
China agreed to buy 250 million tons of liquefied
natural gas (LNG) from Iran over 25 years. It is
the largest deal Iran has signed with a foreign
country since 1996 and will include several other
benefits, including China's assistance in building
numerous ships to deliver the LNG to Chinese
ports. Iran also committed itself to exporting
150,000 barrels of crude oil per day to China for
25 years at market prices.
Iran's oil
minister, Bijan Zanganeh, on a visit to Beijing
noted that Iran is China's biggest foreign oil
supplier and said his country wants to be China's
long-term business partner. He told China Business
Weekly that Tehran would like to replace Japan
with China as the biggest customer for its oil and
gas. The reason is obvious: US pressure on Iran to
give up its nuclear-power development program and
the Bush administration's declared intention to
take Iran to the UN Security Council for the
imposition of sanctions (which a Chinese vote
could veto). On November 6, Chinese Foreign
Minister Li Zhaoxing paid a rare visit to Tehran.
In meetings with Iranian President Mohammad
Khatami, Li said that Beijing would indeed
consider vetoing any US effort to sanction Iran at
the Security Council. The US has also charged
China with selling nuclear and missile technology
to Iran.
China and Iran already did a
record $4 billion worth of two-way business in
2003. Projects included China's building of the
first stage of Tehran's Metro rail system and a
contract to build a second link worth $836
million. China will be the top contender to build
four other planned lines, including a 30-kilometer
track to the airport. In February 2003, Chery
Automobile Co, the eighth-largest auto maker in
China, opened its first overseas production plant
in Iran. Today, it manufactures 30,000 Chery cars
annually in northeastern Iran. Beijing is also
negotiating to construct a 386-kilometer pipeline
from Iran to the northern Caspian Sea to connect
with the long-distance Kazakhstan to Xinjiang
pipeline that it began building last October. The
Kazakh pipeline has a capacity to deliver 10
million tons of oil to China per year. Despite US
bluster and belligerence, Iran is anything but
isolated in today's world.
The European
Union is China's largest trading partner and China
is the EU's second-largest trading partner (after
the United States). Back in 1989, to protest the
suppression of pro-democracy demonstrators in
Beijing's Tiananmen Square, the EU imposed a ban
on military sales to China. The only other
countries so treated are true international
pariahs such as Myanmar, Sudan and Zimbabwe. Even
North Korea is not subject to a formal European
arms embargo. Given that the Chinese leadership
has changed several times since 1989 and as a
gesture of goodwill, the EU has announced its
intention to lift the embargo. Jacques Chirac, the
French president, is one of the strongest
proponents of the idea of replacing US hegemony
with a "multipolar world". On a visit to Beijing
in October, he said that China and France share "a
common vision of the world" and that lifting the
embargo will "mark a significant milestone: a
moment when Europe had to make a choice between
the strategic interests of America and China - and
chose China".
In his trip to Western
Europe in February, Bush repeatedly said, "There
is deep concern in our country that a transfer of
weapons would be a transfer of technology to
China, which would change the balance of relations
between China and Taiwan." In early February, the
House of Representatives voted 411-3 in favor of a
resolution condemning the potential EU move. The
Europeans and Chinese contend that the Bush
administration has vastly overstated its case,
that no weapons capable of changing the balance of
power are involved, and that the EU is not aiming
to win massive new defense contracts from China
but to strengthen mutual economic relations in
general. Immediately after Bush's tour of Europe,
the EU trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson,
arrived in Beijing for his first official visit.
The purpose of his trip, he said, was to stress
the need to create a new strategic partnership
between China and Europe.
Washington has
buttressed its hardline stance with the release of
many new intelligence estimates depicting China as
a formidable military threat. Whether this
intelligence is politicized or not, it argues that
China's military modernization is aimed precisely
at countering the US Navy's carrier strike groups,
which would assumedly be used in the Taiwan Strait
in case of war. China is certainly building a
large fleet of nuclear submarines and is an active
participant in the EU's Galileo Project to produce
a satellite navigation system not controlled by
the US military. The Defense Department worries
that Beijing might adapt the Galileo technology to
anti-satellite purposes. US military analysts are
also impressed by China's launch, on October 15,
2003, of a spacecraft containing a single
astronaut who was successfully returned to Earth
the following day. Only the former USSR and the
United States had previously sent humans into
outer space.
China already has 500-550
short-range ballistic missiles deployed opposite
Taiwan and has 24 CSS-4 intercontinental ballistic
missiles (ICBMs) with a range of 13,000 kilometers
to deter a US missile attack on the Chinese
mainland. According to Richard Fisher, a
researcher at the US-based Center for Security
Policy, "The forces that China is putting in place
right now will probably be more than sufficient to
deal with a single American aircraft-carrier
battle group." Arthur Lauder, a professor of
international relations at the University of
Pennsylvania, concurred. He said the Chinese
military "is the only one being developed anywhere
in the world today that is specifically configured
to fight the United States of America".
The US obviously cannot wish away this
capability, but it has no evidence that China is
doing anything more than countering the threats
coming from the Bush administration. It seeks to
avoid war with Taiwan and the US by deterring them
from separating Taiwan from China. For this
reason, China's pro forma legislature, the
National People's Congress, passed a law this
month making secession from China illegal and
authorizing the use of force in case a territory
tried to leave the country.
The Japanese
government, of course, backs the US position that
China constitutes a military threat to the entire
region. Interestingly enough, however, the
Australian government of Prime Minister John
Howard, a loyal ally of the United States when it
comes to Iraq, has decided to defy Bush on the
issue of lifting the European arms embargo.
Australia places a high premium on good relations
with China and is hoping to negotiate a free-trade
agreement between the two countries. Canberra has
therefore decided to support the EU in lifting the
15-year-old embargo. Chirac and German Chancellor
Gerhard Schroeder both say, "It will happen."
The United States has long proclaimed that
Latin America is part of its "sphere of
influence", and because of that most foreign
countries have to tread carefully in doing
business there. However, in the search for fuel
and minerals for its booming economy, China is
openly courting many Latin American countries
regardless of what Washington thinks. On November
15, President Hu Jintao ended a five-day visit to
Brazil during which he signed more than a dozen
accords aimed at expanding Brazil's sales to China
and Chinese investment in Brazil. Under one
agreement Brazil will export to China as much as
$800 million annually in beef and poultry. In
turn, China agreed with Brazil's state-controlled
oil company to finance a $1.3 billion gas pipeline
between Rio de Janeiro and Bahia once technical
studies are completed. China and Brazil also
entered into a "strategic partnership" with the
objective of raising the value of bilateral trade
from $10 billion in 2004 to $20 billion by 2007.
President Hu said this partnership symbolized "a
new international political order that favored
developing countries".
In the weeks that
followed, China signed important investment and
trade agreements with Argentina, Venezuela,
Bolivia, Chile and Cuba. Of particular interest,
in December, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela
visited China and agreed to give it wide-ranging
access to his country's oil reserves. Venezuela is
the world's fifth-largest oil exporter and
normally sells about 60% of its output to the
United States, but under the new agreements China
will be allowed to operate 15 mature oilfields in
eastern Venezuela. China will invest about $350
million to extract oil and another $60 million in
natural-gas wells.
China is also working
to integrate East Asia's smaller countries into
some form of new economic and political community.
Such an alignment, if it comes into being, will
certainly erode US and Japanese influence in the
area. In November, the 10 nations that make up
ASEAN (Brunei, Myanmar, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos,
Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and
Vietnam), met in the Laotian capital Vientiane,
joined by the leaders of China, Japan and South
Korea. The United States was not invited and the
Japanese officials seemed uncomfortable being
there. The purpose was to plan for an East Asian
summit meeting to be held next November to begin
creating an "East Asia Community". Last December,
the ASEAN countries and China also agreed to
create a free-trade zone among themselves by 2010.
According to Edward Cody of the Washington
Post, "Trade between China and the 10 ASEAN
countries has increased about 20% a year since
1990, and the pace has picked up in the last
several years." This trade hit $78.2 billion in
2003 and was reported to be about $100 billion by
the end of 2004. As senior Japanese political
commentator Yoichi Funabashi observed, "The ratio
of intra-regional trade [in East Asia] to
worldwide trade was nearly 52% in 2002. Though
this figure is lower than the 62% in the EU, it
tops the 46% of NAFTA [the North American Free
Trade Agreement]. East Asia is thus becoming less
dependent on the US in terms of trade."
China is the primary moving force behind
these efforts. According to Funabashi, China's
leadership plans to use the country's explosive
economic growth and its ever more powerful links
to regional trading partners to marginalize the
United States and isolate Japan in East Asia. He
argues that the United States underestimated how
deeply distrusted it had become in the region
thanks to its narrow-minded and ideological
response to the East Asian financial crisis of
1997, which it largely caused. On November 30,
Michael Reiss, the director of policy planning in
the State Department, said in Tokyo, "The US, as a
power in the Western Pacific, has an interest in
East Asia. We would be unhappy about any plans to
exclude the US from the framework of dialogue and
cooperation in this region." But it is probably
already too late for the Bush administration to do
much more than delay the arrival of a
China-dominated East Asian Community, particularly
because of declining US economic and financial
strength.
For Japan, the choices are more
difficult still. Sino-Japanese enmity has had a
long history in East Asia, always with disastrous
outcomes. Before World War II, one of Japan's most
influential writers on Chinese affairs, Hotsumi
Ozaki, prophetically warned that Japan, by
refusing to adjust to the Chinese revolution and
instead making war on it, would only radicalize
the Chinese people and contribute to the coming to
power of the Chinese Communist Party. He spent his
life working on the question "Why should the
success of the Chinese revolution be to Japan's
disadvantage?" In 1944, the Japanese government
hanged Ozaki as a traitor, but his question
remains as relevant today as it was in the late
1930s.
Why should China's emergence as a
rich, successful country be to the disadvantage of
either Japan or the United States? History teaches
us that the least intelligent response to this
development would be to try to stop it through
military force. As a Hong Kong wisecrack has it,
China has just had a couple of bad centuries and
now it's back. The world needs to adjust
peacefully to its legitimate claims - one of which
is for other nations to stop militarizing the
Taiwan problem - while checking unreasonable
Chinese efforts to impose its will on the region.
Unfortunately, the trend of events in East Asia
suggests we may yet see a repetition of the last
Sino-Japanese conflict, only this time the US is
unlikely to be on the winning side.
(Source citations and other references
for this article are available on the website of
the Japan Policy Research
Institute.)
Chalmers Johnson
is president of the Japan Policy Research
Institute. The first two books in his Blowback
Trilogy - Blowback: The Costs and Consequences
of American Empire, and The Sorrows of
Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the
Republic - are now available in paperback. The
third volume is being written. This article
appeared previously on Tomdispatch
http://www.tomdispatch.com/ and is used here by
permission.
(Copyright 2005 Chalmers
Johnson.) |
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The Dragon squeezes
Taiwan
(Mar 15, '05)
China, Greenspan rub salt
into dollar wound (Mar 12,
'05)
Devil in the details of
US-Japan pact
(Mar 12,
'05)
Cornering the
dragon (Mar 2, '05)
The Dragon roars over
US-Japan accord (Feb 23,
'05)
China 'threat' binds US,
Japan militaries (Jan 13,
'05)
ASEAN, China all smiles for
now
(Dec 3,
'04)
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