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2 China: Barking up the wrong
tree By Benjamin A
Shobert
HONG KONG - Established by the
United States Congress in 2000, the US-China
Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) was
conceived as a mechanism to analyze the
national-security implications of the trade
relationship between the two countries.
As
China has begun to foray into areas of
geopolitical consequence, realms developed
economies are eager to protect
for
themselves and reluctant to open to newly
competitive powers, the thoughts reflected in
reporting commissions like the USCC serve as
foundational materials for how large portions of
the US political framework will respond to
perceived threats or, much less minimally,
opportunities within US-China relations.
Released on November 20, the primary
talking points within the 2006 USCC report were
referenced by US Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice while on her trip to Hanoi with President
George W Bush. During her interview, Rice touched
on questions of intellectual property, currency
valuation, and whether China's economic
infrastructure could be further opened to function
more transparently within the global economy.
Sandwiched into this was the comment: "And of
course there are concerns about Chinese military
buildups; it's sometimes seemed outsized for
China's regional role." [1]
Rice's comment
and the USCC report in general have a number of
assumptions around which the analysis is bent, not
least of which is the idea that China's growth is
somehow incompatible with US national security.
The USCC report dances around the gray area where
a government's attempt to warn about the potential
for conflict becomes its own incentive for
assuming the inevitability of said conflict.
When the report goes so far as to project
a "window of vulnerability" between 2008 and 2015,
during which time Taiwan's military systems would
be poorly matched to the mainland's modernization
program and could be overrun, the reader has the
sense that inevitability has become the USCC's
order of the day (p 161).
After World War
II, much has rightly been made of Western Europe's
failure to see Germany's militarization and
regional aspirations for what they were;
government agencies such as the USCC are designed
to be political prophylactics against similar
complacency and appeasement.
But a fear
that US policymakers might overlook the potential
dangers China could present can in its own right
become a force that equally distorts and
misrepresents the nature of the current situation,
and entirely misses discussing opportunities for
working together to avoid conflict. While no one
wishes to play again the role of British prime
minister Neville Chamberlain to a rapidly
militarizing Germany, we forget that
misunderstanding and misrepresentation can lead
not only to appeasement, but also to unnecessary
aggressiveness and protectionism.
The USCC
report makes 44 recommendations to Congress, of
which 10 are primarily emphasized. Of these 10,
one could properly be characterized as dealing
with business concerns, three are political in
nature, and the other six revolve around questions
of national security.
Respectively, the
business concern results in a recommendation that
the US use the World Trade Organization to
prosecute China for its continuing
intellectual-property infractions. The three
political concerns include forcing China to work
toward ending the genocide in Darfur by not
supporting policies that further enrich the
Sudanese government, urging Congress to offset
China's attempts to isolate Taiwan within the
international community, and requiring that US
Internet providers not comply with the Chinese
government's attempts to gain access to users'
identities or the information users choose to post
on the Web.
The six recommendations that
address national-security concerns deal with two
of the "axis of evil" countries - Iran and North
Korea. Included within the six recommendations is
that the USCC wants to see increased scrutiny by a
joint US-China operation of all shipping
containers from North Korea that pass through
China (an understanding of why such a
comprehensive program has failed to take root
within US borders would likely make this
recommendation moot).
Additionally, the
USCC report suggests that increased sanctions be
applied by Congress toward those Chinese companies
the US government has identified as being engaged
in chemical, nuclear and missile proliferation
activities. Closely related to this, the USCC also
recommends that Congress "instruct the
administration to insist that China fulfill its
obligations under UN Security Council Resolutions
1695 and 1718" (p 15), each of which works to end
the North Korean nuclear program.
The last
three recommendations that deal with national
security echo Cold War policymaking: better
assessing China's military-modernization programs,
engaging in a "strategic dialogue" concerning the
use of space for military purposes, and improving
the United States' ability to trace supply chains
for what are deemed to be critical weapons systems
that might make their
