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2 China
checks the US picket line By
Peter Lee
The passing year was the
People's Republic of China's (PRC) first
opportunity to get up close and personal with the
United States' pivot back to Asia, the strategic
rebalancing that looks a lot like containment.
The PRC spent a lot of 2012 wrestling with
contentious neighbors emboldened by the US policy,
like Vietnam and the Philippines; combating
American efforts to nibble away at the corners of
China's spheres of influence on the Korean
peninsula and Southeast Asia; and engaging in a
test of strength and will with the primary US
proxy in the region, Japan.
This state
affairs was misleadingly if predictably spun in
the Western press as "assertive China exacerbates regional
tensions", while a more
accurate reading was probably "China's rivals
exacerbate regional tensions in order to stoke
fears of assertive China."
Whatever the
framing, this was the year that the world - and in
particular Japan - discovered that the PRC can and
could kick back against the pivot.
The fat
years for "rising China" were the presidencies of
George W Bush. Preoccupied with cascading
disasters in the Middle East, a burgeoning fiscal
deficit that demanded a foreign partner with an
insatiable appetite for US debt, and, later on, a
meltdown in the US and world economies, Bush had
no stomach for mixing it up with China.
The PRC took the ball and ran with it,
emerging as an overpowering presence in East Asia,
plowing into Africa, establishing itself as a
crucial paymaster for the European Union, and
hammering away at the final bastions of Western
leadership of the post-World War II planet: the
major multinational policy and financial
institutions.
Rollback was inevitable, and
it was pursued, purposefully, carefully, and
incrementally under Barack Obama.
Also
back is ineffable American self-regard. With the
election and re-election of a black president from
a modest background, the United States reclaimed
as its assumed birthright the moral high ground,
something that one might think the US had
forfeited for a decade or two thanks to the Iraq
War, American mismanagement of the global
financial system, and the failure to face the
existential issue of climate change.
It
would have been amusing, in a grim sort of way, to
see if the election of Mitt Romney as president
would have elicited the same ecstatic neo-liberal
squealing about the glories of American democracy
that we saw with President Obama's re-election. In
any case, the comically inept Romney was no match
for the popularity, intelligence, and relentless
organizational focus of Obama and American
self-righteousness - or, as Evan Olnos of the New
Yorker would approvingly characterize it,
America's "moral charisma" - is back.
With
the United States firmly back in the leadership
saddle, at least as far as the foreign affairs
commentariat is concerned, China has nothing to
show the world except the flaws of an
authoritarian political and economic system,
nothing to teach except as an object lesson in how
to avoid them, and no right to participate in any
world leadership councils except by Western
sufferance.
This attitude dovetails almost
perfectly with Obama's apparent disdain for the
PRC as an opaque, unfriendly, and unsavory regime
that responds to engagement with overreach, one
that must be stressed, pressured, and coerced in
order to drive it toward humanity's preferred
goals. Under the leadership of the Obama
administration, the West has made the significant
decision to restrain China instead of accommodate
it.
China will be a welcome partner in the
world order, at least defined by the West, only if
it democratizes, dismantles its state-controlled
economy, and adheres to the standards of liberal
multinational institutions in seeking its place in
the world order. These outcomes are so far off the
radar as far as the current PRC leadership is
concerned, the only near-term endgame on these
terms is regime collapse.
That's a risky
bet. If the regime doesn't collapse, a simmering,
constitutional hostility between the PRC and its
many antagonists is on the books for the
foreseeable future.
China's response has
been to avoid confronting the United States
head-on, instead probing for weaknesses in the US
chain of proxies and allies, while trying to shore
up weaknesses in its own proxies and allies.
The only unalloyed win for the PRC in East
Asia in 2012 was the re-election of the
Kuomintang's Ma Ying-jeou as president of Taiwan.
President Ma has a steady-as-she-goes policy of
minimal friction with the PRC, in contrast to the
fractious pro-independence and pro-Japanese
Democratic Progressive Party. In 2012 he went a
step further. In a move that was largely ignored
in the Western press because it complicated the
narrative of unilateral PRC thuggery, Ma
dispatched a flotilla of official and unofficial
vessels to give grief to the Japanese coastguard
presence around the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands.
Other than Taiwan, one of the brighter
spots in the authoritarian firmament has been the
gradual pro-China/pro-reform tilt of North Korea
under Kim Jong-eun. The PRC is still making the
Obama administration pay for its disastrous
miscalculation in 2009, when the US thought that
the PRC's overwhelming trade ties with South Korea
would cause Beijing to abandon North Korea in the
aftermath of the Cheonan outrage (the
sinking of a South Korean frigate by forces
unknown, but widely assumed to be North Korea) and
join the United States in a multi-lateral
diplomatic and sanctions-fueled beatdown of the
Pyongyang regime.
Instead, the late Kim
Jung-il realized that his long-standing
opera-bouffe efforts at engagement with the United
States were futile and got on his armored train to
journey into China and fall into the welcoming
arms of Hu Jintao.
On the other side of
the ledger, Myanmar threatened to slide out of the
PRC camp with the decision of the government to
rebalance its foreign policy away from China
toward the United States and reach an
accommodation with domestic pro-democracy forces.
The necessary demonstrations of pro-democracy and
pro-Western enthusiasm by the Thein Sein
government were 1) the release of Aung San Suu Kyi
from house arrest and her return to public life
and 2) postponement of the Myitsone hydroelectric
project.
The Myitsone project was
unpopular domestically because it was PRC-funded
and had been adopted as a symbol of the casual
sell-out of Myanmar interests to China by corrupt
generals. Postponing Myitsone was popular with the
West because it raised the possibility it would
block development of Myanmar's sizable
hydroelectric potential by China and, instead,
allow Western interests, shut out of the Myanmar
economy for years because of sanctions, to
reorient hydropower exports away from China and
towards Thailand.
The PRC has responded
cautiously to the Myanmar shift, apparently taking
consolation in its dominant role in Myanmar's
economy, foreign trade, and security policy thanks
to the long and porous border the two countries
share.
Myanmar's political elites,
including Aung San Suu Kyi, apparently have
decided that an anti-China economic jihad would be
counter-productive and the PRC has good reason to
hope that by upping its public relations game,
spreading money around to deserving citizens both
inside and outside politics (and perhaps
discretely renegotiating some terms of some
excessively favorable sweetheart deals with the
Myanmar junta), it can successfully navigate the
now dangerous shoals of Myanmar multi-party
politics (in which a traditional strain of
anti-Chinese populism has become an inevitable
tool of political and popular mobilization).
In a sign that the United States also
hoped to put Laos and Cambodia into play,
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton paid a rare
visit to the Laotian capital of Vientiane before
putting in an appearance at Phnom Penh for a
get-together of the Association of Southeast Asian
Nations (ASEAN). Results were mixed, as Cambodia
loyally defended the PRC from an attempt to place
an ASEAN united front versus China concerning a
South China Sea mediation initiative on the
agenda.
Cambodian and Laotian desires to
distance themselves from the big bully of Asia,
the PRC, are perhaps counterbalanced by their
desire to keep the big bully of Southeast Asia,
Vietnam, at bay. As for Vietnam, it has learned
that, as far as the United States is concerned,
China is not Iran and Vietnam is not Israel - at
least for now, and quite possibly for always.
Even
as the United States has vocally supported freedom
of navigation in the South China Sea and a
multilateral united front in dealing with the PRC,
it has avoided "taking sides in territorial
disputes" - the only kind of dispute that the
nations surrounding the South China Sea care
about, since "the PRC threat to freedom of
navigation" in the area is little more than a
nonsensical canard.
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