A new book by two journalists with long experience in Asia is having a major impact on the debate over how the United States should deal with the PRC as it becomes wealthier, militarily stronger, and increasingly aggressive in the Asia-Pacific region.
Surely the harshest criticism in this excellent but uneven book is directed at what the authors call the "New China Lobby," led by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in Washington, DC, that favors mainland China over Taiwan in the tense rivalry between Beijing and Taipei. The authors contend that this new pressure group is "a multifaceted, loosely correlated network actively encouraged and manipulated by China, mainly by promising or withholding money." They assert that "Kissinger is only the best known and most prestigious of a group of former senior officials who have been cultivated by China."
The New China Lobby, they argue, "fosters a vision of China as an essentially benign, peaceable, and defensive country whose long-term interests and those of the United States are one and the same." They charge that Kissinger's view of China is "almost identical to the view put forward in public statements by China's leaders themselves" and conclude: "We think they are lying and that he is wrong."
Hard words, no doubt, from Richard Bernstein, onetime Hong Kong and then Beijing correspondent for Time magazine and now a book critic at The New York Times, and Ross H. Munro, a long-time Asia hand now at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. Even so, they make a powerful case in a book likely to become controversial in the gathering American debate over China policy.
In an early passage, the authors come straight to the main point, declaring: "China is an unsatisfied and ambitious power whose goal is to dominate Asia, not by invading and occupying neighboring nations, but by being so much more powerful than they are that nothing will be allowed to happen in East Asia without China's at least tacit consent." A few paragraphs on, they elaborate: "China, during the past decade or so, has set goals for itself that are directly contrary to American interests, the most important of those goals being to replace the United States as the pre-eminent power in Asia." They contend that China seeks "to reduce American influence, to prevent Japan and the United States from creating a kind of 'contain China' front, and to extend its power into the South China and East China Seas so that it controls the region's essential sea-lanes."
The findings of the authors have already attracted considerable attention. An extract from their book has appeared in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the US East Coast foreign policy elite, and a number of columnists, including George Will, have looked upon it favorably. The Far Eastern Economic Review reports that the book has been translated into Chinese for circulation within the Communist Party but not for release to the public. An official in Beijing was quoted as saying Bernstein and Munro would be denied visas if they tried to visit China.
For the last couple of years, a steady flow of books and articles on China has appeared in the United States with widely divergent predictions on whither China. They can be classified into roughly three schools:
· Aggressive China: With swift economic growth rates for the past twenty years projected to continue for at least another decade, Beijing will use its wealth to acquire a powerful military force to intimidate and dominate its neighbors, as in the days of the Middle Kingdom. This view appears to be ascending in America.
The Coming Conflict with China clearly fits into this school, as does Alastair Iain Johnston's Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton University Press, 1995). In that academic treatise, the Harvard political scientist found that China was more likely than other nations to use force to settle disputes. More recently, a study by the National Defense University in Washington, DC, entitled Chinese Views of Future Warfare (1997), assembles forty translated essays by Chinese military leaders and strategic thinkers. They leave little doubt that China intends to acquire a first-class military force and will be prepared to use it.
· Benign China: China's new wealth will foster democracy and thus China will seek to raise the standard of living for its 1.2 billion, soon to be 1.5 billion, people and will integrate itself into an expanding global economy. For instance, three scholars from Boston University, June Grasso, Jay Corrin, and Michael Kort, hold this more optimistic view in Modernization and Revolution in China (M.E. Sharpe, 1997), where they say that mainland Chinese will most likely hold to the reforms of the late Deng Xiaoping and emphasize economic progress over military power. This view appears to be receding in America, although many still hope for the best.
· Fractured China: Perhaps the world's most difficult nation to unify, China will split apart, as it has repeatedly from the dim beginnings of time through the warlord period of the twentieth century. James Miles, a correspondent in Beijing for the British Broadcasting Corporation, expresses this orientation in Legacy of Tiananmen: China in Disarray (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). He says that a myriad of "destructive emotions will spill open just as they did in some of the former communist countries of Eastern Europe and parts of the former Soviet Union." A number of Westerners still hold this view, even though strong and cohesive Chinese nationalism seems to make it increasingly unlikely.
In the American debate over China that Bernstein and Munro intend to influence, there is nothing yet that approximates a unified assessment of China's destiny nor anything that approaches a coherent, comprehensive US government policy. In the little attention President Clinton gave to China in his first term, he vacillated, as Bernstein and Munro assert. The authors skewer the president for an "amateurish, fumbling, and inconsistent policy toward China." The first months of his second term have likewise held out little promise because none of the President's senior advisers are schooled in Asia.
Beyond Washington, the authors appear to be aiming at the East Coast's European-oriented establishment on foreign affairs, where ignorance of Asia and China abounds. In the boardrooms of corporate America little but potential profits dance on the table and in the halls of academe many scholars see China in rosy hues. Some of these are active in the "New China Lobby."
But a more somber view of China can be found west of the Rocky Mountains, and especially in Hawaii, site of the headquarters of the Pacific Command that controls US military forces from the West Coast of the USA to the east coast of Africa. Some military officers have expressed private fears that the United States will appease an aggressive China. Others assert that too much attention is being directed toward China at the expense of keeping Japan as an ally, of reducing tensions on the volatile Korean peninsula, and of winning friends along the shores of the South China Sea, through which passes one-quarter of the world's seaborne trade.
Staff officers at the Pacific Command will not discuss war plans, but it does not take a military genius to figure that somewhere in the bowels of the headquarters bright young majors and colonels are constantly revising scenarios for as many contingencies as they can anticipate, however perishable those plans may be once hostilities begin. (If they aren't writing those plans, US taxpayers are due a refund.)
At the same time, the Pacific Command is engaged in military-to-military contact with the leaders of the People's Liberation Army. The Chinese Defense Minister, Chi Haotian, was invited to the United States last December to be given two strategic messages. The first and categorical message was that America does not pose a military threat to China. The second and more subtle one was that China's military forces are no match for the US fighter planes, warships, armored forces, and American soldiers, sailors, and aviators that Chi saw during his tour of the United States--and they will not be for at least a decade. All was intended to avert history's most frequent cause of war: miscalculation.
Outside of military circles, the focus of deliberations has changed over the last half-dozen years on the Asia-Pacific security conference circuit. In the early 1990s, Asians often expressed concern that Japan would acquire an armed force commensurate with its economic power. After Japan's so-called "bubble economy" burst, that fear seemed to fade. Those concerns have been replaced today by a quiet anxiety among Asians that China has reverted to its historical posture of seeking to decree the fates of less powerful nations. Bernstein and Munro will surely feed those fires with their chapters asserting that the Chinese consider America to be their prime enemy and that Beijing seeks to replace the United States as the foremost power in Asia.
The writers are cogent in assessing the de facto independence of Taiwan and the need for the United States to maintain that island's separation from the mainland unless there is a peaceful and amicable reunion. They note "the United States is committed in theory to the untruth that all of the people involved in this unique historical situation see themselves as belonging to the same country, even as it is in practice committed to preserving the real truth, which is that they do not."
Most Americans balk at the idea that any nation could perceive the United States as being an enemy; it goes against the fundamental image Americans have of themselves. Bernstein and Munro are persuasive, however, in asserting that China "has decided that American power represents a threat, not just to China's security but to China's plans to grow stronger and to play a paramount role in the affairs of Asia."
"In interviews we conducted with Chinese strategic thinkers in 1996," they write, "there was little effort to disguise the consensus view that China and the United States had become rivals, and that the rivalry will intensify as China becomes stronger." They quote a senior Chinese analyst: "In the coming fifteen years there won't be fundamental conflicts between the United States and China, but after that, fundamental conflict will be inevitable."
With China already having the world's second largest economy when measured by the World Bank formula based on purchasing power parity, Bernstein and Munro believe that China's economic power and leverage will push it to greater aggressiveness as well as further defiance of international opinion. They note that Chinese leaders have mocked President Clinton's policy on human rights. In the inner councils of the Communist party, the leadership "argued that the human rights question represented an opportunity to confront the United States, demonstrate its lack of resolve, and get away with it." The authors foresee China, which they say is already by far the most powerful country in Asia, evolving into "a kind of corporatist, militarized, nationalist state."
Bernstein and Munro miss their footing, however, when analyzing Japan's security role in the region, and they fail to summon enough Japanese voices to prove their points. Similarly, an imaginary war game between China and America in 2004 borders on the ludicrous, because there is no way China can acquire enough military power to challenge the United States in less than a decade--unless President Clinton retires another third of the US armed forces.
The authors rightly assert that "America must have Japan as its partner," but they overestimate Japanese willingness to be a full partner, especially in military matters. The authors seem reluctant to accept their own finding: "After a half century of pacifism, Japanese self-perception may simply not permit the country to accept a genuine great-power role, even in its own backyard." Had they written "will" instead of "may," they would have gotten it right.
To cope with China, the authors advocate strengthening Japan's armed forces. "It is Japan's weakness that threatens peace and stability by creating a power vacuum that the United States alone can no longer fill," they argue. Yet they overlook the very real danger that a well-armed Japan would scare the daylights out of most Asians and would give China and Korea, which are all too willing to remind the Japanese of their misdeeds in the 1930s and 1940s, another bat with which to bash Japan.
More important, the chances of Japan acquiring a large armed force are next to nil. Japan has the industry, technology, money, and people to assemble a first-class military force. What it lacks is the political will to do so. The Constitution, government policy for fifty years, poll after poll, and reams of anecdotal evidence of opposition to militarism make the Bernstein-Munro proposal a non-starter.
In their war-game scenario, Bernstein and Munro have China tripling its submarine, amphibious, and surface forces by 2004--and doing so in secret. Absent a mobilization on the scale of the United States in World War II, that would be physically impossible. In secret? Not with US satellites, submarines, and spy planes watching China round the clock, to say nothing of the thousands of travelers in China at any given moment from Taiwan, as well as America, Japan, Korea, Russia, and dozens of other nations.
The Bernstein-Munro prescription for America in trying to cope with China is unsurprising but nonetheless a practical one. They would like to see Washington define American interests in Asia and China, maintain a stable balance of power, encourage China to be a responsible international citizen, and induce China to become democratic.
They don't hold out much hope, however, that any of this will happen.
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Richard Halloran, formerly with The New York Times as a foreign correspondent in Asia and military correspondent in Washington, writes about Asia from Honolulu.
Copyright 1997 by Richard Halloran.