Cold War ghosts haunt China relations

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See the Sol Sanders Archive By Sol Sanders SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

Beijing tells Tokyo who tells Washington it doesn't accept American evaluations of North Korean nuclear capabilities. [After all, the U.S. hasn't found Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, the line goes.] The Chinese tell us, the State Dept. says, it doesn't want a nuke-armed North Korea. But American intelligence leaks stories of continued Chinese technology flows toPyongyang. Washington's greatest fear is North Korea's current missiles and missile technology proliferation could be followed by nukes, maybe to "nonstate" terrorists. But five Chinese firms are sanctioned for violating Beijing's written missile non-proliferation agreements just as Sec. Powell says relations with China have never been better. China, conventional wisdom holds, coaxed North Korea into multilateral negotiations replacing one-on-one negotiations Kim Il Jong demanded. But China pushes North Korea's agenda, meetings get nowhere, meetings are postponed, and ø presumably ø North Korea's nuclear development goes forward.

Confusion? Yes, possibly. A difficult problem? Yes, certainly. Easy solutions? Not likely.

"What we are dealing with is a failure of communication": transparency of decision-making processes, the real aims of Chinese leadership.

Billions of dollars were devoted to research and analysis of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In the end, the Soviet Union's implosion was largely unpredicted. It came suddenly, developed more rapidly than anticipated. And, it could be argued, it took the U.S. a decade [while Cold War debris elsewhere fermented], to pick up the pieces and begin to put together a new world strategy ø the need for which 9/11 brought crashing in on us, the reality, indeed, it was still a jungle out there.

China is not the Soviet Union of the 1950s-80s certainly. When that bill comes in for 2003 trade with China, it will shatter records [including possibly as much as a $130 billion deficit in China's favor, funding the present Chinese Coastal Boom and permitting Beijing to pour reserves into the black hole of the relics of their Soviet system]. It could be argued, China is more open, not the failed, largely autarchic, economy that brought down Gorbachev. After all, there are all those American, Taiwanese, Japanese, and Southeast Asian MBA's sitting in those new Shanghai skyscrapers investing billions in China's export industries. And there is no dearth of interpretations of what is going on in China.

Yet the basic problem remains: the lack of transparency in Chinese decision-making. We are told the new generation of Chinese leaders is "technocratic", pragmatic, devoted to solving problems with international management techniques. But the fact is there is no one in senior leadership that did not get there as a personal choice of Deng Xiaoping [or his family], the last Paramount leader. We still are not clear whether former President Jiang Zemin as chairman of the Party and state Central Military Commissions is not, like Deng who hung on to that role, the ultimate arbiter. We do know present leadership arrived by keeping their heads down, groveling through the Great Cultural Revolution, avoiding decisions, and spouting slogans of uncritical loyalty to the secret society which is the Party. We see them abandoning all but the slogans of Marxist-Leninist-Maoism [except brutal internal repression] including government "ownership of the means of production". The present endorsement of Jiang's gobbledygook "Three Represents", largely a device to get leading businessmen admitted into the club, is part of the same old process. [But their legalization of private property still stops short of the peasantry.]

Unfortunately, what observers substitute for real information is what was called by the Cold War hawks "mirror-imaging": attributing one's own "logic" and "motivation" to the adversary. [When it is done on a personal level, the Freudians call it "projection".] Beijing must not want nuclear weapons in the hands of a bankrupt regime like North Korea's [we wouldn't]; the Chinese Communist planners must recognize that Taiwan, a major source of technology and capital, can be left to its own democratic games [we would]; etc., etc. Despite the public spanking President Bush gave Taiwan's Chen Shui-bian øin the presence of visiting Prime Minister Wen Jinbao, calling him by Beijing's nomenclature, "the leader of Taiwan" ø reciprocity on Beijing's part is not yet forthcoming; instead more fiery oratory and threats. [Chen has a point: increasing missiles deployment on the Fukien coast against Taiwan is not playing the game ø the U.S.' oft-repeated mantra there must be a peaceful resolution of the Beijing-Taipei issue.] We are told there are hawks and doves; but the history of these Communists' dedication - just as their Soviet models - to principle turns like a weathervane in a storm when "objective conditions" demand.

China may not be as Winston Churchill described the Soviet Union ø "an enigma wrapped in a mystery" ø but it is certainly not predictable. A little more of Ronald Reagan's "trust and verify" is certainly in order in dealing with Beijing.