Hard facts about China’s 'soft power'

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

Much is being made of China’s greatest weapon in her increasing competition with the U.S. for dominance in Asia. [Rummy’s unanswered question: why enormous hidden military expenditures? Who is the enemy?]

Beijing, we are told, is playing its cards brilliantly, insuring its new position as a major customer and exporter morphs into growing political power.

That capacity was demonstrated, it is argued, by Beijing’s ability to organize an East Asia Summit just concluded in Kuala Lumpur, the germ of a new regional political union which excludes America. The Chinese were even able to entice our allies, Japan, Korea, and Australia [as well as our freeloading partner New Zealand] and the wannabe, India. Another of those meaningless treaties which nevertheless are propaganda weapons against U.S. leadership for collective defense was made the ticket to the party – and Seoul, Tokyo, Canberra, and New Delhi, bought with varying degrees of alacrity.

Furthermore, with considerable success – especially among academics who once bought Chinese Communism as “agrarian radicalism” — Beijing has put about a hypothesis it is pursuing “peaceful rising”. Unlike other nation-state latecomers such as Germany, we are told, the Chinese will make their way toward international VIPism without disrupting the party.

It’s a hypothesis worthy of examination, of course. No one, least of all Americans, want the emergence of a powerful China as an avowed enemy. We are cautioned not to create a self-fulfilling prophecy, that is, engender such fear and loathing among the Chinese, war becomes inevitable.

But to proceed through the graveyard at night whistling “China no yoru” [woops! nice song, but it was, after all, a Japanese ditty romantizing Japanese claims they were civilizing the Continent during their 1930s aggression] would be foolish.

It’s a vast and largely uncharted subject. But here are some caveats one ought to consider before accepting either Chinese ‘soft power” genius or the benevolent intentions of present leadership.

The “soft power” argument assumes – even though businessmen should know better – [highly inflated and dubious] Chinese growth statistics will continue in a straight line. I know too many Japanese who thought the same just as their bubble economy imploded. The Chinese boom is rickety — disproportionate dependence on assembly manufacturing for foreign trade, fantastic disparities not only in personal income but between regions and sectors, corruption at levels constituting economic disincentive, a banking system built on vast nonperforming lending, central planning system with regions and municipalities doing their thing, etc., etc.

Was it really so clever for the Chinese to exclude American from the East Asian Summit, a meeting inevitably drawn to economic issues? Much has been made of the growth of intra-Asian trade in recent years as the basis of a new agglomeration. But integral to this is movement of components — largely from Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan – for assembly with cheap labor and [increasingly expensive imported] energy in China is their export to the U.S. and the industrial world. Washington’s probable $200+ billion trade deficit with China this year is fueling this trade.

The growing rural discontent – Chinese media have suppressed the latest police firing on villagers — is a manifestation of all this. China’s “soft power” gurus have refused to undo the Communist Party’s monopoly on land ownership, established during the halcyon “land reform” which took hundreds of thousands if not several million lives. If land belongs to an increasingly corrupt bureaucracy, no wonder it becomes the source of increasingly bitter conflict.

When the prime minister of China refuses to pass the pen for a final signature to the prime minister of Japan, after a public denunciation for praying at a controversial war memorial, you have to wonder. Since the modernization attempts first hit China at the turn of the 20th century, virtually all Chinese looked to Japan as a model, the one non-European society which succeeded in industrializing in a few short decades.

Leaving aside the argument of a welter of Japanese apologies, reparations through enormous concessionary lending and transfer of technology to China, and Beijing’s refusal to acknowledge much less apologize for its own bloody record of some 50 million killed in various lunatic domestic campaigns, why would “soft power” prowess dictate a policy of driving Tokyo into a tighter and tighter alliance with the U.S.? All this when China is still heavily dependent on the world’s second economy for continued investment and technology?

The spinmeisters tell us China is handling its affairs brilliantly. But semiofficial statistics say 74,000 rural incidents broke out in 2004. This for a regime which came to power, at least initially, by exploiting traditional complaints against overweening landlords and central power and must, therefore, know intimately China’s “tradition” of violent peasant revolts.

As Party leaders increasingly use these failings as tools in never ending one-party regime fratricide, “soft power goes right out the moon gate [if there are any left after bulldozing of Beijing’s physical environs as well as its history].