A SENSE OF ASIA
Disquieting evidence the Pandahuggers are just wrong
See the Sol Sanders Archive
By Sol Sanders
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM
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Friday, November 24, 2006
It has not been a good fortnight for Pandahuggers, those who believe “engagement” with “a rising China” can ease Beijing’s growing power into the international system without an explosion. China Hawks will take satisfaction, if not comfort, from events evidencing somewhere in the Chinese Communist Party hierarchy aggressive intent is manifest.
Just preceding Chinese President Hu Jinatao’s first visit to India, the other Asian behemoth seeking its place in the sun, Beijing’s ambassador let fly with a flat claim to Arunachal Pradesh, one of India’s northeastern states. It was there Chinese forces scuppered the Indians in 1961 when New Delhi tried to assert its claims derived from the Raj to a defensible border with Tibet. [Somehow Indians don’t seem to remember their then Defense Minister V.K. Krishna Menon couldn’t deliver on his promises Moscow would block the Chinese, and always forgetting American air deliveries of arms came as fast as Calcutta’s decrepit Dum Dum airport could receive them. An Indian friend at the time warned Washington was arming Chinese divisions as they came across the Himalayas given the ineptitude of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s civilian and military yes-men. But the Chinese took Alexander the Great’s advice and withdrew as soon as they had made their point.]
A Chinese submarine shadowing the American aircraft Carrier Kitty Hawk was spotted surfacing a few miles in deep waters off Okinawa. Chinese media, when word got out the Americans were surprised, bragged about how they had demonstrated their growing naval power. Such encounters with Soviet ships during The Cold War were largely codified in order to prevent “episodes”. But Beijing’s command has ignored such courtesies, in this encounter as in others with the Japanese and the U.S. – including the disastrous crash of a Chinese hotshot pilot over international waters taunting an unarmed American surveillance aircraft off Hainan back in April 2001.
American technology for the B2 bomber — so-called “stealth” characteristics which confuse the enemy’s radar trying to pick up approaching aircraft with heat and chemical sensoring — has been compromised by an elaborate piece of Chinese espionage. Spying is a commonplace between countries, of course, especially for technology [often as not among private corporations], even the closest of allies. But the extent of Chinese penetration has to be an increasing concern in keeping American defenses at the cutting edge of the art after a decade of dereliction in transferring dual use technologies to China during the Clinton decade.
Beijing was quick, of course, to back away from the Ambassador’s forthright statement. Not much had been going on anyway in the torturous Beijing-New Delhi negotiations – except a further move by India to acknowledge Chinese sovereignty in Tibet and Beijing’s acceptance of India’s old suzerainty derived from British India in the Himalayan state of Sikhim; not much of a swap.
Apologists are quick to say Beijing anticipates a crisis with the eventual death of 71-year-old Dalai Lama presiding over a Tibetan government in exile in India since 1959. Thubten Gyatso has, much to the chagrin of many Tibetans, counseled peaceful, more recently even proposing autonomy rather than independence. With everything from 90 percent Han Chinese personnel in Tibetan Autonomous Region’s government and growing Chinese People’s Liberation Army forces with expanding armaments [missiles, probably nuclear weapons, looking down on the Indian Gangetic plain] and expanding railway and road transport, such a revolt would be the last gasp of the Tibetan civilization. But the Chinese do not want to take chances, and the ambassador was laying claim to the Towang Valley, traditionally the revolving door between India and Tibet [through which the Dalai Lama escaped].
Despite the vast expansion of China’s ‘blue water” navy with Russian purchases and surreptitious sales by American allies [this particular submarine is said to have German engines and Japanese computer platforms], Beijing still faces a formidable U.S. naval power in the Western Pacific. But again, the erosion during the Clinton years and the Bush Administration’s continued downsizing coupled with its ambitious defense of American interests in the Mideast, would have to be reversed if Ronald Reagan’s “trust and veruify” is to be standard for relations with China.[It would help if the characteristically vapid out of Honolulu military were less naïve. [Failure to track the submarine was ascribed to not implementing anti-submarine warfare tactics. Why not?]
So far, in a Washington where preoccupation with Islamofascist penetration of our defenses is the priority, spying for more disputable enemies may be an added burden. But it is clear it is one with its own high priority.
Meanwhile, Secretary of Treasury Henry Paulson is stoking up his mid-December mission to China to attempt to get some concessions on a host of economic issues. He has added the prestige of the chairman of the Federal Reserve. That is all to the good, perhaps. But the Pandahuggers’ argument democracy follows inevitably in the footsteps of economic development is not confirmed by history. Nor is a booming economic relationship necessarily a guarantee against conflict. [Please check the 1940 Japan-U.S. trade figures.]
Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net),
is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent
for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International.
He writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.
Friday, November 24, 2006
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