China's intentions: Stakeholder or like Japan's leading up to Pearl Harbor?
Monday, April 6, 2009 E-Mail this story Free Headline Alerts
Sol Sanders also writes the "Asia Investor" column weekly for EAST-ASIA-INTEL.com.
Almost four years ago the then Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick posed a question in an insightful way before the annual meeting of the American business lobby for the Chinese:
Zoellick has since gone on to grander heights, heading the World Bank which is the principal cheerleader for subsidized aid to [and statistical fictions about] the Chinese economy.
But the essence of Zoellick’s lucid and frank exposition at that time still floats in the ether: how valid is the concept, again elucidated eloquently a bit earlier by Zheng Bijian, chairman of the China Reform Forum, in the journal Foreign Affairs, entitled "China’s ‘Peaceful Rise’ to Great Power Status."? [It may be significant that official Chinese media have long since abandoned the phrase “peaceful rise”.]
Four years is not a long time in the history of nations – particularly the Chinese civilization with its 3500 years of recorded history. But given the urgency of the current worldwide economic crisis and its drastic political implications, neither of which can be wholly anticipated, and China’s recent responses to the earliest of these events, it may be time to take a look at whether, indeed, China has chosen to become a “stakeholder”.
And were that not the case, is it time for American policy to take another possibility into account and proceed with the necessary action.
Many have argued that the U.S. – and the world – really hasn’t a choice. As Napoleon supposedly once warned against, “the sleeping giant” has been awakened. Any attempt to rein it in would only create the very menace which were anticipated runs this argument, that is, it would create a fearful, paranoid and belligerent China.
Yet, as Zoellick maintained, seven American presidents have tried in their own way to meet any challenge from China with offers of integration.
If the issue of Taiwan is a bone that sticks in China’s craw, what Beijing sees as U.S. interference in a domestic affair, the bringing to heel of a rebellious province, it must be recalled that the issue arose in no small part, by Beijing’s intervention on the side of an aggressor in the Korean War. That led to American guarantees to the Taiwan regime of Gen. Chiang Kai-shek. It arose, as a recent and uniquely researched biography of Mao Tse-tung examines in new detail, as a deliberate act by Beijing to play the Soviet Union against the U.S.
Furthermore, is there not the argument that a negotiated resolution of the Beijing-Taipei dispute is the very essence of the role China would pursue in world affairs were it to follow “peaceful rising”? After all, with its own turn toward “a socialist market economy”, Beijing tacitly endorses a Chinese regime in Taiwan which has given its 23 million people an economic and political model unequaled in Chinese history. The fact that more than half a million Taiwanese managers with more than $100 billion in investment are at work on the Mainland, bringing along an enormous transfer of technology and management abilities, is the evidence that peaceful intercourse is the logical route for settlement of the dispute just as a peaceful reversion of British Hong Kong was achieved. And that has been the basis of American support for Taipei.
But the balance sheet for China’s relations with the U.S. and the world extends, of course, far beyond the Taiwan issue.
Despite its benefits from its membership in the World Trade Organization which Washington pushed with concessions not extended to other new members, Beijing has followed a mercantilist policy of protecting its internal markets and subsidizing its exports. Despite a widely acknowledged benefit for the U.S., and much of the rest of the world, of cheap merchandise – perhaps often at below cost – this strategy has resulted in Beijing accumulating an unprecedented hoard of foreign exchange reserves. Just as in the immediate post-World War II, the U.S. [through the Marshall Plan] acknowledged the obligation of surplus payments economies to accept as much responsibility as deficit countries which asked for relief, China has been obligated to address this problem. But it has stonewalled its trading partners’ demands and, in fact, at this very moment, when the whole trading system is threatened with a return to protectionist policies which deepened the Great Depression, it has moved toward extending new subsidies to its foundering exporters.
On the eve of the G20 emergency meeting in London to address the world crisis, China played political games by proposing a new reserve currency to replace the dollar. That it was totally a political ploy was obvious: something like this was tried at the International Monetary Fund in the 1960s and failed for most of the same reasons it would be difficult if not impossible to implement in the midst of a world economic crisis today. It flies in the face of China’s own self interest in the vast investment it has made and therefore its interest in maintaining the validity of the dollar, it was sprung in a PR manner not commensurate with serious economic discussion, etc., etc.
Rather than offer, for example as Japan did in November 2008, early in the crisis, $100 billion to supplement the IMF’s ability to help the most desperate economies – Beijing waited until the London meeting to offer [with still unknown strings] $40 billion although its own reserves are more than double Japan’s own bloated holdings.
There are a multitude of other economic issues. Despite repeated professions of WTO adherence, for example, Chinese companies pirate intellectual property to the tune of billions of dollars theft from American and Japanese and other Western companies.
Perhaps even more important, China continues to carry forward a vast military buildup which it refuses to explain or to ventilate. No enemy has been identified, for the obvious reason there is none apparent to any other world strategic circles. But China’s armaments binge is leading to a growing arms race which none of her Asian neighbors need, especially faced with a yet to be determined period of economic downturn.
In the so-called diplomatic arena, Beijing refuses to use its leverage through its longstanding military alliance and major trading partner relationship to halt the efforts of North Korea to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Promises to join with the three allies, Japan, South Korea and the U.S., and Russia, to achieve a peaceful settlement to the ambitions of a regime which even the Chinese have criticized privately as retrograde have turned into empty rhetoric.
Furthermore, China is pursuing an aggressive and reckless policy by sending its submarines into Japanese territorial waters and playing tag with American warships, creating incidents with American intelligence activities on the high seas, supplying weapons – and political support at the UN Security Council – for the worst pariah regimes such as Burma, Sudan, Iran and Zimbabwe. It continues a missiles buildup opposite Taiwan even though a newly elected Taiwanese administration has made extensive concessions to Beijing demands for more direct intercourse.
The repression of political dissidents in China is as fierce as ever before. Not only do the ethnic minorities in Tibet and Singkiang continue to suffer bitter and almost haphazard suppression, but the regime literally assigns ten of thousands of personnel and untold financial resources to a pursuit of high tech methods of fighting expressions of dissent in electronic communications. Despite the network of official propaganda, word reaches the outside world of naked barbarism such as the selling of human body parts of imprisoned political dissidents.
This is far from a complete list of transgressions of “peaceful rising”. It’s where the Obama Administration finds itself along with so many other difficult domestic and foreign problems.
Sec. of State Hillary Clinton made her trip to East Asia – and especially to China – her first official overseas mission. But the stopover in Beijing, perhaps inevitably as the first intercourse with officialdom there, was filled with little more than the old clichés of American China policy — strikingly enough not that different for an Obama Administration which appears dedicated if nothing else to negating what was done by the Bush team.
However, China remains at the forefront of American foreign policy considerations. Recent advances in Chinese weaponry – particularly in the growth of its naval forces – presents the Obama Administration with a stark conundrum. Having announced proposed cutbacks in defense spending in the face of new requirements – which Obama himself has highlighted – in Afghanistan, Washington policymakers can no longer avoid the question of whether Beijing is, indeed, a stakeholder.
Historical parallels are worthless for the most part. But the determined effort [including some in the U.S. Navy establishment] to avoid the implications of the Chinese military buildup – whatever the intentions of the regime that can be deduced – recalls all too strongly the years leading up to Pearl Harbor.