Five tough truths about US-China relations
The more American and Chinese officials proclaim their innocent intentions toward each other, the deeper the level of mistrust they generate. China watchers worry about strategic miscalculation by one side or the other.
Understatement, subtlety, and nuance are the hallmarks of diplomacy and are Washington’s preferred tools for avoiding confrontation with China. But when professions of benign intent don't reflect actions and policies, the parties can actually increase mutual suspicion.
Official candor on five key truths about US-China relations will likely contribute to a more mature bilateral relationship and could help halt a potential slide to conflict.
Joseph A. Bosco, July 12, 2012
1. China is trying to supplant the US as the leading military and political power in Asia.
Beijing’s first regional interest is Taiwan, which it claims as part of China. Control of the island would extend Beijing’s reach an additional hundred miles into the Pacific and the South China Sea. In 1942, Japan used Taiwan to launch its invasion of the Philippines – where China is now aggressively pursuing territorial claims.
For 60 years, America has blocked China from seizing Taiwan, first when it was a dictatorship and now as a flourishing democracy. But when asked directly by Chinese officials in 1995, Washington said it no longer knows whether it will defend Taiwan. It has repeated that “strategic ambiguity” mantra ever since.
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Beijing’s response has been less nuanced: It has acquired the naval, air, and cyber arsenal needed to attack Taiwan. To deter American involvement, it has developed area denial and anti-access weapons like attack submarines and the world’s first anti-ship ballistic missiles. Chinese generals have added nuclear threats against US cities in a Taiwan conflict.
Similarly, Beijing has claimed the South China Sea – which, since World War II, the US Navy has kept open to global commerce, including China’s – as a “core interest” like Taiwan and Tibet. When Beijing employs bullying tactics against countries with competing claims, it warns Washington not to interfere in China’s affairs. The United States takes no position on the merits of the claims as long as they are settled peacefully, and it has pledged to ensure freedom of navigation in the area.
China also vehemently protests America’s Asian bases and military exercises as further evidence of Washington’s strategic “encirclement” of China, rather than a natural reaction to its own increasingly assertive actions. Clearly, China wants the US out of the way as it seeks to work its will in Asia.
2. The United States is trying to contain China’s military rise.
Since Nixon went to China, America and the West have been working to expand China’s economic rise and to integrate it diplomatically and politically into the international system. That part of the engagement policy has worked, to China’s great advantage and the benefit of millions of Chinese.
Even in the security realm, Washington had been willing to give China the benefit of the doubt during its dramatic military buildup. Putting the best face on it, US policymakers acknowledge that economic power usually leads to military power, if for no other reasons than the accrual of international prestige and the defense of expanding economic interests.
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But that tolerant view ignores three facts:
1) China faces no external threat requiring its huge military investment,
2) the US Navy has protected China’s commercial interests along with everyone else’s by keeping the world’s sea lanes open, and
3) China hardly needs weapons systems like long-range ballistic missiles just to ward off Somali pirates.
When China decided to accompany its military build-up with threatening rhetoric and actions against the interests of the United States, Japan, South Korea, and Southeast Asian countries, alarm bells finally went off in Washington and the region. Chinese actions are starting to evoke unpleasant memories of Japan’s rise in the 1930s.
The bottom line is that Washington is committed to deterring an aggressive, expansionist China and is expanding its regional security ties for that purpose. When Beijing warns its neighbors to remember, “you are small and we are big,” it practically invites big friends of those small countries to undertake some serious containment.
3. China and the US don’t share the same concerns about North Korea’s nuclear program.
Ever since it was clear that Pyongyang was pursuing a nuclear weapons program, US officials and Asia experts have assured the world that Beijing was every bit as worried as the rest of us – indeed, that proximity to its volatile ally gave it even more cause for concern.
Those assurances glossed over the fact that Chinese nuclear technology was the starting point for the North Korean program, both directly and through the proliferation network of Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan, who originally got it from China. They also ignored Beijing’s overwhelming leverage over Pyongyang given the latter’s dependence on Chinese food and fuel.
Western equanimity regarding Chinese intentions prevailed despite almost two decades of Beijing’s UN Security Council obstructionism, which shielded North Korea from serious international sanctions.
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Moreover, Chinese officials never expressed any of the concerns attributed to them by Western officials and scholars. Instead, they talked blandly of “peaceful resolution” and “the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula,” meaning elimination of a US nuclear deterrent against renewed North Korean aggression.
Still, Western governments accepted Beijing’s assurance of cooperation and made it the key player in the six-party talks devoted to reining in the North Korean nuclear program. China’s elevated status as a putative responsible stakeholder brought not only world prestige but also great leverage over Washington in negotiations on a range of other internal and international issues. American officials were reluctant to press China on human rights, Taiwan, or trade because “we need them on North Korea.”
Meanwhile, the Pyongyang problem has been a major distraction for US diplomacy and strategic planning, a result not unwelcome in Beijing. As befits longtime allies, China and North Korea, despite occasional frictions, work together to serve their own and each other’s interests, not those of the international community.
4. Economic reform will not lead inexorably to political reform.
For 30 years, China’s communist leadership has succeeded in largely disproving the liberal Western faith that decentralizing control over the economy would necessarily foster political reform. Taiwan, South Korea, and others have shown that when prosperity builds a middle class and technology provides access to global information, the people will inevitably demand their civil and human rights.
But Beijing offers a different, non-democratic, development model for Asia, Africa, and even South America: Discarding most Marxist theory and practice, it retains its Leninist system of governance. Beijing is betting that relative prosperity will keep its populace satisfied and stable and will substitute for the political legitimacy lacking in one-party rule. It also hedges its bet by periodically stirring up Chinese nationalism against perceived threats from outside powers led by the US.
5. Washington wants to change China's government.
Taiwan and South Korea made the transition from authoritarianism to democracy because their American protector maintained the pressure for political reform. China has been able to defy modern history because the West, without the same leverage over Beijing, has refrained from holding it accountable for its lack of political progress.
The shock of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre has long faded, and the broken promises of democratic progress that were prerequisites to awarding Beijing the 2008 Olympics are forgotten. While Western countries sporadically decry China’s terrible human rights record, they never allow the criticism to interfere with business as usual.
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But Western reticence does not mean the ultimate, unstated, goal of a democratic China has disappeared. Washington’s appeals for Beijing to move toward the rule of law, religious liberty, and freedom of expression are inherently subversive for one-party dictatorship. A Chinese government that makes those changes could no longer be called communist. America has more in common with the aspirations of the Chinese people than it does with the interests of China’s present rulers. Beijing understands, and resents, that fact.
Joseph A. Bosco served in the office of the secretary of Defense as China country desk officer and previously taught graduate seminars on China-US relations at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. He now writes on national security issues.
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http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2012/0712/Five-tough-truths-about-US-China-relations/China-is-trying-to-supplant-the-US-as-the-leading-military-and-political-power-in-Asia
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