"Seeing
China Plain" by Peter W Rodman
from the New York Post, May 22, 2000.
Even as Congress considers granting China normal trading status, the Pentagon is beginning to focus more seriously on China as a potential security problem in the Asia/Pacific region. The paradox of China policy is that both are the right thing to do.
Americans need to look at China soberly, with neither sentimentality nor panic. China is not the Soviet Union. China's foreign policy is not an ideologically-driven campaign to subvert neighboring governments or to undermine Western positions around the world; China is not a global power but a regional power, and it gave up its "revolutionary" foreign policy 30 years ago. And, while the Soviets practiced an absurd autarky to prop up their backward socialist economy, China is integrating rapidly into the world economic system - giving it much more of a stake in international order.
That's what China is not. What China is, is an emerging economic powerhouse that aims at eventually becoming the leading power in the region. Thus it inevitably becomes a security problem for the United States, since we are sitting in forward positions in the Asia/Pacific region guaranteeing the security of millions of people around the Chinese periphery who are not eager to be dominated by China.
China's military power is growing gradually. It starts from a low base, but it includes hundreds, soon to be thousands, of ballistic missiles meant to awe its neighbors. Beijing has used force twice in recent mini-crises - in 1995, in a skirmish with the Philippines in the South China Sea, and in 1996 by launching missiles in the Taiwan Strait to influence a Presidential election in Taiwan. It is beginning to put diplomatic pressure on America's alliance system in the region, hoping that the American presence will someday be gone, leaving China as the regional superpower.
This is a long-term aspiration, which China may never achieve. But there is also a more immediate problem for us. Among China's arms purchases from Russia are supersonic anti-ship missiles and advanced torpedoes designed for attacking U.S. ships.
The Chinese can certainly never aspire to blow the U. S. Seventh Fleet out of the water, but that is not the standard that they must meet: Merely to raise the costs and risks and potential casualties to the United States is to raise the inhibitions of an American president as he contemplates intervening in a future crisis over, say, Taiwan.
This is a significant tilt in the psychological balance. And it is already upon us. The next crisis over Taiwan is likely to be much more dangerous than previous ones.
How do we respond to this challenge? Our first responsibility is to maintain our naval and military supremacy in the Asia/Pacific region, countering whatever threat China might pose. (Defenses against ballistic missiles are one obvious necessity.) Second, we must maintain our alliances and commitments, including unambiguous deterrence of the use of force against Taiwan. Our regional allies and friends - Japan, South Korea, India, Australia and New Zealand, the Southeast Asian nations - are counterweights to Chinese power.
If we do all these things, we and our allies and friends will be in a strong position to shape the international system into which China is emerging, and to which it will have to adapt.
But an intelligent strategy will also offer China a constructive course, as a positive alternative to a collision course. We can encourage Taiwan to refrain from unilateral actions that provoke a crisis. We can maintain normal diplomatic and economic relations. The regime in Beijing has staked its survival on continuing its successful economic performance; for this, economic ties with the rest of the world are essential.
This gives the regime a lot to lose if a real military clash should occur. That is the strategic value of bringing China into the World Trade Organization and granting it normal access to the U.S. market (on a reciprocal basis). As China grows stronger, the incentives and disincentives that we are in a position to build into the international system can steer China’s policies in a constructive direction whatever its ultimate dreams may be.
In the longer run, too, its "people's dictatorship" at home is not sustainable. Chinese leaders gamble that economic success will fend off pressures for political change. But it's a losing gamble. On the contrary, openness to outside influences is bound to have a subversive effect.
We shouldn't exaggerate what political change in China will mean for its foreign policy; a post-Communist China is likely to be nationalistic, just as post-Communist Russia is. But with a democratic China a solution to the Taiwan problem would probably be easier, and relations with us would become easier as well.
Thus, as the new century begins, U.S.-China relations could go either way - toward a violent rivalry, or toward long-term peace and prosperity. We need to be vigilant both in deterring the first and in seizing opportunities to promote the second.
(Peter W. Rodman is Director of National Security Programs at The Nixon Center.)
