Waldron – Why China Could Be Dangerous

Why China Could Be Dangerous

By Arthur
Waldron

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Those inclined to stress the many good things about China today must not forget the real ugliness
of China’s political fundamentals. As the Tiananmen Square massacre reminds, the
Chinese regime still rests, ultimately, on force alone. Much genuine progress
notwithstanding, China remains a police state controlled by a self-perpetuating
communist dictatorship, a regime for which lawless coercion remains very much a
fundamental tool of politics—not only domestically, but in foreign policy as
well. Therefore China almost by definition poses a potential threat to her
neighbors and to the U.S.

Whether that potential is realized will depend on many other
factors, but its existence should not be doubted. The sort of genuine and
multifaceted political comity now budding in post-Communist Europe will be
impossible for Asia so long as China remains a dictatorship. Optimists about
Asian peace point to the undoubted fact that China could not win a war against
the U.S., or even against most of her neighbors. But that is not the issue. The
question is whether China might mistakenly start such a war—the consequences of
which would be incalculable.

The danger China poses
can best be understood by looking back to the first half of
the twentieth century, when European states veered from crisis to crisis, and
twice into catastrophic war. The same things that made Europe unstable then make
Asia unstable now: domestic unrest, arms races, lack of strong alliances, and
disagreements over territories. The sort of instability that led to unexpected
war then can lead to unexpected war now.

Even as it takes small steps toward political openness, Beijing
is building up its crowd-control troops—the People’s Armed Police. When crisis
comes, and some sort of seismic adjustment in China’s regime seems inevitable,
the appeal of a distracting foreign crisis with Japan, Taiwan, or the United
States could be irresistible.

China is also building up its military with high-tech weapons
that can threaten neighbors and the U.S., even as it pursues the most reasonable
foreign policy in 50 years of Communist rule. Looking only at the positive
developments in China, many observers now argue that no measures need be taken
to assure military balance in Asia. But like their predecessors in Europe, they
are unwittingly making conflict more likely.

Certainly America and her Asian friends should “engage” China,
but only with our eyes open. For engagement and trade alone will not stop
China’s military actions against her neighbors, as the small but significant
Chinese actions in recent years against Vietnam, Japan, the Philippines,
Taiwan, and others make clear.

Remember, Europe was thoroughly interdependent economically as
World War I approached, but that did not deter military threats in the region.
Only countervailing military might can accomplish that.

Besides, we have no assurance that the current moderate Chinese
foreign policy will continue. The Communist regime faces a fundamental crisis of
legitimacy fairly soon. And while a post-Communist China is likely to prove a
much better neighbor than the People’s Republic has been, the transition could
prove all too eventful.

Neither the United States nor China’s immediate neighbors
are eager to point these dangers out publicly. In fact, the Clinton
administration has tried to bury a whole series of China-related security
concerns. Call China a threat, the conventional wisdom goes, and you will make
her into a threat. But it is hard to find historical evidence for such a
proposition: Did England and France create a threat in the 1930s by worrying out
loud about German armament?

China’s territorial claims
would likely lead to regional war if they were consistently
enforced. The best-known case is Taiwan, which Beijing claims in its
constitution as “a province of the People’s Republic of China.” Short of war, it
is hard to imagine how this claim could become a reality. Rather than
compromise and treat Taiwan as a valuable neighbor, or even part of some Great
Chinese confederation, the People’s Republic has repeatedly threatened the
island. And China is now making substantial improvements in its ability to
threaten both Taiwan and any U.S. force that might be sent to assist
it.

Taiwan is only one of a host of potentially dangerous
territorial claims that China is unwilling to compromise. Look at any map
officially published in China and off of southeast Asia you will see that most
of the South China Sea, containing the myriad of small reefs and islets called
the Spratlys, is enclosed by a line marking China’s territorial limits. If taken
seriously, this claim would mean that, far from being a distant presence, China
is a close neighbor for Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Similar claims
are made to the Senkaku Islands held by Japan.

What these claims mean in practice is now hotly debated by
students of international relations. Many observers don’t find them worrying.
But the countries involved wonder why, if the claims are only “symbolic,” they
are so sharply drawn on the map, and why rather than moderating or
abandoning them, China regularly underlines them, by word and deed?

I believe domestic politics drives these assertions. Mention
Taiwan and Chinese officials will quickly tell you that they have to bring
Taipei to heel because otherwise the provinces of Tibet and Xinjiang will want
more freedom. Democracy and freedom on China’s borders, in short, threaten
dictatorship within them. A regime will not be feared at home if it is not
feared abroad.

But whatever its origins, this irredentist nationalism that so
worries its neighbors seems well-entrenched in Chinese policy. So the question
arises, Is China laying down markers now for action later? The trend of Chinese
military modernization suggests so.

China’s military certainly
needed modernization. It had grown increasingly obsolete in
the decades that followed the brief but intense period of cooperation with the
Soviet Union in the 1950s, when most of China’s defense industrial complex was
created. Numerically unsurpassed anywhere, the People’s Liberation Army was in
danger of becoming a vast museum of ’50s technology in all but a few fields. The
exceptions were nuclear weapons and missiles, in which China had managed to
develop its own capacity for modernization.

Still an Outlaw

Last October, Chinese President Jiang Zemin
and President Clinton met in Washington, and Jiang promised that China
would curb its long efforts to spread the proliferation of nuclear weapons
and delivery systems to gangster states inimical to the United States. In
particular, Jiang promised to stop aiding Iran’s effort to build the bomb.
That promise already has been broken, and the Clinton administration knows
this and has tried to hide and deny it.

According to a March report in the Washington Post,
the National Security Agency intercepted—in the same month that Clinton
certified China’s nuclear compliance to Congress—at least two
communications between an Iranian official and Chinese officials, which
showed that China was negotiating to sell to Iran hundreds of tons of
anhydrous hydrogen fluoride, a material necessary to enrich uranium to
weapons grade. The material was to be transferred from China’s state-run
China Nuclear Energy Industry Corp. to the Isfahan Nuclear Research
Center, the heart of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

An administration more trammeled by reality might have
informed Congress that the Jan. 12 non-proliferation certification was
null and void, and might have abandoned plans to rush China into
additional nuclear non-proliferation accords. This administration, the
Post reports, sought to “prevent public disclosure” until forced
out into the open by questioning in closed House and Senate hearings on
Feb. 4 and March 12.

And the denial continues. The White House’s current
incredible position is that China’s violation of the Jiang-Clinton deal is
a reason to push forward with more deals. The rationale? When national
security adviser Samuel R. Berger confronted China in the first week of
February (as the congressional hearings were about to blow the lid),
China, after some squirming, agreed to cancel the sale of anhydrous
hydrogen fluoride to Iran—agreed not to do what it had promised not to do
in the first place.

“The Chinese followed through on it and kept their
agreement to the letter,” the president assured reporters. “I am well
pleased, actually, with the way that issue came out.” No doubt.

—Michael Kelly in the Washington
Post, March 26, 1998.

To plug the gaps in its battle readiness, Beijing began
acquiring weapons and technologies from abroad in the 1990s. The former Soviet
Union proved willing to sell almost anything—nuclear weapon technologies,
missiles and missile guidance systems, aircraft engines, and so forth. Israel,
evidently operating on the basis of secret and limited American approval given
by the Carter administration, has taken a lead role in developing Chinese
military aircraft. American companies have sold missile technology. The list of
Chinese acquisitions is so formidable that one knowledgeable administration
official has characterized American indifference to the buildup as perhaps this
administration’s biggest national security error.

Still, although the quality of Chinese weaponry has steadily
improved, the speed with which the Chinese military industry is being modernized
must not be overestimated. Even with overt and covert foreign assistance, huge
problems remain in aircraft manufacture, ship design and propulsion, and other
areas—not to mention in the training and logistics support which alone make
equipment effective.

This slowness in China’s military modernization, regularly
invoked by those who downplay the Chinese threat, would be far more reassuring
if we could be confident that China will refrain from military action until she
reaches a high level of capability—sometime comfortably in the next century, if
present trends continue.

Unfortunately, that does not seem to be the way China uses
force. When approaching military tasks, the Chinese look above all else at the
vulnerabilities (material and psychological) of their opponents. That means
fighting asymmetrically—seeking to cripple and intimidate and confuse, to obtain
a respectable payoff for a small risk.

Unlike the United States, which tends to draw a sharp line
between peaceful diplomatic operations and war, China moves back and forth over
the war/peace line, making threats as integral a part of her diplomacy as calls
for negotiations are of her war-making. When China moved a few years ago to
occupy Mischief Reef, one of those Spratly islets also claimed by the
Philippines, she took advantage of the ill will between Manila and Washington
bred by the closing of U.S. bases in the Philippines. China has repeatedly moved
against Vietnam as well, always at times when Vietnam lacked allies. Similarly,
while calling for peaceful negotiations, China makes great efforts to snip any
connection Taiwan gains with other countries, even minor, impoverished African
or Central American states.

Chinese military operations are also very unlike American ones. In the
Gulf War, we employed overwhelming force after a clear and visible buildup. By
contrast, China’s operation against the Philippines was carried out secretly
(and discovered only after the fact) and involved force so limited—a few naval
vessels that unloaded men and building materials—as to hope to go unnoticed by
other Asian states, not to mention powers outside the region. This nearly
worked. The United States did nothing, but the Southeast Asian nations protested
loudly, though not loudly enough to get the Chinese off the island (where they
remain).

This islet near the Philippines is only one of the places where
China has established a small but strategically significant presence. India is
concerned about alleged violations of her northern frontier, and a helicopter
base built on its soil; Vietnam has lost a number of islets to China; small
presences also exist on Burmese-held islands near India’s Andaman Islands
bases.

For the moment, these Chinese footholds would be unsustainable
against serious attack. But no such attack is likely. In the odd calculus of
these things, a response by another Asian power at this point would likely be
portrayed, even in Washington, as more “provocative” than the initial Chinese
move. It’s only a matter of time before China’s ability to project its forces
catches up with the claims already advanced. So in ten or 15 years, thanks to
Russian and other foreign assistance as well as her own efforts, China will
probably possess sufficient air and sea capabilities to enforce her arbitrarily
expanded perimeters—a potentially dangerous situation.

The other danger is that these very acts of stealth and bluff,
withwhich China has succeeded in the past, will one day fail. An attack on
a member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (asean), such as Vietnam
or the Philippines, could quickly lead to retaliatory military action, for
China’s neighbors have substantial military capabilities of their own. Imagine a
sea battle in which Vietnamese ships, perhaps with some covert assistance from
another asean member, sink some Chinese combatants. Under this very real
possibility, China might well decide to escalate. The conflict might prove
impossible to contain, and other regional powers—Japan or the United
States—might be forced to intervene.

The world came very close to this danger almost three years ago,
when China fired ballistic missiles close to Taiwan just as that island’s people
voted in their first democratic presidential election. China had carefully
isolated Taiwan diplomatically and believed (based on some bad signals from
Washington) that the United States would do nothing. In fact, Washington
awakened and sent two aircraft carriers to the region. China stopped its missile
firings, protesting that they had only been an exercise and were in any case
completed.

What lessons has China drawn from this humiliation? Chiefly, I
believe, that she must develop some way to interfere with U.S. operations in
Asia without resorting to nuclear threats against the United States mainland. Is
such a capability possible? Unfortunately, yes.

In order to confront the U.S. Navy, the Soviet Union developed
advanced supersonic anti-ship missiles that can penetrate our existing defenses
and threaten our aircraft carriers. China is now obtaining these missiles and
technologies from Russia. Carriers can also be threatened by submarines quiet
enough to evade detection—and such submarines are likewise entering the Chinese
inventory. In addition, U.S. forces are highly dependent on satellite and other
communications links that are vulnerable to attack, as war games regularly
demonstrate.

The Chinese are masters of strategic thought; they also
understand the most advanced modern technology, though they may not yet be able
to develop and deploy it. They are working to identify our weaknesses and target
them. While the carriers recently sent to Taiwan’s aid were never in danger,
suppose in ten years’ time the same threat arose, but this time the
carriers would be endangered? It would be foolish for the Chinese to sink an
American carrier—but then again, some will say, it would be foolish to send a
carrier in harm’s way.

Just as Imperial Germany attempted (unsuccessfully) to keep
Britain out of World War I by threatening the Royal Navy with a “risk fleet,”
China seeks to combine targeted military capabilities with diplomatic and
economic measures in order to weaken American presence and resolve in Asia. She
also hopes to cut the security links many Asian states have with us. This is an
attractive strategy for China, particularly at a time when, in relative terms,
U.S. strength is diminishing, and our will and staying power are in
question.

Some observers are comforted by the fact that Chinese
expansionism is now limited to petty smash-and-grab operations, rather than the
sort of massive wars the Kremlin once contemplated. But this strategy may
actually be more dangerous. During the Cold War, both sides understood the
dangers and the stakes, and moved carefully lest there be a real collision.
Small incidents erupted into headlines and were stopped. Today, no one is
watching China nearly so closely.

Yet it is just when no one is looking that the Chinese strategy
urges action. And action elicits unpredictable reaction: limited war can quickly
spiral upward toward general war. Suppose the missile firings against Taiwan had
not stopped? Suppose the Philippines destroyed the Chinese base on Mischief
Reef? Suppose a spark didn’t die but spread? America and her Asian friends must
think about these kinds of threats—and work together to counter them.

The ancient Chinese military philosopher Sun Tzu counseled for
isolating an enemy through intimidation and attacks on his alliances. Beijing
today is following that course. The game China plays with her neighbors—mixing
threats and bluffs over seemingly low stakes—is almost identical to the game
played by Austria and Germany before 1914.

Europe in those years was a far more dangerous place than anyone
realized. The same is probably true of Asia today.

China’s Dangerous Misperceptions of the
U.S.

No one has any real idea of whether the U.S.
and China are capable of talking their problems out. But if you chat long
enough with Shanghai’s Mayor Xu Kuangdi, you almost forget he’s a
Communist. In fact, Xu Kuangdi sounds more like pragmatic American mayors
such as New York’s Rudy Giuliani or Los Angeles’s Dick Riordan than an
aloof, pre-programmed robot out of Mao’s Little Red Book (except, of
course, that he’s not democratically elected). And this may explain why
he’s so well liked by Western multinationals, and so relatively successful
in managing China’s most populous city.

Shanghai’s mayor is widely viewed both here and abroad as
a major voice of China. This opportunity-rich but trouble-plagued city of
13 million to 16 million (depending on how all the heads are counted) is
the place to be if you want to go places in Chinese politics. President
Jiang Zemin is a former Shanghai mayor, as is the powerful economic
reformer Zhu Rongji. What’s next for Mayor Xu?

A former Shanghai University official and engineering
professor who once was a scholar in England, Xu represents the new breed
of Chinese leader who believes that ideology doesn’t really take you very
far if you have a leaky roof over your head, little to eat, and a bleak
future.

When former Mayor Zhu asked Xu years ago to head the
city’s planning commission, Xu complained that he despised the whole idea
of central planning. “Then you’re exactly the man I want,” replied Zhu,
also fed up with bureaucracy. That story summarizes as well as anything
the spirit of Shanghai, a sprawling metropolis where per capita income is
among the highest in China and where lingering European architectural
influences serve to remind the visitor of the city’s rakish past as a
just-about-anything-goes melding of East and West.

When Xu, 60, spoke recently in the reception room at
Shanghai’s City Hall, he insisted that “A lot of our problems are the
result of the old planned economy. The government interfered too much.
Whether you were a Western businessman or Chinese, you had to get too many
approvals. We have got to simplify everything and make it more
transparent.”

Shanghai today is effervescent chaos. Subways are
expanding and freeways zigzag here and there but traffic still piles up in
frenzied clumps; clusters of skyscrapers streak upward across the river
from downtown, then wait for the future to bring them tenants; after
sundown residents and tourists mill about the main streets, turning every
night into a lively celebration….

Major foreign investment declined last year. Coming months
may bring growing unemployment on a massive scale as the long-planned
dismantling of China’s huge, inefficient state industries unfolds. Today’s
unemployed workers can become tomorrow’s social instability; Xu knows that
street unrest leading to another Tiananmen-style crackdown would further
arrest Western investment so crucial to Shanghai.

Xu works to warm up Sino-U.S. relations because he wants
Western investors to keep coming. “From the bottom of my heart,” he says,
“we like Americans. They’re not like others whose faces you can’t read and
who say they like you but are really feeling something else. Generally,
Americans are easy to read and we Chinese appreciate that.”

—UCLA’s Tom Plate in the Los Angeles
Times February 17,
1998.

Arthur Waldron is director of Asian studies at the American
Enterprise Institute and Lauder Professor of International Relations at the
University of Pennsylvania.

A Politician for China’s Future

Crisis and conflict can occur as much
through misunderstanding and miscalculation as through conscious decision
and calculation. If recent studies of the Chinese military mentality have
got it right, then one unintended result of the patchwork diplomatic
settlement of the recent Iraq standoff may be to reinforce Beijing’s
instinct that America is soft, its will shaky, and its military
capabilities somehow less than advertised.

The U.S. record in the Persian Gulf in 1991 offers the
Chinese the most recent example of what this nation and its military can
do when the mission is clear and the American people are united behind the
president. But where much of the world saw a massive, well-organized use
of superior force and technology, many in China’s military saw something
less. That, at least, is the concern of China specialist and rand
Corporation consultant James Mulvenon, who recently studied the senior
Chinese officer corps for rand’s National Defense Research Institute.
While he gives Beijing high marks for its efforts to improve the
professionalism of its sprawling People’s Liberation Army, Mulvenon feels
strongly that its understanding of the United States is still deficient:
“There are people in the pla that believe we could only kill all those
Iraqi tanks because no one was in them. They think: ‘You use smart weapons
too much, you have no stomach for fighting.’”

If that’s the actual Chinese belief, then the gap between
the reality of U.S. military capabilities and China’s perception of them
is wide. Worse yet, Mulvenon’s informed melancholy is shared in
Washington. A recent Pentagon study, “Dangerous Chinese Misperceptions,”
agrees that, despite all the recent military-to-military contacts between
Chinese officers and their U.S. counterparts, the true picture of America
apparently is still fuzzy. Says the Pentagon report: “China’s leadership
holds a number of dangerous misconceptions that may well cause serious
political friction or even military conflict with the United States. The
consequences of China consistently underestimating the military power of
potential opponents complicates any effort to deter China.”

A widespread Chinese belief about U.S. weakness could
trigger miscalculation by Beijing. One such error would be a wholly
unilateral Chinese decision to intervene suddenly in North Korea, should
that failing state disintegrate and refugees pour over the border into
China. Or a decision to attack Taiwan, a nation of 21 million people which
Beijing claims as its historic own. Of the latter, Mulvenon agrees: “Many
Chinese officers think, ‘You would not risk the lives of American boys and
girls over Taiwan.’”

If indeed top Chinese military leaders were unmoved by the
overwhelming U.S. showing in 1991, one can only worry.

—UCLA’s Tom Plate in the Los Angeles
Times, February 24,
1998.

THE AMERICAN ENTERPRISE, JULY/AUGUST
1998