Oct 22nd 2009
From The Economist print edition
China is piling up more weapons than it appears to need
WHEN Hillary Clinton said in January that America should exercise “smart power”, Chinese officials and commentators pricked up their ears. Here was a neat way of describing, some of them said, what China too was trying to do: find the right mix of military might, cultural influence and economic clout—hard power and soft power—to secure its place in the world. Yet both countries are at risk of dangerously mishandling this exercise in carefully calibrating their dealings with each other.
AFP
A sight to terrify the enemy
China’s demonstration of military might and authoritarian muscle on October 1st, its national day, was one recent example of how its judgment can go awry. The parade of thousands of goose-stepping troops through central Beijing, along with military hardware intended mainly to intimidate America and its quasi-ally Taiwan, was a throwback to the imagery of cold-war days. It did not help that dissidents were rounded up and the public kept away from the event (except on television).
Such scenes touch raw nerves in America, where intellectual and political opinion has long been bitterly divided over how to assess China’s rise. Left-wing Democrats, alarmed by China’s human-rights abuses, find themselves in league with right-wing Republicans who see China as a new Soviet Union, to be distrusted and contained. The October 1st extravaganza also worried a third, more centrist, camp: those who see the Communist Party’s resort to nationalism as a sign of its weakness and of China’s vulnerability to upheaval that could have damaging global consequences.
Mr Obama’s smart-power strategy towards China resembles that of his predecessor, George Bush, who after the attacks of September 11th 2001 abandoned talk of China as a “strategic competitor” and sought instead to downplay differences. China, no less smartly, began in 2003 to emerge from its diplomatic shell by organising six-nation talks to deal with the nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula. By the middle of this decade it had also begun to back away from its belligerent rhetoric on Taiwan (while continuing to amass more weaponry should it ever wish to attack the island). America breathed easier.
The Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank in Washington, DC, that helped popularise the notion of smart power with a study on American foreign policy in 2007, issued a report in March which drew attention to a “strategic mistrust” between the two countries’ leaders. American policymakers, it said, should start a “new narrative” and show respect for China’s status as a rising power. Mr Obama, who has put more emphasis than Mr Bush did on China as a solver of global problems, appears to agree.
America’s friendly rhetoric may help to secure more constructive thinking in Beijing about issues such as tackling climate change or dealing with North Korea. But the intractable problem of Taiwan will continue to fuel a dangerous escalation of the two countries’ hard-power capabilities with respect to each other. In the realm of soft power (a term defined by Joseph Nye, a Harvard professor and former senior official, as a country’s ability to persuade or influence others without the threat of force), China has only recently begun to play a global part. Its efforts so far, whether in securing oil and mineral deals in Africa or in trying to promote its view of the world through the internet, have often merely raised American hackles.
Unlikely but not unthinkable
On the military side, the Pentagon worries that China is acquiring capabilities that go beyond what is needed to deal with possible conflict over Taiwan. China does not speak publicly of displacing American power in Asia. It has good reasons, indeed, to support it, given that America’s presence helps to deter North Korean aggression against South Korea, keep Japan from becoming militarily more assertive and protect shipping lanes in South-East Asia. But China’s military build-up, which began to gather pace in the late 1990s and has shown no sign of slacking, could one day tempt Chinese leaders to think that they could fight and win a war, either over Taiwan or over a host of mostly uninhabited islands whose sovereignty China disputes with countries from Japan to Malaysia.
China’s growing armoury would make it far more difficult for America to respond to a crisis in the Taiwan Strait in the way it did in 1996 when it sent two aircraft-carrier battle groups close to the island. The Pentagon says China is developing medium-range ballistic missiles that could be guided to their targets far out into the Pacific beyond Taiwan: a clear threat to the American navy. Medium-range missiles are also being targeted at American bases in Japan and Guam. China, says the Pentagon, has the biggest missile programme of any country in the world.
Although it is well aware of the dangers of misunderstandings, China has brushed off repeated American overtures for more dialogue. Talks between the two armed forces typically sputter on for a few months before being called off again by China to express its disapproval of American military support for Taiwan. There have been glimmers of progress. This year multinational anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden (China’s first active naval engagement beyond Asia) saw Chinese and American ships operating in the same zone and communicating with each other in a friendly enough manner.
But Pentagon officials have never been allowed to visit the headquarters of the Chinese armed forces, an underground facility in the Fragrant Hills west of Beijing. Attempts by the Pentagon over the past few years to persuade the chief of China’s strategic nuclear forces to visit America have so far failed (although he has visited other countries). In 2008 the two countries agreed to establish a hotline between their two defence ministries. But for unexplained reasons the two sides did not use it when Chinese boats harassed an American surveillance ship, the Impeccable, in the South China Sea in March.
Few expect rapid progress. Dennis Wilder, a former adviser to the National Security Council under President Bush, says there is a dangerous lack of knowledge even about basic issues such as China’s nuclear-alert system. China has a few dozen land-based nuclear missiles capable of hitting some or all parts of America and is soon expected to deploy them on submarines. America’s nuclear force is far larger, but as Richard Bush and Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution argue in a book published in 2007, nuclear war between the two countries over Taiwan is not unimaginable.
No less worrying to the Pentagon is what appears to be a lack of effective communication between the Chinese armed forces and other parts of the bureaucracy. This was evident in April 2001 when an American EP-3 military spyplane hit a Chinese fighter jet off the Chinese coast. American officials believe the crisis was escalated by distorted information that was fed to Chinese leaders by the armed forces before other departments were able to weigh in with sounder analysis. It seemed that the Chinese armed forces did not promptly inform China’s foreign ministry about the Impeccable incident.
China bristles at any American suggestion that its behaviour could be construed as threatening. America’s latest National Intelligence Strategy, the first issued by the Obama administration, makes one brief mention of China, saying that its “increasing natural-resource-focused diplomacy and military modernisation are among the factors making it a complex global challenge.” This statement of the obvious was enough to trigger howls of protest. The Chinese foreign ministry called on America to abandon its “cold-war mentality and prejudices”. At an annual gathering of regional defence ministers in Singapore earlier this year, a speech by the deputy Chinese chief of staff, Ma Xiaotian, was sprinkled with critical allusions to American “cold-war” behaviour in Asia.
China has reason to feel uncomfortable about the imbalance between its own military power and America’s. American ships and spy planes claim the right to operate only 12 nautical miles from the Chinese coast (a boundary observed by Soviet and American military craft off each other’s coasts during the cold war). They routinely come closer than the 200-mile boundary that China insists on. China does not have the means to project its power anything like as close to America’s shore, and shrewdly refrains from suggesting that it would like to.
But some Americans worry that China could make a cold war with America a self-fulfilling prophecy by trying to acquire more of the trappings of a global military power. For example, China is quietly developing its first aircraft-carrier. The Pentagon reckons the country is unlikely to have one in operation before 2015, but is considering building at least two by 2020, along with associated vessels. “The Indians have one, the Italians have one, so why can’t China have one?” asks a Chinese general.
Pentagon officials profess not to worry. America’s navy would be well equipped to deal with a Chinese carrier-borne force, particularly one with little experience (it would be an “easy target”, says one former senior official in the Bush administration). But China’s deployment of a carrier would send a powerful signal that its naval interests are no longer confined mainly to coastal defence.
A senior Chinese officer once quipped to Admiral Timothy Keating, who is about to retire as America’s top commander in the Pacific, that when China has aircraft-carriers the two countries should draw a line down the middle of the Pacific through Hawaii to define their spheres of operation. Mr Keating politely declined.
Culture wars
On the soft-power side, China is slowly learning. After much complaining from Western politicians and NGOs, it has used its considerable economic clout to give Sudan and Myanmar at least little nudges towards accommodating Western concerns in those countries (less so, however, in the case of Iran). Soft power was mentioned for the first time by a Chinese leader in public in 2007. Culture, said Mr Hu (oblivious, it seemed, of the cold-war overtones of his remarks), was of growing significance in the “competition in overall national strength”. China should therefore “enhance culture as part of the soft power of our country”.
A cursory glance at the streets and shops of Chinese cities suggests what Mr Hu may have had in mind: the all-pervasiveness of American brands and cultural products, from Coca-Cola to (pirated) boxed sets of a comedy series, “Friends”, from Kentucky Fried Chicken to Starbucks. America’s intellectual drawing power is evident in the queues of students waiting for visas at the American embassy: in the 2007-08 academic year more than 81,000 Chinese were studying in American colleges.
Such exposure to American ideas does not always work in America’s favour. Many of the nationalists who have staged protests against America in recent years have been members of an internet-savvy generation immersed in American popular culture. But the Chinese government now hopes that by taking its own cultural message to foreigners it can help to convince them that China’s rise is nothing to be feared .
Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
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