http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/GC19Ad05.html
Greater China
Mar 19, 2005
The real 'China threat'
By Chalmers Johnson
I recall 40 years ago, when I was a new professor working in the field of
Chinese and Japanese international relations, that Edwin O Reischauer once
commented, "The great payoff from our victory of 1945 was a permanently
disarmed Japan." Born in Japan and a Japanese historian at Harvard, Reischauer
served as US ambassador to Tokyo in the administrations of presidents John
Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Strange to say, since the end of the Cold War in
1991 and particularly under the administration of George W Bush, the United
States has been doing everything in its power to encourage and even accelerate
Japanese rearmament.
Such a development promotes hostility between China and Japan, the two
superpowers of East Asia, sabotages possible peaceful solutions in those two
problem areas, Taiwan and North Korea, left over from the Chinese and Korean
civil wars, and lays the foundation for a possible future Sino-American
conflict that the United States would almost surely lose. It is unclear whether
the ideologues and war lovers of Washington understand what they are unleashing
- a possible confrontation between the world's fastest-growing industrial
economy, China, and the world's second-most-productive, albeit declining,
economy, Japan; a confrontation that the United States would have caused and in
which it might well be consumed.
Let me make clear that in East Asia we are not talking about a little
regime-change war of the sort that Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney
advocate. After all, the most salient characteristic of international relations
during the last century was the inability of the rich, established powers -
Great Britain and the United States - to adjust peacefully to the emergence of
new centers of power in Germany, Japan and Russia. The result was two
exceedingly bloody World Wars, a 45-year-long Cold War between Russia and the
"West", and innumerable wars of national liberation (such as the
quarter-century-long one in Vietnam) against the arrogance and racism of
European, US and Japanese imperialism and colonialism.
The major question for the 21st century is whether this fateful inability to
adjust to changes in the global power structure can be overcome. Thus far the
signs are negative. Can the United States and Japan, today's versions of rich,
established powers, adjust to the re-emergence of China - the world's oldest
continuously extant civilization - this time as a modern superpower? Or is
China's ascendancy to be marked by yet another world war, when the pretensions
of European civilization in its US and Japanese projections are finally put to
rest? That is what is at stake.
Alice in Wonderland policies
China, Japan and the United States are the three most productive economies on
Earth, but China is the fastest-growing (at an average rate of 9.5% per annum
for more than two decades), whereas both the US and Japan are saddled with huge
and mounting debts and, in the case of Japan, stagnant growth rates. China is
today the world's sixth-largest economy (the US and Japan being first and
second) and America's third-largest trading partner after Canada and Mexico.
According to Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) statisticians in their Factbook
2003, China is actually already the second-largest economy on Earth measured on
a purchasing-power-parity basis - that is, in terms of what China actually
produces rather than prices and exchange rates. The CIA calculates the United
States' gross domestic product (GDP) - the total value of all goods and
services produced within a country - for 2003 as US$10.4 trillion and China's
as $5.7 trillion. This gives China's 1.3 billion people a per capita GDP of
$4,385.
Between 1992 and 2003, Japan was China's largest trading partner, but in 2004
Japan fell to third place, behind the European Union and the United States.
China's trade volume for 2004 was $1.2 trillion, third in the world after the
US and Germany, and well ahead of Japan's $1.07 trillion. China's trade with
the US grew some 34% in 2004 and has turned the California cities of Los
Angeles, Long Beach and Oakland into the three busiest seaports in the United
States.
The truly significant trade development of 2004 was the EU's emergence as
China's biggest economic partner, suggesting the possibility of a Sino-European
cooperative bloc confronting a less vital Japanese-American one. As the
Financial Times observed, "Three years after its entry into the World Trade
Organization [in 2001], China's influence in global commerce is no longer
merely significant. It is crucial." For example, most Dell computers sold in
the US are made in China, as are the digital-video-disc players of Japan's
Funai Electric Co. Funai annually exports some 10 million DVD players and
television sets from China to the United States, where they are sold primarily
in Wal-Mart stores. China's trade with Europe in 2004 was worth $177.2 billion,
with the United States $169.6 billion, and with Japan $167.8 billion.
China's growing economic weight in the world is widely recognized and
applauded, but it is China's growth rates and their effect on the future global
balance of power that the US and Japan, rightly or wrongly, fear. The CIA's
National Intelligence Council forecasts that China's GDP will equal Britain's
in 2005, Germany's in 2009, Japan's in 2017, and the United States' in 2042.
But Shahid Javed Burki, former vice president of the World Bank's China
Department and a former finance minister of Pakistan, predicts that by 2025
China will probably have a GDP of $25 trillion in terms of purchasing power
parity and will have become the world's largest economy, followed by the United
States at $20 trillion and India at about $13 trillion - and Burki's analysis
is based on a conservative prediction of a 6% Chinese growth rate sustained
over the next two decades. He foresees Japan's inevitable decline because its
population will begin to shrink drastically after about 2010. Japan's Ministry
of Internal Affairs reports that the number of men in Japan already declined by
0.01% in 2004; and some demographers, it notes, anticipate that by the end of
the century the country's population could shrink by nearly two-thirds, from
127.7 million today to 45 million, the same population it had in 1910.
By contrast, China's population is likely to stabilize at approximately 1.4
billion people and is heavily weighted toward males. (According to Howard
French of the New York Times, in one large southern city the government-imposed
one-child-per-family policy and the availability of sonograms have resulted in
a ratio of 129 boys born for every 100 girls; 147 boys for every 100 girls for
couples seeking second or third children. The 2000 census for the country as a
whole put the reported sex ratio at birth at about 117 boys to 100 girls.)
Chinese domestic economic growth is expected to continue for decades,
reflecting the pent-up demand of its huge population, relatively low levels of
personal debt, and a dynamic underground economy not recorded in official
statistics. Most important, China's external debt is relatively small and
easily covered by its reserves; whereas both the US and Japan are approximately
$7 trillion in the red, which is worse for Japan, with less than half the US
population and economic clout.
Ironically, part of Japan's debt is a product of its efforts to help prop up
America's global imperial stance. For example, in the period since the end of
the Cold War, Japan has subsidized America's military bases in Japan to the
staggering tune of approximately $70 billion. Refusing to pay for its
profligate consumption patterns and military expenditures through taxes on its
own citizens, the United States is financing these outlays by going into debt
to Japan, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and India. This situation has
become increasingly unstable as the US requires capital imports of at least $2
billion per day to pay for its governmental expenditures. Any decision by East
Asian central banks to move significant parts of their foreign-exchange
reserves out of the US dollar and into the euro or other currencies to protect
themselves from dollar depreciation would produce the mother of all financial
crises.
Japan still possesses the world's largest foreign-exchange reserves, which at
the end of January stood at around $841 billion. But China sits on a $609.9
billion pile of dollars (as of the end of 2004), earned from its trade
surpluses with the US. Meanwhile, the US government and Japanese followers of
George W Bush insult China in every way they can, particularly over the status
of China's breakaway province, the island of Taiwan. The distinguished economic
analyst William Greider recently noted, "Any profligate debtor who insults his
banker is unwise, to put it mildly ... American leadership has ... become
increasingly delusional - I mean that literally - and blind to the adverse
balance of power accumulating against it."
The Bush administration is unwisely threatening China by urging Japan to rearm
and by promising Taiwan that, should China use force to prevent a Taiwanese
declaration of independence, the US will go to war on its behalf. It is hard to
imagine more shortsighted, irresponsible policies, but in light of the Bush
administration's Alice in Wonderland war in Iraq, the acute anti-Americanism it
has generated globally, and the politicization of America's intelligence
services, it seems possible that the US and Japan might actually precipitate a
war with China over Taiwan.
Japan rearms
Since the end of World War II, and particularly since gaining its independence
in 1952, Japan has subscribed to a pacifist foreign policy. It has resolutely
refused to maintain offensive military forces or to become part of America's
global military system. Japan did not, for example, participate in the 1991 war
against Iraq, nor has it joined collective security agreements in which it
would have to match the military contributions of its partners. Since the
signing in 1952 of the Japan-United States Security Treaty, the country has
officially been defended from so-called external threats by US forces located
on some 91 bases on the Japanese mainland and the island of Okinawa. The US 7th
Fleet even has its home port at the old Japanese naval base of Yokosuka. Japan
not only subsidizes these bases but subscribes to the public fiction that the
US forces are present only for its defense. In fact, Japan has no control over
how and where the US employs its land, sea and air forces based on Japanese
territory, and the Japanese and US governments have until quite recently
finessed the issue simply by never discussing it.
Since the end of the Cold War in 1991, the United States has repeatedly
pressured Japan to revise Article 9 of its constitution (renouncing the use of
force except as a matter of self-defense) and become what US officials call a
"normal nation". For example, last August 13, then secretary of state Colin
Powell stated baldly in Tokyo that if Japan ever hoped to become a permanent
member of the United Nations Security Council it would first have to get rid of
its pacifist constitution. Japan's claim to a Security Council seat is based on
the fact that, although its share of global GDP is only 14%, it pays 20% of the
total UN budget. Powell's remark was blatant interference in Japan's internal
affairs, but it merely echoed many messages delivered by former deputy
secretary of state Richard Armitage, the leader of a reactionary clique in
Washington that has worked for years to remilitarize Japan and so enlarge a
major new market for US arms. Its members include Torkel Patterson, Robin
Sakoda, David Asher and James Kelly at the State Department; Michael Green on
the National Security Council's staff; and numerous uniformed military officers
at the Pentagon and at the headquarters of the Pacific Command at Pearl Harbor,
Hawaii.
America's intention is to turn Japan into what Washington neo-conservatives
like to call the "Britain of the Far East" - and then use it as a proxy in
checkmating North Korea and balancing China. On October 11, 2000, Michael
Green, then a member of Armitage Associates, wrote, "We see the special
relationship between the United States and Great Britain as a model for the
[US-Japan] alliance." Japan has so far not resisted this US pressure since it
complements a renewed nationalism among Japanese voters and a fear that a
burgeoning capitalist China threatens Japan's established position as the
leading economic power in East Asia. Japanese officials also claim that the
country feels threatened by North Korea's developing nuclear and missile
programs, although they know that the North Korean standoff could be resolved
virtually overnight - if the Bush administration would cease trying to
overthrow the Pyongyang regime and instead deliver on US trade promises (in
return for North Korea's agreement to give up its nuclear-weapons program).
Instead, on February 25, the State Department announced that "the US will
refuse North Korean leader Kim Jong-il's demand for a guarantee of 'no hostile
intent' to get Pyongyang back into negotiations over its nuclear-weapons
programs". And on March 7, Bush nominated John Bolton to be US ambassador to
the United Nations even though North Korea has refused to negotiate with him
because of his insulting remarks about the country.
Japan's remilitarization worries a segment of the Japanese public and is
opposed throughout East Asia by all the nations Japan victimized during World
War II, including China, both Koreas, and even Australia. As a result, the
Japanese government has launched a stealth program of incremental rearmament.
Since 1992, it has enacted 21 major pieces of security-related legislation,
nine in 2004 alone. These began with the International Peace Cooperation Law of
1992, which for the first time authorized Japan to send troops to participate
in UN peacekeeping operations.
Remilitarization has since taken many forms, including expanding military
budgets, legitimizing and legalizing the sending of military forces abroad, a
commitment to join the US missile defense ("Star Wars") program - something the
Canadians refused to do in February - and a growing acceptance of military
solutions to international problems. This gradual process was greatly
accelerated in 2001 by the simultaneous coming to power of President George W
Bush and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. Koizumi made his first visit to the
United States in July of that year and, in May 2003, received the ultimate
imprimatur, an invitation to Bush's "ranch" in Crawford, Texas. Shortly
thereafter, Koizumi agreed to send a contingent of 550 troops to Iraq for a
year, extended their stay for another year in 2004 and, on October 14,
personally endorsed Bush's re-election.
A new nuclear giant in the making?
Koizumi has appointed to his cabinets over the years hardline anti-Chinese,
pro-Taiwanese politicians. Phil Deans, director of the Contemporary China
Institute in the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London,
observes, "There has been a remarkable growth of pro-Taiwan sentiment in Japan.
There is not one pro-China figure in the Koizumi cabinet." Members of the
latest Koizumi cabinet include Defense Agency chief Yoshinori Ono and Foreign
Minister Nobutaka Machimura, both ardent militarists; Machimura is a member of
the right-wing faction of former prime minister Yoshiro Mori, which supports an
independent Taiwan and maintains extensive covert ties with Taiwanese leaders
and businessmen.
Taiwan, it should be remembered, was a Japanese colony from 1895-1945. Unlike
the harsh Japanese military rule over Korea from 1910-45, it experienced
relatively benign governance by a civilian Japanese administration. The island,
while bombed by the Allies, was not a battleground during World War II,
although it was harshly occupied by the Chinese Nationalists (Chiang Kai-shek's
Kuomintang) immediately after the war. Today, as a result, many Taiwanese speak
Japanese and have a favorable view of Japan. Taiwan is virtually the only place
in East Asia where Japanese are fully welcomed and liked.
Bush and Koizumi have developed elaborate plans for military cooperation
between their two countries. Crucial to such plans is the scrapping of the
Japanese constitution of 1947. If nothing gets in the way, Koizumi's ruling
Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) intends to introduce a new constitution on the
occasion of the party's 50th anniversary this coming November. This has been
deemed appropriate because the LDP's founding charter of 1955 set as a basic
party goal the "establishment of Japan's own constitution" - a reference to the
fact that General Douglas MacArthur's post-World War II occupation headquarters
actually drafted the current constitution. The original LDP policy statement
also called for "the eventual removal of US troops from Japanese territory",
which may be one of the hidden purposes behind Japan's urge to rearm.
A major goal of the Americans is to gain Japan's active participation in their
massively expensive missile defense program. The Bush administration is
seeking, among other things, an end to Japan's ban on the export of military
technology, since it wants Japanese engineers to help solve some of the
technical problems of its so-far-failing Star Wars system. The United States
has also been actively negotiating with Japan to relocate the US Army's 1st
Corps from Fort Lewis, Washington, to Camp Zama, southwest of Tokyo in the
densely populated prefecture of Kanagawa, whose capital is Yokohama. These US
forces in Japan would then be placed under the command of a four-star general,
who would be on a par with regional commanders such as Centcom commander John
Abizaid, who lords it over Iraq and South Asia. The new command would be in
charge of all US Army "force projection" operations beyond East Asia and would
inevitably implicate Japan in the daily military operations of the American
empire. Garrisoning even a small headquarters, much less the whole 1st Corps
made up of an estimated 40,000 soldiers, in such a sophisticated and centrally
located prefecture as Kanagawa is also guaranteed to generate intense public
opposition as well as rapes, fights, car accidents and other incidents similar
to the ones that occur daily in Okinawa.
Meanwhile, Japan intends to upgrade its Defense Agency (Boeicho) into a
ministry and possibly develop its own nuclear-weapons capability. Goading the
Japanese government to assert itself militarily may well cause the country to
go nuclear in order to "deter" China and North Korea, while freeing Japan from
its dependency on the US "nuclear umbrella". Military analyst Richard Tanter
notes that Japan already has "the undoubted capacity to satisfy all three core
requirements for a usable nuclear weapon: a military nuclear device, a
sufficiently accurate targeting system, and at least one adequate delivery
system". Japan's combination of fully functioning fission and breeder reactors
plus nuclear-fuel reprocessing facilities gives it the ability to build
advanced thermonuclear weapons; its H-II and H-IIA rockets, in-flight refueling
capacity for fighter bombers, and military-grade surveillance satellites assure
that it could deliver its weapons accurately to regional targets. What it
currently lacks are the platforms (such as submarines) for a secure retaliatory
force in order to dissuade a nuclear adversary from launching a preemptive
first strike.
The Taiwanese knot
Japan may talk a lot about the dangers of North Korea, but the real objective
of its rearmament is China. This has become clear from the ways in which Japan
has recently injected itself into the single most delicate and dangerous issue
of East Asian international relations - the problem of Taiwan. Japan invaded
China in 1931 and was its wartime tormentor thereafter as well as Taiwan's
colonial overlord. Even then, however, Taiwan was viewed as a part of China, as
the United States has long recognized. What remains to be resolved are the
terms and timing of Taiwan's reintegration with the Chinese mainland. This
process was deeply complicated by the fact that in 1987 Chiang Kai-shek's
Nationalists, who had retreated to Taiwan in 1949 at the end of the Chinese
civil war (and were protected there by the US 7th Fleet ever after), finally
ended martial law on the island. Taiwan has since matured into a vibrant
democracy and the Taiwanese are now starting to display their own mixed
opinions about their future.
In 2000, the Taiwanese people ended a long monopoly of power by the
Nationalists and gave the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), headed by
President Chen Shui-bian, an electoral victory. A native Taiwanese (as distinct
from the large contingent of mainlanders who came to Taiwan in the baggage
train of Chiang's defeated armies), Chen stands for an independent Taiwan, as
does his party. By contrast, the Nationalists, together with a powerful
mainlander splinter party, the People First Party headed by James Soong (Song
Chuyu), hope to see an eventual peaceful unification of Taiwan with China. On
March 7, the Bush administration complicated these delicate relations by
nominating John Bolton to be the US ambassador to the United Nations. He is an
avowed advocate of Taiwanese independence and was once a paid consultant to the
Taiwanese government.
Last May, in a very close and contested election, Chen Shui-bian was
re-elected, and on May 20, the notorious right-wing Japanese politician
Shintaro Ishihara attended his inauguration in Taipei. (Ishihara believes that
Japan's 1937 Rape of Nanking was "a lie made up by the Chinese".) Though Chen
won with only 50.1% of the vote, this was still a sizable increase over his
33.9% in 2000, when the opposition was divided. The Taiwanese Ministry of
Foreign Affairs immediately appointed Koh Se-kai as its informal ambassador to
Japan. Koh has lived in Japan for some 33 years and maintains extensive ties to
senior political and academic figures there. China responded that it would
"completely annihilate" any moves toward Taiwanese independence - even if it
meant scuttling the 2008 Beijing Olympics and good relations with the United
States.
Contrary to the machinations of American neo-cons and Japanese rightists,
however, the Taiwanese people have revealed themselves to be open to
negotiating with China over the timing and terms of reintegration. On August
23, the Legislative Yuan (Taiwan's parliament) enacted changes in its voting
rules to prevent Chen from amending the constitution to favor independence, as
he had promised to do in his re-election campaign. This action drastically
lowered the risk of conflict with China. Probably influencing the Legislative
Yuan was the warning issued on August 22 by Singapore's new prime minister, Lee
Hsien-loong: "If Taiwan goes for independence, Singapore will not recognize it.
In fact, no Asian country will recognize it. China will fight. Win or lose,
Taiwan will be devastated."
The next important development was parliamentary elections on December 11.
President Chen called his campaign a referendum on his pro-independence policy
and asked for a mandate to carry out his reforms. Instead he lost decisively.
The opposition Nationalists and the People First Party won 114 seats in the
225-seat parliament, while Chen's DPP and its allies took only 101. (Ten seats
went to independents.) The Nationalist leader, Lien Chan, whose party won 79
seats to the DPP's 89, said, "Today we saw extremely clearly that all the
people want stability in this country."
Chen's failure to capture control of parliament also meant that a proposed
purchase of $19.6 billion worth of arms from the United States was doomed. The
deal included guided-missile destroyers, P-3 anti-submarine aircraft, diesel
submarines, and advanced Patriot PAC-3 anti-missile systems. The Nationalists
and James Soong's supporters regard the price as too high and mostly a
financial sop to the Bush administration, which has been pushing the sale since
2001. They also believe the weapons would not improve Taiwan's security.
On December 27, mainland China issued its fifth Defense White Paper on the
goals of the country's national defense efforts. As one longtime observer,
Robert Bedeski, noted, "At first glance, the Defense White Paper is a hardline
statement on territorial sovereignty and emphasizes China's determination not
to tolerate any moves at secession, independence or separation. However, the
next paragraph ... indicates a willingness to reduce tensions in the Taiwan
Strait: so long as the Taiwan authorities accept the one-China principle and
stop their separatist activities aimed at 'Taiwan independence', cross-strait
talks can be held at any time on officially ending the state of hostility
between the two sides."
It appears that this is also the way the Taiwanese read the message. On
February 24, President Chen met for the first time since October 2000 with
chairman James Soong of the People First Party. The two leaders, holding
diametrically opposed views on relations with the mainland, nonetheless signed
a joint statement outlining 10 points of consensus. They pledged to try to open
full transport and commercial links across the Taiwan Strait, increase trade,
and ease the ban on investments in China by many Taiwanese business sectors.
The mainland reacted favorably at once. Astonishingly, this led Chen to say
that he "would not rule out Taiwan's eventual reunion with China, provided
Taiwan's 23 million people accepted it".
If the United States and Japan left China and Taiwan to their own devices, it
seems possible that they would work out a modus vivendi. Taiwan has already
invested some $150 billion in the mainland, and the two economies are becoming
more closely integrated every day. There also seems to be a growing recognition
in Taiwan that it would be very difficult to live as an independent
Chinese-speaking nation alongside a country with 1.3 billion people, 9.6
million square kilometers of territory, a rapidly growing $1.4 trillion
economy, and aspirations to regional leadership in East Asia. Rather than
declaring its independence, Taiwan might try to seek a status somewhat like
that of French Canada - a kind of looser version of a Chinese Quebec under
nominal central government control but maintaining separate institutions, laws
and customs.
The mainland would be so relieved by this solution it would probably accept it,
particularly if it could be achieved before the 2008 Beijing Olympics. China
fears that Taiwanese radicals want to declare independence a month or two
before those Olympics, betting that China would not attack then because of its
huge investment in the forthcoming Games. Most observers believe, however, that
China would have no choice but to go to war because failure to do so would
invite a domestic revolution against the Chinese Communist Party for violating
the national integrity of China.
Sino-American, Sino-Japanese relations spiral downward
It has long been an article of neo-con faith that the US must do everything in
its power to prevent the development of rival power centers, whether friendly
or hostile. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, this meant they turned
their attention to China as one of the United States' probable next enemies. In
2001, having come to power, the neo-conservatives shifted much of the US's
nuclear targeting from Russia to China. They also began regular high-level
military talks with Taiwan over defense of the island, ordered a shift of US
Army personnel and supplies to the Asia-Pacific region, and worked strenuously
to promote the remilitarization of Japan.
On April 1, 2001, a US Navy EP-3E Aries II electronic spy plane collided with a
Chinese jet fighter off the south China coast. The US aircraft was on a mission
to provoke Chinese radar defenses and then record the transmissions and
procedures the Chinese used in sending up interceptors. The Chinese jet went
down and the pilot lost his life, while the US plane landed safely on Hainan
Island and its crew of 24 spies was well treated by the Chinese authorities.
It soon became clear that China was not interested in a confrontation, since
many of its most important investors have their headquarters in the United
States. But it could not instantly return the crew of the spy plane without
risking powerful domestic criticism for obsequiousness in the face of
provocation. It therefore delayed for 11 days until it received a pro forma US
apology for causing the death of a Chinese pilot on the edge of the country's
territorial airspace and for making an unauthorized landing at a Chinese
military airfield. Meanwhile, the US media had labeled the crew as "hostages",
encouraged their relatives to tie yellow ribbons around neighborhood trees,
hailed the president for doing "a first-rate job" to free them, and endlessly
criticized China for its "state-controlled media". They carefully avoided
mentioning that the United States enforces around the country a 200-mile
aircraft-intercept zone that stretches far beyond territorial waters.
On April 25, 2001, during an interview on national television, President Bush
was asked whether he would ever use "the full force of the American military"
against China for the sake of Taiwan. He responded, "Whatever it takes to help
Taiwan defend herself." This was US policy until September 11, 2001, when China
enthusiastically joined the "war on terrorism" and Bush and his neo-cons became
preoccupied with their "axis of evil" and making war on Iraq. The United States
and China were also enjoying extremely close economic relations, which the
big-business wing of the Republican Party did not want to jeopardize.
The Middle East thus trumped the neo-cons' Asia policy. While the Americans
were distracted, China went about its economic business for almost four years,
emerging as a powerhouse of Asia and a potential organizing node for Asian
economies. Rapidly industrializing China also developed a voracious appetite
for petroleum and other raw materials, which brought it into direct competition
with the world's largest importers, the US and Japan.
By the summer of 2004, Bush strategists, distracted as they were by Iraq, again
became alarmed over China's growing power and its potential to challenge US
hegemony in East Asia. The Republican Party platform unveiled at its convention
in New York in August proclaimed that "America will help Taiwan defend itself".
During that summer, the US Navy also carried out exercises it dubbed "Operation
Summer Pulse '04", which involved the simultaneous deployment at sea of seven
of the United States' 12 carrier strike groups. A US carrier strike group
includes an aircraft carrier (usually with nine or 10 squadrons of planes, a
total of about 85 aircraft in all), a guided-missile cruiser, two
guided-missile destroyers, an attack submarine, and a combination
ammunition-oiler-supply ship. Deploying seven such armadas at the same time was
unprecedented - and very expensive. Even though only three of the carrier
strike groups were sent to the Pacific and no more than one was patrolling off
Taiwan at a time, the Chinese became deeply alarmed that this marked the
beginning of an attempted rerun of 19th-century gunboat diplomacy aimed at
them.
This US show of force and Chen Shui-bian's polemics preceding the December
elections also seemed to over-stimulate the Taiwanese. On October 26 in
Beijing, then secretary of state Colin Powell tried to calm things down by
declaring to the press, "Taiwan is not independent. It does not enjoy
sovereignty as a nation, and that remains our policy, our firm policy ... We
want to see both sides not take unilateral action that would prejudice an
eventual outcome, a reunification that all parties are seeking."
Powell's statement seemed unequivocal enough, but significant doubts persisted
about whether he had much influence within the Bush administration or whether
he could speak for Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld. Early in 2005, Porter Goss, the new director of the CIA, Defense
Secretary Rumsfeld, and Admiral Lowell Jacoby, head of the Defense Intelligence
Agency, all told Congress that China's military modernization was going ahead
much faster than previously believed. They warned that the 2005 Quadrennial
Defense Review, the every-four-years formal assessment of US military policy,
would take a much harsher view of the threat posed by China than the 2001
overview.
In this context, the Bush administration, perhaps influenced by the election of
November 2 and the transition from Colin Powell's to Condoleezza Rice's State
Department, played its most dangerous card. On February 19 in Washington, it
signed a new military agreement with Japan. For the first time, Japan joined
the US administration in identifying security in the Taiwan Strait as a "common
strategic objective". Nothing could have been more alarming to China's leaders
than the revelation that Japan had decisively ended six decades of official
pacifism by claiming a right to intervene in the Taiwan Strait.
It is possible that, in the years to come, Taiwan itself may recede in
importance to be replaced by even more direct Sino-Japanese confrontations.
This would be an ominous development indeed, one that the United States would
be responsible for having abetted but would certainly be unable to control. The
kindling for a Sino-Japanese explosion has long been in place. After all,
during World War II the Japanese killed approximately 23 million Chinese
throughout East Asia - higher casualties than the staggering ones suffered by
Russia at the hands of the Nazis - and yet Japan refuses to atone for or even
acknowledge its historical war crimes. Quite the opposite, it continues to
rewrite history, portraying itself as the liberator of Asia and a victim of
European and US imperialism.
In - for the Chinese - a painful act of symbolism, after becoming Japanese
prime minister in 2001, Junichiro Koizumi made his first official visit to
Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, a practice that he has repeated every year since.
Koizumi likes to say to foreigners that he is merely honoring Japan's war dead.
Yasukuni, however, is anything but a military cemetery or a war memorial. It
was established in 1869 by Emperor Meiji as a Shinto shrine (though with its
torii archways made of steel rather than the traditional red-painted wood) to
commemorate the lives lost in campaigns to return direct imperial rule to
Japan. During World War II, Japanese militarists took over the shrine and used
it to promote patriotic and nationalistic sentiments. Today, Yasukuni is said
to be dedicated to the spirits of approximately 2.4 million Japanese who have
died in the country's wars, both civil and foreign, since 1853.
In 1978, for reasons that have never been made clear, General Hideki Tojo and
six other wartime leaders who had been hanged by the Allied Powers as war
criminals were collectively enshrined at Yasukuni. The current chief priest of
the shrine denies that they were war criminals, saying, "The winner passed
judgment on the loser." In a museum on the shrine's grounds, there is a fully
restored Mitsubishi Zero Type 52 fighter aircraft that a placard says made its
combat debut in 1940 over Chongqing, then the wartime capital of the Republic
of China. It was undoubtedly not an accident that, in Chongqing during the 2004
Asian Cup soccer finals, Chinese spectators booed the playing of the Japanese
national anthem. Yasukuni's leaders have always claimed close ties to the
imperial household, but the late Emperor Hirohito last visited the shrine in
1975 and Emperor Akihito has never been there.
The Chinese regard Yasukuni visits by the Japanese prime minister as insulting,
somewhat comparable perhaps to Britain's Prince Harry dressing up as a Nazi for
a costume party. Nonetheless, Beijing has tried in recent years to appease
Tokyo. Chinese President Hu Jintao rolled out the red carpet for Yohei Kono,
Speaker of the Japanese Diet's House of Representatives, when he visited China
last September; he appointed Wang Yi, a senior moderate in the Chinese foreign
service, as ambassador to Japan; and he proposed joint Sino-Japanese
exploration of possible oil resources in the offshore seas that both sides
claim. All such gestures were ignored by Koizumi, who insists that he intends
to go on visiting Yasukuni.
Matters came to a head in November at two important summit meetings: an
Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) gathering in Santiago, followed
immediately by an Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) meeting with
the leaders of China, Japan and South Korea that took place in Vientiane. In
Santiago, Hu Jintao directly asked Koizumi to cease his Yasukuni visits for the
sake of Sino-Japanese friendship. Seemingly as a reply, Koizumi went out of his
way to insult Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in Vientiane. He said to Premier Wen,
"It's about time for [China's] graduation" as a recipient of Japanese
foreign-aid payments, implying that Japan intended unilaterally to end its
25-year-old financial-aid program. The word "graduation" also conveyed the
insulting implication that Japan saw itself as a teacher guiding China, the
student.
Koizumi next gave a little speech about the history of Japanese efforts to
normalize relations with China, to which Wen replied, "Do you know how many
Chinese people died in the Sino-Japanese war?" Wen went on to suggest that
China had always regarded Japan's foreign aid, which he said China did not
need, as payments in lieu of compensation for damage done by Japan in China
during the war. He pointed out that China had never asked for reparations from
Japan and that Japan's payments amounted to about $30 billion over 25 years, a
fraction of the $80 billion Germany has paid to the victims of Nazi atrocities
even though Japan is the more populous and richer country.
On November 10, the Japanese navy discovered a Chinese nuclear submarine in
Japanese territorial waters near Okinawa. Although the Chinese apologized and
called the sub's intrusion a "mistake", Defense Agency director Ono gave it
wide publicity, further inflaming Japanese public opinion against China. From
that point on, relations between Beijing and Tokyo have gone steadily downhill,
culminating in the Japanese-American announcement that Taiwan was of special
military concern to both of them, which China denounced as an "abomination".
Over time this downward spiral in relations will probably prove damaging to the
interests of both the United States and Japan, but particularly to those of
Japan. China is unlikely to retaliate directly but is even less likely to
forget what has happened - and it has a great deal of leverage over Japan.
After all, Japanese prosperity increasingly depends on its ties to China. The
reverse is not true. Contrary to what one might expect, Japanese exports to
China jumped 70% between 2001 and 2004, providing the main impetus for a
sputtering Japanese economic recovery. Some 18,000 Japanese companies have
operations in China. In 2003, Japan passed the United States as the top
destination for Chinese students going abroad for a university education.
Nearly 70,000 Chinese students now study at Japanese universities, compared
with 65,000 at US academic institutions. These close and lucrative relations
are at risk if the US and Japan pursue their militarization of the region.
A multipolar world
Tony Karon of Time magazine has observed, "All over the world, new bonds of
trade and strategic cooperation are being forged around the US. China has not
only begun to displace the US as the dominant player in the Asia-Pacific
Economic Cooperation organization (APEC), it is fast emerging as the major
trading partner to some of Latin America's largest economies ... French
foreign-policy think-tanks have long promoted the goal of 'multipolarity' in a
post-Cold War world, ie, the preference for many different, competing power
centers rather than the 'unipolarity' of the US as a single hyperpower.
Multipolarity is no longer simply a strategic goal. It is an emerging reality."
Evidence is easily found of multipolarity and China's prominent role in
promoting it. Just note China's expanding relations with Iran, the European
Union, Latin America and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Iran is
the second-largest OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) oil
producer after Saudi Arabia and has long had friendly relations with Japan,
which is its leading trading partner. (Ninety-eight percent of Japan's imports
from Iran are oil.) On February 18, 2004, a consortium of Japanese companies
and the Iranian government signed a memorandum of agreement to develop jointly
Iran's Azadegan oilfield, one of the world's largest, in a project worth $2.8
billion. The US has opposed Japan's support for Iran, causing Congressman Brad
Sherman (Democrat, California) to charge that Bush had been bribed into
accepting the Japanese-Iranian deal by Koizumi's dispatch of 550 Japanese
troops to Iraq, adding a veneer of international support for the US war there.
But the long-standing Iranian-Japanese alignment began to change in late 2004.
On October 28, China's oil major, the Sinopec Group, signed an agreement with
Iran worth between $70 billion and $100 billion to develop the giant Yadavaran
natural-gas field. China agreed to buy 250 million tons of liquefied natural
gas (LNG) from Iran over 25 years. It is the largest deal Iran has signed with
a foreign country since 1996 and will include several other benefits, including
China's assistance in building numerous ships to deliver the LNG to Chinese
ports. Iran also committed itself to exporting 150,000 barrels of crude oil per
day to China for 25 years at market prices.
Iran's oil minister, Bijan Zanganeh, on a visit to Beijing noted that Iran is
China's biggest foreign oil supplier and said his country wants to be China's
long-term business partner. He told China Business Weekly that Tehran would
like to replace Japan with China as the biggest customer for its oil and gas.
The reason is obvious: US pressure on Iran to give up its nuclear-power
development program and the Bush administration's declared intention to take
Iran to the UN Security Council for the imposition of sanctions (which a
Chinese vote could veto). On November 6, Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing
paid a rare visit to Tehran. In meetings with Iranian President Mohammad
Khatami, Li said that Beijing would indeed consider vetoing any US effort to
sanction Iran at the Security Council. The US has also charged China with
selling nuclear and missile technology to Iran.
China and Iran already did a record $4 billion worth of two-way business in
2003. Projects included China's building of the first stage of Tehran's Metro
rail system and a contract to build a second link worth $836 million. China
will be the top contender to build four other planned lines, including a
30-kilometer track to the airport. In February 2003, Chery Automobile Co, the
eighth-largest auto maker in China, opened its first overseas production plant
in Iran. Today, it manufactures 30,000 Chery cars annually in northeastern
Iran. Beijing is also negotiating to construct a 386-kilometer pipeline from
Iran to the northern Caspian Sea to connect with the long-distance Kazakhstan
to Xinjiang pipeline that it began building last October. The Kazakh pipeline
has a capacity to deliver 10 million tons of oil to China per year. Despite US
bluster and belligerence, Iran is anything but isolated in today's world.
The European Union is China's largest trading partner and China is the EU's
second-largest trading partner (after the United States). Back in 1989, to
protest the suppression of pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing's Tiananmen
Square, the EU imposed a ban on military sales to China. The only other
countries so treated are true international pariahs such as Myanmar, Sudan and
Zimbabwe. Even North Korea is not subject to a formal European arms embargo.
Given that the Chinese leadership has changed several times since 1989 and as a
gesture of goodwill, the EU has announced its intention to lift the embargo.
Jacques Chirac, the French president, is one of the strongest proponents of the
idea of replacing US hegemony with a "multipolar world". On a visit to Beijing
in October, he said that China and France share "a common vision of the world"
and that lifting the embargo will "mark a significant milestone: a moment when
Europe had to make a choice between the strategic interests of America and
China - and chose China".
In his trip to Western Europe in February, Bush repeatedly said, "There is deep
concern in our country that a transfer of weapons would be a transfer of
technology to China, which would change the balance of relations between China
and Taiwan." In early February, the House of Representatives voted 411-3 in
favor of a resolution condemning the potential EU move. The Europeans and
Chinese contend that the Bush administration has vastly overstated its case,
that no weapons capable of changing the balance of power are involved, and that
the EU is not aiming to win massive new defense contracts from China but to
strengthen mutual economic relations in general. Immediately after Bush's tour
of Europe, the EU trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, arrived in Beijing for
his first official visit. The purpose of his trip, he said, was to stress the
need to create a new strategic partnership between China and Europe.
Washington has buttressed its hardline stance with the release of many new
intelligence estimates depicting China as a formidable military threat. Whether
this intelligence is politicized or not, it argues that China's military
modernization is aimed precisely at countering the US Navy's carrier strike
groups, which would assumedly be used in the Taiwan Strait in case of war.
China is certainly building a large fleet of nuclear submarines and is an
active participant in the EU's Galileo Project to produce a satellite
navigation system not controlled by the US military. The Defense Department
worries that Beijing might adapt the Galileo technology to anti-satellite
purposes. US military analysts are also impressed by China's launch, on October
15, 2003, of a spacecraft containing a single astronaut who was successfully
returned to Earth the following day. Only the former USSR and the United States
had previously sent humans into outer space.
China already has 500-550 short-range ballistic missiles deployed opposite
Taiwan and has 24 CSS-4 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) with a
range of 13,000 kilometers to deter a US missile attack on the Chinese
mainland. According to Richard Fisher, a researcher at the US-based Center for
Security Policy, "The forces that China is putting in place right now will
probably be more than sufficient to deal with a single American
aircraft-carrier battle group." Arthur Lauder, a professor of international
relations at the University of Pennsylvania, concurred. He said the Chinese
military "is the only one being developed anywhere in the world today that is
specifically configured to fight the United States of America".
The US obviously cannot wish away this capability, but it has no evidence that
China is doing anything more than countering the threats coming from the Bush
administration. It seeks to avoid war with Taiwan and the US by deterring them
from separating Taiwan from China. For this reason, China's pro forma
legislature, the National People's Congress, passed a law this month making
secession from China illegal and authorizing the use of force in case a
territory tried to leave the country.
The Japanese government, of course, backs the US position that China
constitutes a military threat to the entire region. Interestingly enough,
however, the Australian government of Prime Minister John Howard, a loyal ally
of the United States when it comes to Iraq, has decided to defy Bush on the
issue of lifting the European arms embargo. Australia places a high premium on
good relations with China and is hoping to negotiate a free-trade agreement
between the two countries. Canberra has therefore decided to support the EU in
lifting the 15-year-old embargo. Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder
both say, "It will happen."
The United States has long proclaimed that Latin America is part of its "sphere
of influence", and because of that most foreign countries have to tread
carefully in doing business there. However, in the search for fuel and minerals
for its booming economy, China is openly courting many Latin American countries
regardless of what Washington thinks. On November 15, President Hu Jintao ended
a five-day visit to Brazil during which he signed more than a dozen accords
aimed at expanding Brazil's sales to China and Chinese investment in Brazil.
Under one agreement Brazil will export to China as much as $800 million
annually in beef and poultry. In turn, China agreed with Brazil's
state-controlled oil company to finance a $1.3 billion gas pipeline between Rio
de Janeiro and Bahia once technical studies are completed. China and Brazil
also entered into a "strategic partnership" with the objective of raising the
value of bilateral trade from $10 billion in 2004 to $20 billion by 2007.
President Hu said this partnership symbolized "a new international political
order that favored developing countries".
In the weeks that followed, China signed important investment and trade
agreements with Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia, Chile and Cuba. Of particular
interest, in December, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela visited China and
agreed to give it wide-ranging access to his country's oil reserves. Venezuela
is the world's fifth-largest oil exporter and normally sells about 60% of its
output to the United States, but under the new agreements China will be allowed
to operate 15 mature oilfields in eastern Venezuela. China will invest about
$350 million to extract oil and another $60 million in natural-gas wells.
China is also working to integrate East Asia's smaller countries into some form
of new economic and political community. Such an alignment, if it comes into
being, will certainly erode US and Japanese influence in the area. In November,
the 10 nations that make up ASEAN (Brunei, Myanmar, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos,
Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam), met in the Laotian
capital Vientiane, joined by the leaders of China, Japan and South Korea. The
United States was not invited and the Japanese officials seemed uncomfortable
being there. The purpose was to plan for an East Asian summit meeting to be
held next November to begin creating an "East Asia Community". Last December,
the ASEAN countries and China also agreed to create a free-trade zone among
themselves by 2010.
According to Edward Cody of the Washington Post, "Trade between China and the
10 ASEAN countries has increased about 20% a year since 1990, and the pace has
picked up in the last several years." This trade hit $78.2 billion in 2003 and
was reported to be about $100 billion by the end of 2004. As senior Japanese
political commentator Yoichi Funabashi observed, "The ratio of intra-regional
trade [in East Asia] to worldwide trade was nearly 52% in 2002. Though this
figure is lower than the 62% in the EU, it tops the 46% of NAFTA [the North
American Free Trade Agreement]. East Asia is thus becoming less dependent on
the US in terms of trade."
China is the primary moving force behind these efforts. According to Funabashi,
China's leadership plans to use the country's explosive economic growth and its
ever more powerful links to regional trading partners to marginalize the United
States and isolate Japan in East Asia. He argues that the United States
underestimated how deeply distrusted it had become in the region thanks to its
narrow-minded and ideological response to the East Asian financial crisis of
1997, which it largely caused. On November 30, Michael Reiss, the director of
policy planning in the State Department, said in Tokyo, "The US, as a power in
the Western Pacific, has an interest in East Asia. We would be unhappy about
any plans to exclude the US from the framework of dialogue and cooperation in
this region." But it is probably already too late for the Bush administration
to do much more than delay the arrival of a China-dominated East Asian
Community, particularly because of declining US economic and financial
strength.
For Japan, the choices are more difficult still. Sino-Japanese enmity has had a
long history in East Asia, always with disastrous outcomes. Before World War
II, one of Japan's most influential writers on Chinese affairs, Hotsumi Ozaki,
prophetically warned that Japan, by refusing to adjust to the Chinese
revolution and instead making war on it, would only radicalize the Chinese
people and contribute to the coming to power of the Chinese Communist Party. He
spent his life working on the question "Why should the success of the Chinese
revolution be to Japan's disadvantage?" In 1944, the Japanese government hanged
Ozaki as a traitor, but his question remains as relevant today as it was in the
late 1930s.
Why should China's emergence as a rich, successful country be to the
disadvantage of either Japan or the United States? History teaches us that the
least intelligent response to this development would be to try to stop it
through military force. As a Hong Kong wisecrack has it, China has just had a
couple of bad centuries and now it's back. The world needs to adjust peacefully
to its legitimate claims - one of which is for other nations to stop
militarizing the Taiwan problem - while checking unreasonable Chinese efforts
to impose its will on the region. Unfortunately, the trend of events in East
Asia suggests we may yet see a repetition of the last Sino-Japanese conflict,
only this time the US is unlikely to be on the winning side.
(Source citations and other references for this article are available on the
website of the Japan Policy Research Institute.)
Chalmers Johnson is president of the Japan Policy Research Institute. The first
two books in his Blowback Trilogy - Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of
American Empire, and The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of
the Republic - are now available in paperback. The third volume is being
written. This article appeared previously on Tomdispatch
http://www.tomdispatch.com/ and is used here by permission.
(Copyright 2005 Chalmers Johnson.)
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