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- From: "antonhartomo" <antonhartomo@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: ekonomi-nasional@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, ppiindia@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 20 Mar 2005 14:55:50 -0000
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rehat minggu
---
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.
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