Coming To Terms
With China
By Chalmers Johnson
16 March, 2005
TomDispatch
I recall forty 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 American ambassador to Tokyo in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
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 which the United States would
have both 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 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 forty-five-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, American, and Japanese imperialism and colonialism.
The major question
for the twenty-first 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 reemergence 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 U.S. and Japanese
projections are finally put to rest? That is what is at stake.
Alice-in-Wonderland
Policies and the Mother of All Financial Crises
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 over two decades), whereas both the U.S. 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 U.S. and Japan
being first and second) and our third largest trading partner after
Canada and Mexico. According to 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 $10.4 trillion and China's $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 (EU) and the United States.
China's trade volume for 2004 was $1.2 trillion, third in the world
after the U.S. and Germany, and well ahead of Japan's $1.07 trillion.
China's trade with the U.S. grew some 34% in 2004 and has turned Los
Angeles, Long Beach, and Oakland into the three busiest seaports in
America.
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 Britain's 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 U.S. are made in China, as are the DVD players of Japan's
Funai Electric Company. 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 U.S. 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 U.S.'s
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 showing signs that it will stabilize at approximately
1.4 billion people, and is heavily weighted toward males. (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.) 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 U.S. and Japan are approximately
$7 trillion in the red, which is worse for Japan with less than half
the U.S. 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 U.S.
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 dollar and into the euro or other currencies in order 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
2005 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 us. Meanwhile, the American 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. forces located on some 91 bases on the Japanese mainland and
the island of Okinawa. The U.S. Seventh 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 American forces
are present only for its defense. In fact, Japan has no control over
how and where the U.S. employs its land, sea, and air forces based on
Japanese territory, and the Japanese and American 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 nine of its Constitution (renouncing the use of force
except as a matter of self-defense) and become what American officials
call a "normal nation." For example, on August 13, 2004, Secretary
of State Colin Powell stated baldly in Tokyo that if Japan ever hoped
to become a permanent member of the U.N. 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 U.N. 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 American arms. Its members include Torkel Patterson, Robin Sakoda,
David Asher, and James Kelly at State; 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 [U.S.-Japan] alliance." Japan has so far not
resisted this American 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 stand-off could be resolved virtually overnight
-- if the Bush administration would cease trying to overthrow the Pyongyang
regime and instead deliver on American trade promises (in return for
North Korea's agreement to give up its nuclear weapons program). Instead,
on February 25, 2005, the State Department announced that "the
U.S. 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 American 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, 9 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 U.N. 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 American missile defense ("Star Wars") program --
something the Canadians refused to do in February 2005 -- 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 Bush and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.
Koizumi made his first visit to the United States in July of that year
and, in May of 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, 2004,
personally endorsed George Bush's reelection.
A New Nuclear
Giant in the Making?
Koizumi has appointed
to his various cabinets hard-line 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 the Defense Agency chief Yoshinori
Ono, and the foreign minister Nobutaka Machimura, both ardent militarists;
while Foreign Minister 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 to 1945. Unlike the harsh
Japanese military rule over Korea from 1910 to 1945, 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 Guomindang) 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 fiftieth anniversary in November 2005. 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 U.S. 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
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 U.S. forces in Japan would then be placed under the
command of a four-star general, who would be on a par with regional
commanders like Centcom commander John Abizaid, who lords it over Iraq
and South Asia. The new command would be in charge of all 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 a sophisticated and centrally located
prefecture like 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 American "nuclear umbrella."
The 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 pre-emptive 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 American Seventh 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, 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, 2005, the Bush administration complicated these delicate relations
by nominating John Bolton to be the American ambassador to the United
Nations. He is an avowed advocate of Taiwanese independence and was
once a paid consultant to the Taiwanese government.
In May 2004, in
a very close and contested election, Chen Shui-bian was reelected, 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 sizeable
increase over his 33.9% in 2000, when the opposition was divided. The
Taiwan 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,
2004, 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 reelection 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, 2004. 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,
2004, mainland China issued its fifth Defense White Paper on the goals
of the country's national defense efforts. As one long-time observer,
Robert Bedeski, notes, "At first glance, the Defense White Paper
is a hard-line 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,
2005, President Chen Shui-bian 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 ten 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 Shui-bian 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, 3.7 million square miles of territory, a rapidly growing $1.4
trillion economy, and aspirations to regional leadership in East Asia.
Rather than declaring its independence, Taiwan may 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
and Sino-Japanese Relations Spiral Downward
It has long been
an article of neo-con faith that the U.S. 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 our probable next enemies.
In 2001, having come to power, the neo-conservatives shifted much of
our 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 Army personnel and supplies to the Asia-Pacific region, and
worked strenuously to promote the remilitarization of Japan.
On April 1, 2001,
a U.S. navy EP-3E Aries II electronic spy plane collided with a Chinese
jet fighter off the south China coast. The American 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 American plane
landed safely on Hainan Island and its crew of twenty-four 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 eleven days until it received a pro
forma American apology for causing the death of a Chinese pilot on the
edge of the country's territorial air space and for making an unauthorized
landing at a Chinese military airfield. Meanwhile, our 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 our 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 American policy
until 9/11, when China enthusiastically joined the "war on terrorism"
and the President 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 U.S. 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 American
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 Navy also carried
out exercises it dubbed "Operation Summer Pulse '04," which
involved the simultaneous deployment at sea of seven of our twelve carrier
strike groups. An American carrier strike group includes an aircraft
carrier (usually with 9 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 American show
of force and Chen Shui-bian's polemics preceding the December elections
also seemed to overstimulate the Taiwanese. On October 26 in Beijing,
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-year formal assessment of
U.S. 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 Condi Rice's State Department,
played its most dangerous card. On February 19, 2005 in Washington,
it signed a new military agreement with Japan. For the first time, Japan
joined the 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 American 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 in September 2004; 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 2004 at two important summit meetings: an Asia-Pacific
Economic Cooperation (APEC) gathering in Santiago, Chile, 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,
Laos. 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 Premier 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,
2004, 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 to 65,000 at American academic institutions.
These close and lucrative relations are at risk if the U.S. 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 U.S. China has
not only begun to displace the U.S. 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, i.e., the preference for
many different, competing power centers rather than the 'unipolarity'
of the U.S. as a single hyper-power. 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 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
oil field, one of the world's largest, in a project worth $2.8 billion.
The U.S. has opposed Japan's support for Iran, causing Congressman Brad
Sherman (D-CA) 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 American 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 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 that 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: American pressure on Iran to give up its
nuclear power development program and the Bush administration's declared
intention to take Iran to the U.N. Security Council for the imposition
of sanctions (which a Chinese vote could veto). On November 6, 2004,
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 American effort to sanction Iran at
the Security Council. The U.S. 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 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 19 mile
track to the airport. In February 2003, Chery Automobile Company, the
eighth largest automaker 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 240 mile
pipeline from Iran to the northern Caspian Sea to connect with the long-distance
Kazakhstan to Xinjiang pipeline that it began building in October 2004.
The Kazakh pipeline has a capacity to deliver 10 million tons of oil
to China per year. Despite American bluster and belligerence, Iran is
anything but isolated in today's world.
The EU 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 like Burma, 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 American hegemony with a "multipolar
world." On a visit to Beijing in October 2004, 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 2005, 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 to 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 following 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 hard-line 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 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 American military. The Defense Department
worries that Beijing might adapt the Galileo technology to anti-satellite
purposes. American 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 to 550 short-range ballistic missiles deployed opposite Taiwan and
has 24 CSS-4 ICBMs with a range of 13,000 km to deter an American missile
attack on the Chinese mainland. According to Richard Fisher, a researcher
at the U.S.-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, concurs. He says that 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 U.S. 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 U.S. by deterring
them from separating Taiwan from China. For this reason, in March 2005,
China's pro-forma legislature, the National People's Congress, passed
a law 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 American position that China constitutes a military
threat to the entire region. Interestingly enough, however, the Australian
government of John Howard, a loyal American ally 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 Schröder 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 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, 2004, 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 that 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 2004, 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 oil fields in eastern Venezuela.
China will invest around $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 American and Japanese influence in the area. In
November 2004, the ten nations that make up ASEAN or the Association
of Southeast Asian Nations (Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos,
Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam), met in
the Laotian capital of 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 in November 2005 to begin
creating an "East Asia Community." In December 2004, 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 the senior Japanese political commentator Yoichi Funabashi observes,
"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 U.S. 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, 2004, Michael
Reiss, the director of policy planning in the State Department, said
in Tokyo, "The U.S., as a power in the Western Pacific, has an
interest in East Asia. We would be unhappy about any plans to exclude
the U.S. 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 American 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 U.S. is unlikely to be on
the winning side.
Source citations
and other references are available on the web site 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.
Copyright 2005
Chalmers Johnson