[Peace-discuss] FW: Chalmers Johnson on China

[Lisa Chason]

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=103
<http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=103&ItemID=7446>
&ItemID=7446
 
ZNet | China
 
No Longer the 'Lone' Superpower
 
Coming to Terms with China
 
by Chalmers Johnson; TomDispatch; March 15, 2005
 
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.
 
[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation
Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and
opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing and author 
of
The End of Victory Culture and The Last Days of Publishing.]

 

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