Balance, not containment.

• Author: McLennnan, A.D.
• Position: US-China policy

A Geopolitical Take from Canberra

The Pages of The National Interest have abounded in recent months with analyses, prognostications, predictions, and arguments over what to do with and about China. Robert Zoellick argued persuasively for the need to rebuild a bipartisan consensus on U.S. policy toward China, and both he and Paul Wolfowitz have urged that such a consensus take as its touchstone the recognition that the problem is one of accommodating the rise of a new power (the Wilhelmine Germany analogy), and not that of containing an implacably hostile imperialism (the Stalinist postwar Soviet Union analogy). It is hard to deny, too, the good sense of recognizing the essential tension between China's rush toward economic development and its ossified political system, a tension that Henry S. Rowen and others maintain will be resolved in the end in a relatively benign way, in favor of democracy. And it also makes sense, as Bruce Cumings has suggested, for Americans to understand the historical - and, in some cases, the very subjective - origins of their own images of China before setting off to propound U.S. interests in Beijing.(1)

Less persuasive, however, are some of the means advanced to achieve these goals. Zoellick's argument, for example, that the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) could effectively engage China on regional security issues takes insufficient account of China's zero-sum view of international relations - a view generic to East Asia. It also underestimates the damaging collateral effects that might attend such an "engagement" policy line, especially on the U.S.-Japanese alliance, and especially bearing in mind the skill that China has demonstrated in manipulating multilateral security diplomacy to its strategic advantage.

That said, it does not follow that if a policy of "engagement" has its problems, a policy of "containment" must be flawless. The language that has arisen to discuss U.S. China policy is itself seminally misleading; both "engagement" and "containment" arguments usually assume that the Sino-American bilateral relationship is so central that it will, in future, control all major regional outcomes. This is not so. The Sino-American relationship will be the main factor in the game, no doubt; but U.S. policy toward China, as with policy toward any major power, must fit into a larger picture in which Japan, Korea, Russia, Vietnam, Indonesia, and other states will inevitably play a part. In this essay I shall examine this dynamic and consider what such a fit involves, for even the advocates of a containment strategy, simple in principle though it may be, are obliged to begin with a realistic awareness of Asian complexities.

China's Strategic Opportunity

To understand where China is going we might start by remembering where it has been. Several stages distinguish the development of China's foreign policy since 1949. First there was Beijing's alliance with Moscow. Then came the Sino-Soviet split, which led China to pursue a revolutionary foreign policy directed against both superpowers. Then followed the Cultural Revolution, during which China had barely any foreign policy at all. By 1969, Beijing was on the brink of a war with the Soviet Union that it could only have lost. As the chaos of the Cultural Revolution gave way to a new internal balance, China redefined its relationship with America to oppose a formidable expansion of Soviet power. In the Cold War's final two decades, China played a major part in defeating Soviet designs. It tied down Soviet forces in the Far East and outmaneuvered Hanoi and Moscow by countering Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia, where the Soviet Union had sought to outflank China and to challenge America's position at the junction of the straits linking the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

With the collapse of the Soviet empire, China entered a new stage in its foreign policy, one as yet without a name. But named or not, it is clear that China is a major beneficiary of the Cold War's outcome. The collapse of the Soviet Union has removed its main strategic threat, and in doing so has also removed its strategic dependence on America. At the same time, Beijing has embraced the transition to capitalism under party control, unleashing the economic energy of its people and far outpacing the social dynamism of its Russian neighbor. Largely as a consequence of all this, China is feeling its oats. Already identifying itself as one of the world's two most powerful nations, China foresees its economy soon overtaking that of the United States in sheer size. It is obviously eyeing a larger place in the sun, and its rise has captured the imagination of political cognoscenti all over the world - an achievement that, by itself, contributes much to the elan of Chinese assertiveness.

Not all is smooth sailing, of course. Domestically, China's economy is spread unevenly between south and north, coast and interior. Agriculture, having once led the way, now lags, and this, together with the increasing withdrawal of the state from the industrial sector of the economy, is generating unprecedented labor dislocation and internal migration. These phenomena, in turn, are deepening the strains on China's national unity, strains that reflect problems of size, regional and ethnic differences, and a historical propensity to fragment. Finally, with Deng Xiaoping's death, contests for power may test the political system to the utmost.

Already that political system, still led by the Communist Party, lacks legitimacy - as must be the case when economic success is achieved by embracing capitalism, and when, until recently, foreign policy success was achieved by siding with the premier capitalist state against the premier communist one. As has been widely observed, this void makes nationalist appeals and demonstrative firmness in foreign policy important in sustaining the party's hold on power. It also tends to raise the stature of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), which, unlike the Soviet army, has always been more the partner than the servant of the party.(2) The PLA is a logical instrument of national assertion. While China does not harbor any vast territorial ambitions, it does entertain some, mostly expressed in irredentist terms linked to historical claims and past "unequal" treatment. Other nations, indeed, did take advantage of China's weakness, none more brutally than Japan. In doing so, they hurt Han pride and sense of superior civilization. Now, with the tables partly turned, China expects redress of historic grievances and demands "respect."

Context matters. The end of the Cold War and the political successes of NATO during it resolved long-standing issues of international security in Europe - contests over hegemony and the balance of power that underlay both world wars and the Cold War. But this happy outcome has no parallel in East Asia, where the glue of common strategic interests no longer binds the United States and China. Relations among major European countries today are more predictably non-violent than they were before the Second - or indeed the First - World War; the same can simply not be said about Asia. Rather, an uneasy equilibrium persists among China, Japan, and the United States. Weakened Russia is an interested onlooker and would-be player. Tensions focus especially on the Korean Peninsula, Taiwan, and the South China Sea.

The larger question in all this is whether the resolution of one set of problems critical to international order must give rise to another set of problems, just as the strategic consequences of the Second World War produced the Cold War. As far as Europe is concerned, the short answer is no, it need not. But in East Asia it might - and if Beijing uses force to achieve its aims at home and abroad, it will. If it again brutally puts down any domestic challenges to the party's power, and if abroad the leadership should decide to resort to force, and to sacrifice Chinese lives in huge number in an effort to achieve strategic goals and causes driven by raison d'etat, a direct link will again have been made manifest between absolute power and a ruthless foreign policy. Then we will have a real problem on our hands, one all too familiar from the experiences of the last sixty years.

Is there any evidence for fearing such an outcome? Yes, there is some.

Muscle Building

The collapse of the Soviet Union freed China from immense strategic pressure on its northern border. It also liberated the PLA from the Maoist "people's war" doctrine - defense by depth and density of population in lieu of firepower. China is developing smaller, more professional forces with greater mobility and striking...