Statement of Dr. Arthur Waldron

Lauder Professor of International Relations, University of Pennsylvania
Visiting Scholar and Director of Asian Studies, American Enterprise Institute

With respect to China we Americans today find ourselves in a rather puzzling position.  Over the past thirty years we have taken a strong interest in China and helped to bring Beijing into the international community. We have opened our markets to a flood of Chinese exports which has in turn propelled a flood of dollars into Chinese coffers. Our leaders travel to China at least as often as to any other country, even including our close allies; hundreds of thousands of Americans visit China every year and several tens of thousands live there. Students from China are the largest single foreign group in our colleges and graduate schools and tens of thousands of them have become citizens. We are attentive to Chinese opinion on all matters, solicitous, even, and have ceased all but the most perfunctory criticism of China’s continuing, indeed worsening, human rights record.

Yet here we are this morning talking not about further flowering and development of an important and mutually beneficial relationship but rather about dangers, up to and including the danger of actual war. How can this be?

The situation reminds me in certain respects of what we faced fifty years ago with the Soviet Union. We had shed blood together in the common crusade against Hitler; US aid to the USSR had been extensive and critically important; reporting about Russia was so favorable as to be misleading; ordinary Russians and Americans got on well, as, it seemed on the strength of wartime meetings at least, did our leaders. Then came victory and the end of the Third Reich and many in America expected that the US-Soviet friendship would blossom even more in the post war world. But it did not. To the bafflement of most observers, we found ourselves the object of suspicion and hostility. Why?

One explanation, of course, was that we had somehow done something wrong as the war ended and aroused the suspicions of a Stalin who really wanted to be our friend. We hear something like the same explanations with respect to China today: that we are the source of the trouble. Despite everything we have done, despite our manifest good will, our actions somehow leave Beijing no alternative but to be hostile. We have heard this with respect to Taiwan; now we are hearing it in connection with missile defense; we will soon hear it, I suspect, in connection with our Japanese and Korean alliances.

Now in 1947 a rising young diplomat with long experience in Russian affairs made his reputation with an article that persuasively explained why our wartime ally Moscow had turned against us in peace. That diplomat was George Kennan, and the argument of his celebrated “X article” applies to China today just as it applied to Russia then. The argument is that a dictatorship like China or the USSR requires external enemies to keep its people under control and justify its own vast powers. As long as Hitler existed (or in the Chinese case, as long as the USSR posed a real threat) that condition was satisfied. But when peace came, ironically, a buttress of the regime fell away, and a new enemy had to be manufactured.

I well remember my student days at Leningrad State University. We were taken to a Soviet military museum into a hall full of German battle flags, captured by the heroic Russian army in the war. But what did our guide say? Nothing about the 1940s. She talked instead about Germany in the late 1960s” “Now again” she said with real conviction, “it is the same.” She believed the Soviet propaganda that painted the democratic and peaceful state of West Germany as a reincarnation of Hitler’s Reich. In China today much the same is said about today’s democratic and peaceful Japan—and it is persuasive, for in each case the propaganda fits the memories and experiences of a large portion of the population.

The first point I would stress this morning, then, is that China is carrying out a massive military buildup not because it faces threats or dangers—it does not—but rather because it remains a communist dictatorship and needs enemies.

As with the Soviet Union, however, the story does not stop there. With the buildup goes a posture towards the rest of the world and actions to accompany it, which have the effect of increasing tension and spurring attempts to develop countervailing forces. How do these affect the United States?

If China continues to become wealthier and wealthier and if its political system does not change then this buildup will soon pose a major problem for the Asian region and the world. But of course not even the Chinese leadership, knows where China is going now or where she will be in even a year’s time, not to mention ten or twenty years. I believe that although political change has ceased, indeed it has backtracked, during the last decade during which Jiang Zemin has been in power, it has not been permanently stopped. Big changes are ahead, I believe, though whether they will be for the good remains to be seen.

Certainly we cannot treat China’s transformation as a certainty. What we see in China today is economic development without political change, which historically has had little effect on belligerence. If economic development were the key to responsible international behavior, then we would expect that from the mid nineteenth century on Germany would have been the most peaceful of nations, for she was certainly the most developed economically, and deeply enmeshed in global trade. Tragically, of course, that was not the case, for the key variable is not economic but political development. Germany became peaceful when she became democratic, and China is very far from being democratic today, and may continue to be so tomorrow.

What can be said with certainty, however, is that as China’s economy develops she is devoting increasingly substantial resources to the development of an increasingly formidable military capability. This is already disquieting her neighbors and beginning to pose a direct threat to the United States itself.

Is this something we should worry about? My answer is yes, thought not, I would hasten to add, because I believe China must inevitably find herself opposing the United States. Indeed, I don’t think any good reasons exist for China to be hostile to the United States (though there are plenty of bad reasons) and I think the best interests of both countries will be served by a peaceful relationship. But such logical considerations are no guarantee of peace.

China is of course a poor country. Absolute poverty is widespread. Travel where you like in China and you will see for yourself that China’s people do not yet have the housing they deserve, they do not have adequate schools and hospitals, roads are inadequate, water supply is problematical. Everywhere are crying social needs that could easily absorb every penny of the state budget, which already runs a deficit.

Yet in the midst of this, China is spending tens of billions of dollars every year on enormously costly military and military related programs, ranging from a manned space program to extensive nuclear warhead development to the perfection of new generations of mobile, solid-fueled ballistic missiles, to submarines to aircraft to aircraft carriers, not to mention communications, satellites, electronics, and so forth. The question must arise, to what end?

After all, China today faces no identifiable enemy. No one threatens her. Yet her emphasis on military development today is far greater than it was when she did face a formidable enemy, the Soviet Union, during the 1970s and 1980s—when she formed a quasi-military alliance with Washington. Now the Soviet Union is gone. So why does China arm herself far more vigorously than she did when the Soviets actually threatened her?

My answer has three parts:

First, the military is an increasingly important player in China’s domestic politics, and it is in the leadership’s interest to give them what they want. Any military will want the best and most advanced of everything.

Second, although the military’s real mission is to keep the Party in power, as it did in 1989, by shooting Chinese people, such a definition is not popular within the military itself. Therefore it is necessary to define external and patriotic—and therefore acceptable—missions for them. One of these now is to prevent aggression by the US or Japan. Another is to recover Taiwan.

Third, and most importantly, the Party’s absolute rule can only be justified by invocation of external enemies, enemies so threatening as to make plausible the postponing of any political reform until the problem is solved.

Absent some systematic change in China, we can expect in the years ahead a steady level of military tension with Beijing with the real possibility of a crisis.

Beijing regularly identifies Taiwan as the most volatile point, though I disagree. Taiwan is an issue chiefly because Beijing says it is one. The island itself poses absolutely no threat whatsoever to China, unless we agree with Beijing that a fully functioning Chinese democracy is threatening.  Nor is anything going to change soon.  The expectation, which has been around since the 1970s that a deal was coming soon by which Taiwan settled pretty well on Beijing’s terms—“one country, two systems”—that expectation has now definitively failed. Taiwan has a new president and a reinvigorated administration that will insist on sovereignty and equality. US support for Taiwan will continue to be adequate, I expect. Even president Clinton has spoken clearly against any use of force, and underlined the need for Taiwan’s “assent” about the future. All this could of course go badly wrong if Beijing misjudges.

The best way out for Beijing is to find some formula by which it can accept the status quo without any change in substance or symbolism: to do no more than “baptize” it, as I say. This Beijing could do and the payoff would be enormous, politically, economically, and in other respects. But many in Beijing do not want to accept the status quo. They want to change it so that Beijing dominates Taiwan—and that can only be imagined as resulting from military action.

China’s big problem, however, is not with Taiwan, which is eager for friendship, though on terms of equality. Some in China envision an Asian order in which China somehow dominates, rather as traditional historical writings portray China as dominating in the pre-modern period. China has territorial disputes with many of her neighbors, including Japan, and her claims to much of the South China Sea are troublesome to Southeast Asian neighbors. She also faces hostile Muslim peoples both inside and beyond her western borders, has disputes with India to the south, and a history of suspicion with Russia. Plenty of potential exists for trouble.

As in Europe, our security in Asia depends above all upon our alliances. When there is trouble we need genuine friends who can be counted upon, who share values as well as immediate interests. Chinese strategic thought has always understood the crucial importance of alliances. Indeed, Sun Zi explicitly counsels “attack alliances.”

At present China is working very hard to cut our alliance ties in Asia. Our ties with Taiwan were decisively cut twenty years ago and the instability since is a good lesson in the importance of security anchors in the international system. Now China wants to cut our connections with other allies. The recent Korean diplomacy, in which China clearly had a major role, prepares the way for a campaign to end South Korea’s close alliance status with the United States. That in turn will bring the Japanese alliance into doubt.

Some Americans are not particularly concerned about these developments. China is a rising power, they argue, and needs to be accommodated. It makes sense for us to move away from the close tie to Japan toward something more balanced that includes China. But I find it all deeply worrying.

The reason is that the pattern is so similar to what occurred before World War II: the cutting of Japan’s alliance with Britain, the substitution of a weak multilateral system, an international tilt toward China that left Japan feeling cheated—and finally, of course, Japan’s catastrophic decision that, because the international community was unwilling to take her security needs seriously, therefore she had no choice but to act unilaterally.

At the same time that China is attempting to cut US alliances she is building up a network of her own. Internationally she is cultivating Russia by pouring money into the floundering ex-Soviet arms industry, and receiving in return technology that greatly increases her militarily wherewithal. She is also deeply involved in Serbia. She works to weaken trans-Atlantic links. She has developed a very substantial relationship not only with the Muslim states of the Middle East, but also with Israel.

I don’t believe that, if and when the crunch came, any of those states would stand by China and abandon the US and the West. What we see here is opportunistic triangulation in order to bring pressure on Washington and make the occasional million dollars from arms sales. But even that is worrying. Such behavior undermines alliance trust and cohesion, while the military gains China is making, through Russian and Israeli, as well as Western European transfers, are definitely non-trivial, for reasons to which I will return.

In the Asian region, China is working hard on South Korea. Beijing sees Hong Kong’s return as a step toward Taiwan’s incorporation into China. I don’t believe that is going to happen, but should it occur, then China’s influence in the area would be further increased. China’s dubious claims to most of the South China sea would be strengthened and Singapore would undoubtedly join the tilt.

Under such conditions the US would be well-nigh excluded from Asia, just as we were in the 1930s and 1940s when Japan had hegemony there. Our friendship would be of no use to an Asian state, even if they wanted it. Now consider how all this would look to Tokyo. Korea neutral and tilting toward China, and heavily armed; the sea lanes to the south including the Straits of Malacca, under Chinese control. This would worry Japan very much indeed.

What I am describing here is a possible Chinese hegemony over the Asia region. It could happen, though I don’t think it is likely. But the fact that China is actively pursuing this course is very worrying. States that do not welcome Chinese hegemony, which is to say most states in Asia, are likely to turn to the United States as the ally to counterbalance China’s rise. This increases the likelihood that at some point her ambitions will collide directly with the interests of US allies and friends, or indeed the US itself, because the US will be, for China, the dog in the manger.  Out of such often minor conflicts can grow great wars.

I do not believe that any of this is in China’s real interest. It has often been remarked that the Twentieth Century should have been the German century, for as it dawned, Germany was the most advanced country in the world, at least measured by culture, technology, educational level, and economy. Had Germany simply continued to trade and develop, the promise might have been realized. But instead German governments began to fret about nonexistent plots to stifle their state, to deny them their place in the sun, to choke them in central Europe, and so forth, and against these imaginary threats they unleashed two all to real wars. Some talk in China today is disturbingly similar.

So like Germany, China is developing a military capability.  Much comment about this development stresses the fact that China’s order of battle cannot match that of the United States; that we have a whole range of capabilities that they lack, etc. But this misses the point. Wars start when someone decides they can succeed and such decisions are not always governed by the same rules.

What particularly worries me here is the Chinese fascination with lightning victory, with strategems, deception, and so forth. Let me give you an example. I am certain that any attempt by China to use force against Taiwan would be a catastrophic failure. But planning to conquer Taiwan militarily proceeds apace in China, along two lines. One is to perfect a lighting war strategem, using missile barrages, special forces, or whatever, to somehow topple the Taipei government in a matter of hours. This is dangerous fantasy, but people take it seriously. Second, is how to keep the United States out. Here nuclear threats are key, but not the sole resource. Capability being developed to attack US carrier task forces.

The idea is to work with trends that favor you, to find a moment of opportunity, and then strike decisively, as I have explained elsewhere. Chinese military thought contains the most sophisticated exposition to be found anywhere of such an approach. The western tradition today stresses efficient attrition as the key to success. The Chinese looks to surprise, speed, and rapid decision, often from a position of weakness against a stronger adversary. These are of course some of the considerations that led the Japanese to hope the Pearl Harbor attack would work.

But Asians are not the only ones to engage in such fantasies. In 1914 the Germans expected to have World War I won before Christmas by means of the brilliant Schlieffen Plan—but as you will recall, it was still going strong come December 25, and in the end the Germans didn’t even win. Or more recently the United States considered how to bring Mr Milosevic in Belgrade back to the negotiating table. The idea was that two days of missile and air bombardment, with pauses for reflection, would do the trick. As we all know, 78 days of massive NATO bombardment brought no definitive result. Quick and easy victories, technological mastery, lightning war, surgical strikes—this is the realm of fantasy and danger. Fantasy because such things do not exist in the real world; danger because belief in them leads people into the full horror of real war.

This is the danger we face with China. It is that a miscalculation of how successful a use of force will be, particularly if combined with misleading signals from Washington and what looks like American weakness, will lead Beijing to calculate that a “splendid little war” may in fact be possible—for example over Taiwan.

I am certain that an attack on Taiwan would lead to disaster for China. But there are those in Beijing who imagine that the US could be scared off and that a series of missile salvoes could bring the island down. Reality would be very different, of course. Taiwan would strike back; the US would become involved; China’s economy would collapse as exports to the United States suddenly stopped; unemployment would rise and with it unrest, for Beijing has a tacit agreement with its people assuring rising living standards in return for obedience. As the scale of the disaster became clear in China, political struggle would begin within the elite. When the dust finally cleared the achievements of the past thirty years would be gone in China, and her neighbors, thoroughly awake to their own danger, would be developing their own deterrent capabilities.

How can we prevent such a disaster? Here are some things the United States should do.

Rebalance our diplomacy. We need to move away from the current administration’s almost obsessive focus on China to deal with other states as well. We need to strengthen our political and military ties with other democratic states, and always put our allies first.

Make deterrence absolutely clear. This means speaking clearly and credibly. It was clear to me during the Taiwan election period that even this administration has learned something and the verbal signals, naval movements, and bits of news that came out, showed a far better concept of operations than four years ago when Lee Teng-hui was reelected and China fired missiles.

Increase intelligence. China is a vast and capable country and it is difficult to penetrate. I do not for one moment believe that our intelligence agencies have a grip on the situation. More people and more money must be devoted to China, and we need to look at the society as a whole, and activities at home and abroad, and not focus narrowly on a few technical military issues.

Make the Chinese arms buildup an issue. South Korean missiles are a big issue for the United States and so, for that matter are North Korean, Indian, and Pakistani. US pressure prevents Taiwan from developing missiles, and Japan has none. But China’s missile program gets a free pass. Not only that, according to my sources we have intervened to prevent our Korean and Japanese allies from making demarches to Beijing about their missile program. Yet when all is said and done, what drives the entire arms race in Asia is China’s missile program.

See to it that China cannot use free world finance for military plans. The USSR had a socialist economy and was prevented from using Western resources for its military purposes. China, however, has received some three hundred billion dollars in foreign investment since the 1970s and now regularly works in foreign capital markets. There is no reason for the rest of the world to finance a Chinese military buildup aimed outward.

Pressure Russia, Israel, etc to cease arms sales to China. The same logic applies here. Once again, the administration has recently begun to pay some attention to this, but nowhere near enough.

Arthur Waldron is the Lauder Professor of International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania and Director of Asian Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.