America Besieged: Bad things happen when your adversary does not respect you. Washington has been trying to engage a militant state, and as we do so, we have not been supporting our treaty allies and friends as we promised to do. And as a result, that militant state now believes that it can intimidate us and do anything. Anything it wants. There is something very wrong in Asia at the moment. What is it? It is Chinese expansionism. Beijing leaders believe that the People’s Republic of China should be larger than it is today, and Chinese flag officers are comfortable in public urging their country to initiate armed conflict to seize territory from neighbors, as one general, Liu Yazhou, did at the beginning of this year. So, why are the Chinese becoming so hostile? China, I believe, has just passed an inflection point. Until recently, everything was going its way. Now, however, all the problems are catching up with the Chinese state at the same time. And when we look at these problems, we should start with the motor of China’s rise, its economy. We all know that the Chinese economy is slowing, but what is not obvious is that it is slowing so fast that the country could fail. When we ignore official statistics and look at independent data, we see a country that is growing, but it’s growing only in the very low single digits. Yet even if China were growing as fast as it claims, which is 7.7 percent for the last two years, that would be insufficient. Well, why? Because of debt, every province in the country is a Greece. The country is creating debt at an extraordinary pace, 20 to 30 percent a year, in order to keep the economy going. China is building ghost cities and high-speed rail lines to nowhere by accumulating debt at least two times faster than it’s growing, perhaps seven times faster. China is in an impossible situation as arithmetic tells us that there has to be a debt crisis soon. How soon? Well, this month, there have been high-profile defaults in China, so the inevitable correction, the debt crisis, could take place this year. And why are China’s severe economic problems relevant to us? Because for three decades, the Communist Party has primarily based its legitimacy on the continual delivery of prosperity. And without prosperity, the only remaining basis of legitimacy is nationalism. China’s militant nationalism is creating friction in an arc of nations, from India in the south to South Korea in the north. For instance, in the middle of 2012, Chinese vessels first surrounded and then seized Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines. Washington, not wanting to antagonize Beijing and hoping to avoid a confrontation, did nothing to prevent the Chinese from taking the shoal, despite our 1951 defense treaty with Manila. Well, the Chinese were not satisfied with their seizure. As soon as the Chinese took Scarborough, they ramped up pressure on Second Thomas Shoal, also in the South China Sea. Beijing, with its infamous nine-dash line, claims about 80 percent of that international body of water as an internal Chinese lake. And at the same time, the Chinese are trying to grab the Senkaku Islands from Japan by using forceful tactics, regularly sending its ships into Japanese sovereign waters around those islands and some times flying its planes into Japanese airspace there. Now, many people ask why should the Japanese care about eight barren outcroppings in the East China Sea? The answer is the Chinese are acting like classic aggressors. They were not satisfied with Scarborough, so they ramped up pressure on Second Thomas Shoal and the Senkakus, and they will not be happy if they take the Senkakus. Already, Chinese policymakers, backed up by state media, are arguing that Beijing should claim Japan’s Okinawa and the rest of the Ryukyu chain, as well. To dominate its periphery, Beijing, in November, declared its East China Sea air defense identification zone. Now, China’s declaration of this zone, by itself, is a belligerent act. The zone not only includes sovereign Japanese airspace, it not only includes South Korean airspace, but it also impinges on notions of freedom of navigation, which Americans have been defending for more than two centuries. Now, there’s been a noticeable increase in the tempo of China’s belligerence during the last year, and this uptick has generally coincided with the elevation in November 2012 of Xi Jinping as China’s new ruler. There are two theories what’s going on. First, some think that Xi Jinping has quickly consolidated political control and that he really is an ardent nationalist, that he is the one pushing the military to act provocatively. Second, other people, including me, believe that the political transition has not been completed. And people who share my view, which I admit is a minority one, are concerned that China’s flag officers are making their own policies independently of China’s civilian leaders or are essentially telling the civilians what policies to adopt. In short, I believe that the People’s Liberation Army is now the most powerful faction in the Communist Party and that the generals and admirals are calling the tune. Xi Jinping became China’s supreme leader because he appealed to all factions, in large part because he didn’t have a faction of his own. In other words, he was the least unacceptable choice and because now he still has no faction, he cannot afford to offend the flag officers of the PLA, who, in my view, have been driving this bus for quite some time. A militant China under the military is lashing out, and that is not a good sign. My guess is that Chinese leaders, seeing all the problems in their country, believe that the window for them to accomplish their goals is closing, and that’s why they’re acting more aggressively. A turbulent China could lash out and shake the world. We’ve talked about what is wrong in Beijing. We should also think about what is wrong in Washington. Our fundamental mistake is that we fervently believe that if we just try hard enough, the Chinese will have to respond in kind. This is a product of our thinking that we are people, the Chinese are people. We respond to gestures of friendship. They will respond to our friendly gestures. Unfortunately, they don’t. Now, take the dynamic evident in the beginning of 2009 when President Obama took office. In February of that year, the first month after the inauguration, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton publicly announced that we were downgrading our emphasis on human rights in order to continue a dialogue with China. Now, she intended her words as a signal of cooperation. Beijing, however, took it as a sign of weakness. Chinese officials were ecstatic because, in the words of one Beijing analyst, the Chinese leaders thought that Hillary Clinton “had finally succumbed to the full kowtow.” So, in the following months, Beijing leaders pressed what they perceived to be their advantage. Chinese military planes and naval and civilian craft harassed and interfered with the Impeccable and the Victorious, which are two unarmed U.S. Navy reconnaissance vessels, in international waters in the South China and the Yellow Seas. In one of those incidents, the harassment, which was an attempt to sever a towed sonar array from the Impeccable, was so serious that it constituted an attack on an American vessel. In other words, an act of war. President Obama and Secretary Clinton issued only mild protests when the smiling Chinese foreign minister showed up in Washington just a few days after those provocative acts. And then in April, and you won’t believe this, President Obama sent America’s top naval officer and a destroyer, the Fitzgerald, to China to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese navy. Well, that show of friendship proved to be another mistake because in May, the Chinese, again, harassed the Victorious in the Yellow Sea. But this ever-hopeful administration did not give up. In November, Jeffrey Bader, who was then on the National Security Council, attempted to flatter the Chinese by making a speech in Washington and saying that there was no issue in the world today that could not be solved without Chinese cooperation. Beijing, obviously, heard those words as a veto that we had given them on American policies. They reciprocated by humiliating our president when he went to Beijing later that month for the summit and then, also, the following month in Copenhagen at the Climate Change Summit. And then, in the first months of 2010, Chinese officials and military officers started to make direct threats against the United States in public, some of them talking about waging war against the U.S. And those belligerent comments have continued to today. Just in October, Chinese state media, without provocation, bragged about how Chinese submarines could launch nuclear-tip ballistic missiles at the United States and kill tens of millions of Americans. Maintaining feeble policies has consequences. Today, we are still having trouble calling out the Chinese in public for its hostile actions against us and for its aggression against our treaty allies, neighbors of China and friends in the region. If we can’t speak to Beijing clearly, the Chinese will think we’re afraid of them. If they think we’re afraid of them, they will act accordingly. Asia is aflame and America is besieged because, I repeat, bad things happen when your adversary does not respect you. Gordon Chang:.
Posted on: Sun, 13 Apr 2014 11:45:57 +0000