[Mb-civic] Tomgram: Chalmers Johnson, Coming to Terms with China

[Michael Butler]

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Tomgram: Chalmers Johnson, Coming to Terms with China

This post can be found at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2259

In our media lives, Asia plays a remarkably small and fragmented role, given
its growing importance in the world. In our press, coverage of Asia is a
strange jumble of alarums, fears, and trends: the North Korean bomb, avian
flu and SARS, the tsunami, the Taiwan "war bill," the growth of the Chinese
Navy, anime (and remilitarization) in Japan, the U.S. military in Indonesia,
the possibility that the central banks of East Asia may dump dollars for
euros triggering an economic cataclysm, and the normal run of monks,
exotica, and strange customs -- all adding up to conceptual chaos. Seldom do
you find a piece that tries to put East Asia together, laying out for us, in
particular, the explosive nature of the U.S./Japan/China triangular
relationship, which in various combinations has in the past plunged us into
bloody war .

Below, Chalmers Johnson does just that and in monumental fashion. It's rare
for us to take time out of busy lives to consider how exactly the dots might
be connected, how the world actually works. I urge all of you to consider
doing so in the case of Johnson's long essay. It will repay your time many
times over. And while you're at it, any of you who haven't laid your hands
on the first two volumes of Johnson's Blowback Trilogy on imperial America
and the loss of our republic (the third of which is being written at this
moment) should do so immediately. Both 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 and are must reads: The
first was a prophetic account, published in 2000, that laid out the
background to the attacks of 9/11; the second focuses, as no one else has,
on the dramatic story of the endless growth of our military and its bases
abroad. Tom

    No Longer the "Lone" Superpower
    Coming to Terms with China
    By Chalmers Johnson

    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 Œno 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 ŒTaiwan 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 Œ04," 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 policyŠ 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
Œmultipolarity' in a post-Cold War world, i.e., the preference for many
different, competing power centers rather than the Œunipolarity' 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 for this Tomgram are available on
the web site of the Japan Policy Research Institute.

    Chalmers Johnson is president of the Japan Policy Research Institute.
The first two books in his Blowback Trilogy -- Blowback: The Costs and
Consequences of American Empire, and The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism,
Secrecy, and the End of the Republic -- are now available in paperback. The
third volume is being written.

    Copyright 2005 Chalmers Johnson

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