Thinking about China and War

Aerospace Power Journal, Winter, 2001 by Jeffrey Dr. Record

Editorial Abstract: The current focus on international terrorism does not mean that China has gone away. This thought-provoking piece by Dr. Record not only reminds us that China remains an area of potential future conflict but also uses the perspective of past conflict to paint a picture of what a future war with China might look like. China leaders aren't as naive as Saddam Hussein in their appreciation of America 's high-tech capabilities.

CHINA'S XENOPHOBIC AND increasingly strident nationalism reinforces the argument that it is destined to become America's next great strategic rival and, therefore, that the United States should begin to think seriously about the possibility of war with that country. (1) The combination of continued autocracy in Beijing, China's militant assertiveness across the Taiwan Strait and in the South China Sea, and the growing influence of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) "in the development of China's national identity and security policy" all point to a determination to displace American power in East Asia and the Western Pacific. (2)

The new Bush administration is certainly prepared to take a harder line than its predecessor on the noneconomic dimensions of the Sino-American relationship, including Beijing's myriad human-rights abuses and military bullying of its neighbors. The administration has rejected the illusion of strategic partnership with China, has been explicit on US protection of Taiwan against an attack from the mainland, and is openly reorienting America's primary strategic focus from Europe to Asia. It is, in short, moving to contain China even while it embraces expanded trade with that country. indeed, for the Bush administration, trade serves as a means of containment; trade promotes economic democratization, which, in turn--or so it is believed--will undermine the very autocracy that has embraced extreme nationalism as a legitimizing substitute for failed communist ideology. The Bush administration sees eye to eye with its predecessor on the attractiveness of attempting to subvert China politically via trade-assisted eco nomic democratization.

A policy of containing Communist Chinese expansionism is hardly new. It began in 1950, when the Truman administration ordered the interposition of the Seventh Fleet between the mainland and what was then known as Formosa as a means of preventing Mao Zedong's takeover of that island. The administration subsequently fought Chinese forces to a standstill in Korea. Containment continued during the 1960s, when the Kennedy and Johnson administrations escalated US military intervention against the advance of Vietnamese communism, which they believed was a stalking-horse for Chinese imperialism in Southeast Asia. Even during the era of Sino-American tacit strategic alignment against the Soviet Union in the 1970s and early 1980s, the United States insisted on a nonviolent resolution of Taiwan's relationship with the mainland.

But the China that the United States sought to contain during the Cold War was poor and preindustrial and, under Mao Ze-dong, periodically plunged into domestic political upheaval. For Mao, political purification was always more important than wealth creation, and his notions of industrialization were idiotic. Accordingly, the Chinese economy remained a shambles until the late 1980s. Moreover, for most of the Cold War's last two decades, China's military posture was defensive and focused northward on the Soviet Union.

Although the emergence of China as a qualified strategic rival is far from inevitable, it is time to think about a future war with China. Beijing's core political values are hostile to everything America stands for; China is territorially unsatisfied; its military potential is impressive if only slowly mobilizable; and Sino-American flash points are present in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea. Moreover, history teaches that the relative power and influence the United States enjoys around the world today will inevitably decline at some point. That point may be 50 or even 200 years away, but it will come--because no great power remains so forever.

The history of both China and the international political system as a whole also suggests that an emergent Chinese hegemon is unlikely to be a cooperative state willing to accept a continued American-dominated international order. (3) For most of its long history, the Middle Kingdom was the dominant power in its world; only recently, beginning with the Opium Wars of the midnineteenth century, did China fall victim to over a century of Western and, later, Japanese intrusion and humiliation. China, notes Henry Kissinger, "has rarely had the experience of dealing with other societies on the basis of equality." (4) Even unburdened of its profound sense of victimization by the West, China as a rising power is likely to insist on an international order that reflects its power growth relative to that of the United States.

Precautionary thinking about a war with China must address at least four issues: the economic, political, military, and foreign-policy ingredients of China as a qualified strategic rival; the likely causes of a Sino-American war; the strengths and weaknesses each side would bring to the conflict; and the likely scope of combat. Thinking about a war with China also profits from an examination of the Korean War--the one and only Sino-American war to date and a marathon of mutual incomprehension and miscalculation.