The threat that blows from China - China as economic and military threat

National Review, March 20, 2000 by Mark Helprin

China calls each new edition of its most potent intercontinental ballistic missile East Wind. This lovely and suggestive name begs an assessment of China's capabilities and intentions, because it appears to contradict what China tells us of itself and what is most reassuring for us to believe.

By geography, history, and tradition, China has been remarkably self- contained. It seems to have an artificial horizon that allows it to be content within its own sphere and to internalize its upheavals rather than export them. It rejects what it calls "power politics," and shuns alliances. Of the almost 2.5 million soldiers of the world's largest army, it has detailed only 32 for international peacekeeping duties, fewer than provided by Estonia. After going to war in Korea, India, and Vietnam, it simply withdrew, as if it found existence beyond its borders painful.

The historical pattern of Chinese stasis and Confucian self-restraint is repeatedly cited by China as evidence that its foreign policy is neither interventionist nor expansionary. But as China's thinly veiled nuclear threat against the United States shows-as do its wars or objectives in Korea, Vietnam, Tibet, Taiwan, the Senkaku Islands, the Spratlys and Paracels, India, Laos, Burma, Kashmir, on the Amur, and in various Third World clients-even if this is mainly true, it is not entirely true. And even if it is mainly true, China may yet depart from its traditional course.

PATTERNS THROUGH TIME

Certainly historical precedent is not without examples for it to emulate. In the seventh and eighth centuries a.d., the Tang Dynasty expanded northward and westward almost to the Aral Sea, 1,000 miles beyond China's present borders. When the Mongols intermixed with and ruled the Chinese as the Yuan Dynasty, Peking was the seat of an empire that stretched from the Pacific to the Danube, from the Amur to the Euphrates, from Moscow to the Arabian Sea. This very same dynasty also controlled Korea and Vietnam, and sent two naval expeditions to conquer Japan. The borders against which China has in recent times pressed with unmistakable ardor, during a period of weakness, are the gateways to those regions over which, during a period of strength, the Yuan Dynasty once ruled.

The striking precedent of the Yuan Dynasty may be weakened by its Mongol origin and its remoteness in time, but it is a leading example of a nation in ascension. Greeks, Romans, Muslims, Mongols, Russians, British, and numerous others have possessed what the Arabic historian Ibn Khaldun called 'asabiya, a sense of group solidarity, unity of purpose, and esprit de corps: in short, the momentum of destiny, when a whole people comes alight with success. China is reaching for this.

And ours is the perfect era for it to abandon its predilection for looking inward, in that science, technology, and trade-the international currencies of power-will inevitably pull from isolation even those countries that are most deeply entrenched. China has modeled itself, either consciously or by extraordinary and meaningful coincidence, on Japan, another isolated, inward-looking Asian country that, shocked and humiliated by the West, programmatically set out to appropriate the skills of those who had bested it, and succeeded. British and American bombardment impelled the Japanese to tame their warlords, do away with feudalism, restore central power, and begin to study the ways of the West with a vengeance. China-not long ago just as feudal, divided, conquered, and backward-has done exactly this. After the restoration of the Meiji emperor in 1868, the Japanese sought national unity, industrialization, and military strength, recognizing that they would proceed in that order. Their slogan was fukoku kyohei, "rich country, strong arms." Predominantly agricultural Japan was able after only a third of a century to marshal warships, built in European yards, to defeat a second-class European power (Russia), and then after another third of a century to come close to defeating the world's leading naval power (this time with a battle fleet built in Japanese yards), because, to quote the cardinal sentence in G. B. Sansom's The Western World and Japan, "The greater part of her early industrial effort was put into production of goods of direct or indirect strategic importance." Japanese students, officials, and businessmen methodically collected information in the West or from Westerners in Japan, and, although the Japanese imitated every aspect of Western culture, their characteristically disciplined focus was on industry and the military. For China, the stress of occupation and war continued on during the catastrophic Great Leap Forward, the Sino-Soviet split, and the Cultural Revolution. Only in the Seventies did the sky clear enough for it to envision and begin military-industrial modernization, encouraged by its assessment that war was not imminent with either the Soviet Union or the United States, and that China would therefore be allowed a long strategic pause in which to prepare. In 1978, during the Third Plenum of the 11th Party Congress, Deng Xiaoping consolidated his authority and established what came to be known as the 16-Character Policy: "Combine the military and the civil; combine peace and war; give priority to military products; let the civil support the military." Like the Meiji fukoku kyohei, this represents a profound understanding of the relation of military to economic power.