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Business Times - 27 Oct 2006
Washington's wrong bogeyman and wrong issues
By LEON HADAR
WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT
CHINA bashing has become a common pursuit in Washington these days with members of the political right warning that Beijing is becoming America's most threatening geo-strategic rival while those on the political left are arguing the Chinese have been transformed into a major geo-economic peril.
Hence while conservatives - neo or otherwise - are proposing that the United States prepare itself for a cold - or even a hot war with China, liberals are calling for 'protecting' the US economy from Chinese products and investment.
But even those Americans who are urging US diplomatic and business engagement with China have yet to come up with a coherent strategy to advance their agenda, which explains why the China Bashers have succeeded in dominating the debate on the Sino-American relationship while the China Engagers find themselves frequently on the defensive. Indeed, at a time when the consensus among members of the US foreign policy establishment is that American long-term interests lie in enforcing global military and ideological dominance, it is not surprising perhaps that many Americans should view China with apprehension.
'With China returning to wealth and power, it does seem to be the only country that might have the ability, should it choose to do so, to dislodge us from our position as the greatest military and economic power,' explains former US diplomat Chas Freeman, who was the principal American interpreter during President Richard Nixon's historic 1972 visit to China and is currently the co-chair of the United States China Policy Foundation.
'The Chinese are thus our preferred cure for 'enemy deprivation syndrome', the sickening feeling of disorientation we experienced when our longstanding enemy irresponsibly dropped dead,' argues Freeman, who had served, among other things, as charge/deputy chief of mission at US embassies in Beijing and Bangkok; director, Chinese affairs, at the Department of State; and assistant secretary of defence for international security affairs.
Freeman, who spoke recently in Washington in a seminar organised by the Committee for the Republic, a foreign policy analysis group, is very concerned that more and more of his colleagues in Washington are seeing the Sino-American relationship as a zero-sum game, and believe that, like in the case of other troublesome foreigners, the only approach that would work with China is coercion: sanctions, followed up, when these fail - as they invariably do - by military assault.
He points to the recent proposal in the Senate to impose a contemporary version of the Smoot-Hawley tariff on China. Or as Freeman puts it: 'The signal, filtered through the roughly 2 per cent of our GDP accounted for by turnover at Wal-Mart, is: 'Surrender - or we'll blow your brains out!' ' And since US warplanes and nuclear submarines, though conceived for use against a different enemy in a completely different geopolitical and military context, obviously need new targets, where are such targets to be found, if not in China?
Facile judgments
'Threat analysis is the highest form of budget justification and China, faute de mieux (for want of something better), is the justification du jour,' according to Freeman. 'We have clearly arrived at a national consensus that the main challenges we face from China are bilateral and either employment-related or military in nature - or both.'
Freeman has been spending much of his time questioning these judgments which he considers to be 'too facile'. First, contrary to the narrative promoted by the protectionists on the political left, declining employment in manufacturing in the US - however potent a tool of demagoguery it may furnish - is not, as is widely believed, a case of China gaining jobs at US expense.
The fact is that China is also losing manufacturing jobs, and it's losing them both faster and on a much larger scale than the US economy, Freeman points out; between 1995 and 2002, for example, 2 million factory jobs disappeared in the US, while China lost 15 million.
Moreover, the losses in both countries have been in the very same industrial sectors. Over that period, for example, America lost 202,000 textile jobs; China lost 1.8 million. What is happening is that technology and capital are everywhere rapidly replacing labour in manufacturing, just as technology and capital earlier replaced labour in agriculture.
In 1980, about 20 per cent of the American workforce was in manufacturing; today, the figure is less than 10 per cent but US industrial production has more than doubled. 'Productivity gains, not foreign workers, are what is causing increasing numbers of Americans to leave the factory floor, much as their grandparents left the farm,' Freeman explains. 'Cluelessly blaming this on the Chinese may be a good political tactic, but it is not a strategy to cope with our problems.'
At the same time, while one can understand the utility of inventing bogeymen to justify continuing investments in advanced weaponry and tactics, China is simply not up to the role of peer competitor that officials and analysts in Washington have assigned to it, 'even if it were interested in such a role - which it shows no sign of being', Freeman insists, adding: 'We need to keep China's large but relatively backward and defensively deployed military in perspective.'
Even if one agrees with the US government estimate that China is spending twice as much as its stated defence budget on its military - US$70 billion, or around 2.8 per cent of its GDP - one should also note that in the past fiscal year, the US defence budget was about US$441.5 billion and 3.7 per cent of GDP, which doesn't include about US$120 billion in combat operations in Afghanistan and Iran, which are provided outside the budget through 'supplementals'; the benefits for veterans, another US$70 billion or so; nuclear weapons, which are in the Department of Energy budget; the Coast Guard and other homeland security programmes; and the various military-related programmes in space.
'US military spending now is not - as our media commonly states - US$441.5 billion but more like US$750 billion, which is about 6.2 per cent of GDP, not the published 3.7 per cent,' Freeman explains, concluding that US military spending has been rising as a percentage of its national budget, and this has been happening 'despite the fact that, by startling contrast with China, we have no great powers or traditional enemies on our borders, no territories in dispute with foreign powers, and no enemy fleets or air forces probing our defences'.
As Freeman sees it: 'China hasn't designated us as its enemy and, in most respects, doesn't behave as if we were.' But branding China an enemy could prove to be a case of self-fulfilling paranoia, Freeman warns. And if that happens, 'much as some in our military-industrial complex would like to fight the Cold War all over again, we aren't going to get to do this if we make an enemy of China', since the 'Chinese would be a vastly more formidable peer competitor than the late, unlamented USSR'. War with China would likely be hot, rather than cold, and it could involve many battles and last a very long time.
Freeman, who travels to China and Taiwan quite frequently, believes that the one real casus belli between the US and China - the Taiwan issue - has been managed peacefully by the two governments and publics, including through establishment of party-to-party ties between Taiwan's major opposition parties and the Chinese Communist Party, and their joint inauguration of a partial cross-Strait political entente that has reversed the trend towards war in the Taiwan Strait.
'Cross-Strait interaction is replacing Taiwan separatism with a process of political integration that parallels the economic integration and cultural rapprochement that have been under way for more than a decade,' according to Freeman.
Meanwhile, Taiwan's political establishment has rejected massive purchases of US weapons on three occasions, after concluding that they could not win an arms race with 1.3 billion Chinese across the Strait. The leadership in Beijing, for its part, now sees peaceful reunification as the likely result of trends that are increasingly well established.
'Renewed confidence that time is on the side of reunification has enabled China to resume its default position, which - as demonstrated in its approach to the peaceful recovery of Hong Kong and Macau - is to be patient and forbearing,' Freeman says.
From that perspective, American concerns about Chinese aggressiveness in the Taiwan Strait seem 'increasingly delusional', he argues. Freeman maintains that instead of worrying about bilateral challenges from China, Americans should pay more attention to the challenge that the Chinese are presenting to US global economic, scientific and technological leadership.
More specifically, a very different world monetary system is emerging in which Europe and China are bound to play roles commensurate with their economic clout and in which Americans no longer enjoy the privileges of economic dominance but must share financial power with others.
Challenge to US dominance
Moreover, China's drive to excel in science and technology (S&T), and become an innovation leader poses a serious challenge to US dominance in S&T.
And the third challenge to US supremacy is in the realm of global political leadership. 'Alarming numbers of foreigners now hate our country, not because they have ceased to admire our traditional values but because they believe we are repudiating them or at least failing to honour them,' Freeman notes.
'With a few important exceptions - like our own country and Germany - China has everywhere displaced the United States as the country that people most admire.'
Ironically, in the face of Washington's international conduct, China has now emerged as a stalwart defender of the international order.
'As China's global influence continues to grow, I wouldn't bet on Washington's current radicalism prevailing over Beijing's conservatism,' Freeman concludes.
'The east wind may indeed prevail over the west, not in a sudden squall of revolution but as a steady breeze forcing a return to norms of international law and comity we once championed but now repudiate.'
Copyright © 2005 Singapore Press Holdings Ltd. All rights reserved.