By Patricia H. Kushlis
In “Friend or foe? A special report on China’s place in the world” published on December 4, 2010, The Economist assesses the multitextured technicolored relationship that has developed over the past 15 years between the US and China. As part of that assessment The Economist’s writers characterize America’s two-track China policy as engagement on the one hand and deterrence on the other.
In essence, engagement “is designed to reward good behaviour and hedging to deter bad.” In practice, however, argues The Economist, “the hedge risks undermining the engagement” especially since the former is largely run by State Department China hands while the latter by the Pentagon and the two bureaucracies don’t necessarily see eye to eye - let alone talk to each other all that much.
Sadly, the fall-out from the Wikileaks fiasco likely increases the distance across the Potomac rather than lessens it.
To complicate the US-China situation further – although The Economist’s political economists do not so explicitly state – is the possibility that factions within the Chinese government and the ruling Communist Party are themselves not all on the same page regarding how best to pursue China’s interests abroad.
Civilian relationship better than the military one
Over the years, the US government’s relationship with China’s foreign policy civilian side has been far more durable than the military-to-military one which, let’s face it, is a sometime thing. The latter has been almost non-existent for over a year – at least until Secretary Gates’ appeared in Beijing last week – and there are a whole host of issues surrounding a heightened security climate from the South China Sea to North Korea and Japan that demand steady careful management, if, in fact, they can’t be resolved.
The State Department cables thus far released by Wikileaks and a follow-up interview by Guardian reporter Simon Tisdal with an unnamed Chinese diplomat in Europe suggest that Chinese Foreign Ministry representatives and at least one high level Communist party official have decided that propping up the North Korean regime indefinitely is not in China’s long term interest. As far as these civilian officials are concerned, a unified Korea under the South – as long as the transfer of power occurs peacefully and US troops stay below the DMZ would be an acceptable outcome to this six decade long, crisis-fraught dispute.
Multiple sources saying the same thing
This message is contained in not just one gossipy telegram reported from as far afield as the US Ambassador to Kazakhstan on June 8, 2009 following a boozy dinner with his Chinese counterpart in a rotating restaurant atop a newly built Chinese hotel in Astana, but in official US Embassy dispatches from Seoul and Beijing as well. The multiplicity of official sources bearing the same message in and of themselves suggests to me that Washington should be taking it seriously.
Does this mean that all parts of the Chinese government – including the military and the security apparatus – are in accord with their colleagues’ seeming willingness to throw in the towel in response to the largely juvenile neighborhood bullying behavior emanating from China’s northeast client state? Likely not yet. But perhaps if relations were better between the US military and the PLA we might have at least gotten a better fix on China’s overall intentions.
After all, it’s the Pentagon – not the State Department – that has traditionally hemorrhaged information in the past and I don’t mean just what happened with the dump of over 251,000 State Department cables that found their way into Julian Assange’s hands or the 1,300 or so that have appeared thus far on the Wikileaks website. And it has been recent actions by the Chinese military that are causing many of its neighbors to wonder exactly what China’s intentions are.
The South China Sea: the enemy of my enemy is my friend
Earlier this year the flashpoint seemed to center on the South China Sea where the Chinese had begun to encroach on long disputed, essentially uninhabitable islands off the coast of Vietnam. These two island chains known as the Paracels and the Spratlys consist of unresolved claims on the parts of neighboring countries: China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei and Malaysia. The reason the islands have been in contention for ages is not because of the value of their rocky protrusions above the water but because of the rich sea beds underneath.
The Vietnamese were distressed enough about Chinese actions in the South China Sea that they raised the issue at ASEAN last summer to which they reportedly received a haughty brush-off from Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi. They also shared their disquiet with Hillary Clinton who – in a change of long standing US strict hands off neutrality – offered to provide mediation, if asked.
Meanwhile the Vietnamese and US militaries took the first tentative steps towards developing a cooperative relationship and the US Seventh Fleet sent a hospital ship to visit Danang and environs on a good will mission in the fall. The US primary objective is in keeping the vital shipping lanes open – and they include ones that transverse the South China Sea.
The Yogi and the Chrysanthemum
Both India and Japan have drawn closer to the US Seventh Fleet’s security umbrella in a classic balance of power game presumably operating under the assumption that it’s safer to have a closer relationship with a more distant great power than an ascendant one nearby. This, along the lines of the Russian saying “God bless the Czar but keep him far away from us.”
Relations between China and neighbors Japan and India are touchy and both concern Chinese military behavior over contested territories, but the thorniest neighborhood spat is on the Korean Peninsula where a state of war technically continues to exist. It turned hot earlier this month for a brief time when North Korean artillery shelling left South Korean houses in ruins, people’s lives destroyed and South Korea with a refugee crisis on its hands.
But what comes between a peaceful resolution of the two Koreas as intimated by certain Chinese officials to several US government counterparts and the increasingly volatile situation that exists now? Will China continue to prop up a military dictatorship likelyto be “led” by Kim Jong-il, the youngest son of a family dynasty that presides over a nuclear armed dirt-poor country under the patina of Communist ideology?
Getting from here to there is the question
If China’s immediate goals towards the Korean Peninsula are to maintain stability, a “benign economic environment, and if possible, a peaceful dialogue - not withstanding its openness in the longer term to the idea of reconciliation and reunification” as The Economist states then how long will China be willing to do nothing that could force North Korea into a corner and increase the possibility that it might lash out unpredictably?”
Is a starving population ruled by a nuclear weaponized military state sitting on China’s border truly in the best interest of today’s China? The issue is not whether China can afford to prop up the North Korean regime including deliverance of substantial humanitarian aid – but when and how China will sever the political umbilical cord that has bound the two countries together since the start of the Korean War and work with the US, the South Koreans, the Japanese and other interested parties to help bring about a fundamental political shift that would substantially alter the Pacific Rim’s geopolitical landscape – and more than likely in China’s favor – if it plays its cards right. How to get there from here is the question. China, more than any other country, holds that key.