|
| |
China: A Potential Rival of US Dominance in Asia?
From: Columbia University
| By:
Andrew J. Nathan |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
"Asia is under a Pax Americana," says Andrew J. Nathan (right), professor of political science at Columbia University and one of America's leading scholars of Chinese politics. But China, a rising military power, plays a critical role in the stability of the region.
In this interview with Fathom, Nathan explores the China factor in the delicate balance of regional security in Asia, and explains why the rise of China is the biggest issue for American foreign policy in the next 20 years. |
Fathom: You have said that the rise of China is the biggest issue for American foreign policy in the next 10 to 20 years. Why? |
 | |
| Andrew Nathan expalins why the rise of China is the biggest issue for American foreign policy in the twenty-first century. | |
Andrew J. Nathan: There are several layers to that question. One layer is that, simply because China is so huge, because of its impact on many issues--let's say global environment, arms proliferation, movement of people, illegal immigration of people into the United States, the drug trade and so forth--you can't solve any global issue if you don't include China in the solution. |
A second level is that of course the whole Asian region is extremely important to the United States, economically and strategically. And it's a region with a less settled security architecture than, for example, Europe, where you have NATO although you certainly have the remnant problem of Yugoslavia. But, as people have been saying, once the former Yugoslavia is settled, all of Europe will be essentially stable. At least, that's the hope. Whereas in Asia, the regional architecture is evolving, and you have the Korean issue, the Taiwan issue, the issue of Burma, the issue of Cambodia--a lot of unstable elements. And again China is located right there, on the continent of Asia. The Chinese are involved in each of these sub-issues, and you can't solve any one without them. |
Fathom: Does China view the United States as a rival in Asia in terms of the power to influence what goes on politically and militarily? Is China even in a position of being a potential rival of the United States? |
Nathan: There's been a long-standing debate in China about how to regard the United States. The fact is--the Chinese know this and we know this--that Asia is under a Pax Americana. The Americans are dominant in Asia. We have an alliance treaty with Japan and an alliance treaty with South Korea, and we have troops stationed in both those countries. We have a relationship with Taiwan that's hard to describe in a single word, but it's somewhat like a defense commitment to Taiwan. Our Seventh Fleet sails the South China Sea and all the ASEAN (i.e., Southeast Asian) countries show great deference to the United States. |
The US is a big player in Central Asia. Nobody really controls Central Asia, but the US is in Central Asia, the US is in Mongolia, and the US is very influential over the Russians. The US is the major power that the North Koreans want to talk to. So, everywhere you look, as a Chinese, you see the power of the United States. |
Then the question is, is that good or bad for China? One school of thought in China says we can live with the Americans. We have no big conflict of interest with the Americans. If the Americans will let us live, we can live with them. We don't have to be against their power. And even that American power has certain benefits to Chinese interests, because it is a stabilizing force in the region, it keeps the Japanese satisfied, it keeps the Korean peninsula stable, and so forth and so on. |
The other view in China, though, says that we can never really be safe in our own neighborhood when there's somebody else who's dominant, and when that somebody else is a country that doesn't understand us, like the United States. And the Americans are funny, because it seems, from time to time, they're swept with these fevers of anti-China feeling. And the Chinese find that sort of scary and unpredictable. |
Ever since Nixon went to China, the American strategic elites have told the Chinese strategic elites, "We value you as a partner, we understand what you're doing there, we want to cooperate." But every so often the Congress, the mayor of New York City, the American press, the whoever it is, gets all up in arms about this, that or the other thing about China, and the Chinese say, "We don't know where the Americans are really going in the long run"--particularly when you have something like the debate over missile defense that we've been having in the United States. To the Chinese point of view, it's very clear that missile defense is threatening to Chinese interests, and that if the Americans are serious about respecting Chinese security, the Americans should not adopt missile defense. |
But the American body politic doesn't pay much attention to those Chinese views. So the Chinese consider us to be unpredictable. I always like to tell my class that the Chinese consider the Americans to be inscrutable, because Americans used to say Orientals are inscrutable. The Orientals are not so inscrutable. The Chinese policy is pretty clear. It's the Americans who are inscrutable. |
Fathom: Can you explain why missile defense is threatening to Chinese interests? |
Nathan: There are two levels. If the US were able to build a successful national missile defense, it would mean that no other country--China or Russia--could use its missile force to deter the United States from using its missile force against them. |
Let's say there was a war over Taiwan and the Americans wanted to fire missiles at China. I don't think this would happen, but this is the kind of thing that defense planners worry about. It's only by virtue of the Chinese being able to fire back missiles at us that we are supposedly deterred from doing it to them. That's the theory of deterrence, which worked all through the Cold War to prevent a missile war between the US and Russia. |
So national missile defense destroys deterrence and hence opens up the ability for the possessing power, the United States, to unilaterally hit the other guys with missiles or actually with anything at all. You can hit him with it and he can't fire back a missile. That's the national missile defense, the so-called NMD. |
But TMD, theater missile defense, which is a missile defense over a particular military theater, has another problem from the Chinese point of view, which is that it could be used to protect Taiwan, and to prevent the Chinese from threatening Taiwan with missiles. |
At both levels this technology is detrimental to the security of China as China sees it. And they would like to see some signal that in Washington people know that and understand that message. But, for the Chinese, it's like you're just yelling into a hole. The Chinese keep pointing this out and nobody seems to be listening to them. |
Fathom: Is it true that in fact the Americans are using missile defense to send a signal to the Chinese? |
Nathan: Yes. Some Americans--for example, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright--will always tell the Chinese, "Don't worry, it's not about you," which is supposed to calm them down. But at the same time you can open up the paper to the op-ed page, where some strategic thinker will write an article and say, "Just by building this thing, we're going to send a lesson to the Chinese. Just by considering it we're sending a lesson to the Chinese." So whom should the Chinese believe? Now, this has to do with deciphering American politics. What does it mean if some strategic expert says this on the op-ed page? Albright won't be secretary of state for much longer. |
Fathom: It sounds like regional stability hinges a great deal on the common interests between China and the US, the US being the dominant power in the region. What are those common interests? |
Nathan: The US-China fabric of relationships is a mix of common and competing or conflicting interests, which are hard to describe without bringing into it some kind of rhetoric that biases the issue. |
For example, if I said to you that the two countries have a common interest in the stability of Asia, the Chinese will agree. But the trouble is that there are so many different ways of thinking about what the stability of Asia might be, and that's where the conflicts come in. I just gave an example of American troops in the entire Korean peninsula. Very stabilizing, but not in the interests of China. |
What about the US-Japan relationship? Is that in the interests of China or not? A very good argument can be made that the US defense relationship with Japan which involves a heavy American influence on Japan and troops in Japan and all that is in the interests of China, because it makes it impossible for a Sino-Japanese arms race, a Sino-Japanese conflict to occur. But another way to look at it is to say that it's not in the interests of China because it just magnifies American power. |
Is it in the interests of China for the United States to be the dominant power in the Middle East and for the United States to, as we said, push Saddam back into his box and so forth, and all those things that we do in the Middle East? An argument can be made that that's in the interests of China, because it stabilizes oil supply to China as well as to the countries which constitute the markets of China, that is to say, the US, Europe, Japan. But you can also say that's not in the interests of China, because it gives the US too much dominance over the whole trend of world affairs. And as US policy increases, China can't get Taiwan back, China keeps getting attacked on human-rights issues, China has to join the World Trade Organization on American terms. |
There are a lot of ways in which American power is good for China, but also a lot of ways in which it isn't. So the common interests have this generality about them. We have a common interest in the peace of the world, common interest in environmental health of the globe and all these big common interests. But when you come down to who's going to pay the cost, who's going to call the tune on this common interest, it starts to break apart. This is a familiar experience, I think, with a lot of our daily dealings, where we have a common interest in reaching an agreement--we want to buy a house, we want to buy a car. We have a common interest with the car salesman in our getting that car. But the devil lies in the distribution of the benefit. |
I'm painting a stable strategic environment which depends now on maintaining a delicate and somewhat fragile pattern of American dominance, Japanese alliance with the United States, Chinese tolerance of the American presence and so forth. |
Fathom: When you look 20 years into the future, what would Asia be like as a region, in terms of stability? And what would the roles of China and the US be in maintaining this stability? |
Nathan: When one looks 20 years down the road, in terms of statesmanship, we're not talking about the US and China meeting each other halfway. We're really talking about bringing the Chinese into the system that the Americans have constructed and hoping that the Chinese will learn to feel to be comfortable in that system. |
But let me introduce the other variable, which is domestic political evolution of China. That will have a big influence on the question that you just asked. And this is a real tough one to talk about, because the future is unknown to us and there are so many possible scenarios there. |
But if we try to simplify the scenarios down to two or three, the status quo would be one scenario, but that is hard to imagine in a country like China, which has had so much turbulence and where the stresses and strains are so huge now. It's hard to imagine that their domestic politics in 20 years will be a status quo. |
But if it were a status quo, that means it's a nationalist regime which feels vulnerable, which accepts partnership with the outside world only to the minimal degree that it needs that for self-strengthening, but whose image of the future is one of self-sufficient power. And that would mean that 20 years from now China will be more powerful and self-sufficient than it is, and its cooperation with the West will be extremely contingent on its view that this serves its own interest. So it wouldn't really be a partner. It would be more like a rival. |
Then you have a scenario of political tragedy of one form or another--retrogression, dictatorship, tightening up, bad guys in power--which would intensify what I just said. |
And then the other scenario, which I think is what most people expect, is some kind of democratization of China, the collapse of Communism, and China adopting an ideology that is a sort of democratic liberal free market ideology. I think that if you asked China specialists in the US and even people in China who study the direction of things in China, this is what everybody expects and, oddly enough, what everybody has been expecting for about 20 years--and it still hasn't happened, which really gives you pause. How good are our predictions? Nonetheless, this continues to be what we're looking at. |
That scenario has many sub-scenarios, like chaotic transition, but let's hope it is a relatively stable transition to a liberal democratic system. Then what you're hoping for is that the Chinese, at the deeper level of culture or ideology, will begin to feel more integrated into the same global system which, as I've already admitted, we're thinking of as the American system, because that does seem to be the dominant system, and that they would identify with global norms of human rights, humanitarian intervention, the International Criminal Court. |
For example, what NATO has done to Milosevic--which the Chinese don't like right now, don't consider in their interests--in this future that I'm portraying, the Chinese, like much of the rest of the world, would consider this legitimate and necessary. So then you'd have what you're describing as a partnership, in which the Chinese and the Americans and others allied with the Americans wouldn't just be reaching a piece by piece agreement on specific things but would be pursuing much more of a common vision of what kind of international order they want. |
I think that's quite possible and it's certainly worth hoping for, because it would be a nice future. |
|
| |
