With China’s increasing military buildup, there is a growing concern about its strategic goals in the Asia-Pacific region and elsewhere in the world.
The obvious questions are: Does it want to dominate the region? If not (as claimed by Beijing), why is it acting so rough and tough with its neighbors over contested sovereignty and ownership of South China Sea islands and their natural resources?
If it continues on a course of bullying its neighbors, this could unleash a regional arms race. Which, in turn, would create regional instability and hinder Asia’s economic prosperity, of which China has been a major beneficiary.
Making these points in his keynote address at a recent Asian security conference in Singapore, the US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates reportedly said: “We should not forget that globalization has permitted our shared rise in wealth over recent years.”
He added, “This achievement rests above all on openness: openness of trade, openness of ideas and openness of what I would call the ‘common areas’ — whether in the maritime, space or cyber domains,” apparently referring to China’s recent advances in these areas.
Beijing, however, doesn’t accept the US criticism. China’s position is that its increased military expenditure is defensive in nature, and any instability in the region is the result of the US seeking to expand military alliances and develop missile defense systems.
Lieutenant General Ma Xiaotian (馬曉天), deputy chief of the People’s Liberation Army, put it this way at the Singapore conference: “It is imperative that China’s armed forces keep up with this tide of world military development.”
Besides, Ma said, “China’s growing economy and fiscal revenue make the defense budget increase both a logical and imperative reality.”
In other words, with or without perceived US containment of China, its military buildup would rise as a corollary of China’s growing economic prosperity.
If, as Ma says, there is a logical correlation between China’s growing economy and increasing military expenditure, by that logic China’s determining, if not dominating, role in the region is also an “imperative reality.”
The question then is: How would this fit into an existing set of rules and norms (of openness all around), as suggested by Gates?
And as China goes about actively pursuing its policy of securing resources in Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and Latin America for its sustained economic growth, this is bound to put it into competition, if not confrontation, with the existing stakeholders of the international system, like the US and the West in general.
But there is a view in the US that China, which has so far benefitted economically from the existing international order, can be persuaded to continue operating within the system indefinitely.
In a recent Foreign Affairs article, John Ikenberry argued that, “The United States cannot thwart China’s rise, but it can help ensure that China’s power is exercised within the rules and institutions that the United States and its partners have crafted over the last century.”
This should be possible, argues Ikenberry, because even if China were to overtake the US economically, it is “much less likely that China will ever manage to overtake the Western order.”
And it will have to reckon with it.
And this should ensure for the US and its Western allies a powerful, if not the most powerful, role in the international order crafted by them over the last century.
There is one catch, though, in this neat scenario — an assumption that the West will operate as a monolith when dealing with China. Which might not necessarily be the case, with Beijing’s growing clout allowing it to play favorites to undermine the Western bloc.
This seems to be the thrust of US policy toward China, as reflected in Gates urging Beijing to be transparent and open. And if it doesn’t, the ensuing regional instability would adversely affect its economic prosperity.
Beijing is obviously expected to take heed of likely adverse economic consequences from not operating within a Western-designed system.
It is clear that neither China nor the US is keen on military confrontation. China is keen to build on its economic growth and political and military power. Any military confrontation in the short term will impede, if not reverse, this process, thus creating obstacles on its way to become a superpower.
In the case of the US, it is sufficiently over-stretched in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere to want to avoid undertaking further military activity to complicate its situation. This has given China considerable leeway to expand its political influence in the region.
But despite all its problems, the US still remains the only superpower with economic, political and military preponderance. China, though, is working fast to catch up. And when it does, it might find the existing Western-crafted international order rather constricting and constraining for its expanding economic, political and military goals.
As John Mearsheimer observes: “If China continues its impressive economic growth over the next few decades, the United States and China are likely to engage in an intense security competition with considerable potential for war.”
In the short term, though, China is keen to amass a panoply of military hardware to deter the US from risking a military confrontation with Beijing by making it potentially costly. This applies especially to Taiwan.
Gone are the days when by moving two aircraft carriers into the region during the 1996 Taiwan Strait crisis, the US was able to deter China from a risky military adventure against Taiwan.
Although the Taiwan situation is apparently calm now with the new political order in Taipei, it is far from resolved.
China’s military buildup, with a growing fleet of submarines, missiles of varying range, attack aircraft and other long-range weaponry, certainly has a medium and long-term strategy to not only project power but also to assert it.
One example of this was the sudden appearance of a Chinese submarine close to the US aircraft carrier, Kitty Hawk, near Okinawa in 2006.
Aware that it will take China quite some time to reach military parity with the US, Beijing has been simultaneously working on building up its expertise and capabilities in asymmetrical warfare, like disabling (if necessary) the US’ satellites and computer networks — now an integral part of its command, control and communications system.
It is fervently hoped that China can make a peaceful transition to great power status. But it hasn’t happened before with other powers — like Germany and Japan — judging by the two world wars. Will China be different? Only time will tell.
Sushil Seth is a writer based in Australia.
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