China and the West By Iqbal Masud DAWN Today
Excerpt:
There is a growing consensus in America in which China replaces the Soviet Union as their main enemy. Mr. Segal
regards China merely a regional threat to Western interests. He regards it ludicrous to say that China matters because the West needs it as a strategic partner.
KARACHI:After 2000 years of exchange between the Chinese and the West - commerce,
diaspora, diplomacy and war - the most sophisticated Westerners to this day find it hard not
to look at China without a large degree of fear and fantasy, complaining of its ambivalence to
foreigners, taking small parts of China for the whole and treating the entire nation as a place
apart that runs to its own rules and remains strangely impervious to change. As a rule, foreign
China-watchers have usually tried to fit the country into their own prevailing intellectual
interests. A constant, specially in Westerners' attitudes, is an abiding belief in China's hostility
to outsiders and resistance to change.
Most significant and worrying is the deterioration in Sino-American relations which are under
the greatest strain since diplomatic contact was re-established in 1971. The persistent denial
of China's legitimate right to World Trade Organization membership, human rights
accusations and charges of espionage are regarded by China as symptoms of America's
unwillingness to allow China to play a role on the world stage. There is a growing consensus
in America in which China replaces the Soviet Union as their main enemy.Some are fatalistic
about this drift toward confrontation which may lead even to military conflict.
China might have been static and isolationist in the past for justifiable historic reasons:
doubting, mistrusting and fearing foreigners who came flooding China with opium, followed
by gunboats and humiliation and collapse of the imperial system. But what about China today
with clear signs of openness and normality? Is it not a stirring giant, a vast market, the 21st
century's new world power? Most people, even Westerners, think so.But not some Western
think tanks.
George Segal of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, for instance,
derides the idea that China is a great economic, geopolitical or military power. Writing in the
September/October issue of Foreign Affairs he says that China is at best a "second rank
middle power that has mastered the art of diplomatic theatre." Militarily China is a second
rate power for the simple reason that it is not capable of taking on the first rate power
America. While it can threaten the U.S. directly through its nuclear weapons and by stealing
U.S. secrets about missile guidance and nuclear war-heads a la Cox report, Mr. Segal
regards China merely a regional threat to Western interests. He regards it ludicrous to say
that China matters because the West needs it as a strategic partner.
Polemical verve aside, the real impulse behind this denigration of China's status as a world
power could be whistling in the dark, a defensive attitude born of paranoia about its growing
economic and military power. Why this paranoia and what is the case against China of those
who suffer from it?
First dogma, that inveterate enemy of all rational thinking: that China, the old communist
bugbear, like the late Soviet Union, is ideologically hell-bent on regional, if not global
domination. Is that really so? The Chinese communist leadership makes no such claims.It
does not run any international network of communist parties or radical forces to undermine
Western positions. True, China is a one-party state with perhaps some repressive aspects still
continuing but even its worst critics cannot deny that there has been a vast improvement since
Mao and the Cultural Revolution. Unlike the Soviets even down to the 1970s, China never
proclaimed the goal of world-wide triumph of communism or claimed universal applicability
for its ideology. The Cultural Revolution was strictly a home-grown phenomenon with no
application outside China's borders. Pakistan, as China's only friend and ally in its dark night
of complete international isolation, should know. Pakistan-China relations were closest at the
height of the Cultural Revolution, including military help in Indo-Pakistan wars, and there was
not a suspicion of ideological activity from across our borders with China.
The second basis for the paranoiac thinking could be the proposition that China's military
buildup coupled with the growth of its economy challenges the U.S. position in Asia and
should be stifled before it takes on unmanageable proportions. As compared to the Soviet
Union with its 2500 strategic delivery vehicles, most with multiple warheads and many with
high accuracy, the Chinese strategic force consists of some 25 liquid-fuelled missiles with
single warheads requiring hours to get ready, making an attack on the United States neither
technically feasible nor strategically conceivable.
The Chinese ground forces are at a level of the technology of 1960s, capable of defending
the home country but not suitable for offensive operations against a major opponent. China's
military leaders would be much more concerned with defending their frontiers than with
expanding these militarily. That China's intentions are not any more ambitious than this is
borne out by Mr. Segal's own figures of China's defence spending being only 4.5% of global
defence spending as against the U.S. defence spending share of 33.9%.
Defending their frontiers, of course, includes Taiwan, which was part of China until 1895
when Japan annexed it. Although, since the Second World War, the U.S. has been affirming
Taiwan to be a part of China in one form or another, it has also been expressing its abiding
concern for a peaceful resolution of the issue, meaning opposition to the use of force by
China to bring about a reunion. Not only that, the U.S. also, while recognising Beijing as the
legitimate government of all of China, continued to supply, unlike most other countries, the
great bulk of weapons for Taiwan.
China, on the other hand, while insisting on ultimate unification, continues to defer a final
resolution in the interest of its relationship with other countries, specially the U.S. But it is very
clear that China cannot continue to do so indefinitely. As China develops its 'comprehensive
national strength', its military power will grow. And in spite of China's stake in its relationship
with the U.S., which has so far been the key constraint on its Taiwan policy, a time may
come when there is a military clash. This could be either the result of Taiwan's achieving
formal recognition by some future U.S. government of a separate status for itself or by China
itself coming to the conclusion that enough is enough.
As an economic power house with a huge market, home to a fifth of humanity, and an
economy that in a decade or so may outstrip even America's in sheer size, China is a global
factor which simply cannot be ignored.It is, therefore, amazing to read Mr. Segal say that in
truth China is a small market that matters relatively little to the world. In support he takes
recourse to the convenient aphorism about statistics and damn lies.
Chinese economic data, he says, are not to be trusted.China's economic growth figures of 7
to 8% a year, and in some years even higher, over the last decade, are dismissed airily.
Discount at least 2% as statistical exaggeration, subtract 2 or 3% as shoddy goods rusting in
warehouses that nobody wants to buy, 1% due to massive government spending on
infrastructure, 3% as a one-time gain on account of shifting of peasants off land to cities
where productivity is higher and you are left with the conclusion that the economy is hardly
growing at all. He also explains away the "so-called massive Foreign Direct Investment( FDI)
boom as evidence of how much China matters in global economy" by saying that in 1997, the
peak year for FDI, 80% of $45 billion inflow came from ethnic Chinese, mostly in East Asia
- as if FDI ceases to be FDI if it represents savings of a country's own overseas population.
The latest World Bank figures show China, with a population of 1.23 billion having the
seventh largest economy in the world with 1998 GNP of $ .92 trillion as compared to the
U.S., the largest economy, with a population of 270 million and 1998 GNP of $7.9trillion.
Annual rates of growth of the economy of China in the decades1980-90 and 1990-98 were
10.2 and 11.1 per cent respectively. China's merchandise imports in 1998 valued $140
billion, a market ranking number 11 in size in the world. The other population giant India, with
a population of just under one billion, GNP of $421 billion and a market size which is
supposed to make western mouths salivate, had merchandise imports in 1998 valuing only
$42.8 billion.
As for the inflow of FDI into China, it clearly has had its day.In 1979, with the launching of
market reforms, foreign companies were invited to invest. Lured by a soaring GDP, a market
of 1.2 billion people and the economy promising to become the world's biggest as early as
2020, huge amounts of investment began to arrive. The annual increase in FDI averaged 40%
over the 1990s and peaked in 1993 at an outstanding 175%. A total of more than $270
billion, half of all investment in the developing countries, has been invested in China by
thousands of firms since 1992. But the boom is over, at least for now.
After two decades of rapid economic growth, 1999 will be the first year in which total FDI
will fall. The decline, however, is no disaster for China. Its importance to the economy has
often been exaggerated. It has never amounted to more than 5% of China's GDP over the
past decade.To the extent China seeks FDI at all, it is as a source of technology, hard
currency and a way to channel the country's huge private savings into useful investments as a
temporary measure aimed at kick-starting its economy while domestic economic reforms
take effect.
The West must get over its paranoia. The U.S. and China must try to defuse the immediate
crisis and begin to place Sino-American relations on a solid basis. There are enough points of
congruence between the U.S. and China - proliferation, Asian economic progress, stability in
South Asia and Korea - to render a permanent geopolitical dialogue, even a 'strategic
partnership' between the U.S. and China indispensable, notwithstanding 'thinking' of people
like George Segal. |
