SoftPower, Hard Choices
China is emerging as a major economic power, but will that translate into a military threat? Taiwan will be the test
Peter Rogers / Getty Images
Flexing: With or without the EU ban, it's too late to keep China from modernizing its military
[My comment: That is because China can and will modernize its military defense on their own! Get over it.]
By Melinda Liu and John Barry
Newsweek
March 7 issue - Ask a party bureaucrat in Beijing about China's foreign ambitions these days, and the reply may sound like a beauty contestant's doe-eyed promise to work for world harmony. "Peaceful resolution of global problems is both our aim and our style," asserts one official involved in international affairs. China has no interest in becoming a military superpower, he insists. "A power, yes, but not a superpower," he says. "We don't want to be enemies with anyone."
Don't laugh. One of the hottest topics among foreign-policy specialists is China's rapidly growing "soft power." The term, coined 15 years ago by Harvard political scientist Joseph S. Nye Jr., refers to influence arising from attraction and persuasion rather than threats and force. Nye was talking about the global reach of American arts and ideas—and about the danger of overplaying U.S. weaponry while neglecting the country's cultural and intellectual clout. Back then, Beijing had scant international leverage aside from its nuclear arsenal and its huge but threadbare Army. Today China is an economic giant, reshaping the landscape of world trade. In February the Washington-based Earth Policy Institute announced that China has surpassed the United States as the world's biggest consumer of meat, grain, coal and steel.
Beijing's diplomats are tireless salesmen. While America's emissaries rail against tyranny and terror—and vow to spread democracy throughout the world—China's envoys aren't pushing any kind of ideology. And they're not squeamish about human rights; they've cut deals with Burma, Cuba, Sudan, just about anybody. The only thing Beijing asks for is new opportunities for Chinese entrepreneurs to trade and invest—and a promise that its foreign friends will support China's claims on the island of Taiwan. The Beijing official says: "We don't preach like the U.S. does."
Has prosperity tamed the People's Republic? The European Union seems to think so. Its members are eager to end the arms-sale ban they declared after the bloody 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. "A trade-driven soft power without a military threat" is how Europeans see China now, according to Willem van der Geest, head of the European Institute for Asian Studies in Brussels. But George W. Bush and his advisers aren't so sure. As he made the rounds in Europe last week, the American president voiced "deep concern" over the lifting of the embargo.
With or without the EU ban, it's far too late to keep China from modernizing its military. The Chinese have been using their new wealth for years to buy top-of-the-line weaponry from Russia and Israel. Neither country ever joined the embargo. And in most places China clearly wants to make money, not war. What scares the Bush administration is the risk of armed conflict between China and Taiwan. That fear is more than just a neocon thing; it's shared by observers like Kenneth Lieberthal, the top Asia hand at the National Security Council during the Clinton years. "The fundamental reason to worry is that these two sides neither trust nor under-stand each other," he says. Last year he and David Lampton, director of China studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, issued a joint warning: "Unless an improved framework [for PRC-Taiwan relations] is adopted, war across the strait will become increasingly probable."
Last year a U.S. expert with close Chinese military ties warned privately that China's brass were displaying "a new cockiness" on the risks of war in the strait. "They think they have figured out how to win," he said. Their solution: barrages of missiles, along with rapid escalation. The new strategy seems to call for early attacks on U.S. aircraft carriers and on key U.S. bases in Japan. A U.S. source who has participated in Pentagon war games of an attack on Taiwan says the almost inevitable outcome is "rapid escalation to a very substantial conflict" with "consequences that are extremely serious." The threat of nuclear weapons was deliberately excluded from the games.
In the past year alone, by Pentagon figures, China boosted its missile strength on the strait by 20 percent. Beijing was horrified last March when Chen Shui-bian, a pro-independence-party candidate, edged out his opponent in Taiwan's presidential election. In the past, Chen (following story) has promised to revise Taiwan's Constitution to treat the island as a sovereign state, a step Beijing regards as part of a "time-line toward independence." In response, China drafted a new "anti-secession law" to mandate a military invasion if Taiwan declares independence. The National People's Congress is expected to enact the measure at the annual session that convenes this week, although the Bush administration has warned Beijing that America will have to step up its support for Taiwan if the law goes through.
Many analysts minimize the risk of war in the strait. They say Beijing's recent moves are no more than posturing to scare Taiwan out of formally breaking away. "Beijing is conducting coercive diplomacy," says Taipei military analyst Andrew Yang. "That kind of psychological warfare is leaving people with the impression that Beijing is squeezing Taiwan even more than in the past."
Soft power can't do everything. Sometimes you need the ability to pose a plausible threat. By the same token, hard power eventually breaks down unless there's positive incentive for peaceful cooperation. Neglecting your allies is no way to keep them happy, as Washington is finding out. "I'm quite curious why U.S. scholars and officials didn't notice that the Chinese are establishing their own empire in East Asia," says Chen Po-chih, chairman of a Taiwan think tank. The Americans have been busy, of course. But so has China. Ensuring a peaceful future will take a special kind of power: brainpower.
With Jonathan Adams in Taipei and bureau reports
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
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