Freeze in US-China Relations
Missile Defense may be the last straw
An intense round of US diplomacy this week is attempting to save a pillar of Bill Clinton's foreign policy: constructive engagement with China.
In what was billed as a significant foreign policy speech last week, Mr Clinton repeated that the US remains "strongly committed to principled and purposeful engagement with China."
Trouble is, since his visit to China last year, he has precious little to show for it. Much to Americans' dismay, China has been cracking down on dissidents in the wake of the Asian financial crisis, while the environment for US companies in China has worsened.
Now, all of a sudden (or so it seems) a new issue has emerged which could expose the fault lines between the two countries: missile defence.
The debate was set off by the launch last August of a North Korean missile over Japan. That missile shifted public and political opinion in Japan, arguably the US's most important Asian ally, towards a more serious consideration of a missile defence system protecting its territory.
It also led the US to jumpstart existing programmes for theatre missile defence (TMD) to protect US forces abroad (as well as to pour resources into a US national missile defence system aimed at protecting the US itself from missile attack).
Beijing is violently opposed to the introduction of a theatre missile shield anywhere in Asia, as an unwelcome shift in the balance of force there. But it is the prospect of a US-furnished missile shield for Taiwan, which it considers a renegade province, which has provoked the most extreme reaction.
A decision to deploy such a shield would be regarded in unambiguous terms by Beijing as the start of the dreaded policy of "containment" - the opposite of "constructive engagement" and the policy pursued by the US to China in the 1950s and 1960s. It would kill any remaining hope for a US-China "strategic partnership", and raise the temperature in relations across the Taiwan strait. Engagement would risk turning into enduring hostility.
Beijing fears that a missile shield for Taiwan would encourage the island to declare independence because it would neutralise Beijing's threat to use force in that event. James Mulvenon of Rand Corporation, says TMD for Taiwan raises two main concerns for China. It would undermine China's only credible military threat against Taiwan, given that an invasion is militarily impossible, and it would foster much greater co-operation between Taiwan and the Pentagon.
Visiting Beijing this week, Madeleine Albright, the US secretary of state, sought to avoid confrontation on these matters. When Chinese officials raised the question of the missile shield, "I replied that instead of worrying about a decision that has not been made to deploy defensive technologies that do not yet exist, China should focus its energies on the real source of the problem - the proliferation of missiles".
Mrs Albright said China should first use its influence to urge North Korea to restrain from missile development and testing, and to use its dialogue with Taiwan to reduce the perceived need for both missiles and missile defence.
But the missile debate may have brought to the surface a fundamental divergence of interests between the US and China. This divergence, say critics, has been almost deliberately submerged as the administration has sought to justify its engagement with China.
Most military analysts and China watchers believe China's medium-term strategic ambition is to become the most powerful nation in Asia. The achievement of this aim will necessarily mean unseating the region's current military and diplomatic boss - the US.
Military experts say that the pattern of China's arms acquisitions and deployment shows it is preparing primarily for two theatres of operation, Taiwan and the South China Sea.
Of the two, the South China Sea - which China claims virtually in its entirety - has the greater strategic significance. About 15 per cent of the world's cross-border trade passes through the sea every year. If China controlled these sea lanes, it would have a potential stranglehold over not only commercial but also military traffic through the heart of Asia.
China's recent construction of structures on a reef near the Philippines shows that Beijing has no intention of letting go of its claim to the Spratly islands - several hundred dispersed islands and reefs scattered through the sea, the analysts say. Legally, too, Beijing is preparing to exercise sovereignty. In 1992, it promulgated a law that allows its navy to "evict foreign naval vessels", and rules that foreign navy ships must apply for permission before crossing the sea.
The Clinton administration would not be the first to try to conduct China policy without airing fundamental issues publicly. In a new book about US-China relations, About Face (Knopf, $30), James Mann of the Los Angeles Times writes that US administrations have conducted China policy secretively and in a personalised manner since Henry Kissinger opened up relations during a historic visit to Beijing in 1971 as Richard Nixon's national security adviser.
But in the long run, argues Mr Mann, policy cannot be hidden from the public and carried out exclusively by elites, In particular, conducting secret diplomacy has become more difficult since the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989 exposed another fundamental fault-line: attitudes to human rights.
Changes in this secret diplomacy may be on the horizon. There are two reasons for thinking that the changes will see a hardening of US attitudes and, hence, a greater likelihood of confrontation. First, China is likely to be an important issue in the 2000 presidential election - as it has been in every election since 1989. With the likely Republican candidate George Bush assembling a group of foreign policy advisers with relatively hawkish reputations, such as Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, "constructive engagement" may prove a policy on which his likely challenger, Al Gore, the vice-president, is vulnerable.
Mr Gore has shown signs anyway that he may talk tougher on foreign policy than Mr Clinton. So to cover Mr Gore's potential vulnerability, a hardening of administration attitudes toward China over the next 18 months may be on the cards.
Second, Congress seems less likely than ever to allow the administration a free hand with China policy - both from the left, where Democrats are pressing hard on human rights concerns, to the right, where security issues dominate.
Part of the reason for that is the legacy of mistrust that remains between the majority party and the White House after the impeachment trial. That mistrust has its special Chinese dimension.
A special report from a House panel led by Christopher Cox, the California Republican, has concluded that US national security has been endangered by China's licit and illicit attempts to gain access to US technology with military applications.
Though that bipartisan report has not been declassified yet, some Republicans have concluded that the Clinton administration has played fast and loose with the system of controls on transfers of so-called dual use technology - commercial technology with potential military uses.
Those suspicions have centred on, but are not limited to, the benefits to Chinese missile technology that have been derived from the launches of US satellites on Chinese rockets.
According to one Republican aide on Capitol Hill, "the system to prevent technology transfers to China during satellite launches wasn't working, not because it couldn't work but because they [the administration] didn't want it to work".
Republicans then question why the administration seemed to be looking the other way. Was it to preserve the policy of engagement with China? Or to preserve a business-friendly environment for US companies operating there?
Both motives, they admit, would have been potentially valid public interest arguments. It is a third Republican suspicion that could be the most damaging: that the administration was influenced by Chinese campaign finance contributions.
Democratic campaign coffers benefited ahead of the 1996 elections from contributions both from prominent satellite manufacturers such as Loral and from Asian businessmen - though much of their money was returned as illegal.
The Cox committee's efforts to examine the link between campaign finance and technology transfers went nowhere - one reason it was able to preserve a bipartisan consensus in its findings. Many potential witnesses have either fled the country or took the fifth amendment right to silence. The prospect of prosecutions under a Justice Department investigation deterred the Cox committee from offering immunity from prosecution for other witnesses.
Administration officials react angrily to claims they were influenced by campaign finance considerations. They point out that senior Republicans were pressing the administration to relax export controls in the early 1990s; that countries such as China have access to high technology from sources other than the US; and that the decline of military spending in the US means that technology exports are necessary to the continuing success of US high-technology companies.
Whatever the truth, though, a tightening of the control regime on US high-technology exports is almost certain to result. The rejection of an export licence last month for the launching of a Hughes satellite on a Chinese rocket has provided yet another bone of contention between Beijing and Washington.
With difficulties almost across the board, US and Chinese officials are hoping for a breakthrough in the one area where it still is possible: China's accession to the World Trade Organisation. That could cap a visit to Washington next month by Zhu Rongji, the Chinese premier and economic supremo. Given China's economic difficulties, getting an agreement that will satisfy US business and farm interests - and other members of the WTO - will be far from easy.
And even if an accord is reached, the unusual warmth between the two countries that was demonstrated during Mr Clinton's visit last year is unlikely to return for some time to come.
The Financial Times, March 4, 1999 |
