U.S. Starting to View China as Potential Enemy

When U.S. strategic planners comb through history in search of precedents for the growing economic and military strength in China today, they are coming up with some ominous examples: Germany in the 1880s and Japan in the 1920s.

Their search for historical comparisons demonstrates an important shift during the past two years in American policy and attitudes toward China.

For the first time in decades, U.S. military and intelligence officials are beginning to cast a wary eye at China as a possible long-term rival, a future threat to American interests in Asia and the Pacific.

Few believe that the two countries will be adversaries within the next 10 or 15 years. But China’s fast-developing economy, its steady increases in military expenditures, its purchases of warplanes and submarines from Russia and some of its recent actions in the South China Sea are making U.S. military and intelligence officials begin to think about possibilities for future conflict.

American defense officials insist they do not now consider China a threat to American interests. But even the denials underscore the intensity of the current debate about China and raise questions about the future.

“If you treat China as an enemy, China will become an enemy,” said Assistant Secretary of Defense Joseph Nye Jr. in a recent interview. “It will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“If you have a policy of containment toward China now, you’ve written off the chance (that China won’t become an enemy). It may be a 50-50 chance, so why write off the 50%? If you do, you’re going to have a 100% possibility of hostilities.” (Nye said later that he did not mean for his percentages to be taken as exact figures.)

Merely talking about containment of China or the possibility of a future Chinese threat represents an extraordinary change in American strategic thinking.

During the 1970s and ‘80s, the United States saw China as its strategic partner in counteracting Soviet military power. At times during this period, American officials griped to their Chinese counterparts that they were not spending enough money or devoting enough attention to modernizing the People’s Liberation Army, the Chinese military.

And at the beginning of the 1990s, after China had forcibly suppressed democracy demonstrations in Beijing’s Tian An Men Square, the conventional wisdom among U.S. strategic planners was that China would be preoccupied for a long time with the job of maintaining internal stability.

Now, American thinking about China has shifted again. The dominant attitudes are pessimism and wariness. Indeed, some American China specialists who have for years taken a relatively sympathetic view toward the Chinese leadership and military admit that they have become more gloomy.

“I’m worried, I really am,” says Paul Godwin, a China specialist at the Defense Department’s National War College. “I had assumed that when China’s revolutionary elite passed away, the venom of Marxism-Leninism would be removed from China’s defense policies.

“But that venom has been replaced by extreme Chinese nationalism. The young guys I meet (from the Chinese military) are extremely nationalistic. . . . The objective is, ‘Rich country, strong army.’ ”

These worries about future Chinese power are the main underlying factor in current American policy toward Beijing.

*

The main thrust of American strategy is to try to bring China into international organizations now and to try to make sure that the Chinese leadership agrees to play by the same rules as everyone else--so that it will not be necessary to try to contain a renegade Chinese superpower later on.

That strategy is what helps drive many of the seemingly contradictory components of American policy toward China, which is occasionally tough and more frequently conciliatory.

Over the past two years, the Clinton Administration has been seeking to bring China into groups such as the Missile Technology Control Regime and the World Trading Organization; to require China to obey rules on intellectual property rights, and to have China defend itself before the U.N. Commission on Human Rights.

The unease about China’s future power and intentions has also prompted the continuing efforts by Defense Secretary William J. Perry to restore military contacts with Beijing and by the State Department to send a phalanx of U.S. officials to China.

“China is now just starting out as a growing power, just as Japan and Germany were growing powers at the beginning of this century,” Harvard University professor Ezra Vogel, who is the U.S. intelligence community’s national intelligence officer for East Asia, observed recently.

“It’s the role of all of us to see we have a stable system that tries to encourage China and yet tries to prevent it from going too far.”

*

For its part, China has over the past two years repeatedly denied that it poses a threat to anyone, arguing that it is still a developing country with peaceful intentions and a far smaller defense budget than the United States. Defense Minister Chi Haotian called the idea of a Chinese threat “ridiculous tales of the Arabian nights.”

Sometimes, however, Chinese press commentaries take on a belligerent tone.

“Obviously, China, which is becoming mighty, is regarded as an opponent not to be taken lightly,” thundered one official Chinese publication after an American aircraft carrier had a tense high-seas encounter last October with a Chinese nuclear submarine.

The American unease about China is based on several factors.

* The steady increase in China’s spending for its armed forces. By official Pentagon estimates, China’s official defense budget, adjusted for inflation, has increased by about 40% over the past five years during a period when American, Russian and Japanese defense spending have either stayed flat or declined.

* The continuing growth of China’s economy. Throughout the 1980s, China’s economy expanded at rates of more than 9% a year, and recently some annual growth rates have been about 12%.

* China’s continuing purchases of advanced military equipment from Russia and other countries. China has just obtained four new Kilo-class submarines from Russia. Over the past five years, the Russians have also sold China advanced jet fighters, helicopters, tanks, transport planes, surface-to-air missiles, rocket engines, missile-guidance technology and uranium-enrichment technology.

From Israel, China has purchased tank-armor, missile and jet-fighter technology. And from Iran, Beijing has obtained air-refueling technology that will enable its jet fighters to operate at greater distances from Chinese territory.

* China’s territorial claims and recent behavior in the South China Sea. China long has claimed sovereignty over huge tracts of ocean and over the Spratly Islands, where five other governments also have claims. In February, Chinese personnel hoisted the Chinese flag and began building structures on a reef near the Philippines, arousing strong protests from President Fidel V. Ramos.

All these developments have attracted the attention of U.S. strategists in places like the Defense Department’s Office of Net Assessment, an internal Pentagon think tank responsible for examining future threats to America’s national security.

“There’s a natural basis for the U.S. to be looking out at China and asking, ‘What is the future of this country, what will be the military capability and how will it be used?’ ” notes Banning Garrett, an independent specialist on the Chinese military. “People who do threat analysis are looking for threats wherever they can find them. That’s their job.”

Some of this thinking has begun to filter into official Pentagon documents. A newly published East Asia Strategy Report released by the Pentagon in February warns guardedly:

“Although China’s leaders insist their military buildup is defensive and commensurate with China’s overall economic growth, others in the region cannot be sure of China’s intentions. . . . Absent a better understanding of China’s plans . . . other Asian nations may feel a need to respond to China’s growing military power.”

Still, Garrett and many other experts on the Chinese military caution that it would be a mistake to exaggerate China’s current capabilities or to think of it as a current threat to the United States.

For example, while China’s overall economic growth has been rapid, its population is so huge that per capita income remains very low and it will face huge problems in feeding its people, who will number more than 1.5 billion by the year 2025.

*

The sharp increases in the defense budget over the past five years follow a decade in which China’s military spending was held flat and at relatively low levels. Likewise, experts say, the recent purchases of advanced weaponry come against a backdrop of years in which the Chinese armed forces operated with very low levels of technology.

“Right now, China can’t even establish air superiority over China itself,” says one U.S. government specialist on the Chinese military. “India has a better air force than China. Ten years from now, China will be able to establish air superiority over China.”

For now, China also remains weak in the sort of high technology the United States used in the Persian Gulf War.

“Beijing leaders are well aware that Chinese forces continue to have much more in common with those of (Iraqi President) Saddam Hussein than with the West,” Robert Sutter, a Library of Congress China specialist, wrote last year.

Moreover, some experts point out that in acquiring new weapons, China is trying to keep up with military modernization programs of nearby governments like Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia and Singapore.

“From the Chinese point of view, everyone else in the region is modernizing,” says Godwin. “Their view is, ‘Why should we be left behind?’ I have an answer for that. I tell them, ‘Because you’re too big, and because you have nukes.’ ”

Because of these limitations, some U.S. defense officials have concluded that the current worries about the Chinese military are overblown.

China “is a middle-ranking state very much constrained by the distribution of power within the Asia-Pacific region,” wrote Karl W. Eikenberry, a Defense Department official and former U.S. military attache in Beijing, in a recent defense publication.

“While on an upward growth path, it is still far from the point at which it might seek to rewrite the rules, in the fashion of, say, Germany or Japan in the 1930s.”

However, other defense analysts in Washington warn that the United States has, for much of the past two decades, underestimated China’s potential.

“Chinese military modernization has gained momentum and will likely bring forward a more assertive China in international interactions,” says Chong-Pin Lin of the American Enterprise Institute. “This trend challenges a widely shared, but unspoken, U.S. hope that modernization will tame a once-militant Marxist-Leninist China.”

Most of the U.S. defense experts agree that China won’t pose much of a threat to the United States over the next 10 to 15 years--but few are willing to make any predictions after that time.

“My sense is that they (Chinese leaders) are trying to keep their powder dry over the next few years,” says Jonathan Pollack of the RAND Corp., who urges U.S. defense officials to hedge their bets on whether China will be peaceful or threatening in the future. “Whatever their longer-term thoughts are in the South China Sea, now is not the time.”