A Confident China No Longer Wants America’s Military Muscle in Asia

Lost amid the ups and downs of daily events in Asia is a fundamental change of extraordinary importance. For the first time in a quarter-century, China says it no longer welcomes an American military presence in Asia.

China’s new message seems to be “Go home, America,” a reverse of George S. McGovern’s “Come home, America” refrain during the Vietnam War. Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qichen made this abundantly clear during the conference of the Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations that just ended here.

It is time for the United States to stop regarding itself as the “savior of the East,” Qian told reporters. “We do not recognize the United States as a power which claims to maintain the peace and stability of Asia.”

Qian was talking only a few days before the incident in which two American military attaches from Hong Kong were detained and then expelled from China on allegations of spying. His remarks were the most explicit, high-level acknowledgment yet of what Chinese defense and military officials have been privately telling Americans with increasing frequency.

Over the past two years, several American defense experts have been surprised to be informed, during meetings with their Chinese counterparts, that there is no need for the United States to keep its forces in Asia. The American troop strength in Asia is now 100,000, including 47,000 in Japan and about 37,000 in South Korea.

Americans who are aware of today’s messy relations between the United States and China may not find the go-home theme surprising. But for China, it is a startling turnabout.

From the days of President Richard Nixon’s opening of relations with Beijing until the end of the Cold War, China welcomed the U.S. presence in Asia as a counterweight to the Soviet Union’s military power. And in the years immediately after the Cold War ended, China let it be known that it wanted the Americans to remain in Asia to help maintain the status quo.

China’s logic was clear: Without the U.S. presence, Japan would be forced to increase military spending sharply. China did not want to have to compete with Japan for power and influence in Asia.

Over the past few years, the United States has done whatever it could to reinforce this logic. America has portrayed itself as the keeper of the peace in the Pacific.

Both the George Bush Administration and the Clinton Administration repeatedly suggested that America played the role of a balancer, preventing any single country (translate: China or Japan) from dominating the world’s fastest-growing region.

This has become official American policy. “The stability brought about by the U.S. military presence provides a sound foundation for economic growth in the Asia-Pacific region, benefiting Asians and Americans alike,” the Pentagon declared in February in its most recent description of its strategy.

The Pentagon’s description of its Asia strategy said that the United States “has the capability, credibility and even-handedness to play the ‘honest broker’ among nervous neighbors, historic enemies and potential antagonists.”

America’s portrayal of itself as the “great balancer from across the seas” is not unique to Asia. It has long been part of America’s self-image in Europe too. American officials have for years depicted the continuing U.S. military presence in Europe as necessary to keep any other big nation (translate: Germany or Russia) from achieving so much power that it could overwhelm its neighbors.

So when China tells the United States that it no longer views U.S. troops as a force for stability in Asia, that is not only a change in Chinese strategy. It is also a direct challenge to America’s self-image in the world and its justification for a permanent military presence overseas.

What lies behind China’s new message?

In part, China no longer sees the United States as a neutral, benevolent force in Asia. Instead, it has been accusing the United States of pursuing a policy of “containment”--seeking to limit and restrain China’s power in Asia.

Chinese officials look at a series of U.S. actions as indications of this containment strategy: America’s normalization of relations with Vietnam, its increasing warmth toward India, its sale of F-16 warplanes and other equipment to Taiwan, its search for a huge offshore “depot” to store military equipment in Southeast Asia, and its increasing involvement in other places near China, from Hong Kong to Mongolia.

Over the past few months, American officials have repeatedly denied that such a containment strategy exists. “We have no desire to contain or isolate China,” Secretary of State Warren Christopher told the Asian foreign ministers gathered here last week. Again and again, Clinton Administration officials describe American strategy toward China as one of “engagement, not containment.”

China doesn’t believe the bland reassurances. Some Chinese officials have theorized that the United States is carrying out a strategy of “secret containment.”

According to this theory, America’s commercial interests in China make the Clinton Administration unwilling to announce its policy openly, as did the architects of the policy of Soviet containment during the Harry S. Truman Administration.

Still, China’s suspicions do not entirely explain why it wants to see U.S. forces out of Asia.

If China were still as worried about Japan as it used to be, it would still want to keep the United States around. Only the American presence prevents Japan from becoming what some of its leaders call a “normal country,” with its own independent military capability.

So when China says it would be happy to see American troops pull back from Asia, that reveals something important about its changing attitude toward Japan.

It shows that China’s growing military and economic strength has given it enough confidence to envision a future Asia in which China and Japan are the two leading powers. For now, China apparently thinks it would come out better dealing with Japan alone than dealing with a partnership of Japan and the United States.

China’s new go-home-America posture may turn out to be a passing phase, perhaps an outgrowth of the struggle among various leaders and factions for power after the death of Deng Xiaoping.

For the past couple of years, virtually every government that has important dealings with China--among them Japan, Britain, France, Russia, Taiwan and India, along with the United States--has tried to avoid emerging as China’s enemy in the middle of the ongoing political transition in Beijing.

No nation wants to emerge as the foil for an outpouring of Chinese nationalism, the foreign “villain” that a Chinese leader or group could exploit to distract attention from internal divisions or problems. That helps explain why Britain, over the past two years, has begun to smooth over its conflicts with China over the future of Hong Kong.

There was really never any doubt, however, that if any country was going to play this role in Chinese politics, it would be the United States. It is the only superpower. It is the only nation whose policies toward China are sometimes directly confrontational, the only one that so openly seeks what National Security Adviser Anthony Lake calls the “enlargement” of freedom and democracy around the world.

Last week, Christopher told Asian officials here that “the United States is and will remain a Pacific power--militarily, economically and politically.” Nothing new there. Those words sounded like the boilerplate language top American officials have used for the past several years.

What’s different now is that the biggest, most populous country in Asia is starting to tell the world that it is no longer happy to have the Americans nearby.