Is China’s Army the Real Wild Card? : The calls in Congress to ‘contain’ Beijing are laughable; its fate won’t be decided in Washington.

The diplomat from Beijing, in a sharp double-breasted suit and even sharper English, suddenly cut off the discussion and became short with me. Perhaps that was because I was starting to get his goat with my argument that someday China the Vast might crumble, like the former Soviet Union, into a hodgepodge of states and provinces and duchies quite beyond the control of the central party.

“Quite imaginative,” he said, going overboard with a diplomatic compliment. “But quite wrong. And wrong for two reasons. The first is that you Westerners underestimate the tremendous lure of a reunited Chinese motherland. Just think--Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macao--all returning to the motherland after so many decades.” Merely a Chinese communist spiel? No; last Monday, in a notably conciliatory inauguration speech, Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui explicitly rejected “Taiwan independence” and called for “both sides to pursue eventual national reunification.”

Continued the Beijing diplomat, in English honed with years of service abroad: “But there is another reason you are mistaken. The party knows that if we don’t improve the economic welfare of our people, then we’ll be out of power, just like the Soviet Communist Party. In the end, you have to deliver the goods. And if we don’t, we’ll be out, too. Economic development is, for us, everything now.” A revealing and important admission: The party evidently believes that if the people’s stomachs and mouths are well fed, the people’s hearts and minds will stay with the program. Sounded suspiciously capitalistic and materialistic to me.

Deng Xiaoping is dying; Mao is long gone. But China lives on--among the world’s oldest civilizations and its most vast nation. Will it break up into a maze of ministates, as some experts believe? Or, if my diplomatic tutor is correct, mature into the 21st century’s new superpower--more important than the U.S. and Japan and everyone else?

Who can say with any confidence which way China will go? That’s why calls from some members of Congress to “contain” China would be sort of comical if they were not so worrisomely egocentric. Contain what? For how long? At what cost? And why? The Beijing of today is not the same iron-fisted, do-it-or-else Beijing of 20 years ago.

Whatever happens with the emerging China will happen largely because of developments within China itself, not because of external pressure. Let’s remember that its 5,000 years of political history have included everything from the tight leash of dynastic control to the chaos of warlordism. What’s next? Today the central government is struggling to keep China’s nearly three dozen provinces, regions, self-administered cities and annexed territories together. Current Chinese anxiety can be seen in a favorite slogan of the Beijing propaganda machine: “Long live the unity of the Chinese people.” Maybe not so long: A Pentagon study last year computed the chances of a Soviet-style breakup at about 50-50. Respected Japanese author Kenichi Ohmae predicts for China a commonwealth future of reasonably autonomous Chinese states.

Chinese trade negotiators, smarting over the recently proposed billions in U.S. sanctions, have indicated to their American counterparts that closing down those mainland factories that illegally duplicate U.S. software, CD-ROMs and compact discs is not as easy as it sounds, especially when some of them are owned by the People’s Liberation Army. Phony excuse or honest admission? The PLA is a powerful and almost-independent player in the new China; the dramatic U.S. arrests for illegal Chinese arms smuggling pointed to major, ominous PLA involvement. Without a Mao or a Deng to keep it in its place, and with no clear successor to the latest Chinese dynasty, one senses that the PLA is almost sovereign unto itself.

Worse yet, not unlike the U.S. Congress, the PLA is an unguided missile in the troubled Sino-U.S. bilateral relationship. Was all that clumsy blustering over the Taiwan Strait back in March the cool, calculated product of the cool, calculating and urbane foreign ministry officials that I met when I visited Beijing? Or was it a sign of the PLA acting more or less as an independent force, flexing its muscles for the edification of the non-PLA party authorities in Beijing as much as anyone in Taipei? Even more worrisome, is there a visible generation gap in the PLA that threatens to erupt in a showdown for power? “The young PLA turks were absolutely itching for a fight when the U.S. sent in the two carriers,” claimed a Taiwanese official. “I’m so glad Clinton didn’t send a carrier through the strait--who knows what might have happened?” Surely the Clinton administration, for all its many policy problems in Asia, handled this one just about right.

Congress is about to embark on a predictably rancorous annual debate over whether to continue China’s current trade status. If we have learned nothing else from the history of our pitiful relations with China--a history replete with monumental blunders and persistent misunderstandings and mutual tauntings--we should have learned the need for caution, care and humility.

I’m honestly not sure we’re up to it. And I’m not sure the PLA is, either.

* Tom Plate’s column runs Tuesdays. His e-mail address is <tplate@ucla.edu>.