James Nolt is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute, adjunct professor at the New School University, and author of numerous articles on China and the Chinese military.
At the start of China’s parliament session this week, China’s Premier Wen Jiabao said, “China would advocate peace, development and cooperation, and always pursue an independent foreign policy of peace.” Fine words indeed, but words are cheap. Americans are used to discounting such pronouncements. In fact, our media often ignores them altogether. On the other hand, time and time again, we hear that China is a “rising power,” “growing threat” or “emerging superpower.” Phrases like this are repeated so often by American politicians and media that most Americans believe China is a formidable military power and likely adversary.
In fact, despite its large population and vibrant economy, China is remarkably weak militarily, especially compared with the U.S. Premier Wen’s words rather accurately portray China’s spending priorities, in which military spending is quite modest, unlike China of the 1950s or the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Likewise, in its foreign policy these days China acts more like a business internationalist, seeking mutually profitable commerce and easing military tensions, rather than a Cold War communist state. In recent years China has improved relations and expanded commerce with many countries near and far, including former adversaries like India, Russia, South Korea and Taiwan. China helped the U.S. negotiate the recent nuclear arms reduction agreement with North Korea.
Why does China remain a country Americans love to hate? There are three reasons. Many on the left mistrust China as a non-democratic and repressive state. Many on the right hype the China threat as a way to justify a large U.S. military establishment. Many people of various political stripes fear the effects of China’s potent economic success
Human rights concerns are legitimate, but there are many countries in the world with poor human rights records that are nonetheless peaceable in their foreign relations. Furthermore, although China continues to be intolerant of political dissent, Chinese people today are certainly freer than in the past and freer than most Americans imagine.
China’s economic challenge is real. China can manufacture efficiently a wide range of manufactured products, based especially on low wages, good infrastructure and well-educated workers and engineers. China’s economic threat is often measured by the growing U.S. trade deficit.
It is a great measure of our own success that we have created an open trading system that encourages countries to behave more peaceably than the closed economic system of the 1930s that led to World War II. China, unlike Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia or imperial Japan, is quite content to sell two-fifths of its exports in the U.S. market and to invest surplus capital here, too. Its economic success within the U.S.-designed global economy explains why it strongly prefers good relations with the U.S.
It is not necessary to fight for foreign markets or raw materials when opportunities to buy and sell are open to all. In fact, fighting for resources rather than trading for them is usually counterproductive economically, as the U.S. is learning in Iraq. This is a designed feature of the current world economic order that its principal authors, Americans, now too easily forget.
The notion of China as a military rival of the U.S. is absurd. China’s navy and air force today are in training and technology more backward than the Soviet forces of a quarter century ago. Numerically, they are a tiny fraction of the Soviet forces we confronted and stalemated during the Cold War. The U.S. navy today is more powerful on the high seas than the navies of the rest of the world combined. Considering that most other significant naval powers (as well as most of the world’s great industrial powers) are our formal military allies, the U.S. is militarily stronger today than any other country has ever been in world history.
We could cut all our military forces in half and still have an overwhelming advantage over China in any military contest outside of its borders or on the sea. Terrorism now looms so large because it is the desperate weapon of those too militarily weak to attack any other way. Why do we have such a large military establishment? Especially, why such a large navy when we have no significant naval rivals? A potential Chinese threat is one of the few plausible excuses, but even one tenth of our current navy could control the high seas in the face of the feeble Chinese navy. Qualitatively and quantitatively, our current advantage is out of proportion to any conceivable threat.
The traditional goals of the American military have been: to protect our homeland from invasion, the defend the freedom of the seas and to deter aggressors from conquering our allies. As ambitious as these goals were, they have been replaced since 9/11 by an even greater ambition, which is to invade and pacify hostile populations. This is not easy even for a superpower, as Russia discovered in Afghanistan and we should have learned in Vietnam. If we are starting to realize today the limits of our military power, it is not because we are weak, but because in our overwhelming strength we have demanded our military solve problems for which it is ill-suited.
The Bush administration has been schizophrenic on China. On the one hand, many Republican business leaders have encouraged Bush to maintain good relations with China because it is a lucrative market. Yet Bush’s interest in expensive military programs, like ballistic missile defense, are difficult to justify without some plausible great power enemy. Thus right-wing commentators have been exaggerating China’s military for years, earning the generous regard of military contractors who have no better sales people.
More important is the real substance of U.S.-China relations, which is a growing volume of business. Bush has never actively threatened China in any way that would interfere with business. China has reciprocated with peaceable behavior, which is good for the broad business relations between the two countries, if not for those who yearn to hype the China threat. Peace should be the first priority. Within a peaceful trading system, industries will move to seek favorable conditions, whether to China or India or Sri Lanka. Progressives need to defend workers' rights within the context of this global system.
