China syndrome

IN SINGAPORE LAST SUNDAY, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told an audience of Asian defense officials and military officers that their neighbor China was a liar and a threat.

"China's defense expenditures are much higher than Chinese officials have publicly admitted. It is estimated that China's is the third-largest military budget in the world, and now the largest in Asia," he said, citing findings from a forthcoming Pentagon report. "Since no nation threatens China one wonders: Why this growing investment?"

Rumsfeld's comments created a stir, but they fit with an increasingly angry and alarmed tone in Washington over China in recent months. Bending to pressure from American businesses and congressmen from both political parties, the Bush administration has sharpened its criticisms of China for undervaluing its currency, keeping foreign goods out of its markets, and ignoring intellectual property protections. In February, CIA director Porter Goss told the Senate Intelligence Committee that "Beijing's military modernization and military buildup [are] tilting the balance of power in the Taiwan Strait" and "threaten US forces in the region." The administration has strenuously objected to European proposals to ease an embargo on arms sales to China. And the Pentagon report Rumsfeld drew on in Singapore is said to describe China's military in decidedly more ominous terms than in previous years.

As the Financial Times wrote in a news analysis this spring, "With Iraq and the Middle East no longer the only topic of conversation in Washington, policymakers and analysts from members of Congress to career diplomats are already talking about the ‘China threat' more than at any time since 2001."

To many, it all seems very familiar, a return to the open suspicion of China that the Bush administration brought with it into of. ce four and a half years ago. But is it? Several prominent scholars and policy analysts caution against reading too much into recent events. Even if the administration does want to return to its administration does want to return to its old confrontational stance, some argue, it must first do some significant rethinking — in part because the United States remains deeply entangled in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also because China today already presents a qualitatively different challenge than it did even four years ago.

. . .

"China has never been a country you have the luxury of not thinking about," says Michael O'Hanlon, a foreign policy scholar at the Brookings Institution. Indeed, what now looks like a change of course on China, says Richard Haass, who retired as director of policy planning at the State Department in June 2003 and is now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, is in fact a long-running administration debate making its way to the surface. "The Bush administration has always been of more than one mind on China," said Haass in a recent interview. "There's always been a view within the administration . . . that China is a threat, or at a minimum, a potential threat."

That school of thought was dominant in the early months of the Bush administration. Bush had run in 2000 as a fierce critic of China and the Clinton administration's policy of treating the country as a "strategic partner." The more appropriate term, Bush said in campaign interviews, was "strategic competitor."

But eager for assistance in the war on terrorism after Sept. 11, 2001, and looking for support on the Security Council for an ultimatum to Iraq a year later, the administration soon began to treat China more like an ally. Bush became the first American president to visit China twice in one year and invited Jiang Zemin, then China's president, to his ranch in Crawford, Texas. High-level military exchanges and talks were revived, and the United States, at China's request, put an ethnic Uighur separatist group in China's northwest Xinjiang province on the State Department's terrorism watch list.

Last September, Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, said the Bush administration had "the best relationship that any administration has had with China."

According to Haass and O'Hanlon, 9/11 and Iraq in essence gave the upper hand to moderates in the administration like then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, who argued for greater engagement with China. Powell's absence in Bush's second term may have strengthened hawks like Rumsfeld, but according to Jonathan Pollack, an Asian and Pacific studies professor at the Naval War College, Bush has given little sign that he has aligned himself with them. Bush, says Pollack, "realizes that he has to rely on China."

On no issue is that reliance more apparent than on North Korea and its nuclear program. Indeed, most observers see the administration's recent round of criticisms stemming in part from frustration with China's unwillingness to exert more of its influence on North Korea. Pollack suggests that if talks with North Korea resume, and if progress is made (an admittedly big if), the administration's language toward China could quickly lose its edge.

In general, as Pollack sees it, American policy on China is at the moment highly contingent, depending on an unexpected confluence of unrelated events. (The dispute over the value of the yuan, for example, has little to do with North Korea.) "There's often a tendency," Pollack says, "to attribute more causality in these situations than is warranted to the fact that so many things seem to be coinciding."

. . .

As Richard Haass puts it, even if there's been an element of coincidence to recent China-related news, the fact remains that "China is a rising power." James Mann, author of two books on US-China relations and, most recently, "The Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet," agrees that it's premature to speak of any new direction in China policy. But he nonetheless sees a new sense of alarm over China emanating from the Bush administration.

Part of the concern, Mann says, grows out of a realization that China represents a thornier problem than it did only a few years ago. Traditionally, as a military and diplomatic matter, China has been predominantly seen through the lens of the Taiwan question: how to protect Taiwan's autonomy without provoking China into military action. While Taiwan remains important, Mann argues, "the concern has shifted."

Now, says Mann, the administration is asking itself, "what if China is so powerful that all the other East Asian countries defer to it?" In other words, what if traditional allies like South Korea start to throw in their lot, militarily and diplomatically as well as economically, with China instead of the United States?

John Mearsheimer, a University of Chicago political scientist and leading scholar of international relations, believes that Japan and South Korea are already growing nervous that the United States won't "be there for them" if trouble with China arises. At the same time, however, he predicts little meaningful change in US-China policy in the short-term, largely because the Middle East will continue to monopolize the administration's attention. "We're going to continue to focus on the Middle East at the expense of Asia—and Europe."

Still, as Mearsheimer and others readily concede, the future of US-China policy is anything but clear. "It's very early in the game, China is in the early stages of its rise," Mearsheimer says. "This is kind of like looking at Germany in 1882, not Germany in 1912."

Haass is somewhat more sanguine. (His new book, "The Opportunity: America's Moment to Alter History's Course," is in part about the "opportunity to integrate China into a US-led world order.") Still, he agrees that it's too soon to make long-term projections. "It's possible in 25 years we could wake up and we'll have a US-China Cold War. We could also wake up in 25 years and see the US and China selectively cooperate on various global and regional concerns just as they do now."

"History suggests," Haass goes on, "that working out relations between a dominant power and a rising power always involves friction. It's almost like geology, when tectonic plates run up against one another. The potential is always there for friction, or worse."

Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas. His e-mail address drbennett@globe.com.