China looks at the world: the world looks at China

Author(s): David M. Lampton

Source: Great Decisions , 2010, (2010), pp. 43-54

Published by: Foreign Policy Association

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43681098

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Chinese military jets of the PLA ( People 's Liberation Army) fly over Tiananmen Square during a grand military parade for the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, in Beijing , China , Oct. 1, 2009. (Imaginechina via AP Images)

China looks at the world: the world looks at China

by David M. Lampton

Never periphery of the before global of has international population a country moved with developments some from 20% the of the global population moved from the

periphery of international developments to the center of them with such rapidity. In 1976,

the year of Mao Zedong's demise, the Chinese Communist elite defined national security in terms of economic self-sufficiency, support for Third World revolution and a closed ideological system in which intellectual contamination from the West and the Soviet Union was a principal danger. Today, China is in many (but not all) ways a status quo power. It is a self-acknowl- edged beneficiary of, and cheerleader for, inter- dependence. And, it is a country that eschews revolution (at home or abroad) with the same alacrity that it embraced it 40 years ago.

In 1976, the era was officially defined as an "era of war and revolution"- today it is the "era of peace and development." China has been transformed from an aggrieved victim nation

lamenting a world system in which the "imperi- alists" had repeatedly stripped away sovereignty, into a generally self-confident great power in a system largely built by others. In short, Beijing's national security circumstances and behavior have changed, with implications for China's neighbors, the U.S . and the global system. Many, perhaps most, of these changes have been posi- tive; some less so.

A lot has changed in China and with regard to its role in the world since 1976.

At that time, the sign in the lobby of the Beijing Hotel may have proclaimed "China has friends all over the world," but no serious person in China, or anywhere else, then be- lieved that. China's leaders still had a tenuous

relationship with Washington and a war with Moscow was possible. Today, China has dip- lomatic relations with 175 countries and "stra-

tegic partnerships" with 17.

www.greatdecisions.org 43

4 What are

China's

security concerns and

goals , and how do its

perceptions affect its

neighbors , the U.S. and the

world?

DAVID M. LAMPTON

/ s H y man Pro fe s s o r, director of China Stud- ies, and dean of faculty at the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins Univer- sity. Former president of the National Commit- tee on United States-Chi- na Relations, his most re- cent book is: The Three Faces of Chinese Power:

Might, Money, and Minds ( University of California Press , 2008). The author thanks Tabi t ha Mai lory for her research assis- tance and comments on

an earlier draft.

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Then, the country was largely cut off from the world, with a one-room

airport terminal more than adequate to serve the capital of a nation that com- prised 25% of the world's population. In recent years, air travel has been growing at close to 10% a year. In the mid- 1 970s , China had a prim- itive and small nuclear deterrent force;

today it is acquiring a new generation of land-mobile ballistic missiles and

missile-launching submarines. Seven years after the U.S. had put

men on the moon, China did not have

any realistic prospect for manned space flight; by late 2008, it had knocked an aging satellite out of orbit and had put six astronauts into space and safely re- trieved them.

In that year, virtually none of Chi- nese gross domestic product (GDP) was involved in foreign trade; by 2008, about 70% of China's GDP was con-

nected to exports and imports. In 1976, China held virtually no

U.S. government and/or private debt; today, it holds over U.S. $1 trillion in such instruments, making Washington and Beijing mutual financial hostages.

And for that year, China's C02

emissions were about one quarter of those of the U.S., but by 2006-2007, it had become the world's largest C02 emitter, threatening not only its own environment, but also arousing interna- tional demands that China contribute to

global environmental security. Nothing so defines the difficulty of

dealing with China today as the jux- taposition of its strengths and weak- nesses. While the outside world may be fixated on China's growing muscles, its leaders generally are still more preoc- cupied with their nation's disabilities and vulnerabilities. The international

community sees Beijing's mounting strengths and expects more rapid po- litical liberalization and greater relative effort in addressing issues of the global

commons. Yet, the first thing on Chi- nese leaders' minds when they arise in the morning generally is the staggering

domestic agenda they confront. From their perspective, they need to husband their scarce resources to deal with a

domestic agenda often on the ragged edge of control, believing that they currently enjoy a window of opportu- nity for growth that soon may close, not

least because of its aging population.

As one interviewee in Shanghai recent- ly put it to this author: "Strategically, our number one priority is Chinese Communist party (CCP) survival, eco- nomic growth…." Consequently, with respect to issues such as global warm- ing, civil liberties and dealings with reprehensible states, one finds China's resistance to change explained by ref- erence to its internal needs for stability

and economic growth. In short, China has many reasons to cooperate with the world, and in many important respects it desires to do so, but the titanic forces

of domestic social and political turmoil that are accompanying its moderniza- tion do not always make this easy or possible.

In order to respond to a changing China, it is important to understand the framework through which its leaders look at the world. Some key questions to consider include: Can a China with growing comprehensive national power feel secure at the same time that the rest of the world does?

Can a China that places primacy on economic growth cooperate to effec- tively address global environmental challenges? •

China's national security strategy

China's serves national internal security development. strategy It serves internal development. It does so by increasing the flow of re- sources into China and minimizing the external threats and drains that might divert leadership attention and scarce resources from its domestic growth and

social change agenda. More specifical- ly, Beijing's national security strategy consists of four broad, interrelated and

evolving elements. Since the late 1970s, Deng Xiao-

ping and his successors have felt they could see about 20 years into the fu- ture. When they have looked ahead, they have thus far felt confident that a weakened Soviet Union/Russia and

a preoccupied U.S. have made a big-

power war involving China unlikely. Therefore, the first element of Beijing's security strategy is the assessment that

China has at least a two-decade-long window of opportunity during which it can keep military spending at a rela- tively low fraction of GDP and focus human and material resources on the

modernization of the economy and so- ciety. Although military spending and defense modernization have advanced

impressively in recent years, China's rapid economic growth- nearly 10% annually for more than three decades- has enabled civilian leaders to maintain

defense spending at a relatively low level of GDP while keeping the military

at least modestly satisfied with increas-

ing resources. Beijing learned from the 1991 implosion of the Soviet Union that an economy that overinvests in its military apparatus and underinvests in human needs erodes regime legitimacy to the point where even an enormous military cannot save the regime from the wrath of its own people.

Second, foreign and national secu- rity policy are to provide the cocoon for a tumultuous internal economic and

social transformation process, whose defining features are urbanization, mar- ketization and globalization. Each of these changes is wrenching, such as the relocation of 300^-00 million peasants into urban areas over the last 30 years (with a like number still to go). Simi-

44

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China vs. U.S. Defense Expenditures, 1989 – 2008

CHINA

LUCIDITY INFORMATION DESIGN

NOTE: There are several estimates of China's military expenditures, with the U.S. Department of Defense estimate more than double that of the IISS estimate displayed here.

larly, remaking the Chinese economy from a state-owned-and-managed op- eration into a predominantly nonstate- owned structure involves creating winners and losers on an enormous

scale- once again, a perilous politi- cal undertaking. Therefore, the job of foreign and national security policy, beyond providing physical security on the conventional and nuclear lev-

els, is to make sure that the domestic modernization process has the interna- tional technological, financial and hu- man inputs necessary for success. This means ensuring that Chinese industry has access to foreign markets for its exports and assuring the uninterrupted flow of strategic materials and financial resources into China.

A third element of the strategy is to reassure neighbors and more-distant powers that as China's military grows in reach and punch, the People's Re- public of China (PRC) will not threaten either the prevailing global order or the

core interests of other powers. Were Beijing's rise to be perceived as a threat to either its neighbors or the current dominant power, the U.S., this would elicit international counterreactions

that would retard China's domestic

modernization. Central to this reassur-

ance effort has been China's participa- tion in international multilateral orga- nizations; its generally careful use of

military power outside its borders over the last 30 years; growing involvement in military-to-military exchanges and United Nations peacekeeping efforts; gradually expanding transparency; and Beijing's welcoming of foreign direct investment that not only has fostered growth in China, but also given for- eigners a positive stake in China's suc- cess.

The final element of this strategy has been to keep U. S .-China relations on a relatively even keel. A militarily hostile U.S. would force a dangerous diversion of human and financial re-

sources away from domestic modern- ization. A hostile U.S. would not pro- vide the trade surplus, technological and human inputs that have contributed

so much to China's progress. And, a hostile U.S. might make the prospect of an eventual resolution of the Taiwan

issue more difficult. So, from Beijing's perspective, productive Sino- American relations are central to everything it wants to achieve, at least for now and the foreseeable future.

This four-pronged strategy, of course, leaves unanswered how Chi-

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A Chinese bicyclist peddles past a massive television screen rebroadcasting the 60th anni- versary military parade in Beijing on Oct. 26, 2009. Although military spending and defense modernization have advanced impressively in recent years, China 's rapid economic growth has enabled civilian leaders to maintain defense spending at a still relatively low level of GDP. (UPI/Stephen Shaver /Landov)

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na will use its heightened power two decades hence. On the one hand, it is

entirely possible (and, indeed, central to America's strategy with respect to China) that 20 years from now the PRC will have so invested itself in global interdependence that it will become an increasingly stabilizing force, or as then U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick put it in September 2005, a responsible "stakeholder" in the inter- national system. On the other hand, a more sobering possibility exists, name- ly, that Beijing's greater power gives it greater capacity to meet its own narrow interests without due regard for others, and that those greater capabilities will give rise to new, more expansive objec- tives. The policy implication of the first

scenario is that America's enlightened self-interest lies in facilitating Chinese growth and involvement international- ly, in the belief that multiplying strands

of interdependence will incline China in the direction of cooperative and con- structive behavior. No one can be sure

that this happy scenario will material- ize. But, if outside powers now exces- sively focus on the uncertain and pos- sibly deleterious uses of Chinese power decades hence, and consequently seek to slow and constrain that growth and involvement today, this certainly will

decrease Beijing's propensity to coop- erate now and in the future. One can

be more certain about the downside of

trying to constrain Chinese growth than one can be about the pacifying conse- quences of interdependence.

China's interests and fears

Given China's national security strat- egy, its historical experience of hav- ing been a great nation cast upon hard times in the 19th and 20th centuries and

the success of Beijing's domestic de- velopment policies and diplomacy over the past three decades, there is a wide- spread leadership and popular consen- sus on the mainland about the PRC's

current core interests and what consti-

tute the principal threats to them. The regime's core interest is survival. Many things are seen as potential threats to that, most prominently internal insta- bility. In 2008 there were 90,000 mass incidents in China: tumult stemming from income and social inequality, en- vironmental concerns, corruption and justice-related issues. While most of these disturbances remain localized and

limited to a domestic audience, China's

leaders are ever vigilant for possible connections between the activities of

foreigners and domestic discontent.

Throughout their history, the Chi- nese have believed that internal solidar-

ity is the greatest resource for survival and that outsiders wishing to weaken or dominate China first seek to increase

internal division. There are, of course, the more traditional conventional mili-

tary and economic threats that worry Beijing (discussed below), but PRC leaders are highly concerned that the actions and policies of foreign groups, foreign governments or international organizations may make the job of internal governance more difficult. At the same time, they recognize how beneficial China's engagement with the world has been overall. The stock and

trade of a PRC foreign minister or am- bassador is to effectively protest actual and imagined foreign "interference in the internal affairs of China."

Threats from China's frontier

The PRC's national capital is near the eastern seaboard on the North China

Plain, very far from China's western periphery. This periphery is vast in its geographic extent, rich in natural re- sources and populated by "minority" peoples with identities and cultures quite distinct from the numerically dominant Han population, who con- stitute more than 90% of the country's total population. Put bluntly, these mi- nority peoples (the Uyghurs, Tibetans and others) that Beijing trusts least occupy a large percentage (nearly one third) of China's real estate- and stra- tegic ground at that. Moreover, these peoples have a history of association with their ethnic and religious brethren who straddle the PRC's far-flung bor- ders and with their diasporas around the

world. To various extents they would like as much autonomy from Beijing as they can get.

These realities, combined with the economic opportunities pulling Han migrants into these areas, not to men- tion Beijing's "Go West" development effort, all have combined to produce various central policies over the years, some more accommodating than others. However, the long-term trend has been to let the migration of Han people into

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these regions in order to weaken the hold of native peoples over their tra- ditional areas and dilute their cultures,

breeding resentment on both sides, which intermittently leads to violence. These processes were at work in March 2008 in areas of China with significant Tibetan populations and most recently in July 2009 among the Uyghurs (a Turkic minority group of considerable size) in Xinjiang. In both cases, there was violence directed against the Han by aggrieved indigenous persons, re- prisal by Hans, and violent repression by the central government and its local administrations.

If this were the end of the story, one

could say this is a tragic, albeit famil- iar, saga of continental expansion by a dominant group, muscularly displac- ing native peoples and their cultures. In the Han Chinese narrative, howev- er, there often have been connections (sometimes imagined and sometimes real) between the discontent of mi- nority peoples and external agitation, aimed at weakening Beijing's gover- nance capacity and fragmenting the nation. In the 1950s, 1960s and into the 1970s, the U.S., as former Cen-

tral Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer John Kenneth Knaus recounts, was in-

timately connected to efforts to foster unrest in Tibet in order to destabilize

the Communist regime in Beijing. In the early 1960s, the Soviet Union used economic distress in China to

encourage disaffected local people in Xinjiang to cross the border into the U.S.S.R.'s then subordinate Central

Asian republics. When his Holiness the Dalai Lama sought the support of the U.S. government and people for his movement, this bred distrust in Beijing. In the same way, the World Uyghur Congress, which held its 3rd general assembly in Washington , D .C . , in 2009, and the 2005 establishment of the International Uyghur Human Rights and Democracy Foundation in Washington, D.C., both reinforce the presumed connection between dis- content in China's West and policy in Washington. Concisely, the first job of Chinese national security policy is to secure the nation's borders, con-

solidate control over its vast periphery and the people who live there and to keep "meddling" foreigners out. To the foreigners, problems in these ar- eas are seen through the lens of self- determination and human rights- to the Chinese government, these issues are viewed more through the lenses of "terrorism" and/or "separatism," both national security challenges.

Turning to China's offshore periph- ery, specifically Taiwan, the island al- most certainly would have fallen to Mao Zedong's forces had U.S. Presi- dent Harry S. Truman (1945-53) not sent the 7th Fleet into the Taiwan Strait

as part of his broader decision to in- tervene in the war on the Korean Pen-

insula in June 1950. Thereafter, in the

mid-1950s, Washington signed a de- fense treaty with Taiwan (the Republic of China, or ROC) and had other secu- rity relationships with the island, some of which were terminated at the end

of 1979 as part of the Sino- American normalization agreement a year ear- lier. In the PRC narrative, reunifica-

tion has been prevented by Washing-

ton's policies and actions, though in more recent years cross-Taiwan Strait economic and cultural integration has somewhat eased Beijing's anxiet- ies. Nonetheless, the Taiwan Strait is the one place in the world where one could currently imagine a direct con- flict between nuclear powers.

These issues of China's unstable

periphery and the action of foreigners, real and imagined, become directly linked to regime security because a key element of the CCP's legitimacy, beyond economic growth, rests on its ability to reunify the country follow- ing its dismemberment in the 19th and 20th centuries (Xinjiang, Hainan Island, Tibet, Hong Kong and Macau already have been "brought back to the fold of the Motherland"). For Beijing and the PRC citizenry, Taiwan remains the principal item of unfinished territorial business, beyond offshore claims in the East and South China seas, which are

not trivial. Moreover, linking China's Han majority and the Beijing elite to- gether is the shared belief that, in the case of Xinjiang and Tibet, the Chinese

47 I

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state has brought to these "backward" regions the blessings of development and yet the more central government subsidies these areas have received, the

more hostile they have become. There- fore, resentment at what is perceived as ingratitude reinforces the nationalism of unification. As a result, Beijing's central leaders are under popular do-

mestic pressure from the Han majority to get tougher and tighten their grip on

China's western periphery at precisely the time when much of the rest of the

world is calling for accommodation. Beyond the combined threats to territorial unification and regime le- gitimacy that China's vast periphery presents, China's elite also perceives

an array of more "traditional" security threats in the military and economic realms, the latter reaching beyond the narrow confines of economics to

the vulnerabilities that are intrinsic

to interdependence. Some of these threats have long existed and others are newer, reflecting China's growing involvement in the world system. •

Military- related concerns Two related large threats categories are of of particular military- related threats are of particular concern to Beijing: frictions with oth- er big powers and failed states along China's periphery, along with techno- logical developments with respect to weapons systems.

China's regional environment

China lives in a tough neighborhood, not only bordered by 14 land neigh- bors, but several additional big mari- time states as well. Throughout most of recorded history, China's imperial, then Republican, and now PRC leaders have focused on managing relations with the peoples and states that surround China. Many different elements have made such management difficult: the expan- sionist desires of some (Japan from 1894 to 1945); territorial and resource-

related disputes with others (the Soviet Union/Russia, India, Vietnam, Korea, the Philippines and Japan); minority groups straddling common borders to China's south, west and north; conflicts

in neighboring countries that drew Bei- jing in (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Korea); the historically derived fear of China's small bordering states and so- cieties that they will be culturally and economically dominated by their big neighbor (Myanmar/Burma, Vietnam, the Russian Far East and the Koreas); and China's constant anxiety that its neighbors will allow themselves to be used strategically as a counterweight to China itself (e.g., India, Japan, Vietnam, Mongolia, Central Asian states and the Koreas- not to mention Taiwan). Two

countries are highly indicative of the depth, breadth and interconnectedness of Beijing's regional national security concerns: India and Japan.

China and India have frictions (not least their respective relations with Pakistan). China and India's long- standing border dispute involving two principal tracts of territory, one about the same size as Switzerland and the

other three times that size, has been quiescent for some time; nonetheless, it has incendiary potential. New Delhi and Beijing held a 13th round of nego- tiations in August 2009. Moreover, the Administration of President George W. Bush (2001-2009) was widely viewed in China to be seeking an improved re- lationship with New Delhi as leverage against an ever-stronger Beijing. In the Chinese view, Bush's 2008 final agree- ment (the U.S .-India Nuclear Coopera- tion Approval and Non-Proliferation Enhancement Act) to move ahead with

Indo-U.S. civilian nuclear cooperation even though India detonated nuclear weapons in 1998, remains outside the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Trea-

ty,* and has a substantial unconstrained

military nuclear- weapons sector, dem- onstrated that the U.S. was seeking In- dian strategic support by trading away Washington's usually sacred nonpro- liferation concerns. As one Chinese

security specialist put it to the author in mid-2009: "The U.S. uses nonpro- liferation as tactics, not as strategy- look at India relations! They are trying to check China- smart tactics, but bad

strategy…

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