Fear of Chinese threat baseless and premature

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): China's Premier Li Peng was in Malaysia last week, and he had a new message: Asians should start worrying about the danger that the U.S.-Japanese alliance poses to regional security. That rang a faint bell among those Southeast Asians who still remember the Japanese occupation in the World War II, but its main effect was to start Asians worrying about Chinese intentions.

Li Peng was annoyed that the newly revised terms of the U.S.- Japan security treaty still commit both countries to the defense of Taiwan. In the best diplomatic tradition, he said that the treaty "aroused suspicion and disappointment not only in China but also in Southeast Asian nations," but the truth is that it arouses very few such emotions -- yet.

The Chinese premier's real message was that it is high time for Southeast Asian countries to start lining up with China against its main rivals in the region, Japan and the United States. Given the general nervousness in the region about the emerging Chinese giant, that was enough to unleash a serious regional bout of nail-biting.

Southeast Asia is full of people who will pounce on any sign of an assertive foreign policy in China as proof that it is becoming a menace to its neighbors. Only last month Philippines President Fidel Ramos was warning that China's rapid growth "will unavoidably press militarily and politically in Asia". The next 10-15 years would be crucial, he said, because "they may turn out to be the last years of (American military superiority in Asia)."

Any event like Li Peng's speech also triggers a new round of articles in the world's press about the Spratly Islands, an archipelago in the South China Sea that is claimed in whole or in part by six countries including China. It's a well-worn formula that always includes lurid descriptions of the growth in Chinese military power: long-range missiles, modern submarines, maybe even an aircraft carrier or two in the near future -- and concludes that the Spratlys are the 'flashpoint' where a war might start.

Journalists write this sort of article because it's easy, just as 'strategic analysts', military professionals, and arms manufacturers focus obsessively on situations like the Spratlys because they help justify their expensive services.

In 1994, for example, the U.S. Naval War College ran a computerized war game simulating hostilities with China in the South China Sea. It ran it again in 1995, and both times the U.S. lost: China's land-based aircraft, submarines, and anti-ship missiles were too strong. There are no prizes for guessing how American naval strategists propose to redress this imbalance.

But it's striking that these self-serving images of an expansionist, potentially aggressive China concentrate so narrowly on the Spratlys (where China's behavior has been no more assertive than that of several other claimants). Could the reason be that there is a distinct lack of other examples of Chinese expansionism?

In the past 35 years, China has fought border wars with India, Vietnam, and the old Soviet Union, but in each case the other side pushed its claim just as hard -- and in no case did China press a local military advantage to seize its own maximum claim.

There has been a lot of Chinese Communist saber-rattling and some shooting around Taiwan over the years, but both parties would agree that this is an internal Chinese affair. It's a dangerous confrontation, but it is NOT evidence of Chinese expansionism.

And now China is publicly re-examining the one indisputable example of Chinese external aggression in the post-war era. Last month, in a new magazine called Hundred-Year Tide, scholars from the Central Party History Research Institute (and you can't get much more official than that) published a lengthy reconsideration of China's role in the Korean War of 1950-53. It overturns every traditional Chinese Communist dogma about the war.

The Party academics, writing under the pseudonym Qing Shi (which sounds the same as 'Clear History' in Mandarin), frankly admit that North Korea launched an unprovoked attack on South Korea in 1950 after prior consultation with the Soviet leader, Josef Stalin, and the Chinese Communist leader, Chairman Mao Zedong. And then they criticize Mao's tactics, strategy, and policy.

He was wrong to approve the plan, he was wrong to send Chinese troops in after the North Koreans were defeated, and he was wrong in his assumption that Chinese manpower could beat American fire- power. He spent three years fighting the wrong war, and meanwhile the chance of quickly seizing Taiwan and reunifying China vanished.

This sort of stuff doesn't get published in China just on some academic's whim. It is a clear warning to 'adventurists' that China's best strategy is still defensive and highly conservative. (Senior Chinese military leaders are even praised for their "lack of confidence in confronting the U.S.") It is also a mature rejection of the childish dogma that China has always been the innocent victim of other people's aggression.

A China whose emerging leadership encourages this kind of critical thinking is not that worrisome a neighbor. And strategic analysts raised in the traditions of the Cold War are not our best guides to its future policies.

One of the most spine-chilling episodes of the Cold War, revealed only last month in the 'Bulletin of Atomic Scientists', was the debate that raged in both Washington and Moscow in the 1960s about whether to make an unprovoked attack to wipe out all of China's nuclear weapons facilities.

In 1964, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk sought Soviet agreement for a military strike at China's nuclear test site at Lop Nor, but Moscow disagreed. Four years later, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev sought U.S. agreement for a similar joint attack on China's nuclear facilities, but this time the U.S. demurred. So nobody got hurt -- but the fools could easily have started World War III in Asia if they had got their timing right.

It was criminal lunacy, driven by basically racist fears that Chinese with nuclear weapons wouldn't be as 'responsible' as Americans or Russians with the same weapons. The current fears about Chinese 'expansionism' fall into exactly the same category. It's not that the Chinese cannot be aggressive -- of course they can -- but there's no hard evidence that they have such intentions.

The writer is a London-based independent journalist and historian whose articles appear in over 35 countries.