Will China be a super power?

This is the second of two articles based on a paper presented by our Asia correspondent Harvey Stockwin at a conference last Friday sponsored by The Jakarta Post and the Asia-Pacific Economics Group.

JAKARTA (JP): Despite the claims of massive sustained growth made by foreigners, China's statistics are highly suspect. Inside the Middle Kingdom, from time to time, they actually criticize their statistical shortcomings. The foreigners with their external version of the Middle Kingdom complex take far too little notice. Inside China, those who report statistics see the figures as an inevitable part of the perennial political patterns of sycophancy -- sadly, one of the hallmarks of China's political culture. You are not going to tell your bosses that they are doing badly if you want to keep your rice bowl filled. Under a paranoid communist regime, anxious for its very survival, the statistical unreliability factor increases considerably. Yet these dubious statistics are frequently being used -- misleadingly in my view -- to portray China as already being a colossus-in-the-making.

The mundane truth would seem to be that China has been, is, and will remain a major regional power. It will gradually but increasingly become a major world power too. Since it already possesses a few intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads, it can be said to already be a superpower -- but in the all-round sense of a true super power, China will not be a superpower for a long time to come.

There is a lot of confusion on this point. For decades, China officially asserted that it would never seek to become a superpower. In the past, those foreigners inhibited by their belief in the external Middle Kingdom complex often accepted those assertions at face value, which gives the foreigners problems now that it is manifestly not true.

The maxims of China watching should have been applied. The very fact that the assertions were constantly repeated by China clearly signaled that the opposite would be true. The first Chinese nuclear explosion in 1964, plus the 45 nuclear tests which have followed up until the one on July 30th, has pointedly clarified where China's real ambition lay in the realm of power politics.

In the modern media, ambition is too often confused with capability. Thus if tomorrow China buys a helicopter carrier from Spain (as Thailand has done) or if China finally acquires a rusting helicopter carrier from the leftovers of the former Soviet navy, the press (particularly in Southeast Asia) will be filled with talk of China's newly acquired superpower status or hype to that effect.

It will be forgotten that the US navy not merely has eleven large fixed-wing aircraft-carriers, it also has a dozen or so helicopter carriers plus many more of both types in moth balls. Even more important, the US has decades of acquired expertise in the highly complex business of projecting air power at sea. China has none. It will take a long time for China to start projecting sea power, let alone air power at sea. Given the enormous costs involved, one must question what would happen to China's economic prospects were it to even try. Playing catch-up in order to become a military superpower would be ruinously expensive.

So it follows from all this that China is not an immediate threat, in the sense that Japan was an aggressive threat to Asia in the 1930s. But China clearly does possess the potential to be threatening. This is an important distinction to make. Amidst all the alarms of the 1996 Taiwan Straits crisis, it was too often forgotten that the Chinese navy simply did not have the amphibious-lift capability to carry an invading army across the Taiwan Straits. That capability, too, will not be attained easily, or quickly. All that China does have are missiles with which it can threaten to flatten its chief foreign investor -- or the capability to retake a few of the less heavily defended of the 87 offshore islands which Taiwan possesses on the Chinese side of the Taiwan Straits.

It says something about the real balance of real power in the Taiwan Straits that even now, forty years after the two Taiwan Straits crises in the 1950s, China could not be certain of victory if it tried to take the heavily defended offshore islands of Quemoy (Kinmen) or Matsu. Those missiles fired last March into the sea near Taiwanese, and Japanese, territorial waters signaled China's frustration as well as its bellicosity. Thus while China insists that it will not abandon the use of force against Taiwan, it cannot implement that policy short of raining ruin from the skies with its missiles.

Speaking on the economic "threat" from China to ASEAN, Prof. Hai Wen (of Beijing University) suggested that cooperation does not rule out competition between China and ASEAN while, equally, Sino-ASEAN competition does not rule out cooperation. A similar conclusion presents itself on the political front. For now, the Sino-ASEAN relationship is not an either-or situation -- either confrontation or cooperation.

To the contrary, the essence of the situation is that the two choices are complementary. If there is a sensible degree of confrontation by Southeast Asia, there will be cooperation from China. But if Southeast Asia naively offers one-sided concessions dressed up as cooperation, then it had better look out for more confrontation by China. If Southeast Asian states ever make the mistake of behaving like tributary states, then China's Middle Kingdom complex will be reinforced, and they will be treated like tributary states.

All this has been well illustrated by the recent diplomacy concerning the South China Sea. Whenever ASEAN gets its act together, and asserts itself verbally, Chinese conciliation has been observable. When ASEAN concentration on the issue declines, China moves one step further in its cartographic aggression. The lesson is plain: only sustained ASEAN diplomatic confrontation of this crucial issue will lead to Chinese cooperation. Personally, I feel that ASEAN has made a grave error by not insisting, day in and day out, that China must vacate its occupation of Mischief Reef in the Spratly chain. ASEAN was once implacable in its opposition to Vietnamese aggression against Cambodia. The same determination should be applied towards China in the South China Sea. Otherwise, one day ASEAN may wake up and find more reefs flying the Chinese flag.

So, if China is not a superpower, not as strong as its drum beaters make it out to be, and not likely to commit aggression, except in the South China Sea -- what is the real danger?

For this reporter, the real threat is not China's bellicose posture over Taiwan, nor China's aggressive posture vis-a-vis the South China Sea, neither its unhelpful attitude towards Hong Kong, nor its harsh attitude towards its own people. All these are the symptoms of the real threat, NOT the threat itself.

The real "threat" is the unpredictably and potentially dangerous course upon which China's internal politics are set -- which can, in turn, have damaging consequences for all of China's near neighbors.