- ...Chinese leaders believe that, "despite overwhelming
U.S. military and technological superiority, China can still defeat the
United States by transforming its weakness into strength and exploiting
U.S. vulnerabilities through asymmetric warfare, assassin's-mace weapons,
deception, surprise and pre-emptive strikes."
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-
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- Should Bush revise U.S. policy on Beijing in light of
the Pentagon and China Commission reports?
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- The Bush administration's ambiguous China policy got
a kick in the pants recently when the Pentagon and the bipartisan, congressionally
chartered U.S.-China Security Review Commission issued separate reports
describing Beijing's looming military threat to U.S. national interests.
Both reports - mandated by Congress at the end of the Clinton era to evaluate
China's growing military power - ratified the long-stated views of U.S.
national-security analysts that Beijing has been using cash from American
consumers and investors to bankroll an ambitious military buildup that
ultimately may be used to attack the United States.
-
- Both reports begin by warning that the United States
has a poor understanding of the Chinese military and Beijing's intentions
because intelligence and analysis on China is sketchy. And that alone is
sending shock waves through the foreign-policy, defense and intelligence
establishments.
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- "The Pentagon report specifically, but the China
Commission report as well, question a key tenet upon which America's peaceful
relations with China have been based since the early 1970s," says
Richard D. Fisher, a China military expert with the Jamestown Foundation.
"The fundamental tenet being that America expects China to peacefully
settle its differences with Taiwan. This expectation is included in two
of the major communiqués between the United States and China, and
is enshrined as policy in the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act. The Pentagon has
very likely started a major debate within the U.S. government by questioning
for the first time China's willingness peacefully to resolve its differences
with Taiwan."
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- That's a big development. Neither report says it explicitly,
but both issue observations and conclusions that bury the argument of the
George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations that the "People's Republic
[of China] is our partner." Political shenanigans on the China Commission,
and fears in some quarters of the present presidential administration that
the Pentagon report would offend Beijing, made supporters of the missions
of these reports fear that neither would be objectively written or, if
they were, that they ever would see the light of day.
-
- The Communist Chinese government has complained loudly.
In his first Washington news conference, Chinese Embassy spokesman Xie
Feng actually accused the Pentagon and the congressional commission of
lying, warning that the reports could endanger bilateral relations and
world peace. Claimed Xie, "The threat to Sino-U.S. relations, the
threat to world peace, doesn't lie in China but rather in these people
who have fabricated this China threat."
-
- The Pentagon report meanwhile is the product of intense
wrangling between two strains within the Department of Defense (DoD). These
are the go-along-to-get-along attitude of some of the "Clintonized"
flag officers and research institutes (see "Clinton Undead Still Haunt
Pentagon," June 17), and the more real-world policy shop led by Undersecretary
of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith. Administration sources say the
National Security Council held up its publication for half a year.
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- The DoD report smashed the conventional wisdom that China
would be far from able to conquer Taiwan. "Previously, the whole debate
over the threat to Taiwan had been cast through the lens of whether the
PLA [People's Liberation Army] could invade or not invade," Fisher
says. "This was always a straw-man argument because nobody would ever
take seriously the prospect of an all-out, D-Day-style invasion, so the
liberal side of the argument would always discount the threat to Taiwan.
The Pentagon report does a great service by introducing the notion of the
PLA's development of a range of coercive strategies and military options
to use against Taiwan. There are operations, short of an all-out invasion,
that are designed to produce a political outcome, such as a surrender by
Taiwan's leaders after a rapid, two- to three-day blitzkrieg assault."
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- For the first time, an official U.S. government policy
document states that Beijing's military buildup against Taiwan presents
a threat to U.S. allies in the region. The Pentagon report says, "The
PRC's ability to exercise coercive military options presents challenges
not only to Taiwan but also to other potential adversaries, such as the
Philippines and Japan." Fisher notes, "This is the first time
any U.S. government statement has cast China's military as a threat to
the region, much less as a threat to U.S. allies in particular."
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- The report also crystallizes a growing concern about
Russia's massive weapons proliferation to China (see "PRC Arms Itself
to Wage War on U.S.," Aug. 12). "The Pentagon's emphasis on the
degree to which Chinese-military modernization stems from Russian assistance
is indicative of the administration's emerging focus on the Russia-China
strategic relationship," says Ilan Berman, vice president for policy
at the American Foreign Policy Council. "This is definitely a positive
development."
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- "I thought it exceeded expectations," Fisher
says. "Knowing about the degree of dissension among the members of
the China Commission, it was a pleasant surprise. It produced useful and
solid observations and recommendations." Congress created the commission
at the instigation of national-security conservatives a year after requiring
the Pentagon's annual reports on Chinese military power, at the end of
Clinton's term in 2000. The idea was to get the White House and the public
to confront "the national-security impacts of the bilateral trade
and economic relationship between" the United States and China. Congress,
according to a commission document, "wanted the commission to evaluate
whether our economic policies with China harm or help United States national
security and, based on that assessment, to make recommendations in those
areas that will improve our nation's interests" in regular annual
reports.
-
- It seemed the commission would remain in security-oriented
hands until liberal Republican Sen. James Jeffords of Vermont defected
and kicked the Senate to Democratic control. That put Senate Appropriations
Committee Chairman Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) in control of much of the commission's
staffing. Famous for channeling taxpayer money to his home state and to
his friends, Byrd promptly installed old cronies at top levels of the commission
staff. These included longtime staffer C. Richard D'Amato, who had no public
record of expertise on China but who had just wrapped up work with another
congressional commission, that one on the trade deficit. D'Amato became
commission chairman, with Republican Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise
Institute as vice chairman.
-
- Congressional sources tell Insight that the Democratic
majority pushed many conservative commissioners aside - even the only recognized
academic sinologists among them - and allied with Chamber-of-Commerce-type
Republicans who tended to place commercial interests ahead of national
security. They doled out research and writing grants to few specialists
considered tough on China.
-
- Commission leaders even shortened the organization's
name to "U.S.-China Commission," taking out the words "Security
Review" - an illegal act, some insiders cautioned, since the name
was spelled out by federal law. Commission letterhead, staff business cards,
the Website banner and even the site address (www.uscc.gov) all reflected
the soft-soap name change.
-
- Yet somewhere along the way, as experts wrote studies
and provided testimony, the facts fell into place. Human-rights and labor
concerns of liberals found fertile ground among the national-security-minded
conservatives and vice versa. Remarkably, the widely bipartisan group of
12 commissioners, with just a single exception, found what many more-assertive
analysts had argued all along. Their final product became a primer for
a broad-based rethinking of how the United States should deal with China's
regime.
-
- The commissioners wrote that U.S. intelligence collection
and analysis on China continues to be poor; that U.S. leaders have a "limited
understanding" of Chinese official goals because "the U.S. government
has dedicated insufficient resources to collect, translate and analyze
Chinese writings and statements"; that "attempts to build crisis-management
and confidence-building measures between the United States and China have
failed"; that Beijing "sees the United States as a hegemonic
power" and a "superpower in decline"; that the PRC "is
dedicating considerable resources toward preparing for potential conflict
with the United States, especially over Taiwan"; and Chinese leaders
believe that, "despite overwhelming U.S. military and technological
superiority, China can still defeat the United States by transforming its
weakness into strength and exploiting U.S. vulnerabilities through asymmetric
warfare, assassin's-mace weapons, deception, surprise and pre-emptive strikes."
-
- The sole dissenting commissioner was William A. Reinsch
- a former Clinton undersecretary of commerce and now a business lobbyist
who has pushed for relaxing or lifting sanctions against rogue nations
such as Iraq, the Sudan and Cuba that have been identified by the State
Department as terrorist regimes. Reinsch complained, "The commission
majority has bent over backward to avoid describing the Chinese as a 'threat';
yet the belief that they are permeates every chapter" of the report.
Reinsch's dissent thus underlined the commission's accomplishment.
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- Commissioner Waldron's Grave Warning
-
- Commissioner Arthur Waldron, a professor of international
relations at the University of Pennsylvania and a key figure in shaping
the U.S.-China Security Review Commission report, wrote an addendum offering
his own concerns to expand on the document's final draft:
-
- "The wide-ranging purpose of China's military buildup
must be recognized. It is not a response, as is sometimes suggested, to
U.S. support for Taiwan and other Asian friends. Rather, the buildup should
be understood as aimed at excluding the U.S. from Asia, and establishing
the ability to threaten and coerce neighboring states ranging from Mongolia
to Japan to India. This conclusion is supported not only by evidence of
China's capabilities, but also widely available statements of Chinese intent.
If Taiwan did not exist, today's China would still pose serious security
issues to all Asian states.
-
- "Money gained through trade with the U.S. must not
be permitted to strengthen China's military and security apparatus. Current
measures are entirely inadequate. A massive strengthening of counterintelligence
is required; scrutiny must be imposed on Chinese access to U.S. capital
markets, with real sanctions. U.S. companies should be forbidden to do
business with army and security-related Chinese entities. Foreign companies
helping China's military and security apparatus should be denied any participation
in U.S. government procurement or development programs.
-
- "With respect to China's proliferation behavior,
we have all the evidence we need: China is a major source of advanced weapons
to terrorist-sponsoring and other dangerous states. What is required is
firm action.
-
- "Far more work is required, both from the commission
and from government, on China's role (or lack of role) in international
terrorism. Beijing's close connections to terrorist-sponsoring states provide
ample reason for concern.
-
- "U.S. intelligence operations with respect to China
are inadequate and often misguided. Thorough reform is required, along
the lines suggested by the Congressionally-mandated Tilelli report, which
the CIA did not implement."
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- J. Michael Waller is a senior writer for Insight magazine.
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- http://www.insightmag.com/news/259476.html
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