One thing you can say about China: Despite all the finesse of her ancient culture and art, she sure doesn’t waste any of that historical delicacy on foreign policy.
In a few very public actions of the last month, the Beijing regime first hosted a high-level American political and military delegation headed by Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott.
Well, maybe the word “hosted” isn’t quite right. Actually, the communist regime deliberately snubbed the group, sent by President Clinton to ameliorate problems over Taiwan, by sending a lower-ranking officer to lecture them over China’s right to Taiwan.
Three days later, Beijing’s State Council, which is in effect China’s Cabinet, issued an ll,000-word “white paper” that for the first time threatened to take “all drastic measures,” which means invading Taiwan if the small and prosperous island would not immediately begin talks toward reunification. Funny, there had been not even a hint of such a dramatic change of policy to the American delegation! (The Chinese can be so forgetful.)
But although China’s friend, President Clinton, immediately dismissed such threats as simply due to the “electoral politics playing out” before the March l8 Taiwanese elections, others had a far more ominous reading of this entire panorama of events unraveling in high and dangerous drama this winter. The American Foreign Policy Council’s perceptive report to congressmen, “The China Reform Monitor,” further reported how Chinese President Jiang Zemin had himself told the Communist Party’s political bureau to “get ready to liberate Taiwan,” which means preparing for “all fields of warfare.”
The fact that China would make such threats just at the very moment when Congress was deep into considering the Taiwan Security Enhancement Act, which would provide Taiwan world-class destroyers–and when the White House was waging a major campaign to get China into the World Trade Organization–is another hint of what the Chinese leadership is really willing to countenance.
But there are some deeper geopolitical truths here.
What we are seeing acted out in China is little less than a test of the administration’s–and the liberal globalizers’ and the conservative libertarians’–ideas that the free market will inevitably lead to development, and that economic development will inexorably lead to political democracy. This is the policy paradigm that has been in place; we can afford to put up with anything the Chinese leadership does because we are really in the process of “changing” them!
There is only one problem: It is not working.
Consider, first, a remarkable new book, “China Debates the Future Security Environment,” just published with the cooperation of the Defense Department. In it, respected China scholar Michael Pillsbury has painstakingly translated documents and opinions directly from 200 of China’s major military and strategic thinkers. In that country where Chairman Mao once commanded the people to destroy all the birds, perhaps not surprisingly he found few doves.
Instead, he found intense and unabated anti-foreigner and anti-American feelings. “The consensus about the U.S. from these authors from the major Chinese think tanks is that we really are a deceptive nation,” Pillsbury says. “We don’t do what we say, and we are up to nefarious schemes around the world. There are even many harsh criticisms of President Clinton.”
The accusations include that the United States is trying to split Tibet and Taiwan from China, that she is trying to separate the Chinese Muslims in Central Asia from China, and that Washington is pursuing NATO expansion only in order to put its heel on the neck of Russia.
Interestingly enough (and frighteningly), Pillsbury found that virtually every one of Beijing’s policy analyses over the years, and today, has turned out to be wildly incorrect. They believe, for instance, that the Soviet Union collapsed because Mikhail Gorbachev was a CIA agent. (One of the worst epithets in China today is to say that someone is “a Gorby.”)
Their faulty logic, of course, leads to faulty policies, as they fit facts to theory in “correct thought,” rather than uncovering facts from empirical proof, as in the Western tradition.
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“You see in these pages a massive misperception that could lead to conflict between the U.S. and China,” warns professor David Shambaugh of George Washington University. “And remember, China has now had an `open-door’ policy for 20 years. These are the very `strategic thinkers’ that the West has brought to world conferences and spent tens of millions of dollars to influence. They have wasted their money.”
In short, we are seeing acted out before us a real duel of misperceptions.
The Chinese are, in fact, still mired deeply both in their own ancient history and in Marxism, which has not disappeared there at all, and they have shown themselves quite capable, thank you, of taking what the foreign companies so eagerly want to give–while giving remarkably little in return.
But they also are matched in misperception by this American administration, which is held captive by its arrogant compulsion to believe that it can really change a remote and hostile universe through the “magic” of free markets, instead of respecting the very real limits that culture and history impose and realizing that political democracy comes only through complex and evolutionary steps.
Unfortunately, it is our misperceptions that also feed theirs –and Taiwan is right in the middle.
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