"I was in Darfur 20 years ago and people were killing each other then. It's an ancient battle between nomadic people and settled people, between Arab Africans and black Africans, between Islam and Christians ... The reason why it has not been resolved is because of China," Geldof said.
AP, Geldof Blames China for Problems in Darfur, April 20, 2006
An ancient African struggle that the Chinese are to blame for? Am I the only one for whom Sir Bob’s remarks elicit the spoink of cognitive dissonance?
Probably so, because dumping on China for its cynical Sudan policies is the cause du jour, especially on the liberal side of the blogosphere.
Nicholas Kristof’s call for 13 million Chinese internet users to rise up and flex their atrophied moral muscles with a call for China to confront its Darfur responsibilities has been linked to with approval by Asia-centric bloggers.
I’m not one of the chorus, because I regard a lot of the Darfur talk as an attempt to counter China’s highly successful economics-driven foreign policy in the third world.
And there may be a local tactical aspect to Washington’s ostentatious outrage as well.
The best thing I’ve read recently on China has been Howard French’s analysis of the covert “Beijing consensus” of economic penetration, contrasted with Washington’s increasingly unpopular reliance on the grim mathematics of zero-sum confrontation to rally allies outside of Europe and Japan.
As I recently posted, Washington’s rhetorical riposte to Beijing’s foreign policy thrust has been the relatively toothless epithet of “mercantilism”. Robert Zoellick has contributed the concept of the “responsible stakeholder”, which is so bloodless and corporate that the Chinese wonk establishment has appropriated the term as its own.
Given the way Beijing has been cleaning our clock in the Third World hearts and minds department in the last three years, by far a more effective way for America to assert that what’s wrong with the world is China’s amoral pursuit of economic advantage is to abandon doctrinal hairsplitting and simply point to Darfur.
Nick Kristof’s op-ed is of a piece with this thinking. He declares that Darfur is a test of China’s obligation to engage in “increasingly responsible behavior”. And right now, China is, according to him, “failing the test”.
After all, China has formed a close reliance with the Sudanese regime in order to obtain access to its oil, which reportedly accounts for 6 to 7% of China’s imports. The PRC reportedly provides military assistance to the regime as well as diplomatic cover at the UN.
All bona fide bad guy stuff.
But one also has to believe that the Sudan would still be pretty screwed up without China.
As the invaluable Wikipedia informs us, the Darfur crisis is the second civil war in recent years between the Arab Muslim regime and other ethnic groups in Sudan. The first civil war, with the non-Muslim south, was settled with a truce and sharing of oil revenues between the central government and the local forces.
The second war, between non-Arab Muslims of Darfur and the central government, commenced in 2002 with attacks by rebels of the Sudan Liberation Movement and Justice and Equality Movement. The central government, apparently uncertain of the loyalty of its conventional ground troops (predominantly of Darfur origin), took the disastrous tack of turning to air attacks and an ethnic cleansing campaign against Darfur villages conducted by an Arab irregular militia, the Janjaweed, in order to counter the rebel strength in the area.
As a result, divisions between Arab pastoralists and non-Arab agriculturalists in the Darfur regime have been exacerbated and, one would expect, rendered permanent.
Peace negotiations between the rebels and the central government, a refugee crisis, a state of belligerence between Chad and Sudan, mediation through the offices of African states and organizations, arguments about whether the incendiary and politically useful charge of “genocide” can be applied to Sudan (answer, according to the UN, No, and according to George Bush and John Kerry, Yes), half-assed peacekeeping initiatives by the African Union, and bloviating by the Great White Fathers of Europe and the United States through the U.N. seem to have had little effect on the Sudanese regime’s determination to proceed with the ethnic cleansing of Darfur and create the “facts on the ground” it deems necessary to its security before the world community takes any meaningful steps to stop it.
Unless one is infected with terminal win-win optimism, there doesn’t appear to be any good solution to the Darfur problem.
The Sudan regime has taken its fateful bite of the ethnic cleansing apple, and there’s no easy return to whatever previous state of grace the nation enjoyed.
Given the orgy of rape, murder, and pillage that the Janjaweed have conducted in Darfur on behalf of the Sudanese government, a return to the status quo ante of somewhat peaceful coexistence and low-level friction between Arab and non-Arab Muslims seems impossible.
The Sudanese government’s probity and political and moral stature are fatally compromised by its encouragement of the ethnic cleansing campaign. A sealed report delivered to the International Criminal Court by the UN in 2005 reported includes a list of 51 war crimes suspects, including many high officials of the Sudanese government.
So it looks like the way forward for Sudan is 1) the world and the regime grits its teeth as a bloody, unjust, and criminal policy is applied successfully in Darfur or 2) Sudan staggers along, an imperfectly punished outlaw state in diplomatic limbo 3) Western troops and money establishes a safe haven in Darfur or 4) Western power forcibly impose a new, advantageous security arrangement on Sudan like we did in Yugoslavia: the outlaw state is attacked, its leaders imprisoned, and sovereignty is divided between various ethnic stakeholders subservient to the West.
Re Option 3, there was some agitation from the Madeleine Albright quadrant last year for using NATO to augment the woefully undermanned and underequipped African Union troops to protect Darfur. However, “Kurdifying” (create an ethnic enclave that was autonomous, permanent, and de facto independent) would simply take the responsibility for Darfur security off the shoulders of the Sudan government while creating a First-World funded buffer between Chad and Sudan—to my thinking, more of a gift to the Sudan regime rather than a punishment.
Also, it has a whiff of that open-ended Clinton incrementalism that the Bush administration repudiated in Iraq when it announced its disdain for “managing” the problem through sanctions, no-fly zones, and containment, and “solved” the problem instead through an invasion.
Finally, one thing that is totally unambiguous is Sudan’s fear and suspicion of an effective military force, be it American, UN, African, NATO, Chinese, or whatever, operating independently in the Darfur region and challenging the regime’s military and political supremacy.
However, Option 4, a Yugoslavia-style regime change undertaking is, given the global outrage over Darfur, somewhat surprisingly not on anybody’s drawing board.
NATO has apparently decided that it does not want Darfur as its first test case to flex its military muscles as world supercop outside the confines of Europe.
Invasion and regime change seem to be off the table, not only for NATO and the EU, but for Washington as well.
Sudan’s Arab Muslims seem to be rather strongly behind the Khartoum regime, and inside the Beltway martial fantasies of decapitating strikes and third-world thugs bending knee to righteous democratic conquerors is probably tempered by images of Black Hawk Down, a Muslim quagmire in Africa to bookend the fiasco in Iraq, and expectations that a new Arab Muslim warlord would probably arise from the rubble of a half-hearted regime-change adventure to reprise the role of the current strongman, Omar al-Bashir.
So, we have a situation in which the West is unwilling to select what might be the best option to end the humanitarian crisis through creation of an expensive and exasperating buffer zone between Darfur and the Sudan and an immense, open-ended effort to construct, fund, protect, and maintain refugee camps for the isolated population.
Military action—the seductive alternative for the great powers—to change the regime and its behavior, and reconstruct a shattered society so that the warring ethnic factions can be reconciled—is a job too big, dangerous, African, and Muslim for the US, UN, or NATO to consider, let alone the Chinese.
So we’re down with Options 1 and 2, which both depend on Darfur somehow becoming a small enough problem, either through the bloody efficiency of the Sudan government or the exhaustion of its enthusiasm for ethnic cleansing, for the West to comfortably ignore it.
That’s before the Chinese come on the scene and cynically cozied up this regime to make oil deals.
So, contra Sir Bob and Nick Kristof, although the Chinese might have plenty of Darfur blood on their hands, China doesn’t represent the origin of, or necessarily the solution to, the Darfur crisis.
In fact, Darfur may be simply another arena in which the Great Game between China and the US is acted out.
Undoubtedly the Chinese don’t like being in the Western bullseye on Darfur.
But they are stuck there.
Chinese oil interests are hostage to the Sudanese government.
The most likely consequence of a harder, more human-rights friendly line against the Sudan by China is the Chinese getting thrown out on their ear and Sudan turning its allegiance and exports over to the West.
Because, in my view, Sudan is not helplessly and exclusively dependent on Chinese support.
An oil exporting nation is never bereft of friends, leverage, or options.
And Sudan is probably no exception.
A rational pariah state might accept aid and support from China; but it would buy insurance by keeping channels open to the West.
And that’s exactly what I believe is happening.
Ever since early 2005, the Bush administration has been ratcheting down the pressure on Sudan over Darfur.
The administration has backed away from calling the ethnic cleansing “genocide”.
Ironically—or significantly—depending on how you construe it, Robert Zoellick, US Assistant Secretary of State and current proponent of the “responsible stakeholder” role for China, was called upon to visit Khartoum in April 2005 and skate away awkwardly from the genocide assertions previously made both by the US Congress and Colin Powell.
The US government reportedly welcomed a top Sudanese official, Major General Gosh—an architect of the ethnic cleansing program, no less--to Washington.
Rightwing fireeater John Bolton has promoted limited, toothless, and ineffectual sanctions and condemnation in the United Nations.
The official backstory is that Sudan has played the War on Terror card and Washington recognizes it as a valuable though unsavory asset in the battle against al Qaeda.
I have my doubts.
Sudan is far enough beyond the pale as an outlaw, radical Muslim state that stands accused of genocide, that its contributions against al Qaeda in the heart of Africa should not be sufficient to gain it an alliance with the United States.
Sudan’s other civil war, between the central government and the Christian tribes to the south, may have played a role in Washington’s rapprochement with Khartoum.
This conflict had made confronting Sudan a hot-button issue for the Christian evangelical movement in the United States and the Bush administration. According to the LA Times, notorious Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff had unsuccessfully solicited the stupendous sum of $18 million dollars from the Sudanese government in 2002 for his good offices in pleading Sudan’s case with Ralph Reed and the Christian Coalition.
However, a peace treaty concluded this conflict in 2005 and partial, sub rosa normalization of relations between Sudan and the United States might have been a quid pro quo for an outcome that mattered deeply to President Bush’s evangelical base.
The United States, perhaps not unhappily engaged with the Sudan regime at last and with a diminished emotional stake in the Darfur tragedy, may have seen it primarily as an opportunity to discommode China.
A genuinely aggressive campaign by the United States of condemnation, ostracization, and destabilization on the issue of Darfur would simply drive Sudan irrevocably into the Chinese camp.
On the other hand, accommodating Sudan offers the US the chance that the Chinese can be expelled from one of their most precious spheres of influence—that’s a gambit in the Great Game that’s worth playing.
If this analysis is correct, then Sudan is playing a double game, relying upon Chinese economic, military, and diplomatic support while at the same time encouraging American hopes that it may eventually veer to the West.
American equivocation and Sudanese opportunism have placed China in the awkward position of having too much at stake and too little leverage in Khartoum.
So, if Chinese bloggers unite behind a campaign to support sanctions against Sudan (sanctions which Kristof himself derides as “the most feeble sanctions possible”), one likely outcome is that China gets kicked out of Sudan, Sudanese oil ends up in US gas tanks, and ethnic cleansing in Darfur continues without respite.
If this was a test for unintended consequences--blind promotion of a supposedly high-minded and moral foreign policy that yielded a catastrophic result--China would indeed “pass the test”: the same test that Nick Kristof and the New York Times and interventionist liberals in general passed when they condoned the invasion of Iraq.
Monday, April 24, 2006
Friday, April 21, 2006
Paging Maltese Security: More About that FLG Blip on the White House Lawn
In the course of cataloging the Bush administration’s series of intentional and unintentional slights to Hu Jintao, the Washington Post reveals that the White House security apparatus does not wish to be judged by the rigorous standards of…Malta (emphasis added):
But as protocol breaches go, it's hard to top the heckling of a foreign leader at the White House. Explaining the incident -- the first disruption at the executive mansion in recent memory -- White House and Secret Service officials said she was "a legitimate journalist" and that there was nothing suspicious in her background. In other words: Who knew?
Hu did. The Chinese had warned the White House to be careful about who was admitted to the ceremony. To no avail: They granted a one-day pass to Wang Wenyi of the Falun Gong publication Epoch Times. A quick Nexis search shows that in 2001, she slipped through a security cordon in Malta protecting Jiang (she had been denied media credentials) and got into an argument with him. The 47-year-old pathologist is expected to be charged today with attempting to harass a foreign official.
What the article reveals is a pattern of intentional Bush administration behavior meant to exhibit its lofty disdain for the Chinese Communist Party regime.
There are strategic and political reasons for giving Hu less than a warm welcome. We also can't rule out the demands of President Bush's ego. He does not like to acknowledge equals or near-equals on the world stage, and China's unwillingness to acknowledge absolute US pre-eminence on Iraq, Iran, and other issues is surely a sore point.
Add to this the fact that Bush’s brief visit to China last year did not go well. The lasting memory of that trip is the historic series of photographs on the front page of the New York Times of Bush trying to blunder through a locked door trying to escape unwanted questions.
Given what we know of Bush’s prickly pride, maybe he passed the word that he wanted Hu to have as unpleasant a visit in Washington as Bush had experienced in Beijing.
Whether or not the campaign to discomfit China included maliciously admitting a known Falun Gong activist into Hu Jintao’s presence, or whether the climate of hostility to China simply encouraged some cavalier White House grunt to engage in a piece of free-lance anti-diplomacy, perhaps awaits the revelations obtained by our bulldog White House press corps.
Another great line from the article:
It took so long to silence her -- a full three minutes -- that Bush aides began to wonder if the Secret Service's strategy was to let her scream herself hoarse.
It’s rather remarkable that we live in a burgeoning national security state dedicating to pre-empting threats before they occur, but when someone apparently becomes unhinged and starts screaming in front of the president, it takes three minutes for the Secret Service to get the memo and move in on her.
Maybe the War on Terror has burned them out and we need some fresh blood.
Paging Maltese security!
But as protocol breaches go, it's hard to top the heckling of a foreign leader at the White House. Explaining the incident -- the first disruption at the executive mansion in recent memory -- White House and Secret Service officials said she was "a legitimate journalist" and that there was nothing suspicious in her background. In other words: Who knew?
Hu did. The Chinese had warned the White House to be careful about who was admitted to the ceremony. To no avail: They granted a one-day pass to Wang Wenyi of the Falun Gong publication Epoch Times. A quick Nexis search shows that in 2001, she slipped through a security cordon in Malta protecting Jiang (she had been denied media credentials) and got into an argument with him. The 47-year-old pathologist is expected to be charged today with attempting to harass a foreign official.
What the article reveals is a pattern of intentional Bush administration behavior meant to exhibit its lofty disdain for the Chinese Communist Party regime.
There are strategic and political reasons for giving Hu less than a warm welcome. We also can't rule out the demands of President Bush's ego. He does not like to acknowledge equals or near-equals on the world stage, and China's unwillingness to acknowledge absolute US pre-eminence on Iraq, Iran, and other issues is surely a sore point.
Add to this the fact that Bush’s brief visit to China last year did not go well. The lasting memory of that trip is the historic series of photographs on the front page of the New York Times of Bush trying to blunder through a locked door trying to escape unwanted questions.
Given what we know of Bush’s prickly pride, maybe he passed the word that he wanted Hu to have as unpleasant a visit in Washington as Bush had experienced in Beijing.
Whether or not the campaign to discomfit China included maliciously admitting a known Falun Gong activist into Hu Jintao’s presence, or whether the climate of hostility to China simply encouraged some cavalier White House grunt to engage in a piece of free-lance anti-diplomacy, perhaps awaits the revelations obtained by our bulldog White House press corps.
Another great line from the article:
It took so long to silence her -- a full three minutes -- that Bush aides began to wonder if the Secret Service's strategy was to let her scream herself hoarse.
It’s rather remarkable that we live in a burgeoning national security state dedicating to pre-empting threats before they occur, but when someone apparently becomes unhinged and starts screaming in front of the president, it takes three minutes for the Secret Service to get the memo and move in on her.
Maybe the War on Terror has burned them out and we need some fresh blood.
Paging Maltese security!
Not a Good Day
Thanks to Peking Duck for the link. More about Dr. Wang's outburst here.
Not a Good Day for Relations Between China and the Bush Administration
The revelation that the White House granted a Falun Gong activist, Dr. Wang Wenyi, a temporary press pass in the name of the Epoch Times, whereupon she hectored Chinese president Hu Jintao at length on the White House lawn on April 20 during the welcoming ceremony, is unlikely to elicit a forgiving shrug from the Chinese government.
Dr. Wang is not a journalist. She is a pathologist, and the lead researcher on Falun Gong's current hot-button issue--the alleged vivisection of Falun Gong practitioners by the Chinese government at a facility in Shenyang, and the sale of their organs for transplant purposes.
The Epoch Times is widely known as an organ of the Falun Gong spiritual practice movement, which has been at loggerheads with the Chinese Communist Party ever since the Chinese government suppressed its practice in 1999.
An analogous situation would have been if the Chinese government had granted a credential to Jose Padilla's mother as representative of “The Newspaper of Record for Increasingly Desperate and Infuriated Relatives of Detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo” and permitted her to participate in President Bush’s visit to Beijing last year.
This quote from the AP report pretty much sums it up:
"It's hugely embarrassing," said Derek Mitchell, a former Asia adviser at the Pentagon and now an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
China "must know that this Bush administration is good at controlling crowds for themselves, and the fact that they couldn't control this is going to play to their worst fears and suspicions about the United States, into mistrust about American intentions toward China."
It will be interesting to see how this spins out. Initial US news reports concentrated on Dr. Wang’s dire—and legally more problematic statements—along the lines of “President Hu, your days are numbered!”
Subsequent reports concentrated on the more civil disobedience-styled Let My People Goisms such as “President Bush, stop him from persecuting Falun Gong!”. More recent reports merely described Dr. Wang as “pleading with Bush to stop the Chinese president from persecuting the Falun Gong”.
Ming Pao reported more categorically that Dr. Wang declaimed in a piercing voice, shouting exhortations such as “Heaven will destroy the Chinese Communists”, “Leave the Party”, “10 million heroes have left the party, when will you leave?”, “Judge Jiang Zemin, Luo Gan, Zhou Yongkang” and “Falun Practice is Great”.
Apparently Dr. Wang’s outburst continued for two minutes—which, one can confidently assume, felt like an eternity for the White House staff—before she was hustled from the scene.
The Epoch Times professed itself as flummoxed as Hu Jintao. The paper waited several hours before issuing a statement apologizing for Wang’s outburst and declaring the paper had nothing to do with it. As a mitigating circumstance, it also stated that Wang and the movement are incensed by horrific reports that the Chinese government is vivisecting Falun Gong supporters and harvesting and selling their organs.
From a domestic Chinese perspective, the image of Falun Gong as an organization of extraordinary reach and resource—after all, these were the same people who hacked into a Chinese TV satellite twice in 2003—has been reinforced.
And part of that image will now include the idea that Fa Lun Gong has penetrated the White House.
Bush administration apologies for sloppy security procedures will gain little traction.
It is difficult to believe that an administration that is so fetishistic about message control that it salts the White House press conferences with hustler-shills like Jeff Gannon to ensure favorable coverage did not understand that Epoch Times is the house organ of Falun Gong and could be expected at least to embarrass Hu Jintao if given the opportunity , if not verbally assault him.
It is also difficult to believe that the Epoch Times sought accreditation for Dr. Wang—who they describe as the key activist and researcher on the vivisection issue—for the White House ceremony with the idea that she would be fulfilling some conventional journalistic function.
I don’t know if Epoch Times has a regular Washington correspondent, but the fact that concerns about security and decorum relating to the admission of an unorthodox representative of an intensely hostile group—moreover, the point person for an issue described as “desperate”-- didn’t set off any alarm bells in the White House does seem kind of fishy.
Maybe there was some kind of nod-and-a-wink going on between a sympathetic party in the White House and Falun Gong to give the movement a platform to get its message out.
If there was, we’ll probably never know.
The takeaway, intentional or inadvertent, is that the Bush administration simply doesn’t care enough, either about Hu Jintao’s face--or about relations with his regime--to take care to prevent such a humiliating incident.
It also leaves the Bush administration open to the accusation that it lacks the skill, discipline, and credibility to conduct a carefully modulated policy of confrontation and conciliation with Beijing on behalf of the free world.
Altogether, not a good day.
Not a Good Day for Relations Between China and the Bush Administration
The revelation that the White House granted a Falun Gong activist, Dr. Wang Wenyi, a temporary press pass in the name of the Epoch Times, whereupon she hectored Chinese president Hu Jintao at length on the White House lawn on April 20 during the welcoming ceremony, is unlikely to elicit a forgiving shrug from the Chinese government.
Dr. Wang is not a journalist. She is a pathologist, and the lead researcher on Falun Gong's current hot-button issue--the alleged vivisection of Falun Gong practitioners by the Chinese government at a facility in Shenyang, and the sale of their organs for transplant purposes.
The Epoch Times is widely known as an organ of the Falun Gong spiritual practice movement, which has been at loggerheads with the Chinese Communist Party ever since the Chinese government suppressed its practice in 1999.
An analogous situation would have been if the Chinese government had granted a credential to Jose Padilla's mother as representative of “The Newspaper of Record for Increasingly Desperate and Infuriated Relatives of Detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo” and permitted her to participate in President Bush’s visit to Beijing last year.
This quote from the AP report pretty much sums it up:
"It's hugely embarrassing," said Derek Mitchell, a former Asia adviser at the Pentagon and now an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
China "must know that this Bush administration is good at controlling crowds for themselves, and the fact that they couldn't control this is going to play to their worst fears and suspicions about the United States, into mistrust about American intentions toward China."
It will be interesting to see how this spins out. Initial US news reports concentrated on Dr. Wang’s dire—and legally more problematic statements—along the lines of “President Hu, your days are numbered!”
Subsequent reports concentrated on the more civil disobedience-styled Let My People Goisms such as “President Bush, stop him from persecuting Falun Gong!”. More recent reports merely described Dr. Wang as “pleading with Bush to stop the Chinese president from persecuting the Falun Gong”.
Ming Pao reported more categorically that Dr. Wang declaimed in a piercing voice, shouting exhortations such as “Heaven will destroy the Chinese Communists”, “Leave the Party”, “10 million heroes have left the party, when will you leave?”, “Judge Jiang Zemin, Luo Gan, Zhou Yongkang” and “Falun Practice is Great”.
Apparently Dr. Wang’s outburst continued for two minutes—which, one can confidently assume, felt like an eternity for the White House staff—before she was hustled from the scene.
The Epoch Times professed itself as flummoxed as Hu Jintao. The paper waited several hours before issuing a statement apologizing for Wang’s outburst and declaring the paper had nothing to do with it. As a mitigating circumstance, it also stated that Wang and the movement are incensed by horrific reports that the Chinese government is vivisecting Falun Gong supporters and harvesting and selling their organs.
From a domestic Chinese perspective, the image of Falun Gong as an organization of extraordinary reach and resource—after all, these were the same people who hacked into a Chinese TV satellite twice in 2003—has been reinforced.
And part of that image will now include the idea that Fa Lun Gong has penetrated the White House.
Bush administration apologies for sloppy security procedures will gain little traction.
It is difficult to believe that an administration that is so fetishistic about message control that it salts the White House press conferences with hustler-shills like Jeff Gannon to ensure favorable coverage did not understand that Epoch Times is the house organ of Falun Gong and could be expected at least to embarrass Hu Jintao if given the opportunity , if not verbally assault him.
It is also difficult to believe that the Epoch Times sought accreditation for Dr. Wang—who they describe as the key activist and researcher on the vivisection issue—for the White House ceremony with the idea that she would be fulfilling some conventional journalistic function.
I don’t know if Epoch Times has a regular Washington correspondent, but the fact that concerns about security and decorum relating to the admission of an unorthodox representative of an intensely hostile group—moreover, the point person for an issue described as “desperate”-- didn’t set off any alarm bells in the White House does seem kind of fishy.
Maybe there was some kind of nod-and-a-wink going on between a sympathetic party in the White House and Falun Gong to give the movement a platform to get its message out.
If there was, we’ll probably never know.
The takeaway, intentional or inadvertent, is that the Bush administration simply doesn’t care enough, either about Hu Jintao’s face--or about relations with his regime--to take care to prevent such a humiliating incident.
It also leaves the Bush administration open to the accusation that it lacks the skill, discipline, and credibility to conduct a carefully modulated policy of confrontation and conciliation with Beijing on behalf of the free world.
Altogether, not a good day.
Thursday, April 20, 2006
Mercan--what???
The administration’s focus on China’s quest for oil was signaled when it published a revised National Security Strategy last month, approved by Mr. Bush, that contained a pointed new entry about China.
That country’s leaders, the document declared, are “expanding trade, but acting as if they can somehow ‘lock up’ energy supplies around the world or seek to direct markets rather than opening them up, as if they can follow a mercantilism borrowed from a discredited era.”
Mercantilism was a post-feudal doctrine of national economic health through protectionism, foreign trade, and exports, but administration officials have repeatedly used it to describe China…
…Mr. Greene…recalled a visit from a senior Chinese official who tried to explain that China was only seeking business deals…”He used the example of Sudan and he said, ‘Look, you know, we don’t care about internal issues like genoicide, we only care about the oil because we need the resources.’”
“And I said, ‘Well, look, that’s mercantilism.’ And the Chinese translator had trouble translating “mercantilism” and they had a big debate about it, and we figured it out. And then they had a big debate about whether I meant that as a good thing or a bad thing.”
David Sanger, China’s Big Appetite for Oil is High on U.S. Agenda, New York Times print edition April 19, 2006
The confusion is understandable.
I would characterize “mercantilism” as post-feudal, post-Renaissance, and post-Reformation, a creature of the Enlightenment, an attempt to apply rational scientific principles to the national economy, and the doctrinal mainstay of the British Empire during its glory years of the 18th and 19th century.
The Chinese have an intimate experience with one of mercantilism’s signature moments and most significant expression: the development of the Chinese opium trade.
The British crown was appalled at the outflow of specie occasioned by England’s thirst for Chinese tea in the 18th century, at a time when the Chinese famously declared no need for British manufactures.
The British response was to stimulate the Chinese demand for opium cultivated in India, and promote and protect that commerce through a series of wars in the 19th century that not only opened up China completely to the trade, but caused the Chinese to lose control both of its customs regime and its revenues and experience a serious balance of trade deficit as its silver poured out of the country. Then, as they say in Hollywood, much craziness ensued, culminating in the Communist takeover in 1949.
Yes, that mercantilism.
The “Mr. Green” referred to in the New York Times quote is Michael J. Green, former Senior Director for Asia at the National Security Council, a very bright fellow, fluent in Japanese, and presumably one of the chief architects of the Bush administration’s China policy.
That policy is predicated on the hope that Japan’s current steadfastness in support of U.S. policy aims in Asia and the Middle East will be rewarded with a giant kablooie in China, instead of witnessing a trend of growing Chinese influence and waning American presence that will send Japan sliding ineluctably into the Chinese camp.
That’s why President Bush seems to spend more time on his trips to Asia communing with Donald Rumsfeld’s lonely pony in Mongolia than he does engaging with the Chinese leadership.
But I digress.
Anyway, Mr. Green surely knows the meaning and connotation of the word “mercantilism”, and that using it to describe an unprincipled grubbing for oil in Sudan very similar to what we do in Saudi Arabia is less than accurate.
For that matter, the death knell for the possibility of a global consensus in favor of laissez faire and the international free trade of oil—and the slide into “mercantilism”--was probably sounded by two US actions: the invasion of Iraq and the US political fracas that led to the abandonment of CNOOC’s bid for Unocal and its offshore, free-market oil resources.
What I think Mr. Green is trying to deal with is an “epithet deficit”.
We want to discommode China, we want to wrongfoot it, we want to frame China in a negative and unwelcome way.
But we’re running out of good epithets.
“Axis of evil” and “rogue state” aren’t available, not for a country that seems to be playing the 21st century economic game almost as well as we are.
“Protectionism” might accurately convey China’s solicitude in not opening its economy wholeheartedly to foreign capital flows and business participation, but “protectionism” isn’t scary. It brings to mind a country trying to protect its economy, not the specter of invading Oriental hordes that elicits steely, desperate resolve on freedom’s front line and justifies multi-billion dollar defense budgets.
To justify the political, economic, and military risks of confronting China--and wean Taiwan, Australia, Indonesia, and India away from the dangerously seductive idea that peace, prosperity, and coexistence might go hand in hand--China’s policy is best described in aggressive, expansionist terms.
At the very least, we hope to characterize China as an immoral and inimical actor on the world stage, greedily playing footsie with dictators in Iran, Burma, and Sudan while the US valiantly tries to build a better, freer world.
How about “global oil hog?”
Nah. Too much “pot calling the kettle black” there.
But I’m afraid “mercantilism” is not going to send shivers down anybody’s spine.
All it does is conjure up the vision of a Chinese foreign policy that’s amoral and refuses to address any ethical issues beyond the win-win math of trade and economic development.
An accurate expression of China’s current policy might be “aggressive globalization of its economy enabled by the United States idiotically shoveling government debt onto the world market to finance an irresponsible national lifestyle.”
We’ll leave that question to the philosophers--and the economists.
Today, with America’s freedom crusade mired in a failed war of aggression in Iraq and seemingly bereft of foreign policy alternatives vis a vis Iran other than infuriated saber-rattling, China’s stance doesn’t really suffer by comparison.
In fact, people might get the opposite idea: that we might advance goals of security and prosperity by welcoming states into the family of nations through trade, rather than ostracizing them.
By the way, the correct Chinese translation of “mercantilism” is “zhong-shang zhu-yi”, “giving the highest priority to commerce”.
And today I guess it’s a “good thing”.
That country’s leaders, the document declared, are “expanding trade, but acting as if they can somehow ‘lock up’ energy supplies around the world or seek to direct markets rather than opening them up, as if they can follow a mercantilism borrowed from a discredited era.”
Mercantilism was a post-feudal doctrine of national economic health through protectionism, foreign trade, and exports, but administration officials have repeatedly used it to describe China…
…Mr. Greene…recalled a visit from a senior Chinese official who tried to explain that China was only seeking business deals…”He used the example of Sudan and he said, ‘Look, you know, we don’t care about internal issues like genoicide, we only care about the oil because we need the resources.’”
“And I said, ‘Well, look, that’s mercantilism.’ And the Chinese translator had trouble translating “mercantilism” and they had a big debate about it, and we figured it out. And then they had a big debate about whether I meant that as a good thing or a bad thing.”
David Sanger, China’s Big Appetite for Oil is High on U.S. Agenda, New York Times print edition April 19, 2006
The confusion is understandable.
I would characterize “mercantilism” as post-feudal, post-Renaissance, and post-Reformation, a creature of the Enlightenment, an attempt to apply rational scientific principles to the national economy, and the doctrinal mainstay of the British Empire during its glory years of the 18th and 19th century.
The Chinese have an intimate experience with one of mercantilism’s signature moments and most significant expression: the development of the Chinese opium trade.
The British crown was appalled at the outflow of specie occasioned by England’s thirst for Chinese tea in the 18th century, at a time when the Chinese famously declared no need for British manufactures.
The British response was to stimulate the Chinese demand for opium cultivated in India, and promote and protect that commerce through a series of wars in the 19th century that not only opened up China completely to the trade, but caused the Chinese to lose control both of its customs regime and its revenues and experience a serious balance of trade deficit as its silver poured out of the country. Then, as they say in Hollywood, much craziness ensued, culminating in the Communist takeover in 1949.
Yes, that mercantilism.
The “Mr. Green” referred to in the New York Times quote is Michael J. Green, former Senior Director for Asia at the National Security Council, a very bright fellow, fluent in Japanese, and presumably one of the chief architects of the Bush administration’s China policy.
That policy is predicated on the hope that Japan’s current steadfastness in support of U.S. policy aims in Asia and the Middle East will be rewarded with a giant kablooie in China, instead of witnessing a trend of growing Chinese influence and waning American presence that will send Japan sliding ineluctably into the Chinese camp.
That’s why President Bush seems to spend more time on his trips to Asia communing with Donald Rumsfeld’s lonely pony in Mongolia than he does engaging with the Chinese leadership.
But I digress.
Anyway, Mr. Green surely knows the meaning and connotation of the word “mercantilism”, and that using it to describe an unprincipled grubbing for oil in Sudan very similar to what we do in Saudi Arabia is less than accurate.
For that matter, the death knell for the possibility of a global consensus in favor of laissez faire and the international free trade of oil—and the slide into “mercantilism”--was probably sounded by two US actions: the invasion of Iraq and the US political fracas that led to the abandonment of CNOOC’s bid for Unocal and its offshore, free-market oil resources.
What I think Mr. Green is trying to deal with is an “epithet deficit”.
We want to discommode China, we want to wrongfoot it, we want to frame China in a negative and unwelcome way.
But we’re running out of good epithets.
“Axis of evil” and “rogue state” aren’t available, not for a country that seems to be playing the 21st century economic game almost as well as we are.
“Protectionism” might accurately convey China’s solicitude in not opening its economy wholeheartedly to foreign capital flows and business participation, but “protectionism” isn’t scary. It brings to mind a country trying to protect its economy, not the specter of invading Oriental hordes that elicits steely, desperate resolve on freedom’s front line and justifies multi-billion dollar defense budgets.
To justify the political, economic, and military risks of confronting China--and wean Taiwan, Australia, Indonesia, and India away from the dangerously seductive idea that peace, prosperity, and coexistence might go hand in hand--China’s policy is best described in aggressive, expansionist terms.
At the very least, we hope to characterize China as an immoral and inimical actor on the world stage, greedily playing footsie with dictators in Iran, Burma, and Sudan while the US valiantly tries to build a better, freer world.
How about “global oil hog?”
Nah. Too much “pot calling the kettle black” there.
But I’m afraid “mercantilism” is not going to send shivers down anybody’s spine.
All it does is conjure up the vision of a Chinese foreign policy that’s amoral and refuses to address any ethical issues beyond the win-win math of trade and economic development.
An accurate expression of China’s current policy might be “aggressive globalization of its economy enabled by the United States idiotically shoveling government debt onto the world market to finance an irresponsible national lifestyle.”
We’ll leave that question to the philosophers--and the economists.
Today, with America’s freedom crusade mired in a failed war of aggression in Iraq and seemingly bereft of foreign policy alternatives vis a vis Iran other than infuriated saber-rattling, China’s stance doesn’t really suffer by comparison.
In fact, people might get the opposite idea: that we might advance goals of security and prosperity by welcoming states into the family of nations through trade, rather than ostracizing them.
By the way, the correct Chinese translation of “mercantilism” is “zhong-shang zhu-yi”, “giving the highest priority to commerce”.
And today I guess it’s a “good thing”.
Friday, March 03, 2006
Parsing the U.S.--India Nuclear Agreement and What It Means for China
East Asia Has Always Been at War with Oceania…Not
It’s difficult to see the nuclear agreement between the United States and India as anything other than a sign of American weakness and skillful exploitation of that weakness by India.
In return for upgraded nuclear cooperation, India agreed to…
…spare the IAEA the aggravation of having to inspect its military nuclear facilities.
In the plan, India agreed permanently to classify 14 of its 22 nuclear power reactors as civilian facilities, meaning those reactors will be subject for the first time to international inspections or safeguards.
The other reactors, as well as a prototype fast-breeder reactor in the early stages of development, will remain as military facilities, and not be subject to inspections. India also retained the right to develop future fast-breeder reactors for its military program, a provision that critics of the deal called astonishing. In addition, India said it was guaranteed a permanent supply of nuclear fuel.
Bush and India Reach Pact that Allows Nuclear Sales, Elizabeth Bumiller and Somini Singupta New York Times, March 3, 2006 (hereafter Pact)
That’s about the only sensible construction one can put on the details of the agreement, which allows India to exempt 8 of its 22 reactors from inspection. Add to that, inspections on the civilian reactors will be phased in over the next 8 years. And there is apparently no limit on military fast breeder reactors, which by themselves can develop enough fissile material to make India a major nuclear power.
"This deal not only lets India amass as many nuclear weapons as it wants, it looks like we made no effort to try to curtail them," said George Perkovich, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "This is Santa Claus negotiating. The goal seems to have been to give away as much as possible."
Dissenting on Atomic Deal, Steven Weisman, New York Times, March 3, 2006
What do we get out of the deal?
The New York Times snarkily concluded its article with the President’s remark:
At the news conference, Mr. Bush and Mr. Singh announced additional cooperative agreements … including the importing to the United States of Indian mangoes, considered by connoisseurs to be among the best in the world.
"And oh, by the way, Mr. Prime Minister, the United States is looking forward to eating Indian mangoes," Mr. Bush said at the news conference. (Pact)
Ah…it’s all about the mangoes.
The subtext for most Bush administration shenanigans in Asia is China, and India is no exception.
The United States has been attempting to lure India into the Western camp as a counterweight against China since Clinton. The stumbling block—now removed—has always been our quaint allegiance to the Non-Proliferation Pact that hung over the legitimization and expansion of the Indian nuclear weapons program and normalized defense ties with the United States.
U.S. courtship of India reached its current, intense stage with the signing of the defense agreement between Rumsfeld and India’s Secretary of Defense last summer that declared that India and the United States had entered into a new strategic partnership.
At the time, the comment was made:
Many of these analysts interpret the recent U.S. courtship of India as part of a wider goal of containing the growing power and influence of India's Asian rival, China.
Lalit Mansingh, India's foreign secretary between 1999 and 2001 who subsequently served as ambassador to the Washington until 2004, agreed that this was a significant agreement. "We have much greater shared interests than we did 10 years ago, and we are talking now about co-production of arms," he said. "This is quite clearly a new step towards strategic partnership." However, he also sensed a shadow of shared U.S. and Indian unease over China lingering over the document, which he said would be the subject of close scrutiny in Beijing.
"China is like the ghost at the banquet - an unspoken presence that no one wants to talk about," Mansingh said. "No one in Washington or Delhi would admit that this has anything to do with China," he continued with a reference to ideological neoconservatives in the United States. "But the U.S. neocons say that the long-term threat to the U.S. can only be from China, and India also realizes that it has a neighbor with whom it has border disputes, whose economic and military growth is greater than its own."
“New era” on Defense for India and U.S. , Amelia Gentleman, International Herald Tribune June 30, 2005
But it is doubtful that Bush’s giveaway will yield more than a sense of exquisite satisfaction in New Delhi, let alone a commitment to containing China.
India has been determinedly pursuing a two-handed policy vis a vis India and China. One might also call it playing one off against the other.
Chinese prime minister Wen Jiabao made a high-profile state visit to India last summer. Other than increased trade, his particular carrot, instead of a endorsing a runaway nuclear weapons program, was to sign an agreement aimed at resolving the nagging border disputes with China. The two nations have proclaimed that 2006 is, of all things, Sino-Indian Friendship Year. Hu Jintao is expected to visit in May.
India and China may be politically and culturally incompatible but it is difficult to find areas of genuine strategic friction.
China’s playground is East Asia, India’s is South Asia.
On the occasion of President Bush’s visit to India, Michael Vatikiotis, former editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review, provided a comprehensive overview of India-China relations in Asia Times.
He concluded:
Apart from regional talk shops, India and China are expected to avoid any head-on confrontation. Both countries' leaderships arguably share a new sense of pragmatism, which understands the risk confrontation poses to economic progress.
The best demonstration of this has been with regard to Pakistan. China has long backed Pakistan, using significant military and financial aid, to prevent India's northward and westward hegemonic extension. Yet Beijing's ties with Islamabad have, perhaps surprisingly, not proved a big obstacle to the recent improvement of India-China relations.
China stays out of the Kashmir quagmire, in return for which India doesn't play games in Tibet - although the Dalai Lama still maintains his headquarters-in-exile in the northern Indian town of Dharamsala. Beijing is notably backing India's candidacy for permanent membership of the United Nations Security Council, although partially as a ploy to scupper Japan's bid for permanent membership.
…
What could go wrong? There is always the risk that China and India will allow pretensions to power and national pride overcome their current tendency toward engagement and cooperation. More worrying is the potential for the US or Europe to drive a wedge between the two historic rivals, playing one off the other to achieve their own political and economic interests. Both are nuclear powers and both have a history of flexing their nuclear weaponry as a bargaining chip with both allies and foes.
US President George W Bush's current four-day visit to New Delhi underscores Washington's recognition of India's growing strategic importance, politically and economically. The United States could just as likely complicate the move toward a new regional balance of power by pressuring India to forge a China containment strategy. That's already happening in Japan, with Tokyo hastily attempting to shore up ties with India as a hedge against what it regards as a more aggressive China.
Such superpower scenarios are all reasonable and historically borne out, but they are grounded in Western-oriented assumptions about the behavior of large powers. The 21st century could just as likely see the rise of two Asian powers drawing as much on their historical traditions of diplomacy and engagement as on the past century's Western antecedents of competition and conflict.
The Asian tradition has arguably placed greater emphasis on trade and diplomacy, with war conducted only on a limited scale and in extreme circumstances. Nandan Nilekani, chief executive officer, president and managing director of Indian software giant Infosys, told global leaders at this year's World Economic Forum in Davos that it was time to "change the perception about India and China being a zero-sum game" and instead presented them as economies that offer complementary opportunities.
China, India, and the land between, Michael Vatikiotis, Asia Times Online, March 4, 2006
India may be willing to fish in troubled waters in Tibet if China teeters into dissolution.
However, India, as Mr. Vatikiotis points out, is too wary of its own irridentist issues in Kashmir and along its northern border to pursue reckless policies vis a vis China and Tibet for the dubious pleasure of erecting an impoverished client regime in Lhasa.
As long as India refrains from fomenting unrest in Tibet and the Land Above the Clouds remains an isolated buffer between Han China and India, there are no existential issues that should compel China to view India’s beefed-up nuclear weapons program with special concern.
Now India is free to continue its even-handed policy. What the United States has gained is less clear.
Absent clear benefits, the Bush administration is engaged in more overt than usual skid-greasing with allies and politically influential defense contractors to sell the deal, as the New York Times pointed out:
The Defense Department issued an unusually explicit statement hailing the deal for opening a path for more American-Indian military cooperation.
"Where only a few years ago, no one would have talked about the prospects for a major U.S.-India defense deal, today the prospects are promising, whether in the realm of combat aircraft, helicopters, maritime patrol aircraft or naval vessels," the Defense Department statement said.
Diplomats familiar with the negotiations with India said Britain, France, Germany and probably Russia would eventually line up to support the agreement, in part because it would clear the way for them to sell nuclear fuel, reactors and equipment to India. They would not agree to be identified, because several countries have yet to signal what stance they would take. (Pact)
Jacques Chirac, continuing his role as America’s new best friend that he commenced by backing our policy in Lebanon and against Syria (and which has been largely ignored in the U.S. press), was the first to chime in:
President Jacques Chirac of France also offered his blessings late Thursday, calling India "a responsible power" and saying access to civilian nuclear energy would help India "respond to its immense energy needs while limiting its emissions of greenhouse gases," Agence France-Presse reported. (Pact)
What this deal reveals more than anything is the bankruptcy of the Bush containment strategy toward China. It is based upon the premise of unmatchable military force that permits the U.S. and its allies to pursue an aggressive China strategy—including the willingness to escalate to armed conflict if the opportunity presents itself—without fear of excessive consequences.
American unilateralism is predicated upon the idea that U.S. backing will embolden client states to risk the prospect of military confrontation with China.
The result of this policy is defense pacts that are supposed to enable to the militarization of foreign policy i.e. including the increased threat of force in the strategic equation. The pacts are intended to be destabilizing, and lead to what is supposed to be for the world’s only superpower a virtuous cycle of escalating tension, culminating if necessary in armed conflict that the U.S. camp is uniquely positioned to survive and profit from.
This policy has been a tough sell for the Bush administration from the get-go, as can be seen from Taiwan’s half-hearted interest in the beefed-up spending regime Washington has been pushing on Taipei, and South Korea’s coldness to the idea that it fulfill the front-line tripwire role at the 38th parallel.
Add to that the dismal results and substantial perils of an aggressive military strategy as masterminded by the Bush administration on full display with Iraq, only Koizumi’s Japan—which views China as an existential threat to its security and way of life—has signed onto the American program wholeheartedly.
By concluding such a one-sided deal, the Bush administration has not drawn India into the American camp. It has merely demonstrated to the world the pleasures—and benefits—of non-alignment.
Regimes like India, which can foresee a future of peaceful coexistence with China, are free to take the gifts that the Bush agreements has strewn with so lavish and desperate a hand, and pursue its strategic and economic interests as independently—and as peaceably—as it wants.
Oceania has always been at war with East Asia—not.
March 3, 2006
It’s difficult to see the nuclear agreement between the United States and India as anything other than a sign of American weakness and skillful exploitation of that weakness by India.
In return for upgraded nuclear cooperation, India agreed to…
…spare the IAEA the aggravation of having to inspect its military nuclear facilities.
In the plan, India agreed permanently to classify 14 of its 22 nuclear power reactors as civilian facilities, meaning those reactors will be subject for the first time to international inspections or safeguards.
The other reactors, as well as a prototype fast-breeder reactor in the early stages of development, will remain as military facilities, and not be subject to inspections. India also retained the right to develop future fast-breeder reactors for its military program, a provision that critics of the deal called astonishing. In addition, India said it was guaranteed a permanent supply of nuclear fuel.
Bush and India Reach Pact that Allows Nuclear Sales, Elizabeth Bumiller and Somini Singupta New York Times, March 3, 2006 (hereafter Pact)
That’s about the only sensible construction one can put on the details of the agreement, which allows India to exempt 8 of its 22 reactors from inspection. Add to that, inspections on the civilian reactors will be phased in over the next 8 years. And there is apparently no limit on military fast breeder reactors, which by themselves can develop enough fissile material to make India a major nuclear power.
"This deal not only lets India amass as many nuclear weapons as it wants, it looks like we made no effort to try to curtail them," said George Perkovich, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "This is Santa Claus negotiating. The goal seems to have been to give away as much as possible."
Dissenting on Atomic Deal, Steven Weisman, New York Times, March 3, 2006
What do we get out of the deal?
The New York Times snarkily concluded its article with the President’s remark:
At the news conference, Mr. Bush and Mr. Singh announced additional cooperative agreements … including the importing to the United States of Indian mangoes, considered by connoisseurs to be among the best in the world.
"And oh, by the way, Mr. Prime Minister, the United States is looking forward to eating Indian mangoes," Mr. Bush said at the news conference. (Pact)
Ah…it’s all about the mangoes.
The subtext for most Bush administration shenanigans in Asia is China, and India is no exception.
The United States has been attempting to lure India into the Western camp as a counterweight against China since Clinton. The stumbling block—now removed—has always been our quaint allegiance to the Non-Proliferation Pact that hung over the legitimization and expansion of the Indian nuclear weapons program and normalized defense ties with the United States.
U.S. courtship of India reached its current, intense stage with the signing of the defense agreement between Rumsfeld and India’s Secretary of Defense last summer that declared that India and the United States had entered into a new strategic partnership.
At the time, the comment was made:
Many of these analysts interpret the recent U.S. courtship of India as part of a wider goal of containing the growing power and influence of India's Asian rival, China.
Lalit Mansingh, India's foreign secretary between 1999 and 2001 who subsequently served as ambassador to the Washington until 2004, agreed that this was a significant agreement. "We have much greater shared interests than we did 10 years ago, and we are talking now about co-production of arms," he said. "This is quite clearly a new step towards strategic partnership." However, he also sensed a shadow of shared U.S. and Indian unease over China lingering over the document, which he said would be the subject of close scrutiny in Beijing.
"China is like the ghost at the banquet - an unspoken presence that no one wants to talk about," Mansingh said. "No one in Washington or Delhi would admit that this has anything to do with China," he continued with a reference to ideological neoconservatives in the United States. "But the U.S. neocons say that the long-term threat to the U.S. can only be from China, and India also realizes that it has a neighbor with whom it has border disputes, whose economic and military growth is greater than its own."
“New era” on Defense for India and U.S. , Amelia Gentleman, International Herald Tribune June 30, 2005
But it is doubtful that Bush’s giveaway will yield more than a sense of exquisite satisfaction in New Delhi, let alone a commitment to containing China.
India has been determinedly pursuing a two-handed policy vis a vis India and China. One might also call it playing one off against the other.
Chinese prime minister Wen Jiabao made a high-profile state visit to India last summer. Other than increased trade, his particular carrot, instead of a endorsing a runaway nuclear weapons program, was to sign an agreement aimed at resolving the nagging border disputes with China. The two nations have proclaimed that 2006 is, of all things, Sino-Indian Friendship Year. Hu Jintao is expected to visit in May.
India and China may be politically and culturally incompatible but it is difficult to find areas of genuine strategic friction.
China’s playground is East Asia, India’s is South Asia.
On the occasion of President Bush’s visit to India, Michael Vatikiotis, former editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review, provided a comprehensive overview of India-China relations in Asia Times.
He concluded:
Apart from regional talk shops, India and China are expected to avoid any head-on confrontation. Both countries' leaderships arguably share a new sense of pragmatism, which understands the risk confrontation poses to economic progress.
The best demonstration of this has been with regard to Pakistan. China has long backed Pakistan, using significant military and financial aid, to prevent India's northward and westward hegemonic extension. Yet Beijing's ties with Islamabad have, perhaps surprisingly, not proved a big obstacle to the recent improvement of India-China relations.
China stays out of the Kashmir quagmire, in return for which India doesn't play games in Tibet - although the Dalai Lama still maintains his headquarters-in-exile in the northern Indian town of Dharamsala. Beijing is notably backing India's candidacy for permanent membership of the United Nations Security Council, although partially as a ploy to scupper Japan's bid for permanent membership.
…
What could go wrong? There is always the risk that China and India will allow pretensions to power and national pride overcome their current tendency toward engagement and cooperation. More worrying is the potential for the US or Europe to drive a wedge between the two historic rivals, playing one off the other to achieve their own political and economic interests. Both are nuclear powers and both have a history of flexing their nuclear weaponry as a bargaining chip with both allies and foes.
US President George W Bush's current four-day visit to New Delhi underscores Washington's recognition of India's growing strategic importance, politically and economically. The United States could just as likely complicate the move toward a new regional balance of power by pressuring India to forge a China containment strategy. That's already happening in Japan, with Tokyo hastily attempting to shore up ties with India as a hedge against what it regards as a more aggressive China.
Such superpower scenarios are all reasonable and historically borne out, but they are grounded in Western-oriented assumptions about the behavior of large powers. The 21st century could just as likely see the rise of two Asian powers drawing as much on their historical traditions of diplomacy and engagement as on the past century's Western antecedents of competition and conflict.
The Asian tradition has arguably placed greater emphasis on trade and diplomacy, with war conducted only on a limited scale and in extreme circumstances. Nandan Nilekani, chief executive officer, president and managing director of Indian software giant Infosys, told global leaders at this year's World Economic Forum in Davos that it was time to "change the perception about India and China being a zero-sum game" and instead presented them as economies that offer complementary opportunities.
China, India, and the land between, Michael Vatikiotis, Asia Times Online, March 4, 2006
India may be willing to fish in troubled waters in Tibet if China teeters into dissolution.
However, India, as Mr. Vatikiotis points out, is too wary of its own irridentist issues in Kashmir and along its northern border to pursue reckless policies vis a vis China and Tibet for the dubious pleasure of erecting an impoverished client regime in Lhasa.
As long as India refrains from fomenting unrest in Tibet and the Land Above the Clouds remains an isolated buffer between Han China and India, there are no existential issues that should compel China to view India’s beefed-up nuclear weapons program with special concern.
Now India is free to continue its even-handed policy. What the United States has gained is less clear.
Absent clear benefits, the Bush administration is engaged in more overt than usual skid-greasing with allies and politically influential defense contractors to sell the deal, as the New York Times pointed out:
The Defense Department issued an unusually explicit statement hailing the deal for opening a path for more American-Indian military cooperation.
"Where only a few years ago, no one would have talked about the prospects for a major U.S.-India defense deal, today the prospects are promising, whether in the realm of combat aircraft, helicopters, maritime patrol aircraft or naval vessels," the Defense Department statement said.
Diplomats familiar with the negotiations with India said Britain, France, Germany and probably Russia would eventually line up to support the agreement, in part because it would clear the way for them to sell nuclear fuel, reactors and equipment to India. They would not agree to be identified, because several countries have yet to signal what stance they would take. (Pact)
Jacques Chirac, continuing his role as America’s new best friend that he commenced by backing our policy in Lebanon and against Syria (and which has been largely ignored in the U.S. press), was the first to chime in:
President Jacques Chirac of France also offered his blessings late Thursday, calling India "a responsible power" and saying access to civilian nuclear energy would help India "respond to its immense energy needs while limiting its emissions of greenhouse gases," Agence France-Presse reported. (Pact)
What this deal reveals more than anything is the bankruptcy of the Bush containment strategy toward China. It is based upon the premise of unmatchable military force that permits the U.S. and its allies to pursue an aggressive China strategy—including the willingness to escalate to armed conflict if the opportunity presents itself—without fear of excessive consequences.
American unilateralism is predicated upon the idea that U.S. backing will embolden client states to risk the prospect of military confrontation with China.
The result of this policy is defense pacts that are supposed to enable to the militarization of foreign policy i.e. including the increased threat of force in the strategic equation. The pacts are intended to be destabilizing, and lead to what is supposed to be for the world’s only superpower a virtuous cycle of escalating tension, culminating if necessary in armed conflict that the U.S. camp is uniquely positioned to survive and profit from.
This policy has been a tough sell for the Bush administration from the get-go, as can be seen from Taiwan’s half-hearted interest in the beefed-up spending regime Washington has been pushing on Taipei, and South Korea’s coldness to the idea that it fulfill the front-line tripwire role at the 38th parallel.
Add to that the dismal results and substantial perils of an aggressive military strategy as masterminded by the Bush administration on full display with Iraq, only Koizumi’s Japan—which views China as an existential threat to its security and way of life—has signed onto the American program wholeheartedly.
By concluding such a one-sided deal, the Bush administration has not drawn India into the American camp. It has merely demonstrated to the world the pleasures—and benefits—of non-alignment.
Regimes like India, which can foresee a future of peaceful coexistence with China, are free to take the gifts that the Bush agreements has strewn with so lavish and desperate a hand, and pursue its strategic and economic interests as independently—and as peaceably—as it wants.
Oceania has always been at war with East Asia—not.
March 3, 2006
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Arthur Waldron Visits China Matters...And Is Not Amused
A while back I posted a lament that the New York Times quoted Arthur Waldron on the matter of Chinese policy activities vis a vis Uzbekistan, without identifying Prof. Waldron as someone whose views on China and the Chinese threat were well to the right and who, in fact, is worshipped as a tutelary deity by the “Blue Team” of distinctly non-Asian-expert conservatives that have found post Cold-War careers in hyping the Chinese threat. Arthur Waldron and the Rightward Drift of
Although I took deliberate pains to ascribe Prof. Waldron’s comments to his rather unique views of
For the convenience of the reader, I reproduce my post and Prof. Waldron’s comments below.
Professor Waldron’s dismissive statement that “The Blue Team exists mostly in the mind of those who fear them” will provide food for thought and amusement for us, and possibly dismay for that group of panda-affronted
After all, the Blue Team seeks to cultivate an aura of mystery and menace concerning its hidden web of connections and virtuous conspiracies inside the Washington national security establishment, possibly to compensate for the limitations of intellect, experience, credibility, and achievement that characterize its non-covert activities:
The impact of the Blue Team still "isn't nearly what this community [of
hard-liners] desires," lamented Richard Fisher…. But he noted with
satisfaction that the Blue Team "strikes terror into the heart" of
The interesting issue of whether Professor Waldron is choosing to distance himself from the Blue Team as a matter of tactics or of principle could be addressed more easily if he started his own blog and deconstructed the inside-the-Beltway gyrations of the Blue Team from his privileged perspective--something that I encourage him to do, so his views can be better examined and understood in full context as he desires.
Professor Waldron concludes with the canard that my anonymity is a mark against my character and presumably discredits my views.
To clarify: I do not know Prof. Waldron professionally or personally. I have a career far removed from academics or public policy, a career which I choose not to endanger by linking my identity to this blog.
In the unlikely event I decide to make a job of retailing my views on China and decide to use my professional standing to enhance the credibility and visibility of my opinions—as Professor Waldron has--I will paint the bull’s eye on my back, abandon the China Hand nom de plume, and provide readers with the dubious pleasure of directing their comments to a name instead of a persona.
Until then, Professor Waldron will have to satisfy himself with addressing the matters of fact and opinion posted on this blog, instead of the individual behind them.
I remain, respectfully—and anonymously:
Arthur Waldron and the Rightward Drift of U.S. Discourse on China
In Joseph Kahn and Chris Buckley’s article in the New York Times, China Gives a Strategic 21-Gun Salute to Visiting Uzbek President, a
"Energy is clearly one driver for
Hmmm. Not exactly the way I read it.
In the interests of full disclosure, I think Kahn and Buckley should have identified Waldron as affiliated with the self-identified “Blue Team” of confront-China enthusiasts seeking to permeate the Pentagon and State Department.
Waldron is the former Director of Asian Studies at the American Enterprise Institute; signatory to Project for the New American Century statements on Taiwan and Hong Kong; served on the boards of various right-leaning foundations, and testifies to Congress on the China threat.
In the feisty days when
He provides academic credibility and cover for the Blue Team, which is composed largely of anti-PRC enthusiasts with limited backgrounds in Asian affairs, in role similar to the one Bernard Lewis played for the neo-cons over
It may be unfair, but I see Waldron, like Lewis, as an academic at best prescribing tough love for his area of study and at worst sounding positively Sinophobic.
In considering 20th century
So perhaps we should listen to other historians, less well known than those who concentrate on Japanese domestic history {for the origins of the China invasion}, stressing instead a series of completely unexpected developments in the region that even the most liberal Japanese leaders saw as threatening to their country’s security.
Most important of these was a strong but erratically guided rise of Chinese power that saw that country’s government, goading and reacting to the resentments of her people, flout many of the undertakings she had made at Washington {at the Washington Conference of 1921-22--CH}.
Almost simultaneously came political splits and then civil wars in a
One element of a parallel to these developments is already in place.
Translation: The Chinese were asking for it in the 1930s and now they’re asking for it again today.
Most students of the period tend to blame Japanese belligerence and imperial ambition for the catastrophe of the Pacific War, not Chinese provocation.
As Waldron himself admits, he’s in the minority in his reading of modern Asian history.
So it seems to me a sign of the rightward drift in the popular discourse about
When Waldron depicts China’s outreach to the Uzbekistan regime primarily as a move touching on the mother of all American strategic interests—oil—and a provocative nose thumbing at the United States…
…instead of a clumsy embrace driven by China’s fear that weakening of authoritarian regimes in Central Asia will give the Muslims of Xinjiang a thirst for the same kind of populist, anti-government activism and promise of democratic self-determination that has roiled Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan…
…it makes me wonder if he’s trying to create a pressing issue for America in China’s relationship with Uzbekistan that really isn’t there.
If anything, China may be using its ostentatious show of support for Karimov to signal to the United States that China is fully vested in the survival of this pro-American tyrant and the U.S. government should not feel there is any need—or compelling alternative—to abandoning him.
Arthur Waldron’s Comment
Dear Colleagues--
I am still squinting from the limelight your blog has directed on me. A few
comments:
First, no one who spends thirty plus years of his life on classical and modern
Chinese can have anything but a very high opinion of Chinese civilization. No
one who knows me would question that.
Second, no one who is named for a young American who died fighting in the
Third, the only point of being an intellectual--and I am, in the sense that I am
paid, for life, to think about things and comment, is to CALL THINGS AS YOU SEE
THEM.
Fourth, while I am pleased to see the great changes in
see much eagerness to attack the fundamentals: freeing the press, freeing the
prisoners, allowing elections and opposition parties, making the currency
convertible, etc. The longer this is put off, the more difficult change
becomes, the more opportunities are wasted amd the more difficult the problems
are when the inevitable crash comes.
Fifth, I note a distinct unwillingness on the part of many colleagues to face
directly the worrying aspects of
surveillance, and wasteful military buildup.
Having these views does not make you anti-China. And I would hate to think that
supporting democracy, freedom, and dignity now places me on the "right." Note
that the real hard line communists in
who are against them are also called conservatives. This makes no sense.
The Blue Team is not a team and is very loose, it exists mostly in the mind of
those who fear it.
As for your comments on the one phrase extracted from a long interview, they do
not adequately convey my full views on a subject I have studied for many years.
Read my books and articles, not just the stuff that turns up on the net. I am
difficult to pigeonhole.
Rather than follow personalities, follow the facts. As Zoellick's fine speech
made clear, these are not ideal.
I have never sought to be an intellectual leader. I just try to say what I
believe and stick by it, damn the torpedoes. I have taken some hits. What do
you do?
Lets get back to the facts. They provide plenty to discuss.
And here is my name: Arthur Waldron. You know where to find me. The person
behind this blog does not even have the guts to admit who he is. That is NOT
how I operate. Even if it is a negative tenure letter, I write it so that I
could present it in person to the subject. It might be difficult, but the words
would be straight.
Best to All Arthur Waldron
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
The Willkie/Soong May-ling Affair
Taiwan intellectual, legislator, firebrand, and free spirit Li Ao acquired a further distinction--dingbat--during the 2000 presidential election by alleging an affair between Mdme. Chiang Kai-shek (Soong May-ling) and U.S. political figure Wendell Willkie during the Chungking years.
Turns out, he was right.
In The Soong Dynasty, author Sterling Seagrave had already cited John Service's on-the-scene but anodyne reports on the apparent mutual interest between Willkie and Soong May-ling, which led to Willkie paving the way for Mdme. Chiang's triumphal visit to the United States in 1943.
The story was taken a step further in Jonathan Fenby's recent biography of Chiang Kai-shek.
Fenby quotes virtually verbatim (and fully cites) Mike Looks Back, a privately published memoir (1985) by Gardner Cowles, scion of a publishing empire that included Look magazine. Cowles was Willkie's supporter and confidant during Willkie's political career, which culminated with a presidential run against FDR in 1940.
In 1942, FDR dispatched Willkie on an around-the-world fact-finding trip accompanied by Cowles. During a brief stay in Chungking, Willkie and Mdme. Soong became powerfully enamoured of each other.
On one occasion they slipped away from a government reception, leaving Cowles to divert the attention and wrath of Chiang Kai-shek. Later that evening, the Generalissimo appeared at Cowles and Willkie's quarters and searched it from top to bottom in a vain effort to find his wife.
At 4:00 am Willkie returned, in Cowles' words "cocky as a young college student after a successful night with a girl...giving me a play by play account of what had happened"--though Cowles is too much the gentleman to reveal the details himself.
Then Wilkie announced to an astounded Cowles that he wanted to bring Soong May-ling back to Washington with him.
Cowles convinced Willkie such an escapade would doom his political aspirations. As repayment Cowles was delegated to deliver the bad news to Mdme. Soong. Her reaction created an indelible impression on him:
Before I knew what was happening she reached up and scratched her long fingernails down both my cheeks so deeply that I had marks for about a week.
When Mdme. Soong eventually made her historic trip to the United States the next year, she summoned Cowles to her suite in the Waldorf and proposed that he devote himself exclusively to obtaining the Republican presidential nomination for Willkie, spending whatever was necessary--with his expenses to be reimbursed by Mdme. Soong:
...she wound up her sales talk with a remark I shall never forget: "You know, Mike, if Wendell could be elected, then he and I would rule the world. I would rule the Orient and Wendell would rule the Western world." And she stressed the word rule.
After the war, Cowles repeated the story to his wife, sophisticate/socialite/inveterate name dropper Fleur Cowles. While deriding Mike Looks Back as ghost-written and inaccurate, at least as it pertains to the launch of her legendary style magazine Flair, she retells the Mdme. Chiang/Willkie story herself in her own 1996 memoir She Made Friends and Kept Them, confirming more explicitly that the encounter was a secret tryst between the two and not simply a tete a tete about absolute world domination:
On this historic trip, Mme Chiang had her dangerous, short-lived affair with Wendell Willkie ...This brief love affair...had taken place in Mme Chiang's secret apartment on the top floor of the Women's and Children's Hospital. Mme Chiang was so besotted by Willkie she asked to see Mike Cowles privately before they left China, pleading with him to make sure that Willkie would beat Roosevelt in the next election for the Presidency. She offered to pay any costs! [Emphasis in original]
The conversation concluded with her agitated promise: 'If Wendell could be elected, he and I would rule the world, I the Orient, Wendell the rest.'
Gardner and Fleur Cowles divorced, apparently not on the best of terms, in 1955. By conflating the two conversations between Mdme. Chiang and Gardner Cowles, she seems to be relying on her own recollections of 40-year old events--indeed she recollects that her husband told her the story "shortly after we were married"--and not regurgitating Gardner Cowles' disparaged memoir.
Amusingly, Fleur Cowles seems unaware of what must have been Mdme. Chiang's resentment at Gardner Cowles for interfering with her plans for the ultimate, world-conquering power couple romance, and for failing to catapault Willkie into the White House in 1944.
When Fleur Cowles unexpectedly passed through Taiwan in 1953, Mdme. Chiang dropped her off at her accommodations--a fog shrouded, cliffside concrete aerie with "hideously primitive" sanitation, originally used as a final residence for Japanese kamikaze pilots--and told the snake-phobic Cowles sharply:
Don't worry about rats, Fleur. My housekeeper keeps a boa constrictor.
A bemused Cowles concludes:
...I used to reason that, in all likelihood, neither snake nor housekeeper really existed, that the snake had been conjured up as a mischievous form of revenge by Mme Chiang for 'dropping in' on her but...I just couldn't sleep. By the time I left, I had decided that insects, whether flying or crawling, and the hole in the floor for sanitation, were horrible enough to make the snake merely another ingredient in a nightmare.
Gardner Cowles' recollections, complete with claw marks, can't be dismissed as hearsay or third-hand tittle-tattle. And it was a story he regaled his wife with shortly after the event, before age, imagination, and fading memory had taken their toll.
The question that interests me is What did Li Ao know--and when did he know it? Did he glean allegations from the otherwise obscure memoirs of Gardner and Fleur Cowles? Or are there other voices?
Turns out, he was right.
In The Soong Dynasty, author Sterling Seagrave had already cited John Service's on-the-scene but anodyne reports on the apparent mutual interest between Willkie and Soong May-ling, which led to Willkie paving the way for Mdme. Chiang's triumphal visit to the United States in 1943.
The story was taken a step further in Jonathan Fenby's recent biography of Chiang Kai-shek.
Fenby quotes virtually verbatim (and fully cites) Mike Looks Back, a privately published memoir (1985) by Gardner Cowles, scion of a publishing empire that included Look magazine. Cowles was Willkie's supporter and confidant during Willkie's political career, which culminated with a presidential run against FDR in 1940.
In 1942, FDR dispatched Willkie on an around-the-world fact-finding trip accompanied by Cowles. During a brief stay in Chungking, Willkie and Mdme. Soong became powerfully enamoured of each other.
On one occasion they slipped away from a government reception, leaving Cowles to divert the attention and wrath of Chiang Kai-shek. Later that evening, the Generalissimo appeared at Cowles and Willkie's quarters and searched it from top to bottom in a vain effort to find his wife.
At 4:00 am Willkie returned, in Cowles' words "cocky as a young college student after a successful night with a girl...giving me a play by play account of what had happened"--though Cowles is too much the gentleman to reveal the details himself.
Then Wilkie announced to an astounded Cowles that he wanted to bring Soong May-ling back to Washington with him.
Cowles convinced Willkie such an escapade would doom his political aspirations. As repayment Cowles was delegated to deliver the bad news to Mdme. Soong. Her reaction created an indelible impression on him:
Before I knew what was happening she reached up and scratched her long fingernails down both my cheeks so deeply that I had marks for about a week.
When Mdme. Soong eventually made her historic trip to the United States the next year, she summoned Cowles to her suite in the Waldorf and proposed that he devote himself exclusively to obtaining the Republican presidential nomination for Willkie, spending whatever was necessary--with his expenses to be reimbursed by Mdme. Soong:
...she wound up her sales talk with a remark I shall never forget: "You know, Mike, if Wendell could be elected, then he and I would rule the world. I would rule the Orient and Wendell would rule the Western world." And she stressed the word rule.
After the war, Cowles repeated the story to his wife, sophisticate/socialite/inveterate name dropper Fleur Cowles. While deriding Mike Looks Back as ghost-written and inaccurate, at least as it pertains to the launch of her legendary style magazine Flair, she retells the Mdme. Chiang/Willkie story herself in her own 1996 memoir She Made Friends and Kept Them, confirming more explicitly that the encounter was a secret tryst between the two and not simply a tete a tete about absolute world domination:
On this historic trip, Mme Chiang had her dangerous, short-lived affair with Wendell Willkie ...This brief love affair...had taken place in Mme Chiang's secret apartment on the top floor of the Women's and Children's Hospital. Mme Chiang was so besotted by Willkie she asked to see Mike Cowles privately before they left China, pleading with him to make sure that Willkie would beat Roosevelt in the next election for the Presidency. She offered to pay any costs! [Emphasis in original]
The conversation concluded with her agitated promise: 'If Wendell could be elected, he and I would rule the world, I the Orient, Wendell the rest.'
Gardner and Fleur Cowles divorced, apparently not on the best of terms, in 1955. By conflating the two conversations between Mdme. Chiang and Gardner Cowles, she seems to be relying on her own recollections of 40-year old events--indeed she recollects that her husband told her the story "shortly after we were married"--and not regurgitating Gardner Cowles' disparaged memoir.
Amusingly, Fleur Cowles seems unaware of what must have been Mdme. Chiang's resentment at Gardner Cowles for interfering with her plans for the ultimate, world-conquering power couple romance, and for failing to catapault Willkie into the White House in 1944.
When Fleur Cowles unexpectedly passed through Taiwan in 1953, Mdme. Chiang dropped her off at her accommodations--a fog shrouded, cliffside concrete aerie with "hideously primitive" sanitation, originally used as a final residence for Japanese kamikaze pilots--and told the snake-phobic Cowles sharply:
Don't worry about rats, Fleur. My housekeeper keeps a boa constrictor.
A bemused Cowles concludes:
...I used to reason that, in all likelihood, neither snake nor housekeeper really existed, that the snake had been conjured up as a mischievous form of revenge by Mme Chiang for 'dropping in' on her but...I just couldn't sleep. By the time I left, I had decided that insects, whether flying or crawling, and the hole in the floor for sanitation, were horrible enough to make the snake merely another ingredient in a nightmare.
Gardner Cowles' recollections, complete with claw marks, can't be dismissed as hearsay or third-hand tittle-tattle. And it was a story he regaled his wife with shortly after the event, before age, imagination, and fading memory had taken their toll.
The question that interests me is What did Li Ao know--and when did he know it? Did he glean allegations from the otherwise obscure memoirs of Gardner and Fleur Cowles? Or are there other voices?
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