Clinton’s win-win formulation of China’s rise fails to convince
In last week’s Intelligence Brief we focused on calls from influential quarters in Washington for the administration to engage more closely with China in the search for a solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis. We expressed scepticism that such an approach would prove fruitful because China’s price for any such help would be too steep for a US administration of any colour. Since we wrote that assessment, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has made a speech to mark the 40th anniversary of President Nixon’s historic 1972 trip to China in which she said that the US is indeed trying to work more closely with China to encourage it to become “an active contributor to global security, stability, and prosperity”. The overt message of the secretary of state’s address was very much in line with the “win-win” formulation of China’s rise that Beijing has been so assiduous in promoting and which the United States has generally been prepared to accept in public. But buried in the speech there was enough to suggest that the Obama administration shares the suspicion of China’s rise that is regularly displayed by the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC), even if its language is more diplomatic. It seems to us that the proposition that the US and China will become harmonious partners in a stable global duopoly is not supported even by those who claim that such a goal is desirable.
Secretary of State Clinton made her address to the US Institute for Peace a week ago, on 7 March. By coincidence, that was also the day on which the USCC published an incriminating report on China’s cyber-espionage and warfare capabilities. The latest USCC report concludes, amongst other things, that:
- The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is pursuing the means to “seize and occupy” the information high ground in the modern battlespace.
- While the modernization of China’s military hardware continues to capture the headlines, the rapid development of a comprehensive Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance infrastructure (C4ISR), “is arguably the most transformative of all PLA efforts currently underway”.
- Computer network operations (CNO) “have become fundamental” to the PLA’s strategic campaign goals for seizing information dominance early and using it throughout a conflict.
- During peacetime, computer network exploitation “has likely become a cornerstone of PLA and civilian intelligence collection operations supporting national military and civilian strategic goals”.
- CNO tools intended to support military contingencies like a Taiwan or South China Sea crisis “also carry appeal for their ability to reach strategic targets in the United States and Western Pacific without requiring the use of conventional weapons and kinetic strikes”.
- The PLA is augmenting its developing CNO capabilities by relying on inputs from China’s commercial IT industry, academia, and civilian and military research institutions. The “inherently dual-use qualities of information technology...allow the PLA to leverage the ‘spin-on’ effect of new innovation from China’s commercial IT sector”.
- Telecommunications hardware companies such as Huawei, Zhongxing (ZTE), and Datang maintain relationships with the PRC government that justify speculation in the US about “potential network attack or exploitation vectors created by the growing presence of these and other Chinese IT companies in global telecommunications infrastructure markets”.
- These concerns are “magnified by the globally diffuse telecommunications supply chain that appears to allow multiple points of access to an adversary intent on corrupting hardware components”, such as integrated circuits or the larger components they support.
Finally, the USCC report concludes that, taken in the aggregate, recent developments in Chinese CNO applications and R&D “point to a nation fully engaged in leveraging all available resources to create a diverse, technically advanced ability to operate in cyberspace as another means of meeting military and civilian goals for national development”.
In contrast to the USCC’s report, Secretary of State Clinton appeared to be highly accommodating to China in her speech to the US Institute of Peace. Following her opening remarks on the importance of Nixon’s work with China, the US secretary of state went on to make three pacific-sounding assertions. The first was that what she termed “the US-China project of 2012” is unprecedented in history because it is the first time when an established power has been prepared to work with a rising power “to foster its rise as an active contributor to global security, stability, and prosperity”. Secondly, she argued that it is wrong to say that the US will “inevitably experience decline” as a result of China’s rise. And, thirdly, she said that the US is not trying to contain China. Clinton said: “To those who ask: ‘Is the United States attempting to contain China?’ Our answer is a clear no.”
This third assertion, in particular, seems to go against the views of the USCC. The USCC’s 2011 annual report to Congress, for instance, included a shift in the way that the US is presenting the China challenge, away from seeing it just in terms of a threat to the US and more as something that threatens the region. When discussing China’s increasing military capabilities, the report said: “The Commission prefers to use the term ‘area control’ for China’s regional strategy, because the terms ‘anti-access’ and ‘area denial’ foster a US-centric view that downplays the PLA’s ability to easily conduct operations against regional states. While US bases in East Asia are vulnerable to PLA air and missile attacks, Japanese, Philippine, and Vietnamese bases are just as vulnerable, if not more so.” The point of this subtle change of emphasis was that these countries need to make common cause with the US – in other words that they need to come together to ‘contain China’.
In practice this can be seen in the much publicized re-focusing of US security policy towards Asia. And it is being acted upon as at the end of this month when Japan is to join the annual US-Philippines military exercise for the first time, with Australian and South Korean forces also expected to take part for the first time in the Balikatan (shoulder-to-shoulder) exercise.
The starkest point to stand out from the USCC annual report was the assessment that China is focusing on controlling the western Pacific and “striking first in order to gain surprise over an enemy in the event of a conflict”. The PLA, the report emphasized, “is acquiring capabilities to allow it to conduct surprise attacks aimed at degrading a superior military’s advantages and preventing an opponent from effectively operating along China’s periphery”.
Now, clearly, dwelling on such fears was not the point of Secretary of State Clinton’s address to commemorate Nixon’s 1972 visit to China. But even in an address intended to put a diplomatic gloss on US-China relations, the secretary of state posed a series of rhetorical questions for China that served to remind her audience that the rise of China is far from being a comfortable development for the US to accept. The questions she posed were:
- Will China adapt its foreign policy so it contributes more to solving regional and global problems to make it possible for others to succeed as well?
- Will it use its power to help end brutal violence against civilians in places like Syria?
- Will it explain its military build-up and the ultimate goals of its military strategies, policies, and programmes to relieve unease, to reassure its neighbours, to avoid misunderstandings, and to contribute to maintaining regional stability?
- Will it uphold international maritime laws and norms?
- Will it work more vigorously to establish international standards in cyberspace, so the internet will be for everywhere and so the people in China can harness its economic and social benefits?
- Will it use its economic standing to enforce a rules-based system for global trade and investment so it can advance its own economic development while contributing to global growth?
- And, can China meet its obligations to protect universal human rights and fundamental freedoms?
There is little doubt that the answer to most of these questions is “no”, and that Clinton intended her audience to understand this. But, even more importantly, even if the answer to most of these questions were to be “yes”, the United States would still have great difficulty in accepting the consequences of a rising China because Clinton’s opening assertion that the US will not “inevitably experience decline” as a result of China’s rise is wrong in logic. All power is relative, and while it may be true that US prosperity will not decline as a result of China’s rise, America’s power – that is its ability to impose its will – must do so.
Finally, it is also worth noting that Secretary of State Clinton’s first assertion, that this is the only time in history that an established power has worked with a rising power “to foster its rise as an active contributor to global security, stability, and prosperity”, is equally wrong. That distinction goes to Britain; and the reasons that Britain’s passing of the baton to the US was so relatively painless was because the two shared close cultural ties and because Britain needed the US to save it from an existential threat. Neither special circumstance applies in the case of the US and China. JdeC.
NOTE: We regularly draw attention to China’s fractious relations with its neighbours, in particular with Japan and the Philippines. This week it is the turn of South Korea to be flustered by China’s territorial claims. On 10 March, the chief of China’s State Oceanic Administration was quoted by the official news agency Xinhua as having said some days earlier that Ieo Island is in waters under Chinese control. Ieo Island is a submerged rock 149km off the southern coast of South Korea’s Jeju Island and within what South Korea considers to be its exclusive economic zone (EEZ). South Korea and China had been negotiating since 1996 on where to demarcate their EEZs, but talks were broken off with no resolution in 2008. On 12 March, South Korea’s foreign ministry lodged an official protest, with Deputy Foreign Minister Kim Jae-shin calling in the Chinese ambassador and telling him that Ieo falls under Korean jurisdiction. Kim was quoted as saying: “We cannot accept any attempt by China to formally exercise jurisdictional control.”
Interestingly, the South Korean daily Choson Ilbo quoted “a government official” as saying that although the US has announced that it is shifting its strategic focus to the Asia-Pacific, it is decreasing its military strength in the region, leading to “an inevitable power vacuum” in East Asia and the Pacific which China may be determined to fill. This is not an impression that Washington will be pleased to see taking root.