Re: China Concerns

A brief reply.  Interesting question.  Key to me is China's history.  Not
expansionist.  Thus, unless the trajectory is seriously turned for some
reason, I see no collisions with China.  The idea of conflicting national
interests is based primarily on market share problems which China poses, but
I've yet to see Asian nations defend market shares militarily.  The
combination of military and markets is rather uniquely European.  Hence, to
tread briefly on dangerous ground, I think Frank is correct there existed
historically accumulation of capital in Asia, but I add, not "capitalism,"
if we understand a de-spiritualized de-socialized system of accumulation
based on market regulation of accumulation.  It is this "relations of
production" innovation that is the European World-System.  Until one
carefully analyzes what type of world-system has evolved historically in
Asia we have very little to go on as to what the Chinese will do when that
1/4 of the world's population re-attains their prerogatives.  I for one
think that the clamour about human rights misses the point that solutions to
quality life WILL evolve within Chinese civilization and given our
atrocities carried out in the U.S. (prison population, bombing Iraq,
freezing out Cuba, etc.) I don't see the need to judge.  Finally, pulling up
from behind involves sacrifice.  Its easy to stand back and condemn every
sacrifice made and every error, but since this is not a perfect world, some
bad goes with every good.  Finally, to my way of thinking from the
perspective of oppressed peoples, only two routes to ending oppression
exist:  amass power or undermine power with love/spirituality.  The Chinese
appear to be taking the first route.  Kudos.
Cynthia

Bruce Podobnik wrote:

> Dear WSN:
>
> The article I have appended below discusses the rising
> influence of a group of 'hard-line' US policy makers who
> forecast that China will emerge as the key geopolitical
> challenger to US hegemony in the coming decades.
> This 'alliance of members of Congress... Republican political
> operatives, conservative journalists, lobbyists for Taiwan,
> former intelligence officers and academics' is apparently
> carrying out a somewhat successful campaign
> to turn China into the next great 'Red?' demon.
>    Now, many of readers of this list (as well as many
> in the progressive community in general) have serious
> problems with China's human rights, labor, environmental, etc.
> record (I certainly include myself here).  For these very
> reasons, it seems at the moment that there is little motivation
> within the progressive US community to try to counter-act
> the campaign that is beginning to be mounted against China.
> This, in my mind, is a very dangerous political/cultural situation --
> especially when viewed in the context of contemporary
> geopolitical dynamics.
>    As some of the readers of this list know, Chris
> Chase-Dunn and I (amongst others) have written about
> possible future dynamics of geopolitical rivalry (see
> 'The Future of Global Conflict,' ed. Bornschier &
> Chase-Dunn 1999).  Our analysis is motivated by
> progressive (anti-imperialist, anti-war) concerns, and yet
> it reaches a similar conclusion as do the hard-liners. That is,
> we acknowledge that China is one country which may
> mount a serious challenge to US hegemony in the not too
> distant future (see the chapter by Weede in the book cited
> for a more in-depth analysis of China).
>    My questions are: Does our world-systems analysis
> of potential US-Chinese rivalry merely serve to strengthen
> the argument of the hard-liners discussed below?  Are
> progressives in the US and elsewhere unwittingly allowing
> a right-wing political/cultural campaign against China to move
> forward unchallenged?  How might a world-systems analysis
> of these issues be used to fortify an anti-war agenda?
> I welcome any ideas regarding these questions.  The
> article itself is attached below.
>
> Bruce Podobnik
> Dept.of Sociology and Anthropology
> Lewis and Clark College
> podobnik@lclark.edu
>
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
> - - - -
>
> Kaiser, Robert and Steven Mufson. 2000. �US Hard-Liners Paint
> Beijing as Big Menace,� International Herald Tribune, Feb. 23.
>
> WASHINGTON - While working as an aide to Representative
> Christopher Cox, Republican of California, Richard Fisher collected
> dozens
> of photographs and sketches of China's latest weaponry: the
> Russian-built
> Sovremenny destroyer, advanced ballistic missiles, pilotless drones and
> Su-27 fighters.
>      Mr. Fisher is grimly confident that someday these weapons could be
> aimed
> at Americans. ''This is shaping up to be a major military disaster for
> the United
> States,'' he said. Mr. Fisher, who moved last month to a Washington
> research
> organization, describes himself as a member of the ''Blue Team'' - a
> loose
> alliance of members of Congress, congressional staff members, research
> organization fellows, Republican political operatives, conservative
> journalists, lobbyists for Taiwan, former intelligence officers and a
> handful of
> academics, all united in the view that a rising China poses great risks
> to
> America's vital interests.
>     These hard-liners on China advance the view that China's steady
> military
> buildup will soon put it in a position to threaten the United States,
> most
> obviously by bullying Taiwan.
>     The Blue Team and its sympathizers think the United States should
> recognize that conflict with China is probable if not inevitable.
>    ''Where the U.S.-China relationship is going is, frankly, toward
> conflict,''
> said Frank Gaffney, a former congressional aide and Defense Department
> official in the Reagan administration who now runs a research
> organization
> called the Center for Security Policy.
>    Mr. Gaffney compared America's current China policy to its relations
> with
> Japan and Germany before World War II. ''In many ways,'' Mr. Gaffney
> said, ''this is a time not dissimilar to the 1930s.''
>    Though little noticed, the Blue Team has had considerable success.
>    By attaching riders to legislation in Congress, it has restricted the
>
> scope of Chinese-American military relations, forced the Pentagon to
> report
> to Congress in detail on the China-Taiwan military balance and compelled
>
> the State Department to take a harder line on China's abuses of human
> and
> religious rights.
>     Some Blue Team allies have promoted public fears of a Chinese
> ''takeover''
> of the Panama Canal; several congressional offices report a deluge of
> mail
> about Panama's choice of a Hong Kong company to operate shipping
> installations at both ends of the canal. Allies of the Blue Team have
> harassed China's biggest oil company, complicating its efforts to sell
> shares
> on the New York Stock Exchange.
>    Members of the Blue Team initially drafted and then helped push
> through
> the House of Representatives this month the Taiwan Security Enhancement
> Act, a measure to strengthen U.S. military ties with Taiwan that has
> angered
> China. A legislative rider compelled the Pentagon's National Defense
> University to establish a center to study China's military.
>    For a time last spring, the Blue Team thought the publication of the
> Cox
> committee report on Chinese espionage - which its allies helped draft -
> might lead to irresistible pressure to alter the Clinton
> administration's policy
> of ''constructive engagement'' with Beijing. Administration officials
> feared
> the same result.
>    The Blue Team has no membership cards or formal meetings. Its
> sympathizers collaborate around particular causes but sometimes disagree
>
> with one another. Some, for example, ridicule fears about the Panama
> Canal.
>     The core of the alliance consists of Capitol Hill aides who draft
> China-related legislation and try to operate as anonymously as possible.
>
> Several of the congressional aides were brought together last year with
> like-minded academics and media commentators in a study group run by a
> small research group, the Project for the New American Century, and
> financed by Richard Mellon Scaife, the Pittsburgh billionaire who has
> given
> hundreds of millions of dollars to conservative causes.
>     The study group was organized by Mark Lagon, a political scientist
> who
> recently joined the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Its
>
> primary purpose was to discuss China policy and help produce a book,
> tentatively titled ''China's Rise and America's Response.''
>    According to a participant, these meetings sometimes took on the
> flavor of
> Blue Team strategy sessions as two dozen Hill aides, scholars, former
> Reagan administration officials and others ate lunch once a month and
> discussed chapters of the book, due out this year.
>   While Blue Team members usually work behind the scenes to urge a
> harder U.S. line on China, their cause has been taken up publicly by a
> few
> politicians. Gary Bauer, the former Reagan White House aide and leader
> of
> the Family Research Council, used stinging anti-Chinese rhetoric in his
> recently abandoned presidential campaign and said it regularly won a
> powerful response from voters.
>     In a speech a year ago to the Republican National Committee, Mr.
> Cox,
> chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee, denounced the
> Clinton administration for, he said, cuddling up to Beijing, accusing
> President Bill Clinton of giving Chinese leaders ''the full Lewinsky.''
> But
> none of the four major candidates for president has embraced the Blue
> Team view.
>     Strong language and with-us-or-against-us judgments are becoming
> common in the struggle between the Blue Team and those it sees as its
> rivals, whom it calls the ''Red Team.'' Blue Team allies speak
> derisively of
> ''panda-huggers'' and ''the Relationship Police,'' referring to those
> who seek
> a close and cooperative U.S. relationship with Beijing.
>    Scholars who have been targets of Blue Team scorn say there is an
> increasingly politicized atmosphere among Sinologists. ''It's not as
> much fun
> as it used to be,'' said Ronald Montaperto, a professor at the National
> Defense University whom the Blue Team considers soft on China. ''Debate
> has become very personal and very political, and frequently generates
> more
> heat than light.''
>     For nearly three decades after Richard Nixon's opening to China in
> 1972, a
> ''domestic consensus used to sustain China policy,'' observed Peter
> Rodman, an assistant to Henry Kissinger in the early days of China
> diplomacy and now a scholar at the Nixon Center here in Washington. That
>
> consensus, Mr. Rodman said, ''was shattered by Tiananmen Square'' in
> 1989, when the Chinese ruthlessly suppressed a student uprising.
>    ''The Soviet threat used to hold the U.S. and China together,'' he
> added.
> No longer.
>    Officials and scholars who disagree with the Blue Team's view that
> conflict
> with China is perhaps inevitable still generally dominate U.S. policy,
> but
> they seem less organized and less cohesive than the Blue Team. The
> Clinton
> administration, which might have provided an alternative vision of
> China,
> instead has offered a series of different China policies over the last
> seven
> years.
>    Mr. Clinton campaigned for the presidency denouncing the ''Butchers
> of
> Beijing'' and, once elected, flirted with denying China trade benefits
> because
> of its human rights abuses. But he abruptly abandoned any such linkage
> and
> decided instead to warm up to China's leaders, eventually embracing
> President Jiang Zemin's suggestion that China and the United States
> could
> be ''strategic partners.''
>    The Blue Team and its allies see China as a rising power run by a
> dictatorial
> regime that suppresses ''the Chinese people's yearning for freedom and
> democracy'' and is determined to challenge the United States, in the
> words
> of William Triplett, an aide to Senator Robert Bennett, Republican of
> Utah,
> and a former staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
>    Mr. Triplett coined the term Blue Team. It comes, he said, from the
> terminology of China's own military exercises, which often feature
> battles
> between red and blue teams. Mr. Triplett, a former China analyst at the
> CIA, and Edward Timperlake, a former Republican foreign policy aide in
> Congress, have teamed up to write two books - ''Year of the Rat'' and
> ''Red Dragon Rising'' - promoting their views. Among them: ''a series of
>
> Faustian bargains and policy blunders'' by the Clinton administration
> has
> played into China's ambitions to acquire military capabilities.
>    China experts of all stripes acknowledge that China is buying and
> building
> more modern weaponry, and some say they are worried about the
> long-term implications of this modernization, which will increase
> China's
> ability to threaten Taiwan.
>    Most China experts agree that rising nationalism in a democratic
> Taiwan
> combined with a frustrated China could create dangerous problems.
>    Critics of the Blue Team's image of China argue, however, that the
> country
> is much too complex and still much too weak to describe in the Blue
> Team's
> stark terms.
>    ''I don't have my head in the sand,'' said Paul Godwin, a China
> military
> expert who recently retired from the National Defense University. But he
>
> deplored analysts who treat ''every rumored Chinese acquisition as a
> reality'' and ''tend to see every weapon as the silver bullet'' for the
> People's
> Liberation Army.
>    Some who disagree with the Blue Team say its members suffer from
> nostalgia for the Soviet threat.
>    ''You don't need to go searching for a new enemy,'' replied Jim
> Doran, an
> aide to Senator Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina, who began his
>
> career as a Soviet analyst and lived in Russia in the early 1990s.
> ''Look at
> the propaganda in the Chinese papers. Look at the vitriolic
> anti-American
> attitude of that. ''It's there for all to see.''
>    Like nearly all the congressional aides who collaborate on the Blue
> Team
> agenda, Mr. Doran is not a China expert. He made his first visit to
> China
> last month. Very few of the other Washington-based activists concerned
> about the Chinese threat have degrees in Chinese studies or speak
> Chinese.
>    But expertise on China is not essential to take a principled view of
> U.S.
> policy, argued William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard magazine,
> which along with The Washington Times daily newspaper is a primary
> outlet
> for Blue Team views. ''I'm not a China expert at all. My view of China
> flows from my view of what you think U.S. foreign policy should be,''
> Mr.
> Kristol said. ''American weakness is really the danger."
>    One prominent China scholar whose views are embraced by the Blue Team
>
> is Arthur Waldron, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania. While
> many
> Sinologists favor constructive relations with China's leadership, Mr.
> Waldron bluntly asserts that U.S. interests would be better served if
> China's
> Communist leaders were displaced.
>    ''I worry that if China continues on its current trend, which is
> repressing at
> home and building up armaments, that becomes very dangerous,'' he said.
> ''I agree with people who think regime change is key to a really stable
> peace.''
>    For a brief time last winter and spring, anti-China sentiment in
> Washington
> was sharply ascendant. Some Republicans saw an opportunity to create a
> political issue over the Clinton administration's ''embrace of Jiang and
> the
> Communist Party,'' as Representative Cox said in a speech.
>   Newt Gingrich, then a Republican representative from Georgia and the
> House speaker, established the Cox committee in 1998 to investigate what
>
> he called ''a profoundly deeper question than any other question that
> has
> arisen in this administration'' - charges that China got U.S. missile
> technology from Loral Corp., whose chief executive was the largest
> individual contributor to the Democrats in 1996.
>    That charge had disappeared by the time the Cox committee's report
> was
> published last May. The final report focused on China's efforts to
> acquire
> secrets about missiles and nuclear weapons, and all the Democrats on the
>
> committee signed it, although on the day of its release two key members
> distanced themselves from the most alarming conclusions about Chinese
> copying of U.S. weapons.
>    Critics found much to fault in the Cox report. One of its most
> frightening
> assertions - that China could be expected to build a nuclear warhead
> based
> on the American W-88 model, thanks to stolen secrets - was challenged by
>
> the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.
>   Its accusations of spying got nearly all the attention, but the Cox
> report also
> embraced a dark view of China's broad intentions. The Chinese Communist
> Party's ''main aim for the civilian economy is to support the building
> of
> modern military weapons and to support the aims of the PLA,'' the report
>
> said.
>   Professor Alastair Iain Johnston of Harvard University, a
> specialist on the Chinese military, criticized this analysis, arguing
> that
> Chinese policy for more than 20 years has been ''to subordinate military
>
> modernization to the development of the overall civilian economy.''
>    Mr. Johnston pointed to several errors, including footnotes to
> sections of
> the Chinese Constitution that did not say what the Cox report reported
> they
> said and a misrepresentation of comments by President Jiang.
>    The Cox report said that in 1997 Mr. Jiang ''called for an
> 'extensive,
> thoroughgoing and sustained upsurge' in the PLA's acquisition of high
> technology.'' The article the committee quoted, Mr. Johnston noted,
> actually
> said Mr. Jiang had ordered an ''extensive, thoroughgoing and sustained
> upsurge of studying high-tech knowledge in the whole army.''
>    Asked about Mr. Johnston's critique, Mr. Cox said, ''The facts as
> reported
> in the committee report, are indeed the facts.''
>    The Jiang quotation showed that the PLA had an ''accelerating
> interest in
> high technology,'' which was ''precisely the point the report makes,''
> Mr.
> Cox said.
>    When the lobbying intensifies this spring or summer on the
> congressional
> vote to grant China permanent ''normal trade relations'' status - the
> key step
> toward membership in the World Trade Organization - the Blue Team's
> opponents will be out in force.
>    Business groups, farm groups, the Clinton administration and
> pro-trade
> members of Congress will probably produce a well-greased lobbying effort
>
> for passage. All will argue that by opening its markets to foreign
> competitors, China will have to advance its own free-market reforms,
> strengthen the rule of law and, over time, moderate its policies.
>    ''It will pass,'' predicted Robert Kagan, who worked in Ronald
> Reagan's
> State Department and has written eloquent denunciations of America's
> China policy in The Weekly Standard. Mr. Kagan, who also writes a
> monthly column in The Washington Post, said, ''You can't block business
> interests and free-trade ideology in the Republican Party short of
> war.''
>    In fact, some members who have been Blue Team supporters on issues
> such as Taiwan - the House majority leader, Representative Richard
> Armey, Republican of Texas, for example - will work for approval of
> permanent normal trade status for China.
>   ''I consider the government of China to be dangerous not only to the
> people
> of China but at least to all the peoples of that region,'' Mr. Armey
> said in an
> interview. But, a staunch free trader, he also said he hoped to extend
> ''freedom through commerce to the Chinese people'' by bringing China
> into
> the WTO.
>    The impact of the Blue Team still ''isn't nearly what this community
> of
> hard-liners, desires,'' lamented Mr. Fisher, the former congressional
> aide
> who collects photographs of Chinese weaponry.
>    But he noted with satisfaction that the Blue Team ''strikes terror
> into the
> heart'' of Washington's policy establishment, adding: ''We are going to
> continue to have problems in our relationship with China and they
> require
> that America remain vigilant.''



--
MZ�

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