Rocket launched; Japan breathes again

The Aso government got its wish: North Korea launched its rocket, with the first stage said to have landed off the coast of Akita prefecture and the second said to have landed in the Pacific Ocean.

After weeks of posturing, there was no attempt to intercept the debris.

It is unclear whether North Korea successfully delivered a satellite into orbit, as it said it would.

The US, Japan, and South Korea will now go to the UN Security Council as planned, citing the launch as a violation of UNSC resolution 1718. There will be some question of whether China will join the others in condemning the launch. China and Russia expressed reluctance to declare North Korea in violation of res. 1718 because it had followed procedures — notifying the International Maritime Organization and the International Civil Aviation Organization of its impending launch — and gave indictations that it was "just" a satellite launch, even though the implications of a successful launch have obvious implications for North Korea's missile arsenal. (As an aside, I suspect that Japanese conservatives are happy with a successful launch, thinking that it will render the US as vulnerable to North Korea missile strikes as Japan, narrowing the distance between the US and Japan on North Korea.)

China always walks a fine line in its relationship with North Korea, and this case will be no different. China will likely stop short of supporting a new resolution condemning North Korea or supporting new sanctions — both Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao were cool to the urgings of Prime Minister Aso and Foreign Minister Nakasone on the sidelines of the G20 in London — but I wouldn't be surprised if Beijing used one of its own back channels with Pyongyang to express its displeasure.

Recommended book: Will The Boat Sink The Water?, Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao

Speaking of rural troubles, I have just finished reading Chen Guidi's and Wu Chuntao's Will The Boat Sink The Water?, which documents the poverty of rural China and the hardships imposed on peasants by a bloated bureaucracy. (This book was briefly available in China, but has since been blacklisted.)

The first half of the book is comprised of anecdotes from Anhui Province, showing episodes of the struggles of rural Chinese as they fought for justice against corrupt officialdom, while the second half using the anecdotes to make a broader argument about how to change conditions in rural China.

The entire book has the feeling of a morality play from an earlier period of Chinese history. The actors are the same — downtrodden peasants, the occasional righteous advocate within or outside the bureaucracy, corrupt taxmen and their goons, and the distant imperial government — but the setting is Mao's New China, in which the peasants were to be liberated from oppression. Ultimately, Chen and Wu provide a glimpse at what lies behind the glittering skyscrapers hugging China's coast and suggest that without rapid and systematic change, the entire growth process will come crashing to a halt.

The book is effective because it presents the problem from the bottom up. Rather than viewing political and economic change from the usual Beijing-centered perspective, Chen and Wu illustrate how the overwhelming majority of Chinese citizens interact with state and party. And it's not pretty. The growth of the bureaucracy in China — thanks in no small part to the country's having five layers of government — has given a class of knaves, thieves, and criminals extraordinary power over the lives of millions at the township and county levels. Not unlike the image of the state in Franz Kafka's "The Great Wall of China," the central state and party organs play a small role in the tale, a distant presence that has promulgated decrees that make defending rural Chinese from oppression state policy but has little ability to exert control over the officials responsible for executing the policy (who also happened to be the target of said policy).

Accordingly, rural "revolts" and unrest cannot necessarily be construed as being directed at Communist Party rule. In fact, in the anecdotes related by Chen and Wu, the peasants who raised concerns about excessive taxation and misrule by officials often have official party policy on their side; their desire is to see "the law" implemented. They seem to look to Beijing with hopeful, not accusatory, eyes.

It remains to be seen how long they will place their hope in the central government and the party's senior officials.

Meanwhile, another problem briefly identified by Chen and Wu is that of rural migrants to the cities, who are second-class citizens at the very least, who enjoy few legal rights, who struggle to find work, and who have no access to public services. This is what prompts them to use the phrase "one country, two nations." How long, they ask, can this system prevail, wherein urban Chinese, who have enjoyed a disproportionate share of economic growth, enjoy a set of privileges denied to hundreds of millions of rural Chinese (either still living in rural areas or having migrated to cities)?

The persistence of rural poverty does not, of course, diminish the impressive achievement that is China's development since the late 1970s — but awareness of what remains to be done should temper more enthusiastic accounts of the rise of China.

At the frontier of political thought in China

This week it seems Wan Gang, a non-CCP party member (he belongs to the nominally independent China Party for the Public Interest), became the first non-communist cabinet minister in decades. The People's Daily noted that Wan views his appointment as an important step in the development of democracy in China.

Wan is undoubtedly being overoptimistic in his assessment of his appointment, but via the China Digital Times comes an article by Daniel Bell in Dissent on the active debate about how China will change politically.

Bell's essay, which is rich with references, is a must-read to understand how officials and intellectuals are thinking about the future of the Chinese political system. He insists that change is only a matter of time, and that the Confucian revival — discussed here — could well provide the basis for a kind of deliberative council composed of meritocratic elites. Bell deserves credit for thinking seriously about China's political future in a way that recognizes that the perfect should not be the enemy of the good: just because it is extremely unlikely that China will become a liberal democracy in the near future does not mean that political change that falls short of democracy should be dismissed out of hand.

This just goes to show the extent to which China's identity, like Japan's, is up in the air. The manner in which these two giants answer the open questions about who they are, how they should relate to their pasts, and how to ensure the best quality of life for their citizens in a time of rapid change will profoundly impact the international environment in Northeast Asia — and so rushing to condemn China's military modernization, as Gary Schmitt does in the Washington Post, is wholly premature. (Check out Robert Economist's reply to Schmitt here.)

China's history problems

On my recent trip to China — discussed here — I had a distinct sense of twenty-first century China being a country alienated from its past. Its modern past, the decades following the declaration of the "New China" following the CCP's victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1949, is passed over in the public space, but for the ubiquitous visage of Mao Zedong (including the massive portrait overlooking Tiananmen Square that was recently vandalized and replaced).

The vacuum of the modern past seems to be filled, instead, with the hollowed-out and commercialized vestiges of the imperial past, the heirlooms of China's ancient civilization that the CCP has "naturally" inherited. Tourist sites like the Forbidden City and Summer Palace are undoubtedly major moneymakers for the PRC, but they — and the past they represent — seem more like curiosities of a decadent past than a source of meaning for a China that is wholly uncertain about its identity.

Indeed, in looking for how the CCP views the past, I was struck, if not surprised, by the party's efforts to cultivate an air of inevitability about its rule when visiting the museum of the Chinese Communist Party at the site of the first party congress in Shanghai; the party is presented as delivering China from its foreign enemies, the heir of earlier attempts to expel foreigners and overturn the weak rulers who had failed to defend China. Like all communists, the CCP views history simply as something to justify its hold on power, not as a force that can help the Chinese people think about who they are, what they value, and how they should relate to other countries.

With this in mind, it is worth looking at two articles linked to by the China Digital Times today. Each article in turn addresses a different aspect of the PRC's history problem.

The first, by Henry Zhao in the New Left Review, looks at a debate between two Francophone Sinologists on the relevance of Confucianism as a means of looking at the revival of classical learning within China. (For more on this phenomenon, and Yu Dan, the biggest beneficiary of the revival thus far, check out this article on Danwei.) In reviewing of Swiss Sinologist Jean-François Billeter's Contre François Jullien, Zhao gives a succinct overview of Confucian thought, and its treatment in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and he is clearly sympathetic to Billeter, who has argued that Confucianism cannot be separated from the political system it undergirded for millennia.

This is an important reminder as Confucianism sweeps China again — both for the Chinese people and for the CCP. While it is understandable that Chinese are interested in reclaiming an important part of their past that had been vilified under Mao, to re-embrace the past uncritically is no virtue either. The party, meanwhile, is surely cognizant that Confucianism, while giving absolute power to rulers and demanding obedience for the ruled, also included provisions for dynastic change when rulers failed to fulfill their duties properly. In any case, there is no question that the Confucius vogue is a product of the vacuum at the heart of Chinese identity.

A second article, by Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a professor of history at California-Irvine, calls attention to Shanghai's changing interpretation of its past as host to a foreign enclave. While I was indeed impressed by how pre-1949 history was presented in Shanghai in a relatively favorable light, the relegation of the early decades of communist rule — noted by Wasserstrom — to "Old Shanghai" (perhaps even "Old China") should by no means be viewed as a welcome change.

In any other words, Japan is hardly alone in having problems searching for a usable past — and it is hardly the worst offender in the region, seeing as how the party that rendered China's recent history "unusable" still sits, however uneasily, upon the Dragon Throne.

Making sense of China's Sudan policy

If there's any sense to be made, that is.

In the same week that Amnesty International condemned China for selling arms to Sudan that are purportedly being used in Darfur by Janjaweed militias accused of genocide, China has announced that it is both sending a military detachment to support African Union peacekeepers in Darfur and appointing a special envoy to Africa who will focus on Darfur.

Will this policy change make any difference whatsoever in stopping genocide in Darfur, or will it simply be window dressing to distract observers from China's unstinting support for unsavory regimes worldwide, including elsewhere in Africa? As James Kirchick wrote in the New York Sun this week, China has become the major supporter of Zimbabwe, even as the country's total collapse continues.

For all the talk about how China wants no political trouble surrounding the Beijing Olympics, I strongly doubt that China will completely back away from support for regimes that provide it with critical resources, no matter how much pressure comes from abroad. China's relations with authoritarian regimes is, after all, as much a part of the debate about who runs China as domestic policy, with this week's announcements on Darfur showing that there may be more infighting behind the scenes between the PLA and the CCP than outsiders realize.

In light of this though, I have to ask: where is Japan? Why is Japan, with its self-defense forces now having international activities as one of its primary missions, not in Africa, helping to prevent genocide in Sudan? Seems like a perfect opportunity to show how Japan is willing to bear a greater burden globally.

The China enigma

After an afternoon of walking around in slums located within blocks of Tiananmen Square — festooned with flags for the national holiday — I am ever more convinced that the only way to think about China in the early twenty-first century is by drawing upon the Jain parable of the blind men and the elephant.

For Japan's neighbors, and, indeed, for the entire international community, there is no generalizing about China. There are no simple answers.

What is one to make of the existence of urine-soaked slums in the heart of Beijing, adjacent to broad avenues packed with European luxury cars and blocks away from crowds of tourists (Chinese and otherwise) carrying the latest digital cameras and snapping pictures of the portrait of Mao overlooking Tiananmen Square? And how about the whitewashing of Chinese history between the founding of the People's Republic in 1949 and the turn of the twenty-first century — and the consequently crass abuse of China's imperial past?

There appears to be no logic to Beijing and little order. Massive commercial and housing developments appear to have fallen from the sky, with nothing but the presence of cranes building similar structures suggesting that the behemoths were the product of human hands. I felt a distinct and omnipresent energy and a materialism unmatched in my experience (dialectical materialism without the dialectical). At the same time that more and more Chinese are following Deng Xiaoping's injunction that "to get rich is glorious," millions of Chinese are turning to religions of ancient or western provenance. It is a society changing in ways that even its one-party rulers are incapable of controlling, try though they might.

How can the US and Japan deal with this bundle of contradictions that is China? China demands a foreign policy approach, especially from the US, that resists the urge to rush to judgment or to cajole. The political change desired by Americans will not happen overnight, and it will not happen because of American prompting. Tokyo, perhaps to an extent greater than Washington, acknowledges that the ability of outside powers to impact the course of political development within China is limited.

Unpleasant as it may seem, this is the China with which the world will have to live for the foreseeable future.

A hazy shade of Beijing

I arrived in Beijing yesterday -- and was immediately struck, even before landing, by the dirty haze that shrouds the city. I had read, of course, about how polluted Beijing has become, but reading about it does not convey just how filthy the air is.

Beyond the pollution, it is hard to believe the scale of the city, in particular the monumental scale of buildings and avenues. China may be a "socialist market economy," but the style of its capital is more Bucharest than Tokyo. (Of course, the similarities with a city like Bucharest are strengthened by the landscape's being dotted with communist-style apartment blocks that stand alongside the new glittering architectural wonders built for the 2008 Olympics.)

Meanwhile, there's no confusing China for Japan. The impression I get is that, economically, China is like a vastly super-sized version of one of the Southeast Asia tigers, in its frenetic pace and fiercely materialistic, crass capitalism.

I realize that none of these observations are particularly novel, but these aspects of the "new China" are immediately apparent, and highlight the contradictory nature of Chinese development.

More in the coming days...

Have China Scholars All Been Bought?

That's the question asked by Carsten Holz, economist at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, in an article in the Far Eastern Economic Review. (Hat tip: Arts and Letters Daily)

He asks:

Does it matter if China researchers ignore the political context in which they operate and the political constraints that shape their work? Does it matter if we present China to the West the way the Party leadership must like us to present China, providing narrow answers to our self-censored research questions and offering a sanitized picture of China's political system?

I'm not altogether sure if the situation for China scholars is nearly as bad as the picture painted by Holz, but the questions he raises are serious ones.

Read the whole thing.

China is not creating its own risk fleet...yet

In the years before World War I, Imperial Germany developed its "risk fleet" -- a large fleet of relatively little utility -- to force the Royal Navy to focus on defending the British Isles, a textbook example of the concept of a fleet in being.

It is with this in mind that I read this op-ed by the Heritage Foundation's Peter Brookes -- via RealClearPolitics -- about reports of a Chinese program to build an aircraft carrier, leading Brookes to conclude, "This isn't good news."

And yet the reasons he gives to demonstrate why this is so can easily be used to reach different conclusions.

Brookes suggests that a domestically produced Chinese aircraft carrier would mark a pronounced turn from asymmetry in Chinese military doctrine -- but I fail to see why a shift away from platforms and planning that seeks to deny American advantages in a potential conflict in the Taiwan Straits would be a bad thing. Brookes suggests two possibilities: a desire by Beijing for a more balanced fleet capable of projecting power at greater distances or a desire by Beijing for a naval force capable of showing the flag. I suspect it's a combination of both.

But I repeat my objection: why is either development necessarily a bad thing?

Specifically regarding the latter, it's entirely appropriate that China would want to have a blue-water navy capable of showing the flag. As Brookes admits:

China is, without question, a rising power - world's largest population, No. 2 energy consumer, No. 3 defense budget, No. 4 economy. And so on. It's an up-and-comer. Beijing may well think the time is ripe to unmistakably proclaim to the world: We're not just a regional power anymore.

That was the message of President Teddy Roosevelt's Great White Fleet 100 years ago. Flush with success in the Spanish-American War - defeating a major European power and adding possessions in the Atlantic and Pacific - TR sent a large naval task force on a global circumnavigation in 1907-09.

I especially like that Brookes refers to the US Navy's Great White Fleet, because, as I've argued before, I think the position of the US at the turn of the twentieth century may provide the best historical example for assessing China at the turn of the twenty-first century.

But, again, why is this a problem? Brookes suggest one way a Chinese "prestige" fleet could have real consequences: he argues that China may seek a carrier force so as to be able to secure unobstructed access to oil moving along sea lines of communication (SLOC) currently protected by the US Navy. But the mission of securing SLOCs that serve East Asia may well be an opportunity to deepen cooperation between the US Military and the PLA, being an area in which US and Chinese interests overlap.

The US should view Chinese aspirations for a blue-water navy -- which is still more dream than reality, at least according to the Pentagon's own assessment in the 2006 Annual Report on the Military Power of the People's Republic of China -- as an opportunity first, the basis for Sino-US cooperation to secure SLOCs. That doesn't mean the US shouldn't hedge at the same time, but naval cooperation could serve to give China a "stakeholder" role in providing public goods to the region, a point made by Thomas Barnett, among others.

China's Good Cop?

When I read articles such as this one from the IHT, I have a hard time figuring out if China's Premier Wen Jiabao is simply playing good cop to the PLA's bad cop or if Wen actually believes the argument he advances at every opportunity.

If it's the latter, then the bureaucratic infighting within the PRC's government may be greater than it appears to the outside world, in which case every country in the region must be extremely careful not to act in ways that do not strengthen the PLA's hand within internal policy debates.

For IR wonks, I'm led to think of a book like Jack Snyder's Myths of Empire, in which Snyder looks for correlations between the unity of a regime and its tendency towards an "overstretched" imperial foreign policy. That's not to say that China is imperial, but the concern that the more divided the Chinese government it is, the more its neighbors have to fear is, I think, very real.

All of which suggests that, as I wrote in this post, every country in the region, the US included, must think very carefully about the decisions they make now. Pushing too quickly for an organized "hedge" option without a parallel move towards an Asian "OSCE" risks encouraging elements within the PRC who favor antagonism -- resulting in self-fulfilling prophecies about Chinese behavior and producing a vicious cycle that could rapidly spiral out of control.

Two Chinas, two Asias

I spent Friday afternoon at the headquarters of the Keidanren -- a classic example of Tokyo-style brutalism if I've ever seen one -- at a symposium convened by the World Trade Center Tokyo and the Tokyo American Center on "China's Rise and the Emerging Architecture of Trade and Investment in the Asia-Pacific Economy." Keynotes by a Chinese and an American academic, with a panel of veteran Japanese diplomats.

The discussion ended up being very interesting, addressing the many varieties and possibilities of trade agreements in East Asia.

But I'm not going to summarize the discussion here. Rather, I found the contrast with the talk I attended earlier this week, on the evolving situation in the Taiwan Straits, jarring, but illuminating.

It seems that at present, two Asias exist side by side -- with observers seeing the Asia they prefer to see. The business leaders, academics and diplomats gathered at the Keidanren today prefer to see the Asia characterized by ever-deepening economic, political, and cultural integration, the "spaghetti bowl" of organizations and agreements, including ASEAN, ASEAN + 3, the East Asian Summit (ASEAN + 6), APEC, the Chiang Mai Initiative (connected to ASEAN + 3), the ASEAN Regional Forum, and a host of bilateral free trade agreements. It's an Asia marked by increasingly dense trade and investment ties within the region. At the heart of this Asia is China, the new "workshop of the world," which has become one of the world's biggest traders since joining the WTO, and has enthusiastically embraced regionalism. This is the China that showed up at Cebu earlier this year.

But then there's the other China -- the China that reacts defensively to US calls for military transparency (not to mention the ASAT test) -- that was the focus of Randy Schriver's talk on Wednesday. That's not to say that Schriver only described the belligerent China; if anything, his view, and the view of China in the Armitage-Nye Report, is much more balanced than the seemingly unbridled optimism I heard today. In any case, this second Asia contains the risk of conflict, as it is characterized by ethnic tensions, arguments over history, the possibility of zero-sum competition for energy (the Sino-Japanese conflict over EEZs in the East China Sea, for example), the potential for a nuclear arms race in Northeast Asia, and concerns about China's military buildup, especially as directed at Taiwan. This Asia is by no means inevitable, but every time China shows its belligerent side, the shadow of this conflictual Asia threatens to darken the bright, shining Asia of ever thicker regional ties.

I give the US government credit for not overreacting in recent years to the shadows of the latter Asia -- but sooner or later it is going to have to exert substantial effort to ensure that the former takes a shape that is in the interests of the US (i.e., an Asia that does not harden into a trade bloc that excludes the US). Having a hedge against the latter outcome, in the form of enhanced alliances with Japan and Australia and deeper ties with India, Vietnam, and other regional partners, is fine, but it can only be one facet of US Asia policy.

So I'm with Georgetown's Dennis McNamara, one of the keynote speakers on Friday: it is time for the US to begin working at shaping the cooperative Asia as best it can in a direction that favors the US. (See this Asahi interview for a summary of McNamara's views on this subject.)

But it is important to remember that the decision as to which Asia -- cooperative or conflictual -- will emerge will depend largely on decisions made in Beijing.

A new "new world order"?

Apologies for the lag in posting; life in Nagata-cho has gotten busy, leaving little time to dash off notes.

In any case, I want to call attention to an article in Foreign Affairs by Tufts University professor and blogger Daniel Drezner, called "The New New World Order."

Drezner argues that US foreign policy in recent years has been characterized by an increasing willingness to welcome emerging powers, namely China and India, into leadership roles in international society, lest they opt out and create parallel structures: "If China and India are not made to feel welcome inside existing international institutions, they might create new ones -- leaving the United States on the outside looking in."

His thesis links to a notion I've been toying with for some time. In the early years after the cold war, various international relations theorists (realists, by and large) were quick to point out that a new multipolar order would quickly replace the aberrant unipolarity that had followed the fall of the Soviet Union. Numerous articles talked about the inevitability of multipolarity, and speculated as to which powers were the leading candidates to become the next great powers. (Germany and Japan were the leading candidates -- just as Japan's economy stalled and Germany was forced to absorb the enormous costs of reunification with the impoverished East.)

It seems, however, that those realists were right, about fifteen years too soon -- and their vision of multipolarity owed more to bygone nineteenth century European balance of power than to the world order actually coalescing today. It seems that the multipolar order emerging today more resembles the "three-dimensional chessboard" discussed by Joseph Nye and others, in which multipolarity in economics, culture, and politics exist alongside and despite US military dominance.

Rather than resisting this, Drezner argues, the US has embraced the emergence of new powers and sought to revise international order accordingly, given them a stake in the system in a bid to forestall a revolution of the "upstarts."

This is especially interesting in light of the recommendations of the recent second Armitage-Nye Report, which I have previously discussed at length. The picture painted by the report is of a US more willing to cooperate with China, India, and other regional powers -- including Japan -- to shape the regional environment so to accommodate the new giants. The extent to which the US has worked to engage China was revealed today, in a talk by Randall Schriver, partner at Armitage International, former deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asia/Pacific affairs, and participant in the drafting of the Armitage-Nye Report. (I was attending on behalf of my boss.)

The picture painted by Schriver -- whose brief was to discuss China-Taiwan relations, which ended up encompassing Sino-US relations -- is of a US that, while still hedging somewhat in the event that China takes a belligerent turn, has fully embraced engagement with China, from the president down. Thanks to Secretary Paulson, the China-US Strategic Economic Dialogue ensures that US fears don't subvert the overall economic relationship. Under outgoing chief of Pacific Command William Fallon, the US Military and the PLA held their first joint exercises and engaged in a number of visits and exchanges. The Bush administration, like earlier administrations that have entered office intent on taking a hard line against China, is now pushing for greater engagement with China in the hope that it will become, in the words of former Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, a "responsible stakeholder" in international society.

I will close with a number mentioned by Schriver in his talk. In the first Armitage-Nye Report, published in October 2000, China was mentioned a total of six times. In the most recent Armitage-Nye Report, China was mentioned 123 times. It is a new Asia, and, perhaps, a new world order.

Breaking for book notes

Another day, another session of the budget committee, with the opposition once again raking the Abe Cabinet over the coa...by which I mean soberly discussing Japan's policy goals and requirements.

As such, I want to take a brief break from tracking the current Diet session to post some notes on a book I recently finished reading.

But first, I now have a dedicated email address for questions and comments concerning the content of this blog. Please direct your email to observingjapan@gmail.com.

As longtime readers of this blog will note, I have a particular fascination with China (er, who -- especially among observers of the Asia-Pacific -- doesn't these days). In any case, I have been reading as many books worth reading on China that I can get my hands on in order to get a more nuanced view of the country that may claim the twenty-first century in the same way that America claimed the twentieth. (Find a previous review here.)

In this vein, I have just finished reading journalist Ian Buruma's Bad Elements, in which he travels the Chinese world, from the suburbs of Washington, DC to Tibet, to talk with prominent and not-so-prominent Chinese dissidents, including dissidents who have resisted governments in Taipei and Singapore. While already several years old, Buruma provides a thorough look at the dynamics of resistance from which the successful removal of the CCP might spring. At the same time, however, Buruma should be credited for not writing hagiography. It is altogether too easy to lose one's critical eye when assessing individuals who have risked everything to resist tyrannical governments, and while Buruma gives the subjects of his book the credit they deserve, he doesn't not hesitate in his probing of their motives and their goals.

I drew several especially salient points from Buruma's book.

First, there is no question that the CCP will fall sooner or later. Having unleashed the tremendous forces of a modern market economy without having relinquished power, the CCP cleared the way for rampant corruption -- while at the same time ever so slightly giving citizens space to begin demanding accountability (how else does one explain this). The question is how long before demands for accountability metastasize into demands for greater political accountability. Buruma's frequent references to Chinese history -- which is filled with examples of long-ruling regimes overturned -- serve as a constant reminder that sooner or later each regime that has governed China has faltered and fallen, usually overwhelmed by systemic failures and flaws. The timeline at work in the demise of the CCP regime may not conform to the demands of the twenty-four news cycle, but the forces that will cause its downfall are already at work, and they were unleashed by the CCP itself when it opted for vast liberalization. (For a look at how this might happen, I strongly recommend Bruce Gilley's China's Democratic Future.)

Second -- this is a more philosophical point -- Buruma was surprised to find that many of the exiled dissidents with whom he talked converted to Christianity while in exile, which suggests that no matter how hard materialists like the CCP try to extinguish the human soul, that deep need to believe in something greater than oneself, it finds a way of re-emerging, often as religious belief. I suspect that the cadres in Beijing realize this, hence the promotion of nationalism in the wake of Deng's reforms.

Speaking of nationalism, Buruma expertly documents the twisted skein that is Chinese nationalism in the twenty-first century: sometimes racialist, sometimes cultural, sometimes political, often belligerent, the impact Chinese nationalism will have on the political and social evolution of China in the coming decades is probably the greatest wild card at present.

One final point that I found interesting is that in contemporary China, as in Eastern Europe during the 1970s and 1980s, when the ruling party has politicized everything, the act of carving out a place for the non-political in society becomes, paradoxically, imbued with great political significance (This phenomenon was deftly described in Tony Judt's Postwar).

I can very easily imagine research institutes in Beijing full of newly minted Chinese PhDs digging through the history of the demise of the Eastern bloc -- not to mention Chinese history -- looking for clues to avoid the same fate as the "people's democracies."

In any case, I give credit to Buruma for not simply writing a book that cheers China's dissidents and looks to post-CCP China with rose-tinted glasses. China's democratic transition, when it comes, is bound to be a messy and potentially bloody affair, and Buruma successfully treads the thin line between realistically assessing the future and worshipping the present power on the throne in Beijing. The picture that emerges from his account is of a China that's more than ready for a change, thanks to a population more politically astute than observers often suggest.

Hysteria on China

This op-ed by James Pinkerton (via RealClearPolitics) is typical of the hysteria in many corners of the chattering classes that has greeted China's test of an ASAT missile, the kind of breezy certainty that China is definitely, one-hundred percent, no doubt about it the biggest threat America faces and we better do something about it NOW.

In the Jain / Buddhist / et al parable of the blind men and the elephant, Pinkerton has grasped the tail firmly and is utterly convinced that he's holding a snake that has to be smothered now.

This kind of thinking is utterly retrograde -- much like Lou Dobbs's fulminating against "Red China."

As I've said before, China is exactly like the elephant in the above-mentioned parable. No country can form policy based on a single facet of its behavior, and to do so is to court disaster.

As for Pinkerton, I specifically object to this throw away line:

The Chinese military is not independent. So, if China shot down a satellite, it's because the leadership in Beijing wanted it shot down - as part of its plans for fighting a possible war with the United States.

Of course, no bureaucracy is entirely independent of the government of which it is a part. But the trend in recent years has been greater autonomy for the People's Liberation Army as it has become less politicized and more professionalized -- and accordingly, a more serious force to be reckoned with in bureaucratic disputes.

So it is entirely possible that the Foreign Ministry's surprise is not feigned. The PLA simply might have neglected to inform other ministries of a policy area that is exclusively its domain. Hmm, not altogether different than the acrimony between Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon. Of course, it is unsettling that no one in the PRC's government anticipated that this might concern other countries, but then the PRC's opacity -- and, in particular, the PLA's opacity -- is not news to anyone.

And as for China's "plans for fighting a possible war with the United States," well, of course. If you're going to be in a war, you might as well put yourself in a position to succeed. But the question that Pinkerton neglects to ask is whether the US and China are likely to find themselves coming to blows. If he asked that, he would see that apart for Taiwan, there is no bilateral issue between the US and China today that could result in war. Will there be friction? Absolutely. No power of China's magnitude could rise without causing major global friction. But this is not a re-run of Imperial Germany or Imperial Japan. If anything, it is a re-run of the rise of the United States, which caused friction but did not spark a major global war. And given the decline in the importance of violence in great-power relations, there is even less reason to anticipate Sino-US conflict.

Regarding Taiwan, as the Taiwanese public backs away from the brinkmanship of Chen Shui-bian and returns to the realism of the Kuomintang, the risks of war in the Taiwan Straits will diminish, and the situation will return to as it was in the 1980s, when the US and China had a mutual understanding of the situation resulting in its being significantly demilitarized.

China challenges the regional security order

Reports have emerged that China successfully tested an anti-satellite missile last week, after two previous failures (BBC; CNN). The implications of this test are obvious but not necessarily ominous.

The question is, in light of Japan's recent overtures to improve cooperation with China and with a visit by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao scheduled for this spring, what will be Japan's response to this test, given its implications for the efficacy of the US-Japan alliance in securing the region and responding to crises (especially in the Taiwan Straits)? The Abe Cabinet has provided an initial response in relatively measured tones, reiterating Japanese concerns about a lack of transparency in China's military modernization program. If criticism does not go much further than this, chances are this will not be an important turning point in the Sino-Japanese rapprochement -- but until the full international response unfolds it is too early to say.

This is also interesting in light of China's successful overtures to ASEAN in the Philippines, with its proposal for a China-ASEAN free trade area, which prompted Gloria Arroyo, president of the Philippines, to say, "We are very happy to have China as our big brother in this region." As Sheng Lijun points out in this piece posted at YaleGlobal Online, ASEAN's member states are both drawn to China and concerned about its power, leaving room for the US to counter Chinese influence:

While there is less public talk of a “China threat,” Washington can take some comfort from the fact that distrust of China remains deep-rooted in the region and may grow if a rising China enters too deep. ASEAN countries have not joined the China bandwagon but “hedge,” engaging China while developing robust ties with the US and other extra-regional powers to balance China. Asian countries generally do not have much trust for one another and the US is perceived as the least distrusted of all major powers. Asian nations need the US as a balancer and double insurance when they develop their relations with China. ASEAN is aware that without a strong relationship with the US, China may take ASEAN for granted.

A vigorous but balanced relationship with the US is seen as not only security insurance but also an incentive for China to offer more economic sweeteners. Barring a sudden and major change in the international strategic landscape and a disaster in US Southeast Asia policy that would unexpectedly boost China’s influence by default, the more China pushes in deepening its relations with ASEAN, the more ASEAN may feel that it needs a strong relationship with the US and other extra-regional power to keep the balance.

How will ASEAN react to this display of China's dark side, so shortly after it was hailed for its positive role in the region? Will it contribute to undermining the perceived reliability of the US as regional security guarantor, and lead Southeast Asian nations to seek the best possible arrangements with Beijing? Or will it serve to highlight the importance of the US as a check to China's ambitions?

Thomas Barnett offers a perspective on China's test of an ASAT missile that is somewhat in tune with my own thinking. The US-China relationship and the relationships between China and its neighbors are far too complex to reduce to a cold war-style antagonism, which is what much of the preliminary media coverage of this test tries to do.

Which goes to show that while this test is an important reminder that China's rise has a dark side, it's only that: a reminder. It's no surprise that China would develop ASAT technology and other weapons that could neutralize American advantages in any potential conflict, but that does not mean that China desires war or that war between the US and China is inevitable.

Chinese Siberia

This piece in today's Japan Times by Cambridge's own David Wall spells out in detail the silent, slow-motion annexation of Pacific Russia by China.

Russia is in quite a bind as far as the Russian Far East is concerned. As Wall points out, the region is being depopulated of Russians, and millions of Chinese are migrating -- whether temporarily or permanently remains to be seen -- into Russia to work. Even if the Russian population remained static, however, Russia would still be facing demographic defeat in the territories it took from China in the 1860s.

Were Pacific Russia to return to China sometime during the twenty-first century, the consequences would not necessarily be dire, particularly if China exercises de facto rule before formalizing the transition.

This process shows, however, that alarms about Russia may be overblown. Yes, Russia is an increasingly substantial player in global energy markets. And yes, Vladimir Putin's government has taken a frightening turn in the direction of outright autocracy. But increasingly Russia is imploding, so that even as super-wealthy Russians make splashes internationally and Putin's government taunts and threatens, they are the shiny facade hiding a country in terminal decline. Russia's inability to control its territory adjacent to China is just one example of how powerless it has become in the face of high mortality rates and a pervasive spiritual gloom.

Paulson's long-anticipated journey

US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is in Beijing this week at the head of a mission that includes Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke.

Will these talks achieve concrete results?

I have my doubts, because I don't think talks of this nature can "resolve" long-term structural changes in the global economy. As noted in this article in the International Herald Tribune:

Still, focusing on China as the economic bogeyman may turn out to be a politically easy but economically misbegotten strategy. Even if China allowed the yuan to float, it might not make much difference to the American trade balance.

"The United States is no longer a manufacturing economy," Chen [Xingdong, BNP Paribas's chief economist in Beijing] said. "They have to import the daily necessities."

The most recent statistics from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, show that durable goods made up only 14 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product; adding in clothing, shoes and some other nondurable products, the total is still less than a quarter of U.S. output.

Referring to Americans, Chen said: "If they don't import from China, they will have to import from other countries anyway. The only change is that they may not have such a good combination of quality and prices."

Does the US really want to go back to manufacturing the kind of goods being cranked out of Chinese factories? Or, alternatively, does the US want to curb its consumption of the products being produced by those factories?

I fear that the US is currently tempted by the "pull up the ladder" response. Having reaped great advantages from global economic integration, the US wants to call its quits on the whole global economic openness thing in the face of intense competition from new developers. So the US can badger China, but it shouldn't expect major results. The best that the US can do is focus on structural reform at home to enhance America's ability to compete in a world where more and more countries are learning to take advantage of economic liberalization.

Two looks at modern China

Two recent articles provide an excellent look at the bundle of contradictions that is modern China.

First, the Atlantic's James Fallows, currently residing in China, presents his "Four Cautions and Two Mysteries" about rapidly changing China. His look is largely limited to urban China, but it is still worthwhile, because Fallows also was on hand when Japan emerged in the 1980s as a contender, and has a number of useful comparisons with Japan's period of explosive growth. The picture that Fallows paints is of a China that has more in common with the United States than any other country -- a point I made in my contribution to this book. China, like the US, is a continental country, and like the US in the heady days of its industrialization in the late nineteenth century, its rise is profoundly impacting its own society, the surrounding region, and the world. A continental power has unleashed its boundless energy, and the world is being remade. That is why I defy anyone to predict what China will look like in the near-future.

Accordingly, in time the US and China may look across the Pacific and see a close friend in the other. At present, beyond the Taiwan Straits, there is no issue in US-China relations that could result in war between the two. There are points of friction, certainly, but nothing that would unleash the "guns of August," so to speak. In fact, as Fallows implies, culturally speaking the US and China may be far more natural allies than the US and Japan:

One reason why Americans typically find China less “foreign” than Japan is that in Japan the social controls are internalized, through years of training in one’s proper role in a group, whereas China seems like a bunch of individuals who behave themselves only when they think they might get caught. As I took an airport bus from downtown Tokyo to the distant Narita International Airport for the trip to Shanghai, the squadron of luggage handlers who had loaded the bus lined up, bowed in unison, and chanted safe-travel wishes to the bus as it departed. When I arrived in Shanghai, I saw teenaged airport baggage handlers playfully slapping each other and then being told by the foreman to get back to work. In Japan, the controls are built in; in China, they appear to be bolted on.

There's a lot to unpack in this quote, but, to be brief, Fallows points to a fundamental cultural divide between Japan on the one hand, and China and the US on the other. Japanese institutions have been shaped by limits -- of land, of resources, of people. While this argument is perhaps overexaggerated, not least by the Japanese (an example of Nihonjinron), it is significant when comparing the Japanese experience to that of China and the US, both of whom have been shaped by bigness and plenty (Maoism aside, which for China was a masochistic ideology that essentially entailed renouncing China's continental advantages). The Chinese people, in general, strike me as more entrepreneurial than the Japanese, which is hardly surprising because to me entrepreneurialism is a natural reaction to seemingly limitless possibilities.

As such, the more the Communist Party steps out of the way, the easier China and the US will be able to cooperate, a scenario that has kept many in Kasumigaseki up at night ever since Nixon and Kissinger sprang the opening to China on Tokyo without prior warning.

The second essay worth reading is from the London Review of Books, by Indian writer Pankaj Mishra (hat tip to a correspondent in Beijing). Mishra's view is more nuanced than Fallows', and in many ways more grim. For example:

The old heart of the city has been razed to meet the needs and desires of this new elite. Luxury villas have sprung up to accommodate expatriate businessmen, senior Party officials and the nouveaux riches. With their bewilderingly mixed facades – American colonial-style decking, neoclassical columns, baroque plasterwork, Tudor beams –they symbolise a city under fresh occupation by the transnational elite of the rich and powerful.

Others make do with what they have. One afternoon, soon after arriving in Shanghai, I travelled on one of the elevated expressways that lead from downtown to the clusters of high-rise housing estates built for those expelled from their neighbourhoods of longtang alleys and lanes. Rust and grime have already tainted these buildings, the lifts don’t work, there is no water pressure, the residents walk up and down the gloomy stairs carrying plastic buckets, but the inhabitants of this premature decay still seemed privileged, compared to the residents of the remoter suburbs, crammed in subdivided houses with enclosed balconies and a view of oil-blackened dust lanes and exposed drains.

Much of the essay comes from a conversation Mishra had with liberal Chinese intellectual Zhu Xueqin, and the picture that emerges is of a China that, loosed from the moorings of Maoism, is now adrift on a (polluted) sea of ideological rootlessness, with a number of pretenders to intellectual "hegemony" (to use a favorite word of one of my Cambridge chums) but no clear winner, meaning that soulless consumerism has filled the void. Arguably, this is not all that different from Japan, which turned to world-beating economic growth and consumerism after emerging from its own romance with a murderous ideology (although, to split hairs, Maoism was much more coherent as an ideology than that of Japan's militarist government). But it is not pretty, and its consequences for the world are far greater than those of Japan's postwar modernization ever were.

Bell on the Chinese way of sport

The always enjoyable Daniel Bell has an essay in Dissent called "The Politics of Sports: Watching the World Cup in Beijing." Before elaborating further, I just want to note as an aside how much I look forward to Bell's essays from Beijing. Bell is one of my intellectual heroes, and he has an extremely sharp eye for observing societies, which in recent years he has cast upon China and East Asia in general.

In any case, in this essay Bell dissects how the Chinese view international athletics. I have previously looked at how at Japanese attitudes towards international competitions, so I found this essay particularly useful for the sake of comparison. The Japanese too are greatly interested in how their national teams perform in international competitions (and how Japanese nationals perform in foreign professional leagues: witness the nightly recaps on how Japanese baseball players in the US and footballers in Europe perform). But at the same time, I haven't noticed a prevailing pattern in Japanese attitudes to competitions in which Japanese teams or players are not involved (although there is apparently some interest in American football, based on there being university football teams and broadcasts of NFL games).

But Bell finds something interesting about the teams Chinese fans support internationally:

Chinese fans support traditional soccer powers such as Germany, England, Brazil, Argentina, and Italy. It is difficult to overestimate the passion for such teams. In the 2002 World Cup, the CCTV hostess Sheng Bin wept openly at Argentina’s early exit. When England went down in defeat against Portugal in 2006, my son’s piano teacher’s husband was so depressed he could barely get out of bed. Partly, the preference for traditional soccer powers can be explained by the love of the game: Chinese fans support teams that have performed well in the past and are likely to generate exciting games in the future. But there may also be a special form of internationalist nationalism at work. The support for established teams may be an expression of a more general appreciation for nations with long and rich histories and cultures.

Bell suggests that the flip side of this attitude is an aversion to supporting underdogs in sports and in politics, which is hardly surprising given that the CCP has tried to cultivate the impression that it is the natural heir to five thousand years of Chinese civilization, and the rightful counterpart to other nations that are heirs to great civilizations. A good example of Beijing's about-face since Cultural Revolution is the creation of Confucius Institutes beginning in 2004. It seems that the more the CCP appears as the guardian of Chinese civilization, the more legitimacy it expects to enjoy at home and abroad.

Accordingly, expect the Beijing Olympics to be steeped in Chinese history, presenting China as a worthy world leader.

The paranoid fantasies of Lou Dobbs

This morning before work I caught Lou Dobbs on CNN International while flipping through the news channels. In the span of the few minutes I watched, he reported on grassroots efforts to fight illegal immigration quashed by the US corporations and the government, US cooperation on policing with "totalitarian" Red China, "the march of the leftists" in Latin America, and the specter of Putin's menacing new Russia.

Much attention has been focused on his staunch economic populism and anti-globalism. This attention is not misplaced or unwarranted, but just from watching a few minutes of his show I discerned a much broader and much more dangerous worldview than simple economic nationalism.

As the stories mentioned above indicate, Dobbs essentially believes that America is a haven amidst a sea of troubles. The countries of the world are dysfunctional and/or dangerous. Unfair economic competition is only one facet of the dangers posed by the rest of the world. Foreign governments and peoples are hostile to America, and therefore we must retreat within our borders, tend our own garden, and watch the world fall to pieces.

Even if this approach were possible, it would be undesirable. Despite apparent disorder in the short term, the world may be on the brink of true peace and prosperity, as the likelihood of great-power war diminishes and billions of people are pulled out of debilitating poverty by economic liberalization. The US has an interest in using its power to usher this new era into being, and interdependence means that it has little choice in the matter. Thus to view the world as a cavalcade of threats to the American way of life is paranoid to the extreme.

Take his views on China. His report on US cooperation on policing and law enforcement expressed bafflement at the "contradictions" in US China policy. This reporting is gravely misleading, given that as every observer of US-China relations knows, US policy vis-a-vis Beijing has been riddled with contradictions ever since Nixon and Kissinger went to China. "Coopetition" is the watchword of the relationship, as every US administration since 1972 has found in China a potential partner in the management of regional security and, post-1978, a trading partner of ever-growing importance, even as the same administrations saw a looming threat to Taiwan and a brutal oppressor of its own people. But China is changing rapidly, and in unknown ways -- it's impossible to know what it will look like in ten, or even five, years. So to talk of "Red China" like some kind of 1950s newsreel is unhelpful in the extreme. The US should cooperate wherever possible and criticize and cajole only when necessary, but most importantly it must not view China as a kind of unmitigated enemy of America.

In short, America must not succumb to Dobbsian paranoia. The challenge of my generation -- indeed of every generation of American leaders -- will be to use American power to help usher in a more peaceful, prosperous world, which necessarily means rejecting the fear peddled by Lou Dobbs and his ilk.