Robert Kaplan: Center Stage for the 21st Century: Rivalry in the Indian Ocean

For better or worse, phrases such "the Cold War" and "the clash of civilizations" matter. In a similar way, so do maps. The right map can stimulate foresight by providing a spatial view of critical trends in world politics. Understanding the map of Europe was essential to understanding the twentieth century. Although recent technological advances and economic integration have encouraged global thinking, some places continue to count more than others. And in some of those, such as Iraq and Pakistan, two countries with inherently artificial contours, politics is still at the mercy of geography.

So in what quarter of the earth today can one best glimpse the future? Because of their own geographic circumstances, Americans, in particular, continue to concentrate on the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. World War II and the Cold War shaped this outlook: Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, and communist China were all oriented toward one of these two oceans. The bias is even embedded in mapping conventions: Mercator projections tend to place the Western Hemisphere in the middle of the map, splitting the Indian Ocean at its far edges. And yet, as the pirate activity off the coast of Somalia and the terrorist carnage in Mumbai last fall suggest, the Indian Ocean -- the world's third-largest body of water -- already forms center stage for the challenges of the twenty-first century.

The greater Indian Ocean region encompasses the entire arc of Islam, from the Sahara Desert to the Indonesian archipelago. Although the Arabs and the Persians are known to Westerners primarily as desert peoples, they have also been great seafarers. In the Middle Ages, they sailed from Arabia to China; proselytizing along the way, they spread their faith through sea-based commerce. Today, the western reaches of the Indian Ocean include the tinderboxes of Somalia, Yemen, Iran, and Pakistan -- constituting a network of dynamic trade as well as a network of global terrorism, piracy, and drug smuggling. Hundreds of millions of Muslims -- the legacy of those medieval conversions -- live along the Indian Ocean's eastern edges, in India and Bangladesh, Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Indian Ocean is dominated by two immense bays, the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, near the top of which are two of the least stable countries in the world: Pakistan and Myanmar (also known as Burma). State collapse or regime change in Pakistan would affect its neighbors by empowering Baluchi and Sindhi separatists seeking closer links to India and Iran. Likewise, the collapse of the junta in Myanmar -- where competition over energy and natural resources between China and India looms -- would threaten economies nearby and require a massive seaborne humanitarian intervention. On the other hand, the advent of a more liberal regime in Myanmar would undermine China's dominant position there, boost Indian influence, and quicken regional economic integration.

In other words, more than just a geographic feature, the Indian Ocean is also an idea. It combines the centrality of Islam with global energy politics and the rise of India and China to reveal a multilayered, multipolar world. The dramatic economic growth of India and China has been duly noted, but the equally dramatic military ramifications of this development have not. India's and China's great-power aspirations, as well as their quests for energy security, have compelled the two countries "to redirect their gazes from land to the seas," according to James Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara, associate professors of strategy at the U.S. Naval War College. And the very fact that they are focusing on their sea power indicates how much more self-confident they feel on land. And so a map of the Indian Ocean exposes the contours of power politics in the twenty-first century.

Yet this is still an environment in which the United States will have to keep the peace and help guard the global commons -- interdicting terrorists, pirates, and smugglers; providing humanitarian assistance; managing the competition between India and China. It will have to do so not, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, as a land-based, in-your-face meddler, leaning on far-flung army divisions at risk of getting caught up in sectarian conflict, but as a sea-based balancer lurking just over the horizon. Sea power has always been less threatening than land power: as the cliché goes, navies make port visits, and armies invade. Ships take a long time to get to a war zone, allowing diplomacy to work its magic. And as the U.S. response to the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean showed, with most sailors and marines returning to their ships each night, navies can exert great influence on shore while leaving a small footprint. The more the United States becomes a maritime hegemon, as opposed to a land-based one, the less threatening it will seem to others.

Moreover, precisely because India and China are emphasizing their sea power, the job of managing their peaceful rise will fall on the U.S. Navy to a significant extent. There will surely be tensions between the three navies, especially as the gaps in their relative strength begin to close. But even if the comparative size of the U.S. Navy decreases in the decades ahead, the United States will remain the one great power from outside the Indian Ocean region with a major presence there -- a unique position that will give it the leverage to act as a broker between India and China in their own backyard. To understand this dynamic, one must look at the region from a maritime perspective.

Thanks to the predictability of the monsoon winds, the countries on the Indian Ocean were connected well before the age of steam power. Trade in frankincense, spices, precious stones, and textiles brought together the peoples flung along its long shoreline during the Middle Ages. Throughout history, sea routes have mattered more than land routes, writes the historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto, because they carry more goods more economically. "Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice," went one saying during the late fifteenth century, alluding to the city's extensive commerce with Asia; if the world were an egg, Hormuz would be its yolk, went another. Even today, in the jet and information age, 90 percent of global commerce and about 65 percent of all oil travel by sea. Globalization has been made possible by the cheap and easy shipping of containers on tankers, and the Indian Ocean accounts for fully half the world's container traffic. Moreover, 70 percent of the total traffic of petroleum products passes through the Indian Ocean, on its way from the Middle East to the Pacific. As these goods travel that route, they pass through the world's principal oil shipping lanes, including the Gulfs of Aden and Oman -- as well as some of world commerce's main chokepoints: Bab el Mandeb and the Straits of Hormuz and Malacca. Forty percent of world trade passes through the Strait of Malacca; 40 percent of all traded crude oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz.

Already the world's preeminent energy and trade interstate seaway, the Indian Ocean will matter even more in the future. Global energy needs are expected to rise by 45 percent between 2006 and 2030, and almost half of the growth in demand will come from India and China. China's demand for crude oil doubled between 1995 and 2005 and will double again in the coming 15 years or so; by 2020, China is expected to import 7.3 million barrels of crude per day -- half of Saudi Arabia's planned output. More than 85 percent of the oil and oil products bound for China cross the Indian Ocean and pass through the Strait of Malacca.

India -- soon to become the world's fourth-largest energy consumer, after the United States, China, and Japan -- is dependent on oil for roughly 33 percent of its energy needs, 65 percent of which it imports. And 90 percent of its oil imports could soon come from the Persian Gulf. India must satisfy a population that will, by 2030, be the largest of any country in the world. Its coal imports from far-off Mozambique are set to increase substantially, adding to the coal that India already imports from other Indian Ocean countries, such as South Africa, Indonesia, and Australia. In the future, India-bound ships will also be carrying increasingly large quantities of liquefied natural gas (LNG) across the seas from southern Africa, even as it continues importing LNG from Qatar, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

As the whole Indian Ocean seaboard, including Africa's eastern shores, becomes a vast web of energy trade, India is seeking to increase its influence from the Plateau of Iran to the Gulf of Thailand -- an expansion west and east meant to span the zone of influence of the Raj's viceroys. India's trade with the Arab countries of the Persian Gulf and Iran, with which India has long enjoyed close economic and cultural ties, is booming. Approximately 3.5 million Indians work in the six Arab states of the Gulf Cooperation Council and send home $4 billion in remittances annually. As India's economy continues to grow, so will its trade with Iran and, once the country recovers, Iraq. Iran, like Afghanistan, has become a strategic rear base for India against Pakistan, and it is poised to become an important energy partner. In 2005, India and Iran signed a multibillion-dollar deal under which Iran will supply India with 7.5 million tons of LNG annually for 25 years, beginning in 2009. There has been talk of building a gas pipeline from Iran to India through Pakistan, a project that would join the Middle East and South Asia at the hip (and in the process could go a long way toward stabilizing Indian-Pakistani relations). In another sign that Indian-Iranian relations are growing more intimate, India has been helping Iran develop the port of Chah Bahar, on the Gulf of Oman, which will also serve as a forward base for the Iranian navy.

India has also been expanding its military and economic ties with Myanmar, to the east. Democratic India does not have the luxury of spurning Myanmar's junta because Myanmar is rich in natural resources -- oil, natural gas, coal, zinc, copper, uranium, timber, and hydropower -- resources in which the Chinese are also heavily invested. India hopes that a network of east-west roads and energy pipelines will eventually allow it to be connected to Iran, Pakistan, and Myanmar.

India is enlarging its navy in the same spirit. With its 155 warships, the Indian navy is already one of the world's largest, and it expects to add three nuclear-powered submarines and three aircraft carriers to its arsenal by 2015. One major impetus for the buildup was the humiliating inability of its navy to evacuate Indian citizens from Iraq and Kuwait during the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War. Another is what Mohan Malik, a scholar at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, in Hawaii, has called India's "Hormuz dilemma," its dependence on imports passing through the strait, close to the shores of Pakistan's Makran coast, where the Chinese are helping the Pakistanis develop deep-water ports.

Indeed, as India extends its influence east and west, on land and at sea, it is bumping into China, which, also concerned about protecting its interests throughout the region, is expanding its reach southward. Chinese President Hu Jintao has bemoaned China's "Malacca dilemma." The Chinese government hopes to eventually be able to partly bypass that strait by transporting oil and other energy products via roads and pipelines from ports on the Indian Ocean into the heart of China. One reason that Beijing wants desperately to integrate Taiwan into its dominion is so that it can redirect its naval energies away from the Taiwan Strait and toward the Indian Ocean.

The Chinese government has already adopted a "string of pearls" strategy for the Indian Ocean, which consists of setting up a series of ports in friendly countries along the ocean's northern seaboard. It is building a large naval base and listening post in Gwadar, Pakistan, (from which it may already be monitoring ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz); a port in Pasni, Pakistan, 75 miles east of Gwadar, which is to be joined to the Gwadar facility by a new highway; a fueling station on the southern coast of Sri Lanka; and a container facility with extensive naval and commercial access in Chittagong, Bangladesh. Beijing operates surveillance facilities on islands deep in the Bay of Bengal. In Myanmar, whose junta gets billions of dollars in military assistance from Beijing, the Chinese are constructing (or upgrading) commercial and naval bases and building roads, waterways, and pipelines in order to link the Bay of Bengal to the southern Chinese province of Yunnan. Some of these facilities are closer to cities in central and western China than those cities are to Beijing and Shanghai, and so building road and rail links from these facilities into China will help spur the economies of China's landlocked provinces. The Chinese government is also envisioning a canal across the Isthmus of Kra, in Thailand, to link the Indian Ocean to China's Pacific coast -- a project on the scale of the Panama Canal and one that could further tip Asia's balance of power in China's favor by giving China's burgeoning navy and commercial maritime fleet easy access to a vast oceanic continuum stretching all the way from East Africa to Japan and the Korean Peninsula.

All of these activities are unnerving the Indian government. With China building deep-water ports to its west and east and a preponderance of Chinese arms sales going to Indian Ocean states, India fears being encircled by China unless it expands its own sphere of influence. The two countries' overlapping commercial and political interests are fostering competition, and even more so in the naval realm than on land. Zhao Nanqi, former director of the General Logistics Department of the People's Liberation Army, proclaimed in 1993, "We can no longer accept the Indian Ocean as an ocean only of the Indians." India has responded to China's building of a naval base in Gwadar by further developing one of its own, that in Karwar, India, south of Goa. Meanwhile, Zhang Ming, a Chinese naval analyst, has warned that the 244 islands that form India's Andaman and Nicobar archipelago could be used like a "metal chain" to block the western entrance to the Strait of Malacca, on which China so desperately depends. "India is perhaps China's most realistic strategic adversary," Zhang has written. "Once India commands the Indian Ocean, it will not be satisfied with its position and will continuously seek to extend its influence, and its eastward strategy will have a particular impact on China." These may sound like the words of a professional worrier from China's own theory class, but these worries are revealing: Beijing already considers New Delhi to be a major sea power.

As the competition between India and China suggests, the Indian Ocean is where global struggles will play out in the twenty-first century. The old borders of the Cold War map are crumbling fast, and Asia is becoming a more integrated unit, from the Middle East to the Pacific. South Asia has been an indivisible part of the greater Islamic Middle East since the Middle Ages: it was the Muslim Ghaznavids of eastern Afghanistan who launched raids on India's northwestern coast in the early eleventh century; Indian civilization itself is a fusion of the indigenous Hindu culture and the cultural imprint left by these invasions. Although it took the seaborne terrorist attacks in Mumbai last November for most Westerners to locate India inside the greater Middle East, the Indian Ocean's entire coast has always constituted one vast interconnected expanse.

What is different now is the extent of these connections. On a maritime-centric map of southern Eurasia, artificial land divisions disappear; even landlocked Central Asia is related to the Indian Ocean. Natural gas from Turkmenistan may one day flow through Afghanistan, for example, en route to Pakistani and Indian cities and ports, one of several possible energy links between Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Both the Chinese port in Gwadar, Pakistan, and the Indian port in Chah Bahar, Iran, may eventually be connected to oil- and natural-gas-rich Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and other former Soviet republics. S. Frederick Starr, a Central Asia expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, said at a conference in Washington last year that access to the Indian Ocean "will help define Central Asian politics in the future." Others have called ports in India and Pakistan "evacuation points" for Caspian Sea oil. The destinies of countries even 1,200 miles from the Indian Ocean are connected with it.

The United States faces three related geopolitical challenges in Asia: the strategic nightmare of the greater Middle East, the struggle for influence over the southern tier of the former Soviet Union, and the growing presence of India and China in the Indian Ocean. The last seems to be the most benign of the three. China is not an enemy of the United States, like Iran, but a legitimate peer competitor, and India is a budding ally. And the rise of the Indian navy, soon to be the third largest in the world after those of the United States and China, will function as an antidote to Chinese military expansion.

The task of the U.S. Navy will therefore be to quietly leverage the sea power of its closest allies -- India in the Indian Ocean and Japan in the western Pacific -- to set limits on China's expansion. But it will have to do so at the same time as it seizes every opportunity to incorporate China's navy into international alliances; a U.S.-Chinese understanding at sea is crucial for the stabilization of world politics in the twenty-first century. After all, the Indian Ocean is a seaway for both energy and hashish and is in drastic need of policing. To manage it effectively, U.S. military planners will have to invoke challenges such as terrorism, piracy, and smuggling to bring together India, China, and other states in joint sea patrols. The goal of the United States must be to forge a global maritime system that can minimize the risks of interstate conflict while lessening the burden of policing for the U.S. Navy.

Keeping the peace in the Indian Ocean will be even more crucial once the seas and the coasts from the Gulf of Aden to the Sea of Japan are connected. Shipping options between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean will increase substantially in the future. The port operator Dubai Ports World is conducting a feasibility study on constructing a land bridge near the canal that the Chinese hope will be dug across the Isthmus of Kra, with ports on either side of the isthmus connected by rails and highways. The Malaysian government is interested in a pipeline network that would link up ports in the Bay of Bengal with those in the South China Sea. To be sure, as sea power grows in importance, the crowded hub around Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia will form the maritime heart of Asia: in the coming decades, it will be as strategically significant as the Fulda Gap, a possible invasion route for Soviet tanks into West Germany during the Cold War. The protective oversight of the U.S. Navy there will be especially important. As the only truly substantial blue-water force without territorial ambitions on the Asian mainland, the U.S. Navy may in the future be able to work with individual Asian countries, such as India and China, better than they can with one another. Rather than ensure its dominance, the U.S. Navy simply needs to make itself continually useful.

It has already begun to make the necessary shifts. Owing to the debilitating U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, headlines in recent years have been dominated by discussions about land forces and counterinsurgency. But with 75 percent of the earth's population living within 200 miles of the sea, the world's military future may well be dominated by naval (and air) forces operating over vast regions. And to a greater extent than the other armed services, navies exist to protect economic interests and the system in which these interests operate. Aware of how much the international economy depends on sea traffic, U.S. admirals are thinking beyond the fighting and winning of wars to responsibilities such as policing a global trading arrangement. They are also attuned to the effects that a U.S. military strike against Iran would have on maritime commerce and the price of oil. With such concerns in mind, the U.S. Navy has for decades been helping to secure vital chokepoints in the Indian Ocean, often operating from a base on the British atoll of Diego Garcia, a thousand miles south of India and close to major sea-lanes. And in October 2007, it implied that it was seeking a sustained forward presence in the Indian Ocean and the western Pacific but no longer in the Atlantic -- a momentous shift in overall U.S. maritime strategy. The document Marine Corps Vision and Strategy 2025 also concluded that the Indian Ocean and its adjacent waters will be a central theater of global conflict and competition this century.

Yet as the challenges for the United States on the high seas multiply, it is unclear how much longer U.S. naval dominance will last. At the end of the Cold War, the U.S. Navy boasted about 600 warships; it is now down to 279. That number might rise to 313 in the coming years with the addition of the new "littoral combat ships," but it could also drop to the low 200s given cost overruns of 34 percent and the slow pace of shipbuilding. Although the revolution in precision-guided weapons means that existing ships pack better firepower than those of the Cold War fleet did, since a ship cannot be in two places at once, the fewer the vessels, the riskier every decision to deploy them. There comes a point at which insufficient quantity hurts quality.

Meanwhile, by sometime in the next decade, China's navy will have more warships than the United States'. China is producing and acquiring submarines five times as fast as is the United States. In addition to submarines, the Chinese have wisely focused on buying naval mines, ballistic missiles that can hit moving targets at sea, and technology that blocks signals from GPS satellites, on which the U.S. Navy depends. (They also have plans to acquire at least one aircraft carrier; not having one hindered their attempts to help with the tsunami relief effort in 2004-5.) The goal of the Chinese is "sea denial," or dissuading U.S. carrier strike groups from closing in on the Asian mainland wherever and whenever Washington would like. The Chinese are also more aggressive than U.S. military planners. Whereas the prospect of ethnic warfare has scared away U.S. admirals from considering a base in Sri Lanka, which is strategically located at the confluence of the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, the Chinese are constructing a refueling station for their warships there.

There is nothing illegitimate about the rise of China's navy. As the country's economic interests expand dramatically, so must China expand its military, and particularly its navy, to guard these interests. The United Kingdom did just that in the nineteenth century, and so did the United States when it emerged as a great power between the American Civil War and World War I. In 1890, the American military theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan published The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783, which argued that the power to protect merchant fleets had been the determining factor in world history. Both Chinese and Indian naval strategists read him avidly nowadays. China's quest for a major presence in the Indian Ocean was also evinced in 2005 by the beginning of an extensive commemoration of Zheng He, the Ming dynasty explorer and admiral who plied the seas between China and Indonesia, Sri Lanka, the Persian Gulf, and the Horn of Africa in the early decades of the fifteenth century -- a celebration that signals China's belief that these seas have always been part of its zone of influence.

Just as at the end of the nineteenth century the British Royal Navy began to reduce its presence worldwide by leveraging the growing sea power of its naval allies (Japan and the United States), at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the United States is beginning an elegant decline by leveraging the growing sea power of allies such as India and Japan to balance against China. What better way to scale back than to give more responsibilities to like-minded states, especially allies that, unlike those in Europe, still cherish military power?

India, for one, is more than willing to help. "India has never waited for American permission to balance [against] China," the Indian strategist C. Raja Mohan wrote in 2006, adding that India has been balancing against China since the day the Chinese invaded Tibet. Threatened by China's rise, India has expanded its naval presence from as far west as the Mozambique Channel to as far east as the South China Sea. It has been establishing naval staging posts and listening stations on the island nations of Madagascar, Mauritius, and the Seychelles, as well as military relationships with them, precisely in order to counter China's own very active military cooperation with these states. With a Chinese-Pakistani alliance taking shape, most visibly in the construction of the Gwadar port, near the Strait of Hormuz, and an Indian naval buildup on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, near the Strait of Malacca, the Indian-Chinese rivalry is taking on the dimensions of a maritime Great Game. This is a reason for the United States to quietly encourage India to balance against China, even as the United States seeks greater cooperation with China. During the Cold War, the Pacific and Indian oceans were veritable U.S. lakes. But such hegemony will not last, and the United States must seek to replace it with a subtle balance-of-power arrangement.

So how exactly does the United States play the role of a constructive, distant, and slowly declining hegemon and keep peace on the high seas in what Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International, has called "the post-American world"? Several years ago, Admiral Michael Mullen, then the chief of naval operations (and now chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), said the answer was a "thousand-ship navy . . . comprised of all freedom-loving nations -- standing watch over the seas, standing watch with each other." The term "thousand-ship navy" has since been dropped for sounding too domineering, but the idea behind it remains: rather than going it alone, the U.S. Navy should be a coalition builder supreme, working with any navy that agrees to patrol the seas and share information with it.

Already, Combined Task Force 150 (CTF-150), a naval force based in Djibouti and comprising roughly 15 vessels from the United States, four European countries, Canada, and Pakistan, conducts antipiracy patrols around the troubled Gulf of Aden. In 2008, about a hundred ships were attacked by pirates in the region, and over 35 vessels, with billions of dollars worth of cargo, were seized. (As of the end of 2008, more than a dozen, including oil tankers, cargo vessels, and other ships, along with over 300 crew members, were still being held.) Ransom demands routinely exceed $1 million per ship, and in the recent case of one Saudi oil tanker, pirates demanded $25 million. Last fall, after the capture of a Ukrainian vessel carrying tanks and other military equipment, warships from the United States, Kenya, and Malaysia steamed toward the Gulf of Aden to assist CTF-150, followed by two Chinese warships a few weeks later. The force, which is to be beefed up and rechristened CTF-151, is likely to become a permanent fixture: piracy is the maritime ripple effect of land-based anarchy, and for as long as Somalia is in the throes of chaos, pirates operating at the behest of warlords will infest the waters far down Africa's eastern coast.

The task-force model could also be applied to the Strait of Malacca and other waters surrounding the Indonesian archipelago. With help from the U.S. Navy, the navies and coast guards of Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia have already combined forces to reduce piracy in that area in recent years. And with the U.S. Navy functioning as both a mediator and an enforcer of standard procedures, coalitions of this kind could bring together rival countries, such as India and Pakistan or India and China, under a single umbrella: these states' governments would have no difficulty justifying to their publics participating in task forces aimed at transnational threats over which they have no disagreements. Piracy has the potential to unite rival states along the Indian Ocean coastline.

Packed with states with weak governments and tottering infrastructure, the shores of the Indian Ocean make it necessary for the United States and other countries to transform their militaries. This area represents an unconventional world, a world in which the U.S. military, for one, will have to respond, expeditionary style, to a range of crises: not just piracy but also terrorist attacks, ethnic conflicts, cyclones, and floods. For even as the United States' armed forces, and particularly its navy, are in relative decline, they remain the most powerful conventional military on earth, and they will be expected to lead such emergency responses. With population growth in climatically and seismically fragile zones today placing more human beings in danger's way than at almost any other time in history, one deployment will quickly follow another.

It is the variety and recurrence of these challenges that make the map of the Indian Ocean in the twenty-first century vastly different from the map of the North Atlantic in the twentieth century. The latter illustrated both a singular threat and a singular concept: the Soviet Union. And it gave the United States a simple focus: to defend Western Europe against the Red Army and keep the Soviet navy bottled up near the polar icecap. Because the threat was straightforward, and the United States' power was paramount, the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization arguably became history's most successful alliance.

One might envision a "NATO of the seas" for the Indian Ocean, composed of South Africa, Oman, Pakistan, India, Singapore, and Australia, with Pakistan and India bickering inside the alliance much as Greece and Turkey have inside NATO. But that idea fails to capture what the Indian Ocean is all about. Owing to the peripatetic movements of medieval Arab and Persian sailors and the legacies of Portuguese, Dutch, and British imperialists, the Indian Ocean forms a historical and cultural unit. Yet in strategic terms, it, like the world at large today, has no single focal point. The Gulf of Aden, the Persian Gulf, the Bay of Bengal -- all these areas are burdened by different threats with different players. Just as today NATO is a looser alliance, less singularly focused than it was during the Cold War, any coalition centered on the Indian Ocean should be adapted to the times. Given the ocean's size -- it stretches across seven time zones and almost half of the world's latitudes -- and the comparative slowness at which ships move, it would be a challenge for any one multinational navy to get to a crisis zone in time. The United States was able to lead the relief effort off the coast of Indonesia after the 2004 tsunami only because the carrier strike group the USS Abraham Lincoln happened to be in the vicinity and not in the Korean Peninsula, where it was headed.

A better approach would be to rely on multiple regional and ideological alliances in different parts of the Indian Ocean. Some such efforts have already begun. The navies of Thailand, Singapore, and Indonesia have banded together to deter piracy in the Strait of Malacca; those of the United States, India, Singapore, and Australia have exercised together off India's southwestern coast -- an implicit rebuke to China's designs in the region. According to Vice Admiral John Morgan, former deputy chief of U.S. naval operations, the Indian Ocean strategic system should be like the New York City taxi system: driven by market forces and with no central dispatcher. Coalitions will naturally form in areas where shipping lanes need to be protected, much as taxis gather in the theater district before and after performances. For one Australian commodore, the model should be a network of artificial sea bases supplied by the U.S. Navy, which would allow for different permutations of alliances: frigates and destroyers from various states could "plug and play" into these sea bases as necessary and spread out from East Africa to the Indonesian archipelago.

Like a microcosm of the world at large, the greater Indian Ocean region is developing into an area of both ferociously guarded sovereignty (with fast-growing economies and militaries) and astonishing interdependence (with its pipelines and land and sea routes). And for the first time since the Portuguese onslaught in the region in the early sixteenth century, the West's power there is in decline, however subtly and relatively. The Indians and the Chinese will enter into a dynamic great-power rivalry in these waters, with their shared economic interests as major trading partners locking them in an uncomfortable embrace. The United States, meanwhile, will serve as a stabilizing power in this newly complex area. Indispensability, rather than dominance, must be its goal.

"There is nothing illegitimate about the rise of China's navy. ">

I beg to differ...

War Is Not Far from Us and Is the Midwife of the Chinese Century
By Chi Haiotian, August 8, 2005
Leading CCP official argues for exterminating U.S. population
The following is a transcript of a speech believed to have been given by Mr. Chi Haotian, Minster of Defense and vice-chairman of China’s Central Military Commission. Independently verifying the authorship of the speech is not possible. It is worth reading because it is believed to set out the CCP’s strategy for the development of China. The speech argues for the necessity of China using biological warfare to depopulate the United States and prepare it for a future massive Chinese colonization. “The War Is Not Far from Us and Is the Midwife of the Chinese Century” was published on February 15, 2005 on www.peacehall.com and was published on www.boxun.com on April 23, 2005. This speech and a related speech, “The War Is Approaching Us” are analyzed in The Epoch Times original article “The CCP’s Last-ditch Gamble: Biological and Nuclear War.”
Text of the speech:
Comrades,
I’m very excited today, because the large-scale online survey sina.com that was done for us showed that our next generation is quite promising and our Party’s cause will be carried on. In answering the question, “Will you shoot at women, children and prisoners of war,” more than 80 percent of the respondents answered in the affirmative, exceeding by far our expectations [1].
Today I’d like to focus on why we asked sina.com to conduct this online survey among our people. My speech today is a sequel to my speech last time [2], during which I started with a discussion of the issue of the three islands [3], mentioned that 20 years of the idyllic theme of “peace and development” had come to an end, and concluded that modernization under the saber is the only option for China’s next phase. I also mentioned we have a vital stake overseas. Today, I’ll speak more specifically on these two issues.
The central issue of this survey appears to be whether one should shoot at women, children and prisoners of war, but its real significance goes far beyond that. Ostensibly, our intention is mainly to figure out what the Chinese people’s attitude towards war is: If these future soldiers do not hesitate to kill even non-combatants, they’ll naturally be doubly ready and ruthless in killing combatants. Therefore, the responses to the survey questions may reflect the general attitude people have towards war.
Actually, however, this is not our genuine intention. The purpose of the CCP Central Committee in conducting this survey is to probe people’s minds. We wanted to know: If China’s global development will necessitate massive deaths in enemy countries, will our people endorse that scenario? Will they be for or against it?
As everybody knows, the essence of Comrade Xiaoping’s [4] thinking is “development is the hard truth.” And Comrade Jintao [5] has also pointed out repeatedly and empathetically that “development is our top priority,” which should not be neglected for even a moment. But many comrades tend to understand “development” in its narrow sense, assuming it to be limited to domestic development. The fact is, our “development” refers to the great revitalization of the Chinese nation, which, of course, is not limited to the land we have now but also includes the whole world.
Why do we put it this way?
Defense Minster Chi Haotian (Jonathan Utz/AFP/Getty Images)
Both Comrade Liu Huaqing [6], one of the leaders of the old generation in our Party, and Comrade He Xin [7], a young strategist for our Party, have repeatedly stressed the theory regarding the shift of the center of world civilization. Our slogan of “revitalizing China” has this way of thinking as its basis. You may look into the newspapers and magazines published in recent years or go online to do some research to find out who raised the slogan of national revitalization first. It was Comrade He Xin. Do you know who He Xin is? He may look aggressive and despicable when he speaks in public, with his sleeves and pants all rolled up, but his historical vision is a treasure our Party should cherish.In discussing this issue, let us start from the beginning.
As everybody knows, according to the views propagated by the Western scholars, humanity as a whole originated from one single mother in Africa. Therefore, no race can claim racial superiority. However, according to the research conducted by most Chinese scholars, the Chinese are different from other races on earth. We did not originate in Africa. Instead, we originated independently in the land of China. The Peking Man at Zhoukoudian that we are all familiar with represents a phase of our ancestors’ evolution. “The Project of Searching for the Origins of the Chinese Civilization” currently undertaken in our country is aimed at a more comprehensive and systematic research on the origin, process and development of the ancient Chinese civilization. We used to say, “Chinese civilization has had a history of five thousand years.” But now, many experts engaged in research in varied fields including archeology, ethnic cultures, and regional cultures have reached consensus that the new discoveries such as the Hongshan Culture in the Northeast, the Liangzhu Culture in Zhejiang province, the Jinsha Ruins in Sichuan province, and the Yongzhou Shun Emperor Cultural Site in Human province are all compelling evidence of the existence of China’s early civilizations, and they prove that China’s rice-growing agricultural history alone can be traced back as far as 8,000 to 10,000 years. This refutes the concept of “five thousand years of Chinese civilization.” Therefore, we can assert that we are the product of cultural roots of more than a million years, civilization and progress of more than ten thousand years, an ancient nation of five thousand years, and a single Chinese entity of two thousand years. This is the Chinese nation that calls itself, “descendents of Yan and Huang,” the Chinese nation that we are so proud of. Hitler’s Germany had once bragged that the German race was the most superior race on Earth, but the fact is, our nation is far superior to the Germans.
During our long history, our people have disseminated throughout the Americas and the regions along the Pacific Rim, and they became Indians in the Americas and the East Asian ethnic groups in the South Pacific.
We all know that on account of our national superiority, during the thriving and prosperous Tang Dynasty our civilization was at the peak of the world. We were the center of the world civilization, and no other civilization in the world was comparable to ours. Later on, because of our complacency, narrow-mindedness, and the self-enclosure of our own country, we were surpassed by Western civilization, and the center of the world shifted to the West.
In reviewing history, one may ask: Will the center of the world civilization shift back to China?
Comrade He Xin put it in his report to the Central Committee in 1988: If the fact is that the center of leadership of the world was located in Europe as of the 18th Century, and later shifted to the United States in the mid 20th Century, then in the 21st Century the center of leadership of the world will shift to the East of our planet. And, “the East” of course mainly refers to China.
Actually, Comrade Liu Huaqing made similar points in early 1980s. Based on an historical analysis, he pointed out that the center of world civilization is shifting. It shifted from the East to Western Europe and later to the United States; now it is shifting back to the East. Therefore, if we refer to the 19th Century as the British Century, and the 20th century as the American Century, then the 21st Century will be the Chinese Century.
To understand conscientiously this historical law and to be prepared to greet the advent of the Chinese Century is the historical mission of our Party. As we all know, at the end of the last century, we built the Altar to the Chinese Century in Beijing. At the very moment of the arrival of the new millennium, the collective leadership of the Party Central Committee gathered there for a rally, upholding the torches of Zhoukoudian, to pledge themselves to get ready to greet the arrival of the Chinese Century. We were doing this to follow the historical law and setting the realization of the Chinese Century as the goal of our Party’s endeavors.
Later, in the political report of our Party’s Sixteenth National Congress, we established that the national revitalization be our great objective and explicitly specified in our new Party Constitution that our Party is the pioneer of the Chinese people. All these steps marked a major development in Marxism, reflecting our Party‘s courage and wisdom. As we all know, Marx and his followers have never referred to any communist party as a pioneer of a certain people; neither did they say that national revitalization could be used as a slogan of a communist party. Even Comrade Mao Zedong, a courageous national hero, only raised high the banner of “the global proletarian revolution,” but even he did not have the courage to give the loudest publicity to the slogan of national revitalization.
We must greet the arrival of the Chinese Century by raising high the banner of national revitalization. How should we fight for the realization of the Chinese Century? We must borrow the precious experiences in human history by taking advantage of the outstanding fruition of human civilization and drawing lessons from what happened to other ethnic groups.
The lessons include the collapse of communism in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as well as the defeats of Germany and Japan in the past. Recently there has been much discussion on the lessons of the collapse of communism in the former Soviet Union and Eastern European countries, so I will not dwell on them here. Today I’d like to talk about the lessons of Germany and Japan.
As we all know, Nazi Germany also placed much emphasis on the education of the people, especially the younger generation. The Nazi party and government organized and established various propaganda and educational institutions such as the “Guiding Bureau of National Propaganda,” “Department of National Education and Propaganda,” “Supervising Bureau of Worldview Study and Education,” and “Information Office,” all aimed at instilling into the people’s minds, from elementary schools to colleges, the idea that German people are superior, and convincing people that the historical mission of the Arian people is to become the “lords of earth” that “rule over the world.” Back then the German people were much more united than we are today.
Nonetheless, Germany was defeated in utter shame, along with its ally, Japan. Why? We reached some conclusions at the study meetings of the Politburo, in which we were searching for the laws that governed the vicissitudes of the big powers, and trying to analyze Germany and Japan’s rapid growth. When we decide to revitalize China based on the German model, we must not repeat the mistakes they made.
Specifically, the following are the fundamental causes for their defeat: First, they had too many enemies all at once, as they did not adhere to the principle of eliminating enemies one at a time; second, they were too impetuous, lacking the patience and perseverance required for great accomplishments; third, when the time came for them to be ruthless, they turned out to be too soft, therefore leaving troubles that resurfaced later on.
Let’s presume that back then Germany and Japan had been able to keep the United States neutral and had fought a protracted war step by step on the Soviet front. If they had adopted this approach, gained some time to advance their research, eventually succeeded in obtaining the technology of nuclear weapons and missiles, and launched surprise attacks against the United States and the Soviet Union using them, then the United States and the Soviet Union would not have been able to defend themselves and would have had to surrender. Little Japan, in particular, made an egregious mistake in launching the sneak strike at Pearl Harbor. This attack did not hit the vital parts of the United States. Instead it dragged the United States into the war, into the ranks of the gravediggers that eventually buried the German and Japanese fascists.
Of course, if they had not made these three mistakes and won the war, history would have been written in a different fashion. If that had been the case, China would not be in our hands. Japan might have relocated their capital to China and ruled over China. Afterwards, China and the whole of Asia under Japan’s command would have brought into full play the oriental wisdom, conquered the West ruled by Germany and unified the whole world. This is irrelevant, of course. No more digressions.
So, the fundamental reason for the defeats of Germany and Japan is that history did not arrange them to be the “lords of the earth,” for they are, after all, not the most superior race.
Ostensibly, in comparison, today’s China is alarmingly similar to Germany back then. Both of them regard themselves as the most superior races; both of them have a history of being exploited by foreign powers and are therefore vindictive; both of them have the tradition of worshipping their own authorities; both of them feel that they have seriously insufficient living space; both of them raise high the two banners of nationalism and socialism and label themselves as “national socialism”; both of them worship “one state, one party, one leader, and one doctrine.”
And yet, if we really are to make a comparison between Germany and China, then, as Comrade Jiang Zemin put it, Germany belongs to “pediatrics”—too trivial to be compared. How large is Germany’s population? How big is its territory? And how long is its history? We eliminated eight million Nationalist troops in only three years. How many enemies did Germany kill? They were in power for a transient period of little more than a dozen years before they perished, while we are still energetic after being around for more than eighty years. Our theory of the shifting center of civilization is of course more profound than the Hitler’s theory of “the lords of the earth.” Our civilization is profound and broad, which has determined that we are so much wiser than they were.
Our Chinese people are wiser than the Germans because, fundamentally, our race is superior to theirs. As a result, we have a longer history, more people, and larger land area. On this basis, our ancestors left us with the two most essential heritages, which are atheism and great unity. It was Confucius, the founder of our Chinese culture, who gave us these heritages.
These two heritages determined that we have a stronger ability to survive than the West. That is why the Chinese race has been able to prosper for so long. We are destined “not to be buried by either heaven or earth” no matter how severe the natural, man-made, and national disasters. This is our advantage.
Take response to war as an example. The reason that the United States remains today is that it has never seen war on its mainland. Once its enemies aim at the mainland, they enemies would have already reached Washington before its congress finishes debating and authorizes the president to declare war. But for us, we don’t waste time on these trivial things. Comrade Deng Xiaoping once said, “The Party’s leadership is prompt in making decisions. Once a decision is made, it is immediately implemented. There’s no wasting time on trivial things like in capitalist countries. This is our advantage.” Our Party’s democratic centralism is built on the tradition of great unity. Although fascist Germany also stressed high-level centralism, they only focused on the power of the country’s executive, but ignored the collective leadership of the central group. That’s why Hitler was betrayed by many later in his life, which fundamentally depleted the Nazis of their war capacity.
What makes us different from Germany is that we are complete atheists, while Germany was primarily a Catholic and Protestant country. Hitler was only half atheist. Although Hitler also believed that ordinary citizens had low intelligence, and that leaders should therefore make decisions, and although German people worshipped Hitler back then, Germany did not have the tradition of worshipping sages on a broad basis. Our Chinese society has always worshipped sages, and that is because we don’t worship any god. Once you worship a god, you can’t worship a person at the same time, unless you recognize the person as the god’s representative like they do in Middle Eastern countries. On the other hand, once you recognize a person as a sage, of course you will want him to be your leader, instead of monitoring and choosing him. This is the foundation of our democratic centralism.
The bottom line is, only China, not Germany, is a reliable force in resisting the Western parliament-based democratic system. Hitler’s dictatorship in Germany was perhaps but a momentary mistake in history.
Maybe you have now come to understand why we recently decided to further promulgate atheism. If we let theology from the West into China and empty us from the inside, if we let all Chinese people listen to God and follow God, who will obediently listen to us and follow us? If the common people don’t believe Comrade Hu Jintao is a qualified leader, question his authority, and want to monitor him, if the religious followers in our society question why we are leading God in churches, can our Party continue to rule China?
Germany’s dream to be the “lord of the earth” failed, because ultimately, history did not bestow this great mission upon them. But the three lessons Germany learned from experience are what we ought to remember as we complete our historic mission and revitalize our race. The three lessons are: Firmly grasp the country’s living space, firmly grasp the Party’s control over the nation, and firmly grasp the general direction toward becoming the “lord of the earth.”
Next, I’d like to address these three issues.
The first issue is living space. This is the biggest focus of the revitalization of the Chinese race. In my last speech, I said that the fight over basic living resources (including land and ocean) is the source of the vast majority of wars in history. This may change in the information age, but not fundamentally. Our per capita resources are much less than those of Germany’s back then. In addition, economic development in the last twenty-plus years had a negative impact, and climates are rapidly changing for the worse. Our resources are in very short supply. The environment is severely polluted, especially that of soil, water, and air. Not only our ability to sustain and develop our race, but even its survival is gravely threatened, to a degree much greater than faced Germany back then.
Anybody who has been to Western countries knows that their living space is much better than ours. They have forests alongside the highways, while we hardly have any trees by our streets. Their sky is often blue with white clouds, while our sky is covered with a layer of dark haze. Their tap water is clean enough for drinking, while even our ground water is so polluted that it can’t be drunk without filtering. They have few people in the streets, and two or three people can occupy a small residential building; in contrast, our streets are always crawling with people, and several people have to share one room.
Many years ago, there was a book titled Yellow Catastrophes. It said that, due to our following the American style of consumption, our limited resources would no longer support the population and society would collapse, once our population reaches 1.3 billion. Now our population has already exceeded this limit, and we are now relying on imports to sustain our nation. It’s not that we haven’t paid attention to this issue. The Ministry of Land Resources is specialized in this issue.
But the term “living space” (lebensraum) is too closely related to Nazi Germany. The reason we don’t want to discuss this too openly is to avoid the West’s association of us with Nazi Germany, which could in turn reinforce the view that China is a threat. Therefore, in our emphasis on He Xin’s new theory, “Human rights are just living rights,” we only talk about “living,” but not “space,” so as to avoid using the term “living space.” From the perspective of history, the reason that China is faced with the issue of living space is because Western countries have developed ahead of Eastern countries. Western countries established colonies all around the world, therefore giving themselves an advantage on the issue of living space. To solve this problem, we must lead the Chinese people outside of China, so that they could develop outside of China.
The second issue is our focus on the leadership capacity of the ruling party. We’ve done better on this than their party. Although the Nazis spread their power to every aspect of the German national government, they did not stress their absolute leadership position like we have. They did not take the issue of managing the power of the party as first priority, which we have. When Comrade Mao Zedong summarized the “three treasures” of our party’s victory in conquering the country, he considered the most important “treasure” to be developing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and strengthening its leadership position.
We have to focus on two points to fortify our leadership position and improve our leadership capacity.
The first is to promote the “Three Represents” theory [8], stressing that our Party is the pioneer of the Chinese race, in addition to being the pioneer of the proletariat. Many citizens say in private, “We never voted for you, the Communist Party, to represent us. How can you claim to be our representatives?”
There’s no need to worry about this issue. Comrade Mao Zedong said that if we could lead our allies to victory and make them benefit, they would support us. Therefore, as long as we can lead the Chinese people outside of China, resolving the lack of living space in China, the Chinese people will support us. At that time, we don’t have to worry about the labels of “totalitarianism” or “dictatorship.” Whether we can forever represent the Chinese people depends on whether we can succeed in leading the Chinese people out of China.
The second point, whether we can lead the Chinese people out of China, is the most important determinant of the CCP’s leadership position.
Why do I say this?
Everyone knows that without the leadership of our Party, China would not exist today. Therefore, our highest principle is to forever protect our Party’s leadership position. Before June 4, we realized vaguely that as long as China’s economy is developed, people would support and love the Communist Party. Therefore we had to use several decades of peacetime to develop China’s economy. No matter what -isms, whether it is a white cat or a black cat, it is a good cat if it can develop China’s economy. But at that time, we did not have mature ideas about how China would deal with international disputes after its economy is developed.
Comrade Xiaoping said then that the main themes in the world were peace and development. But the June 4 riot gave our Party a warning and gave us a lesson that is still fresh. The pressure of China’s peaceful evolution makes us reconsider the main themes of our time. We see that neither of these two issues, peace and development, have been resolved. The western oppositional forces always change the world according to their own visions; they want to change China and use peaceful evolution to overturn the leadership of our Communist Party. Therefore, if we only develop the economy, we still face the possibility of losing control.
That June 4 riot almost succeeded in bringing a peaceful transition; if it were not for the fact that a large number of veteran comrades were still alive and at a crucial moment they removed Zhao Ziyang and his followers, then we all would have been put in prison. After death we would have been too ashamed to report to Marx. Although we have passed the test of June 4, after our group of senior comrades pass away, without our control, peaceful evolution may still come to China like it did to the former Soviet Union. In 1956, they suppressed the Hungarian Incident and defeated the attacks by Tito’s revisionists of Yugoslavia, but they could not withstand Gorbachev thirty some years later. Once those pioneering senior comrades died, the power of the Communist Party was taken away by peaceful evolution.
After the June 4 riot was suppressed, we have been thinking about how to prevent China from peaceful evolution and how to maintain the Communist Party’s leadership. We thought it over and over but did not come up with any good ideas. If we do not have good ideas, China will inevitably change peacefully, and we will all become criminals in history. After some deep pondering, we finally come to this conclusion: Only by turning our developed national strength into the force of a fist striking outward—only by leading people to go out —can we win forever the Chinese people’s support and love for the Communist Party. Our Party will then stand on invincible ground, and the Chinese people will have to depend on the Communist Party. They will forever follow the Communist Party with their hearts and minds, as was written in a couplet frequently seen in the countryside some years ago: “Listen to Chairman Mao, Follow the Communist Party!” Therefore, the June 4 riot made us realize that we must combine economic development with preparation for war and leading the people to go out!
Therefore, since then, our national defense policy has taken a 180 degree turn and we have since emphasized more and more “combining peace and war.” Our economic development is all about preparing for the need of war!
Publicly we still emphasize economic development as our center, but in reality, economic development has war as its center! We have made a tremendous effort to construct “The Great Wall Project” to build up, along our coastal and land frontiers as well as around large and medium-sized cities, a solid underground “Great Wall” that can withstand a nuclear war. We are also storing all necessary war materials. Therefore, we will not hesitate to fight a Third World War, so as to lead the people to go out and to ensure the Party’s leadership position.
In any event, we, the CCP, will never step down from the stage of history! We’d rather have the whole world, or even the entire globe, share life and death with us than step down from the stage of history!!! Isn’t there a ‘nuclear bondage’ theory? It means that since nuclear weapons have bound the security of the entire world, all will die together if death is inevitable. In my view, there is another kind of bondage, and that is, the fate our Party is tied up with that of the whole world. If we, the CCP, are finished, China will be finished, and the world will be finished.
Our Party’s historical mission is to lead the Chinese people to go out. If we take the long view, we will see that history led us on this path. First, China’s long history has resulted in the world’s largest population, including Chinese in China as well as overseas. Second, once we open our doors, the profit-seeking western capitalists will invest capital and technology in China to assist our development, so that they can occupy the biggest market in the world. Third, our numerous overseas Chinese help us create the most favorable environment for the introduction of foreign capital, foreign technology and advanced experience into China. Thus, it is guaranteed that our reform and open-door policy will achieve tremendous success. Fourth, China’s great economic expansion will inevitably lead to the shrinkage of per-capita living space for the Chinese people, and this will encourage China to turn outward in search for new living space. Fifth, China’s great economic expansion will inevitably come with a significant development in our military forces, creating conditions for our expansion overseas. Even since Napoleon’s time, the West has been has been alert for the possible awakening of the sleeping lion that is China. Now, the sleeping lion is standing up and advancing into the world, and has become unstoppable!
What is the third issue we should clinch firmly in order to accomplish our historical mission of national renaissance? It is to hold firmly onto the big “issue of America.”
Comrade Mao Zedong taught us that we must have a resolute and correct political orientation. What is our key, correct orientation? It is to solve the issue of America.
This appears to be shocking, but the logic is actually very simple.
Comrade He Xin put forward a very fundamental judgment that is very reasonable. He asserted in his report to the Party Central Committee: The renaissance of China is in fundamental conflict with the western strategic interest, and therefore will inevitably be obstructed by the western countries doing everything they can. So, only by breaking the blockade formed by the western countries headed by the United States can China grow and move towards the world!
Would the United States allow us to go out to gain new living space? First, if the United States is firm in blocking us, it is hard for us to do anything significant to Taiwan and some other countries! Second, even if we could snatch some land from Taiwan, Vietnam, India, or even Japan, how much more living space can we get? Very trivial! Only countries like the United States, Canada and Australia have the vast land to serve our need for mass colonization.
Therefore, solving the “issue of America” is the key to solving all other issues. First, this makes it possible for us to have many people migrate there and even establish another China under the same leadership of the CCP. America was originally discovered by the ancestors of the yellow race, but Columbus gave credit to the white race. We the descendents of the Chinese nation are entitled to the possession of the land! It is said that the residents of the yellow race have a very low social status in United States. We need to liberate them. Second, after solving the “issue of America,” the western countries in Europe would bow to us, not to mention to Taiwan, Japan and other small countries. Therefore, solving the “issue of America” is the mission assigned to CCP members by history.
I sometimes think how cruel it is for China and the United States to be enemies that are bound to meet on a narrow road! Do you remember a movie about Liberation Army troops led by Liu Bocheng and Deng Xiaoping? The title is something like “Decisive Battle on the Central Plains.” There is a famous remark in the movie that is full of power and grandeur: “The enemies are bound to meet on a narrow road, only the brave will win!” It is this kind of fighting to win or die spirit that enabled us to seize power in Mainland China. It is historical destiny that China and United States will come into unavoidable confrontation on a narrow path and fight each other! The United States, unlike Russia and Japan, has never occupied and hurt China, and also assisted China in its battle against the Japanese. B
ut, it will certainly be an obstruction, and the biggest obstruction! In the long run, the relationship of China and the United States is one of a life-and-death struggle.
One time, some Americans came to visit and tried to convince us that the relationship between China and United States is one of interdependence. Comrade Xiaoping replied in a polite manner: “Go tell your government, China and the United States do not have such a relationship that is interdependent and mutually reliant.” Actually, Comrade Xiaoping was being too polite, he could have been more frank, “The relationship between China and United States is one of a life-and-death struggle.” Of course, right now it is not the time to openly break up with them yet. Our reform and opening to the outside world still rely on their capital and technology, we still need America. Therefore, we must do everything we can to promote our relationship with America, learn from America in all aspects and use America as an example to reconstruct our country.
How have we managed our foreign affairs in these years? Even if we had to put on a smiling face in order to please them, even if we had to give them the right cheek after they had hit our left cheek, we still must endure in order to further our relationship with the United States. Do you remember the character of Wuxun in the movie the “Story of Wuxun”? In order to accomplish his mission, he endured so much pain and suffered so much beating and kicking! The United States is the most successful country in the world today. Only after we have learned all of its useful experiences can we replace it in the future. Even though we are presently imitating the American tone “China and United States rely on each other and share honor and disgrace,” we must not forget that the history of our civilization repeatedly has taught us that one mountain does not allow two tigers to live together.
We also must never forget what Comrade Xiaoping emphasized “refrain from revealing the ambitions and put others off the track.” The hidden message is: we must put up with America; we must conceal our ultimate goals, hide our capabilities and await the opportunity. In this way, our mind is clear. Why have we not updated our national anthem with something peaceful? Why did we not change the anthem’s theme of war? Instead, when revising the Constitution this time, for the first time we clearly specified “March of the Volunteers” is our national anthem. Thus we will understand why we constantly talk loudly about the “Taiwan issue” but not the “American issue.” We all know the principle of “doing one thing under the cover of another.” If ordinary people can only see the small island of Taiwan in their eyes, then you as the elite of our country should be able to see the whole picture of our cause. Over these years, according to Comrade Xiaoping’s arrangement, a large piece of our territory in the North has been given up to Russia; do you really think our Party Central Committee is a fool? To resolve the issue of America we must be able to transcend conventions and restrictions. In history, when a country defeated another country or occupied another country, it could not kill all the people in the conquered land, because back then you could not kill people effectively with sabers or long spears, or even with rifles or machine guns. Therefore, it was impossible to gain a stretch of land without keeping the people on that land. However, if we conquered America in this fashion, we would not be able to make many people migrate there.
Only by using special means to “clean up” America will we be able to lead the Chinese people there. This is the only choice left for us. This is not a matter of whether we are willing to do it or not. What kind of special means is there available for us to “clean up” America? Conventional weapons such as fighters, canons, missiles and battleships won’t do; neither will highly destructive weapons such as nuclear weapons. We are not as foolish as to want to perish together with America by using nuclear weapons, despite the fact that we have been exclaiming that we will have the Taiwan issue resolved at whatever cost. Only by using non-destructive weapons that can kill many people will we be able to reserve America for ourselves. There has been rapid development of modern biological technology, and new bio weapons have been invented one after another. Of course we have not been idle; in the past years we have seized the opportunity to master weapons of this kind. We are capable of achieving our purpose of “cleaning up” America all of a sudden. When Comrade Xiaoping was still with us, the Party Central Committee had the perspicacity to make the right decision not to develop aircraft carrier groups and focus instead on developing lethal weapons that can eliminate mass populations of the enemy country.
From a humanitarian perspective, we should issue a warning to the American people and persuade them to leave America and leave the land they have lived in to the Chinese people. Or at least they should leave half of the United States to be China’s colony, because America was first discovered by the Chinese. But would this work? If this strategy does not work, then there is only one choice left to us. That is, use decisive means to “clean up” America, and reserve America for our use in a moment. Our historical experience has proven that as long as we make it happen, nobody in the world can do anything about us. Furthermore, if the United States as the leader is gone, then other enemies have to surrender to us.
Biological weapons are unprecedented in their ruthlessness, but if the Americans do not die then the Chinese have to die. If the Chinese people are strapped to the present land, a total societal collapse is bound to take place. According to the computation of the author of Yellow Peril, more than half of the Chinese will die, and that figure would be more than 800 million people! Just after the liberation, our yellow land supported nearly 500 million people, while today the official figure of the population is more than 1.3 billion. This yellow land has reached the limit of its capacity. One day, who knows how soon it will come, the great collapse will occur any time and more than half of the population will have to go. We must prepare ourselves for two scenarios. If our biological weapons succeed in the surprise attack [on the United States], the Chinese people will be able to keep their losses at a minimum in the fight against the United States. If, however, the attack fails and triggers a nuclear retaliation from the United States, China would perhaps suffer a catastrophe in which more than half of its population would perish. That is why we need to be ready with air defense systems for our big and medium-sized cities. Whatever the case may be, we can only move forward fearlessly for the sake of our Party and state and our nation’s future, regardless of the hardships we have to face and the sacrifices we have to make. The population, even if more than half dies, can be reproduced. But if the Party falls, everything is gone, and forever gone! In Chinese history, in the replacement of dynasties, the ruthless have always won and the benevolent have always failed. The most typical example involved Xiang Yu the King of Chu, who, after defeating Liu Bang, failed to continue to chase after him and eliminate his forces, and this leniency resulted in Xiang Yu’s death and Liu’s victory (during the war between Chu and Han, just after the Qin Dynasty (221-206BC) was overthrown). Therefore, we must emphasize the importance of adopting resolute measures. In the future, the two rivals, China and the United States, will eventually meet each other in a narrow road, and our leniency to the Americans will mean cruelty toward the Chinese people. 　　 Here some people may want to ask me: what about the several millions of our compatriots in the United States? They may ask: aren’t we against Chinese killing other Chinese?<{P> These comrades are too pedantic; they are not pragmatic enough. If we had insisted on the principle that the Chinese should not kill other Chinese, would we have liberated China? As for the several million Chinese living in the United States, this is of course a big issue. Therefore in recent years, we have been conducting research on genetic weapons, i.e. those weapons that do not kill yellow people. But producing a result with this kind of research is extremely difficult. Of the research done on genetic weapons throughout the world, the Israeli’s is the most advanced. Their genetic weapons are designed to target Arabs and protect the Israelis. But even they have not reached the stage of actual deployment. We have cooperated with Israel on some research. Perhaps we can introduce some of the technologies used to protect Israelis and remold these technologies to protect the yellow people. But their technologies are not mature yet, and it is difficult for us to surpass them in a few years. If it has to be five or ten years before some breakthroughs can be achieved in genetic weapons, we cannot afford to wait any longer.
Old comrades like us cannot afford to wait that long, for we don’t have that much time to live. Old soldiers of my age may be able to wait for five or ten more years, but those from the period of the Anti-Japanese War or the few old Red Army soldiers cannot wait any longer. Therefore we have to give up our expectations about genetic weapons. Of course, from another perspective, the majority of those Chinese living in the United States have become our burden, because they have been corrupted by the bourgeois liberal values for a long time and it would be difficult for them to accept our Party’s leadership. If they survived the war, we would have to launch campaigns in the future to deal with them, to reform them. Do you still remember that when we had just defeated the Koumintang (KMT) and liberated Mainland China, so many people from the bourgeois class and intellectuals welcomed us so very warmly, but later we had to launch campaigns such as the “suppression of the reactionaries” and “Anti-Rightist Movement” to clean them up and reform them? Some of them were in hiding for a long time and were not exposed until the Cultural Revolution. History has proved that any social turmoil is likely to involve many deaths. Maybe we can put it this way: death is the engine that moves history forward. During the period of Three Kingdoms [9], how many people died? When Genghis Khan conquered Eurasia, how many people died? When Manchu invaded the interior of China, how many people died? Not many people died during the 1911 Revolution, but when we overthrew the Three Great Mountains [10], and during the political campaigns such as “Suppression of reactionaries,” “Three-Anti Campaign,” and “Five-Anti Campaign” at least 20 million people died. We were apprehensive that some young people today would be trembling with fear when they hear about wars or people dying. During wartime, we were used to seeing dead people. Blood and flesh were flying everywhere, corpses were lying in heaps on the fields, and blood ran like rivers. We saw it all. On the battlefields, everybody’s eyes turned red with killing because it was a life-and-death struggle and only the brave would survive.
It is indeed brutal to kill one or two hundred million Americans. But that is the only path that will secure a Chinese century, a century in which the CCP leads the world. We, as revolutionary humanitarians, do not want deaths. But if history confronts us with a choice between deaths of Chinese and those of Americans, we’d have to pick the latter, as, for us, it is more important to safeguard the lives of the Chinese people and the life of our Party. That is because, after all, we are Chinese and members of the CCP. Since the day we joined the CCP, the Party’s life has always been above all else! History will prove that we made the right choice.
Now, when I am about to finish my speech, you probably understand why we conducted this online survey. Simply put, through conducting this online survey we wanted to know whether the people would rise against us if one day we secretly adopt resolute means to “clean up” America. Would more people support us or oppose us? This is our basic judgment: if our people approve of shooting at prisoners of war, women and children, then they would approve our “cleaning up” America. For over twenty years, China has been enjoying peace, and a whole generation has not been tested by war. In particular, since the end of World War II, there have been many changes in the formats of war, the concept of war and the ethics of war. Especially since the collapse of the former Soviet Union and Eastern European Communist states, the ideology of the West has come to dominate the world as a whole, and the Western theory of human nature and Western view of human rights have increasingly disseminated among the young people in China. Therefore, we were not very sure about the people’s attitude. If our people are fundamentally opposed to “cleaning up” America, we will, of course, have to adopt corresponding measures.
Why didn’t we conduct the survey through administrative means instead of through the web? We did what we did for a good reason.
First of all, we did it to reduce artificial inference and to make sure that we got the true thoughts of the people. In addition, it is more confidential and won’t reveal the true purpose of our survey. But what is most important is the fact that most of the people who are able to respond to the questions online are from social groups that are relatively well-educated and intelligent. They are the hard-core and leading groups that play a decisive role among our people. If they support us, then the people as a whole will follow us; if they oppose us, they will play the dangerous role of inciting people and creating social disturbance.
What turned out to be very comforting is they did not turn in a blank test paper. In fact, they turned in a test paper with a score of over 80. This is the excellent fruition of our Party’s work in propaganda and education over the past few decades.
Of course, a few people under the Western influence have objected to shooting at prisoners of war and women and children. Some of them said, “It is shocking and scary to witness so many people approving of shooting at women and children. Is everybody crazy?” Some others said, “The Chinese love to label themselves as a peace-loving people, but actually they are the most ruthless people. The comments are resonant of killing and murdering, sending chills to my heart.”
Although there are not too many people holding this kind of viewpoint and they will not affect the overall situation in any significant way, but we still need to strengthen the propaganda to respond to this kind of argument.
That is to vigorously propagate Comrade He Xin’s latest article, which has already been reported to the central government. You may look it up on the website.
If you get on the website using key words to search, you will find out that a while ago, comrade He Xin pointed out to the Hong Kong Business News during an interview that: “The US has a shocking conspiracy.” According to what he had in hand, from September 27 to October 1, 1995, the Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachëv Foundation, funded by the United States, gathered 500 of the world’s most important statesmen, economic leaders and scientists, including George W. Bush (he was not the US president at the time), the Baroness Thatcher, Tony Blair, Zbigniew Brzezinski, as well as George Soros, Bill Gates, futurist John Naisbitt, etc., all of the world’s most popular characters, in the San Francisco Fairmont hotel for a high-level round table conference, discussing problems about globalization and how to guide humanity to move forward into the 21st century. According to what He Xin had in hand, the outstanding people of the world in attendance thought that in the 21st century a mere 20% of the world’s population will be sufficient to maintain the world’s economy and prosperity, the other 80% or 4/5 of the world’s population will be human garbage unable to produce new values. The people in attendance thought that this excess 80% population would be a trash population and “high-tech” means should be used to eliminate them gradually.
Since the enemies are secretly planning to eliminate our population, we certainly cannot be infinitely merciful and compassionate to them. Comrade He Xin’s article came out at the right time, it has proven the correctness of our tit for tat battle approach, has proven Comrade Deng Xiaoping’s great foresight to deploy against the United States military strategy.
Certainly, in spreading Comrade He Xin’s views, we cannot publish the article in the party newspapers, in order to avoid raising the enemy’s vigilance. He Xin’s conversation may remind the enemy that we have grasped the modern science and technology, including “clean” nuclear technology, gene weapons technology as well as biological weapons technology, and we can use powerful measures to eliminate their population on a large-scale.
The last problem I want to talk about is of firmly seizing the preparations for military battle.
Currently, we are at the cross road of moving forward or backward. Some comrades saw problems flooding everywhere in our country—the corruption problem, the state-owned enterprise problem, the bank’s bad accounts problem, environmental problems, society security problems, education problems, the AIDS problem, various appeals problem, even the riots problem. These comrades vacillated in the determination to prepare for the military battle. They thought; they should first grab the political reform problem, that is, our own political reform comes first. After resolving the domestic problems, we can then deal with the foreign military battle problem.
This reminds me of the crucial period in 1948 in the Chinese revolution. At that time, the People’s Liberation Army’s “horses were drinking water” in Yangtze River, but they faced extremely complex situations and difficult problems everywhere in the liberated areas, and the central authority received emergency reports daily. What to do? Should we stop to manage rear areas and internal matters first before moving forward, or press on to pass the Yangtze River with one vigorous effort? Chairman Mao, with his extraordinary wisdom and mettle, gave the marching order “Carry on the revolution to the end,” and liberated all of China. The previously thought “serious” conflicting problems were all resolved in this great forward moving revolutionary wave.
Now, it seems like we are in the same critical period as the “horses were drinking water” in the Yangtze River days in the revolutionary era, as long as we firmly seize the most basic principle of preparing for the military battle. The central committee believes, as long as we resolve the United States problem at one blow, our domestic problems will all be readily solved. Therefore, our military battle preparation appears to aim at Taiwan, but in fact is aimed at the United States, and the preparation is far beyond the scope of attacking aircraft carriers or satellites.
Marxism pointed out that violence is the midwife for the birth of the new society. Therefore war is the midwife for the birth of China’s century. As war approaches, I am full of hope for our next generation.
* * *Notes: [1] Sina.com is one of the largest on-line media corporations in China. The on-line survey was launched by sina.com’s branch Sina Military (jczs.sina.com.cn). It started on February 2 and ended on March 1, 2004 and there were 31,872 persons who filled out the survey. The web page for this on-line survey is at “http://jczs.sina.com.cn/2004-02-02/1644180066.html” but this page has been removed and cannot be viewed. The question was “If you are a solider, and if are under the orders of your commanding officers, will you shoot at women, children and prisoners of war?” 34% of the visitors answered they would shoot under any circumstances even without permission from their commanding officer. 48.6% of the visitors replied that they would shoot when the lives of themselves or their companies are threatened. Only 3.8% of the participants held they would not shoot under any circumstances. Those who agreed to shoot were mostly under the age of 25. [2] “War Is Approaching Us” [3] “Three islands” refer to Taiwan, Diaoyu Islands, and Spratly Islands. [4] Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997). Officially, Deng was the leader of the CCP and China from 1978-89. Actually, after Mao’s death in 1976 Deng became the de facto leader of China until Deng finally died in 1997. [5] Hu Jintao (1942-). Leader of the “fourth generation” of CCP officials. In 2003, Hu became President of the People’s Republic of China. [6] Liu Huaqing (1916-). Commander of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy from 1982 through 1988, vice-chairman of China’s Central Military Commission (until 1997). Liu is considered to be responsible for the PLA’s modernization efforts. [7] He Xin (1949-). Senior Fellow of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. [8] “Three Represents” states that the CCP represents the requirement to develop advanced productive forces, an orientation towards advanced culture, and the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the people in China. It was put forward by Jiang Zemin, former Chinese president. [9] Three Kingdoms refer to Wei, Shu, and Wu, three countries that overlapped the land of China during the period A.D. 220-80. [10] “Three great mountains” were said according to the CCP to have weighed on the backs of the Chinese people—imperialism, feudalism and bureaucratic-capitalism. Source: http://en.epochtimes.com/news/5-8-8/31055.html

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