BEIJING, June 27 — Meetings between a Pentagon official and various members of the Chinese government fostered a “frank and constructive atmosphere” that could help push the sometimes tense countries toward a smoother, closer military relationship, China said Thursday.
PETER RODMAN, U.S. assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, wound up a two-day visit to China on Thursday by meeting with Defense Minister Chi Haotian, who said China was ready to make efforts to improve military relations.
“We hope that the two sides will ... develop military cooperation on the basis of equality, mutual benefit and trust,” Chi said, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.
Chi said, however, that the United States “should take full responsibility for the twists and turns in bilateral ties,” Xinhua said.
The U.S. Embassy in Beijing had no comment about the meetings Thursday, a spokesman said, though Xinhua said Rodman pronounced the talks “frank” and “constructive” and expressed optimism that military ties could be improved.
The embassy had said in a statement Wednesday that Rodman’s visit was intended to stimulate progress — but not necessarily to produce immediate agreements.
That’s just what happened, China said, repeating the language used to describe Rodman’s comments.
“In a frank and constructive atmosphere, the two sides exchanged views on how to improve bilateral ties and the increase of military-to-military exchanges,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said.
At issue is whether the two countries will resume full military exchanges, which were curtailed last year after the seizure of a U.S. spy plane.
Contacts have included academic conferences, exchanges of students and visits to military installations. They were limited after a Chinese fighter jet and a U.S. Navy surveillance plane collided over the South China Sea on April 1, 2001, and China detained the American crew for 11 days.
In the 15 months since, China-U.S. ties have improved markedly. U.S. President George W. Bush has visited China twice — once for a regional economic forum and once for a state visit in February.
Chinese Vice President Hu Jintao, widely assumed to be preparing to replace Jiang Zemin as president, visited the United States in late April and early May.
Still, the history of relations between the two countries suggests it would take little to derail the recent months of relative placidity.
Both nations remain deeply suspicious of each other, and China often accuses the United States of trying to “contain” it and interfere with its relations with Taiwan, which Beijing considers an internal affair.
Sources of Wars
What will be the causes of the regional wars that will occur throughout the transition period as the new world structure is in the process of replacing the old one? Where will they take place? Who will be involved? Chinese analysts explain the outbreak of local wars in the 1990s as having two major reasons: first, the ethnic, religious, historical, and territorial disputes previously covered up and restricted by the U.S.-Soviet confrontation were free to emerge following the end of the Cold War; and second, as the new world structure is forming, there is competition and contention for power, influence, and economic resources. As the transition period progresses, the hot spots where local wars are focused will not be static but are expected to shift as some conflicts come to an end and new ones emerge, and as relations between the powers develop. Former SIIS president Chen Qimao explains:
These hot spots must go through a process, from breaking out, to intensifying, to relaxing, to resolution. Currently, their development still is not very even; some have already relaxed, some are intensifying, some have just broken out, some have not yet shown their heads; they still are in a stage where "as one falls another rises.". . . Internationally, following the end of the Cold War, the various forces have been re-dividing and uniting, and relations between the powers are very unstable, which also is a very significant source of the turbulence in the transformation period. Therefore, the current world still is not stable. (152)
Consequently, the local wars will occur for a variety of reasons, with the participants ranging from small groups to major powers, and at locations worldwide.
Several Chinese authors have suggested that the fault lines of future war in the multipolar security environment will not be the same as during the bipolar Soviet-American confrontation. Following the end of the Cold War, the main area where local wars were focused was in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. However, most Chinese analysts, while not predicting protracted peace and stability, consider the region's turmoil and armed conflicts to have subsided to some extent and see the main local war hot spot as shifting to Africa. A People's Daily article reported that for 1997, "According to statistics, nearly half of all the local wars that took place worldwide this year happened in Africa. . . . Though these conflicts were of the nature of civil wars and were local, they have nevertheless posed a certain threat to peace and stability and have caused the concern of the international community." (153) Chinese analysts do not foresee the problems in Africa disappearing any time in the near future and expect that there will continue to be frequent wars. For example, Li Zhongcheng of CICIR writes, "At the turn of the century, and the early part of next century, it is extremely possible that there will appear in the African Great Lake region a situation where as one racial or sectional conflict ends another begins." (154) The Middle East is another area mentioned by Li and other authors as a current hot spot:
<The Palestinian-Israeli peace process can only through repeated reversals slowly progress. At the same time, aside from the Palestinian-Israeli and Arab-Israeli contradictions, other Middle Eastern regional conflicts will gradually develop and intensify, becoming the sources of the Middle Eastern region's continued turbulence and intranquility, and its continued and frequent regional conflicts. (155)
Many Chinese analysts point out that the proliferation of local ethnic, religious, and territorial wars has not meant that the major powers have not been involved in the conflicts. In fact, a number of analysts cite hegemonism and military interventionism as contributing to and exacerbating local wars. Wang Xuhe of the Strategy Department at AMS stated, "The factors threatening international security are pluralizing, becoming more complicated, and have more layers, but hegemonism and power politics will for a considerably long period still be the major threats to international security." (156) With regard to the two current hot spots, Africa and the Middle East, Chen Feng, a Senior Research Fellow at CIISS, writes,
The conflicts in Africa and the Middle East have their respective causes, e.g., the complicated ethnic or cultural contradictions, frontier resource disputes and internal struggles, etc. However, if analyzed from a deeper perspective, these conflicts reflect the struggle to control these regions between the great powers. Conflicts in these regions all have the intervention from those powers involved. The United States, making full use of the chance that France had adjusted its African policy, tried various means to create its own agents in Africa and to drive the French forces out of its sphere of influence. In the Middle East, because the U.S. policy is biased toward Israel, it has put the peace process in a stalemate, and its influence in the Arab world has declined. (157)
Other examples of hegemonism and intervention on the part of the major powers are cited by another CIISS Research Fellow, Li Qinggong: the United States sending aircraft carriers to the Gulf when Iran crossed the "restricted airspace" to attack Iraq's Kurdish region; in Bosnia, "the U.S. peacekeeping forces clashing with local people and shooting a number of Serbian residents"; the United States "sending an 'expeditionary air force' to Bosnia to terrorize psychologically the Serbian people;" and France "continuously engaging in military intervention against the Republic of Central Africa." (158)
Following NATO military strikes against Yugoslavia in spring 1999, there was a tremendous increase in criticism and alarm about U.S. hegemonism being a source of war. One author writes, "Hegemonism and power politics are still developing, and there will be no peace under heaven in the 21st century." (159) Wang Jincun, a senior researcher at CASS portrays the United States as "striving to build a single-polar world and to strengthen its hegemony.”After the U.S. accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Wang wrote that the United States is employing military methods as one means for achieving its goal: "What deserves more attention is that the United States, not yet satisfied with its Cold War achievements, seeks to gain more advances through military means. Therefore, there has appeared an even closer growing link between the new Cold War and 'hot war.' The military interference by the United States in Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, the bombing against Sudan and Afghanistan, and especially the ongoing air strikes against Yugoslavia, serve as prominent examples." (160)
Chu Shulong of CICIR pointed out, "The number of times and the frequency with which the United States has used force in various parts of the world in just a few years have rarely been seen before in the history of U.S. foreign policy and in the history of international relations." (161) An explanation offered by one author for the sudden increase in U.S. intervention is that it has a "Gulf War syndrome:" "The United States, the world's sole superpower, developed a 'Vietnam syndrome' on account of its defeat with heavy casualties in the Vietnam war, and became careful and cautious for a time about getting involved in overseas conflicts. Success in the 1991 Gulf War produced a 'Gulf War syndrome' in the United States and it became enthusiastic about military intervention activities." (162) One article noted that, "Since 1990, the United States has dispatched troops more than 40 times, and 10 of them were strong military interventions." It concludes, "Given the large amount of indisputable evidence, the United States has become the world's major source of war by its arms expansion and implementation of hegemonism and power politics, and it has become a major threat to the world's peace. It is predictable that more countries will become test spots for the high- and new-technology weapons of the United States and the victims of its war machine." (163)
For Chinese analysts, the question is not whether the U.S. will once again interfere overseas, but where. In its pursuit of global hegemony and a unipolar world order, U.S. military intervention is expected to continue to occur throughout the transition period. According to Colonel Zhang Zhaozhong of NDU, "Gangster logic is now emerging ever more prominently. We should realize from this that at the turn of the century we are in an extremely unstable strategic pattern, and the United States is also testing the water. At present it is in midstream, not knowing if it can get to the opposite bank and whether there will be any dangerous rocks or reefs. I believe that this testing of the water will go on for several years, and we need to observe whether Chechnya or the Korean peninsula will be next." (164)
An article in the Liberation Army Daily, after asserting that U.S. "gunboat policy will inevitably lead to endless wars and disorder all over the world," predicted that U.S. military interference may not be limited to smaller nations in the future. "The target today may be a small nation, but it could be a big country tomorrow! The target may be Kosovo today, but it could be any country that does not meet U.S. desires tomorrow. . . . War increasingly will become the major means adopted by the United States to establish a polarized pattern. Wars are not far away from us." (165)
In addition to hegemonism and power politics and ethnic, religious, and territorial reasons, Chinese analysts see the struggle for economic resources as another major source contributing to local wars in the transition era. As Colonel Liu Mingde states, "The Marxists hold that the conflict of economic interests is the root of war." He explains that the Arab-Israeli dispute "has to do with Israel's heavy reliance on the Jordan River" and that the Iran-Iraq war and the Gulf War were about petroleum. Similarly, the civil war in Yugoslavia is a war between the "poor" Serbs and the "rich" Slovaks and Croats. Liu concludes, "Competition in Comprehensive National Power has aggravated the scrambling for resources among nations." (166) An even bleaker forecast about the rivalry over economic resources is predicted by He Xin, who draws an analogy to the Warring States era of Chinese history:
The energy and natural resources crises of the early 21st century will unavoidably lead to the economic decline of industrial countries, and cause the intensification of economic and political wars as countries contend for natural resources and markets. In this situation, the world probably will enter a new "Cold War" (economic, political war), even a "Warring States era" with numerous local and regional hot wars emerging. (167)
It is this struggle for economic resources that could lead to direct conflicts between the major powers. While many Chinese authors imply that there will not be a war among the five major powers, that they very likely will participate in the regional wars but probably not against each other, there is another viewpoint that believes the potential for conflict exists. (168) Three analysts at the Strategy Institute at NDU write, "The majority of regional conflicts in the world are civil wars, social turmoil, and civil coups. Although there are influence and interference from some other countries, these interventions do not develop into military confrontations between large countries." However, they warn that, "Potential conflict areas do exist that may possibly involve direct military confrontations between large countries or regional powers. If large-scale armed conflicts and local wars happen in these regions, it can result in drastic changes in the world situation and harm the global strategic situation." (169)
A likely area for future conflict among the powers will be Central Asia where "abundant natural resources will become the target of a struggle" between the major powers. Yang Shuheng from the U.S. Institute at CASS writes that the United States wants the region's energy resources, but Russia is unwilling to "drop to the status of a second-rank country" and will resist the United States. However, pursuing economic interests is not the only U.S. goal in the region--another is "squeezing Russia out." (170) She explains, "The rivalry over the Caspian Sea region's oil and natural gas . . . is part of the U.S.-Russian rivalry over strategic interests and spheres of influence in the Eurasian hinterland." Yang predicts, "The number of countries involved will increase. The European Union also regards the Central Asian region as an energy resources base that can replace the Gulf in the future . . . . International forces covet the treasure chest that is Central Asia." (171)
The NATO bombing of Yugoslavia was seen by a number of Chinese authors as part of the organization's efforts to gain influence and control in the region. Li Yonggang, a scholar at the Chinese Society for Strategy and Management, says geopolitical, economic, and energy interests were the motivations for NATO actions, for once NATO controlled the Balkans it had a direct path to Central Asia. He writes,
"From the angle of geopolitics, Kosovo is located in the middle of the Balkan Peninsula, which is situated among the three continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa; as such, Kosovo has a decisive strategic position. To NATO, with control over the Balkans, it can advance westward to the Mediterranean and North Atlantic, and southward, it can consolidate the 'southern wing of NATO,' offering a link to its strategy in the Middle East. Eastward in the region of Black Sea and Caspian Sea, that is, the region of outer Caucasus and Central Asia, NATO can infiltrate, expand, and weaken and push out the power and influence of Russia."
"Viewed from the angle of economic interests, NATO European powers have been quietly, secretly enthusiastic about getting through the Balkan corridor in the south to extend their sphere of economic influence to Central Asia and even further. . . . Although the European powers are still in line with the United States on several important issues, the building of a united, powerful, and eventually independent Europe to contend with the United States is still the long-term strategy of these countries. . . . Once the Euro has reached the bank of the Caspian Sea, it can enter the hinterland of Russia and can also come into contact with the five countries in Central Asia. This will have an extremely far-reaching political, economic, and cultural significance. This is the general political, economic, and financial strategy of Europe."
"What should also be noticed is that by putting the Balkans under control and moving westward, there is the possibility of manipulating a vast geographic area rich with oil and natural gas." (172)
An additional source of instability in Central Asia has been pointed out by Gao Heng of CASS, who believes that "the development of Islamic resurgence activities" could lead to conflict. (173)
Moreover, Chen Feng of CIISS argues that the contention in Central Asia could be exacerbated by the military activities and exercises of foreign troops. For example, when the United States, "for the first time since the end of World War II, sent regular troops (more than 500 personnel of one battalion under the 82nd Airborne Division) to the region to take part in military maneuvers, it indicated that the struggle to control the region between the big powers has spread from economic and political fields to military and security fields." (174)
Central Asia is one of two regions Chinese analysts predict will emerge as a new hot spot in the future; the other is the Asia-Pacific. (175) There are, however, differing views concerning the potential for future wars in the latter region. While some authors are concerned about the possibility that major conflicts could erupt, others emphasize the recent greater stability in the Asia-Pacific as compared to other parts of the globe. Zhang Changtai, a Research Fellow at CIISS believes, "In a relatively stable security environment, the Asia-Pacific remains one of the regions in the world with fewer cases of armed conflicts and such a situation can still be maintained in the years to come." His views are backed up by the few number of local wars in the region. He writes:
For a long time, especially in the post-Cold War era, the Asia-Pacific has all along been a comparatively stable region. Statistics show that in 1991 prior to the end of the Cold War, 29 armed conflicts and local wars occurred in the world, out of which 6 were in the Asia-Pacific. In 1997 the total number of armed conflicts in the world increased to 38, while it was kept to 6 in the Asia-Pacific, namely the internal armed conflicts in Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, the Philippines and Myanmar, as well as that between India and Pakistan in Kashmir. The armed conflicts in the Asia-Pacific not only remain the least in the world, but also have decreased to some extent in intensity. (176)
However, many authors argue that despite the low number of local wars and greater stability in the 1990s, there still is serious potential for the Asia-Pacific to become a hot spot.
Chen Peiyao, president of SIIS has pointed out, "During the Cold War, East Asia was the region where military conflicts and local wars were constantly seen. The end of the Cold War did not bring an end to all the regional problems." (177) His argument is furthered by Shen Qurong of CICIR, who states, "The Cold War in the postwar Asia-Pacific was never 'cold' and peace in post-Cold War Asia-Pacific has been only lukewarm. The issue of regional peace awaits a fundamental solution. Beneath the surface of relative stability lie destabilizing factors. . . . In the 50 postwar years, the two largest local wars in the world both broke out in the Asia-Pacific region . . . the Asia-Pacific has now entered a stage of 'Cold Peace.' " (178)
According to Li Zhongcheng, of CICIR, major issues such as the Korean peninsula, Taiwan, the Nansha Islands, and the Diaoyu islands "make it clear that in the East Asia-Pacific region there exists the kindling for regional conflicts." (179)
The Japanese parliament's adoption of the U.S.-Japan Security Guidelines, in spring 1999, also is considered to be a source of future conflicts. Not only does it signify the rise of militarism in Japan, considered by some to be a serious potential factor for instability in the region, but it also "increased the capacity of the U.S. military to intervene in the Asia-Pacific . . . [for] without Japan as a forward base, U.S. military forces would have to retreat east to Hawaii and south to Australia." Lu Guangye, a fellow at the Chinese National Defense Strategic Institute, claims that together with NATO, the U.S.-Japanese military alliance has become one of "the two black hands helping the tyrant to do evil." He sees NATO military strikes in Yugoslavia and the bombing of the Chinese embassy as omens of future U.S. and Japanese actions. "Everything that NATO does can be regarded as the most direct and most realistic mirror of what we understand as the substance of the Japanese-US military alliance and of how Japan and the United States will act in the Asia-Pacific region. The 'experiment' carried out in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia by US-led NATO also provides a vivid example for the Asia-Pacific countries." (180)
Another potential cause of war in the Asia-Pacific has to do with China's rise as a global power. Several authors have written about U.S. efforts in the next decade or two to contain China's development and prevent its rise in international affairs. Colonel Zhang Zhaozhong of NDU was asked in an interview why he considered "the next 10 to 15 years will be the most difficult and most important period in China's development." His reply was, "The United States has already realized that this is the best period for containing China, and so it produces stuff like the theory of the Chinese threat to suppress China. If the United States is unable to curb the momentum of China's development in the next 10 to 20 years, it will have wasted a lot of effort. During this period, therefore, the United States may devise all kinds of ways to cause trouble."
However, Colonel Zhang does not foresee China and the United States going to war in the near term. "Unless there are major changes over Taiwan or other issues, the United States at present does not have the gall to take the initiative in attacking China's territory. But we must be vigilant." (181) Chu Shulong of CICIR also predicts that efforts to contain China could lead to problems, "Negative and extremist trends in U.S. domestic politics, external strategy, and diplomacy toward China are extremely dangerous for world peace and development and for the present and future of Sino-US relations." (182) These views are echoed in the yearly Study Reports on the International Situation--1997-1998, published by the Chinese Society for Strategy and Management, where Yan Xuetong of CICIR warns of potential conflicts between China and the United States, as China's power increases and the "desperate" United States struggles to maintain its leading position:
In history, the rise of a new world power often leads to large-scale international wars, but these wars are not necessarily caused by the expansion of a rising power. Some of them resulted from the military policies of a hegemonic power in maintaining its hegemony. The U.S.-British War (1812-1814) is a typical example. In order to constrain the rise of the United States, Britain blocked American shipments to Europe . . . (just like) the case of the U.S. blocking Chinese ships, such as the Yinhe event of 1993. (183)
The predictions of Yan and others tend to modify Deng Xiaoping's earlier assertion, discussed below, that China will never be a "source" of war. Yan and many authors are worried that the United States could somehow force a war upon China in order to contain its rise or dismember its territory.
All of that 'reunifying with the motherland' bulls^%# is codeword for joining into the imposed social order created by the CCP...
