Lao Chen, Little Xi, and Fang Caodi didn’t understand economics, but they were concerned about China, and knew therefore that they could not ignore the subject. They listened attentively and with narrowed eyes to He Dongsheng’s explanations. What rendered them truly speechless was when He Dongsheng turned from economics to a discussion of the international political situation.
“No matter how badly off the American economy is, the United States is still, militarily, the strongest nation in the world. Only the armed forces of the United States have the power to strike anywhere in the world.” He Dongsheng got back into his stride.
China cannot, therefore, follow the path taken by the Soviet Union during the Cold War: competing for world hegemony with the United States, conducting an arms race, implementing a balance-of-terror policy of mutually assured destruction. No, that is not the way to pacify the world, and not where China’s permanent security interests lie. A rational person like He Dongsheng, with his deeply concealed Chinese-style idealism, knew that this road was a dead end because China’s national power could not support it. To prevent the United States from starting a long-distance war, China has to employ its long-range preemptive or unilateral strike capabilities. To prevent the invasion of its territory and to safeguard its national interests, China has to become a friendly older brother to its regional neighbors and not compete with the United States for world hegemony. To use the language of international discourse, this is
China’s Monroe Doctrine.
“American nuclear weapons could destroy China, so it has to make the U.S. understand clearly that China will not wait for them to strike first, but will itself attack. In other words, the United States cannot viciously threaten China with its nuclear weapons because it might provoke China into using nuclear weapons first. That is the essence of China’s preemptive first-strike strategy.
“China has sufficient first-strike nuclear capability to destroy only Hawaii and a few cities on the West Coast of the United States, but that is enough to inflict unacceptable levels of destruction on the Americans. Even if the U.S. counterattack could then produce a hundred times more destruction in China, the American people would still regard the damage on their own soil as too high a price to pay. China employs these two threats—preemptive first-strike and long-range unilateral attack—to frighten the Americans out of the idea of launching a nuclear war against it.
“Even the victor in a nuclear war will pay too great a price—this is also a tacit ‘live and die together’ agreement. China’s strategy is open and made perfectly clear to the United States in order to avoid any misunderstanding on their part. At the same time, China has consistently urged the Americans not to establish an antimissile defense network in the eastern Pacific because that would give rise to a Sino-American nuclear-arms race, and force China to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of breaking through the American antimissile shield, as well as build nuclear submarines and space-based weapons.”
He Dongsheng didn’t believe that nuclear war between the United States and China was likely, and he believed that the probability of the U.S. launching a conventional-warfare invasion of Chinese territory was virtually nil, despite the continued presence of the American military throughout East Asia.
Historically, he said, the Chinese nation’s greatest fear had always been invasion by non-Chinese ethnic groups, the division of China’s national territory, and rule by non-Chinese conquerors. Such fears are quite unnecessary now. China’s current national-defense systems are the strongest they have ever been in the five-thousand-year history of the Chinese race.
“Who would dare invade Chinese territory today?” he asked emphatically.
Since the founding of the People’s Republic, leaving aside conflicts involving Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang, China has had short-term military clashes on its borders with India, the Soviet Union, the former South Vietnam, and Vietnam. The only conflict that truly threatened Chinese national security was the “Resist the United States, Assist North Korea” conflict of sixty years ago.
There are fourteen nations with which China has land borders, and six with adjacent territorial waters. Since 1949 China has already settled fourteen land-border disputes and three offshore-island disputes, but there are still some disputes that cannot be settled in the immediate future. These include India’s refusal to recognize Chinese ownership of the 38,000-square-kilometer Aksai Chin region on the Tibetan plateau; China’s refusal to recognize the 84,000-square-kilometer South Tibet region as part of the Arunachal Pradesh Province of northeast India bordering on Tibet and Bhutan; disputes in the South China Sea between China and each of Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Brunei; Sino-Japanese disputes in the East China Sea; and even with the small Himalayan nation of Bhutan.
Furthermore, Chinese plans to build large dams in Tibet and Yunnan to change the river courses there are coming under increasing criticism and have given rise to heated disputes over transnational water sources because, except for the Ganges, the headwaters of all the major rivers that flow into the countries of South and Southeast Asia are in China’s Himalayan region. Still, none of these disputes or even occasional armed clashes are very likely to develop into full-scale warfare between China and some other country.
He Dongsheng knew, of course, that there were elements in the military that didn’t like his views because of possible effects on their budgets. Although he didn’t agree with the tireless calls by these military interest groups for the government to increase spending on the armed forces, he was not so naïve as to imagine that a large nation could rise without the support of military power. He was a realist, and he wanted only to optimize the national interest most effectively without depending on the military to achieve the victory. To do this, it was necessary to consider grand strategy.
He believed that if a country claims the moral high ground too much, it will make other countries suspicious. In the past, when China was always proclaiming that it would never seek hegemony, and talking about its peaceful rise and a harmonious world order, did other countries believe it? This is a time when other nations worry about China, and so it is a good idea for China to make its national strategic interests perfectly clear so that others will know where to draw the line. That is why China recently put forth the idea of a Chinese Monroe Doctrine.
In the 1820s, President James Monroe announced that a rising United States didn’t intend to contend for hegemony with the great powers of Europe, but that they must not invade any part of the American continent. They especially must not try to colonize parts of Latin America again. The Americas were for the Americans—that was the Monroe Doctrine.
Now China has emulated the nineteenth-century United States and announced that it has absolutely no intention of contending with other great powers for global hegemony. But East Asia is for the East Asians, and China has invited the Euro-American great powers, primarily the United States, to leave East Asia. (What China means by East Asia also includes Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia, Japan, and all the nations that were historically part of the Chinese tributary system.)
During the long period of history when a steppe civilization of northern and western Asia was continually colliding and mixing with a European civilization derived from the Mediterranean area, China was shielded behind the Gobi Desert and high mountain ranges. The self-sufficient Chinese autarchy considered itself a
Tianxia
or “All Under Heaven,” a world unto itself with a high level of cultural unity. Perhaps due to geographical reasons, the ancient Chinese empire didn’t have as great a penchant for foreign invasion and expansion as so many other nations over the centuries: Alexander, the Romans, Attila, the Crusaders, the Mongols, Timur, the Ottomans, Napoleon, or the European powers and Japan during the age of exploration and colonization, or the post–Cold War United States of today with its 850 military bases located all over the world.
“China,” He Dongsheng said with force and getting hoarse now, “certainly does not want to take on the arduous and thankless task of policing the world, nor does it want to govern other countries. Have you ever heard of the People’s Republic of China trying to occupy other people’s territory?”
According to his understanding, the Chinese century is not a century to be enjoyed by China only. The Chinese century means that China has finally regained the rightful historical position that it occupied before the nineteenth century. The European powers and the United States have to understand China’s intentions. It does not want to take over the world, but Europe and the United States should not imagine that they can prevent the rise and optimal development of East Asia under Chinese direction. If only the United States would leave East Asia, China, the United States, and Europe could maintain their own spheres of influence without mutual interference, and they could all prosper. Replacing a struggle for global hegemony with the regionalization of political influence would guarantee world peace during this period of the unstoppable rise of China.
In the economic realm beyond politics, the world is already divided into three main regions: the European Union, the North American free-trade countries, and the Asia Pacific region. The total internal trade and direct investment
within
each region is greater than the economic activity
between
the regions. The European nations’ chief trading partners are other European Union nations, and Canada’s is the United States, not Japan or China. Starting in 2007, over half of the trade of Asian countries, excluding the Middle East, but also adding in Australia and New Zealand, has been with other Asian nations. All that remains is to link politics and economics together on the same footing and you will have regionalization.
Then Europe, America, and China can do business within their own territories and spheres of influence and can both cooperate and compete on investments and development in Africa, Asia, and Latin America based always on economic criteria. For example, in Angola, China, France, and the United States can all seek offshore oil-drilling rights, and the local government will have more choices and not be easily controlled by any one country.
The second Iraq War convinced China to invest heavily in Africa. Angola is now China’s largest single supplier of oil. Other African nations that supply us with fossil fuels include Sudan, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, Chad, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Benin, and Gabon, while Algeria provides natural gas. Over 30 percent of our petroleum imports come from Africa, second only to the supply from the Middle East. Besides energy, China is also active in mining and forestry in Africa. Large areas of farmland are under contract to meet Chinese demands. China has also built roads, hospitals, harbors, airports, and communication networks. China has always advocated trade, friendship, and non-interference in other nations’ internal politics, and African leaders welcome this attitude. It is not surprising that our power and influence in Africa will soon surpass that of America, France, and Great Britain to become Africa’s number-one trading partner.
In South Asia and the Middle East, China has friendly relations with Iran and has expended a great deal of thought and money on its longtime friend Pakistan. This is an important strategic national-security consideration: to contain America’s ally India, our so-called “cold to India, warm to Islam” policy, and to protect our oil-supply lines—the shortest route for the shipment of African and Middle Eastern oil is by sea or overland to the port of Gwadar in southwest Pakistan, and then north along the Chinese-built Gwadar–Dalbandin railway to meet up with the Karakoram highway in China’s Xinjiang Province. This avoids a long sea journey from Africa or the Middle East, and bypasses the Indian Ocean and South China Sea shipping lanes—especially the narrow and busy Strait of Malacca, where the navies of India, the United States, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia, and Japan frequently conduct joint naval exercises.
China has also not failed to grab any energy resources that have slipped out of the grasp of other great powers. In 2008, when the price of oil fell from $147 to $33 a barrel, China greatly increased its oil imports from Venezuela and Iran. In 2009, when Russia reneged on its contract and stopped importing natural gas from Turkmenistan, China reached out its helping hand and signed a thirty-year contract with Turkmenistan that included building a gas pipeline across Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan all the way to China. The same goes for oil from Kazakhstan. China not only participated in its extraction, but built three thousand kilometers of oil pipelines. With the exception of Russia and Iran, the nations in the region are all landlocked, and their energy exports have to be shipped through other countries. Therefore they all support China’s ultimate strategic goal in Central Asia—that is, the construction of a “Pan Eurasian Energy Bridge,” an oil pipeline from the Middle East, through Iran, Russia, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan to Xinjiang.
Today, in its own national interest, China wants to promote regional stability in Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, Iran, and Pakistan. It wants to prevent any manipulation by other great powers and to block the influence of religious extremists, separatists, and terrorists who want to undermine or overthrow the governments in those regions. In order to isolate the Xinjiang independence forces, China has offered special friendship to the six “Stans” of Central Asia, and to Turkey. Turkey has long been denied entry into the European Union, but China has offered it observer status in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and has given Iran official membership. Most unexpectedly, even Israel has to be friendly toward China; because Israel is afraid that China will export high-tech weaponry, including nuclear weapons, to Islamic countries, it is selling sophisticated technology to China.