Worldview: China

CHINA'S DIRE PREDICTION
Arnaud de Borchgrave, 4 Feb 07

Last November, China demonstrated its growing global clout by inviting 48 African heads of state and government to a summit in Beijing where they were wined and dined in a style unmatched by their former French, British and Portuguese colonial masters. China has been buying up their production of raw materials years in advance. Pledges have been made to double aid to Africa to $5 billion, train 15,000 professionals and grant 4,000 scholarships.
Vertiginous double-digit yearly growth for the fourth consecutive year has put China on track to leapfrog Germany as the world's third-largest economy. Its foreign currency reserves are accumulating at the rate of $30 million per hour and recently topped the $1 trillion mark — about 70 percent of that in U.S. paper. It is outspending Japan on technology R&D. China is preening with self-confidence.
[. . .]
To offset America's enormous strategic military superiority, the Chinese military concluded in the 1990s that information warfare — or cyberwarfare — could give China an 'asymmetric' advantage over the United States. In 1998, the PLA newspaper Jiefangjun Bao said priority should be given "to learning how to launch an electronic attack on an enemy... to ensure electromagnetic control in an area and at a time favorable to us." . . .
Chinese strategists view U.S. dependence on space as an asymmetric vulnerability while Chinese scientists are known to be working on ASAT (anti-satellite weapons, such as kinetic kill vehicles). On Jan. 11, China decided it was time to demonstrate the fragility of the U.S. military dependence on communications satellites.
Without warning, China fired a missile aimed at one of its own aging communications satellites. With pinpoint accuracy, the missile pulverized the Feng Yun 1-C 500 miles above Earth, scattering thousands of tiny fragments that could easily puncture the metal skin of other satellites in orbit. The former Soviet Union did it first in 1971, followed by the U.S. in 1985, before Congress banned further tests lest they imperiled one of the several hundred satellites, many from other nations.
And Beijing said China was now ready to talk turkey about an international treaty to curb the weaponization of space. But the U.S. wasn't. In fact, the administration suspended plans agreed to at a summit meeting last April to develop plans for the joint exploration of the moon.

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History

MAO'S LAST REVOLUTION
by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals
reviewed by Orville Schell, Washington Post, 29 Oct 06

[. . .] In the name of wiping out 'capitalist roaders' (a euphemism for anyone seemingly opposed to Mao's revolutionary line) and 'bourgeois revisionism', tens of millions of innocent victims were persecuted, professionally ruined, mentally deranged, physically maimed and even killed. "Beat to a pulp any and all persons who go against Mao Zedong Thought — no matter who they are, what banner they fly, or how exalted their positions may be," proclaimed one Red Guard poster.
"Whereas party violence had normally been carefully controlled and calibrated, now the rules had been suspended," note the authors. "Freed from parental and societal constraints, youths, both girls and boys, had been unleashed to perpetrate assault, battery, and murder upon their fellow citizens to the extent their barely formed consciences permitted. The result was the juvenile state of nature, nationwide, foreshadowed in microcosm by Nobel Prize-winner William Golding in Lord of the Flies."
A few of China's more pragmatic leaders did shrink from Mao's cataclysmic vision of revolutionary extremism. But Mao's Last Revolution suggests how easy it can be for a mercurial 'Big Leader', operating within a totalitarian system, to throw doubters so far off balance that none was able to organize resistance. And if there is one thing that Marxist-Leninist states do well, it is defoliating the political landscape of checks and balances, as well as watchdog institutions like the press. This is especially true when the media fall into the hands of one faction so that any sense of the actual variety of contending viewpoints is eclipsed, making it impossible for an outsider to discern how different factions were actually struggling against each other behind the scenes.
Mao was a master of keeping all comers in a state of paralyzing uncertainty. He garnered enormous power from his imperial opaqueness: While almost everyone wished 'to work toward' Mao and his policies in order to please him, they could never be quite sure whether they were measuring up. Mao was the embodiment par excellence of the advice implicitly given by the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov when he chastises Jesus for failing to compel belief by ruling by 'miracle, mystery and authority'.
By frequently absenting himself from the everyday sordidness of Beijing politics, Mao conjured up an almost otherworldly authority. And by making conflicting pronouncements that were impossible to factor together, he maintained both deniability and an ambiguity that kept his subordinates 'transfixed like rabbits in front of a cobra', as the authors put it. [. . .]

WHEN NIXON MET MAO
by Margaret Macmillan
reviewed by Sir Percy Cradock, Telegraph, 12 Nov 06

The United States' rapprochement with China in the 1970s was one of the turning points in the history of the last century. For more than 20 years, from the Communist victory in China in 1949, there were no relations between Beijing and Washington. At the United Nations Taiwan held the China seat. As the Americans saw it, detente with the Soviet Union was possible, but China was beyond the pale, irredeemably hostile.
American prejudices were confirmed by the experience of the Korean War and, as the US became bogged down in Vietnam, by Chinese aid to the North Vietnamese. The prospect of China acquiring nuclear weapons was seen in Washington as particularly alarming and in the 1960s President Kennedy went so far as to consider the possibility of a joint strike with the Soviet Union on Chinese nuclear installations.
Fortunately, in 1968 US foreign policy passed into the hands of two highly intelligent figures, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Nixon, whatever his domestic iniquities, was a skilled operator in foreign affairs. He was the first to see the necessity of sensible relations with Beijing. He and Kissinger were also alive to the potential leverage offered by the growing dissension between China and the Soviet Union. They were in many ways an un-American pair. They were realists; they talked, and thought, in terms of national interests, even balance of power. They invented triangular diplomacy.
For the Chinese too, the time was propitious. The Sino-Soviet split had ceased to be merely doctrinal or political: Chinese and Russian troops clashed in Manchuria; there was an ominous build-up of Soviet forces on the Chinese border and even rumours of a possible nuclear attack.
The Chinese were particularly alarmed by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and by the Brezhnev Doctrine, which claimed a Soviet right to intervene in any socialist state that showed signs of going the wrong way. Zhou Enlai, the Chinese Prime Minister, publicly likened Brezhnev to Hitler and Western missions in Beijing began to receive Chinese enquiries about the health of Nato. A change of policy was in the air.
[. . .]
Nixon's visit was a gesture, a great ceremonial occasion, minutely choreographed, with the photographers always ready at their assigned places and the timings always arranged to ensure maximum television coverage in the United States. But it was also a bargain. The Chinese wanted radical concessions on Taiwan. The Americans were ready to give some ground, but could not lay themselves open to accusations at home of selling out their ally.
In the end the agreed communique, settled after marathon sessions, bristled with parallel and conflicting declarations: 'The United States side states'; 'The Chinese side states'; and so on. On Vietnam, the Americans needed urgent Chinese pressure on the North Vietnamese to negotiate an end to the war. In fact the Chinese had little leverage on Hanoi and did not try very hard; but as a result of the visit the Americans had a freer hand in the war.
The Sovietologists had warned that American attempts to cultivate the Chinese would backfire, infuriate the Russians and make East-West relations even more dangerous. They were wrong: the opening to China gave the United States much greater freedom of manoeuvre in both Communist capitals.

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