Question: In the face of growing political dissent or social unrest, one country may decide to declare war on another country for which of the following reasons?
- A war against an external foe may increase support for the ruling regime.
- Wartime conditions may be used to justify the repression of political dissent.
- A foreign war may distract the domestic populace from its original dissatisfaction with the ruling regime.
- The new external threat may unify the country around the regime through a “rally round the flag” syndrome.
- Any or all of the above.
In the classic film Wag the Dog, a US president finds himself embroiled in a sex scandal that threatens his reelection. To turn the situation around, the president's political consultant hires a Hollywood director to film a phony war for the media. The faux war does indeed rally the electorate around the seemingly courageous president.
Now ask yourself this question, dear detectives: Is the following event a case of life imitating “wag the dog” art?
To wit: In the midst of his own sex scandal—and curiously after viewing Wag the Dog—President Bill Clinton ordered no less than three military campaigns. These included missile strikes in Afghanistan and the Sudan barely three days after Clinton admitted having sex with a nubile aide, a bombing campaign of Iraq during a Congressional debate over his impeachment, and the strafing of Serbia just after Clinton dodged the Senate impeachment bullet—Serb state television comically broadcast Wag the Dog in the midst of the bombing.1
While Hollywood hit a cynical nerve with Wag the Dog, the underlying logic of the film—that a regime's internal travails can trigger an external war—is actually formalized in an international-relations theory known as “diversionary foreign policy” or “diversionary war.”2 Scholars who have laid out this theory have identified “all of the above” as the correct answer to the question leading off this chapter.
Our next question, of course, is whether this diversionary war theory has any possible real-world application to Asia in general or China in particular. If so, one possible war trigger might be internal political dissent or social unrest that leads China's rulers down the wag-the-dog path. Let's look, then, at the diversionary war argument as it has been framed by at least some China watchers.
The argument's typical starting point is the observation that China is a country run by an unelected Chinese Communist Party with no real legitimacy to rule. In fact, this is a country of 1.4 billion people run by about 2,500 Communist Party members who basically elect themselves. Even more to the point, the Chinese Communist Party's grip on power comes far more from the world's largest army and internal police force than from any widespread popular support or unifying ideological theme.
On this latter point, prior to China's economic revolution in the 1970s, communism was the ideological glue that helped bind the populace together. However, since that economic revolution and the abandonment of communist and socialist principles, it is has become clearer and clearer with each passing day both within and outside of China that ideology has been replaced with a much simpler and often brutal brand of authoritarianism with distinctly Chinese characteristics.
It follows that, in the absence of any such ideological glue, one major concern of the diversionary-war theorists is that nationalism will replace ideology as a unifying force, and there is no better way to nurture and stoke the flames of nationalism than to create external enemies and villains in wag-the-dog style. Here, possible villains for the Chinese populace include an unrepentant and remilitarizing Imperial Japan; a philistine Philippines out to seize sacred and ancient islands in the South China Sea; a treacherous Vietnam stealing oil and natural gas from the territorial waters of the motherland; and of course, the damn Yankee imperialist out to contain, and perhaps even carve up, its “century of humiliation” Chinese victim—and so such wag-the-dog narratives in the government-controlled Chinese press may go.
That this is a potentially dangerous situation is compounded by the authoritarian nature of China itself. At least in the view of scholars such as Aaron Friedberg and Mark Stokes, the goal of the Chinese Communist Party is not the survival of China per se but rather more simply the preservation of Communist Party rule.3 One clear implication of this assumption is that if their rule is threatened, Communist Party leaders will do whatever is necessary to erase the threat—no matter what the risks may be to the broader populace.
There is also another important difference between authoritarianism and democracy that further ups the wag-the-dog ante. In a democracy, the voters have a peaceful chance to “throw the rascals out.” However, in an authoritarian regime, the rascals must police themselves, and this is often a recipe for corruption and plundering.
To be clear—and fair—China's leaders do have a strong incentive to ensure that the nation is safe and prosperous, if for no other reason than to help guarantee continued support from the populace. However, China's Communist Party members are also faced with a tremendous temptation to use the significant powers of their offices for self-enrichment. It is perhaps for this reason that even as China has enjoyed its unprecedented growth spurt, corruption, too, has flourished; today, China regularly ranks as one of the most corrupt large countries in the world.4
It is precisely China's hypercorruption that has become at least one major source of political discontent among a population that is increasingly exposed to dramatic and ever-rising levels of income inequality. Consider that the top 5 percent of households earn almost 25 percent of total household income while the bottom 5 percent account for just 0.1 percent.5 Such a skewed income distribution is particularly remarkable in a country that at its communist birth less than seventy years ago at least putatively started with an equal distribution of income.
Today, however, in China, there are three basic economic strata. The first is the “super rich.” They are China's version of the “one percent” in America, they number in the few thousands, and they are comprised of high-ranking Communist Party leaders and the corporate titans and top entrepreneurs that lubricate Party member bank accounts.
The second segment is an undeniably flourishing middle class that has been able to capture many of the trickle-down effects of China's economic miracle. While estimates vary widely, their numbers are anywhere from 100 to 250 million Chinese citizens, and they tend to be clustered along China's prosperous coast.
While the size of China's middle class seems at first glance very impressive, it is far less so when compared to China's total population of 1.4 billion. Indeed, despite the undeniable wealth that China's economic revolution has created, a full billion of China's citizens remain in poverty while more than half a billion of these quite literally dirt-poor souls live a Malthusian existence on subsistence farms.
It is not just extreme poverty, however, fanning the flames of rural discontent. It is also the rapacious practices of Chinese Communist Party officials who have turned brute-force landgrabs to fuel industrial development into a fine art. Here is how London's Guardian newspaper has described more than one million cases of illegal landgrabs as reported by the Chinese government itself:
Sometimes it is little more than armed robbery as police and gangsters use force to drive people off their property. More often, it is fraud, when local officials—bribed by developers—cheat the farmers of fair compensation.6
While moving more and more of China's rural poor into its teeming cities may prevent a peasant revolt, such mass migration and a level of Chinese urbanization projected at fully 70 percent by 2035 may well create this entirely different, and highly ironic, conflict scenario: A classically pure Marxist “workers revolution” against the abominable sweatshop conditions of modern day China. On this possibility, there are already hundreds of millions of Chinese laborers who suffer from difficult and often horrific work conditions as they eke out a relatively meager existence—even as they watch with growing envy as their rulers and China's rising middle class flaunt their BMWs and Rolexes and newly acquired wealth.
It follows that doubling down on industrialization as a path to peace and prosperity may not be the smartest strategy for a Chinese Communist Party looking for stability and tranquility. Indeed, it is far too easy for Party leaders to imagine a scenario in which slowing growth in China, or even recession, creates a political clamor for regime change.
Beyond the daunting economic demands of peasants and workers, the Chinese Communist Party must also grapple with a host of other problems fueling social unrest. Here, it is well worth noting that China has more than five hundred protests, riots, and mass demonstrations every single day.7 Driving such unrest are problems that range from horrific air and water pollution and the aforementioned forced dislocation of peasants from their land, to poisoned food scandals and a ticking demographic time bomb.
For example, on the air-pollution front, China is home to sixteen of the twenty most polluted cities in the world. At the same time, China's rivers, lakes, streams, and oceans are inundated with all manner of toxins while “an estimated 980 million of China's 1.3 billion people drink water every day that is partly polluted.”8
Regarding China as a ticking demographic time bomb, it has been said many times that China is a country that is growing older faster than it is getting rich. Consider that in 1980, the median age in China was a mere twenty-two—the classic definition of a young developing country. However, by 2050—thanks to China's much reviled and recently loosened “one-child policy”—the median age will be more than double that.9
As for the social turmoil this demographic time bomb is creating, there is a whole new generation of workers with their own aspirations that may not want (or be able) to shoulder the burden of financing the health care and pensions of large cadres of retirees. While Europe, Japan, and the United States face similar problems, China's is far more incendiary.
As a final source of internal turmoil, there are the growing numbers of dissidents themselves for which China's infamous lockups may eventually not be even big enough to hold. These dissidents include political groups pushing a prodemocracy agenda, religious groups hoping for more freedom to worship, pro-life forces vehemently hostile to China's one-child policy, and human-rights activists.
Add to these groups restive Tibetans and Uighurs subject to all manner of Chinese abuses and cultural genocide and China's Communist Party has a tiger of internal turmoil to ride—one that might eventually be addressed by an external wag-the-dog war against any one of a number of countries that China's government-controlled media has assiduously been building up as the “arch villain” out to once again humiliate China.
The escalatory problem with nationalistic fervor, however, is this: Once a population is whipped into a frenzy, compromise with any wag–the-dog enemy on thorny issues such as maritime rights or territorial boundaries becomes that much more difficult. This is because any such compromise exposes the government to charges of weakness rather than wisdom.
Thus, as a trigger or trip wire for war, “wag the dog” should never be underestimated. Given that other countries in the region, along with the United States, are all prone to their own internal problems, it may not even be China starting a wag-the-dog war.