ON JANUARY 11, 2007, the same week that Bush announced the “surge” in Iraq, Old China and New China briefly joined forces in an experiment designed to jolt Washington. With no warning, Chinese military forces sent an anti-satellite missile aloft and blew up one of their own weather satellites, just as it was about to fall out of orbit five hundred miles above Earth. They did it just to prove they could.
It was quite a feat for a country that forty years earlier was on the brink of starvation and anarchy, gripped by the terror of the Red Guards. It was also a long way from Mao's military strategy of a “People's War,” in which the country's enemies—he was thinking mostly about the Soviets—would be lured into Chinese territory and destroyed in a war of attrition. The space test marked the reversal of Mao's doctrine; in this new strategy, China's enemies are to be blinded and intimidated long before military forces make it near the mainland.
To the China hawks in Washington, the anti-satellite test seemed to validate every warning they had issued for years about the “China threat.” At the very moment the Pentagon was fixated on the low-tech but lethal techniques of the militants in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, the Chinese had, in a single missile launch, demonstrated how they could defeat the highest-tech, highest-flying systems in the American arsenal.
The satellite the Chinese shot down—on the somewhat thin pretext that it could pose a danger if it fell on a populated area—was traveling at a far higher altitude than the satellites that aim America's precision weapons, run its GPS systems, keep cell phone calls connected, warn of troop movements, detect nuclear sites, and transmit financial data around the world. Presumably, if Beijing could take out the weather satellite, it could turn off America's lights in space.
Because they gave no warning of the anti-satellite test, the Chinese violated the usual protocol that you should at least notify the world when you are about to create hundreds of pieces of space junk that will be tracked for years. (In this case, it was no small issue; NASA later determined that the test added about 10 percent to the total amount of debris floating around in near-space and said it would take roughly a century for all of it to fall out of orbit.)1 But inside the White House, the complexity of the situation, which American spy satellites had followed minute by minute, went well beyond tracking space junk. The test revealed how little we know, even today, about the relationship between China's civilian leaders and its military.
When I went to see Steve Hadley, the president's national security adviser, about ten days after the test, he said he still did not know if Hu Jintao had ordered the satellite shot down or whether the Chinese leader learned about it from reading the newspaper.
“The question on something like this is, at what level in the Chinese government are people witting, and have they approved?” he said to me. The wave of diplomatic protests that followed the test, he said, was partly an effort to make sure the Chinese military's actions “get ventilated at the highest levels in China.”2
For nearly two weeks the Chinese leadership responded to Washington's queries with nothing but stony silence. When Beijing finally acknowledged that it had shot down the satellite, the description of the event left the regime's intentions highly ambiguous. “This test was not directed at any country and does not constitute a threat to any country,” Liu Jianchao, the spokesman for China's foreign ministry, insisted to reporters. “What needs to be stressed is that China has always advocated the peaceful use of space, opposes the weaponization of space and an arms race in space.” He seemed to be hinting that this was a shot across Bush's bow. A few months earlier the White House had issued a new space policy that declared the United States would “preserve its rights, capabilities and freedom of action in space.”3 China's message seemed clear: We can play this game too.
But there was a deeper meaning to the Chinese statement. While the United States spent the first years of the new millennium probing al Qaeda's vulnerabilities, the People's Liberation Army spent those same years probing ours. Like al Qaeda and the Taliban, the Chinese were looking for America's Achilles’ heel, the hidden vulnerabilities in the world's biggest military and economic machine. Al Qaeda and the Taliban were thinking small: Their idea of asymmetric warfare was to plant roadside bombs and other improvised explosives, or send suicide bombers to the gates of American embassies and hotels. Their tactics were tragically effective at generating headlines and producing casualties (mostly innocent Muslims), but as asymmetric warfare goes, roadside bombs represent amateur hour. Absent a true weapon of mass destruction, al Qaeda and the Taliban are restricted to disabling a few personnel carriers at a time and hoping that the grievous injuries and fear they sow in the streets of Baghdad and Kabul will eventually drive out the Americans.
The Chinese are thinking big. They recognize that America's vulnerability lies in its high-tech infrastructure. So while the Taliban labored away in basements building magnetic IEDs to stick under cars, the Chinese labored away in computer labs and missile sites. No one gets hurt in an antimissile attack. But China's military strategists know they can do far more damage to the United States by threatening to take out the military and civilian satellite systems than by threatening a nuclear confrontation.
“Unlike the Soviets, the Chinese decided early on that nuclear weapons have a limited utility in the world,” Kurt Campbell, an Asia expert who served as a defense official in the Clinton administration, told me. “But they recognize how sensitive we are to strategic competition. So they look for the subtle edge.” Antisatellite missiles provide that edge: We have a far larger number of vulnerable satellites circling the globe than the Chinese do. The anti-satellite missile launch was asymmetric warfare, New China style.
The change in strategy was years in coming, a product of China's two biggest assets: its persistence and its growing wealth. In the early 1990s, the People's Liberation Army spent a lot of time studying the Persian Gulf War. Their shock at how far behind they were triggered the first wave of big annual increases to fund military modernization. As America's brief “unipolar” moment peaked in the late 1990s, China's feeling of inferiority mounted. Nothing sent a bigger chill through Zhongnanhai, the leaders’ residential compound, than the image of American B-2 bombers lazily lifting into the air over Missouri at midday, flying an 11,000-mile, thirty-two-hour mission to drop laser-guided weapons over Belgrade, and arriving back in time for the pilots to have dinner at home the next evening.4 When one of those bombs went astray and destroyed the Chinese embassy in downtown Belgrade, the blunder not only touched off anti-American protests in the streets of Beijing but also produced huge skepticism on the part of the People's Liberation Army that the attack could have been anything but deliberate. A senior Chinese official told Thomas R. Pickering, the American diplomat sent to Beijing to apologize for the bombing, that the United States had gotten involved in Kosovo for one reason only: to test its latest armaments.5
This concern about American military superiority grew with the rapid destruction of Saddam Hussein's much-feared Republican Guard in 2003, a sobering reminder of the fate of those who try to confront the American military directly, force-on-force. And for the past few years, visiting delegations of Chinese military officers have said they are fascinated by the use of unmanned Predator drones in Iraq and along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, particularly by the thought that the planes were being flown by a young pilot with a joystick who was sitting in a trailer in the Nevada desert.
“They looked at what we were doing by remote control from Bagram Air Base,” one senior official in the Pacific Command told me, referring to the huge outpost in Afghanistan where many of the Predators are launched, “and you could see them calculating what we could do over China someday from our bases in Japan.”
It's no surprise that the People's Liberation Army spent the past two decades focusing on America's heavy dependence on the intelligence, computer, and communications technology that give American military forces global eyes and global reach. Chinese military planners quickly began searching for inventive ways to shut it down, investing in cyberwarfare and sea-skimming ballistic missiles that could threaten, from hundreds of miles away, any American carrier fleet that might one day head to the Taiwan Strait in a crisis over China's claims to that last, wealthy artifact of the Cold War. It is all part of a broader strategy, as two of America's top experts on the subject wrote, to “puncture American dominance wherever possible.”6
When he became secretary of defense, Gates examined this new strategy and emerged concluding that China's buildup was a reason for concern—but not reason for panic. “They want to have a capability to hold us at risk,” Gates told me when I asked him about China's intentions. (Rumsfeld's holdovers, no surprise, had a darker, more expansive view of China's ambitions.)
The “puncture” strategy is a direct challenge to the Bush Doctrine, enunciated by the White House in its first “National Security Strategy,” published in September 2002.
The doctrine is best known, of course, for its emphasis on preemption against states amassing weapons of mass destruction that could threaten the United States—an approach that went awry in its first application, with the invasion of Baghdad six months later.1* But for the China hawks—and for the Chinese—the most important sentence of the document lay elsewhere, in the section meant to address America's approach to dealing with rising great powers. “Our forces will be strong enough,” the document said, “to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military buildup in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States.”
At the time, Russia seemed so financially hobbled that the statement seemed clearly aimed at the Chinese and their expanding conventional and nuclear forces. When I was first reporting on the new National Security Strategy—and its declaration that no “peer competitor” would be allowed to take on the United States—Con-doleezza Rice was very clear about Bush's objectives. “The president has no intention,” she told me, “of allowing any foreign power to catch up with the huge lead the United States has opened since the fall of the Soviet Union more than a decade ago.”7
The Chinese are a long way from catching up, but the test in January 2007 left little doubt that the Chinese leadership viewed Bush's vow as bluster. With American troops bogged down on the other side of the globe, the U.S. defense budget under pressure, and huge U.S. deficits financed largely by the willingness of the Chinese government to lend Washington the money to keep paying the bills, Hu Jintao banked on the proposition that the United States could do little to prevent China from developing a twenty-first-century military that targeted America's vulnerabilities. He was right. Even if we had not gone into Iraq, even if the country were not deeply in debt, it would have been difficult to dissuade China from building a military that reflects its new influence in the world.
The White House reaction to the antisatellite test was almost as fascinating as the test itself. If Iran or North Korea or Iraq in Saddam's day had conducted such a test, Bush would have denounced it from the South Lawn and threatened retaliation. He never did in China's case. But he also never budged from his space policy, which declared that the United States would “deny, if necessary, adversaries the use of space capabilities hostile to U.S. national interests.”8 The White House however, did quietly order the military to prove that it could perform the same feat. A little over a year later, in February 2008, the United States launched an interceptor—a version of what it designed for the antiballistic-missile system—to destroy a U.S. satellite that was falling out of orbit with 1,000 pounds of highly toxic fuel.
Earlier, the United States had said the fuel posed no threat and that the military would simply let the satellite fall, hoping it would sink to the bottom of some ocean. Then, when the Air Force and others realized there was an opportunity to match the Chinese accomplishment and to show off the ABM technology, they declared that the toxic fuel posed too great a risk. They proceeded to do exactly what the Chinese had done: They took the satellite out with a single shot. With that accomplishment, both countries crossed into dangerous new territory.
Apart from the space junk—theirs and ours—no one did serious damage with these tit-for-tat shots. But as America tries to manage the Old China-New China tensions, it is incidents such as these that give one pause. In public, both Chinese and American leaders say roughly the same thing: The world is a big place, and there's plenty of room for both of us. But in reality, the Pentagon and the People's Liberation Army are pursuing their own versions of a “hedging strategy” just in case the world really isn't that big, after all.
America hedges by keeping bases in Japan and South Korea and by patrolling the region with its carriers and submarines. The Chinese hedge by talking incessantly about their “peaceful rise” while testing weapon after weapon to send the message that Beijing will tolerate no interference in its sphere of influence, especially near Taiwan.
China used to wrap those weapons programs and tests in total secrecy, save for the May Day parades of missiles and tanks, a holdover from the Communist era of muscle-flexing when military power was still measured in throw-weights. But these days, many in the Chinese leadership prefer a different expression of power. In gradual increments, they have been dispatching their navy to farther destinations. “They want us to see them everywhere—in the Pacific, in the Indian Ocean,” an Indian admiral told me during a visit to New Delhi. “It would be years before they would be able to run a war far from China—they simply can't do it. But they want us to get used to seeing them,” he said, so that years from now no one will question their right to patrol Asia's waters.
To show off their new capabilities, the Chinese have started publishing photos of their second-generation nuclear-powered attack submarines and announcing big increases in defense spending, upward of 18 percent per year. (The Chinese insist their defense budget is $45 billion; the Pentagon thinks the real number is more than $100 billion. That's a big number, but even the higher figure would amount to less than a quarter of the American defense budget.)2* The Chinese have disclosed, or made obvious to American spy satellites, about ten different varieties of ballistic missiles—including nearly 1,000 short-range missiles based opposite Taiwan. The Chinese Navy is developing its own aircraft carrier, after concluding that the Russian ships they were buying were built to Russian standards. The list goes on: new laser weapons, new missiles with sophisticated guidance systems, and new submarines.
Still, many experts in Washington say that what they worry about in China is what we don't see. “There is scandalously little intelligence on their weapons systems,” one senior intelligence official complained to me in the fall of 2008, “because it's simply tied up elsewhere.”
What really grabs the attention of the China hawks in Washington, however, is the gradually increasing size and sophistication of the country's nuclear arsenal—and the number of weapons aimed at the United States.
Americans have never known quite what to make of the Chinese nuclear arsenal. In the mid-1960s, the prospect of Mao with nuclear weapons seemed so terrifying that President Johnson briefly considered teaming up with the Soviets for a joint strike on the country's nuclear facilities before the first Chinese test in 1964. (That debate closely paralleled the current arguments about whether the world can live with an Iranian nuclear weapon or should strike before one is built.) The risks seemed wildly high, and the idea, fortunately, was dropped. For the rest of the Cold War, the Chinese nuclear arsenal was something of a strategic footnote. The country was satisfied with a “minimum deterrent” of just a couple of hundred warheads, compared with thousands in the United States and the former Soviet Union. The Chinese were far more enlightened on this issue than either Washington or Moscow; China knew it needed just enough to create a credible deterrent. It had other priorities for its money.
New riches have ushered in a slightly changed approach. In 2005 a National Intelligence Estimate circulated to the top layer of the national security leadership but never publicly discussed by the Bush administration, warned that the Chinese were increasing the size of their nuclear arsenal by about 25 percent—a number that sounded big but didn't amount to many more weapons. More important, the Chinese began deploying a new, mobile-launched, land-based missile—called the DF-31A—that is difficult for American forces to target and, perhaps more worrisome, can reach just about the entire United States. American intelligence officials estimated that by 2015, China will have 75 to 100 warheads aimed at American territory—not exactly how you treat a “strategic partner.”9
“They have thought out their strategy very carefully, as you might expect,” one of the key Pentagon analysts assessing the Chinese buildup told me. “They know that credibility is the coin of the realm, so they've built a very, very credible force. But they still have a hard time integrating their security interests with their economic interests. So we really don't know how they plan to use all this power.”
In a parting shot just as the Bush administration was packing up and getting ready to leave Washington, Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy secretary of defense who gained fame arguing that the invasion of Iraq could be done on the cheap because oil revenues would pay for the reconstruction of the country, made the argument that the United States cannot allow China to gain nuclear parity.
“China's military modernization is inspired in part by growing nationalism and pride, by the goal of checkmating U.S. military power while expanding its own presence and capabilities in Asia and the Pacific, by its increasing international commerce, and by Beijing's desire to be perceived as a serious player on the world scene,” he wrote in a report to Condoleezza Rice in his capacity as chairman of a State Department advisory board. After years of humiliation by Korea, Japan, and the United States, he wrote, China's leaders “probably believe that, with rising nationalism under way, any similar humiliation in the future would be a threat to the regime from within.”
Wolfowitz's solution was to rebuild and modernize America's nuclear infrastructure, because “the United States cannot risk China perceiving the United States as either unprepared or unwilling to respond to Chinese nuclear threats and use.” He called for better missile defenses and making it clear that Washington “will not accept a mutual vulnerability relationship with China.”10
Wolfowitz was giving voice to a strand of thinking in Washington that the United States must be “second to none.” If China is allowed to challenge the United States in the number of deployed nuclear weapons, that theory goes, Iran or Pakistan or India will be right behind. Such thinking dominated the White House in the Bush years, driving its determination to talk about eliminating nuclear weapons as a long-term goal—much like paying off the national debt—that everyone loves in theory and has no interest in pursuing in practice. Nowhere in Wolfowitz's report to the secretary of state was there mention of the option of opening up talks with the Chinese about reducing the size or potency of their arsenal and ours.
THE MAN RESPONSIBLE for figuring out how to deal with these threats is Admiral Keating. A warrior with an imposing presence but a friendly demeanor, he has spent his life engaging his Asian military counterparts at endless receptions where the defenders of the world's most vibrant economies eye one another over mai tais. Keating grew up in landlocked Dayton, Ohio, graduated from the Naval Academy in Annapolis, and has, for the better part of the past thirty-five years, been floating and flying across the Pacific. During 9/11 and the Iraq War, he headed the North American Aerospace Defense Command—NORAD, the famed mountain fortress—before commanding the newly created Northern Command, the military unit created to focus on homeland defense.
But in early 2007, after Donald Rumsfeld was shown the door and the more thoughtful, less confrontational Robert Gates settled into the job of secretary of defense, Keating returned to his roots. He was made commander of all American forces in the Pacific.
From his perch over Pearl Harbor, where he can just make out the sunken remains of the USS Arizona, still bubbling oil nearly seven decades after the Japanese attack that brought America into World War II, Keating devotes more time to understanding our Asian rivals’ intentions than to counting ther ballistic missiles. It's an approach that might have benefited his predecessors in the late 1930s. Yet it is not much easier to figure out which of many competing factions in Beijing will emerge on top than it was to determine which of the battling factions in Tokyo would win out in 1941.
“When I ask my Chinese colleagues,” Keating told me, “they say, ‘We only want to protect those things that are ours.’ We say, ‘Fair enough.’ When you rely as much as they do on importing precious metals, and oil, and exporting their goods, having a maritime presence makes sense. But why sixty-five submarines that can shoot a missile a hundred kilometers? That's a different kind of navy—and a different kind of air force—than you might create if you were only interested in protecting those things that are yours.”11
Keating has concluded that—at least for now—the Chinese are largely interested in creating what he calls “an area of denial,” a zone around the mainland and Taiwan that they can keep American forces from entering, especially if a nasty confrontation develops between Beijing and Taipei. If he had been in the same job ten years ago, when the Clinton administration was focused on the “big emerging markets” and diplomacy centered far more on the Pacific, Keating would have been constantly fending off officials from Washington. But to Keating's relief, the Bush administration was so wrapped up in Iraq and Afghanistan that it couldn't be bothered to focus on pesky extraneous issues such as managing military interchanges with China. You can't take the time to think about long-term threats, he told me, if you are waking up every morning in a cold sweat about how to handle short-term threats.
“There is the unmistakable focus by Washington on matters Middle Eastern, largely Iraq, secondarily Afghanistan, maybe the Levant,” he said, the last a reference to the area that encompasses Israel, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. Those are the three areas that Bush associated with terrorism. “The issues with which we deal aren't in the top three,” he said, “and we are six time zones away, so everyone's stayed out of our hair.”
The results are startling to anyone who travels the globe these days measuring the mood about America. In the Pacific, there is far more concern about whether the United States is turning protectionist than about whether it is turning loose the captives in Guan-tánamo. Wherever I travel in Asia—back to my old haunts in Japan, in Thailand, in India—top officials nervously ask whether I think America is gradually withdrawing from the Pacific and surrendering the region to China's influence.
Maybe they like us, or maybe they just like having us there. It is easy to understand why. As Keating and I talked, we peered down from his office window as sailors and Air Force personnel were rushing to put together “earthquake kits” for victims of the huge disaster in China's Sichuan Province that destroyed whole cities and brought down shoddily built schools. It was the latest of a series of humanitarian operations that Keating was overseeing. He had just returned from a trip to the border of Myanmar where he tried to persuade the paranoid Burmese junta to allow the United States to provide aid to victims of a cyclone. Always suspicious, the Burmese were reluctant. Keating found himself attempting to reassure the leaders of the military regime that America was not interested in occupying the country. “We don't want Burma,” he says he told them.
The exchange with the Burmese was not unusual. The Indonesians have made it clear they do not want the hospital ship Mercy bobbing conspicuously offshore during emergencies; to them, its appearance is a sign of national weakness. The Philippines had the same worry about American counterinsurgency forces that arrived to help clear out Islamic extremists. In both cases Keating learned the importance of delivering help silently, invisibly, even if it meant that the United States military did not get credit on the evening news.
As we talked I kept thinking back to Bush's confident-sounding lectures during the 2000 presidential campaign about why American troops should never be used for nation-building. The refutation of that view was unfolding below Admiral Keating's window: It's the best single way to make use of America's soft power while delivering a subtle message about America's hard power.
“It's a different kind of American presence, and it works,” Keating told me. The speed with which the aid arrives and the accuracy with which it is airdropped, leave an impression. These operations remind people, Keating said, that “we're still the predominant military power out here, and we intend to stay that way.” He recalled an incident from the winter of 2007, when two American C-17 cargo planes were dispatched to Guangzhou Province in China with blankets because the area had been hit with a brutal cold spell that threatened mass deaths from exposure. It took less than seventy-two hours, he said, between the time the Chinese asked for some help and the arrival of the first American planes, which immediately offloaded pallets full of blankets.
“There was a Chinese general there,” Keating recalled. “And the first thing he said was, ‘I can't believe you got here so quickly.’”
The real message of the Chinese general's surprise is that humanitarian operations give the United States a chance to make a point about our speed and our reach—wordlessly. “We don't want to fence them in,” Keating said. “We want to draw them out, let them see the capabilities we have, coax them to let us see their capabilities, and assure them we mean them no ill will.” He paused.
“And we want to convince them,” he said, “that if it ever came down to soldier-to-soldier, airplane-to-airplane, ship-to-ship, we are not going to lose. So don't waste your money, don't waste your time. Come with us, let us operate together. Send your kids to West Point, and we'll send our guys to the Guangzhou Military Academy.”
EVEN IF YOUNG Chinese officers end up at West Point, the leaders of Old China have no intention of giving up the “puncture strategy” to deal with the United States, any more than Lenovo intends to surrender the laptop market to Dell and Apple. But at the same time, I detect no desire among the Chinese, even the hardliners of Old China, to engage in direct confrontation with the United States. It is the last thing they want—and their behavior during the Bush years suggests they have concluded that it is completely unnecessary.
Hu Jintao and his colleagues have plenty of problems these days—from tainted milk to desperate water shortages, protests over new chemical plants and toxic rivers, and tens of millions of restive unemployed workers. But when they look across the Pacific, they see a superpower consumed by woes of equal magnitude. With the publication of every new State Department assessment of China's human-rights record, Chinese diplomats gently ask when water-boarding became an acceptable American interrogation technique. They rarely miss a moment to point out that the America that preached to China about fiscal “transparency” and the wonders of efficient markets amid the Asian financial crisis in 1998 ignored its own advice before the American financial crisis in 2008.
Now, for the first time in the history of Chinese-American relations, we are the ones with our hands out—for diplomatic help with unruly rogue states like North Korea, and for desperately needed capital.
When the United States reached its last, unsatisfactory deal with North Korea on nuclear inspections in October 2008, Con-doleezza Rice was on the phone to her Chinese counterparts trying to get assurances that Beijing would enforce compliance. The same week, private investment houses and banks were turning to Chinese investors, hoping that Beijing would find them an exit ramp from financial calamity. So was the U.S. government, which knew that if the Chinese chose not to show up for the Treasury auction, the White House was going to have trouble raising the cash for its bailout of the banks. Naturally, the American concern that China would stop lending was all fodder for the daily debate in Beijing, where the question of whether America is in decline is a constant subject of self-interested discussion. The Chinese are not sure of the answer, but they are certain the United States is suffering from the triple plagues of debt, distraction, and global overreach.
The Chinese like to overstate our dependency on them. American politicians want to understate it. But the fact is we need them as much as they need Wal-Mart. Under these circumstances, American efforts to stop China from becoming a “peer competitor” are bound to fail. We can delay the day, but we can't stop it. If we view our relationship with China as a zero-sum game, in which one nation is on top, and one is pursuing the brass ring, the relationship will be defined by a constant series of confrontations.
That strategy simply does not make sense. If American exceptionalism meets Chinese exceptionalism, we'll end up in two camps. The best thing we have going for us right now is that the relationship with China is fundamentally unlike the old relationship with the Soviet Union. The coin of the realm is not the number of strategic weapons, but the number of strategic partnerships. That means encouraging more purchases like Lenovo's buyout of the personal computer division of IBM. It means letting more Chinese engineers into the country, even at the risk of displacing some American jobs. The more China is invested in America, the more likely it is to think twice about confrontation. As one of America's top intelligence officials said to me about cyberwarfare, “I'm more worried about Russian teenagers than I am about the Chinese Army. You think twice about shutting down our Federal Reserve if you've got a few hundred billion tied up in Treasury bills.”
None of this intermingling of interests guarantees peace and harmony. After all, Germany went to war with France and Britain twice in the first half of the twentieth century, despite deep commercial interconnections. Yet in China's case, there is an additional incentive to avoid conflict. The Communist Party knows that preserving internal stability—and its own hold on power—depends on the country's ability to keep exporting. That's why the Party itself has absorbed into its ranks so many entrepreneurs, university students, and professionals—the people who forty years ago would have been sent to camps to be “reeducated.” Without trade, without rising prosperity, that stability is threatened.
“This is a very reflective party,” David Shambaugh, a longtime China scholar, said at the opening of the Olympics. “They are adaptive, reflective, and open, within limits. But survival is the bottom line. And they see survival as an outcome of adaptation.”12
That survival instinct gives President Obama a surprising amount of leverage with the Chinese—if only he can learn to use it.
America has an opportunity to rewrite the first big diplomatic engagement between America and Beijing: the “Open Door Policy” first created by John Hay, Lincoln's personal secretary during the Civil War and the secretary of state just as America was becoming a power in the Pacific with the annexation of the Philippines. At the time it seemed that many European countries would seek to partition a weak China. Hay sought everyone's agreement to preserve China's territorial rights, an effort that failed when the Japanese couldn't help themselves and seized Manchuria.
The new Open Door Policy has to work in reverse: It has to open our doors wider to China, in return for a Chinese agreement not to carve up Asia, global energy supplies, outer space, or the atmosphere to satisfy its own growth agenda. We have much that the Chinese desperately want: universities that are brimming with ideas, companies that are developing new technologies. That gives the new president leverage. But he has to learn how to use it and learn how to move fast, because the Chinese are placing their bets all over the globe.
In 2003, the year of the Iraq invasion, China's investments in foreign mergers and acquisitions totaled a couple of billion dollars a year. By 2008 those investments hit $45 billion, more than half of that amount in companies around the world that can provide China with natural resources, from Australia to Syria.13 They've been busy in Brazil, buying up iron ore and timber and manganese, along with copper in Chile, a country that now sends more of its exports to China than to the United States. And they have been very busy in the Sudan and Chad, one of the most isolated corners of Africa, buying the rights to vast new exploration zones and promising that unlike the preachy Americans they will offer no lectures on human rights. Nigeria, Angola, and the Ivory Coast all have embraced the Chinese investment boom, in part because its cash comes free of the restrictions attached to loans from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. (Chinese firms are building a new capital for the Ivory Coast, in the wonderfully named Yamoussoukro, just as they built a new capital for East Timor.) The residents of Khartoum, Sudan's dusty capital, point to their paved roads—something many Sudanese have never seen before—as the product of deals struck with Beijing, not with Western financial institutions. In northern Cambodia, Chinese firms are building bridges across the Mekong to their new Silk Road, a 1,200-mile route down to the Gulf of Thailand.
China isn't pursuing these ventures because the Great Hall of the People has suddenly been taken over by the Sisters of Charity. It is extracting what Beijing hopes will be exclusive deals that will ensure a steady supply of oil and commodities to fuel Shanghai and Guangdong, even if global energy crises hit. “They are buying long-term supplies wherever they find them, including in unsavory places like Sudan, Iran, and Burma, where we won't buy,” Bush's former China adviser, Michael Green, said to me. “They say it is benign, because they don't interfere with the internal affairs of other nations. And we say it is anything but benign.”
Yet astoundingly, the Bush administration fired only one warning shot about this practice, just before Hu Jintao arrived in Washington in 2006. That visit is remembered mostly for a series of diplomatic disasters on the South Lawn, when ceremonies for the state visit opened with the announcement of the playing of the national anthem for the Republic of China—the formal name for Taiwan. The Chinese delegation nearly walked out. A few minutes later a protester from Falun Gong interrupted Hu's speech with shouts. Hu paused for a long while, as if to say, “I'll wait a few moments while you shoot this miscreant,” but Bush nudged Hu to go on.
The administration's warning to China about its efforts to scoop up the world's energy supplies was buried in a revision of the National Security Strategy in 2006. The document, approved by Bush, explicitly cautioned China's leaders against “acting as if they can somehow lock up’ energy supplies around the world or seek to direct markets rather than opening them up, as if they can follow a mercantilism borrowed from a discredited era.”14
As the Chinese quickly pointed out, mercantilism was a European and an American invention, and a series of weak Chinese regimes were on the receiving end of it a century ago. But curiously, Bush himself never issued a public complaint beyond that single line in the National Security Strategy, a document read mostly by diplomats, policy wonks, and professors. “With the Chinese,” Stephen Hadley said when I raised the question, “some things are better done privately.”
Perhaps so, but history suggests that China responds, grudgingly, to public pressure. It has begun to pressure the Sudanese government about Darfur because of international criticism. It releases imprisoned human-rights leaders when the heat gets too high. And it has embraced environmental cleanup largely because of public protests.
For the next president, it is this last category—climate change and environmental cleanup—that affords the greatest opportunity for an alliance with both New and Old China, if only we seize the chance.
Hardly a week goes by without some group in the United States, Europe, or Asia issuing a report enumerating the terrifying statistics about China's growth, starting with a thousand new cars on the roads around Beijing every day. So many new cement factories are being constructed that the country is now using half of all the cement made in the world and spewing out toxic dust and smog along the way. Satellites are beginning to track those deadly clouds as they move around the globe.
In April 2006, researchers who sample air on the tops of mountains in Oregon and Washington began to pick up sulfur compounds and carbon residue that they traced back to coal plants across the Pacific. When air filters in Lake Tahoe start turning black with Chinese particulates, globalization takes on a very different, darker hue.15
Remarkably, the Chinese are now openly acknowledging the environmental problem, and that marks a dramatic change from just a few years ago. They don't like to hear specific numbers about the costs of their growth—particularly the World Bank's estimate that pollution leads to 750,000 premature deaths every year in China— but they have started publishing their own stark warnings about the dangers of doing nothing.16 Of course, while the national government says all the right words, local officials and businesses are still buying up wildly inefficient old steel mills from ThyssenKrupp in Germany and moving them halfway around the world to increase the economic growth of their provinces.17 That is the reality of modern-day life in China: centralized instructions from the top, decentralized resistance below.
But for Washington and Beijing, rarely has there been such a ripe chance to forge a profitable collaboration. China is desperate for clean-coal technologies, new, low-emission power plants, nuclear power, and expensive experiments in carbon sequestration-pumping carbon emissions back into the earth or sea. American companies, of course, will complain at first that they can't run the risk that the Chinese will steal some of their technology. But it is a risk we will have to take—because it is the only way into the market.
The Chinese, of course, will argue that the United States polluted the world for decades when its industrial base was growing, so it needs some patience—say, a century or so—while China catches up. But that argument is already being chipped away as Chinese entrepreneurs embrace clean-energy technologies that also save them money by running plants more efficiently. The central problem will be who pays the bill for all this technology. It's difficult to imagine Congress, strapped by demands to pay for Wall Street's sins and new health-care programs, agreeing to finance environmental projects that will benefit Chinese companies.
“We're going to say you are the developed country and we are the developing country,” a senior Chinese diplomat in Washington said to me one day. “And you're going to say, ‘Yes, but we're broke.’ I'm not sure how we get past that.” That may be where President Obama begins his dialogue with the Chinese.
PRESIDENCIES ARE ABOUT setting priorities. Bush got several of his China priorities right: He coaxed the Chinese into dealing with North Korea (the process was better than the results), and he ignored members of his own party who were eager to make China the enemy. But when it came to energy policy, he favored showing off prototypes of hydrogen-powered cars instead of putting real money into alternative energy research.
His biggest mistake was wasting years denying, then ignoring, the science around climate change. Imagine what he could have done for the image of the United States around the world if he had championed an American-subsidized program to sell China far more efficient, far less polluting coal-fired power plants. During the height of the Chinese boom—which roughly matched the years Bush was most absorbed in Iraq—the United States could have been at the forefront of a global effort to help China grow at 10 percent per year without adding the equivalent of Britain's carbon emissions. No single action would have done more to combat global warming. No single action would have done more to promote American exports. Yet Bush never tested the Chinese or pushed them. He could have launched a truly broad program with Beijing to cap our emissions together—with the world's largest economy and the world's largest new consumer of energy each bearing a share of the cost, and each benefiting from the creation of the hottest new industry on Earth. There would be no better way to encourage the rise of New China. There were many lost opportunities in the Iraq years; this one may have been the most consequential.
Eight weeks before the presidential election in 2008, five former secretaries of state gathered at George Washington University to talk about the agenda for the next president. They disagreed on much, from how to handle Iran to how to pursue Mideast peace. But they agreed on one thing: The Chinese will not move on environmental cleanup until we force the issue.
“You're not going to get it done if the president of the United States doesn't lead the charge,” one of the former secretaries said. The other four—Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, and Warren Christopher—nodded in agreement. The speaker was James A. Baker III, the man who led the legal team that, in 2000, won the recount in Florida for George W. Bush.
Compared to the other problems the next president faces, the China problem is a blessing. It does not require the threat of confrontation, and it may not require a huge investment beyond what we would make anyway in energy technology. It is all about leadership, partnership, and confidence—the confidence that America is strong enough to manage the rise of another superpower and secure enough not to become paranoid about the prospect that America's lead over one of its biggest competitors is shrinking. Over time that was bound to happen. It isn't a sign of weakness. It's a sign of progress.
1* In interviews, Rice and others have argued that the invasion of Iraq was not an example of preemption because Saddam Hussein had so blatantly ignored a series of United Nations resolutions. Thus, they do not consider it a test of the Bush Doctrine. Most Americans and much of the rest of the world, however, considered it to be a preemptive strike, largely because Bush, Cheney, and Rice had warned in vivid terms of the dangers of Saddam's weapons.
2* Congress agreed to $462.8 billion for defense programs for fiscal year 2007. This does not include the supplemental budget packages for funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.