If the Soviet Union and the U.S. have served as the PRC’s chief security threats throughout its history, the third greatest threat has consistently come from Japan. Japan is by many measures a more powerful country than any of China’s other immediate neighbors. Its population, at 130 million, ranks tenth in the world. Its GDP was the second largest after that of the U.S. until 2010 and still stands third in the world after China’s. Moreover, China’s GDP has overtaken Japan’s not because of superior productivity but because of its larger population. Japan continues to outpace China as an innovator, investor, financial power, and exporter of high-tech manufactures and cultural products.
Japan is also a formidable military power. It has the sixth-largest defense budget in the world, and because it spends the smallest percentage of GDP on defense of any major power, it would have plenty of room to increase military spending if it decided to do so. It supports a military establishment (known as the Self-Defense Forces [SDF]) that is trim in manpower at 237,000 personnel but rich in high-tech weaponry and skills at sea, in the air, and in space.1 The SDF is backed by world-class electronics, nuclear technology, and heavy industrial sectors. It operates in coordination with the U.S., which stations 36,000 troops on Japanese soil. This redoubtable power is located in intimate proximity to China, only about 500 miles across the East China Sea from Shanghai and within 1,200 miles of most of China’s population. These distances can be traversed in a day by a modern combat ship, in half an hour by a fighter plane, and in a matter of minutes by a missile.
Yet no other neighbor—not even Russia—offers equally large prospects to China of mutual benefit because of the near-perfect complementarity of Japan’s high-tech, resource-needy economy with China’s hunger for capital and technology and its ability to supply resources and labor. The puzzle of China–Japan relations is why the conflicts have been so difficult to resolve and the benefits so hard to achieve.2 The answer lies in geopolitics: the undesired intimacy of two large countries in a small space. Areas crucial to Japan’s security include Korea, Taiwan, and the East China Sea, all of which are also vital to China’s security. The two countries are so close together that their security needs compete, generating a classic security dilemma where each side’s moves to increase its own security threaten the security of the other side.3 Advances in technology and intensified economic interactions have made distances in the region even less significant than they were in the past. Any effort to reconcile Chinese and Japanese interests is further complicated by the turbulent dynamics of a regional system that includes the two Koreas, Taiwan, Russia, and the U.S.
SCORPIONS IN A BOTTLE: THE CHINA–JAPAN SECURITY DILEMMA
Japan’s geostrategic position makes it the most insecure of any major modern power. Its four long, narrow, densely populated main islands stretch for about 1,400 miles alongside the Asian mainland, lying only 200 miles from Russia, 155 miles from the Korean Peninsula, and, as noted, 500 miles from China. These distances were sufficient under premodern conditions to protect Japan and the Asian mainland from each other except once, when the Mongols briefly attacked Japan in the thirteenth century. But as soon as the two countries built modern steam-driven battle fleets in the late nineteenth century, their security perimeters began to overlap. They clashed in a battle for regional predominance in 1894–1895, which Japan won. As part of the settlement, Japan gained Taiwan as a colony, laying the basis for the separation of Taiwan from China that continues today. Ten years later Japan fought with the new Russian navy and army over preeminence in northeastern China and Korea. Japan’s victory in that war laid the basis for its colonization of Korea in 1910 and its invasion of Manchuria, large parts of China, and most of Southeast Asia over the next few decades. Yet this position proved unsustainable, and Japan’s defeat in World War II reconfirmed the home islands’ ultimate vulnerability.
A second vulnerability, created by modernization, is economic. Under premodern conditions, the islands were self-sufficient. As the country started to industrialize in the Meiji period (1868–1912), it came to depend on outside sources for raw materials and energy resources unavailable at home. By the 1930s, Japan already imported 90 percent of its iron and 84 percent of its oil (today the numbers stand near 100 percent). These dependencies made the country mortally susceptible to any disruption of its access to sea lanes along the China coast and through Southeast Asia—the same shipping routes on which China has also come to rely since the 1980s for its imports and exports. Japan’s lifelines are also open to strangulation at a number of straits closer to home, including the Tsushima Strait near Korea, the Tsugaru Strait between the Japanese main islands of Honshū and Hokkaidō, and the La Pérouse or Soya Strait near Russia.
A third area of Japanese vulnerability has been generated by the increasing importance of maritime and undersea resources in modern times, the resulting new salience of maritime territorial boundaries, and the expansion of competing territorial claims at sea under recent international law. Modern fishing fleets are able to go farther from shore and feed larger populations than traditional fleets. New drilling technology made it possible to exploit oil and gas reserves beneath the seabed. At the same time, the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS)—to which both China and Japan acceded in 1996—expanded the size of the maritime zones over which states could claim various kinds of jurisdiction (full sovereignty over a 12-nautical-mile territorial sea, limited sovereignty over a 24-nautical-mile contiguous zone, economic rights in a 200-nautical-mile EEZ, and so on). These developments led to nearby states’ lodging overlapping claims to rights that were of growing economic as well as strategic value. Although the UNCLOS contains provisions to settle competing claims, they are too complex to produce unambiguous answers. China claims island groups that Japan holds—notably the Senkaku Islands (in Chinese, the Diaoyutai Islands), which are located at the lower end of the Ryukyu island chain approximately 120 nautical miles to the northeast of Taiwan—and disputes Japanese claims to certain seabed resources, notably the Shirakaba (in Chinese, Chunxiao) gas field in the East China Sea, where the Japanese accuse the Chinese of siphoning off gas from their side via wells on the Chinese side.4 Japan also has territorial disputes with Korea over the Dokdo (or Takeshima) Islets in the Sea of Japan and with Russia over the four southernmost islands of the Kuril island chain, which were seized by the Soviets after World War II and are known as the “Northern Territories” in Japan. Russia has not relinquished the Kuril Islands because they have a strategic position in controlling the Sea of Okhotsk, substantial natural resources, and Russian populations.
Adding to Japanese concern about the rise of Chinese power are the two countries’ competing interests in Taiwan and Korea. Although Japan does not openly oppose the unification of Taiwan with China, it has an interest in postponing that outcome. Taiwan’s separation from China serves Japan’s interests because of the island’s strategic position near the main shipping lanes, because China’s preoccupation with Taiwan ties up military assets that might otherwise be used to threaten Japan, and because of Japan’s large economic interests in Taiwan. For years, Japan served as the main base for the Taiwan independence movement, with the unofficial support of some powerful Japanese, until most of the activists returned home to participate in domestic politics after Taiwan’s democratization. Japan lines up with its ally the U.S. in insisting on “peaceful resolution of the Taiwan issue,” has promised to provide facilities to support the U.S. defense of Taiwan in case of armed mainland attack, backs Taiwan’s participation in international organizations, and allows official contacts at a relatively high level. Beijing sees these actions as obstacles to the success of its Taiwan policy.
And the two countries’ interests clash over Korea. China is interested in the stability of the North Korean regime and supports it as a client, whereas Japan is threatened by Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons and missile-delivery systems. Part of the Japanese response has been to develop a ballistic missile defense system in cooperation with the U.S., which in turn reduces the deterrence value of Chinese missiles and makes China less secure.
Japan in modern times has tried two different grand strategies to assure its security.5 Neither has produced satisfactory results for Japan, and both have threatened China. The first, before World War II, was to build an empire on the model of European empires of the time in order to assure military control of a wide security perimeter and access to raw materials and markets. After annexing Taiwan as a colony in 1895, Japan developed the island into a supplier of cotton, sugar, and rice. It added Korea to its colonial resource base in 1910. From there, Japanese troops and administrators moved into northeast China (called Manchuria at the time) to create the client state Manchukuo (1932–1945). Starting in 1937, Japan seized control of large parts of China and most of Southeast Asia, building the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Imperial Japan overreached, however, and the strategy ended in defeat, having imposed tragic costs on China and the other victim nations as well as on Japan itself.
Japan’s second grand strategy, pursued after World War II, was to depend on U.S. protection in exchange for serving as the main base for American power in Asia. (A third option, neutrality, was advocated by the former Japan Socialist Party but never tried.) The U.S. occupied Japan at the end of the war and imposed the so-called Peace Constitution, which says in Article 9, “[T]he Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.”6 With the start of the Cold War, however, the U.S. shifted course and began to rearm Japan. Japan accepted a subordinate security position in the U.S. alliance system under a policy that came to be called the Yoshida Doctrine, which said that the country should take advantage of American military protection in order to place its priority on economic development. The two countries signed a Mutual Security Assistance Pact in 1952, which was replaced in 1960 by a Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security. Under this arrangement, the protection of Japan’s territorial integrity—and eventually also of its strategic straits and sea lanes—became a joint endeavor. The U.S. extends its threat of nuclear retaliation to deter any nuclear attack on Japan, bases troops in Japan, and patrols the sea lanes that are crucial to Japan. The countries cooperate in developing military technology, and they constantly renegotiate the operational division of labor between their forces as the regional security environment evolves.7
Some scholars say that culture—the lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the revulsion against war, the commitment to Article 9—explains Japan’s postwar preference for this second security strategy because it has allowed Japan to adopt a pacifist posture behind the shield of a U.S. defense guarantee.8 Indeed, there are intense pacifist feelings in some sectors of Japanese society. For example, the 1960 decision to renew the alliance with the U.S. aroused large protest demonstrations. But geostrategic reasons ultimately best explain Tokyo’s choice. The failure of the imperial strategy proved that Japan could not assure its security on its own. This was even more so under Cold War conditions, when the chief threat was the Soviet Union, with its nuclear arms, its vast Pacific Fleet, and its alliances with China (for a time) and North Korea. If Japan did not wish to be dominated by Russia, it had to put its hope for protection in the other superpower. Not only was partnering with a superpower the only practical choice, but it also held down defense costs and allowed more of the nation’s energies to be devoted to economic growth.
The U.S. partnership did, however, require Japan to invest significantly in its own defense, and over time Washington pushed Tokyo further to increase its military capabilities in order to reduce the American defense burden. In 1969, Richard Nixon articulated the Nixon Doctrine, under which America’s allies should provide for their own defense with U.S. help and under the U.S. nuclear umbrella. As time went by, Japan accepted a wider range of defense duties. In 1981, Tokyo agreed to take responsibility for defending the sea lanes to a distance of 1,000 nautical miles from the main islands, far enough to encompass the Senkaku Islands and reach to the edge of Taiwan. In 1983, Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone stated that Japan would develop the capability to bottle up the Soviet fleet in the Sea of Okhotsk by controlling the three nearby straits. In 1988, Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita yielded to U.S. demands that Japan pay a larger share of the costs of basing U.S. troops in Japan. In the 1990s, after U.S. criticism of Japan for not contributing more to the Gulf War effort, the Diet (Japanese Parliament) adopted a bill allowing Japanese troops to participate in UN-mandated peacekeeping operations overseas. The 1997 version of the Guidelines for U.S.–Japan Defense Cooperation—an implementing document for the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security—included a new provision for “cooperation in situations in areas surrounding Japan,” which implicitly called for Japanese involvement if the U.S. found itself engaged in conflicts over Korea or Taiwan. In 2004, Japan dispatched SDF forces to Iraq as part of U.S.-led coalition forces, even though only for police work and sea supply, marking the first time since World War II that Japanese military personnel had entered areas where combat operations were taking place. In 2007, the Japan Defense Agency was upgraded to cabinet level and renamed the Ministry of Defense. Japan made major financial contributions to the U.S.-led war effort in Afghanistan. Each of these policy shifts was accompanied by increases in defense expenditures and capabilities.
Chinese policymakers and some foreign analysts labeled these trends “remilitarization.”9 Beijing took note when, after the Soviet threat to Japan disappeared, China itself began to be cited as a reason for building up the Japanese military. In 1995, Japan punished China for conducting nuclear weapons tests by temporarily suspending its official development assistance (ODA). Japan’s 1997 defense white paper expressed concern about China’s ballistic missile arsenal and its expanding maritime capabilities. Around that time, Tokyo began building a missile defense system in cooperation with Washington. Although Japan cited the North Korean threat as the reason, the system also threatened to reduce the value of China’s nuclear deterrent. In 2004, for the first time, Tokyo’s National Defense Program Guidelines explicitly named China as a potential threat. In 2005, a committee of top U.S. and Japanese security officials adopted a communiqué that listed peaceful resolution of the Taiwan issue as a “common strategic objective” for Japan and the U.S. One result of Tokyo’s growing concern with Beijing’s naval developments was the decision in 2005 to more than triple the annual equipment budget of Japan’s coast guard, which is officially a civilian organization rather than part of the military, but more heavily armed than most country’s coast guards.10 Japan’s 2008 defense white paper complained about China’s lack of military transparency. In 2009, Japan put what it called a “helicopter-carrying destroyer” into service, which China saw as tantamount to an aircraft carrier and a significant increase in Japan’s power-projection capability. In 2010, Japan publicly pressured China to cease expanding its nuclear arsenal and published the new National Defense Program Guidelines, which called for a shift of forces away from the northern front facing Russia to the southwestern front facing the maritime boundaries disputed with China. In Chinese eyes, this series of steps and others reflected not only Japan’s deep suspicion of China, but also its participation in the ongoing American plan to hedge against the rise of China by maintaining a military balance in Asia unfavorable to China.
For Japan, the problem with the U.S. alliance has been—as Mao discovered in dealing with Khrushchev—that the interests of security partners are seldom identical. The U.S. at various times has failed to defend interests Japan regards as important (for example, by giving low priority in negotiations with North Korea to the issue of Japanese citizens abducted by Pyongyang), has insisted on Japan’s performing missions that most Japanese do not wish Japan to perform (pressing Japan, for example, to contribute money and manpower to the war in Iraq), has ignored Japanese interests when pursuing interests of its own (for example, when Richard Nixon “shocked” Japan by making his historic breakthrough with China without informing Tokyo in advance or when President Bill Clinton made a nine-day visit to China in 1998 without a stopover in Tokyo), and has pressured Japanese officials into tolerating actions in secret that they had publicly vowed not to permit (for example, by bringing nuclear weapons into Japanese ports on navy ships in violation of a public Japanese government policy that forbade this very act). Moreover, the American commitment has seemed politically shaky, especially when the U.S. seemed poised to reduce its commitment to Asia (such as after the Vietnam War) or when Americans were angry about the trade deficit with Japan in the 1980s and 1990s.
These problems have fostered discussion in Japan of a potential new security strategy, widely referred to as the “normal country” strategy. Advocates argue that Japan should revise Article 9 of the Peace Constitution so as to regain the right to use force held by any other state. Beyond this specific point, the normal country policy is ill defined. Some say Japan should continue to cooperate with the U.S. but act more independently, not seeking military dominance in any part of the world, but engaging in more military activity than it has in the past. Others seem to want Japan to move to an equidistant position between the U.S. and China. A third group points vaguely toward a more assertive, nationalistic posture. It is hard to know how such a policy would work, but if put into effect it would only intensify Beijing’s perception of a Japanese threat. From China’s point of view, Japan’s alliance with the U.S. therefore remains the least bad of many bad options. At least it has reduced Japan’s incentive to go nuclear, a function sometimes impolitely called “keeping the cork in the bottle.”11
The ideal security solution for countries situated as Japan and China are with respect to one another would theoretically be the construction of what scholars call a “security community.”12 A security community is a group of nations, such as the members of the EU, who see their security interests as consistent rather than conflicting so that threats from each other are no longer included in national security planning. But the conditions that made such an outcome possible for Europe are lacking in the case of China and Japan. They included the presence of a common threat (the USSR) that was greater than the threat posed by one another; a common security guarantor, the U.S.; technological developments that devalued the control of disputed pieces of territory for economic or security purposes; levels of prosperity combined with levels of military technology that made war more costly than any potential benefit it could bring; mutual military “burnout”; and deep agreement on core cultural values—including a common interpretation of what happened between the member nations in the past—and intense people-to-people and economic ties. There is no prospect that this demanding suite of preconditions will be realized in the China–Japan relationship any time soon.
Tokyo has nonetheless done what it can to create a community of interests with China.13 It broke formal ties with the ROC and normalized diplomatic relations with China in 1972; signed a Treaty of Peace and Friendship with China in 1978; offered a series of apologies for World War II atrocities in China; and since 2000 has hosted more than seventy thousand tertiary-level students from China each year. Japan was the first country to end the sanctions imposed on China by the G7 countries after Tiananmen. It endorsed and pushed for China’s admission into the WTO. It channeled nearly $21 billion worth of ODA to China in the three decades from 1979 to 2009, making China the largest recipient of Japanese ODA and Japan the biggest aid donor to China. The two countries have signed numerous agreements for cultural, scientific, and technological exchanges, and since 1997 Japan has intermittently promoted the idea of an “East Asia community” that would intensify cooperation in economics, health, environment, and other fields among Japan, China, South Korea, and the ten ASEAN countries.
Most important, thanks to the complementarity of their economies, the two countries have built trade and investment ties that rank among each country’s largest overseas economic relationships. Japan has been one of China’s top trading partners since the early 1970s, and China one of Japan’s top trading partners since the 1990s. China imports medium- and high-tech goods, machinery and equipment, cars, and metals from Japan and sells clothing, footwear, information technology products, foodstuffs, oil, and coal to Japan. And Japanese firms have been among the largest sources of foreign direct investment in China.
Yet the two countries remain politically far apart. Their economic relations have been filled with contention as well as cooperation. Each has many other important economic partners, so neither is economically dependent on the other.14 Japan is not as open to Chinese immigrants and students as are the U.S. and Europe, and there are fewer people-to-people ties. Each country’s public attitudes toward the other are negative. Instead of a security community taking shape, there is the perception in Beijing and Tokyo that each other’s security priorities are fundamentally opposed.
CHINA CONDITIONS JAPAN
Because China cannot eliminate the threat that it perceives from Japan, its goals in the relationship have been more defensive than proactive (in contrast, for example, to Beijing’s strategy toward Russia after the Cold War, described in chapter 3). China seeks to minimize Japanese support for Taiwan’s separation from the mainland, to hold the line on territorial claims, and, above all, to discourage Japan from moving further toward the more assertive security posture that China pessimistically sees as the likely trend given Tokyo’s current policy trends and American pressure.
To pursue these goals, China has used a “conditioning” strategy: it rewards politicians and interest groups in Japan’s factionalized political scene who show sensitivity to Chinese interests and punishes those who do not. Positive incentives include trade and investment deals for cooperative companies, smiling diplomacy with favorably inclined party leaders and prime ministers, and exchange and cooperation agreements. Negative incentives include trade and investment hindrances for unfriendly companies, assertive naval and air patrolling, popular demonstrations in Chinese cities against Japan, and, whenever Japanese policy seems headed in the wrong direction, loud criticisms of those policies and of the Japanese wartime atrocities that they allegedly resemble. This reward-and-punish approach sometimes produces an impression of inconsistency, but it is better understood as a way of using relatively weak and imprecise influences to try to steer the direction taken by a large neighbor that is itself cross-pressured by strong domestic and international forces. In conditioning Japan, the Chinese government draws on nationalistic public sentiments that are real but modulates the timing, duration, and intensity of their expression and what issues they include. Chinese leaders have tried to leverage Japanese feelings of guilt and claim the moral high ground as the victim in order to extract economic and political concessions. Conflicts over history and memory serve as signals rather than drivers of policy.15
Thus, in the 1950s and 1960s, even though Japan officially participated in the U.S. trade embargo against China, China concluded a variety of private trade agreements with friendly Japanese companies and politicians, using frameworks known as “friendship trade” and “memorandum trade.” In 1969, when the U.S. put pressure on Japan to extend its defense posture under the Nixon Doctrine, China denounced Prime Minister Eisaku Satō as a militarist and tightened the conditions for Japanese companies that it would be willing to trade with. In 1972, when Japan gave China diplomatic recognition, China responded with an era of good feeling. Beijing awarded a huge steel mill project at Baoshan near Shanghai to Nippon Steel in 1977 in part because the company’s chairman was a longstanding friend of China.16 In 1978, Deng Xiaoping visited Japan, followed by a visit in 1983 by CCP general secretary Hu Yaobang. Deng and Hu sought Japanese aid and investment to power their new program of reform and opening. Speaking of the Senkaku Islands dispute, Deng said it was not urgent and could be left to future generations.
In the 1980s, however, when Japanese leaders intensified defense cooperation with the U.S., China responded with negative signals. On the fortieth anniversary of Japan’s 1945 defeat, China mounted exhibitions, events, performances, and ceremonies throughout the country that focused on Japanese war crimes during the invasion of China. China protested when Prime Minister Nakasone visited Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine, which honors the spirits of Japanese war dead, including World War II war criminals. Nakasone’s visit helped trigger anti-Japan student demonstrations, which the Chinese government allowed to continue on and off for several weeks. For the next few years, China complained about one issue after another: the way Japanese textbooks described World War II atrocities, a meeting held in Tokyo to commemorate Chiang Kai-shek, a Japanese court’s award of a contested dormitory building to ROC instead of PRC authorities, and the cutting of scenes of the Nanjing massacre from the version of the film The Last Emperor distributed in Japan. Economic frictions happened to intensify at the same time as the fast development of the Chinese economy generated a trade imbalance with Japan and led to China’s cancellation of a number of orders and contracts.
Beijing again softened its rhetoric in the early 1990s to reward Tokyo for taking the lead in relaxing post-Tiananmen sanctions. Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu visited China in 1991, the emperor was welcomed in 1992, Jiang Zemin visited Japan in 1993, and Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa visited China in 1994. Both the emperor and Hosokawa showed sensitivity to Chinese concerns by apologizing for Japanese aggression. Therefore, when a private Japanese nationalist group placed a marine signal station on one of the Senkaku Islands to emphasize Japanese sovereignty, China responded in a low-key manner.
China turned up the loudspeaker again in the mid-1990s in response to more assertive trends in Japanese policy. In a trade dispute over agricultural products, China responded to Japanese protective duties with heavy tariffs on a wide range of goods, forcing Japan to back down. After Japan declared an EEZ around the Senkaku Islands in 1996, Beijing protested and allowed a private patriotic group based on Chinese soil to conduct three small-scale attempts to land on the islands (during which one protester, a man from Hong Kong, drowned). PLA ships, submarines, and aircraft stepped up their patrolling near and sometimes within Japanese-controlled waters and airspace. On a 1998 summit visit to Tokyo, Jiang Zemin said that previous Japanese apologies were insufficient and demanded unsuccessfully that more explicit language be put in writing. Both countries made preparations to drill gas wells in the disputed area of the East China Sea, and each protested the other’s activities.
In 2001, a new Japanese prime minister came to office espousing policies that alarmed Beijing. Jun’ichirō Koizumi promoted enhanced defense cooperation with the U.S., ballistic missile defense, an expansion of the SDF’s role and its dispatch to Iraq, and the upgrading of the SDF to ministry status. During the election campaign, Koizumi had vowed to visit the Yasukuni Shrine regularly while in office. China—along with South Korea—protested and imposed a freeze on relations. In 2005, the CCP Propaganda Department conducted a massive campaign to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the victory over Japan. Fresh student demonstrations broke out, targeting the Yasukuni visits, Japanese textbooks’ treatment of the Nanjing massacre, and Japan’s candidacy for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council (UN secretary-general Kofi Annan had recently proposed Security Council reform). Koizumi’s successors seemed to have gotten the message: none visited Yasukuni while in office. China rewarded this stance with exchanges of high-level visits in both directions.
China’s conditioning policy toward Japan carries risks. At home, nationalist passions can turn into a xenophobia that might be hard to control. For example, in 2004 the Japanese national team in the Asian Cup soccer tournament was the target of abuse when it played matches in the central city of Chongqing. The defeat of the Chinese national team by the Japanese team in the championship game in Beijing provoked extreme hostility from Chinese fans. Any appearance of not standing up to Japan may cause this anger to turn against the Chinese government. In Japan, Chinese harping on historical issues (along with Korean and Filipino attacks on similar issues) risk fostering a more nationalistic response rather than deeper apologies. Although Japan’s relationship with the U.S. makes Beijing uncomfortable, a weakening or collapse of the alliance might lead Japan to arm itself even faster than it has done under U.S. prodding. For this reason, China has not called for an end to the alliance since the Sino–Soviet split. As realists, Chinese leaders have little hope for smooth relations with Japan in the foreseeable future. The most they can do is keep trying to get Japanese policymakers’ attention so that Japanese actions do not make the two countries’ security dilemma even worse than it is.
THE KOREA PROBLEM
Even closer to China than Japan lies a spur of land between the two large neighbors whose existence only intensifies the security threat that each offers to the other. The Korean Peninsula is often described as “a dagger aimed at the heart” of both China and Japan because of its potential to be used as a channel for an attack on either of them by the other or by a third power such as Russia or the U.S. Korea is also of strategic importance for any power seeking to contain Russia (with which Korea shares a short border), as it was for the U.S. during the Cold War. This location has made the Korean Peninsula one of those unfortunate territories on which outside powers pursue their rivalries by spilling local people’s blood. The history of Korea is one of invasions by both China and Japan, colonial occupation by Japan in the early twentieth century, warfare in the early 1950s, and division since 1945 in a constant state of crisis.
Korea would be considered a large country by any standard except that of its three immediate neighbors, and in any other neighborhood it would exert considerable influence. The two Koreas’ combined population totals 71 million, ranking eighteenth in the world just behind Turkey. The peninsula covers an area of 84,500 square miles, making it nearly two-thirds the size of Japan and six times as large as Taiwan. The South Korean economy at about $833 billion in 2009 was the world’s fourth largest, approximately one-sixth the size of China’s (the North Korean economy is too small to change the country’s rank if it were added in). The total manpower of the two Koreas’ armed forces—approximately 1.8 million personnel—is second in the world only to China’s. South Korea’s army is well equipped and well trained. North Korea’s conventional forces are antiquated, but the country commands an arsenal of ballistic missiles and has perhaps half-a-dozen nuclear devices that are close to being usable as weapons. If integrated, they would constitute a formidable force.
Korea is historically one country, and its people have a shared culture and identity. All Koreans’ abiding goal is to establish independence from great-power meddling and provide for their own security without depending on foreign patrons. Until the peninsula is unified, Korea’s strength is wasted through division and competition, and disunity provides an ongoing excuse for foreign nations to remain involved. Tragically for the Koreans, however, although no outside power openly opposes unification, none actively supports it. No outside power can hope to dominate a unified peninsula the way China and Japan did at different times before 1945 because the others would oppose it. Nor can any of the surrounding powers be sure that a unified Korea would not ally with its enemies. For each of the great powers, therefore, the safest course is to allow the peninsula to remain divided as long as possible so that no other power dominates. In this way, North Korea will continue to provide China with a buffer against the U.S. and Japan, and South Korea will continue to provide Japan and the U.S. with a buffer against China, as it did against Russia in the Cold War era.
Even without outside interference, unification would not be easy to achieve because of the enormous differences between the political and social systems of North Korea and South Korea. Only one regime and one way of life can survive the process. Hence, the impulse for unification has generated not rapprochement but competition between the two Koreas ever since they emerged after the end of World War II. The opening gambit of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) in the North in 1950 was to attempt the military conquest of the Republic of Korea (ROK) in the South. When this failed, Pyongyang maintained a high level of military threat along the armistice line that ran in the vicinity of the Thirty-Eighth Parallel, sent teams of agents to try to destabilize the Seoul regime, and in the 1980s engaged in acts of international terrorism aimed at South Korean officials. For military supplies and economic support, Pyongyang relied on the patronage of its two large Communist neighbors. The onset of the Sino–Soviet dispute in 1960 enhanced the value of Pyongyang for both Moscow and Beijing, creating a “small strategic triangle” that North Korean dictator Kim Il-sung (1912–1994) skillfully played to enhance the flow of benefits to his regime.
South Korea’s strategy went through a number of stages. After an interlude of weak democratic government, Seoul began to focus on economic growth under the stewardship of military strongman Park Chung-hee (r. 1961–1979). South Korea leveraged its growing economic power to develop a more independent diplomacy, at first in Asia and then in the 1980s also in other parts of the world. By that time, the two Koreas had achieved rough parity diplomatically, economically, and politically. They had enjoyed comparable rates of growth, with Pyongyang holding an edge over Seoul in some areas. Both Koreas dramatically increased the number of states with which they had full diplomatic relations from slightly more than a dozen in 1960 to seventy-five for the DPRK and ninety-three for the ROK in 1978. Unlike the PRC and the ROC, the two Koreas allowed other countries to maintain diplomatic relations with both of them at once on the ground that both were legitimate states pending unification. The major patrons of each Korea, however, denied diplomatic recognition to either other’s client.
The 1980s brought a shift in the balance of advantage. South Korea’s globalization-linked economy grew at annual rates of around 8 percent, whereas North Korea’s isolated economy stagnated. South Korea went through a transition to democracy in 1987 that enhanced its international prestige, whereas the North carried out a protracted dynastic succession in the context of a bizarre cult of personality as Kim Il-sung’s eldest son, Kim Jong-il, gradually consolidated his personal power from the mid-1980s until his father died in 1994. As South Korea grew, Pyongyang’s diplomatic allies in the socialist bloc flocked to establish economic and diplomatic ties with Seoul, at first under the cover of the 1988 Seoul Olympics (a process dubbed “sports diplomacy”) and then with full diplomatic recognition as the socialist bloc dissolved. This process culminated in the normalization of relations with Seoul by Pyongyang’s major patrons, the Soviet Union in 1990 and China in 1992. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian economic aid to the DPRK ended, and Chinese aid was reduced. Starting in the early 1990s, the country encountered serious economic difficulties, and North Koreans began to suffer famine.
As Pyongyang’s patrons set their erstwhile client adrift, the two Koreas entered into direct talks, each side trying to improve its position in the new circumstances. Direct contacts had taken place three times previously: in 1972–1973 in response to the strategic shock both Koreas suffered from Sino–American rapprochement, in 1979–1980 after the assassination of South Korean president Park Chung-hee, and in 1984–1986 after severe floods in North Korea. Officials in 1991 signed the Agreement on Reconciliation, Nonaggression, and Exchanges and Cooperation; in 1992 the Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula; and later the same year a nonaggression protocol. In 1993, however, Pyongyang broke off talks with Seoul, believing that the nuclear crisis that emerged that year created an opportunity to force Washington into direct talks.
THE KOREAN NUCLEAR CRISES
The series of Korean nuclear crises that began in 1993 had their roots in programs to develop nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles that Pyongyang started in the 1960s. These programs aimed to benefit the regime in several ways. They were status symbols that helped hold the loyalty of the elite, military officers in particular. They were commercial ventures that brought millions of dollars into Pyongyang’s coffers through sales of missiles and nuclear technology to countries such as Iran and Syria, virtually Pyongyang’s only source of foreign exchange except for the counterfeiting of U.S. dollars. And weapons of mass destruction were a deterrent against what Pyongyang believed was an American strategy to undermine or possibly even attack the regime.17
In the early 1990s, North Korean leaders discovered another use for these programs. When the U.S. began to put pressure on the DPRK to end the programs, Pyongyang saw the opportunity to use them as leverage to force the U.S., Japan, and South Korea into negotiations for diplomatic recognition, security guarantees, and economic aid. Under Soviet pressure, the DPRK had signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1985, stating that its nuclear program was for peaceful uses only. In 1989, however, a classified U.S. assessment that Pyongyang was developing nuclear weapons was leaked to the media. Claiming to disprove the media report, North Korea allowed International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors entry to its Yongbyon nuclear facility in 1992. The inspectors raised serious questions about the amount of plutonium North Korea might have produced and discerned major discrepancies in Pyongyang’s official accounting of its fissile materials. Under increasing U.S. pressure, in March 1993 Pyongyang threatened to withdraw from the NPT and in May tested its Nodong-1 missile by firing it into the sea between itself and Japan. Then, in May 1994, North Korea began the removal of the Yongbyon reactor’s fuel rods unsupervised by IAEA inspectors, which meant there was no way to know if any plutonium in the rods was being extracted and used to make nuclear weapons. One month later Pyongyang announced that it would withdraw from the IAEA and expel that organization’s inspectors. As tensions mounted, the Clinton administration began serious consideration of military action to destroy North Korea’s nuclear capability.
This sequence of events came to be called the first North Korean nuclear crisis. It was only the intervention by former President Jimmy Carter that resolved the standoff. He flew to Pyongyang and initiated a dialogue with the elderly Kim Il-sung in June 1994, persuading Kim to allow the IAEA inspectors to remain. This dialogue led to direct negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang that resulted in the Agreed Framework, signed by the two governments in October 1994 (the elder Kim had died in July and been succeeded by his son Kim Jong-il). The framework established the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO) to build two proliferation-resistant light water nuclear reactors in North Korea for nuclear energy and, until the first of the two reactors was completed, to supply five hundred thousand tons of heavy fuel oil annually to help North Korea meet its energy needs. The U.S., Japan, and South Korea were the initial members of KEDO; some other countries joined later. Pyongyang in exchange promised to dismantle its Yongbyon reactors, to remain a signatory to the NPT, and to permit international monitoring.
Building on this success in enhancing the status of his regime and stabilizing the economy, Kim Jong-il reached out to each of the other major powers around the peninsula as well as to South Korea to extract benefits for his regime. In May 2000, he made the first of a series of visits to China to obtain commitments for economic aid and diplomatic support. In the following month, he held a summit in Pyongyang with President Kim Dae-jung of South Korea, who pursued a diplomatic thaw with the North that he called the “sunshine policy.” Kim Dae-jung and his successor, Roh Moo-hyun, hoped to facilitate a “soft landing” for the North by providing relief aid, investment, and diplomatic engagement. In 2001, Kim Jong-il met with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Moscow and he visited Russia again in 2004. Perhaps the most remarkable diplomatic initiative took place between North Korea and Japan. Japanese prime minister Koizumi visited Pyongyang twice (in 2002 and 2004) in an attempt to normalize relations. The effort failed because of the North’s unwillingness to give a full accounting of the fate of Japanese citizens who had been abducted by Pyongyang in the late 1970s and early 1980s to serve in the North as language tutors and in other capacities. Although Koizumi did return to Tokyo with a handful of surviving abductees and their offspring, the initiative felt short of resolving the issue and did not result in normalization.
Despite all this activity, Pyongyang was unable to achieve a breakthrough with Washington. North Korea was of two minds about normalizing relations with the U.S. On the one hand, this step would create a less threatening security environment for Pyongyang; on the other, it would eliminate the great adversary that provided the rationale for Kim Jong-il’s “military-first” policy and his repressive rule. Nonetheless, in keeping with its commitments under the Agreed Framework, Pyongyang started taking apart the Yongbyon facility. But KEDO’s construction of the two reactors and its supply of fuel oil lagged, in part because of funding disagreements among the organization’s member states. Perhaps to get the West’s attention, in 1998 Pyongyang conducted a test of its Taepodong-I missile, sending the projectile over Japan to land in the Pacific Ocean. Western intelligence agencies reported that Pyongyang was also selling missiles to Pakistan, Iran, and countries in the Middle East. The U.S. again considered military options but decided to try to engage Pyongyang instead. U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright visited North Korea to discuss plans for a possible summit visit by President Clinton.
But the Clinton administration left office before this summit could take place. The George W. Bush administration, which took office in January 2001, decided to take a tougher line. In his second State of the Union address, the new president labeled Pyongyang part of an “axis of evil.” Shortly thereafter the U.S. charged that a Pyongyang diplomat had acknowledged to a U.S. diplomat the existence of a second, previously unknown, nuclear weapons program based on highly enriched uranium rather than plutonium.18 Charging that this program was a violation of the spirit—although not the letter—of the Agreed Framework, KEDO suspended fuel oil shipments. In retaliation, Pyongyang withdrew from the NPT, expelled the IAEA inspectors, and resumed its Yongbyon program; KEDO in turn suspended the light water reactors program. The U.S. now demanded “complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantlement” of the North’s nuclear program—in effect, unilateral disarmament—as the precondition for resuming talks. This sequence of events is known as the second Korean nuclear crisis.
CHINA STEPS IN
These developments alarmed China. On the one hand, Pyongyang was within its rights under international law in everything it had done save for its initial violation of the NPT. It had not broken any of its promises to the U.S. For example, it had never promised not to have a highly enriched uranium program—the Americans had neglected to ask for such a guarantee. Pyongyang’s basic negotiating objective was reasonable in Beijing’s eyes: an assurance that the U.S. would not attack it. The regime had shown its ability to survive and to wrest deference and aid from its more powerful neighbors. And the North Korean regime’s survival was in China’s interest insofar as the likely alternatives were a messy collapse, the loss of a valuable buffer state, and a flow of refugees from North Korea into adjacent Jilin and Liaoning provinces.
On the other hand, Beijing considered Kim Jong-il its most difficult neighbor. He extorted food and oil from China by the threat of regime collapse. He ignored Chinese advice for economic reform to feed his people and for political liberalization to allow North Korea to begin to modernize. He created tension between Beijing and Washington by motivating American policymakers to pressure China to rein him in. His missile firings near Japan spurred Japan’s remilitarization, its creation of a theater missile defense system, and its tightening of defense ties with the U.S. It was North Korea’s 1993 missile test and 1996 preparations for another test (later aborted) that precipitated the inclusion of new language in the 1997 U.S.–Japan Defense Guidelines about defense cooperation in “situations in areas surrounding Japan,” language that Beijing believed also applied to Taiwan.
Perhaps most distressing, Beijing judged that Kim Jong-il’s brinkmanship created a real risk of war, with its attendant risks of possible nuclear contamination affecting nearby Chinese populations, a South Korean takeover of the North, and the ultimate presence of American troops on China’s border. The U.S. had just demonstrated its willingness to use force by invading Afghanistan and Iraq. Beijing was worried that Washington would take on Pyongyang next.19 Because the U.S. refused to engage in bilateral negotiations with Pyongyang, the Chinese devised the idea of multilateral talks, which eventually came to involve all the stakeholders—both Koreas, the U.S., China, Japan, and Russia. The Six-Party Talks began in 2003. Beijing conceived them as a fig leaf for negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang, mediated by the Chinese, with the other parties being perceived as little more than observers.
Beijing served as host and facilitator but also pursued some goals of is own that were different from Washington’s. China worried about instability and war on its borders and thus favored a gradual and cautious approach to minimize tensions, whereas the U.S. was concerned that North Korea would use its missiles to threaten Japan and would sell nuclear and missile technology to rogue regimes or terrorists and thus wanted quick changes in Pyongyang’s policies. Washington wanted China to force North Korea to yield, but the Chinese believed that Washington’s hard line made a solution impossible. Beijing lobbied both sides to soften their positions but asked for more changes in Washington’s position than in Pyongyang’s.
Beijing signaled Pyongyang that the North should not expect China to come to its rescue in a military conflict of its own making. It did not, however, cancel the 1961 Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation and Mutual Assistance. China appeared to find that piece of paper still useful in a number of ways. First, it gave China the right to counsel Pyongyang against rash action and diminished the incentive for North Korea to lash out in panic. Second, it helped to deter an attack on Pyongyang by other states. Finally, the treaty would provide a justification if China ever felt that it needed to intervene militarily on Korean soil.
China’s hosting and tortuous mediation efforts produced some results. In September 2005, the Joint Statement of the Fourth Round of the Six-Party Talks announced that the six parties agreed to the goal of verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula (so stated to include a commitment by South Korea not to go nuclear and by the U.S. not to station nuclear weapons on the peninsula). But immediately following this round of talks, the U.S. Treasury Department—apparently working without coordination with the State Department—accused a financial institution located in Macao that held substantial North Korean assets, Banco Delta Asia, of money laundering for Pyongyang. To avoid U.S. sanctions, the monetary authority of Macao froze the bank’s accounts and thus Pyongyang’s money. North Korea responded by canceling talks, firing seven test missiles in July 2006, and detonating an underground nuclear test three months later. Beijing issued its first public condemnation of Pyongyang in the form of votes in favor of two UN Security Council resolutions that condemned North Korean actions and imposed symbolic sanctions. They were the first of a series of Security Council votes that China was to cast against North Korea in subsequent years.
After further mediation efforts by China, in 2007 the U.S. removed Banco Delta Asia from its watch list, Macao’s financial regulators freed up the North Korean assets, and North Korea again agreed to shut down its Yongbyon reactor, to allow the return of IAEA inspectors, and to make full disclosure of past activities (which in principle would have included the alleged highly enriched uranium program). The U.S. and its allies renewed their commitment to provide two light water reactors and fuel oil.
In short order however, the implementation of the agreement unraveled as Pyongyang and Washington accused each other of not making good on their respective promises. North Korea further raised tensions with a new series of missile and nuclear tests in 2009, followed in 2010 by the torpedoing of a South Korean navy ship, the Cheonan; the revelation of a sophisticated new uranium-enrichment facility; and the shelling of a South Korean–held island in waters disputed between the two sides. These events constituted the third Korean nuclear crisis.
BEIJING’S KOREA STRATEGY
Although this unsettled state of affairs was a major headache for Beijing, it had some upsides for China. The long-running crisis tied down the Americans in a complex diplomatic venture, and the Six-Party Talks gave China the prestige of a diplomatic convener and responsible member of the international community. Korea required constant attention by the U.S. military and threatened to complicate American and Japanese actions if a war were to occur over Taiwan. Washington was less free to challenge Beijing on other issues because it relied on China as its bridge to the rulers in Pyongyang. The crisis created tensions between the U.S. and its allies in Japan and South Korea—the former because during the talks the Americans placed low priority on the issue of the Japanese abductees and the latter because the hard line pursued by the Bush administration overlooked the importance for South Korea of avoiding war or a collapse of the North Korean regime. (The Obama administration, by contrast, coordinated its positions closely with Seoul.) The talks increased South Korean trust in Beijing because China’s stress on gradualism and stability mirrored South Korean concerns. Above all, the extended crisis served to prop up the Pyongyang regime by fostering an atmosphere of heightened tension within North Korea, cementing the loyalty of the North Korean military to the ruling group, and sustaining the flow of economic aid and diplomatic attention from the other parties. As the talks dragged on, the only outcome that would have constituted failure from China’s point of view would have been their collapse. Process was success.
In the longer term, Beijing hoped to emerge from a period of unpredictable change on the Korean Peninsula as its most influential outside power.20 One part of the strategy never seemed to gain traction: persuading Pyongyang to undertake Chinese-style reforms in order to generate the economic resources to survive. In pursuit of this goal, Chinese leaders treated Kim Jong-il with flattering deference and offered him numerous chances to tour Chinese reform projects to see how profit-making entrepreneurship could be combined with political control. Beijing refused to give up on Pyongyang—China increased its infusion of trade, investment, and aid. At least one-third of Beijing’s total foreign economic assistance budget reportedly went to Pyongyang. Chinese businesses invested in North Korean mining, food processing, and the service sector.21 But given his government’s repressive political controls and insulated society, Kim seems to have judged that any significant opening would be tantamount to regime suicide. The North Korean leadership held tightly to its failing totalitarian system, and the populace continued to live on the edge of starvation. Beginning in 2008, Kim Jong-il showed signs of ill health, and upon his death in 2011 power passed to his youngest son, Kim Jung-un. Beijing supported the new leader verbally and with stepped-up economic aid, for the time being at least consolidating its position of special influence in Pyongyang.
China worked simultaneously to strengthen relations with South Korea, counting on the gravitational pull of its economy to bring South Korea closer, to build trust, and eventually perhaps to reassure the Koreans that they would not need American troops on their soil to feel secure. South Korea’s economy complemented China’s, with its technically adept, export-oriented manufacturing skills and its needs for natural resources and cheap labor. South Korea was especially attractive as an economic partner because of its unique ability to serve industry by industry as a lowercost competitor to Japan. South Korean entrepreneurs were comfortable in China, and their head offices were a short airline flight across the Yellow Sea from the provinces of Shandong and Liaoning. Following the opening of trade offices in Beijing and Seoul in 1991 and the normalization of relations in 1992, trade and investment boomed. To facilitate rapid development of ties, the government in Beijing allowed provincial and even municipal authorities to deal directly with South Korean enterprises. In 2004, China replaced the U.S. as South Korea’s largest trading partner, and South Korea became China’s fourth-biggest trade partner. Also in 2004, South Korea became the third-largest contributor of foreign direct investment to China.
Chinese policymakers are not adamantly opposed to an eventual unified Korea under the dominance of the South, but they seem to have decided that they will do everything they can to postpone or even prevent a collapse of the North Korean regime. Beijing fears that regime change in the North Korean buffer would be dangerously destabilizing. If and when a unified peninsula comes into being, China can be expected to seek an end to the U.S. military presence or at least a smaller U.S. footprint and to encourage Korea to anchor its future security strategy in cooperation with China. But this hope confronts obstacles. The growing operations of China’s navy in the seas on either side of the peninsula may make a unified Korea feel that its security is threatened. For example, in 2010 Beijing vigorously protested planned U.S.–South Korea naval exercises inside the 200-mile EEZ it claims in the Yellow Sea, even though the area also falls within South Korea’s EEZ. There is no open territorial dispute, but parts of the China–Korea land boundary remain undefined.22 Some South Korean strategists are worried by revisionist analyses published by Chinese historians that argue that the ancient kingdom of Koguryo (37 B.C.E.–668 C.E.) was a Chinese dynasty rather than the forerunner of modern Korea, signaling, some think, a possible future Chinese claim to Korean territory. The 2-million-strong Korean ethnic minority that is concentrated in part in China’s Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture near the border is the single largest diaspora of Koreans in the world and retains a close linguistic and cultural affinity with the homeland, so China’s treatment of this minority may become an issue with a unified and more ambitious Korea.
Economic ties are a strong basis for a good relationship—although they are never without their own potentials for conflict—but China will need to deal wisely with a host of other issues to keep a postunification Korea from selecting the more obvious path of continuing to balance against its large, close neighbor with security ties to more distant powers such as the U.S., Japan, and even Russia. In the meantime, Beijing is satisfied to maintain the fragile balance of a divided Korea.
UP AGAINST THE FIRST ISLAND CHAIN
The Northeast Asia regional system, which includes Taiwan because of its historical ties and geographical connection to the security of Japan, forms an arc of territory only a few hundred miles from China’s coast, extending for 2,000 miles from the northern tip of the Japanese main islands to the southern tip of Taiwan. Taking account of the smaller Japanese-administered islands that stretch between Japan and Taiwan, this chain of islands hems China tightly in. Chinese strategists view this arc of territory as the northern section of what they call the first island chain, which continues into Southeast Asia along the coasts of the Philippines, Brunei, and Malaysia (chapter 11). As seen by Chinese defense analysts, this chain forms a base for potential hostile action by rivals and a barrier to the China navy’s expansion from the near seas to the high seas. The three components of the northern section of the chain—Korea, Japan, and Taiwan—are close U.S. allies. Although the strategic goal of weaning them from their alliances with the U.S. is aided by China’s economic rise, the rise also paradoxically creates the incentive for these states to stay close to the U.S. as a counterbalance to China. If China’s strategic imperative is to seek regional preeminence, the path to that goal is strewn with obstacles.