China: Will It Become the West’s Next Great Adversary?

(Washington, D.C.): Perhaps the single most strategically important repercussion of the
Asian
financial meltdown⁽¹⁾ will prove to be the additional time the
West may be given before the
People’s Republic of China emerges as a world-class adversary. All other things being
equal,
however, this economically driven respite will amount to a stay of execution, rather
than a
commutation of sentence. Therefore, it behooves the United States and its European
allies to
understand the nature of the problem which China will ultimately represent — and to take steps
now to address the attendant danger.

China’s ‘Vaulting Ambition’

It should come as no surprise that the Chinese government aspires to superpower status.
After
all, the “Middle Kingdom” has for several millennia regarded itself as the center of the universe.
The economic strength that has accrued to it over the past twenty years — and the prospects for
future growth — have emboldened China’s Communist leaders to believe that the last few
centuries, when China was humiliated and exploited by a succession of stronger nations, are an
anomaly that is now at an end.

Some China scholars downplay concerns that these ambitions will translate into an externally
aggressive PRC. They point to the absence of any tradition of imperialism beyond China’s
historic borders. Setting aside the question of whether Beijing’s policies with regard to Tibet and
Taiwan contradict this contention, a new reality suggests that historical experience may not apply
in the future: Were China to continue the staggering rate of economic growth exhibited in recent
years, it will be obliged to find foreign sources of energy.

Even if the Communists succeed in their ambitious program of building scores of nuclear
power
plants, tapping the hydroelectric potential of the Three Gorges Dam and consuming vast
quantities of domestically available, high-sulfur-content coal (without regard to the environmental
impact), most projections forecast that China will be obliged to import large quantities of oil in
the next century. While acquiring world-class military capabilities might otherwise be simply
desirable to a leadership like the PRC’s, its need to acquire and secure access to foreign
oil
supplies makes it imperative that China be able credibly to project power throughout its
region — and to prevent the United States from interfering as it does so.

The PRC’s Threatening Policies and Activities

Viewed against this backdrop from the Chinese perspective, the myriad activities being
pursued
by the Communist leadership make perfect sense. The West ignores or misconstrues at its peril
the strategic import of the following:

An Alarming Military Modernization Program: China is
engaged in a breathtaking military
build-up involving every aspect of its conventional and unconventional forces. It is attempting to
effect what might be called a “Great Leap Forward” in terms of the sophistication and lethality of
its land, air and sea elements, having learned the lesson of Operation Desert Storm: Traditional
Maoist strategies of “people’s war” and defense-in-depth would not assure victory over an
adversary like the United States, equipped with modern precision weapons and information-based
technologies.

Particularly noteworthy are the strides being made to enhance the power and reach of China’s
naval forces. Thanks to a “strategic partnership” forged in recent years with Russia, the Chinese
navy is acquiring, among other things, advanced Soviet-designed Kilo-class submarines and
supersonic cruise missiles optimized for attacking U.S. aircraft carriers and AEGIS fleet air
defense vessels. As Merrick Carey, president of Washington’s respected Alexis de Tocqueville
Institute recently wrote in the Washington Times: “The American withdrawal from
Subic Bay in
the Philippines has opened a power vacuum in the South China Sea that the Chinese navy has
begun to fill. As Naval War College war games indicate, U.S. surface forces might not survive a
21^st Century clash off the Chinese coast.”

The Russians are also aiding in the modernization of China’s relatively rudimentary
nuclear forces. Cooperation reportedly includes assistance in the design of nuclear
weapons and
in the upgrading of the PRC’s land- and sea-based ballistic missile force through the transfer of
SS-18 ICBM technology, mobile launchers and other valuable hardware and expertise. Russian
personnel may be assisting in the ongoing Chinese biological and chemical weapons programs, as
well.

In addition, China is clearly interested in other, unconventional ways of responding
asymmetrically
to the West’s seeming overwhelming military superiority. Three members of the PLA’s Academy
of Electronic Technology recently wrote in China Computer World that China has
abandoned
“traditional concepts of war-making…which emphasized the destruction of hardware, attacking
cities, seizing territory and inflicting casualties. Now, the struggle to control information is the
focus of weapon systems and the countermeasures taken against these systems.” href=”#N_2_”>⁽²⁾

Western Technology in the Wrong Hands: Unfortunately, the
Russians are not the only ones
enabling the Chinese rapidly to transform their massive People’s Liberation Army (PLA) into a
First World military. China is also securing high technology from Western sources. In some
cases, this has been done legally; in others, China has mounted an unprecedentedly comprehensive
effort to acquire militarily relevant know-how and materiel through illegal means.

A prime example of the former is the purchase of some 47 supercomputers from the United
States. Thanks to the Clinton Administration’s reckless decontrol of much of this technology, a
significant number of these computers have found their way into the hands of the PLA — including
several now being used by China’s nuclear weapons design bureaus. A recent, excellent report
entitled The Proliferation Primer by the U.S. Senate Governmental Affairs
Subcommittee on
International Security, Proliferation and Federal Services, quotes former Under Secretary of State
William Schneider as saying that the Clinton Administration’s “liberaliz[ation of] export controls
on dual-use technology, equipment and services…has had the unintended consequence of
facilitating the process of proliferating Weapons of Mass Destruction and their means of delivery
as well as advanced conventional weapons.”⁽³⁾ The same
could be said of many of the United
States’ European allies.

The PRC has complimented its legal technology acquisition efforts with various other means
of
securing state-of-the-art weapons technologies. Hundreds of PLA-owned or -affiliated companies
operate in the United States alone. Such organizations have proven in the past to be conduits for
smuggling goods manufactured with Chinese slave labor, drugs and even automatic weapons into
the U.S. They are also useful as vehicles for purchasing and exporting without permission
militarily valuable technology.⁽⁴⁾

In addition, U.S. intelligence believes that the PRC is running espionage operations in this
country
as large — if not larger — than the KGB’s at the height of the Cold War. The counter-intelligence
task is made infinitely more difficult, moreover, by virtue of the presence of tens of thousands of
Chinese students attending American universities, where they are studying hard sciences that
could prove valuable to Beijing’s military, as well as civilian, sectors. There is also the challenge
posed by American citizens of Chinese descent who may, by dint of personal loyalties or family
ties, be susceptible to recruitment by China’s intelligence services. One such individual, Peter
Lee, recently pleaded guilty to passing to the PRC national security secrets he had obtained while
working at the U.S. nuclear laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico and for an American defense
contractor.

A Proliferator of Weapons of Mass Destruction: The CIA has
identified China as “the principal
supplier of weapons of mass destruction and missile technology to the world.” Various official
reports have cited the PRC for making such technology — relevant to chemical, biological,
radiological and/or nuclear weapons and to the ballistic and cruise missile delivery systems for
such weapons — available to the likes of Iran, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and North Korea.

This appalling practice appears to be motivated by more than a desire merely to secure hard
currency or energy resources from rogue/client states. It may also be seen as serving a larger
strategic purpose: To the extent that the United States and other Western nations are
preoccupied with dangers posed by Chinese-supplied conventional and unconventional weaponry
in the hands of those like Kim Jong Il and the mullahs of Iran, those nations will be distracted
from the threat China itself poses — or at least be less capable of dealing with it.

The Bottom Line

The impending meltdown of China’s banking industry and dramatic reductions in its exports
and
ability to attract foreign capital — developments that have been put in sharp relief and
compounded by East Asia’s financial crisis⁽⁵⁾ — may offer the
West a window of opportunity. If it
adopts policies now aimed at changing, rather than propping up, the Chinese
government so as to
bring about democratic reforms and the end of what is, at best, crony/klepto-capitalism, it has a
chance to prevent a grave new peril from emerging in China. If, on the other hand, it fails to do
so, the present economic crisis will simply have postponed a terrible day of reckoning with a
dangerous Chinese superpower, one that promises to have profound repercussions far beyond
East Asia.

– 30 –

1. Former U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission member Victor
Galinsky and former Bush
Administration Pentagon non-proliferation official Henry Sokolski argued persuasively in the
Washington Post on 19 January 1998 that another “silver lining” of this crisis may be
the
opportunity it affords for a re-negotiation of the ill-advised nuclear cooperation agreement with
North Korea.

2. These quotes appeared in the Far Eastern Economic
Review and were cited by the very
valuable “China Reform Monitor”, a product of the American Foreign Policy Council
(www.afpc.org).

3. The Proliferation Primer is an invaluable source of up-to-date
information about the role China
and other nations are playing in the burgeoning problem posed by the spread of technology that
can be used in manufacturing and/or delivering weapons of mass destruction. It can be obtained
via the Subcommittee’s Web site (4. The William J. Casey Institute of the Center for Security Policy
has also warned about one
other worrisome facet of these American-based and other PLA-owned companies: By issuing
stocks and bonds on international markets, China’s military not only taps into new sources of
undisciplined, non-transparent resources. It also creates a vehicle for massively increasing the
“China lobby” by recruiting many thousands, if not millions, whose mutual funds, pension funds,
life insurance portfolios, etc. suddenly create a vested interest in maintaining cordial relations with
Beijing. (For more on this subject, see the Center’s World Wide Web site
(www.security-policy.org).

5. The South China Morning Post reported on 10
January 1998 that the “special economic
zones” of the Fujian and Guangdong provinces have been especially hard hit. Foreign investment
in the latter dropped 33 percent in 1996 and another 46 percent in 1997 largely before the
effects
of the regional currency devaluation were felt.