HVK Archives: China's super power status is bogus
China's super power status is bogus - The Times of India
Harvey Stockwin
()
6 September 1996
Title : China's Super Power Status is Bogus
Author : Harvey Stockwin
Publication : The Times of India
Date : September 6, 1996
Hong Kong: Despite the claims of massive sustained
economic growth made by foreigners, China's statistics
are highly suspect. Inside China those who report
statistics see the figures as an inevitable part of the
perennial political patterns of sycophancy - one of the
hallmarks of China's modern political culture. You do
not tell your bosses that they are doing badly if you
want to keep your rice bowl filled. Under the communist
regime, anxious for its very survival, the statistical
unreliability factor increases considerably. Yet these
dubious statistics, plus the questionable World Bank
calculations of purchasing power parity, are frequently
be rig used - to portray China as already being a
colossus in the making.
The mundane truth would seem to be that China has been
and is a major regional power. It will gradually, but
increasingly, become a major world power too. However,
it has not reached the super power status yet, although
it possesses a few intercontinental ballistic missiles
with nuclear warheads. For decades China officially
asserted that it would never seek to become a super
power. The very fact that the assertions were constantly
repeated by China clearly signalled that the opposite
would be true. The first Chinese nuclear explosion in
1964, and the 45 nuclear tests which have followed until
the one on July 30 have pointedly clarified where China's
real ambition lay in the realm of power politics.
Aggressive Threat
Although China is not an immediate threat, in the sense
that Japan was an aggressive threat to Asia in the 1930s,
it clearly possesses the potential to be threatening.
This is an important distinction to make, given the ease
with which television reporting confuses real firepower
with military fireworks. Amidst all the alarms, and
television fireworks, of the 1996 Taiwan Straits crisis
it was too often forgotten that the Chinese navy simply
did not have the amphibious-lift capability to carry an
invading army across the Taiwan Straits. That
capability, too, will not be attained easily.
All that China does have are missiles with which it can
threaten to flatten its chief foreign investor - or the
capability to retake a few of the less heavily defended
of the 87 offshore islands which Taiwan possesses on the
Chinese side of the Taiwan Straits. It says something
about the balance of real power in the Taiwan Straits
that even now, 40 years after the two Taiwan Straits
crises in the 1950s, China could not be certain of a
quick victory if it tried to take the heavily defended
offshore islands of Quemoy (Kinmen) or Matsu. Those
missiles fired last March into the sea near Taiwanese,
and Japanese, territorial waters (north of Japan's
Sakishima islands) signalled China's frustration as well
as its bellicosity. Thus while China insists that it
will not abandon the use of force against Taiwan, it
cannot implement that policy short of raining ruin from
the skies with its missiles.
Speaking about the economic "threat" from China to ASEAN,
Prof Hai Wen of Beijing University recently suggested
that co-operation does not rule out competition between
China and ASEAN while, equally, Sino-ASEAN competition
does not rule out co-operation. To the contrary, the
essence of the situation is that the two choices are
complementary. If there is a sensible degree of
confrontation by South-east Asia, there will be co-
operation from China. But if South-east Asia naively
offers one-sided concessions dressed up as co-operation,
then it had better look out for more confrontation by
China. If South-east Asian states ever make the mistake
of behaving like tributary states, then China's Middle
Kingdom complex will be reinforced, and they will be
treated like tributary states.
Conciliatory China
All this has been well illustrated by the recent
diplomacy concerning the South China sea. Whenever ASEAN
asserts itself verbally, China turns noticeably
conciliatory. When ASEAN's diplomatic concentration on
the issue declines, China moves one step further in its
cartographic aggression. The lesson is plain: only
sustained ASEAN diplomatic confrontation of this crucial
issue will lead to Chinese co-operation. I feel that
ASEAN has made a grave error by not insisting that China
must vacate its occupation of Mischief Reef in the
Spratly chain. ASEAN was once implacable in its
opposition to Vietnamese aggression against Cambodia.
The same determination should be applied towards China in
the South China Sea. Otherwise, one day ASEAN may wake
up and find more reefs flying the Chinese flag.
So, if China is not a super power, not as strong as its
drum-beaters make it out to be, and not likely to commit
aggression, except in the South China Sea, what is the
real danger? The real "threat" is the unpredictably and
potentially dangerous course upon which China's internal
politics is set - which can, in turn, have damaging
consequences for all of China's near neighbours. The
Middle Kingdom complex, together with a communist party
desperate to survive, at a time when a crucial succession
struggle is already overdue - this could be a lethal
combination.
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