TOKYO - If there is any country that has benefited from America’s decade-long preoccupation with the Middle East and the larger war on terrorism following the attack on America on 9/11, it was China. Before the attack, Beijing was moving into Washington’s gun sights.
A head of steam was building around the proposition that China was emerging as America’s new rival, the only country left in the world, following the breakup of the Soviet Union, that was big enough and potentially powerful enough to challenge the U.S. on near equal terms.
The new administration led by President George W. Bush telegraphed this apparently new American position by defining China as a “strategic competitor," rather than a “strategic partner,” which was the term favored by President Bill Clinton.
True, China was not viewed as an imminent threat in the same way that Iraq and other “rogue nations” would be. Rather, it was seen as the new Germany, referring to the Germany of one hundred years ago, newly unified, newly prosperous, ready to take its place on the world stage, needing to be watched, tamed and if necessary contained.
Much attention was devoted to China’s growing military budget and whether it signaled war-like intentions. Every purchase of modern weaponry, such as fighter-bombers or destroyers from Russia, was noted and commented on. Books with titles such as The Coming Conflict with China rolled off the presses.
In many ways China does represent a theoretical threat in a way that Osama bin Laden never could. For one thing, China really does possess weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them, even on the American continent; Bin Laden could only dream. During a time of tensions over the Taiwan Strait, a Chinese general wondered out loud whether Los Angeles was worth a war with China over Taiwan independence.
Yet, these days China has dropped off the radar screen. Very occasionally the editors of prominent opinion journals, especially those supporting the neoconservative movement in America, abandon their obsession with the Middle East to complain about President Barack Obama’s policies toward Taiwan. But these days when China appears in the news it is usually on the business pages.
As one consequence of 9/11, China has morphed into an economic story, not a strategic one. The main points of conflict seem to revolve around such things as the strength of the renminbi against the U.S. dollar, the burgeoning trade deficit and the awful question: what if the Chinese stopped underwriting the budget deficit by recycling its huge dollar reserves into U.S. Treasury bonds?
Opinion writers could easily pull their old clippings of a couple decades ago and by simply substituting the word “China,” for “Japan,” republish them almost word for word. This development must be highly satisfying to China's leaders. It means that China has moved from being perceived as the “new Germany” to being the “new Japan” - the economic powerhouse of today, of course, not the expansive, militaristic Japan of the 1930s. That is a more comfortable place to be.
The decade since 9/11 has been good to China, as it has been allowed to pursue its much ballyhooed “peaceful rise” without much interference from either the U.S. or, for that matter, from Japan, which was obsessed with its own internal problems, especially since this year’s massive earthquake/tsunami/ nuclear meltdown (Japan’s own “3/11”).
