Stephen Roach thinks so:

Yet fears of hard landings for both economies are overblown, especially regarding China. Yes, China is paying a price for aggressive economic stimulus undertaken in the depths of the subprime crisis. The banking system funded the bulk of the additional spending, and thus is exposed to any deterioration in credit quality that may have arisen from such efforts. There are also concerns about frothy property markets and mounting inflation.

While none of these problems should be minimized, they are unlikely to trigger a hard landing. Long fixated on stability, Chinese policymakers have been quick to take preemptive action....

India is more problematic. As the only economy in Asia with a current-account deficit, its external funding problems can hardly be taken lightly. Like China, India’s economic-growth momentum is ebbing. But unlike China, the downshift is more pronounced – GDP growth fell through the 7% threshold in the third calendar-year quarter of 2011, and annual industrial output actually fell by 5.1% in October.

But the real problem is that, in contrast to China, Indian authorities have far less policy leeway. For starters, the rupee is in near free-fall. That means that the Reserve Bank of India – which has hiked its benchmark policy rate 13 times since the start of 2010 to deal with a still-serious inflation problem – can ill afford to ease monetary policy. Moreover, an outsize consolidated government budget deficit of around 9% of GDP limits India’s fiscal-policy discretion.

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I've gotten underway on Aaron Friedberg's new book: A Contest for Supremacy: China, America and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia. One thesis of the book that has surfaced in reviews is that a democratic China would cede the contest for supremacy to the United States. A democratic China, he argues:

would certainly seek a leading role in its region…. But it would be less fearful of internal instability, less threatened by the presence of strong democratic neighbors, and less prone to seek validation at home through the domination and subordination of others.

I personally doubt this, but will keep an open mind until I finish the book. What's interesting is that Friedberg notes approvingly at the outset of Contest that U.S. strategy has long sought to deny the emergence of a dominant power in Eurasia - which makes the U.S., if not a "dominant" power there than at least a decisive one in Eurasia. In other words, the U.S. - a democracy - can have a strategy of exercising robust military power far from its shores to protect its interests. It's not clear to me why a democratic China would forego the same opportunity.

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Ma Guangyuan argues that it's not the "China model" that many in the West ascribe to:

Those viewing China’s model often point to the powerful Chinese government and its centralized authority as the key in propelling the development of the Chinese economy. They argue that centralization of forces makes it possible to launch major undertakings and minimize internal frictions.

However, this conclusion does not hold water when examined from a historical point of view. When the, Chinese government controlled everything at the start of the reform and opening-up drive in China, China did not prosper. On the contrary, China’s national economy fell to the brink of collapse during this period due to extreme political and economic leftism. It is obvious, therefore, that policy stability and the exercise of government power are not the key to economic transformation. In fact, the biggest hurdle blocking China’s course of development has been its stagnation in political reform and the transformation of government, as well as the government’s control over resources. Because its political reform has lagged, the Chinese government has become too involved in economic affairs and its officials have received unfettered powers over the distribution of land, capital and other economic resources. By getting directly involved in project examination and approval, licensing standards for market access, price control, and the execution of other types of administrative measures, the government not only frequently interferes with micro economic operations, but also commits many types of malpractices such as rent seeking to throttle market economic vitality.

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NightWatch sees China's partnership with the UAE as filling a void left by the U.S. :

China has maintained a strategic relationship with Saudi Arabia since before the first Gulf War. The closer relationship with the UAE signifies that China intends to be consequential in both Sunni Arab states as well as Shiite Iran.

A recent analysis concluded that Arab states friendly to the US now perceive that the will to use US influence in the Middle East is waning and thus have begun looking for other partners to help ensure their long term security. China is the obvious candidate and is showing that it is prepared to fill any power vacuum the US choses to leave.

Omri Ceren sees this as some kind of problem, but I'd argue it's a positive development. China is more dependent on Gulf oil than the U.S. (the short-sighted killing of the Keystone pipeline notwithstanding) and should therefore take on a larger share of the Gulf's security headaches.

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According to John Bennett, the Obama administration is flooding Asia with advanced fighter aircraft:

The culmination of this work will leave Washington with nearly 150 F-35s in the Asia-Pacific region and more than 100 F-16s.

That means about 250 of the world's most advanced warplanes are on their way to the region, even as China is building its own sophisticated jets and anti-aircraft systems.

The U.S. Air Force also has its super-stealthy F-22 fighter stationed in the region, bringing even more firepower as a check on possible Chinese aggression.

What’s more, Japan’s decision to buy 42 F-35s ... "increased the likelihood that South Korea will follow suit, enabling the U.S. to maintain a coalition of friendly forces in the region that operate compatible combat systems,” defense insider Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute wrote in a column on Forbes.com Tuesday.

It's better for the U.S. to sell allies the tech required for self-defense than promise to do it for them, so all-in-all this is a positive development. It also proves, once again, that there is little chance that China's rise is going to create a cascade of states falling into its orbit. Most countries in the region are reacting in just the opposite fashion, which means the U.S. has more leeway to remain the "balancer of last resort."

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Martin Green documents it:

On October 18, the U.S. government was asked to impose tariffs on imports of Chinese solar cells and modules, based on the argument that China-based producers have been heavily subsidized and are selling solar products at unfairly low prices. Perhaps not surprisingly, some Chinese companies have now asked the Chinese government to impose tariffs on imports of American solar products, arguing that U.S.-based producers have been heavily subsidized, too. And just like that, the production of affordable and competitive solar products has become a political liability in the world's two largest producers and consumers of energy.

(AP Photo)

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President Obama has called himself America's "first Pacific president." Tom Lasseter created the map above to highlight visits from key Obama administration officials:

It strikes me that the map's message is in the eye of the beholder. If you throw in Obama's trip to China in 2009, it suggests the blanket approach that the Americans have claimed. And there are, of course, many non-China reasons for trips to places like Pakistan and Russia.

But if you don't trust the United States and see its increased engagement in Asia as a way of hemming in China's rise, well, it might suggest that too.

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A recent study from Georgetown suggested that China had 3,000 nuclear weapons. Hans Kristensen isn't so sure:

Although we don’t know exactly how many nuclear weapons China has, we are pretty sure that it doesn’t have 3,000. In fact, the Georgetown University estimate appears to be off by an order of magnitude.

In fact, he thinks the number is actually ... 100.

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The foreign policy debate in the GOP primary has been something of a non-event, but Galrahn raises some important issues:

The Republican candidates, one of which is likely to replace Barack Obama unless the President can learn economics in the next 12 months, are almost certain to adopt the Obama doctrine for Asia that centers on US primacy. All evidence suggests that US political leaders cannot take any political stand except one that focuses on US primacy in Asia now and forever. This is a fools gold, but no one ever said politics wasn't foolish.

So we are left to search for other leaders, whether civilian or military, who are ready to promote visions of Americas future foreign policy in Asia and around the world that is congruent with the very real possibility that China may indeed have the largest economy in the world by 2025 - just 15 years from now. If China becomes the worlds largest economy, would that disrupt American primacy in Asia? President Obama's policy record isn't very good, indeed he isn't running a reelection campaign based on his record in case you haven't noticed, so there is certainly no evidence this new Obama Doctrine for Asia will be successful. There is also little evidence that anyone is thinking about a Plan B.

As China builds up military resources and capabilities commensurable with their economic growth, how should the US respond? Whose strategic vision of the future includes US prosperity and security regardless of whether China is the largest economy in the world or not?

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Writing in the Wall Street Journal (of all places) Andy Stern argues that China's model of single party authoritarianism and state-directed capitalism is superior to America's economic model. I think Stern is wrong - but his piece does raise two very important questions: 1. At what point does Stern's diagnosis become correct? 2. Would the United States possess the capacity to recognize that its system was failing and change course?

Usually when talk turns to China's performance and fears about America's future, we're reassured by knowledgeable experts that Churchill's maxim applies: "democracy is the worst form of government except for the all the others." We're also reminded of China's very deep social and economic problems - problems which even three decades of torrid economic growth have not fully solved (and in some cases may be exacerbating). I also find this analysis very persuasive - I'd be more willing to bet that the U.S. looks a lot stronger in 10 or 20 years than China does. I don't believe history vindicates the kind of strong central planning role that Stern lauds in his piece (to say nothing about the many abuses that abound in China's single-party system).

But what if China makes it work? What if over the next 20 years, China continues to experience strong economic performance with ever larger numbers of people rising from unemployment or subsistence wages and the U.S. creaks along with stagnant growth, very high unemployment and very high levels of income inequality? What if China makes the leap from a manufacturing-based economy to an innovations-based economy? What would defenders of the American status quo say then? At what point does China's economic performance, and America's lack thereof, speak to something more systemic? Something ideological?

The second question is even more intriquing - would the United States and its political leaders even be willing to acknowledge it had fallen behind and look abroad for solutions? We know that several Asian countries were able to do this kind of rigorous self-assessment and adopt growth-boosting reforms. At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, Japan realized their society was lagging behind the West and embarked on a crash modernization that saw Japanese power grow enormously before World War II. China has done much the same thing in the economic arena. Could America?

(AP Photo)

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China's not interested:

Much like the U.S., China is aiming to address a problematic demographic that has recently emerged: a generation of jobless graduates. China’s solution to that problem, however, has some in the country scratching their heads.

China’s Ministry of Education announced this week plans to phase out majors producing unemployable graduates, according to state-run media Xinhua. The government will soon start evaluating college majors by their employment rates, downsizing or cutting those studies in which the employment rate for graduates falls below 60% for two consecutive years.

The move is meant to solve a problem that has surfaced as the number of China’s university educated have jumped to 8,930 people per every 100,000 in the year 2010, up nearly 150% from 2000, according to China’s 2010 Census. The surge of collge grads, while an accomplishment for the country, has contributed to an overflow of workers whose skill-sets don’t match with the needs of the export-led, manufacturing-based economy.

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According to Jon Russell, a video campaign from the authorities coupled with stricter policing have cut drunk driving accidents in China by a third. Above, an image from the campaign that reads: "Driving after drinking is deadly."

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I bet Bernie Madoff's happy he doesn't live in China:

Chinese official dubbed the "land granny" was executed after amassing 145 million yuan ($23 million) in bribes and illicit wealth, media reported on Thursday, offering a glimpse into the country's underground economy in land deals.

Luo Yaping was head of a land sub-bureau in a district of Fushun, a city in northeast China -- not an especially high position -- and yet she was able to use her power over land development and compensation to accumulate a fortune in bribes and embezzled compensation, the China News Service reported.

Luo, 50, was executed on Wednesday, the report said.

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Robert Bigelow thinks they will by 2025:

At the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight, Bigelow laid out a timeline of a wild-west-style Chinese takeover of the moon, calling China "the new gunslinger in Dodge." Bigelow's timeline notes China's increasing success in space projects, up to and including last month's launch of the Tiangong Space Station module. He further declares that the moon's abundance in helium-3, a possible future fuel, but more importantly that "claiming" the moon would be a major glory moment for China. The timeline suggests that China will complete surveys of the moon, withdraw from the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 and formally claim the moon as part of China. Bigelow even suggested diverting 10 percent of the defense budget--some $60 billion--to preventing this moon theft.

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The National Journal took the measure of U.S. sentiment of both the recently concluded free trade pacts with South Korea, Colombia and Panama, as well as Senate action on China's currency manipulation:

When asked if they supported or opposed the congressionally approved agreements with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama, voters were just about evenly divided, with 38 percent supporting the accords and 41 percent opposing them. A full 21 percent of voters didn’t know enough to answer or refused to say.

While the overall number of voters was divided fairly evenly, the differences among subgroups were stark. Men favored the agreements 46 percent to 38 percent; women opposed them 44 percent to 30 percent. Although Republicans are sometimes thought of as being more pro-trade, 41 percent of GOP rank-and-file voters polled opposed the agreements. The number was slightly higher for Democrats: 45 percent of them opposed the treaties. When it comes to education, 44 percent of college graduates supported the agreements and 31 percent opposed them. Among those with some college or less education, 45 percent opposed the trade pacts and 35 percent supported them—perhaps reflecting views on the loss of manufacturing jobs to foreign competition.

Voters were similarly divided about a proposed measure that would slap tariffs on Chinese goods if Beijing is found to be manipulating its currency. Overall, voters were evenly divided on the measure, with 44 percent supporting it and 41 percent opposing it. College graduates supported the sanctions measure, 57 percent to 30 percent. When party affiliation was factored in among college grads, Republicans were the most supportive of the measure: 62 percent of them backed the bill and only 24 percent opposed it despite the widespread opposition to higher taxes in the Republican Party. Among Democrats and independents, the support for the measure was a bit lower. There was less enthusiasm for the punitive sanctions among voters who were not college-educated, although Republicans once again led the way; 44 percent of GOP voters with no college degree backed the bill, compared with 37 percent for Democrats and 40 percent for independents.

Interesting partisan split on the China question.

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Speaking of busting China myths, Arthur Kroeber does a nice job with one persistent meme:

China is not in any practical sense “America’s banker.” China holds just 8% of outstanding US Treasury debt; American individuals and institutions hold 69%. China holds just 1% of all US financial assets (including corporate bonds and equities); US investors hold 87%. Chinese commercial banks lend almost nothing to American firms and consumers – the large majority of that finance comes from American banks. America’s banker is America, not China.

It is more apt to think of China as a depositor at the “Bank of the United States:” its treasury bond holdings are super-safe, liquid holdings that can be easily redeemed at short notice, just like bank deposits. Far from holding the United States hostage, China is a hostage of the United States, since it has little ability to move those deposits elsewhere (no other bank in the world is big enough).

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In recounting the ten myths of America's China policy, Dan Blumenthal cites as a myth the fact that the U.S. is engaging with China:

This is a surprising policy unicorn. After all, we do have an engagement policy with China. But we are only engaging a small slice of China: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The party may be large--the largest in the world (it could have some 70 million members). We do need to engage party leaders on matters of high politics and high finance, but China has at least one billion other people. Many are decidedly not part of the CCP. They are lawyers, activists, religious leaders, artists, intellectuals, and entrepreneurs. Most would rather the CCP go quietly into the night. We do not engage them. Our presidents tend to avoid making their Chinese counterparts uncomfortable by insisting on speaking to a real cross section of Chinese society. Engagement seen through the prism of government-to-government relations keeps us from engaging with the broader Chinese public. Chinese officials come to the United States and meet with whomever they want (usually in carefully controlled settings, and often with groups who are critical of the U.S. government and very friendly to the Chinese government). U.S. leaders are far more cautious in choosing with whom to meet in China. We do not demand reciprocity in meeting with real civil society--underground church leaders, political reformers and so on. China has a successful engagement policy. We do not.

What an odd thing to say. As I understand Blumenthal, the point of engaging Chinese lawyers, activists, religious leaders, etc., inside China is to put pressure on the Communist Party and get them to change their policies. As Blumenthal notes, when Chinese officials come to the states, they meet with people "who are critical of U.S. policy" toward China, but has that changed anything about how the U.S. governs itself or behaves toward China? Blumenthal cites no evidence to suggest it has, so this can hardly be called a "successful" engagement on China's part, can it?

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Instead of more tough talk and increased defense spending, the United States and its allies in Asia need to grasp the malleable nature of China’s strategic intentions and shape a “mixed” regional approach focused more on creating incentives to cooperate than on neutralizing every possible Chinese military capability of concern to U.S. defense analysts. In particular, there is a need for a more far-reaching U.S.-China strategic dialogue that focuses on long-term interests and intentions and on what steps each country could take to avert growing security competition.

This is not pie-in-the-sky utopian thinking. It is rooted in the realities of America’s changing economic position in the world, China’s own internal problems and debates, and Asia’s increasing openness to cooperative multilateral security approaches. - Michael Swaine

This sounds reasonable and it would certainly be helpful if U.S. defense planners put themselves in the shoes of their Chinese counterparts when thinking about the U.S. posture in Asia. To wit: the very act of bulking up U.S. power in the region is almost certainly going to cause China to accelerate their own defense build-up - which is the thing we find so objectionable in the first place. But that said, I think at this point China's defense build up is baked in - they're a growing economy and even if they enter into a recession, it's not unreasonable to expect that they'll rebound and resume building up their military power. I think Swaine is right to caution that China's strategic intent is still unclear, but as the U.S. demonstrates, the stronger you get, the more prone you are to define your interests in an expansive manner.

On a more mundane point, the U.S. doesn't need to raise its defense spending to compete with China. The U.S. is already well ahead of China in terms of defense spending and even in more austere times can remain a superior military force vis-a-vis the Chinese for decades to come, provided it prioritizes that outcome and jettisons the idea that the entire world is an arena of "vital" U.S. interest.

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Another oops:

A Chinese TV news report unwittingly revealed how the communist regime’s Propaganda Department trains its army of paid Internet commentators, notoriously known as “50-cent-party,” to shape public opinion on the Internet.

On Sept. 8, Xishui TV, a local station in Hubei Province, reported a training conducted by the Xishui County Propaganda Department for spokespersons from various work units and all Internet commentators in the county. The purpose of the training, according to the report, was to continuously improve the skills of spokespersons and Internet commentators and to enable them to respond to a public crisis as well as guide public opinion in a “constructive way.”

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John Copper makes a good, though somewhat narrow, case for Taiwan's strategic importance to the U.S., but hangs it around a rather odd analogy:

In December 1890, the United States Army won a battle against American Indians at Wounded Knee in South Dakota. This battle marked the end of the Indian Wars and meant that the United States could focus on external matters since it had finally consolidated its territory in the west.

Within ten years of Wounded Knee, the United States was on the way to becoming a world power. In 1898, the U.S. Navy won the Spanish American War. It acquired the Philippines and Guam as a result. The same year, the U.S. incorporated Hawaii and signed a tripartite agreement on Samoa....

China’s reunification of Taiwan will be its Wounded Knee. It will no longer need to focus on territorial matters and will doubtless look to realize power ambitions further from its shores.

So we must defend Taiwan lest China ... act like the United States.

In any event, I'm not sure this analogy is all that accurate since China is surrounded by much stronger powers (Russia, India, Japan, South Korea) than the United States was when it "broke out."

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Ronald Bailey pours some cold water over fears that China is poised to eclipse America:

China’s total GDP is around $6 trillion today. Assuming 10 percent GDP growth for the next 20 years, China’s GDP would rise to $40 trillion. If the U.S. economy grew at say, 3 percent per year, total GDP would be $27 trillion. Back in 2007, before the financial crisis, the investment bank Goldman Sachs issued a report [PDF] that projected that Chinese GDP would be $26 trillion in 2030 compared to $23 trillion for the U.S. It bears noting that current Chinese purchasing power parity per capita is about $6,000 compared to $46,000 for Americans.

But it is unlikely that China’s economy can sustain 10 percent economic growth for two more decades. Economic history suggests that once countries catch up with leading economies in terms of technologies and business management, growth slows down. In which case, China’s growth might slow down to a mere 5 percent. Assuming sustained respective 5 percent and 3 percent growth rates for China and the U.S. for two decades, China’s total GDP would reach $16 trillion, not $34 trillion. In 30 years, it would grow to $26 trillion, by which time U.S. GDP would be $36 trillion. In 40 years, China’s GDP would $42 trillion and U.S. GDP would be $49 trillion. In 50 years, China’s GDP would finally surpass that of the U.S. reaching $69 trillion compared to $66 trillion.

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Russia grants Venezuela $4 billion for military spending while China is lending Venezuela an additional $4 billion:

Venezuela is finalizing agreements for two separate credit lines of $4 billion each with Russia and China, with a portion of the financing earmarked for military equipment for the South American nation, according to Venezuelan state media.

With the world's largest oil reserves, Venezuela needs a well equipped military to defend itself from foreign aggression, President Hugo Chavez said during a broadcast phone call reported by the Venezuelan News Agency.

Chavez had to call in the news from Havana, where he is undergoing chemotherapy.

Readers of this blog may recall that Russia has financed over $6 billion worth of military equipment from 2005-2010.

On the other hand, Venezuela is borrowing at least $24 billion from China:

last year, Venezuela received a $20 billion credit line from the China Development Bank for housing

The housing construction has not started, but Hugo's betting on oil futures, so to speak, in a very big way.

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As China's first aircraft carrier sets sail, Paul Dibb examines Chinese military power and finds it wanting:

China has 68 tactical submarines (28 of which are obsolete) whereas the USSR had 280 at the height of its military power. China has 78 principal surface combatants in its navy compared with 264 for the former Soviet Union. The Pentagon classifies only 25 per cent of China’s naval surface combatants (and fighter aircraft) as modern.

Many of China’s most advanced weapons are still based heavily on foreign designs (mostly Russian) copied through reverse engineering. This highlights a persistent weakness in China’s capability for innovation and a reliance on foreign suppliers for some propulsion units, fire control systems, cruise missiles, torpedoes, sensors and advanced electronics.

By all means we need to keep a close eye on the development of China’s military forces. China is undoubtedly an ambitious power seeking to claim its historical place in the sun. But let’s not succumb to the fatal assumption that China’s rise will be a simple straight-line extrapolation.

Dibb's description of Chinese conventional military weaknesses is more telling, but China doesn't have to be America's global equal or even to match the US in the Pacific. To change the regional strategic status quo, all it needs is the ability to challenge US control of the sea, and it is well on the way to doing that.

(AP Photo)

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Stephen Walt wonders when it was the U.S. empire started to decline. His answer: the first Gulf War. Here's the rationale:

Unfortunately, the smashing victory in the first Gulf War also set in train an unfortunate series of subsequent events. For starters, Saddam Hussein was now firmly identified as the World's Worst Human Being, even though the United States had been happy to back him during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. More importantly, the war left the United States committed to enforcing "no-fly zones" in northern and southern Iraq.

But even worse, the Clinton administration entered office in 1993 and proceeded to adopt a strategy of "dual containment." Until that moment, the United States had acted as an "offshore balancer" in the Persian Gulf, and we had carefully refrained from deploying large air or ground force units there on a permanent basis.

I think if we're going to pin the blame for a deepening U.S. role in the Middle East on anything it wouldn't be the Gulf War but the Carter Doctrine - that was what put the U.S. on the path toward an interventionist posture in the region. The Gulf War and the dual containment that followed were in many ways the logical heir to that doctrine.

But I'm not convinced that the Gulf War is really responsible, per se, for U.S. decline, mostly because "decline" is more of a relative phenomena (although we certainly haven't helped ourselves of late). That being the case, I'd argue that Deng Xiaoping's market-oriented reforms in China, which kicked off three decades of economic growth, have probably played a much more significant role in the narrowing of the power gap than America's post-Gulf War blunders.

(AP Photo)

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Michael Auslin takes the measure of an increasingly contentious Asia:

Due to its military alliances, the United States will be further drawn into the conflicting webs of distrust and engagement that characterize Asian relations. Asserting its intent to forge closer ties with countries that seek to uphold regional stability and promote the adoption of effective norms of behavior is perhaps America’s best hope of retaining influence and relevance in a rapidly evolving region.

The question is - what happens if smaller Asian states use the presumption of U.S. defense to push maximalist claims against China? That would be just as destabilizing.

Indeed, in recent months we've seen quite clearly that Chinese "assertiveness" hasn't led to the "Finlandization" of her neighbors. Just the opposite: it has sparked outcries, protests and even military moves from the Philippines and Vietnam. For the U.S., this is an ideal recipe for off-shore balancing.

(AP Photo)

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The Economist reports on a rather surprising event in China: the public criticism of the long-running family planning policy of the state by an official in the nation's most populous province. According to their report, Zhang Feng, director of Guangdong’s Population and Family Planning Commission, has proposed a rather modest reform of the current system, which would allow families where one parent is an only child to have more than one child. He may be sensing the political benefit of speaking out against a policy which is decidedly unpopular, but the incident of such a public challenge is still notable:

Whatever lies behind it, Mr Zhang’s demand is significant both because it is an implied public criticism of the one-child policy and because Guangdong was always likely to be in the forefront of any campaign for change. The province suffers many of the worst problems attributable to China’s population control, notably a grossly skewed gender imbalance among newborns. The combination of a strong cultural preference for boys and prenatal ultrasound imaging has led to couples identifying and aborting female fetuses so that their sole permitted child is male. This is a nationwide problem, but Guangdong has consistently had some of the worst sex ratios. Normally, 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. In 2010, Guangdong had 119 male babies for every 100 girls. Ten years earlier, the ratio was a shocking 130.

The province also has big worries about the balance between its working-age population and their dependants in the decades to come. Guangdong’s boom has sucked in huge numbers of young migrants from elsewhere (children and elderly migrants are deterred from moving by the household-registration system, or hukou). But as economic growth spreads to new areas, potential migrants may opt to stay at home, leaving Guangdong’s labour-intensive export industries vulnerable to labour shortages. This is a microcosm of China’s broader worries about ageing and the coming rise in the number of dependants for each working-age adult.

Zheng Zizhen, a demographer at the Guangdong Academy of Social Sciences (GASS), says even a modest change would help. “Every couple, in Guangdong and all over China, should be able to have two children. But before we take a second step or a third step in that direction, we need to at least take a first step like this one.”

Jonathan Last has written extensively about this problem, and I interviewed him about the challenges facing societies at similar points a few months ago. He noted the example of Singapore as one that illustrates the difficulty of shifting from population restriction to population encouragement:

Singapore began modernizing late, in the mid '60s. And they embarked on a China style one child policy, because China had a policy to stop people from having kids because they thought fertility was what was keeping them poor and they wanted to get industrialized and rich really quickly. So, they did a really eugenic program - forced sterilizations, increased taxes on people who had more than one kid - that sort of thing. And their program was fantastically effectively.

Within seven years their fertility rate was down by 60% and they realized dear God, we’ve made a huge mistake. They saw their fertility rates collapsing so quickly that they threw all the machinery into reverse and for now coming on 20 years they have been trying desperately to get people to have more kids. They hand out a full year of paid maternity leave. They give you a $10,000 bonus just for having the baby, each time you have the baby. They have what is essentially a 401k plan for kids where you put away money for your kid’s expenses every year and the government matches it for you. So, it’s a combination of like a 401k plus flex spending. In Singapore the government controls all housing allocation. And so if you have kids you get access to better housing. And in fact if you have more than a couple kids they will make sure that your grandparents get to live near you so that you have, you know, convenience and free child care...

But the scary thing is that they’ve done all this for 20 years, and all that’s happened is that their fertility rates has continued to drop further, and further, and further, and further. And it stands right now at about 1.3 which is about as low as any country has ever recorded a fertility rate in the history of the world... in societies, once it becomes common for people to not have kids, for people to be child free and they get to see what that really means to their lifestyle, it becomes very hard to convince them to take the enormous hit and actually go around, get around to having kids.

This brief rightly notes that "China now has too few young people, not too many. It has around eight people of working age for every person over 65. By 2050 it will have only 2.2." This is a demographic nightmare, an unsustainable economic picture and one that - if Singapore's example proves accurate - is almost impossible for alter via shifts in public policy.

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Much of the brewing tension in the South China Sea hinges on how various claimants view existing international law. Patrick Cronin analyzes:

Similarly, China and the United States have fundamentally different interpretations of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). One major difference is over whether and which type of military activities are permitted within the 200-nautical mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of a nation. China’s national interests and growing confidence lead to an expansive view of its EEZ and a narrow view of which military activities are permissible for a foreign nation to undertake within an EEZ. Such activities must be peaceful, and Chinese nationalists don’t consider intelligence gathering even by non-warships to be peaceful. The United States, on the other hand, not only contends that such information gathering is entirely within international law, but also that the United States has an obligation to periodically test the premise in order to maintain what it considers the global public good of freedom of the seas.

Lyle Goldstein doesn't seem to buy it:

Washington's focus on "freedom of navigation," which has inexplicably become the main pillar of current U.S. policy in the region, is actually rather absurd. China, the world's largest maritime trading nation by almost any measure, is very unlikely to threaten navigational freedoms -- its own economy is almost wholly reliant on those very freedoms. The claim that China's opposition to regular U.S. military surveillance activities in the South China Sea threatens "freedom of navigation" is likewise disingenuous and represents an unfortunate tendency to reach for the clever sound bite. In fact, such U.S. surveillance activities all along China's coasts are excessive to the point of seriously disrupting the bilateral relationship and should thus be decreased, especially if linked to concrete progress on Chinese military transparency.

This piece also dives into the legal issues surrounding U.S.-China tensions.

[Hat tip: Larison]

(AP Photo)

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Daniel Larison continues the discussion about ideology and the rise of China:

I agree that ideology is an instrument of state power, and ideology as such wouldn’t exist except for the desire to acquire and exercise power, but this is what still leaves me puzzled. It doesn’t help the U.S. gain much of anything to stoke hostility towards China, and it isn’t clear to me that it is all that useful to the U.S. to try to encourage regime change in China. America won’t benefit from conflict with China, and it won’t benefit from prolonged instability in China and East Asia. If deploying liberal democratic ideology were actually being used to advance some concrete U.S. interest, that would be one thing, but instead it seems to have become an end in itself that requires the U.S. to put its interests at risk for the sake of prior ideological commitment.

I don't think the Obama administration (or the Bush administration for that matter) has ever been so bold as to declare that regime change is the end-goal of American policy toward China. That may be the implication of some of the ideologically-tinged rhetoric surrounding U.S. policy, but I don't know if either administration has come right out and said so. The further you get from the executive branch, however, the more overt the calls for changing China's regime tend to become.

It's true, I think, that ideological universalism has become an end of U.S. foreign policy in its own right - not just a means to other ends. Larison contends that such universalism won't help the U.S. advance its interests with respect to China:

Other nations don’t have to want to live under a Chinese-style system to accept Chinese investment and influence, and they don’t. In practice, democrats around the world are going to be interested in pursuing their respective national interests, and insofar as China supports or does not interfere with those there is nothing about China’s domestic regime that obviously limits the influence it can have. After all, it isn’t as if China’s neighbors would be less alarmed by its moves in the South China Sea if it were a democratic state. It is fundamentally what China does, not its reigning ideology or its internal repression, that makes its neighbors wary of its intentions.

I agree, although according to the Friedburg article we both cited, the manner in which China has pursued (and to some extent defined) its interests in the South China Sea is an expression of its ideology. I'm not sure about this - partly because I'm not intimately familiar with pre-Communist Chinese history and strategic policy, and partly because this same argument was trotted out about the Soviet Union and Russia and hasn't held up all that well. (Even a "democratic" Russia under Yeltsin complained vociferously about NATO expansion in the 1990s and attempted to exert influence over her neighbors - it was just too economically weak and internally disordered to be effective.)

Bottom line: I think that between China's actions and Washington's ideological commitments, there is ample cause to believe that a Cold War-style standoff is imminent, if not already underway.

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Aaron Friedberg has a good piece in the latest issue of the National Interest on why conflict between the U.S. and China is inevitable:

Deep-seated patterns of power politics are thus driving the United States and China toward mistrust and competition, if not necessarily toward open conflict. But this is not all there is to the story. In contrast to what some realists claim, ideology matters at least as much as power in determining the course of relations among nations. The fact that America is a liberal democracy while China remains under authoritarian rule is a significant additional impetus for rivalry, an obstacle to stable, cooperative relations, and a source of mutual hostility and mistrust in its own right.

To which Larison responds:

If there is an “additional impetus for rivalry” between America and China on account of ideology, whence does this impetus come? Does it not come mainly from the American push for political change inside other countries? In other words, as Andrew Nathan says in his response:

As long as the West wants to change the Chinese political system, Beijing’s rulers will, as Friedberg says, quite rationally “believe that they are engaged in an ideological struggle, albeit one in which, until very recently, they have been almost entirely on the defensive.”

The question that comes to mind is this: why does the U.S. insist on waging such an ideological struggle, when it is likely to intensify any rivalry with China? There’s no question that ideology matters as much as power, but what remains puzzling is why states permit themselves to be held hostage to the dictates of ideology when these promise to fuel dangerous rivalries with other major powers.

There are, I think, two inter-related explanations for this. The first is that ideology is a form of power and states wield it when they think it helps them advance more mundane geo-strategic interests. To take the U.S.-China example - America's liberal democratic ideology is still fairly attractive globally, whereas not many people want to live in a single party communist autocracy that jails artists and Nobel Prize winners. Throwing this in China's face puts them on the defensive in the eyes of global public opinion and, by extension, makes it harder for China to plead its case on other issues of strategic importance. This is why many people who want to take a "harder line" with China over its growing "assertiveness" in Asia usually begin by urging American politicians to call out Beijing's human rights abuses.

The second explanation is that ideological parries are easy and demagogic. It's difficult, time consuming and complicated to suss out which states have legitimate claims to various pieces of aquatic territory and then to rally people around those issues. It's quite easy, by contrast, to call China (or any other state) "evil" and leave it at that.

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Nick Trevethan says that investors aren't buying Nouriel Roubini's China pessimism:

Famed market bear Nouriel Roubini may be talking down China, but resource firms are betting billions that rapid urbanization and economic growth will soak up the country's massive infrastructure investment and prevent a hard landing.

They are buying up competitors, investing in new capacity and speeding expansion projects to feed breakneck growth in raw materials demand in the world's top consumer of commodities.

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“I brought this picture out for you, Henry,” Donald Rumsfeld says to Henry Kissinger, proffering a framed black and white photo of a line of men sitting across from each other at a diplomatic gathering. “It was right after Vladivostok.”

“When you went to China with me?” Kissinger asks, perking up.

“I took you into China and introduced you to Zhou Enlai,” Rumsfeld says, with a smile and a slight chuckle. “No, no, that’s not how it worked.”

“No, but he was still alive, actually,” Kissinger says.

“Yes, you met with him,” Rumsfeld says. He has one hand in the pocket of his trademark fleece vest. “But here’s Deng Xiaoping, your friends Habib, and Winston Lord, and George Herbert Walker Bush, and Phil…”

“I remember that meeting,” Kissinger says, peering through his spectacles at the shadowy photo. “With Deng.”

The two veterans of a thousand policy arguments and diplomatic quarrels are quiet for a moment, looking into the past, at two lines of men divided by ideas and the sea, individuals who would shape the world for half a century and more.

Rumsfeld was hosting Kissinger - who inscribed a book to the two-time Defense Secretary as an “occasional adversary and permanent friend” - to promote the oracular diplomat’s new book, On China. It is a broad collection of his thoughts and anecdotes, with some reminiscing and a few policy prescriptions gained both from his more prominent diplomatic visits, conversations with Chinese leaders, and the over fifty times he’s been in the nation since. As the original, popular proponent of the long arc theory in respect to China, the former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor is now putting forward a recommendation for complementary growth and what he hopes to be a path to avoiding adversarial confrontation, written in longhand and released the same week as his eighty-eighth birthday.

Continue reading "Kissinger on China" »

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Michael Auslin keys in on what I think will be one of the larger problems confronting the U.S.-China relationship if China's rise continues unabated. To wit: China will start to act like the United States:

While Beijing claims that Hanoi and Manila broke agreements on joint exploration, the world should be worried that China feels no qualms about using its growing military power to resolve disputes to its satisfaction.

Where would they get such a crazy idea?

Hypocrisy aside, I think Auslin raises the key challenge confronting the U.S. in Asia. Asian states don't want to be pushed around by China (a good thing) but they don't want to be seen as "balancing against" China for the sake of good regional relations, which are critical for continued economic development. Threading this needle really depends on how "expansive" China views the prerogatives of her growing military power. If the Beijing equivalent of "benevolent global hegemony" emerges - watch out.

(AP Photo)

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Matthew Good - whose Underdogs and Beautiful Midnight albums served as the soundtrack to the teenage years of suburban Toronto youth who spent the late-90s shoulder-tapping outside The Beer Store and shotgunning beer in dorm bathrooms - oddly enough popped back onto the radar this week in an unexpected way.

Borrowing from The Atlantic Wire:

China is at work on its first aircraft carrier which, Canadian musician and Guardian contributor Matthew Good notes, "has some defence analysts concerned, but they'd be the sort that view any alteration in the current global status quo discomforting." Not only is "a single U.S. carrier strike group, at present, the most powerful military asset in the world," but we have 11 of them. That's "two more active carriers than the rest of the world combined." The power a single one of these holds, Good explains, "could--if fully unleashed--devastate most nations on earth." Still, he acknowledges, the Chinese do have at least one sub "capable of launching nuclear weapons" and suspected to be working on two more. But this artillery hardly holds a candle to the U.S.'s "288 nuclear warheads per boat, each possessing a maximum yield of 475 kilotonnes." Good muses, "What an amazing technological age we live in. We can't feed the world, but by God we can blow it up."

What struck me first, judging from his picture byline, was that I'm not the only one who's put on a few pounds since the summer of '99. Sipping wine would come later in life, but in retrospect many of us ought to have at least been chugging lite beer while Mr. Good's rock anthems cranked from the five-disc CD stereo.

But on to the substance of the article which, if nothing else, is very informative. It's full of dry facts about how both China and the U.S. can destroy the world a couple times over. Apparently a deft touch in songwriting doesn't necessarily translate to op-ed pieces.

Good appears confounded by concerns over China's naval development, when, in his view, we should actually be worried about America's already formidable forces and how the resources to build and maintain such deadly arsenals could be put to more humanitarian purposes.

In my younger days, Good could do no wrong in my eyes. But, today, I must disagree with the erstwhile Canadian rocker.

China's rise is indeed inevitable. On track to be the world's largest economy, it's understandable that, in an age of Somali pirates and other rogue actors with out-sized abilities, China's national security interests would extend in lockstep with it's economic reach around the world. The Middle Kingdom must protect the trade routes and supply of raw material that have become absolutely vital to the Politburo as it seeks to maintain social harmony at home.

The concern of defense analysts, however, stems from the opaque nature of the People's Liberation Army (PLA). Even to the closest Asia-watchers, it remains unclear if China intends for its ascension to be one of benevolent and enlightened self-interest or aggressive and rancorous nationalism. Just last week Vietnam accused China of destroying a seismic survey boat in the South China Sea, while China said that Vietnam had "gravely violated" its sovereignty and warned its neighbor to stop looking for oil in the ocean without Chinese permission, said CFR.org.

Until it's clear which path the Chinese have embarked on, the U.S. along with China's increasingly insecure neighbors will have no choice but to brace for the worst while being mindful not to push the PLA into a corner and onto the defensive.

Otherwise the world could have a real time bomb on its hands. Hit it, Matt!

Alim

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Alex Frangos examines which economies will take a hit if China's growth slows:

The first set of economies affected would be big commodity producers that sell to China or rely on China’s demand indirectly. Top of that list would include Australia (coal, iron ore, natural gas), South Africa and Brazil (industrial metals) and Chile (copper). Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand and Vietnam supply rubber, and Indonesia provides a lot of coal.

Those countries’ currencies, such as the Australian dollar, Brazilian real and Chilean peso, which are at record or multiyear highs, would pull back.

Another impact of a China hard landing would be oversupplies in China of steel, machinery and other basic-material items, says Mr. Anderson. During a brief economic slowdown last decade, China reduced a glut by exporting those items at very low prices, which triggered a global drop in steel prices and political standoffs with the U.S. and Europe, where steel industries have bristled in the past over Chinese steel’s flooding global markets.

China’s neighbors South Korea, Taiwan and Japan, which supply heavy machinery for construction and manufacturing, would also get hit.

Higher on the value chain would be countries that produce the high-tech goods needed for China’s burgeoning manufacturing industry, especially Germany, which relies heavily on exports to drive its economy.

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According to a new Pentagon doctrine, the U.S. will consider cyber-attacks acts of war:

The Pentagon's first formal cyber strategy, unclassified portions of which are expected to become public next month, represents an early attempt to grapple with a changing world in which a hacker could pose as significant a threat to U.S. nuclear reactors, subways or pipelines as a hostile country's military.

In part, the Pentagon intends its plan as a warning to potential adversaries of the consequences of attacking the U.S. in this way. "If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks," said a military official.

So does this mean that, according to the Pentagon, Iran would be justified in launching a missile or two at an Israeli or American power plant in response to Stuxnet? It sure sounds that way.

Thomas Barnett sees this aimed squarely not at Iran but China:

This is an destabilizing step sideways in our security relationship with China: Beijing is being warned that its current and ongoing behavior can - at any time - be loosely interpreted as an act of war. Whatever situations or crises ensue, that handy rationale is now always sitting in the Pentagon's back pocket, because I guarantee you, whenever big-war enthusiasts want to play that card, the Defense Department will be able to muster - at a moment's notice - a long list of Chinese hacking attacks over the previous X hours/days/weeks/months. So when the President asks, "Do we have evidence that the Chinese are targeting us at this time for cyber-sabotage?" The answer will always be yes.

Are you fearful of a "Guns of August" scenario erupting with the Chinese? You should be now. "Archduke Ferdinand" currently lives inside virtually any US cyber network you care to cite.

I have a hard time believing that the U.S. would be eager to respond to Chinese hacking with an overt act of military retaliation, which could invite a much larger military confrontation between two nuclear-armed states. I do think this paves the way for the U.S. to respond "in kind" to China - although I have to think (and hope) that when it comes to hacking and cyber espionage, we're giving just as good, if not better, than we're getting.

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The news yesterday that China may build a naval base in Pakistan has raised some eyebrows. Gideon Rachman observes:

The story has come out of Pakistan, following the visit of the Pakistani prime minister to China last week. It may simply reflect Pakistani fury with the US, following the Bin Laden killing – rather than any genuine Chinese decision to go for an overseas naval base. Some western policymakers reckon that the Chinese will actually be wincing at the appearance of this story in the western press, since it will heighten the perception that China is overplaying its hand in the Pacific – an idea that has helped America to strengthen its military alliances across the region.

I don't think it's a Pakistan snub to the U.S., after all there are good strategic reasons for Pakistan and China to partner. And, as Rediff reports, they have been steadily expanding ties for some time:

A free trade area is in place from 2006, raw materials exploitation is in full swing in different parts of Pakistan, while China is building (often without international competitive bidding) infrastructure projects such as widening Karakoram highway, railway projects (closer to Abbottabad), port facilities at Gwadar and Karachi, hydro-electric projects in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, etc. Also, Pakistan procured 50 new fighter aircraft from China during Gilani's visit.

China had in the recent past substantially increased military supplies to Pakistan -- including JF-17 fighters, four frigates, six submarines, early warning aircraft and other ground forces equipment. More such projects are committed during this visit. Some Chinese retired naval officers and others have also demanded recently that China should set up military "facilities" in Pakistan. After the Chinese assistance to the Chashma III and IV nuclear power plants were cleared by the International Atomic Energy Agency in March this year (as a counter to the US-India 123 agreement), and as moves towards the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty are being made, the recent news about substantial increases in Pakistan's capability to produce nuclear warheads, is not surprising.

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In an effort to organize my own thoughts on the killing of Osama bin Laden, I find myself returning over and over again to Peter Beinart's take on the terror mastermind's demise:

President Obama now has his best chance since taking office to acknowledge some simple, long-overdue truths. Terrorism does not represent the greatest threat to American security; debt does, and our anti-terror efforts are exacerbating the problem. We do not face, as we did in the 1930s, a totalitarian foe with global ideological appeal. We face competitors who, in varying ways, have imported aspects of our democratic capitalist ideology, and are beating us at our own game.

Bin Laden was a monster and a distraction. It is good that he is dead, partly because the bereaved deserve justice, but also because his shadow kept us from seeing clearly the larger challenges we face. The war on terror is over; Al Qaeda lost. Now for the really hard stuff; let’s hope we haven’t deferred it too long.

The competitor Beinart alludes to, I'm assuming, is China, and I can't help but wonder if bin Laden's death marks the end of an epoch in American foreign policy. Terrorism obviously isn't going anywhere; it existed prior to 9/11, and it will continue to exist long after. The so-called Global War on Terrorism was less a global understanding than a kind of framework for How The World Works According to Washington. The American military has been and will for the foreseeable future remain the preeminent power on earth, but to justify and rationalize that hegemony there must be rules; a kind of flowchart or S.O.P. to help the Beltway make sense of American power.

The War on Terrorism provided Washington's pundits and policymakers with a handy paradigm, much as the Cold War did throughout the latter half of the 20th Century. Will this change? Will a symbolic death lead to a more substantive reappraisal of American policy? Keep in mind that bin Laden's arguably symbolic termination precedes an actual drawdown of American troops from Afghanistan later this year. So while the generals - and the bloggers, and the pundits, and the pols and the wonks - continue to fight and feud over the last war - will we employ 'COIN' or 'Offshore Balancing' in our next indefinite military campaign? - I can't help but think that the American public has already moved on.

And who can possibly blame them? My own gripe with the War on Terrorism, specifically the Afghan mission, was the apparent indefiniteness of the mission. In a decade full of 'surges' and small accomplishments, rarely has there been as decisive and certain an action as bin Laden's killing. This man attacked us, and now he's dead. Seems simple enough.

That's why I can understand last night's displays of revelry and pure emotion in Washington, New York and elsewhere. After nearly ten years of color codes, TSA molestations and frequent condescension from the intelligentsia, the American people finally got a cut and dry result - a mission truly accomplished.

But where to from here for American foreign policy? For all the shortcomings and confusion that came with the GWOT, it was, at the very least, a doctrine premised on national defense. But if, getting back to Beinart's point, the War on Terror is to be replaced by a doctrine of counter-declinism, deficit hawkishness and Chinese containment, then I fear we may be headed toward an even uglier foreign policy paradigm.

China has gradually crept onto the American radar screen, and Beijing, for its own part, has been a busy bee.

With bin Laden now dead, and U.S. withdrawal (kind of) underway in the Near East, is China the next in line to consume America's imagination and energy? And will Washington follow? What happens, in other words, when one distracted giant finally opens its eyes, only to find another right in front of it?

Update: Evan Osnos gives a rather appropriate take on Chinese reactions to bin Laden's killing.

(AP Photo)

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It's rising, according to a new paper. (pdf) However, most of the rise is being driven by China and Russia. In some of the richer nations, such as the U.S., consumption is leveling off or even falling (despite my best efforts):

[Hat tip: Felix Samon]

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Daniel Blumenthal argues that China is experiencing a "resurgence" of "foreign policy aggression." Here is his indictment:

* China "declared" the South China sea a core interest.
* China did not "condemn" North Korea.
* China "demanded" the release of a fishing boat captain detained by Japan.
* China halted the sale of rare earth minerals to Japan.
* China "reneged" on an agreement to air President Obama's speech on state television without censorship.
* China "moved" some short range missles around.
* China "displayed" a new stealth fighter.

Scary stuff. Now, in the same period of time, what has the U.S. done? Let's review:

* Sent additional soldiers to fight a war in Afghanistan.
* Ramped up a bombing campaign against Pakistan's tribal region.
* Provided covert military assistance for military strikes in Yemen.
* Agreed to sell $60 billion in advanced military hardware to Saudi Arabia.
* Cooperated with Israel to conduct sabotage operations against Iran's nuclear facilities
* Sent its secretary of defense into Iraq to request permission to station troops in the country past an agreed upon deadline.
* Bombed Libya.

(AP Photo)

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According to a new poll from GlobeScan, public support for a free market economy is lower in the U.S. than it is in... China.

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Several analysts have been arguing that China has, if not feet of clay, been overvalued. Via Ryan Avent, a new paper on China's economic growth makes the case that China is due for an economic slowdown. Avent analyzes:

The story this suggests is one that's quite at odds with the prevailing view in much of the world—that China's relentless growth will continue until it dominates the global economy. Another possibility arises. Within a few years, we may be reading "What's the matter with China?" stories. A growth slowdown and demographic difficulties will challenge the policy status quo and could potentially expose serious weaknesses in the growth model (as Warren Buffet says, when the tide goes out, one sees who's been swimming naked). India, on the other hand, will be ascendent.

UPDATE: Avent isn't alone. None other than Doctor Doom himself thinks China's headed for a crash:

I’m writing on the heels of two trips to China….My meetings deepened my own impression and RGE’s long-standing house view of a potentially destabilizing contradiction between short- and medium-term economic performance: The economy is overheating here and now, but I’m convinced that in the medium term China’s overinvestment will prove deflationary both domestically and globally. Once increasing fixed investment becomes impossible—most likely after 2013—China is poised for a sharp slowdown. Continuing down the investment-led growth path will exacerbate the visible glut of capacity in manufacturing, real estate and infrastructure. I think this dichotomy between the high-growth/inflation pressures of the next couple of years and growth hitting a brick wall in the second half of the quinquennium is far more important than the current focus on a “soft landing” amid double-digit growth.

(AP Photo)

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Is China building out a series of naval bases in friendly states on its perimeter, the so-called "string of pearls?" Billy Tea thinks not:

First and foremost, China does have some involvement in the identified ports. But with the exception of Sri Lanka's Hambantota and perhaps Myanmar's Sittwe, they are used not only by China and there are currently no signs whatsoever of any developments for future military purposes.

Second, while there is no denying that China has an interest in building relations with strategically located countries, it is important to understand the great power context these countries face. To openly side with China over other regional powers, including India and the United States, would be extremely risky diplomacy for these smaller countries.

Indeed, in today's globalized world, choosing one great power's side over another's unnecessarily limits countries' economic and political options. That's especially true for less-developed countries like Myanmar, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka - all of which are reliant on foreign trade, aid and investment and for development purposes need all they can get. In the current geopolitical context, countries stand to gain the most by subtly playing great power off one another, rather than committing to one in particular.

Third, government officials in the respective "pearl" countries have openly repudiated reports they have given China any preferential treatment and that Beijing is quietly building and/or planning to build military bases in their sovereign territories.

Ultimately, the first and second rationales seems more persuasive than the third. Countries lie all the time about strategic matters, and it wouldn't surprise anyone if China's neighbors were engaged in some misdirection about their own commitments.

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Via Daniel Drezner, it looks like Secretary Clinton is rethinking that whole "smart power" thing:

As Clinton railed against cuts sought by Republican to the U.S. foreign aid program, she told senators, "We are a competition for influence with China. Let's put aside the humanitarian, do-good side of what we believe in. Let's just talk straight realpolitik. We are in competition with China."

She noted a "huge energy find" in Papua New Guinea by U.S. company Exxon Mobil Corp., which has begun drilling for natural gas there. Clinton said China was jockeying for influence in the region and seeing how it could "come in behind us and come in under us."...

She said foreign assistance was important on humanitarian and moral grounds, but also strategically essential for America's global influence.

"I mean, if anybody thinks that our retreating on these issues is somehow going to be irrelevant to the maintenance of our leadership in a world where we are competing with China, where we are competing with Iran, that is a mistaken notion," Clinton said.

Grouping China and Iran into the same category is wrong for a number of reasons, not least because the nature of the relationships are fundamentally different. China and the U.S. may not be fast friends, but the relationship is considerably better than it is between the U.S. and Iran. Having America's top diplomat lump the two nations together doesn't seem particularly helpful.

Moreover, if the best the administration can do in defense of foreign aid is complain that Exxon Mobile might get the short end of a few Asia Pacific oil deals, they're going to have to up their game.

(AP Photo)

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Max Bergmann explains why no one cares what China has to say about unrest in the Middle East:

China doesn’t have an international system it is pushing, it has China. And it is pretty hard to develop a new alternative international order in an age of nationalism, liberalism, and democracy whose sole function is to benefit the mothership power. China is developing and expanding its relations with other countries and building somewhat of a network of associates. But these are largely transactional relationships. A vivid example of the nature of China’s priorities was evident in the evacuation of Chinese oil workers from Libya. China was in Libya because it could get oil, but in Egypt, where resources are scarce, China was relatively absent. For the US the situation was reversed. We had close ties with Egypt and paid it billions, despite it being resource poor, because Egypt is critical to regional stability and peace.

I think this is largely correct, and clearly the fact that the U.S. has a large network of allies is an American strength. That said, having a more "transactional" relationship with the Middle East specifically doesn't sound like a bad thing. The world may not care what China has to say about the mess in the Middle East, but neither do they expect China to clean it up.

(AP Photo)

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Philip Dorling reports that China has its eyes on bulking up its nuclear forces:

Top Chinese officials have declared that there can be no limit to the expansion of Beijing's nuclear arsenal amid growing regional fears that it will eventually equal that of the United States with profound consequences for the strategic balance in Asia.

Records of secret US-China defence consultations, leaked to WikiLeaks and provided to Asia Sentinel, have revealed that US diplomats have repeatedly failed to persuade the rising Asian superpower to be more transparent about its nuclear forces and Chinese officials have privately acknowledged a desire for military advantage underpins continuing secrecy.

The basic argument under-pinning the Obama administration's push to eliminate nuclear weapons is that unless the U.S. takes the lead in delegitimizing them by slashing its own arsenal, other states will naturally seek to build up their own forces. Well, the U.S. has committed to cut its nuclear arsenal and both China and Pakistan have recently indicated that their nuclear arsenals will expand.

That's not to say that the U.S. can't afford to trim its nuclear arsenal, it can. But the idea that doing so and showing "leadership" on this issue is having a demonstration effect on problem states seems unfounded. In fact, especially with respect to China's nuclear forces, the only way to prevent further nuclear weapons states from appearing is for the U.S. to reaffirm its commitment to use nuclear weapons to defend her allies in Asia.

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In the last few months, Russia and Japan have been trading barbs over the Kuril Islands. This follows heightened tension between Japan and China over the Senkaku Island chain. These territorial dust-ups leads J.E. Dyer to issue the following warning:

Keeping our foreign-policy thinking on autopilot leaves our spokesmen giving narrowly conceived, legalistic responses that are inadequate to a changing situation. America’s core ally in the Far East is under real territorial pressure from both Russia and China — and the reflexive assumption that any given situation will stabilize itself, with little or no inconvenience to the U.S., is increasingly outdated.

If we're speaking about 'reflexive assumptions,' lets discuss Dyer's. I'll state up front that my knowledge of both the Kuril and Senkaku disputes is pretty topical and I couldn't weigh in definitely on which country has the stronger claim (hit the links above for the Wiki-versions of both disputes). But Dyer isn't litigating the cases either, just simply assuming that the U.S. must stand with Japan. Clearly the U.S. is obligated to defend Japan, but that does not mean that the U.S. should defend Japanese claims that have no merit.

(Photo of Kuril Islands via Wikipedia Commons)

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Today, the big news out of Asia is that China has overtaken Japan as the world's second largest economy. But polls have indicated that Americans have believed, erroneously, that China has been the world's largest economy for a while now.

The most recent figures come from Gallup:

Rasmussen found that 45 percent of Americans polled knew their country's economy was the biggest. In January, Pew Research reported that 47 percent of Americans thought China was the world's largest economy, while only 31 percent correctly noted that the U.S. was still the world's largest.

Needless to say, it's difficult for policymakers to address issues surrounding China if so many people don't understand the actual dynamics of the relationship.

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One of the biggest impediments to China's rise to great power status is the fact that China is surrounded by powerful neighbors. This, for instance, is how Russia is handling it:

The Kremlin’s choice of stimulus package is a bit of a throwback, though—among other things, a new fleet of warships to challenge China. Last week Prime Minister Vladimir Putin announced a whopping $678 billion package of new defense spending for the next decade, with a quarter of the money going to revamp Russia’s Pacific fleet. On the Kremlin’s shopping list: 20 new ships, including a new class of attack submarines, plus new missile subs, frigates, and an aircraft carrier.

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If you need a respite from Egypt, here's Martin Jacques on China's rise.

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We pause from Egypt-blogging to bring you this important news:

China's state broadcaster used footage that appears to have been taken from a Hollywood film in one of its news reports - but not for the first time.

A China Central Television story about the country's air force showed an explosion that was identical to a scene from the 1986 film Top Gun.

The broadcaster often uses film clips in its news reports.

A person familiar with the company said it was currently trying to set up a system to contain this situation.

Look for the explosion at 1:11.

[Hat tip: The Gulf Blog]

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According to a report from the C.I.A., college students in China frequently spy on peers and professors:

Established in 1989 after the Tienanmen Square protests, “the principal objective of the Student Informant System [SIS] is to ensure campus stability and to control the debate and discussion of politically sensitive issues,” the CIA report said. “Students have had their scholarships revoked and their academic records penalized because of information provided by student informants that is sometimes highly subjective, such as facial expressions.”

This is not without controversy, as the report notes that some Chinese students are posting the names of student informants online.

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Pew Research analyzes U.S. media coverage of China:

In general, larger economic issues involving trade and economic policy with China tend to be overshadowed by different issues -- including tainted imports and disasters. And in any given week, ongoing economic issues are even less visible in the news.

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Nina Hachigian says that American neoconservatives are undermining U.S. policy toward China by viewing international institutions skeptically:

So while China invokes a 19th-century ideal of sovereignty to justify decisions that harm U.S. interests, some neoconservatives are championing the same antiquated notions — legitimizing China’s rejection of international standards and rules.

Yet the United States has benefited enormously from adopting a more modern view of sovereignty. Agreeing to a common set of trade rules means, for example, that Americans profit from exporting farm machinery and eat bananas year round.

The likelihood of a nuclear accident or terrorist incident has gone down — thanks to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which requires the United States and the other 190-odd signatories to allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency at their nuclear facilities. Funding the International Monetary Fund pays dividends in a more stable financial system; and complying with World Health Organization requests has meant less vulnerability to deadly viruses.

It is unclear whether conservatives think these are not important benefits or that the U.S. can somehow enjoy them without, in turn, meeting its international obligations. Either way, it is a dangerous message for a rising China.

I don't agree with everything in the piece (specifically I don't think the view Hachigian decries is really 'neoconservative'), but it is worth noting that seeing as the U.S. had a major, if not decisive, role to play in shaping and creating the norms and institutions of the post World War II international order, it's definitively more favorable to the United States to have China move in that direction than to have the U.S. embrace China's view of how the world should work.

That said, China's "19th century worldview" hasn't lead the country to embark in multiple, costly military interventions around the globe, or burn its finite resources trying to "police" the globe - so maybe there's more to recommend it than Hachigian lets on.

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Yiyi Chen, a professor at the Shanghai Jiaotong University and an adviser on Middle East affairs to the Beijing government, told The Media Line that Beijing in no hurry to significantly increase its role in the region. Right now, its focus is on studying the region and its problems carefully before deepening its involvement.

“The Western way isn’t the only way. The U.S. way has its value, but apparently it hasn’t solved the crises and conflicts of the region,” Chen said. “China has experienced the problem of foreign cultures and foreign value systems trying to impose their views on others ...We don’t have a view that we want to impose on the countries of the region.”

China’s growing economic and political clout hasn’t yet made itself felt in the Middle East, even as it has become the largest importer of the region’s oil, buying just over a tenth of the Gulf’s output and a quarter of Iran’s. But Beijing is starting to exercise unprecedented influence on critical issues, most notably by objecting efforts by the West to impose tougher sanctions on Iran. - David Rosenberg

From an American perspective, there's two ways to look at this. First, one can be enraged (or bemused) at how China is free-riding on America's provision of Persian Gulf security. While the American taxpayer and U.S. military bear the costs of keeping the region (relatively) stable, China bears none of those costs but enjoys all the benefits. The second way to view this is that the U.S. has China by the proverbial short hairs should relations deteriorate between the two great powers. With so much U.S. military power in the Gulf, it would be easy to disrupt energy shipments to China, but hard for China to inflict such a blow on the U.S.

What's interesting is Chinese thinking on the matter - insofar as Chen is a representative example. For the moment at least it looks like China is happy playing an "off-shore" role, which means the first interpretation mentioned above (free-rider) is perhaps a more accurate description of what's going on. Of course, China could very well want to play a more overt role in the region and simply lack the capacity or opportunity.

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Rasmussen has a new survey out gaging people's perception of the Obama administration's approach to alliance management:

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that a plurality of Likely Voters (41%) says Obama believes America’s allies should do what the United States wants most often. But 23% think Obama believes America should do what its allies want more often, while 27% think neither scenario applies.

By contrast, 55% of all U.S. voters say our allies should do what the United States wants more often, and just nine percent (9%) think America should do want its allies want instead. Thirty-one percent (31%) agree with neither course....

Republicans are more likely than Democrats and voters not affiliated with either major political party to believe Obama thinks the United States should do what its allies want most often. While most Republicans hold the opposite belief themselves, roughly half of Democrats agree. Unaffiliated voters are more prone to choose neither option.

One of the things that's somewhat interesting about this finding is how it relates to the just concluded summit with China's President Hu Jintao. Before and during the summit, there was a lot of talk about how important it was for President Obama to publicly excoriate and shame China about its poor human rights record. The basic idea, I guess, is that this scolding would produce better behavior from China.

But consider the Rasmussen finding above - many Americans aren't particularly interested in doing what their allies want them to do, much less a country that's a quasi-adversary. Now, put yourself in the place of the Chinese - not exactly fast-friends with the U.S. - and ask whether they're going to be moved to make reforms at the behest of hectoring from American politicians.

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Arthur Herman sees China's test of the J-20 stealth fighter as a "Sputnik" moment:

Compare this to the moment the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb in 1949. The face of modern warfare has changed--and America's military superiority hangs in the balance.

Air Power Australia, a highly respected defense-analysis outfit, has pronounced the J-20 "a techno-strategic coup." The US Navy's F/A 18, the mainstay of our naval-air fleet, is "outclassed in every respect." So is the plane the Pentagon is counting on to form the next generation of supersonic fighter, the F-35, and so are our integrated air-defense systems. Right now, only our Stealth B-2 bombers and F-22 Raptors stand between us and aviation obsolescence, but President Obama has axed the Raptor program.

There is a long and well-document tendency in U.S. foreign policy circles to vastly over-state the capabilities of American adversaries. From the non-existent "missile gap" decried by President Kennedy to Saddam Hussein's supposed nuclear weapons and WMD. China's military modernization might produce a force capable of imposing greater harm on the United States should the two countries come to blows in the Pacific, but that's a far cry from the force the Soviet Union fielded. (And the J-20, like much of China's military, is completely unproven and untested in combat.)

The analogy to Sputnik is overwrought for more than just technological reasons. Does Herman really believe that China aims to ignite global revolutions to impose Beijing-lead communist governments around the world?

(AP Photo)

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Because of the disjointed setup with respective language translators, President Obama's joint press conference with Chinese President Hu Jintao was often interrupted for translations of remarks and questions into both English and Chinese. But it also allowed an opportunity for bilingual speakers to pick up nuances from the original remarks.

Hu, true to form, came well prepared, particularly with numbers and statistics, as befitting a former engineer. He handled all queries comfortably, even though as the head of a one-party dictatorship, he's never obliged to face a blistering free press at home.

On one occasion, Hu did flash noticeable annoyance, even a slight temper, when asked why congressional leaders are snubbing him at the state dinner tonight. He tersely concluded his remarks with "that's a question for him," and pointed to President Obama. It was a moment reminiscent of John McCain's contempt during a debate in the 2008 presidential election when he pointed to Obama and barked "that one."

Hu did not say "President Obama" as the English translator did, and he was not at all amused, even offended by such a snub. And at least partially he blamed Obama because he must have believed that Obama should have held sway to prevent an incident that would be viewed as a colossal "loss of face" for him at home.

Obama, on the other hand, kept his composure and handled the questions deftly, with skillful dancing on the inevitable and contentious issue of China's human rights record. His one light-hearted moment, though, was also lost in translation.

When asked of a potential challenge from Amb. Jon Huntsman for the presidency in 2012, Obama quipped that the fact that he and Huntsman (a former Republican governor of Utah) work so well together has to help Huntsman in the GOP primary. But the Chinese translator did not get the joke and spoke as if Obama meant it sincerely.

The technological problems have to be seen as somewhat of an embarrassment for the White House. With the leaders of the two most powerful countries meeting in a summit, the U.S. appeared ill-prepared for something as simple as a press conference. The quality of the translators (both for English and Mandarin) is also questionable, as both spoke with a slight accent.

Maybe it's time to boost the ranks of fluent Chinese speakers in the U.S. diplomatic corps. These summits with China's leaders will only increase in frequency for the foreseeable future.

(AP Photo)

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The BBC has a series of slides detailing the balance of economic and military power between the U.S. and China. Check it out.

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The Foreign Policy Initiative calls for a rethink of U.S. policy toward China. Among their recommendations is to ramp up arms sales to China's neighbors and harangue China "in every available forum at every available opportunity" about its human rights record. Then they suggest:

Seek solutions to major international issues without China. Though the P5+1 and Six Party Talks were, conceptually, an innovative method to deal with Iran and North Korea; in practice, they have served as another mechanism by which Russia and China continue to resist efforts to compel their client states. Instead, the United States, in concert with its democratic allies, should seek other avenues to impair these regimes’ capabilities.

This is something I'd love to see fleshed out more. How, exactly, does the U.S. find a "solution" to North Korea that does not involve China? According to my map, the two countries share a border and China is North Korea's major trading partner.

(AP Photo)

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Last week, Pew Research published findings from a survey of U.S. attitudes on China. Now a poll conducted by Horizon Research and published in China Daily reports on Chinese attitudes about the United States:

The number of Chinese people who view Beijing's ties with Washington as "very important" has doubled in the past year, while most people believe relations will remain stable or improve despite recent turbulence, a survey reveals ahead of President Hu Jintao's upcoming visit to the United State...

Nearly seven in 10 (69.9%) believe that in commercial affairs the world's two largest economies are both competitors and partners.

Most people consider that China made a greater contribution than the US in handling the financial crisis and trying to combat climate change, the survey showed.

Asked to value Beijing's ties with Washington, more than half (54.3%) of respondents said they regard Sino-US ties as "very important", more than double the 26 percent in 2009.

An overwhelming nine in 10 (90.9%) viewed the relationship as "important".

However, more than half of the respondents believed that ties had deteriorated in 2010, and nearly four in 10 (the report did not give the specific number) said current relations are "in a bad situation".

Eighty percent said the US was to blame.

As to future ties, six in 10 (no specific figure available) said the relationship will generally remain stable, while about one quarter were more positive, saying it will get better.

People under 30 are more optimistic than those in other age groups.

[Hat tip: China Real Time]

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Galrahn at Information Dissemination is worried about the implications of China's test of its J-20 stealth jet:

It isn't China's military technology I am concerned about, at least not today or anytime in the near future. It is how difficult it is to build a relationship on trust with China when you are given every impression that the President of China is probably being dishonest, or disingenuous at best, to your face in a discussion where you sit across from one another. Know your history - this is what the Japanese were like in the 1930s.

Meanwhile, Bill Bishop runs down various interpretations of the test flight and of reports that Chinese President Hu Jianto did not know the test was about to go down:

1. Hu did not know. This is the terrifying scenario, as it means that in spite of his role as head of the CMC and his promotion of many top generals, the PLA is at risk of major rupture with the Party and civilian leadership. In this scenario we can expect the jockeying for 2012 succession to be especially brutal and potentially spill outside China’s borders;

2. The senior defense official simply misunderstood the Chinese reaction and/or was misunderstood by the reporters. While it is probable that many of the Chinese government officials (aka civilians) did not know, Hu as head of CMC did know (UPDATE: Victor Shih suggested that Hu likely approved the flight but left the timing up to the PLA). Perhaps there is some ambiguity around the quote “it was clear the civilian leadership was uninformed” that led to the conclusion that Hu was unaware of the flight, as people assume he is a “civilian” and not also military given his role as Chairman of the CMC;

3. The senior defense official has a bias towards believing in a civilian-military split, and/or has an agenda to push said “split”. “Evidence” that the PLA has “gone rogue” would be a boon to the Pentagon and defense contractors;

4. The Chinese put on an elaborate charade designed to lead US officials to believe in a military-civilian split. Why would they do this? Perhaps they think that if the US believes that Hu is weakened and in a power struggle with the “hardliners” then the US will go easy on him to avoid “undermining” him and upsetting a “delicate balance”. If you think this suggestion is crazy you are behind in your reading of Chinese military classics like “Art of War”, “Three Kingdoms” and others.

I lean toward #2, but am not really sure at this point.

(AP Photo)

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Pew Research has released a new survey on U.S. views of China that contains many interesting findings:

Nearly half (47%) say Asia is most important, compared with just 37% who say Europe, home to many of America's closest traditional allies....

The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted January 5-9 among 1,503 adults finds that by two-to-one (60% to 27%) Americans see China's economic strength as a greater threat than its military strength. And as Obama goes into talks with the Chinese president, a 53% majority say it is very important for the U.S. to get tougher with China on trade and economic issues.

Yet while Americans may see China as a problem, relatively few describe it as an adversary, and a 58% majority say it is very important to build a stronger relationship between the U.S. and China. By comparison, promoting human rights and better environmental policies and practices are important, but lower priorities.

It's interesting to note the divergence between where the U.S. public expresses concern with China - along the economic dimension - and where most of the "strategic class" of analysts find alarm - China's military build-up.

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Jacob Heilbrunn thinks they might be:

But the temptation to use North Korea as a weapon to torment Washington may be too much for Beijing's hawkish types to resist. If they cooperated, America would have less incentive to bulk up, or maintain, its forces in the region. Instead, China is, from its own standpoint, perversely encouraging America to remain. But that's what happens when the civilian diplomats get shunted aside by the hawkish military neocons. And for now, it looks as though China's neocons have the upper hand. Like the neocons who wrecked American foreign policy, they may be poised to follow policies that are actually inimical to China's true interests, while arguing that they are pursuing its true ones.

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The Wall Street Journal assess the implications of the testing of a stealth jet during Defense Secretary Gates' visit to China:

China's first test flight of its stealth fighter Tuesday overshadowed a mission to China by U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates to repair frayed military relations, and prompted concern about whether President Hu Jintao and the civilian leadership are fully in control of the increasingly powerful armed forces.

U.S. officials said that President Hu appeared to be taken by surprise when Mr. Gates asked him about the test flight during a meeting, hours after pictures and accounts of it began appearing online.

David Axe says not to worry:

First, for all its apparent design strengths as a bomber or a fighter, the J-20 seems to rely on imported Russian engines — just as many other Chinese jets do. That gives Russia effective veto power over the J-20’s use in combat. All Moscow has to do is shut down the supply and support of engines to ground the J-20 and indeed most of the PLAAF.

Secondly, there are lots of ways to shoot down or otherwise disable Chinese fighters. Counting just American forces, there are: Air Force F-15s, F-16s, F-22s and (soon) F-35s; Navy and Marine F/A-18s and F-35s; Navy Aegis destroyers and cruisers; and Army surface-to-air missiles. But in a major shooting war, the Navy and Air Force wouldn’t wait for J-20s or other Chinese fighters to even take off. Cruise-missile-armed submarines and bombers would pound Chinese airfields; the Air Forces would take down Chinese satellites and thus blind PLAAF planners; American cyberattackers could disable Beijing’s command networks.

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Alex Frangos reports that in a contest between Chinese and Indian consumers and businesses over who cares more about the environment, China wins:

Among consumers, 94% of Chinese say they will pay more for products that are certified as green, meaning they have some sort of energy or health and safety benefit. In India, it’s 72%, as it is in Singapore as well.

Businesses in China seem more attuned to marketing green products. Three out of five Chinese businesses think their customers will pay more for green products, while in India and Singapore, that percentage is 35%. Among Chinese food and beverage companies, 67% claim they trade or produce green products, compared to 16% in India. Clothing and footwear makers and sellers, it’s 41% versus 30% in India.

(AP Photo)

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Richard Weitz argues in the Diplomat that the Obama administration's approach to China is much like the Clinton administration's approach to Russia:

Yet these policies should be seen less as an effort to contain China and more as a return to the kind of shaping and hedging policies that the Bill Clinton administration pursued on many security issues, especially relations with Russia. The principle behind this approach is that it will help shape the targeted actor’s choices so that it will pursue policies helpful to the United States and its allies. In the case of China, these policies would include not threatening to use force against other countries, moderating its trade and climate polices and generally embracing and supporting the existing international institutions and the global status quo. On the flip side, if these shaping policies fail, then the United States aims to be in a good position, thanks to its strategic hedging, to resist disruptive Chinese policies until China abandons them.

I don't think the two circumstances are really analogous. Clinton was able to "shape" Russia's choices regarding its immediate security environment because Russia was very weak and consumed with internal problems and the U.S. was not. And the end result of American policy toward Russia through the Clinton administration and into the Bush era was a sharp deterioration in relations between the two countries (a deterioration for which both nations share blame) and a war between Russia and her neighbor - not exactly an ideal we should be shooting for with China.

Furthermore, Weitz argues that the U.S. should try to shape China's choices to avoid a "destabilizing" arms race in Asia. But it's too late - arms purchases in Asia are on the rise and probably won't decline for some time. So has it destabilized Asia? Not yet and when you consider the environment, would Weitz prefer that all of China's neighbors were poorly armed and unable to defend themselves? It seems to me that that's an environment ripe for destabilization and Chinese adventurism. An Asia that's armed to the teeth is one in which China is not invading anyone.

(AP Photo)

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Gordon Chang thinks the Chinese military is suicidal:

Why be concerned with WikiLeaks when the secretary of defense is rushing to give sensitive information to the only great power preparing to kill Americans? The justification for doing so is that the Chinese will reciprocate. Yet they have in fact not responded in kind after years of essentially one-way transfers of information and know-how from the United States to China, and Gates on this trip will not see any military facility not previously opened to U.S. officials....

The Chinese interpret Gates’s offers of cooperation as signs of weakness. He is, in their view, the representative of a power in terminal decline, a country that will soon be so weak it will not be able to resist Chinese advances in the region. Comments early last year to the effect that Beijing can use its holding of American debt to punish the United States reveal the mentality of senior PLA officers.

China’s generals and admirals are wrong in every respect, but the important point is that we are oblivious to what they are thinking. Gates needs to recognize that Beijing is configuring its military to fight the United States, that its senior officers do not fear war, and that they think they can win one. To not recognize facts is reckless—and something that has led to every great tragedy involving Americans.

You have to assume that China's generals also think about the enormous stockpile of American nuclear weapons, long range bombers, submarines and inter-continental ballistic missiles - weapons that, collectively, could obliterate large swathes of their country.

No one should ever discount the possibility that nations can embrace a suicidal irrationality from time to time, but nothing in China's recent behavior suggests that the country wants to fight a war with the United States.

(AP Photo)

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According to a recent poll, only 12 percent of respondents in China said their country was a world superpower:

Looking at relations with Japan, over half of the participants said the ties were unlikely to deteriorate in 2011.

Over 80 % of the participants also expressed concerns about Western intentions to contain China's development, with about 40 % calling for countermeasures to be taken against threats to China.

Among the issues of greatest concern, US intentions to strategically contain China placed ahead of trade disputes as the most important bilateral issue in 2010.

Ties with Washington were deemed as the most significant bilateral relationship for China for the fifth consecutive year.

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A new report on human rights from the risk consulting firm Maplecroft finds backsliding in China:

Most significantly for business, given it plays a major role in supply chains, China has fallen two places in the ranking from last year to 10th. China joins DR Congo (1), Somalia (2), Pakistan (3), Sudan (4), Myanmar (5), Chad (6), Afghanistan (7), Zimbabwe (8), and North Korea (9) as the countries with the worst human rights records.

Russia (14), Colombia (15), Bangladesh (16), Nigeria (17) India (21), Philippines (25) and Mexico (26) have also seen their scores worsen and are featured in the ‘extreme risk’ category.

Interestingly, the report also singles out India for criticism:

India, which is important to the ICT, manufacturing and agriculture sectors, performs particularly badly in the area of labour rights protections. It is ranked joint first for child labour, forced labour and discrimination and 7th for trafficking, which includes the use of girls in bonded labour and sexual exploitation. Estimates of the number of child labourers varied widely. The government's 2004 national survey estimated the number of working children from aged 5-14 at 16.4 million. NGOs, however, claimed the number of child labourers was closer to 55 million.

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China announced yesterday that it would cut its rare earth mineral export quota in 2011, following steep reductions in 2010. While the move is sure to deliver some short-term pain to industries in Asia, Europe and the U.S., it has been a boon for Australia:

Australia's emerging rare earths producers and explorers are enjoying a year-end surge in value thanks to China's latest move to limit supplies from its dominant industry to the rest of the world....

According to the US Geological Survey, rare earths are relatively common within Earth's crust but, because of their geochemical properties, are not often found in economically exploitable concentrations. It said new mines in Australia, the resumption of a big mine in the US, and the possible development of other deposits there and in Canada ''could help meet increasing demand''.

As Ian MacKinnon reports, the international scramble to shore up new sources of supply is creating some uncomfortable bedfellows - such as a tie-up between South Korea and Burma.

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They just might be, if this report from John Pomfret is any indication:

After years of trying, Chinese engineers still can't make a reliable engine for a military plane.

The country's demands for weapons systems go much further. Chinese officials last month told Russian Defense Minister Anatoly E. Serdyukov that they may resume buying major Russian weapons systems after a several-year break. On their wish list are the Su-35 fighter, for a planned Chinese aircraft carrier; IL-476 military transport planes; IL-478 air refueling tankers and the S-400 air defense system, according to Russian news reports and weapons experts.

This persistent dependence on Russian arms suppliers demonstrates a central truth about the Chinese military: The bluster about the emergence of a superpower is undermined by national defense industries that can't produce what China needs. Although the United States is making changes in response to China's growing military power, experts and officials believe it will be years, if not decades, before China will be able to produce a much-feared ballistic missile capable of striking a warship or overcome weaknesses that keep it from projecting power far from its shores.

The report also pours some serious cold water on China's vaunted "anti-ship" missile:

But the challenge for China is that an anti-ship ballistic missile is extremely hard to make. The Russians worked on one for decades and failed. The United States never tried, preferring to rely on cruise missiles and attack submarines to do the job of threatening an opposing navy.

U.S. satellites would detect an ASBM as soon as it was launched, providing a carrier enough warning to move several miles before the missile could reach its target. To hit a moving carrier, a U.S. government weapons specialist said, China's targeting systems would have to be "better than world-class."

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One argument made by proponents of the U.S. foreign policy status quo is that absent a strong American presence in key regions of the world, democratic allies will wilt under the oppressive influence of autocratic powers. But if we have learned anything in 2010 is that precisely the opposite happens, at least in Asia. China's "assertive" behavior hasn't precipitated a bout of regional appeasement but has instead catalyzed regional states to bulk up their defenses. As Barbara Demick reports:

Chinese behavior in the South China Sea has reversed the alliances of the Vietnam War, with Hanoi now edging toward the United States as it seeks protection. Vietnam is investing in submarines and long-range combat aircraft because of dozens of incidents over the last year in which Chinese vessels have harassed its fishing and oil ships. China's territorial claim to 1 million square miles of the sea has also unnerved Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore, pushing them closer to the U.S.

Japan, too, recently announced that its new defense strategy will not entail becoming a satellite state of communist China but instead will be revamped to reflect China's emergence. Arms purchases in Asia are on the rise.

None of this is to suggest that the U.S. should "disengage" from Asia. But it is a telling reminder that if the U.S. were to disengage from, say, Europe, the result wouldn't be the collapse of Western Civilization.

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A new poll finds that a majority of Japanese and Americans do not trust China:

The Gallup poll published Wednesday by the Yomiuri Shimbun was conducted among 1022 Japanese and 1002 Americans and showed that 87 percent of Japanese and 65 percent of Americans do not trust China....

The poll found that Japanese people feel relations between Japan and the U.S. have been worsening due to the planned relocation of U.S. base in Okinawa. Some 40 percent of Japanese respondents said bilateral relations deteriorated, up from 26 percent last year. In contrast, the proportion of those who thought the two countries are on good terms fell from 48 percent last year to 33 percent this year.

Asked about the reasons, 79 percent of Japanese cited complications caused by the relocation plan.

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Thomas Barnett reposts maps produced by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment detailing all the areas inside China that the U.S. would want to bomb in the event of hostilities over Taiwan. Barnett:

If somebody publishes maps of the U.S. delineating all the places they'd want to bomb on the first day of the war . . . I'd take that kinda personally. No, I'm not naive enough to believe the Chinese don't have theirs. But it takes a certain chutzpah to publish yours so openly while decrying Chinese "provocations" and "throwing their weight around." China hasn't waged war in a very long time. The U.S. does so regularly. Whose maps should we take more seriously?

This gets to the nub of one of the odder complaints the Pentagon makes about China's military build-up - its "lack of transparency." Would we feel better about China if they came out and said, ala the U.S., that they're developing their military capability so that they can blow up our carrier battle groups?

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The U.S. faces a series of tough choices with respect to handling a rising China. For decades, American strategy has been predicated on the belief that no one power (besides itself) can be in a position to dominate a strategic region of the world. This principle is challenged by China, which has enjoyed booming economic growth and is slowly but steadily building a military that can defend a range of interests further from its territory. China's continued economic growth is not inevitable, but if it does continue to clip along at a healthy pace, it will be harder and harder for a strapped U.S. to sustain its dominance in Asia - especially if it is expected to maintain supremacy elsewhere in the world.

So what to do? One suggestion comes in the form of a new report from the American Enterprise Institute titled Security in the Indo-Pacific Commons. In it, author Michael Auslin argues for boosting America's forward deployment of military forces, followed by an effort to improve cooperation with China's neighbors.

It's a long report and well worth a read, and a blog isn't the best forum to grapple with it in its entirety, but I would like to raise a few questions: if we find China's military modernization troublesome and the impetus to enhance American forces in the region along with creating 'concentric triangles' of allies around the country, why wouldn't China view America's triangular, militarized containment as equally troubling, and equally worthy of response? Why would an aspiring great power trust a putative rival to keep open the 'commons' it traverses for its own trade, particularly when that rival embarks on a strategy to sustain overt dominance of said commons? The U.S. would not be similarly trusting.

I think we can all agree on the need to sustain a favorable balance of power in Asia. The question centers on how to best manage that. To that end there's less focus in the report on China's strategic aims and interests, outside of noting China's desire to build a military capable of offsetting America's strengths. It's important to monitor China's military, but isn't it equally important to understand what China's perceived interests are and whether or not the U.S. can live in a world where China takes on a greater role 'policing the commons'?

It may be impossible to strike an adequate balance between America's legitimate interest in sustaining an open Indo-Pacific region and China's legitimate interest not to be militarily hemmed in and reliant on an outside power to protect its own vital sea lanes, but it seems incumbent upon us to try and find one.

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It's over a giant robot statue:

Sotsu Co. is investigating whether a Chinese amusement park copied the design of a large statue of the Gundam robot, first built in Japan last year to resemble the huge fighting machines in the legendary Japanese anime series “Mobile Suit Gundam.”

The Tokyo-based company, which manages the copyrights to the comic series, said it started looking into the matter after an outsider alerted the company about the statue last week. The company hasn’t been in direct contact with Floraland, the Chengdu-based amusement park in question, according to a company spokeswoman.

You can view photos of the robot in question here.

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According to a report in the Asahi Shimbum:

A record 77.8 percent of respondents to a government survey at the end of October, at the height of the fallout from the Senkaku Islands dispute, said they did not "feel close" to Japan's giant neighbor.

That marked a sharp 19.3 percentage points increase over a year earlier and was the worst figure since 1978, when the Cabinet Office survey began.

The number of Japanese who did not feel the bilateral relationship was good rose 33.4 points to 88.6 percent.

The survey results mark a new high in negative feelings toward China over the last two decades. Throughout most of the 1980s, about 70 percent of Japanese respondents to the survey said they felt close to China.

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Elizabeth Economy wants to dial back the "China dominance" rhetoric:

The United States is in an economic mess, and it is tempting to see China behind every door. This is a mistake on two fronts. First, as China’s economy and military grow, its policies will certainly matter to the United States more and more; but let’s take our time to understand precisely how and why before we raise alarm bells on every front. Second, and even more important, seeing China everywhere enables us to avoid looking in the mirror — which is where we really ought to be focused in order to fix our problems.

Unfortunately, I think Economy's going to be disappointed. There is a time-honored tendency in politics (and not just American politics) to locate the source of blame for a nation's ills beyond its borders. Why on Earth would a politician blame his or her constituents for something when a more convenient scapegoat lies within reach? China makes an attractive target (and often a legitimate one) for American complaints.

There is also a very strong belief in U.S. national security circles that America must maintain hegemony in Asia, a belief that puts the U.S. on a collision course with a rising China. The alarm bells that Economy fears are drowning out rational discussion are only going to get louder the more China does things like announce it's building an aircraft carrier.

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Thomas Friedman asks what it would look like if WikiLeaks poached China's secrets. He does it to set up a faux cable highlighting America's domestic shortcoming, but it's a question I had been asking myself after reading Glenn Greenwald's defense of the organization:

Ultimately, WikiLeaks' real goal appears to me to be anti-authoritarian at its core: to prevent the world's most powerful factions from operating in the dark.

So has WikiLeaks targeted authoritarian powers like China or Russia? The WikiLeaks Wikipedia page says that one of its founders was a Chinese dissident so it's possible they've been poaching secrets from China, Russia and other authoritarian powers, but clearly not with the intensity that they've gone after the U.S. Or maybe they just have not had the good fortune (in their view) to hook up with the Chinese or Russian equivalent of a Bradley Manning, the alleged source of their U.S. material. But this just belies Greenwald's assertion about the organization's "anti-authoritarian" posture - real authoritarian states don't cough up their secrets that easily and truly "anti-authoritarian" organizations just don't scoop up the low-hanging fruit from flawed democracies and call it a day.

Then again, it's not clear that Greenwald has an accurate sense of international media freedom. He writes in a different post on WikiLeaks:

Simply put, there are few countries in the world with citizenries and especially media outlets more devoted to serving, protecting and venerating government authorities than the U.S.

Obviously this is just hyperbole. But still:

Of the 196 countries and territories assessed during calendar year 2009, 69 (35 percent) were rated Free, 64 (33 percent) were rated Partly Free, and 63 (32 percent) were rated Not Free. This represents a move toward the center compared with the survey covering 2008, which featured 70 Free, 61 Partly Free, and 64 Not Free countries and territories.

The survey found that only 16 percent of the world’s inhabitants live in countries with a Free press, while 44 percent have a Partly Free press and 40 percent live in Not Free environments.

The U.S. media can be servile, corrupt and biased but the idea that there are few other countries in the world whose media is more subservient to government power than America ignores a rather huge swath of world media that is actually run by the state.

(AP Photo)

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There's been a good deal of "nothing to see here" world weariness among commentators assessing the WikiLeaks document dump. But this seems rather significant to me:

Senior Chinese officials have said the Korean peninsula should be reunified under Seoul's control, according to leaked classified US diplomatic cables.

They are said to have told an ex-South Korean minister China placed little value on the North as a buffer state....

Mr Chun said the Chinese officials "were ready to 'face the new reality' that the DPRK [Democratic People's Republic of Korea] now had little value to China as a buffer state - a view that since North Korea's 2006 nuclear test had reportedly gained traction among senior PRC [People's Republic of China] leaders."

"Chun argued that in the event of a North Korean collapse, China would clearly 'not welcome' any US military presence north of the DMZ [Demilitarised Zone]," the ambassador's message said.

"The PRC would be comfortable with a reunified Korea controlled by Seoul and anchored to the United States in a 'benign alliance' - as long as Korea was not hostile towards China," it added.

This is also a pretty interesting case for the utility of secrecy: is it better, or worse, from a U.S. standpoint, that the North Koreans hear about this?

Update: Drezner says not so fast:

I don't doubt that Chinese officials said everything reported in the documents. I do doubt that those statements mean that China is willing to walk away from North Korea. It means that Chinese diplomats are... er.... diplomatic. They will tell U.S. and South Korean officials some of what they want to hear. I'm sure that they will say somewhat different things to their North Korean counterparts.

The key is to determine whether China's actions reflect their words. And over the past six months, China has not acted in a manner consistent with Tisdall's claims.

Fair point, although I do think that China's tipping of the hat that they would be OK with a reunified peninsula still bound to the U.S. military is a significant move - although it's obviously unclear how widely that view is shared within China.

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Writing in the Financial Times Zbigniew Brzezinski offers some advice to President Obama:

The president has to take the initiative. Provocation of this kind cannot be dismissed lightly or left in the hands of diplomats. He should call President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea to reassure him personally and directly of US support. Then he should call President Hu Jintao of China and express serious concern. He should call Prime Minister Naoto Kan of Japan, as America’s prime ally in the Pacific and given its proximity to the Korean conundrum. He should also call President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia. Hillary Clinton, US secretary of state, should then follow up on these calls and set in motion convening the United Nations Security Council.

Reaching out to China and the relevant players here is a good idea, but there's a danger in taking "presidential ownership" of a problem of this kind. Like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which the president is currently struggling with, it is unsolvable.

(AP Photo)

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Not so much:

China’s influence is rising steadily around the world. But the problem of how to manage its Communist neighbor and one-time ally appears to befuddle China’s leaders, who stumble from indulging the North to sending occasional signals of pique, all without making the country adopt a path toward greater openness or stability.

“At the moment China has limited influence,” Cai Jian, a professor of Korean studies at Fudan University, said in a telephone interview. “On one hand it’s unhappy with North Korean actions and its provocative behavior, but on the other hand it still has to support North Korea.”

It's possible for China to really pressure the North by cutting off aid, but, as Jian notes, fears of a refugee flood and the prospect of an American military presence directly on their border has thus far stayed China's hand.

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The language of environmental diplomacy:

Air pollution in Beijing was so bad Friday that the U.S. Embassy, which has been independently monitoring air quality, ran out of conventional adjectives to describe it, at one point saying it was "crazy bad."

The embassy later deleted the phrase, saying it was an "incorrect" description and adding that it was working to revise the language to use when the air quality index goes above its highest point of 500, which means the air is considered hazardous for all people by U.S. standards.

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Be careful what you tweet in China:

Amnesty International today urged the Chinese authorities to release a woman sentenced to a year in a labour camp for retweeting a supposedly anti-Japanese message.

Chinese online activist Cheng Jianping was sentenced to one year of ‘Re-education Through Labour’ on Monday for “disturbing social order”, having retweeted a satirical suggestion on October 17 that the Japanese Pavilion at the Shanghai Expo be attacked.

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In the LA Times, David Schenker & Chirstina Lin argue that we should be concerned about China's relationships in the Middle East:

Given China's extensive presence throughout the world — attributable at least in part to the fact that its foreign policy is devoid of moral concerns — it is unrealistic to expect that Washington could have somehow excluded Beijing from the Middle East. Indeed, the very absence of considerations other than national interest makes China an appealing partner to states in a region where authoritarianism is rife. Some Mideast states also likely view China as useful counterbalance against the West.

That first sentence is odd, no? If China's growing global role is at least partly attributable to a lack of "moral concerns" what do the authors think about the considerably larger U.S. global role? They continue:

What is of concern, however, is that the rapid rate of Chinese progress occurs amid a growing regional perception that the United States is withdrawing from the Middle East.

Although China holds a significant portion of U.S. debt, and trade relations are strong, at the end of the day the two nations are competitors — both strategic and economic — with profoundly differing worldviews. It may be that this great game will end with Washington and Beijing as allies. More likely, though, a modus vivendi will emerge between the two powers. Until then, Washington should work to strengthen its remaining regional allies and reestablish a presence in the region.

Unfortunately the piece ends there, so it's not clear what's entailed by "reestablishing" a presence (add more military bases, reoccupy Iraq?). It's also a bit ironic, given how the authors castigate China for being "devoid of moral concerns" in its foreign policy to then urge the U.S. to reinforce ties with "regional allies" in the Middle East. Those allies, with the exception of Israel, are uniformly autocratic, when they're not tyrannical. Of course, we can't boost ties with democratic Turkey because the authors spend the beginning of the piece bashing "Islamist" Turkey for partnering with China.

The more important question is why, exactly, we should worry about what China's doing in the Middle East. The authors advance the idea that the U.S. and China are competitors, so presumably we would guard our position in the Middle East to exercise some kind of leverage over China. But in reality, it doesn't work that way. We're the ones begging Beijing to sign onto our sanctions against countries in the region. If push came to shove, the U.S. could halt or massively disrupt oil shipments from the Middle East - but that would not only hurt China but every oil-importing country in Asia and beyond.

It seems to me that China has a logical strategy with respect to the Middle East - let the U.S. pick up the cost of stationing forces in the region and exhaust itself waging various wars and hatching clever "containment" schemes to manage this or that political actor it disapproves of while China makes deals and gets access to needed energy resources.

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The Wall Street Journal takes an in depth look at how "state capitalism" works in China:

Central to China's approach are policies that champion state-owned firms and other so-called national champions, seek aggressively to obtain advanced technology, and manage its exchange rate to benefit exporters. It leverages state control of the financial system to channel low-cost capital to domestic industries—and to resource-rich foreign nations whose oil and minerals China needs to maintain rapid growth.

China's policies are partly a product of its unique status: a developing country that is also a rising superpower. Its leaders don't assume the market is preeminent. Rather, they see state power as essential to maintaining stability and growth, and thereby ensuring continued Communist Party rule.

The article notes that Japan pursued a similar strategy during its economic ascendancy, so it's too soon to worry that the sky is falling. If Chinese growth stalls (and you have to imagine at some point it will), they may be forced to rethink some elements of "state capitalism."

(AP Photo)

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David Axe gives us a glimpse of the AirSea Battle concept:

It seems AirSea Battle mostly involves better communications and command procedures for integrating ships and planes into the same task forces. But there’s at least one new piece of hardware: a new, more deadly anti-ship missile. On Wednesday, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency awarded Lockheed Martin a 3-year, $160 million contract to develop the Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile. The goal is for LRASM to give Navy ships “the ability to attack important enemy ships outside the ranges of the enemy’s ability to respond with anti-ship missiles of their own.”

LRASM must fit into the Navy’s existing vertical-launch cells and should rely less on “off-board” targeting — drones, planes, satellites — than current weapons. In other words, the LRASM must have its own, smart sensors. That would allow even isolated or electronically-jammed American ships to sink enemy vessels.

It's good to see the Department of Defense finding inspiration in old Atari games. More, in a serious vein, here.

(AP Photo)

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The Conference Board's Global Economic Outlook claims that the "emerging markets" are going to be the drivers of global economic growth through 2010. At such time, the Board says that China may have a larger GDP than the U.S. in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP) by 2020.

Through 2015, the Conference Board expects U.S. GDP to putter along at 1.8 percent growth while China hums along at 9.2 and India follows behind at 8.3. The Board sees China's growth rates cooling a bit on the back-end of the forecast: down to 8.6, while both the U.S. and India make growth gains. Meanwhile, in Europe

In short, the Board argues that "we are seeing unprecedented shifts in the distribution of global output."

Derek Scissors says we should be skeptical of these numbers because the price of goods in China is likely to increase, which would impact the PPP comparisons considerably.

(AP Photo)

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A new poll finds that about a third of Chinese think China should use force to back up its territorial claims in Asia:

The Global Times newspaper said more than 90 percent of the Chinese responding to the poll are concerned about territorial disputes between China and Japan and Southeast Asian countries but do not view the issue as a national priority.

A vast majority of the respondents, 76.3 percent, reject the idea of the United States acting as a mediator in China's territorial disputes and 40 percent suspect Washington is instigating an "anti-China alliance" over the territorial issues....

The poll results show that 39.8 percent of the respondents believe China should fight for its territorial claims, while 35.3 percent favor "putting disputes aside and developing (the islands) jointly while insisting on our sovereignty," the newspaper said.

The Global Times is affiliated with the official Communist party newspaper, the People's Daily so caveat emptor on the poll results.

(AP Photo)

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Alvin Felzenberg and Alexander Gray make the case for bolstering the U.S. Navy to contain China:

Actions such as these suggest that the people formulating current U.S. military posture may have forgotten a vital lesson of the Cold War: that perception can often be just as important as reality. It was America’s unprecedented investments in rebuilding and protecting Western Europe through the Marshall Plan and deterring an outside threat against it through NATO that demonstrated to the Soviet Union America’s commitment to defending the West against aggression. But for the perception that the U.S. was willing to go to war to protect democratic countries on that continent, the history of the last half-century would have been the story of either the loss of freedom through accommodation to Soviet aggression, or war.

The trouble with this version of Cold War history is that it leaves out a rather important fact: the U.S. fought two massive wars - at a cost of over 100,000 lives - to sustain the "perception" that we were willing to stand up to Soviet Communism. Are the authors suggesting that the U.S. embark on similar endeavors to impress upon the Chinese leadership our seriousness?

They continue:

Absent an overwhelming superiority in naval strength to back up trade and other negotiated agreements, President Obama’s efforts to re-engage in Asia will be worthless. China respects power and will adjust its foreign policy to the realization that the interests of America and its allies are both immutable and capable of being defended. That is the true path to an enduring peace.

I think it's correct for the U.S. to sustain a good deal of military power in Asia, of which the Navy plays a huge role. But this kind of advice really, really falls apart without a clear definition as to the American interests that are supposed to be "immutable." It's particularly important to spell out which of our allies' interests we are expected to treat as immutable and worthy of dying for.

(AP Photo)

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1) Go to Google Maps.

2) Click on 'get directions.'

3) Type in 'Japan' as the start location.

4) Type in 'China' as the end location.

5) Go to direction #43.

6) Laugh, dammit!

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Forbes has a list of their choices for the Most Powerful People on Earth. The list is capped at the top 68. Coming in at number one is China's President Hu Jintao (Obama is number two). Coming in at 68, Julian Assange, the creator of WikiLeaks.

(AP Photo)

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After linking to a rather gruesome story of Chinese human rights violations, Jay Nordlinger writes:

Meanwhile, remember that the policy of the entire world — with the exception of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, oddly — is never, ever, ever to cause the dictatorship in Beijing the slightest discomfort, ever.

Obviously, this is hyperbole, but it's wrong nonetheless. Nations may be wary about wading into China's domestic politics, but they're not interested in making the world an overly comfortable place for Beijing.

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While her husband and many of her administration colleagues are out on the campaign trail, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is on the other side of the world on Monday, beginning a three day visit to Malaysia - the first bilateral visit to the nation in fifteen years.

A number of issues will be on the table during her time there - not the least of which, of course, is China and America's interests in the region in the wake of the ASEAN summit. Clinton has specifically denied to the local press that the U.S. seeks to "contain" China, but it never hurts to reach certain understandings.

Besides the normal security discussions, economic interests will also be a prominent concern. As the Wall Street Journal recently noted, the rebounding export market and domestic consumption have outpaced expectations, and the key now is to reinvigorate private investment - which Malaysia can probably attract via continued transparency reforms, anti-corruption efforts and moving the oft-cited affirmative action policies toward a merit-based solution. Attracting more private investment doesn't require these steps, but they'd grease the skids.

Yet Clinton's visit also brings up a broader signal as well as a need for engagement in the context of more long-term interests. Robert Kaplan raised a similar issue in a Los Angeles Times piece last week concerning the effects on Islam of market globalization:

Yet this new, postmodern Islam with a hard Middle Eastern edge is ramming up against another import: the glitzy materialism that in Malaysia and Indonesia is associated with nominally communist China. This is the real "clash of civilizations" going on. Americans thought they owned the face of global capitalism after the collapse of the Berlin Wall; it turns out that in Islamic East Asia, the Chinese do. Ethnic Chinese own many of the spanking new malls packed with Louis Vuitton, Versace and other designer stores, the places to observe women in the most fashionable silk jilbabs and the most revealing, sophisticated dress. In Muslim Southeast Asia, modesty often stops at the neck.

Malaysia's path as a developing nation is one that seems all the more important in the context of the continued clash around the world concerning our views on radical Muslims and the pursuit of true moderates. The recent arrest of the would-be Metro bomber in Northern Virginia, the UPS plane bomb threat and other incidents are all present in the minds of many American voters this week. That is, sad to say, the face of Islam for many Americans.

If U.S. engagement with moderate Islam is to have a future, that future may well be in Malaysia and other pockets of the Muslim world that have turned to embrace global capitalism. And if the face of Islam in America is going to become more moderate and approachable, then I suspect it will take more than just bilateral talks once every decade and a half.

(AP Photo)

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Not only has China now built the world's fastest supercomputer, surpassing a U.S.-built machine, they're also looking to surpass the U.S. in space:

It's too early to call it a race, says Henry Hertzfeld, research professor of space policy and international affairs in the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. But China's Martian orbiter may indicate a second destination for the country's space program.... Hertzfeld nevertheless cautioned that the differences between the 1960s and the 21st century make for a very different competitive landscape. There are more countries now with space capabilities and access to space; there is much more cooperation among nations; and the costs are astronomical.

"I think it's too early to tell if we will engage in a true 'race' to Mars as we did with the USSR to the moon," he said.
But the official messages from governments seem to tell a different story, with the U.S., India, China, and Russia all declaring that they hope to reach Mars at around the same time.

I would be really surprised if we get a replay of the Cold War-era space race. As America's own space program demonstrated, there's a real difference between space exploration as a bauble of Great Power status (the moon landings) and any kind of strategic, long-term space program. Landing people on Mars just to prove you can do it is a ridiculous waste of money absent a serious strategic vision.

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Investors Business Daily is outraged that Russia is helping Venezuela develop nuclear technology, demanding that someone remind Russia of the Monroe Doctrine.

Unfortunately, the U.S. doesn't have any leg to stand on with respect to the Monroe Doctrine given how it's become a bi-partisan staple of foreign policy establishment dogma that the U.S. does not recognize "spheres of influence." It would be self-evidently absurd for the U.S. to protest Russia's dalliances in Venezuela (a little under 2,000 miles from the U.S. border) when the U.S. is pushing to admit countries that border Russia into NATO.

That said, should we be dusting off the concept of 'spheres of influence' in an era of emerging great powers? Ted Galen Carpenter argues that we should:

Russia needs to find a graceful way out of its increasingly cozy relationship with Chavez, and the United States needs to stop talking about deploying missile defenses or expanding NATO eastward. Washington and Moscow must acknowledge that the concept of spheres of influence is alive and well, and that gratuitous violations of that concept will negate any prospect for a reset in relations.

U.S. leaders must also comprehend that cordial relations with China require a willingness to accept that East Asia’s rapidly rising great power will seek to establish a sphere of influence in its neighborhood. Beijing’s expansive territorial claims in the South China Sea and the recent spat with Japan over disputed islets in another body of water are signs of that process. China’s growing power and assertiveness means that the United States will need to tread softly regarding such territorial disputes, as well as the even more sensitive Taiwan issue, if Washington wants to avoid nasty confrontations with Beijing.

While I think avoiding nasty confrontations should be a key goal, I'm not sure how affording China a 'sphere of influence' would work in practice. China's prospective 'sphere' encompasses major economic powerhouses like Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, and some weaker Southeast Asian states. Unlike, say, Russia, where the U.S. ties to countries like Georgia or even Ukraine were historically relatively weak and economically negligible, American ties to Japan and South Korea are anything but.

(AP Photo)

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An interesting development on the China rare earths front (who ever thought that geology could be so exciting). The New York Times is reporting that China is now blocking rare earth shipments to the U.S. and Europe:

“The embargo is expanding” beyond Japan, said one of the three rare earth industry officials, all of whom insisted on anonymity for fear of business retaliation by Chinese authorities.

They said Chinese customs officials imposed the broader restrictions on Monday morning, hours after a top Chinese official summoned international news media Sunday night to denounce United States trade actions.

This is ultimately going to prove self-defeating for China, but it will prove very lucrative for anyone in the U.S. mining industry. Relatedly, I wonder what this action does to the "responsible stakeholder" view of a rising China.

(AP Photo)

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According to the Broadband Forum, there are just shy of 500 million broadband subscribers worldwide:

China, the powerhouse of global broadband in the 21st century so far, was responsible for 43 percent of all net broadband lines added in Q2 and performed far better than the same quarter in 2009 (China includes Mainland China, Hong Kong & Macau). In Western Europe, many markets did better than the equivalent 2009 quarter. Germany, the UK, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Poland and Turkey, amongst others, all reported strong numbers. Central and South American markets have cooled to an extent, but many are still reporting good quarterly growth (of 5-7 percent). However, the US and in particular Canada, broadband growth has significantly slowed, affected by the end of housing stimulus packages. In Canada's case, the market slowed to levels not seen for a decade.

(AP Photo)

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I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on the foreign policy of Imperial Britain in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but what little I know of it makes me dubious of this argument from Thomas Barnett and, by extension, Robert Kaplan:

Where do Afghanistan and Pakistan fit into this "new Great Game," as Kaplan dubs it? They stand between, on the one hand, India and China and, on the other, all the energy that pair of rising behemoths needs to access in the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. So the current effort in Afghanistan is not a case of America imposing globalization's connectivity on places where it was never meant to go. Instead, it represents -- like in Iraq -- another situation where the U.S. is making dangerous places just safe enough for Asian powers to access much-needed energy and mineral resources.

As I understood it, Britain waged its "Great Game" against Russia for influence in Central Asia and the outskirts of the Ottaman Empire because Britain wanted to protect the trade routes it had between England and India. In other words, there was a clear strategic rationale for why Britain played the Great Game and the aim was to benefit Britain. Barnett argues that the U.S. should continue nation building in Afghanistan on behalf of India and China. But what's in it for the United States?

Barnett argues that we'd be a "stabilizer" between two rising powers, but one has to wonder how much of a role Western troops fighting and dying in Afghanistan should really play in that balancing effort.

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There's an interesting experiment playing out now with China and its rare earth mineral monopoly that holds lessons for the U.S. in the Middle East. Three weeks ago, China began withholding shipments of rare earth minerals to Japan in response to Japan's detention of a Chinese fishing crew operating in disputed waters. This mineral embargo strikes a direct blow at many of the electronic industries in Japan that rely on these minerals for products such as batteries in hybrid cars.

Japan finally relented and released the sailors, and later their captain, in what looked like a capitulation in the face of China's "resource weapon." Whether this is the case or not, I think over the long term China's actions have actually undercut this gambit. It will almost certainly spur other nations with their own rare earths resources (which, according to the Times, aren't actually that rare) to begin, or in the case of the U.S., resume, mining operations to break China's near monopoly.

The lesson here for the Middle East is obvious. For years there's been a fear of an "oil weapon" or worries that a hegemonic power (first Iraq, now Iran) could "take over the world's oil supply" and wield it to our detriment. But there's a reason that the Arab world has only used the so-called "oil weapon" once - it doesn't work. No matter how painful the initial blow, the effect is short-term. Over the long term, the consuming states devise alternatives. But in the case of producing states, there is no alternative. Unlike China, most of the oil-producing states in the Gulf don't have a diversified industrial base. If they can't export oil, they can't eat.

(AP Photo)

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In Vietnam, Defense Secretary Robert Gates stated the administration's position on Asia:

On Tuesday, Gates echoed recent statements by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that the United States would not take sides on competing Asian territorial claims but would insist on open access to international waters and shipping lanes.

"The United States has always exercised our rights and supported the rights of others to transit through, and operate in, international waters," Gates said. "This will not change."

Washington's stance has irked Beijing, and Chinese leaders have told the Obama administration to butt out of what it sees as local disputes.

On the one hand, I think the U.S. position is the correct one with respect to navigating international waters, particularly given the amount of commerce that passes through Asia. On the other, it's worth remembering that with defense partnerships with Japan and budding relationships with other Asian states like Vietnam, we're taking defacto positions on these territorial disputes - against China.

It's also odd to hear the U.S. lecture China on what it can and cannot declare as a core interest. The U.S. takes a much more expansive view of its "core interests" than any other country on the planet, including China, so it's little wonder that our insistences with respect to the South China Sea grate on the ears of the Chinese military.

(AP Photo)

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Nic Maclellan shows how France's colonial holdings give it the third largest exclusive economic zone (defined as water out to 200 nautical miles from the coast over which a country has special rights over the exploitation of natural resources) in the world.

This in response to a very pertinent question:

Does any other country successfully claim an expanse of blue ocean so distant from its land mass? Are there any such precedents, or is China pushing totally unrecognized definitions here?

Let's start with some easy examples, where a body of water is nearly enclosed by a territory (a 'lake' if you will). Doesn't the US virtually control the Gulf of Mexico? If there's an oil rig more than 200km from the US coast, is that in international waters? If so, who, if anyone, agrees on the oilfield's boundaries and the terms of the lease?

(AP Photo)

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Thomas Barnett waxes incredulous:

This is the state of our discussion: the world's biggest and by-far strongest military regularly getting up into the grill of the second-biggest economy on the planet and letting it know--in no uncertain terms--that it will not countenance China exercising military power in its own region! Why? Despite being intensely overdrawn militarily around the planet and facing military resource shortages in the very same regions where Chinese economic interests are skyrocketing, it's in our best interest to deny China's rise with all our might. Safely buttressed by the vast security resources of our NATO allies, it's clear that we don't need any new friends and--instead--must do everything possible to deny their emergence, because more Chinese security means less U.S. security; it is a completely zero-sum game.

Brilliant stuff. I can't imagine why the Chinese look upon us as anything but the best of friends. I am flabbergasted at our naivete in hoping for something better to emerge.

The U.S. position toward China does seem to swerve between patronizing platitudes (they'll be a "stakeholder") and wary hedging.

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Stuxnet, the computer virus that wrecked havoc with Iran's nuclear facilities, may have been a Chinese virus cooked up to attack India:

The deadly Stuxnet internet worm, which was thought to be targeting Iran's nuclear programme, might actually have been aimed at India by none other than China.

Providing a fresh twist in the tale, well-known American cyber warfare expert Jeffrey Carr, who specialises in investigations of cyber attacks against government, told TOI that China, more than any other country, was likely to have written the worm which has terrorised the world since June.

While Chinese hackers are known to target Indian government websites, the scale and sophistication of Stuxnet suggests that only a government no less than that of countries like US, Israel or China could have done it. "I think it's more likely that China is behind Stuxnet than any other country," Carr told TOI, adding that he would provide more details at the upcoming NASSCOM DSCI Security Conclave in Chennai in December.

This is the first I've heard of such accusations and there doesn't appear to be any other experts making similar claims. But still, an intriguing twist.

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Ethan Epstein, a talented young writer, has a series of pieces this week at Slate concerning how the Chinese look at North Korea, in an odd sort of voyeurism:

North Korea fascinates even Chinese people living under nominally Communist rule. All the tourists on the boat clutching binoculars and pointing out sights on the North Korean side of the river are Chinese. The tourists at the Dandong International Hotel peering out into Sinuiju over breakfast were also Chinese.

Chenyin Jin, a Chinese academic, speculates that "Chinese people like to see North Korea because it reminds them of what life was like under Mao. There's an almost nostalgic appeal." Given how much China has changed in the last 30 years, looking at North Korea is like looking back in time for a lot of Chinese people. It is hardly surprising that the great majority of the 16,000 or so tourists who visit North Korea annually on stage-managed propaganda tours are Chinese. (Only a little more than 1,000 hail from Western countries.)

But there's something ghoulish about all this. Like "ghetto bus tours" of Compton or Harlem church tours, it can be argued that all this staring at North Korea amounts to little more than rubbernecking on a grand scale. Sure, North Korea is a country closed to the outside world, so it's easy to understand why people would be curious about how life is lived there. Yet as our boat slows down and we look through our binoculars at the skinny and woefully abused people on the riverbanks, I can't help but feel that this whole "industry" is a little disgusting.

I'll be curious to read his entries, and hope you will too.

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The Financial Times reports on China's move to shore up its hold on the rare earth mineral market:

China produced 97 per cent of the world’s rare earths last year, and global concerns about that monopoly have peaked in recent weeks, after Japanese traders reported their rare earth shipments were halted during a diplomatic dispute between their country and China.

Thomas Barnett explains why China's gotten a strangle hold on the market:

The world has simply allowed China to achieve its dominant production position by abandoning their own mining efforts. Why? Very expensive and very environmentally damaging.

It's likely impossible, and self-defeating, to become "self sufficient" in rare earths (just as it is impossible to become "energy independent"). That said, 97 percent is a pretty alarming number. But I suspect that the more China thinks of its rare earths market position as a strategic cudgel, the faster it's going to lose that market share as alarmed nations reinvest in extraction of their own resources.

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Sam Roggeveen assess China's recent efforts at bulking up its naval strength:

In surface ships, the PLA Navy is still substantially smaller and less capable than the Japanese maritime force, never mind the US Navy. But here, the story is growth and modernisation. China has increased its destroyer and frigate fleet while retiring obsolete ships and introducing advanced new types.

In both surface ships and submarines, Callick's description of 'steady' growth applies. Although there have been major acquisitions of Russian ships and subs, the emphasis has been on small-scale domestic production. After a handful of units, there's a lull while the PLA Navy accumulates operational experience, which leads to new designs. From the outside, at least, it all looks very methodical — even the headline-grabbing purchase of a derelict Russian aircraft carrier has been followed by a painfully slow refurbishment effort.

Given its economic growth, China's naval modernisation over the last decade could have been much more spectacular.

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First it was a flair-up with China over disputed islands to its south. Now Japan and Russia are locking horns over the Kuril Islands to Japan's north.

This is certainly the kind of dynamic that could force a reappraisal inside the ruling DPJ about the merit of U.S. defense ties.

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The Obama administration's decision to insist on an Israeli settlement freeze is, as some predicted, turning out to be a mistake, at least from the standpoint of rejuvenating the peace process. And it's pretty obvious why: the administration drew a line in the sand that they could not enforce. Leave aside whether they should have drawn this particular line so firmly, the fact is they let their rhetoric get out ahead of what they were actually willing or able to do to apply pressure to defend their line.

This is, unfortunately, a common practice in Washington. It was evident during the Bush years, when numerous stern warnings to the likes of Iran and North Korea went unheeded by their intended recipients with no serious consequences. The Obama administration has picked up the torch not only with the peace process, but with Iran as well.

The point here is not that the U.S. should follow through on every foolish pronouncement it makes, but that its public officials should stop using the language of "red lines" unless they actually and sincerely mean to enforce them. Either offer some mealy-mouthed equivocation or keep a reserved silence. Is that so hard?

China, too, has arguably made a similar blunder by recently declaring the South China Sea a "core national interest" - language it previously reserved for discussing Tibet and Taiwan. This proclamation set off an immediate, and overwhelmingly negative response from China's neighbors and the U.S. Whether this was a gaffe or not, it's now a marker in the sand that China is going to have to either defend (which would be costly and potentially calamitous) or claw back (which would be embarrassing). Either way, it's suggests that China is beginning to "talk the talk" of a superpower. They may rue the results.

(AP Photo)

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The Economist has a good piece on why India will over-take China, putting them at odds with the recent swooning over China's efficient authoritarian/capitalist model. They write that India's demography is more favorable to long-term growth than China's, which has been stunted by its "One Child" policy. The second driver of Indian growth, they argue, is its democracy:

The notion that democracy retards development in poor countries has gained currency in recent years. Certainly, it has its disadvantages. Elected governments bow to the demands of selfish factions and interest groups. Even the most urgent decisions are endlessly debated and delayed.

China does not have this problem. When its technocrats decide to dam a river, build a road or move a village, the dam goes up, the road goes down and the village disappears. The displaced villagers may be compensated, but they are not allowed to stand in the way of progress. China’s leaders make rational decisions that balance the needs of all citizens over the long term. This has led to rapid, sustained growth that has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Small wonder that authoritarians everywhere cite China as their best excuse not to allow democracy just yet.

No doubt a strong central government would have given India a less chaotic Commonwealth games, but there is more to life than badminton and rhythmic gymnastics. India’s state may be weak, but its private companies are strong. Indian capitalism is driven by millions of entrepreneurs all furiously doing their own thing. Since the early 1990s, when India dismantled the “licence raj” and opened up to foreign trade, Indian business has boomed. The country now boasts legions of thriving small businesses and a fair number of world-class ones whose English-speaking bosses network confidently with the global elite. They are less dependent on state patronage than Chinese firms, and often more innovative: they have pioneered the $2,000 car, the ultra-cheap heart operation and some novel ways to make management more responsive to customers. Ideas flow easily around India, since it lacks China’s culture of secrecy and censorship. That, plus China’s rampant piracy, is why knowledge-based industries such as software love India but shun the Middle Kingdom.

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Michael Auslin isn't sure why they were conducted:

China has claimed the South China Sea as a core national interest, as we’ve repeatedly heard about lately, and is increasing its naval activities, including aerial exercises, in the East China Sea. All the while it refuses repeated requests that it settle territorial disputes in Southeast Asia in an established, transparent, multilateral manner. It would be a shame for one of America’s closest allies, Australia, to now decide to go down the path of paying respect to China’s maritime ambitions in the hopes of influencing its behavior. What the Australians get out of these exercises is difficult to discern. What the Chinese get is clear, as is the message smaller nations in the region receive.

Rory Medcalf offers an explanation:

Any suggestion that practical navy-to-navy cooperation and dialogue means that Australia is somehow slipping into China's strategic orbit and placing less importance on the alliance with the US – or on promising partnerships with Japan, South Korea and India — is wrong. Indeed, HMAS Warramunga's tour of North Asia included a re-enactment of the Incheon landing, a sign of Australian solidarity with South Korea and the US in these tense times on the Korean Peninsula.

The bottom line is that there are shared security benefits to be derived from navies getting to know each other better: improved channels of communication, understanding of each other's command systems and ways of operating, even basic awareness of the level of seamanship each side is capable of, all of which can help to calibrate decisions and liaison in a crisis. This applies at least as much to nations that might have clashes of interests at sea as it does to those who see their objectives as generally in harmony. That is why China's reluctance to resume military links with the US has been so self-defeating, and needs to end soon, for everybody's sake.

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Rasmussen Reports:

Speaking at a dinner of American and Chinese businessmen in New York last week, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said the China-U.S. relationship “enjoys a bright future because common interests between our two countries far outweigh our differences.” But just 32% of Americans agree.

A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey finds that 30% of Adults do not share the premier's view of common interests, and 38% are not sure. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Most Americans agree, however, that U.S. relations with China are important. Eighty-three percent (83%) think the relation between the two nations is at least somewhat important, including 53% who think it is Very Important. Just nine percent (9%) think relations between the two are not important. This remains unchanged from nearly a year ago.

Still, an overwhelming majority of Americans (87%) are concerned about the level of U.S. debt now owned by China, including 61% who are Very Concerned. Just nine percent (9%) are not very or not at all concerned.

(AP Photo)

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Walter Russell Mead does a nice job shooting down Thomas Friedman's contention that electric cars are the key to rejuvenating American manufacturing and the middle class. To just add a bit to Mead's case, the idea that electric cars will transition America off of "foreign sources" of energy and help us compete with China is simply not true. As frequent RCW contributor Daniel McGroarty has tireslessly pointed out, the batteries we'd be inserting into those electric cars rely on Rare Earth minerals to function. And guess who ha