Awakening Dragon: The Real Danger in Asia Is Coming from China
1992; Hoover Institution; Issue: 62 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0146-5945
Autores Tópico(s)Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East
ResumoSince Napoleon, Westerners have been predicting that once the Chinese dragon awoke, the world would shake. Finally, after almost a century of false starts, China seems firmly embarked on a course of explosive economic growth and military assertiveness that will indeed reverberate throughout Asia and the world. The implications for the economic and security interests of the United States are enormous. China is the only major country in the world whose military now is expanding rapidly. And it is the first example of a Communist political system on its way to meeting the economic aspirations of its people. China today is a dynamic, bubbling stew of a country in which the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 has been mostly forgotten. The people of China seem much more concerned about getting their share of the biggest economic take-off in world history. This year, China's only major disturbances have occurred when ordinary Chinese felt cheated out of a chance to buy shares in new, private companies, as did hundreds of thousands of would-be shareholders in Shenzhen in August. With a mixed bag of mercantilist and free- market economic policies, China has resumed its red-hot, 1980s' pace of 10-percent annual growth. Foreign and overseas Chinese companies are rushing to invest ever-larger stakes in China's booming economy. Meanwhile, China's exports to world markets are soaring. The foundation for all this is a grand compromise, fashioned by China's paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, and now evidently accepted by a broad cross-section of the Communist Party, that combines sweeping economic freedoms with rigid political controls. While such a combination has never worked in the long run elsewhere, Leninist capitalism could provide the formula for many years to come for the expansion of China's wealth and power. Recently, Chinese military power has been growing rapidly in both relative and absolute terms. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the prevailing pacifist mood in Japan, China faces no serious regional threat for the first time in centuries. Indeed, no other East Asian country alone could conceivably confront China today. Nevertheless, Beijing has increased military spending by more than 50 percent since 1989. Much of the new money is being spent to give China's armed forces the capability to fight and win major conflicts outside Chinese borders. Sixty New Taiwans All this affects the United States. The U.S. trade deficit with China, negligible in the late 1980s, was $13 billion last year; this year it's approaching $20 billion, second only to our deficit with Japan. The growth of the Chinese market is of course a spectacular opportunity for U.S. exporters. But American policy- makers don't have a clue about how to cope with the world's first economically successful Communist country. Our trade negotiators treat China as just another rapidly developing Asian tiger, whose trade surplus with the United States can be substantially reduced by resorting to traditional market-opening measures. Little thought is being devoted to the staggering implications that China's development holds for the United States, let alone for world trade: China could soon become an Asian economy as dynamic as Taiwan's, yet 60 times larger. President Bush's sale of F-16s to Taiwan is a first response to this emerging danger. Nor is Washington coming to grips with the implications of China's growing military strength. The sudden spurt in China's relative and absolute military power inevitably affects security relations with our best friends in Asia. Japan, Taiwan, and capitalist Southeast Asia are all unnerved by China's new assertiveness in the region, now that Beijing no longer has the Soviet Union to worry about. All of them are anxiously looking to the United States to maintain its military presence in the region and, somehow, to protect them from China. Our long-term problem in Asia is China--not stable, democratic, and still quasi-pacifist Japan. …
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