US policy focus shifting to Asia-Pacific

By Sushil Seth

The US preoccupation with the war on terror and military engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq over the last decade has distracted it from its focus on the Asia-Pacific region.

This may be changing.

The main reason is that China is making waves in the region, causing disquiet among its Asian neighbors. This was evident last year over a whole range of regional issues.

The Obama administration, when it came to power, was hoping to create a peaceful partnership with China. There were a series of high-level visits to China with that objective in mind.

Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, was there thanking China for continuing to buy US bonds.

She announced that human rights issues wouldn’t be allowed to derail US-China relations.

Premier Wen Jiabao, on the other hand, worried about China’s investments in US treasury notes in the light of economic recession in that country.

And when President Obama visited China, Beijing didn’t seem to regard it as anything special.

China appeared to regard all these special gestures by the new Obama administration as a sign of US weakness, and hence an opportunity to advance its own ambitions.

It reminded one of the Nikita Khrushchev’s Soviet Union when it sought to push its global agenda by underestimating the young President Kennedy, who took power in 1961.

When the Soviet Union installed missiles in the US backyard, it led to the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, the first nightmarish case of a possible nuclear Armageddon.

Which is not to suggest that China might be tempted to do something equally dangerous and outrageous.

The point is that the US is starting to have a rethink about its Asia-Pacific policy in the wake of China’s determination to push its own regional agenda. The response to US overtures for a peaceful partnership has been rebuffed.

The time has, therefore, come to consider that China is more interested in a hegemonic role, seeking to edge out the US, if possible.

China is not a partner but a serious challenger and a threat.

Australia, a US ally, spelled out the Chinese threat to the region in its 2009 defense white paper.

It is reinvigorating its defense ties with the United States and Japan, and starting an annual strategic dialogue with South Korea.

During a recent visit to Japan, Prime Minister Julia Gillard told the Japan National Press Club, “The region is in strategic flux, where changing power relativities are playing out against a background of historical mistrust and conflict.”

She emphasized, “Stability and security depend on the integral role of the US and on developing the right regional architecture to encourage co-operation on security challenges…”

She couldn’t have been clearer about the new destabilizing element in the region.

Canberra, therefore, has a challenge of its own to reconcile its strategic alliance with the United States and its primary economic relationship with China.

Beijing is not terribly happy over Australia’s security alliance with the United States, but is resigned to it.

As a sop to China, the Gillard government has agreed to the visits of Chinese navy ships.

But the central strategic tenet of Australia’s policy, its military alliance with the United States, remains with the goal of meeting a future Chinese military threat.

Japan and South Korea feel similarly threatened.

At the same time, other regional countries are busy developing their own options.

None of them believe China’s routine assertion that it is not a hegemonic power.

In the US, there is increasing realization that they should wrap up their military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq to face the most serious challenge from a very assertive and, sometime, angry China.

The killing of Osama bin Laden is likely to hasten this process.

In a wide-ranging article on the Obama administration’s foreign policy in the New Yorker, Ryan Lizza writes, “ One of [Thomas] Donilon’s [national security adviser] overriding beliefs, which Obama adopted as his own, was that America needed to rebuild its reputation, extricate itself from the Middle East and Afghanistan, and turn its attention toward Asia and China’s unchecked influence in the region.”

Similarly, Kurt Campbell, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, has said, “ We’ve been on a little bit of a Middle East detour over the course of the last ten years.”

But, “… our future will be dominated utterly and fundamentally by developments in Asia and the Pacific region.”

This is not to suggest that the US and China are on a confrontation course in the short term.

Indeed, the two countries are periodically engaged in strategic and economic dialogue at high levels, designed to manage their often-prickly relationship.

And in this, China’s poor human rights record is emerging as a difficult issue.

A case in point is the recent strategic and economic dialogue between the two countries in Washington where China’s crackdown on dissidents and other human rights issues was prominently highlighted by the US side.

Indeed, a recent interview by Hillary Clinton to the Atlantic Monthly was released during the 2-day talks.

In this interview, Clinton labeled China’s human rights record as “deplorable.”

She also said, “They’re worried [about the Arab Spring of revolution], and are trying to stop history, which is a fool’s errand.”

Considering that she had earlier said, during her China visit, that human rights wouldn’t be allowed to derail Sino-US relations, this is quite a turn around in US attitude to China’s violation of human rights.

The two-day talks with the Chinese side, according to the Guardian, ended with “worsening relations over censorship and crackdowns on dissidents.”

The US appears quite serious on censorship and human rights violation by China, and is allocating funds on developing technology to overcome internet censorship.

It is interesting that among many words and subjects banned by Chinese censors, Hillary Clinton has joined the honored ranks.

According to the Guardian, Chinese internet censors “recently blocked search results for ‘Hillary Clinton’ after a speech championing internet freedom.”

China is paranoid about a “jasmine revolution” type popular uprising, which it believes has been encouraged by the United States all over the Middle East.

And it fears that the United States is up to no good with its advocacy of human rights in China.

Only a paranoid and insecure regime can conjure up such fears and conspiracies.

Therefore, it will always be difficult to create a partnership for peace with China’s oligarchs looking for phantoms everywhere.

Since they want to quarantine China from the prevalent revolutionary virus, their record on human rights is going to get worse.

Combined with their hegemonic designs on the Asia-Pacific region, the United States will have a difficult time managing relations with China.

Precisely because of this, the US needs to give grater attention to China’s so-called “peaceful rise”

Will China go the way of the Soviet Union?

Will China go the way of the Soviet Union?

By S.P.SETH

China’s ruling oligarchs are afraid of their own shadow. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be engaged in a harsh crackdown of the country’s dissidents who simply want the political system opened up.
These dissidents and human rights activists are the mirror that reflects China’s reality. And what the rulers see is not at all pretty. Indeed, it is downright ugly. Hence, they want to smash the very mirror that reflects this ugliness.
Take the case of Ai Weiwei, China’s famous artist. He has disappeared since he was arrested on April 4 as he tried to board a plane to Hong Kong. His family has no information about his whereabouts.
The Chinese authorities are now defaming him by filtering out cooked up information about fathering an illicit child, pornography, tax evasion and so on. His real “crime” is that he spoke in favor of reforming the country’s political system.
In a recent newspaper article, the celebrated writer Salman Rushdie says, “These accusations [about Ai] are not credible to those who know him. It seems that the Chinese regime, irritated by the outspokenness of its most celebrated art export, whose renown has protected him up to now, has decided to silence him in the most brutal fashion.”
Rushdie then goes on to list some other prominent Chinese writers and artists who have been silenced by the Chinese authorities with long prison sentences or have simply disappeared.
Comparing such disappearances with what happened in the Soviet Union, Rushdie opines: “We needed the samizdat truth tellers to reveal the ugliness of the Soviet Union. The government of China has become the world’s biggest threat to freedom of speech, and so we need Ai Weiwei, Liao Yiwu and Liu Xiaobo.”
This is precisely why the Chinese regime wants them behind bars, so that they won’t reveal the ugly truth.
But just as the Soviet Union failed to crush the spirit of its dissidents and writers that significantly contributed to its collapse, China’s communist oligarchy might also be headed in that direction.
A country of China’s size and population can’t sustain a top-heavy political system of monopoly power, more so in this age of information explosion--despite the regime’s concentrated efforts to censor, control and suppress “undesirable” information and political views.
China has drawn wrong lessons from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Its rulers believe that the Soviet Union collapsed because of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika (political restructuring), leading to the erosion of the Communist Party’s power.
And they seem determined not to let it happen in China. The Tiananmen massacre in 1989 was a forewarning to China’s people that a challenge to the Party’s political monopoly will not be tolerated, even if it meant killing people.
In other words, the Party’s monopoly power is a prerequisite for perceived social stability and economic growth.
And Deng Xiaoping’s successors are following his script quite faithfully.
Indeed, they have come to fear that the country’s dissidents, activists, human rights champions, and democracy promoters might become the vanguard of China’s own “jasmine” revolution on the lines of Tunisia and elsewhere in the Middle East.
At some deeper level, they are afraid of their own people, despite all the propaganda that the Party and the people are one.
Indeed, the ongoing crackdown on dissidents has been widened to include those Chinese Christians who refuse to conform to officially-approved religious practice.
On top of it all, the Tibetans in China are once again being rounded up after some monks in a monastery have fallen foul of the authorities.
There are so many blemishes in the mirror that China’s oligarchs are starting to see phantoms everywhere.
The Soviet Union is the only large communist country that might offer some explanation for this phenomenon.
Contrary to the belief among China’s leaders, the Soviet Union didn’t suddenly collapse because of perestroika. It collapsed largely because the system hollowed out from inside---starved of the oxygen of life for a political system.
After Brezhnev, his successors died one after the other in reality as well as metaphorically.
And by the time Gorbachev came to rescue the system, the state and the system had already reached a terminal point.
In a collegium of a handful of top leaders (with the Party Standing Committee at the top of the pyramid) deciding the nation’s destiny without any reference to people, a limited political gene pool is bound to lose its vitality and renewal.
This is also true of many of China’s economic corporations run by the sons and daughters of the Party leaders at different levels.
There is an incestuous connection between China’s politics and economy, which doesn’t bode well for the country in the medium and long term.
It is true that China’s economic growth is a plus point.
But it is misdirected and unbalanced favoring industry over agriculture.
As Lester Brown recently wrote in the Washington Post, “As old deserts [in China] grow, as new ones form and as more and more irrigation wells go dry, Beijing is losing a long battle to feed its growing population on its own.”
He adds: “Enter the United States---by far the world’s largest grain exporter. It exports about 90 million tonnes of grain annually, although China requires 80 million tonnes of grain each year to meet just one-fifth of its needs.”
The point to make is that China’s economic growth has its limits creating sectoral imbalances within manufacturing as well as between manufacturing and agriculture, a widening rural-urban divide, inflationary pressures, real estate bubbles, misallocation of resources, top heavy control of the economy, lack of co-ordination, environmental damage (some of its major rivers are polluted) and so on.
On top of it all, the rampant corruption in the country is further skewing an already difficult situation.
No wonder, China’s oligarchs are afraid that the Middle Eastern contagion of popular upsurge might catch on and reach China too.
Since China’s ruling dictatorship has no other way of dealing with its critics and people but to use the sledgehammer, even this approach is unlikely to work over a period of time, as all the dictators in the Middle East are finding out to their cost.