SPEAKERS CONTENTS INSERTS
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2000
[H.A.S.C. No. 106–53]
CHINA'S STRATEGIC INTENTIONS AND GOALS
HEARING
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SIXTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
HEARING HELD
JUNE 21, 2000
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HOUSE COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
One Hundred Sixth Congress
FLOYD D. SPENCE, South Carolina, Chairman
BOB STUMP, Arizona
DUNCAN HUNTER, California
JOHN R. KASICH, Ohio
HERBERT H. BATEMAN, Virginia
JAMES V. HANSEN, Utah
CURT WELDON, Pennsylvania
JOEL HEFLEY, Colorado
JIM SAXTON, New Jersey
STEVE BUYER, Indiana
TILLIE K. FOWLER, Florida
JOHN M. McHUGH, New York
JAMES TALENT, Missouri
TERRY EVERETT, Alabama
ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, Maryland
HOWARD ''BUCK'' McKEON, California
J.C. WATTS, Jr., Oklahoma
MAC THORNBERRY, Texas
JOHN N. HOSTETTLER, Indiana
SAXBY CHAMBLISS, Georgia
VAN HILLEARY, Tennessee
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JOE SCARBOROUGH, Florida
WALTER B. JONES, Jr., North Carolina
LINDSEY GRAHAM, South Carolina
JIM RYUN, Kansas
BOB RILEY, Alabama
JIM GIBBONS, Nevada
MARY BONO, California
JOSEPH PITTS, Pennsylvania
ROBIN HAYES, North Carolina
STEVEN KUYKENDALL, California
DONALD SHERWOOD, Pennsylvania
IKE SKELTON, Missouri
NORMAN SISISKY, Virginia
JOHN M. SPRATT, Jr., South Carolina
SOLOMON P. ORTIZ, Texas
OWEN PICKETT, Virginia
LANE EVANS, Illinois
GENE TAYLOR, Mississippi
NEIL ABERCROMBIE, Hawaii
MARTIN T. MEEHAN, Massachusetts
ROBERT A. UNDERWOOD, Guam
PATRICK J. KENNEDY, Rhode Island
ROD R. BLAGOJEVICH, Illinois
SILVESTRE REYES, Texas
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TOM ALLEN, Maine
VIC SNYDER, Arkansas
JIM TURNER, Texas
ADAM SMITH, Washington
LORETTA SANCHEZ, California
JAMES H. MALONEY, Connecticut
MIKE McINTYRE, North Carolina
CIRO D. RODRIGUEZ, Texas
CYNTHIA A. McKINNEY, Georgia
ELLEN O. TAUSCHER, California
ROBERT BRADY, Pennsylvania
ROBERT E. ANDREWS, New Jersey
BARON P. HILL, Indiana
MIKE THOMPSON, California
JOHN B. LARSON, Connecticut
Robert S. Rangel, Staff Director
Lisa Wetzel, Staff Assistant
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF HEARINGS
2000
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HEARING:
Wednesday, June 21, 2000, China's Strategic Intentions and Goals
APPENDIX:
Wednesday, June 21, 2000
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 21, 2000
CHINA'S STRATEGIC INTENTIONS AND GOALS
STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS
Skelton, Hon. Ike, a Representative from Missouri, Ranking Member, Committee on Armed Services
Spence, Hon. Floyd D., a Representative from South Carolina, Chairman, Committee on Armed Services
WITNESSES
McDevitt, Rear Adm., Michael, U.S. Navy (Retired), Director, Center for Strategic Studies, Center for Naval Analysis
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Pillsbury, Dr. Michael, Visiting Senior Fellow, Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University
Waldron, Dr. Arthur, Lauder Professor of International Relations, University of Pennsylvania, Visiting Scholar and Director of Asian Studies, American Enterprise Institute
Wortzel, Dr. Larry M., Ph.D, Director, Asian Studies Center, The Heritage Foundation
APPENDIX
PREPARED STATEMENTS:
[The Prepared Statements can be viewed in the hard copy.]
McDevitt, Rear Adm. Michael
Pillsbury, Dr. Michael
Skelton, Hon. Ike
Spence, Hon. Floyd D.
Waldron, Dr. Arthur
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Wortzel, Dr. Larry M.
DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
[There were no Documents Submitted for the Record.]
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
[There were no Questions and Answers Submitted for the Record.]
CHINA'S STRATEGIC INTENTIONS AND GOALS
House of Representatives,
Committee on Armed Services,
Washington, DC, Wednesday, June 21, 2000.
The Committee met, pursuant to call, at 10:15 a.m. In room 2118, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Floyd D. Spence [Chairman of the Committee] presiding.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. FLOYD D. SPENCE, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM SOUTH CAROLINA, CHAIRMAN, COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
The CHAIRMAN. The Committee will please be in order. Today the full Committee meets for the first of several hearings intended to review China's foreign policy, security strategies, military capabilities and view of the United States. This morning's hearing will explore China's strategic intentions and goals.
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Today the United States has roughly 100,000 military personnel deployed in the Asia-Pacific region defending America's interests. These interests, which are political, economic and military, appear to be increasingly challenged by China, which is posturing to become the dominant power in Asia. The divergent security interests between the United States and China, especially as they relate to Taiwan, have led to increased concern that may be on a path to serious confrontation in the future. Despite the evolution of our relationship with China over the past several decades, I am concerned that China's goals and policies may not be as benign as some might hope.
Certainly, a significant body of Chinese writings and statements give me pause about China's true intentions and its view of the United States. Unfortunately, I believe a misunderstanding of China's strategic objectives has been compounded by a failure to effectively communicate American interests in the Asia-Pacific region and American intentions to defend those interests. The result has been a more assertive Chinese foreign policy, an increased risk of Chinese miscalculation, the undermining of the strategy partnership that the United States and China once enjoyed, and an increase in the risk of military confrontation.
Ironically, it seems that United States relations with China were better during the Cold War than today. China actually helped the West wage the Cold War against the Soviet Union, supporting freedom fighters in Afghanistan and tying down dozens of Soviet divisions on its frontier, divisions that otherwise would have threatened Western Europe. These actions by China were not altruistic, to be sure, but coincided with Beijing's strategic interest. That is what a real strategic partnership is all about.
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Now it appears that this strategic partnership with China is over. In recent years, China has threatened the United States over our support of Taiwan, including raising the possibility of nuclear war. China is also pursuing a significant strategic forces modernization program, and is greatly increasing the quality of its conventional force for the explicit, officially stated, purpose of challenging the United States in the China Seas, waters that are crucial to the United States for sustaining its relationship with Taiwan, South Korea and Japan, among others.
China is also recognized by the intelligence community as one of the most serious proliferators of weapons of mass destruction technology in the world today. Moreover, China is strengthening its political and military ties with Russia in ways that seek to isolate the United States diplomatically and limit United States influence in the region. These do not appear to be the actions of a strategic partner.
In light of these actions, I am perhaps most troubled by the Administration policy with respect to Taiwan. The Administration's obvious reluctance to arm Taiwan, a democratic friend of the United States, sends a dangerous message to Beijing. Similarly, the Administration's failure to sanction China for its proliferation practices and its failure to discourage China from pursuing stronger security ties with Russia represent further examples of dangerous miscommunication.
In sum, I am concerned that China's intention toward the United States may be more threatening than is widely accepted. If so, current Administration policy may be reinforcing China's behavior and setting the United States and China on a collision course.
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To address these issues today we have the following witnesses: Dr. Michael Pillsbury of the National Defense University; Dr. Arthur Waldron, of the University of Pennsylvania and the American Enterprise Institute; Dr. Larry Wortzel, Director of the Asia Studies Center of the Heritage Foundation; and Rear Admiral Michael McDevitt, United States Navy (Retired), Director, Center for Strategic Studies for the Center for Naval Analysis.
Gentlemen, we welcome you this morning. Before we begin I would like to recognize the Committee's ranking Democrat, Mr. Skeleton, for any remarks he would like to make.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Spence can be found in the Appendix.]
STATEMENT OF HON. IKE SKELTON, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM MISSOURI, RANKING MEMBER, COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
Mr. SKELTON. Mr. Chairman, I join you in welcoming our witnesses today. China is quickly emerging as the dominant economic and military force in the Asia-Pacific region. China's ascendancy as a regional and global power makes it imperative that we on this Committee understand, and understand full well, China's strategic goals and China's intentions.
The relationship between China and the United States and other countries is complicated. The debate about China and Taiwan is reemerging in our Country. The accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade has strained relationships between our countries and increased nationalistic sentiment in China. China's weapons and proliferation activities and recent strategic partnership with Russia are causes for concern.
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At the same time, the Chinese government seems focused on the development of China's national economic power. China's efforts to build its economy and greater participation in world trade suggests that Chinese leaders recognize that the country's interests are better served by avoiding or resolving conflicts through economic power and political maneuver rather than through deployment of military force.
Over the long term, I believe that the Chinese government is seeking to achieve what it sees as an appropriate mix of economic, political and military power. We need to understand the relative priorities assigned to these kinds of power so we can make informed judgments about whether Beijing means what it says about strong preferences for international relations based on peaceful cooperation and friendship.
At this point, it is clear that China sees itself emerging as a major regional power and important global player, and its national security calculus of formidable and modernized military seems most important with respect to Taiwan. Economic considerations seem to predominate China's other regional relationship, so I look forward to today's testimony to help us understand the role of military modernization and economic power and political philosophy and the roles each of those plays in China's future.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Skelton can be found in the Appendix.]
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Mr. Skelton.
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The CHAIRMAN. Without objection, the entirety of your prepared statements will be submitted for the record, and we can start with Dr. Pillsbury.
STATEMENT OF DR. MICHAEL PILLSBURY, VISITING SENIOR FELLOW, INSTITUTE FOR NATIONAL STRATEGIC STUDIES, NATIONAL DEFENSE UNIVERSITY
Dr. PILLSBURY. Thank you, Chairman Spence and members of the Committee, for this invitation to testify on the subject of China's strategic intentions and goals.
My testimony today is going to be drawn from these two long, thick, heavy books published by the National Defense University, which collects 600 quotations from more than 200 Chinese military authors. I am even going to try to teach you some Chinese expressions the Chinese government itself uses to address the topic of the hearing today: What China's Strategy and Intentions Are.
I think many of you have been to Beijing. You know that there are many toasts to friendship between the United States and China. They will talk about moving toward partnership. One of the Chinese expressions is just three words. It is worth learning sometime. You might want to say it. It is ''bu chu tou.'' It means ''don't stick your head up,'' and Deng Xiaoping said this after the Soviet Union collapsed and a lot of other Communist Chinese leaders said to him, we are now number one of the Communist parties in the world. We need to assume world leadership of the Communist movement now that the Soviets are collapsed and are gone. This is China's destiny. And he said, ''bu chu tou.'' the meaning is, let's not get out in front, let's not draw the attention of the chief hegemon of the world who brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union. That is, the United States.
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A second expression that Deng Xiaoping drew from almost 3,000 years ago, ''tao guang yang hui.'' There is no way to translate it into English. It means to put your brightness in your quiver behind your back and then to nourish your capabilities secretly. The official Chinese translation is ''bide our time and build up our capabilities.''
Here, too, the notion is don't attract attention from the Americans.
A young Chinese scholar put this in a rather fascinating article a few years ago when he said about China's long-term strategic intentions, he said, our big dangerous period is not the present time. China will face its true dangerous decade from 2020 to 2030. I know Americans think next quarter, next year, what is going to happen; thinking ahead 20 years sounds pretty presumptious. The author said by 2020 the Americans are going to catch on with the idea that China is surpassing America's economy. We will be bigger than the Americans in our world economic power and other measures of power as well, but by then we here in China will not be ready yet for what the Americans will try to do to us. And what is that to do? To dismember China and break up China and try to contain China. It is an interesting concept. We need to keep the Americans, you might say, happy and not perceiving a challenge and especially not a threat from China.
If I had to nominate for you the most important priority that the Chinese have for their long-term strategic intentions, it is not to provoke a reaction to China's economic growth or the growth in Chinese power, and they have many ways of doing this. And actually it is in some ways a benign intention. We might say the same thing about ourselves.
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I want to emphasize, though, that what we say about China's strategy faces two big obstacles. The first is made by China, and that is secrecy. The Chinese are very proud of their level of secrecy. The United States Department of Defense has encouraged them to reduce secrecy and increase their transparency to international standards.
They really have not done much about this, and the area that might affect your Committee, Mr. Chairman, is the area of the Chinese defense budget. They publish a figure and they say this is our defense budget; it is about $10 billion, they say. The American China expert community varies from saying it is $20 billion or $30 billion to—I would say a consensus is around the $50 billion to $60 billion area. The outlier is Professor Charles Wolf at Rand, a distinguished economist. His estimate is nearly $200 billion. That is 20 times the Chinese announced estimate.
Now, when you are looking at a country's strategic intentions and goals, it seems to me that the size of their defense spending is a pretty important fact that this Committee should know, and it makes a difference whether China's is one-twentieth of ours, or half, or more. This is not known. This is part of the problem of Chinese secrecy. The secrecy even goes to fairly trivial matters like where officials meet when the Chinese—they have a couple of places we would call the Pentagon, where their Central Military Commission and where their general staff has its offices. No American Secretary of Defense can go there. Instead they are taken—our Secretary is taken to someplace else. It would be as though we said to all Chinese visitors, you can't come to the White House or the Pentagon, we will meet you at Dulles Airport or at the Hilton hotel.
So, even in small matters, the secrecy is strong in the security area. It is not that way in economics. If you want to invest or buy something from China, you can be taken on factory floors. It is like night and day between the economic world and the security world.
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The second obstacle to understanding China's strategy is our own fault. We can't blame the Chinese for this, and that is the low level of effort that our Government and our universities place in the study of Chinese security issues. Just the holding of this hearing, Mr. Chairman, is a pretty big step in the understanding of Chinese security perspectives.
My personal estimate is, looking at the intelligence community, our universities, we probably spend ten times more money and have ten times more people looking at the former Soviet Union than we do China.
I don't mean to sound like I am whining that we need more money for Chinese studies, but it is true. Even the journal of Chinese defense issues—there is no journal. The annual conference of experts is on sort of an iffy basis from year to year. So the field needs infrastructure, and frankly I commend this Committee for authorizing the Center at the National Defense University to try to create some more infrastructure for the study of Chinese security issues.
I might mention also the language is four times harder to learn. The number of people studying Chinese is quite small compared to even Korean. And the China field itself has some unusual features. Its members don't like to disagree with each other in public. We all like to pretend that we think the same way and we are moderate and objective, and this cheats outsiders from a rigorous debate where somebody would say, you are a panda hugger, and somebody else would say, you are a McCarthyite. You could judge for yourself what the debate is.
Usually you will not find this among China experts. People do not want to expose their internal differences. If you go to a bookstore, books by journalists give you a clue. Pat Tyler was a New York Times man in China and now he is in Moscow. His book warns against arming Taiwan too much because it could cause war. He talks about the new McCarthyism and the new McCarthyites are coming, and they are trying to turn China into an enemy and this is terrible.
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There are other books with titles that pretty much tell the whole story: Red Dragon Rising; The China Threat; Year of the Rat; and Betrayal, referring to President Clinton's policy toward China. Also, the Coming Conflict of China.
So among, what I would say, journalists and the popular press, there is quite a debate going on, and you both referred to this in your opening remarks. But we don't have a journal or place where that is done by China experts, it seems to me.
I list in my testimony for you ten questions which I believe are relevant in our talking today about China's strategy to this Committee. It seems to me what China does about national missile defense and how much we should take it into account is important. Might they go to Multiple Reentry Vehicles (MRV), or go 100 Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) with ten MRVs each? Might there be 1,000 warheads focused on our country? Some people paint this as a nightmare scenario. Should we pay any attention at all to the Chinese reaction? Is armed sales to Taiwan about right? Should the Congress assert itself some more or not? We have people in the executive branch who have told me over beers that the Congress has lost its right to intervene in the Taiwan Relations Act because it has never asserted itself on what its views are on arms sales to Taiwan.
Should China be engaged in bilateral arms control talks? As you know, as we go into Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) 3 and begin to drop down to 2,000 strategic warheads between ourselves and the Russians, the Chinese move toward equality with both ourselves and the Russians over a 10- or 15-year period. In other words, they are going to become like a nuclear equivalent power to ourselves and the Russians just by having a fairly modest buildup themselves. Should we as a country insist that China must be bound by some kind of a bilateral or trilateral nuclear arms agreement that puts some limit on Chinese ICBMs?
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Do the Chinese have dangerous misperceptions about us? I am going to read a few examples of what I feel those dangerous misperceptions are; in particular, an article that talks about the eight ways, Mr. Chairman, that we are like Nazi Germany. This came out last year in the number one newspaper in China, eight detailed descriptions of why America is like Nazi Germany, read by all 60 million members of the Communist Party. There are lots of articles in the category of misperceptions that describe how easy it is to sink an American aircraft carrier. There are a couple of articles that make long lists of how we Chinese can sink an American aircraft carrier if we have to.
Other issues involve the way we look at China over the next 10 or 15 years. The traditional wisdom has been China is not going to be a pure competitor to the United States and should not be included in the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR); it wasn't last time, and shouldn't be next time. And a more short-term matter is whether or not we can hope, and how much pressure should be applied to ask China to stop its program of building up ballistic missiles aimed at Taiwan. This program was a surprise when it was first discovered. It has not stopped. Admiral Blair has testified that it continues at the rate of 50 missiles a year. It could go as high as 600. This changes the balance of power in the Taiwan Strait.
My own particular interest, as you are aware, is my worry that we are not adequately training the next generation of Americans to speak Chinese and understand China, particularly in the military, but in the intelligence community and academic world as well.
That takes up more than half of my time. I promised you a few quotations from my book. They are good reading if you have that long 14-hour ride from Detroit to Beijing. If you want to sleep, halfway through the books you will be ready for that. The books are done with the help of the Chinese. They offer these books and magazines to me. I am seen as something of a friend of China because of my advocacy 20 years ago, to People's Liberation army (PLA) officers 30 years ago, but I advocated in public that we should sell weapons to China to help with the balance against the Soviet Union.
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My neighbor, Governor Reagan, gave me a letter and said this is a good idea. And when he was President, his Administration negotiated six deals to sell weapons to China. Those programs started. Most people think there is no one more anti-Communist than Ronald Reagan, and here we have the phenomenon of a President selling weapons to Communist China. We also cooperated with China in Afghanistan, and I had the pleasure of being the coordinator for Afghanistan in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The Chinese were quite helpful.
So they help with these materials. They give these books and magazines to me, and they say it is okay to translate this stuff. I say, ''You say some pretty bad things in here, calling America Nazi Germany, talking about your plans to have military forces that would surpass those of American in 20 or 30 years. Are you sure that you want me to translate this?'' and they say, ''Yes, go ahead.'' So in spite of me telling you about ''bu chu tou'' and ''tao guang yang hui'', there is a desire to, I would say, warn the Americans, yes, we are weak and backward, and they talk about themselves being 20 or 30 years behind; but they want us to respect the power that they have, such as it is, and they have taken to criticizing the Americans for underestimating their military power. This is a twist. They used to criticize Americans for overestimating the China threat. In the past couple of years, there have been articles claiming that we are underestimating their power.
The Nazi Germany quotes, I don't want to get anybody upset, but they are worth remembering. They appear on page 1 of the Communist Party Central Committee Newspaper of China. The eight ways America is like Nazi Germany:
Number one, the U.S. wants to be lord of the earth and dominate the whole world.
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Number two, the size of the American expansion of armaments and the frequency of use of military overseas by the Americans has far exceeded those of Nazi Germany.
Number three, the Nazis used anti-communism for expansionism. Americans do, too.
Number four, Americans bypassed the United Nations the same that the Fascist Nazis walked out the League of Nations.
Number five, the Americans are trying to dominate first Europe and then Asia.
Number six, the Nazis tried to dismember other countries; and this is the American goal in Kosovo, to dismember Yugoslavia permanently.
Number seven—this is nasty—the Nazis built concentration camps in Auschwitz and in other areas to slaughter Jews and prisoners of wars with advanced technology. They drove hundreds of thousands of people into gas chambers and poured cyanide through air holes in the roof, killing them all. Today the Americans use high-tech weapons in the same way on the battlefield. The use of American missiles to attack the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia was an atrocity that then-Nazi Germany had not dared to commit. Americans are worse than the Nazis.
And number eight talks about international law being undermined by the Americans, just like the Nazis.
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They accuse us of other bad behavior. We spread the China threat theory in Asia to try to get the Asian countries to keep our basis and our forward presence. The Chinese view of our own five treaties in Asia-Pacific and also our forward presence is that these are Cold War relics that should be terminated. Not that China itself intends to break these treaties or force the United States out. They have a rather long catechism, you might say, and dozens of books about the decline of the United States. Over the next 20 or 30 years, Chinese strategy toward the United States can afford to be somewhat passive because we are—we Americans are already declining, and we are going to amount to only one of five powers in 20 or 25 years without China doing anything about it. So again, if they can hang on and keep us from containing them or trying to break them up in small pieces, the very nature of growth rates in the world is going to change China's situation.
Finally, I want to go into what I call the three schools of thought in China. I don't think all members of the Chinese Communist Party think alike. I don't think that the Chinese military has a unified strategy. I think you can see from their writings that, within limits, they are allowed to discuss the relative priorities that their armed forces should be sized to deal with. One school I call the ''Maoist School of People's War School.'' These people talk about how Mao is still relevant, and they believe if anybody invades China in the future, the most likely response should be sort of a five-year or ten-year local war, building weapons and having nuclear weapons. Obviously only a madman taking over Japan or Moscow or Washington could do that.
The most commonly written about scenario and advice the military gives itself is for what is called local war which dates back to 1985 when Deng Xiaoping reversed Mao. Mao said we must be ready for a big nuclear global war. Deng Xiaoping said no, no; a period of peace is ahead of us. The kinds of wars we should prepare for are border wars. We need to get there fast and resolve the problem. If necessary, strike preemptively, but certainly not a big nuclear global war.
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I think in many ways China—for 15 years now, China's military strategy has been to improve its forces in an incremental way to meet this challenge of Deng Xiaoping back in 1985.
The third school is a minority view and they write in a somewhat—almost a desperate tone. They don't agree with people's war. They don't agree with this local war idea of going to the borders quickly. They say the very nature of warfare is changing, and over the next 20 or 30 years China should take advantage of the peaceful world environment to invest in what we here would call exotic technologies, things that most armed forces don't invest in at the present time, things that here we look to Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and J–9 down at the Joint Forces Command to do experiments—what you might call the fringe area, digitized troops and lasers.
This group in China says this is the answer for China. We don't need to spend a lot of money on our armed forces modernization. We need to bide our time and invest heavily in what both we and the Chinese call the revolution of the military affairs.
My final point is the man who sponsored the research and the publication of these two books, Andrew Marshall, he is in the Office of the Secretary of Defense almost 25 years now, he is quoted a lot in Chinese books and articles as the—kind of a mentor for China. He is not very well known here. He doesn't do a lot of writing in the open world, but Mr. Marshall's view is that the nature of warfare is changing over the next 20 years and a focus on readiness is a mistake, a very unpopular view in the Congress. Readiness is a mistake to focus too much on. The evolutionary improvement of U.S. forces is a mistake to focus on. We should invest heavily ourselves, new concepts, new kinds of troops, experimental technologies, what are called exotic technologies—the Russians used to call it new physical principles—that somewhere in that area the nature of warfare is changing, and over the next 20 or 30 years the United States needs to be at the forefront of that new technology.
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The Chinese quote Mr. Marshall a lot. They say this is the answer for China, and frankly an intelligence community challenge is to see to what degree are all these writings I am quoting to you just aspirations that authors write about and we cannot worry about it, and to what degree are the Chinese pursuing any one of these three schools of thought.
My own view is that there seems to be a mixture. There seems to be no consensus. The money seems to be divided up. A little bit goes to revolution of military affairs exotic technologies, a little goes to keeping people's war alive, and the bulk of the money seems to go toward evolutionary improvement: more troops, more artillery, better destroyers and frigates, and a lot of money for the missile program.
I am not confident in asserting the breakdown among the three schools, I so am going to close with more money is needed for the study of Chinese strategy and Chinese security. Thank you.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Dr. Pillsbury.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Pillsbury can be found in the Appendix.]
The CHAIRMAN. Dr. Waldron.
STATEMENT OF DR. ARTHUR WALDRON, LAUDER PROFESSOR OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, VISITING SCHOLAR AND DIRECTOR OF ASIAN STUDIES, AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE
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Dr. WALDRON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. There is a certain irony in this hearing today. In the last 30 years, the United States has done more than any other country to help bring China into the world community. We probably have done more than any other country to help China's economy, not just with investment but by opening our markets. Tens of billions of dollars of Chinese exports come to the United States every year. We also have a variety of exchanges with China at every level. More students from China are—China is the number one source of foreign students in our universities and higher education. Hundreds of thousands of Americans travel to China every year, and there is a constant flow of officials, investors, and so forth and so on.
Yet, here we are discussing the question not just of why are there bumps in this relationship, but actually whether there is in fact the possibility of hostility or even war in the future. This is really extremely puzzling.
Now, one explanation which we frequently hear is that all would be well but for the fact that we Americans are doing something wrong. Somehow we are spoiling things, and if we will only change some aspect of our behavior, then things will be fine. Now, traditionally, this argument has focused on Taiwan. But it doesn't have to focus on Taiwan; we are now starting to hear it applied to issues of American military preparedness, including our ability to intercept missiles that are aimed at our forces, which seems to me is a capability that we should have. I would add, unless you are opposed to the concept of anti-aircraft warfare and anti-submarine warfare, I don't see how you can oppose the idea that we ought to be able to stop missiles.
We are also finding a clear Chinese attempt to break up some of our alliances in Asia and also to form kind of—spoiling alliances by tilting to, say, Russia or other, what we call the mass states of concern.
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This situation reminds me of the situation we faced with the Soviet Union right after World War II. We, of course, had been allies with the Soviet Union, and we had shed blood stopping the Nazis, and poured aid into the Soviet Union, and there was a general expectation that after the war this friendship was going to flower. But it didn't. The arguments were that Roosevelt died at the wrong time. Truman did not have the right touch. We stepped on toes in Europe. But I don't think that most Americans were satisfied with those arguments anymore than they should be satisfied that the problem in the Chinese relationship mostly comes from mistakes that we make.
All of us will recall, of course, in 1947 a rising young diplomat with great expertise on Russia wrote a paper which made his reputation, in which he argued that the problem with the Soviet Union and the reason that it was behaving in a hostile manner toward the United States was not what we had done, but rather it was the type of regime that the Soviet Union had. This was an unelected authoritarian regime that relied on oppression of its own people. Such regimes, in order to justify what they do, have to have enemies. If you have Hitler, it is fairly easy to convince the Russians that there is an enemy and they will pull together, but once Hitler is defeated you have a problem. You no longer have an external enemy. People in Russia start saying, shouldn't we have a better standard of living and more freedom?
Well, you can give them that, or you can come up with an enemy, and the enemy that they came up with was the West, and I think it was largely an imaginary enemy. And this was a tragedy that Russia made this decision. And that young diplomat was George Kennan, and that article was his famous ''X Article'' in Foreign Affairs in 1947, and I think it has a lot to tell us about China.
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Certainly, we Americans make mistakes, we don't handle everything perfectly, but the first thing that one has to face when dealing with China is the nature of the regime. Here we are talking about Chinese military threats. The most significant Chinese military operation in the last 11 years, in which thousands of people were killed was in Tiananmen Square. The focus of the Chinese regime's interest is its own control. And I think that much of the foreign policy challenge that we find is coming from the type of regime. It is not something that is written in Chinese history or Chinese culture.
But, having said that, in the years since the turn away from liberalization in the 1980s, the regime has, not unlike the way that the Soviet did, built up official nationalism. They have a program of so-called patriotic education in their schools which is something we all—patriotism is a wonderful emotion, but most of us would be extremely uncomfortable if our children were being subjected, say, to Americanism classes which were comparable to what these Chinese are facing, and a great deal of stress on the wrongs that Chinese has endured and the need to be strong again— concerns which, I would add, nearly every country faces one way or another. If you want to find grievances, you can certainly find them. And one of the things that we have to learn, as the Europeans have tragically learned, is that you have to be able to shake hands and forget about things and make peace and get on.
But just look at the official map of China and you will see, among other things, incredible territorial claims in the South China Sea which have no historical basis, which we will hear more about in the future.
To add to this problem of the regime type and the need that this regime has, if it is not going to give its people freedom, then it has to justify a kind of garrison mentality, a stress on military values and obedience and so forth, something that was never true in the Soviet Union; namely, that is China is growing wealthy. That is not to say that ordinary people are seeing a great improvement in their lives. My travels indicate that this economic miracle is genuine up to a certain extent. But a great deal of money is available for military supplies.
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I was visiting a university a couple of weeks ago in China, and they are putting a little more money into teaching, but it is all borrowed money. Remember, though, that tens of billions or possibly hundreds of billions of dollars are available for space programs and missile programs, aircraft carrier programs, purchase of advanced foreign weapon systems, electronics and so forth and so on. They do not face the kinds of foreign exchange restraints, and they are wiser than the Soviet Union was in their use of foreign markets and foreign sources of capital, joint investments, and so forth and so on.
One cannot be complacent about China having a backward economy, because it does not. You have a dictatorship with potentially dangerous foreign policy goals wedded to a functioning economy, which is going to be able to pay for the things that they need, and this is worrying.
Some people say China is going to change. This is getting things slightly wrong. If economic liberalization and having a free economy meant peace, then you would not have had war in 1914 and you would not have had war in 1939. Germany, France, Italy, England, all of those European countries had free economies. The problem was the dictatorship and the particular set of incentives that are created, say, for a Germany or an Italy to engage in an aggressive foreign policy.
I am in favor of economic liberalization in China. I think over the long run it is going to help. But what is really needed if things are going to be more peaceful is democratization, liberalization, release of political prisoners, and none of that is in the cards right now.
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That said, let's consider what effects this is having on the Asian region. Several people have said that China is going to become the greatest power in the region, economically, militarily and so forth.
I am not particularly worried about the country becoming economically strong if strength simply means having big markets, high standard of living and productivity; but, militarily, I would point out that the reason, one of the reasons that we talk this way is the other key countries of Asia have very responsibly removed themselves from military competition.
Take Japan, the most important example. If Japan wanted to make itself a formidable military power, it could. Indeed it has done so on occasion, and they could do it again, in the twinkling of an eye, and it would be bad for everybody if they did.
India for a long time eschewed major military development and so forth. Other countries, South Korea, Russia has the potential to become more militarily involved.
Here is my point. If China continues on its present trajectory, there are going to be responses, reactions, from other countries. It is not the case that China is going to emerge in 2020 or 2030 with a whole lot of missiles and nobody else having any. What they are going to elicit is domestic change in India, in Japan, in Russia which will lead to a more heavily armed and a much more dangerous Asia.
Now, if China had good reason for its current military buildup, perhaps this would be unavoidable. But I would like to point out that at a time when China faced a real enemy in the form of the Soviet Union, nothing like the present military buildup was going on.
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Today China faces no identifiable enemy. There is no country out there that wants to attack China. The President in Taiwan met again yesterday and called for talks. He wants a summit meeting. It would be easy for China to establish peaceful and advantageous relationships for most of its neighbors, and I think it would be wise for her to do so; but for a variety of reasons that I have mentioned, she is not doing that. Well, what does this mean for the United States?
Let me quickly just say something about Taiwan. China regularly identifies Taiwan as the chief problem. I don't agree with that because I think it would be very, very easy to make this a nonproblem simply by arriving at a reasonable solution. As I tell the people in Beijing, make better offers and you can get a settlement. But I think that what Beijing wants is not simply an agreement by which the two entities can continue a mutually advantaged coexistence, they want a kind of dominance, and this is the thing that is worrying under all of this. China is not seeking to be part of a community of nations; a condominium, as it were. They are not looking for horizontal integration like in Europe, a community of equals; they are looking for a hierarchy. They are still living in the 19th century or the Chinese past, when they were the top country and the other countries were arrayed below them. And if you look at international relations that way, you are bound to get in trouble.
One of the victories of international relations in the last 100 years is that we have gotten beyond that. There are a whole series of trouble points around the Chinese frontier, and there are trouble points for the United States, and this is the point with which I would like to conclude and lay some stress on this.
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Our security depends not just on our own strength, it depends on the strength of our friendships. We are a very formidable country, but what makes us a powerful player in the world is that other countries tend to trust us and think that, all things being equal, it is not bad to have the Americans involved. They would rather have us in charge than some other countries. We are not perfect, but we are not bad; we are not a bad ally. We are occasionally there when we are needed, and we are willing to help people out when it comes to the crunch. But to do that we have to be part of a community of like-minded nations.
If you look at Europe, there are a lot of issues involving the future of NATO. But if you look at the density of American presence and the density of the ties that connect NATO to the United States, they are very thick. We have a lot of friends and a lot of back-and-forth.
Look at the map of Asia with that big Pacific Ocean. There are just a couple of allies: Japan, South Korea, Thailand maybe, Australia. We have some sort of relations with the Philippines. It is nowhere near as dense or robust or as deeply rooted culturally, but it is every bit as important to our security. Indeed, I would argue that it is more important. We are more likely to have trouble in Asia than to have trouble in Europe, I would hope.
But China is trying to get in the middle of all of our alliances. They are already in the middle of our relationship with Taiwan. Our Government takes Chinese opinions very strongly into consideration, and there are people in the United States who would argue that, for instance, when dealing with Japan, South Korea, and the others, we must always take China into consideration. Yes, we must; but we must not start becoming arbiters instead of allies. There is a big difference between a negotiator and being an ally.
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Given a weak alliance structure, then China can do things. They are good runners, but they need a broken field in warfare in which to run. A Chinese military thinker always said, first divide alliances. They are working on that, trying to cut our ties with our friends, isolate us or enmesh us in weak and basically ineffective structures. Once that is done, then the most dangerous aspect of Chinese military thought can come into play, and that is an exaggerated belief in the efficacy of force.
One of the lessons I think that we learned, say, in 1914 when the Germans thought that they were going to win and be home in time for Christmas, or, for instance, during the Kosovo crisis when, as I understand it, the American idea was that we were going to drop bombs on Serbia for 48 hours and at the end of that time, Mr. Slobodan Milosevic would see the light and come around.
One of the things you see in military thought is the quick, easy, rapid, clean surgical strike that is going to collapse the enemy and wrap everything up in no time flat. That is not the way the wars work. They are almost always disastrous, destructive, bloody, protracted, and full of the unexpected. Frankly, I am not sure that some of the people in China really understand that, and they start deluding themselves that if the United States can be shooed away, and if our alliances can be weakened, then some of those missiles can be fired at Taiwan and we will do nothing, and Taiwan will sign, or the Japanese can be intimidated, or this or that.
Those are all, I think, fantasies. They will not work for the Chinese. But they will start in motion processes that would be absolutely disastrous. And therefore, it is essential that we do even more than we are doing now to understand this threat and to make it absolutely clear to our allies that we will stand by them to strengthen our alliances, and make it clear that aggression is not going to work because once you let slip the proverbial dogs of war, you never know what is coming.
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I spent six of the best years of my life teaching for the U.S. Navy at the Naval War College. I spent a lot of time thinking about war, and even a good war is on a certain level a disaster. Frankly, when I look at the inattention that we are paying to this threat in our Country today, and at the complacency of some of the scenarios that say that everything is going to work out and at the lack of adequate signaling and support of resolve, I say to myself, you know, things have gone very badly wrong in the past, and if we are not careful they could go wrong again. Thank you.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you Dr. Waldron.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Waldron can be found in the Appendix.]
The CHAIRMAN. Dr. Wortzel.
STATEMENT OF DR. LARRY M. WORTZEL, DIRECTOR, ASIAN STUDIES CENTER, THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION
Dr. WORTZEL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee. I appreciate you inviting me here today to address China's strategic intentions and goals. You are, I think, choosing a subject that is probably one of the most critical issues that faces the United States, and this hearing is one of the ways that the United States Congress demonstrates to the American people, to American friends and allies, and to China, that the United States takes its role in the Asia-Pacific region very seriously, and that is an important thing.
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Beijing's goals out there, at least for me, are fairly transparent. And I will talk about their national security strategy and national military strategy. But Beijing wants to be the preeminent power in the Asia-Pacific region. Beijing wants to be part of and to influence every nation's decision calculus, in my view.
As Dr. Waldron mentioned, and I will go into it further, one of Beijing's goals is to weaken America's alliances and to weaken alliances that are based on shared values and democratic systems and shared market economies, and to place China strategically at the center of a web—I will call it a multipolar web of strategic partnerships. In other words, they go back to their history: the all-powerful state that no one would think of offending. The tributary states know their limits, and they consider what it does before they act.
Now, I guess I am sort of one of the beneficiaries of what Dr. Pillsbury talked about, about this warming up of relations with China. I spent 30 years in the Armed Forces, about 29 of them focused on China—or on Asia—intelligence work and sort of policy jobs; and probably the best part of that was I spent about 4-1/2 years as a military attaché in China. So I got to know, in one form or another, an awful lot of very senior Chinese military leaders and political leaders, and traveled with them and a number of others in the early period who were promoted to senior leaders. And I am going to try to blend a little bit of what I learned from their thinking with perhaps a little bit of history and current events. I think it is important that we understand how Chinese—the community of people that make strategy and policy in China—approach questions.
First of all, China believes that economic power is a major part of national power, and that shows in its growth rate and its focus. The growth rate of China's economy from 1992 to 1998 was between 14.2 and 7.8 percent, lower more recently because of the Asian crisis.
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The General Political Department Director of the Guangzhou military region down in south China, Zhang Guochu, wrote an article in 1998 in the Communist Party's theoretical journal, Qiu Shi, or Seeking Truth. It said, national power is a combination of economic strength and defense modernization. Jiang Zemin said the same thing at the 15th Congress of the Communist Party. And the national defense white paper that they published in 1998, July 1998, says the same thing.
Now, I am one who believes that trade with China is a good thing. I have been in and out of that country since 1979. I have watched a middle class grow and private ownership grow. I think that the middle class, as it grows and gets apartments and houses and decides where to go for mortgages, is going to be a group that eventually is going to look for choice in other areas. That is a long-term strategy. That is a hedging strategy. That is not necessarily what these military leaders of China are looking for.
If you look in the white paper, the Chinese leadership says that they want a world that is based on multipolarity. They oppose military blocs, they oppose power politics, and they oppose agendaism. As Dr. Pillsbury told you, ''agendaism'' is a code work for the United States. And Chinese leaders know that using force might threaten that modernization. They are rational people. It might threaten stability.
The United States therefore, I think, needs to look carefully at what is happening there in terms of its trade. I believe that we should trade with China, but I think we have to be very careful not to provide technologies that would strengthen the military or give them sort of the opportunity or the belief that they could be aggressive and succeed at that.
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But let's look a minute, if I could, at the military culture. I want to talk about a few people very specifically that are very representative of the type of military leader that you run into in China. The commander of the First Airborne Army of China, about 40,000 people strong, Ma Diansheng, a major general. I first met this gentleman in 1998, before Tiananmen Square, when I got to jump out of one of their aircraft, and he was a division commander then. He had been in that division for 30 years in central China, from the time he was a private until the time he was a senior colonel. He had never left. He had never been to a major military academy. He never rotated outside of his province. He had never met an American. He had about 3,000 parachute jumps. He was a hard, tough, nasty, old guy and very nationalistic. He fought the United States in Korea and didn't like the United States.
I went back and he was now the corps commander. Almost ten years later, he still hadn't left China. Just before he became a major general, he finally went through a professional military education. And what did he study? He studied a little bit Sun-tsu, a little bit of Chinese history. He studied this very, very twisted historiography that Dr. Waldron just gave you of China's suffering at the hands of these imperialist powers, and he believed this stuff, and he still had never been to the United States or outside China. He said, ''I would like to visit the United States,'' and he was put into a group. I think that is one of the best things that could possibly happen.
They talk about—a person that I respect as one of the premier military strategists in China, Dr. Pillsbury, knows him, I believe, and has worked on his work—he is now retired—Lieutenant General Li Jijun. He is now retired. He is the guy, when some U.S. Army general decided we are going to try and make the Chinese more like us, they gave to China a set of—I would call it computer simulations that teach you how to fight a war. What did General Li do? He studied it. And when he studied it at the Academy of Military Science as a junior officer, he wrote a thesis about it and the Chinese made him a division commander so he could experiment with it, and he developed it further.
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From having studied American ways of war, he turned a unidimensional, single sort of service infantry-oriented corps into what we would call a pretty good combined arms army with integrated artillery and missiles, integrated armor, and with helicopters. So don't sell the Chinese military short and think that it can't learn and innovate.
I had the opportunity again, as a military attaché, to have him over for a couple of drinks before a Christmas dinner before I took him on a trip to the United States actually. He sat down in my living room next to the Christmas tree, and he said to my wife that, you know, ''The last Christmas I ever spent near the United States was in 1950 when they were shooting at me in the Korean War, and this is the first time I have been near a Christmas tree, and this is the first time I have ever been in an American house and had a drink with an American in a social setting.'' Again, don't sell the guy short. He is a hard-core driven Marxist-Leninst, who will innovate and create the strongest Chinese army he can. But that's the sort of thing that you want to bring out in a person and bring them to the United States when you can and show him around. We did that.
The Operations Director of the PLA in Tiananmen—we brought him as a counterpart to the Chief of Staff to the United States Army. He fought the United States in Korea. A hard-core guy. Deputy Chief to the General Staff of the PLA today. These people are innovative, they are hard, they believe their own versions of history and ideology, and in most cases, until they get to be about 50 years old, they don't ever get exposed to the outside world. And that is the type of person that you really have to think about when you begin to engage China. They are not all of these sophisticated people that you meet at the Chinese Embassy here in Washington, or that you meet out there in the tours that escort you around China. Sovereignty is their major principle. These gentlemen will act on sovereignty, even when it hurts.
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In Korea in 1950, having come out of this long civil war, the Chinese Communist Party still put 300,000 men into Korea over the issue of sovereignty, and buffer zones to keep the capitalists away from the border.
One of the things that two of these gentlemen said to me about the situation in the Korean Peninsula today was as much a warning as a message. They said, you know, ''If North Korea collapses, don't think that the United States and the Republic of Korea can just march up handing out food.'' That wasn't a threat, that was a statement that says China wants to be involved in its periphery, and it is the major power on that continent.
In 1962, despite a huge famine, China put about 80,000 military forces into Tibet to fight India. On the Soviet border, despite an overwhelming Soviet nuclear missile superiority over China by Russia, and in some cases weapons superiority, they fought the Russians.
In Vietnam in 1979, overextending their influence into Thailand, protecting Thailand, protecting the people that they supported in Cambodia, making it a traditional tributary state, listening to what they said, they attacked Vietnam. It helped the United States and we cooperated on that.
So on near border issues, these gentlemen that I described on their periphery are very serious, and that includes Taiwan, which they see as part of their territory.
I said that these gentlemen often did not get formal academic training in military theory sometimes until later in their life. One of the things that they spend their time studying is Sunzi. And I want to sort of read a phrase from his third set of strategies on really attacking through strategy and he says, ''gu shang bing fa mou.'' I will sort of explain what that means as I go through. At the beginning it means before you do anything, attack the enemy strategy. And I think China effectively did that by putting the United States diplomatically on the defensive by portraying U.S. engagement with China as a containment conspiracy in the United States. And all other allies got visits from the Chinese diplomats and military saying that this is containment. Those of you who have gone to China have heard the same thing. Every U.S. military delegation I know has heard that.
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Next, ''qi ci fa jiao.'' That is, attack the enemy's alliances. Here is where I think China sort of scored a major diplomatic coup over the United States by getting President Clinton in 1998 to characterize China as a strategic partner. That confused American allies and the friends that we have in the Asian-Pacific about whether Japan and Korea and the Philippines, Thailand, and Australia are allies by treaty, or China is the focus of our strategic attention; so that it undermined alliances and instead tried to replace it with this web or network of strategic partnerships with them at the center.
The next thing is, only as a last resort, respond with military forces or ''qi ci fa bing.'' Here I think you have to look at the very buildup that is going on, and that is not the first thing that they are doing. You build up these missiles that they are building up. You produce the weapons—they are very good at producing some things—ballistic missiles, air-to-air missiles, surface-to-air cruise missiles—and develop new weapons, as Dr. Pillsbury mentioned. And there are some very belligerent writings. Dr. Pillsbury has made great contributions to what we know about China's strategic writings.
I worked, or taught, at the Army War College for two years. Admiral McDevitt headed the National War College. I don't recall great numbers of senior American military officers writing their theses about how to fight China in the next war. American military people, for the most part, do not see China as its next enemy and are not staying up at night figuring out how to fight the Chinese. It is not reflected in our theoretical or military literature. It is reflected in their literature. It is reflected when a senior colonel of the National Defense University of China, twice in the past six months, put articles in the PLA newspaper that talks about attacking the United States with nuclear weapons over Taiwan. It is reflected when the head of their intelligence international matters for the PLA makes these sort of veiled threats about trading Los Angeles for Taiwan.
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So they are very serious about this stuff. And they are smart enough to know because of this ''qu ci fa bing'' business as last resort, prepared to respond with military forces, doesn't mean a necessarily symmetrical response.
I would argue that the Chinese believe that things like weapons proliferation are good things. My respected colleague, Lieutenant General Li Jijun, if I can find the quote from him, has in his book Thinking About Military Strategy, a statement that getting nuclear weapons and delivery means for weaker developing nations are great ways to break the monopoly of the developed countries over nuclear weapons; polarize power and get it away from the United States and the hegemonists. So I think we have to pay attention to that.
The United States, in my view, should not be ashamed of its alliances or its leadership or its power out in Asia. The United States should do everything it can to strengthen and nurture the alliances that it has with democratic states that have market systems, and right now that is Japan and Korea, the Philippines, Australia, and Thailand. We should not cause those allies or states that help us a great deal, like Singapore, or states with which we have very strong relationships—I guess I shouldn't call it a state, that island, the People's Republic of China—we should recognize the strengths and not apologize to the Chinese about that.
We need to continue proper contacts with the People's Liberation Army, and I congratulate the Congress on the limitations that it put on the Department of Defense over the nature of military contacts. I am a former intelligence officer. I draw kind of a strange distinction between what I call military-to-military activities, and the overt reporting of what you see as a diplomat, and clandestine intelligence. I think we need more intelligence, and more money should go into the intelligence budget if you want to do that; but don't try and make the Chinese military stronger, number one. You have done that.
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Number two, don't try and use these military activities for anything other than means to address the military culture of China, try and change it, and try to get them to understand the United States. We have to be careful not to do anything to increase China's military capabilities while we engage in a hedging strategy and make sure that Taiwan's defenses are adequate to deter any use of force by the Chinese military. And we need to keep a very strong military forward-deployed.
And I have to say that I personally believe that with or without some form of reunification on the Korean Peninsula, forward-deployed United States forces out in Asia are probably the only thing that prevents another major arms race from going on.
Japan would certainly feel less secure, demilitarized. The historical animosities between Korea and Japan could cause other problems. China would see this gap. These things are very important. I kind of characterize our relationship with China as based on a little bit of competition. This is diplomatic business. A little bit of cooperation, Mr. Chairman, you are absolutely right. We have had great periods of cooperating with the Chinese on issues of mutual strategic interest, and I think we will continue to have that, whether it is in the United Nations Security Council or in the drug war business or other things. But we will compete for other things, and there is going to be conflict. Our strategic views are different and our views on proliferation are different. That is natural. I don't think that would lead to war personally, but I don't think that we need to be out here hugging the panda either, as we say. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Wortzel can be found in the Appendix.]
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The CHAIRMAN. Admiral McDevitt.
STATEMENT OF REAR ADM. MICHAEL MCDEVITT, U.S. NAVY (RETIRED), DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR STRATEGIC STUDIES, CENTER FOR NAVAL ANALYSIS
Admiral MCDEVITT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The basis for my statement is the work that my colleague Dr. Dave Finkelstein and I have been involved in and I can make available to the Committee. We are talking about China's strategic intentions and goals, which means that we are asked to speculate a little bit about the future. And it strikes me that since the end of the Cold War, expert opinion has had a pretty dismal record in trying to forecast future options outcomes, so I approach this with a great deal of humility.
Japan was number one; the Asian economic miracle was unstoppable; North Korea is on the verge of collapse; Indonesia is a stable multiethnic society, and so on. So when we talk about strategic intentions in the future, we need—it is well to keep in mind that national security planning and strategy is, in fact, a competitive business.
Strategy does not exist in a vacuum. It consists in this case of China and the United States, two nations in a dynamic interaction. For example, when the United States responds to perceived dangers or tries to shape or hedge against an uncertain outcome with China, Beijing is the object of this initiative and will in turn adapt its stance in response. The point is that it is impossible to be correct all the time, and instead we must constantly reassess the current situation and make changes. With that caveat in mind, let me talk a little bit about China's strategic vision of the future and my analysis of what that means for the United States.
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Their future vision consists of two key elements: a vision of their domestic development and a vision for their external security. That seems trite, but it is important to understand that from Beijing's perspective, they are inextricably linked. And if you try to boil that down into, if you will, a short slogan—and by the way, I don't speak a word of Chinese, so I can't quote any 14-character slogan for you—it would be boiled down to three words: sovereignty, modernity, and stability.
The quest for modernity means that China will continue to focus on increasing their economic strength of the nation, enhancing the technical and scientific capabilities of state, raising the standard of living of the Chinese people. In other words, the Deng Xiaoping vision of economics as the central task will likely continue to be the key driver for their policy decisions.
I think it is important to realize that China has adopted a very realistic time line for accomplishing the objective of modernity, and this long-term vision was articulated by Jiang Zemin at the Ninth People's Congress in March 1998 when he said, ''When the People's Republic celebrates its centenary,'' i.e., the year 2049, ''the modernization program will have been basically accomplished and China will become a prosperous, strong nation.''
They have a time line that runs out 50 years from now. China's vision, when you translate that long-term strategic goal into a vision for external security, it is focused first on the defense of its sovereignty, and they want to play a central role in the security calculations of Asia. And to do that is essentially a two-track process, continued modernization of the military. My belief is that, at a minimum, Beijing will continue to strive to build a military that will be capable enough to impose its will on other regional militaries, if it has to, and credible enough to deter external intervention. And so keep in mind this is an aspiration and this is a goal, and there is certainly no goal that China can or will achieve it.
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The second track on this two-track process of security is involving, if you will, the utilization of the nonmilitary elements of national power—the diplomacy, the political and the economic aspects—to shape the regional environment in ways that are conducive to achieving near interest in Asia.
Now, China has come up with this contextual context of an international system that doesn't have a sole superpower; i.e. the United States. Instead their vision—and you have heard some of this from the previous speakers—is one of a multipolar world with no single dominant states. And China's world position in this future vision of strategic construct, if you will, is that while it wouldn't be a superpower in its own right, it would nevertheless see itself as a key world leader. And in the Asia-Pacific region, the preferred outcome for China is to be the regional hegemon and not, as currently is the case, share a division of power with the United States, in which China tends to dominate the mainland of Asia and the United States and its allies dominate the rimland of Asia, and this shared balance is what brings stability to the regional region.
However, China would settle for a minimum outcome which would have China first among equals with Japan and the United States. Over the long term, what would be worrisome to Beijing is the continued economic, political, and military predominance of the United States on the rimland, on China's doorstep, as Chinese interlocutors often put it; or, worse, a U.S.-led multinational, multi-bilateral security system in Asia arrayed against China.
In trying to translate this vision into a concept of security for the region, Beijing has adopted an approach that is generally at odds with our alliance-based security system, as our Australian friends call it, the San Francisco system. The U.S. system as it is has as its objective a politically and militarily stable east Asia that is not dominated by a single regional power. And, historically, I would argue that the central objective of U.S. policy was to keep from being excluded or frozen out of access to the markets of Asia, and I guess the Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) debate is the latest example of the great importance that the United States places on having access to the markets of Asia and, in this case, the markets of China.
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Since the future U.S. policy seems unlikely to change dramatically from what we have essentially pursued for the last 100 years, reviewing China's new concept of security for the region suggests that there are going to be several points of competition between Beijing and the United States over these dueling visions. And we have already heard a lot about China's new concept of security, so I won't belabor the point, but it has some statements of principles that China is for peaceful coexistence and nonintervention and promotion of mutual understanding. The most important thing is to focus on not what China is for in terms of their security construct, but what they are against. And what they are against is an international and regional security system that is dominated by the United States.
China is going to continue to reject the notion that formal military alliances contribute to regional stability. They acknowledge that they can do little about the current alliance system—and therefore have to live with it—but they don't like it. As a result, I predict that we can expect to hear continued Beijing castigation of our alliance system: the trite phrases that we have heard, it is a Cold War mentality, it is out of touch with the trends of time, and it is inherently destabilizing and it is a relic of the Cold War.
Consequently, any U.S. military posture in Asia in the foreseeable future that assumes a continuation of formal military alliances and forward presence is, by definition, opposed in principle by Beijing, and Beijing assumes that they are the object of these alliances; in other words, that these alliances are oriented toward them. No matter how much we protest, that is their perception.
In terms of context, a new context in thinking about their security situation is beginning to evolve in China based upon a reassessment that was conducted late last year and early this year in the wake of the accidental bombing of the embassy in Belgrade. I would characterize this as a pessimistic assessment of their hopes for the emergence of a multipolar or global security arrangement.
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Admiral MCDEVITT. Based upon analysis of what they have been saying and writing, they argue that even as far as 20 years from now a multi-polar world will not have emerged and that the new security concept that they are marketing will not be any closer to realization than it is today; and they argue that these forecasts are based upon current and future objective realities. And the proximate cause of these objective realities is, when they stepped back and looked at the world after the shock of the bombing, they concluded that the United States, one, was strengthening and expanding its military alliances in Europe and Asia; that the United States is continuing to widen its military lead through high technology; that the United States economy shows no signs of weakening; that the United States continues to be able to dominate world trade and financial institutions; and the key U.S. national security objective, such as the pursuit of missile defense, is to maintain its position as a superpower by seeking, quote, ''absolute security for itself.''
When they translate this pessimistic assessment into some sort of an approach, my conclusion is that China must continue to focus on economic development in the hope that its relative power can increase while, over time, America's relative power decreases. It also means that it is in Beijing's national interest to sustain a peaceful relationship with the United States.
So, in conclusion, what kind of China will we face in the future? Extrapolating from today, we can postulate a genuine, continuing commitment to Chinese nationalism. We can postulate a leadership that is unwilling to compromise on core sovereignty issues, especially Taiwan. We can postulate continued suspicion and resentment towards the United States as the key impediment of the realization of China's strategic vision.
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Therefore, one can judge that China will not accept an independent Taiwan nor will it renounce the use of force as an option for reunification. It will continue to pursue an alternative vision of a regional security structure. The United States will continue to be the major factor in China's strategic calculus, and the U.S.-Chinese relations will continue to be characterized by cycles of cooperation and competition. And the key for the United States is to ensure whenever competition is the predominant feature in relationship to China, that it take place at the diplomatic and rhetorical level and not spill over into military competition.
China is in many ways already a rival of the United States in East Asia, but being a rival is not the same as being an enemy, and it would be a mistake to assume a hostile predisposition. As we have seen already, Chinese aspirations change based upon what they consider the objective conditions. And as long as the United States thinks East Asia is important in a policy sense for the country, then the best orientation for U.S. security policy would be to ensure that we continue to be appreciated by the vast majority of the countries in East Asia as a stabilizing presence. And I would argue the best way to do that would be to emulate Teddy Roosevelt, to speak softly and carry a big stick. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Admiral McDevitt can be found in the Appendix.]
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, gentlemen, all of you.
Mr. Waldron, I think you mentioned the Chinese using the Cold War mentality in describing us. Thinking on that, the Cold War was against international communism, the way that I remember it. I am just wondering if you can say that the Cold War continues against international communism when referring to China or North Korea?
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Dr. WALDRON. I would just say almost exactly that formulation I heard the other day in Washington from a professor of Chinese background who was my teacher at Harvard and later my colleague at Princeton. This is one of the leading Chinese intellectuals who said that it is important to remember that, although the Cold War ended in Europe, you still have a series of communist countries in Asia. If it is the case having a communist system has an effect on the way that you behave, then it hasn't ended.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Skeleton.
Mr. SKELTON. The argument was made during the China trade debate that trade with China will cause their character to change because they will see more of the United States and they be more affected by the Internet. I would like for one of you to comment on that.
Dr. WORTZEL. Mr. Skelton, I think you will see, and I certainly have seen, great changes.
One of the problems of China is that China faces for itself, is that there is no marketplace for ideas. People are educated in this sort of crazy Marxist historiography that views the world in one way, and while you cannot guarantee the outcome of this opening, you certainly have created a group of people through trade thus far, and I believe will continue to create one that begins to think critically about choices, about ownership, about questioning that system.
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Will it change their sense of nationalism? I think that they are going to be nationalistic, but the Chinese people have been the subject under the past 40 or 50 years of communist rule of these sort of crazy political campaigns. I think if Jiang Zemin today mounted a political campaign that said for two years the nationalistic thing to do would be to somehow let Taiwan exist as a state in and of itself, it would succeed.
I don't know what the outcome will be. I think the United States is on the right course. I think trade is the right thing to do.
Mr. SKELTON. I have one other question, any one of you may answer it. Look into the crystal ball and tell me Japan's response to China's increased arms build-up.
Admiral MCDEVITT. Let me make an observation on that.
I think Japan's response has to be seen within the context of the U.S.-Japanese alliance. I believe that as long as Japan believes that the security relationship between the United States and Japan remains strong that they will not overreact or feel like they have to go it alone and perhaps move off in a direction that Arthur Waldron suggested that they had done in the past. And so as long as the relationship with Japan remains strong, I think that Japan's reaction will be very muted. Certainly they have the ability today to defend themselves, and it is important that they maintain that capability to be able to defend themselves.
Mr. SKELTON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
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Mr. BATEMAN. [Presiding.] Reference is made regarding the concern of the United States expanding its alliances and seeking to strengthen its relative position throughout the world and especially in Asia. It occurs to me that, other than the expansion of NATO and not much likelihood of any future expansion of NATO, I don't see this pattern—that the Chinese would have any reason for concern of our strengthening our position. And, in fact, given the European security defense initiative and strains on the NATO alliance there and given the ballistic missile defense problem that we have with NATO and western European allies, it seems to me that they should not be more paranoid but less.
Dr. WORTZEL. Mr. Chairman, there are a few things that they are very, very sensitive to. And as I said in my testimony, those are their near abroad and their peripheries. They simply do not necessarily accept, particularly their military and their intelligence services, that American traditional military engagement activities that we do normally are benign things. So that when the 82nd Airborne Division made a parachute jump into Kazakhstan as part of its Partnership for Peace idea, they saw that as the United States moving the 82nd into their border.
When the United States Pacific Command sent engineers to build schools and toilets up to Mongolia, they saw C-130s going in there and saw it as being surrounded. They are sensitive to that. I don't think that there is any basis for it, but that is their concern.
Admiral MCDEVITT. Mr. Bateman, when they talk about enhancement or expansion of alliances, they throw into that hat the new guidelines of the U.S.-Japanese relationship. They throw into that hat both South Korea—and we have said after unification we would like to maintain a military presence in the region. In other words, they argue that the mere act of reinvigorating these moribund things that should be allowed to pass into history involve expansion beyond the obvious NATO expansion and Partnership for Peace (PFP) issues.
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Mr. BATEMAN. My recollection is that some two years or so ago President Chirak was visiting China and made the statement that he was there to forge a new strategic alliance with the Chinese to avoid American hegemony. Do you have any comment on how helpful that is to anyone's interest?
Dr. WALDRON. Well, the French and the British are our two strongest allies, I would say, and the longest history there. But I remember Charles de Gaulle said, I am going to China; and China—they, of course, recognized China in the early '60s, and then the cultural revolution blew it away, and then Nixon was the one who got all of the plaudits.
There is sort of a parallel here that China and France are both states of enormous cultural achievement that have had a lot of difficulty finding out what kind of country they are going to be in modern times. Think how many republics and how many empires, how many cabinets. We are in the fifth republic now, there have been three empires, a revolution, a series of monarchies.
China has the same sort of political problem, and they have this sense that somehow they can punch above their weight or have a bigger role in the world if they are only extremely adept at manipulating alliances. I don't think that it has been helpful to France, despite the fact that they have put a lot of effort into it. I think a much more straightforward approach would work, and I think—I am very glad that Larry pointed out that all of—most of these Chinese concerns really have no basis. They come from a kind of—it is not just a wounded self-esteem, it is something that is nurtured, that the educational system maintains, and it is cultivated.
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Admiral McDevitt is right, forget all of these military status issues and let the Chinese use these tens of billions of dollars to improve the livelihood of these people. But, unfortunately, things are more complicated than that; and we could have a disaster.
The CHAIRMAN. [Presiding.] Mr. Sisisky.
Mr. SISISKY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
One of you mentioned the big thing—I think we are losing sight of the leverage that the United States has there, too. And leverage to me is very simple, and that is the enlargement of exports from China to the United States, which they must become very dependent upon with the millions of workers that they have, the university students that come to the United States for training, the travelers, the tourism business. I think we seem to forget that.
But the other side, of course, are the investments that the United States does with the World Bank and our own banking institutions. How important is that in the total frame of things? I don't think that we use leverage enough. I will be very honest with you. I don't mean to threaten, but certainly that has got to be an important ingredient.
Dr. WALDRON. I think we saw with the PNTR debate how difficult it is. There are two tracks. There is the economic track, and there is a military track. I think in the case of an actual war one of the things that China can count on is that our markets would be closed. I think if they attacked Taiwan or something, the markets would be closed; and this would have the effect of undermining the whole export-led economy there.
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But short of war—and look at the period before World War II. Trade between the United States and Japan was large, and it was important, and mishandling of the trade, the attempt to exert sanctions, made things worse rather than better. Germany and England, each was the other's largest trading partner before World War I.
The way that I look at this, first, it should be clear that in case of hostilities your investments just turn into wallpaper. The market is going to close. Second, we have to be very, very careful that the American and world markets are not used as a source of capital for ends that we do not want to support. We don't want to have New York's capital markets being tapped for companies that are involved in strengthening China's military capabilities.
Mr. SISISKY. Is that happening today?
Dr. WALDRON. I think it is happening, and this is extremely important. That is the places that we should put the leverage. We must not kid ourselves. There was a very good article about what are these companies for which you have Initial Public Offerings (IPOs). These are not little Chinese entrepreneurs who worked hard and saved their money and are on the way to building a free market. These are government-owned entities which have been carved out of larger entities which are concealed through layers of ownership, whose ultimate ownership and purpose is not always clear. Much of the money that we are putting in is probably not going to go for anything that we want and, just to make it really unattractive, we need to pay much more attention to what this trade really is.
Mr. SISISKY. If you notice, I separated the investments as the last point because that is what concerns me. We have leverage on the other, but they have leverage on the investment.
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Dr. WALDRON. They are accustomed to using that, and we see it not just in the United States but in Hong Kong and Taiwan and elsewhere. They are quite willing to call in an investor and say, you see to it that the organizations that you support take certain positions or you see to it that you lobby your Congress members this way or that way. They don't have any qualms at all about crossing all sorts of lines that we would find troublesome.
Dr. WORTZEL. Mr. Sisisky, I think World Trade Organization (WTO) accession and membership, when it comes, will make some of these political levers more difficult for China.
Mr. SISISKY. Where does Russia fit into all of this? They are the country with the border with China. What do you see in the future between Chinese-Russian relations?
Admiral MCDEVITT. They are in a bit of a high-wire act. They realize they have a growing power sharing a many-thousand-mile border, and they have Chinese immigration moving into the Russian Far East. Meanwhile, the Russian population leaves the Russian Far East. They recognize that there is a long-term potential threat there.
On the other hand, over the short term in terms of their defense industry, China is the best market for their equipment; and so to keep these industries alive and keep people employed, they feel compelled to sell this stuff.
The more sinister aspect is the increasing political alignment that you find in terms of the policies that both are adopting with regard to being against hegemonism, which is anti-U.S., so they are finding common cause and being against modifications to the ABM treaty, national missile defense and those sort of things. Most experts believe that this is a tactical and not a strategic long-term relationship. At least that is what the Russians tell us. The Chinese also say the same thing. Whether or not that is true remains to be seen.
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The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Weldon.
Mr. WELDON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
One of the things that concerns me is the strength that the Communist party has over the people and the commitment of the Chinese people to the goals and objectives of the Party. I was struck by a speech that Jiang Zemin gave last September in China which is entitled Two Bombs, One Satellite, where he went to great lengths to praise 23 Chinese scientists who moved to western nations, the United States, the United Kingdom, got their degrees, spent entire careers in very high-level, sophisticated technology, and then went back to China to give that technology to the motherland.
I have traveled to the Soviet Union many times, now Russia, and I was always convinced in the time that I have traveled there that the communists in Russia were more communists for convenience. It was a way of keeping control of the over 95 percent of the people. I did not see many of the Russians that I dealt with as Marxist-Leninists who believed in the principles of the Communist party.
But in my activities in China, two delegations that I have led there, and I spoke both times at the National Defense University at PLA and in Shanghai, and I speak extensively in this country to Chinese-American scientific associations which are CEOs, vice presidents of some of the biggest companies of this country, the Chinese consular office is always present at those meetings and engaging the scientists; and there seems to be an unusual degree of loyalty back to the motherland.
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Am I misreading this or is there something there that is much deeper in terms of the commitment of the Chinese both here and in China to the principles of the party and the leadership, as opposed to perhaps the Soviet Communists and the Communists in Russia?
The speech that President Jiang Zemin gave highlighted these 23 scientists. I see that literally all of the time. And I see Americans who are here working or Chinese who are working in this country, who in the end I have no doubt will go back to China, and my question is, are they in the end going to serve the technology, military purposes of the Communist party in China and what their goal and objectives are. Do you share my feelings or sentiments?
Dr. WALDRON. Well, first, of course, the Russians were pretty darn good at getting talent to go back from abroad and getting information. It is just-it was quite awhile ago. But, of course, thousands of Americans went to Russian in the early years of communism and in the post-war period, and they had very thorough penetration of our nuclear labs.
One of the things that the Chinese leadership constantly tries to tap into is their idea of the overseas Chinese. There is obviously something to it in terms of there are sentimental ties which might be compared to the sentimental ties of our European ancestry. My sense of how heroic the British were in the 1940s is very deep.
But from their point of view, this is regularly disappointing because Chinese loyalties are largely familial, and they are largely based on networks of friends or they are opportunistic. It is difficult to put together a genuine sense of national loyalty. That might seem to conflict with what you said about the strength of communist belief. One thing about communist belief is that this is all that people have been taught, so they are not familiar with what the alternatives are. But I think that those people who have looked at the alternatives don't find communism particularly attractive.
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What is potent is the sort of appeal to a kind of xenophobic nationalism, to a sense of hurt, to a sense that one is being discriminated against, that one is a victim.
Quickly, there is a group that my wife and I go to near Philadelphia where I live, recent Chinese immigrants to the United States; and many of them are just painfully aware of the fact that people know that they are immigrants. At one of these meetings, I said that the United States is a nation of immigrants; and if you are going down the street and somebody asks you directions and they have a foreign accent of some kind, you don't pull yourself up and say, my God, a foreigner. We are quite accustomed to this, and there is no sense that this is a stranger or alien. A large percentage of American households speak foreign languages at home. This is something that they don't really understand.
To the extent—this is what worries me—to the extent that the party is able to manipulate these nationalistic feelings, then they are going for something. But, as Larry said, we Americans, we have nothing to be ashamed of in our values and beliefs; and I can tell you that they are very powerfully—they resonate very powerfully among those Chinese who are familiar with them.
Dr. WORTZEL. Mr. Weldon, the three most insidious aspects of the Communist party in China or anywhere else are the concept combined with the sense of false consciousness, the idea that the people don't know that it is in their interest, and the doctrine of democratic centralism. That eliminates any sort of—the marketplace of ideas.
Now the educational system in China reinforces that, as Arthur said. And people do somehow, because that is all they hear, begin to believe that. I think that openness and getting out breaks that down. I think American and foreign businesses in China, business is a good employer, business allowing labor rights breaks that down. So that—I am not terribly concerned.
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I am concerned about control. I think that the Communist party has great control through its organizations, but it has—in my view, it has no legitimacy for most people. There are some people that are there for power, but committed Communists. I do believe that the presence of foreign businesses, of foreign individuals who can impart different values and principles is the best thing that the United States or any other democracy could do.
I am not terribly concerned about the people that go back, to be completely honest. They do contribute. Some of them were locked up in some political campaign for 20 or 30 years and got out. Now they just work because they have to work.
But I also try to reflect back, that the people who are leading South Korea today and Taiwan today at one time left that country and stayed in the United States for a number of years for a variety of reasons. They didn't forget where they were from, went back; and that really was the democratic revolution. I don't know how it will come out, but I think here we need a good, strong, sensible counterintelligence security system that focuses not on ethnicity but on the threats that come from the other side. Let the values of our country stand forth.
Mr. WELDON. I agree with you. I supported PNTR this year. As a member of the Cox committee, we studied this problem for seven months. I am convinced that we basically auctioned off our technology. We knew what was going on. We knew the plan that the PLA had in place. It wasn't any secret, and we willingly allowed ourself to be sucked in and transfer that technology through our own conscious decisions. And for us to blame China, that is stupid. It is the fault of this Administration that made those decisions and allowed that technology to flow.
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The irony I think that I deal with all of the time in dealing with the Russians—and they point this out to me frequently. I was over there two years ago at the invitation of their speaker. I was doing a conference on ways to get more American investment in Russia. The Soviets threw off communism in 1992; and up until that period of time, which had been five years—our U.S. Chamber of Commerce gave me a figure—there had been $2 billion of U.S. investment in a new, democratic, free-market Russia. During that same time period, we put $350 billion into the communist Chinese economy.
I support that. I think in the end they will have the ultimate changes that we want. But the irony is, to the Russians who threw off communism, what do the Americans do? That is in many cases caused by the Russians because of their own lack of control and security. But it certainly has not set the tone to the Russians that Americans wanted to see that free-market system emerge.
What they point out to me is we keep investing more and more in communist China. Maybe we should go back communism; and maybe then, with that tough discipline that we can impose through central party control, maybe you will invest in our Country again like you are doing in China.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Kuykendall.
Mr. KUYKENDALL. I have been intrigued by your comments about misinterpreting our benign activities. I look and I see where we pulled out in Vietnam and we pulled out of the Philippines. We have dramatically shrunk our forward-deployed base structure. We have shrunk the number of people that we keep in Asia, although it is still one of the largest forces that we have anywhere deployed forward. And yet to me I look at that and say, if I am the Chinese looking at that, these folks have pulled back pretty significantly. Why do I still consider that any action, although temporary, the 82nd Airborne Division or some troops with C-130s, to be threatening? It is a gray kind of question.
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I would like to have a better understanding, if you can, of this thought process of theirs. I try to think I am taking a long view, and I am looking over the last 25 years and saying the United States has tried to do all it can to maintain a balance and pull itself back from having any bad interpretation of our actions as being imperialist in nature or trying to be a military force to overturn other governments. Just some of your feedback on that.
I have been listening to it in pieces. I do agree that we have got a country that is so large that our engagement with them is essential, and we have just got to get better at it and better at our counterintelligence activities as well. Because we need to realize that we are dealing with a major, mature, long-term country, just like we have had other countries like that in our history to deal with.
Any comments that you would like to share? I certainly don't want the Chinese viewing us as a threat to their national security.
Dr. PILLSBURY. There are a couple of theories why the Chinese government and party leaders analyze the United States the way that they do.
One theory says that it is a generation problem. These are sort of unreconstructed Marxist-Leninists who don't know any better and are not going to change, but the new generation that is coming will not perceive the United States in this sort of sinister, malevolent way. The problem with that theory is that some of the harshest writing against us comes from the young people.
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There is a second theory that says, well, it is education. These people, as Dr. Wortzel mentioned, they have not been overseas; and they do not understand what America is all about. And if we can have more exchange programs and expose them to the West they will calm down and not see us in such a malevolent way.
The two most articulate authors have Ph.D.s from American universities. Dr. Yan Xeutong has a Berkeley Ph.D., unless he learned this at Berkeley; and Dr. Chu Shulong has a Ph.D. from George Washington University.
Mr. KUYKENDALL. I can take that up with the University of California.
Dr. PILLSBURY. And review their Los Alamos contract as well.
The third theory is actually we are dealing with a different civilization. China has its own medicine, its own music and poetry. Certainly they are entitled to have their own ideas about state craft and how states relate to each other.
For me, there is some merit in this theory, that in the last five years or so a lot of books have been coming out from China talking about how the ancient period of the warring states era is a guide for the present circumstance. In that era, there is a big, bad power, something like America supposedly is today, and all of the smart states in the war states era had to be careful and be on their guard. And the ones who were not, the ones who fell for the smile of the Americans, you might say, got eaten alive by the big power; and they were dismembered and destroyed.
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So when you get more than a hundred books like this in the past five years warning that our ancient Chinese history of 2,500 years ago is a guide on how to deal with the Americans today, then it seems to me that you are in a whole new intellectual situation where we need to understand better why do they believe ancient state craft is such a good guide. Is there any way that we can talk them out of their 3,000 years of history and say we Americans are not like this ancient hegemon? And there I am not optimistic that an exchange program or speeches by the President or more engagement is going to persuade them not to take seriously their own history.
I can give you more theories, but those are the three leading ones right now.
Dr. WALDRON. Can I disagree with Dr. Pillsbury? I think there is a fourth which I would like to stress; and I think a lot has to do with the communism system, the encirclement and hegemony. We heard that from the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and there are a lot of scholars that said you have to go back to the ancient Russian tradition to understand the theory of Moscow and the third Rome and the wedding of Zoe Paleologue to Ivan the Terrible, or whoever she married. That is overexplanation.
I think George Kennan got it right. There are cultural resources that can be mobilized, but in China there are other resources. It is not just the warring states. There is a tremendously rich, humane literature of Chinese philosophy which is opposed to violence and is deeply committed to the dignity of human beings.
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I particularly state that it is very important not to align—to think that the Chinese government speaks for the Chinese people or it represents what China would be if you had a free market of ideas.
Look at Poland. I was first in Poland in the 1960s. It was a Soviet bloc country. You heard the same things from Poland as you would hear from the Soviet Union about what America was up to. I was back a few years ago. They are joining NATO. This has not to do with some change in Polish culture. It has to do with a change in the regime.
We never made the mistake with the Soviet bloc countries of imagining that these were authentic expressions of popular will or popular opinion. We should not make the same mistake with China. This is a very repressive regime; and Dr. Wortzel laid out this control—control and indoctrination and obedience—that is absolutely central to the way that state is run.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Hostettler.
Mr. HOSTETTLER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you, gentlemen, for your testimony.
I don't mean to beat a dead horse, a dead horse since the PNTR vote, but as your statements are replete with statements concerning the economy, economic development of China, the key role that the economy plays in building up the military, and I think it is a 16-character message that says that the civil will build up the military side and all of that is interconnected in that society.
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We were told during the debate on PNTR if that permanent normal trade relations were not extended to China, that there would be this strengthening of animosity between the two countries, and I couldn't help but take from your testimony, Dr. Waldron, that you say that this is happening anyway. You say that on page two.
In this Committee we concern ourselves not so much with the billion plus Chinese that would love to experience the American political and economic system but with the few millions of Chinese that have their—to use a Cold War euphemism—their finger on the button and that we must concern ourselves with that. And, in fact, with the massive arms build-up that has already taken place, what is the difference substantially in an arms build-up that is happening with normal trade relations with the United States and one that would ensue according to the proponents of PNTR? What would be the difference in that? Is there a difference?
Dr. WORTZEL. I guess I sort of reject a whole series of analyses, Mr. Hostettler, that proceeds from what is good or bad for China with respect to permanent normal trade relations and generally with analysis on China. I like people to proceed from what is good for the United States.
Mr. HOSTETTLER. Right.
Dr. WORTZEL. I think whether it is dealing with the professional analysis or military writings or external thinking, that permanent normal trade relations is good for the United States. I think there are some creative things that are being debated on how to better protect our technology and how to make sure that Chinese corporations are not going to directly profit. But I think you have to be careful about blunt instruments.
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I will say something heretical here. It would not bother me if every PLA truck had a windshield wiper motor manufactured in the United States. It wouldn't bother me a bit. If we have a policy that says you can't do anything with the PLA, we would never achieve that. So you have to be very careful about what you restrict, in my view.
But the other part, and I think Admiral McDevitt will probably comment on this also, they are going to do what they are going to do as they see it in their own strategic interest. Before there was ever a ballistic missile defense system or an ABM treaty, when the Soviet Union did not have ABM systems, China built up hundreds of ballistic missiles to deter what they saw as potential aggression by the Soviet Union. Taiwan doesn't have an offensive system or missile or missile defenses, and they put 350 missiles opposite Taiwan, and they are going to do what they are going to do as they see it in their strategic interest. I don't think that that will be somehow retarded.
And if the United States didn't trade, the whole economy would grow anyway because of the rest of the world's trade. Do what is in the best interests of the United States, which is to take the very—I won't say very, very, but the long view that trade is creating this marketplace of choices and ideas.
Admiral MCDEVITT. Just a quick issue on the economic thing. It seems to me that there were two assertions made in the debate regarding PNTR. One, as you say, is the assertion that if China is rejected on PNTR that they would somehow use that as a rationale for increasing military spending. I think that may be a questionable assertion.
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But the other assertion that was made, which is also open to—we don't know how it is going to work out—is that trade, the Internet, cell phones and what have you will lead to political change in China. I happen to agree with that. But it is an assertion. We don't know that that is going to happen in fact.
So what you have in effect is a race between if in fact PNTR in—and actually China's membership in the WTO is the sort of thing that China needs to keep their economic engine running and to reduce the unemployment and what have you, then what you really have created is a situation where you have a race between a rich state that can put more money into their defense budget and a race between economic development causing political change. I don't know how that competition or that race inside of China is going to play out, but—.
Mr. HOSTETTLER. Don't we have 20 years of experience?
Admiral MCDEVITT. I don't know that the past 20 years is that much of a litmus test for what the future might be. But you talk to people in China, they would argue that 20 years ago—their ability to do everything but criticize the government is much freer now. They can do most anything and walk around, write things and talk and have more personal freedom as long as they don't criticize the government. They would say that is different than it was 20 years ago. Now whether that trend will continue or not remains to be seen. That is why I favor the PNTR vote.
But you can make the opposite case. All you are doing is enriching a regime that will dump more in military spending.
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Dr. WALDRON. If you take this hearing—we have been talking about a whole series of issues having to do with security. What struck me over the PNTR debate, it is very much overloaded. Whichever way it went, I don't think the consequences of either having it or not are anywhere near as great, whether for good or bad, as people were saying.
What it revealed to me was that this Administration, when it comes to China, this Administration has to have a trade policy. There is no question. I am not worried about the trade policy. What we need is an alliance policy. We need a security policy, and we need a policy on counterintelligence. We need to deal with all of those areas.
And those areas are separate and distinct. It is no good when we begin to discuss issues of security and alliances and related sorts of threats and dangers always to go back to trade, because trade isn't really all that tightly connected to them. If you look at European history, countries that traded with each other in the 20th century went into ruinous wars, and all of that wealth, where did it go, into killing their young people. It could happen again. There is no clear connection, and I think it is a kind of a race. If you trade with an oppressive regime, you may strengthen it; whereas if you weren't trading, it may collapse. On the other hand, you may transform it.
Political change makes a difference, and political change has a relationship to economic change, but we all know that there are such things as societies where people are free to invest and make money but where workers have no rights, citizens have no rights, and so forth and so on.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Taylor.
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Mr. TAYLOR. Mr. Wortzel, just as an aside, I am in the process of building a boat. I have searched in vain for an American-made wiper motor. The question is, how would you feel about American Humvees relying on Chinese wiper motors? That concerns me. I happen to believe our industrial might would carry us through wars, and the loss of it frightens the hell out of me.
A quick question that I pose to you: I have watched with great interest—and that is about the only word that I can use—the initial meeting between the North and South Korean leaders and the media reports of somewhat of a frenzy in South Korea as they buy sunglasses like the Premier wears and try to buy clothes like he wears. And having seen the fall of the Berlin wall, the question that I pose to you is, can something like that happen as quickly as it happened in Berlin, number one?
My follow-up question would be, if that happens, knowing of the Chinese liking a buffer zone that exists now, what would be the possibility, if any, of them saying, sure, you can reunify but only if the Americans go? What is the response of the United States Senate? What would you do if you were a senator? What is the response of the Japanese and the other people in the region, in your opinion?
You may tell me it would never happen, and it kills all of the other questions.
Dr. WORTZEL. I think that you have posed a very critical question. Because I think when Kim Jong-Il went to Beijing, I don't know what passed, but I think one of the things that might have been said, you know, shake hands, be nice, do what you can. Because the long-term goal of China again is get the Americans out.
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I think that the historical animosities that exist in Northeast Asia are such that, absent a stabilizing American presence, I would argue that you would probably find a Korea that would seek its own security guarantees—despite its market economic system, it would seek its security guarantees from China because of historical fears about Japan; and I think you might see a Japan that was concerned about Chinese military growth. So I would argue that if I was in the Congress or in the Senate and I was on this Committee—.
Mr. TAYLOR. All mutual defense treaties are in the sole jurisdiction of the Senate.
Dr. WORTZEL. If I was in the Senate, I would be very, very careful to make sure that we use the political and diplomatic capital we have in those countries to maintain those alliances. I think they are important.
I believe that, absent them, you would really see a very changed dynamic out there in East Asia, and there could be a collapse. We have talked about how strong China is. I just published a paper at Heritage that talked about the internal problems and weakness. Tiananmen was about pent-up dissatisfaction. That has not changed a tremendous amount.
Mr. TAYLOR. You are a United States senator. The question posed is, we will allow unification, we will allow a basically representative form of government, it is not as open as ours, but the Americans have to go. That's the deal. You can't have both. What do you do?
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Dr. WORTZEL. First of all, there is no deal. If it is a representative government, there is going to be a vote. If the voters there, because of a variety of reasons, whether it is Chinese diplomacy or their own political leaders or the failure of American administrations to go over and make the case for what the alliance does, vote and say, sorry, it is over, I don't think that you have much of a choice.
Mr. TAYLOR. What if it is a prerequisite?
Dr. WORTZEL. I would give it no prerequisites whatsoever.
Admiral MCDEVITT. I have been fussing around with this issue for five years, both on active duty and subsequently in my current life, and I think you have put your finger on the key issue with regard to strategic thinking in the United States about Korea, which is—the declaratory policy of both the Republic of Korea and the United States is, one, even after reunification, we want to maintain a military presence, and we want to maintain an alliance relationship. But the key issue is, if you have a negotiated unification and in the process of negotiation Seoul is faced with the prospect of either reunification or hanging on to an alliance, what is public opinion in South Korea? How is that going to turn out?
It is hard to say at the moment, but also it is a very realistic possibility that public opinion could, in fact, despite our best intentions of—both in Seoul and Washington, reach a judgment that reunification was a higher priority than maintaining a formal relationship with the United States.
And so I think the way to hedge against that is to today continue to build on some of the fledgling efforts going on to foster Japanese-Korean rapprochement in terms of going beyond politically willing to tolerate one another to actual security dialogues and military interactions. It comes to the fact that we need to make sure that we have a rationale for U.S. presence in Japan without presence in Korea that also contributes to stability in a region and that a unified South Korea, even if it was not aligned and had no U.S. presence per se, would feel that their security interests were best served by casting their lot, if you will, with the West, with the United States and the Japanese and what have you. Those are issues that have to be worked over the long term.
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Mr. TAYLOR. I don't perceive an answer.
Admiral MCDEVITT. First of all, the U.S. Senate has no veto.
Mr. TAYLOR. But they do decide our mutual defense treaties.
Admiral MCDEVITT. If the Republic of Korea decides that they want to walk away, they walk away; and if they ask us to leave, we leave.
Mr. TAYLOR. What if this is the offer that comes from North Korea and the Chinese? We will agree to unification only if you are gone?
Admiral MCDEVITT. If that is the negotiation position that North Korea assumes, then it would be—as I say, it would ultimately come down to popular opinion in the Republic of Korea, what they felt was more important, reunification without the United States or continued separation with the United States.
Dr. WORTZEL. That is the problem. You can go to some dictatorship and cut a deal, and that is that. But when you deal with a democracy, if the voters get up there and say, hey, this is the way that we want it, the political leadership in Korea reunified or South Korea is probably going to have to go with the voters.
We need to make sure that in the near term we are in very, very close contact and coordination. That is what diplomacy is about. That is what think tanks like us do when we meet with their senators and congressman and their think tanks. As in Thailand in 1975 and in the Philippines in 1991, when the voters of a democratic state say we no longer want this treaty, it is over, we abdicate.
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Dr. WALDRON. One of the things that I think makes us rather a credible player internationally is when we left France. There is a saying in Chinese that inviting the God in is easy but getting the God to leave is difficult. But with the United States we have reliably left when political authorities have told us to, even at the cost of our strategic situation.
I think what you have described underlines something that I worry about, which is the lack of robustness and sort of multiplicity and the lack of density in the American alliance structure in Asia. It is vulnerable for lots of reasons, and all we can do is work on it and first understand that the key to maintaining peace there is to have strong alliances. It is not to pacify one or another player and then work with that. I don't think that we have any choice.
Mr. TAYLOR. You just said what the American response is, and we saw it in Panama recently. What is the Japanese response?
Dr. WORTZEL. I think the Japanese, very frankly, are happy with our presence and want it there.
Mr. TAYLOR. Let's say that the Chinese say we sign off on it as long as the Americans are out. What is the Japanese response then?
Dr. WORTZEL. I would use as a parallel sort of my own experience, having dealt with the breakdown and the breakup of the Soviet Union and Germany and the NATO alliance. The chiefs of the militaries of Germany, France and England made a trip to the United States, and they sat down with the chiefs of staff. And basically what they said was—one of the American chiefs said, we are done, we are gone, we are leaving.
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They said, don't do that. We don't really trust each other that much. We have had a lot of problems with history, and you are an honest broker, please stay. Oh, by the way, when you stay, here is what we need as a credible U.S. presence. And they worked it out, and that is how it got to be a hundred thousand troops because of what it took for a credible presence and deterrence.
I think that that sort of thing could happen in Asia, given good diplomacy. What hurts is not having a reliable and sound security and foreign policy and defense policy. If the countries out there think every time country X, China or you name it, gets upset, the United States is going to leave, then they are going to cut the deals where they can.
We haven't even talked about extended deterrence here. Think about extended deterrence. Do we extend our deterrence to Japan or Korea if there are no U.S. troops there? Is there a base?
So I think these are very careful, sensitive things that those countries think through and have to think through. But the big thing is, if I was working in the American Embassy in Seoul or in Tokyo, that is what I would be talking about. Security thinkers, academics, I would be meeting with their legislators, have to understand what that means. And that has to be backed up—and I think it is in the U.S. legislature it has to be backed up by very strong foreign policy that says the United States is an Asian power and the United States is here to stay as long as you want us. And then—it doesn't hurt to point out the consequences of what happens if you make the other decision.
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Dr. WALDRON. The Japanese are in the process of revising their constitution. And the Japanese-Chinese relationship, this is perilous. It is like the French-German relationship. United States played a major role in mismanaging the Chinese relationship between 1920 and 1941. The book has been translated into Japanese. I worry that a lot of Americans don't understand this story.
The bad scenario that could happen, if what you describe takes place, is instead of having what we kept hearing about, the emergence of China as a great power, we have the simultaneous emergence of China as a great power and Japan, already an economic power, deciding to become a military power. Believe me, I think the Japanese will do whatever they think is necessary to protect their country.
And Larry is quite right to stress without this American balancing role there is no natural balance. There is no natural order in Asia. There is just a natural disorder, and our diplomats and strategists should be aware of this access.
And one of the great problems of the current Administration's policy is that it focuses too much on China and neglects this far more important, crucial issue of alliance relationships. Things could go wrong. In fact, they did at least once in the last century.
Mr. TAYLOR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. You have been very patient.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you.
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I will mention two things which bears on what has been said. In the Philippines, they voted us out, so to speak. And I remember warning President Aquino back in those days, trying to face the world by themselves. And they said, we are going to make treaties; and everything will be all right. With the Spratley Islands situation, they have been coming back to us and wanting to reestablish that situation.
And then, too, the people in that part of the world rely on us for stability; and they speak in terms of us committing a hundred thousand people to that area as evidence of our fulfilling that role. So the other countries out there who would welcome us—I think, Australia, they had a chamber of commerce group come out there—and the other countries who still think that we provide stability on the Pacific Rim and they don't want to see us go. They would rather trust us, I think, than not have us there. So I think we have to consider those things in our overall planning.
I have another meeting. I am going to turn the Chair over Mr. Hostettler, who wants a second go. Before I do go, I would like to thank all of you for helping us. You have helped us tremendously in our work, and I appreciate it.
Mr. HOSTETTLER. [Presiding.] I thank the chairman.
Just one brief question concerning the statements made in the last round, and that is a statement that was made during the debate on PNTR. And that is, if we don't trade with China, they will just trade with someone else. It is intriguing in that, Rear Admiral McDevitt, in your statement, you say that a major concern for China is its current position as sole superpower because the U.S.'s economy shows no sign of weakening, and the United States continues to dominate world trade and financial institutions.
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If that is the case, and I believe it is, and we believe if we voted down normal trade relations or permanent normal trade relations they would say we will trade with someone else, if they believed that some other economic superpower could sell tens of millions of Happy Meals and Humvee wiper blades and portable air compressors, if we believed that they could find that market tomorrow and if we believed that they were concerned about the power of the U.S. economy today, why don't they do that anyway? That is my first question.
My second question is, in relationship to that, Dr. Waldron, in your testimony you state that you are certain an attack on Taiwan would lead to a disaster for China. China's economy would collapse as exports to the United States suddenly stopped. And I assume that they wouldn't be able to find export markets elsewhere. Unemployment would rise and with it arrests, for Beijing has a tacit agreement with its people of rising living standards in return for obedience. Political struggle would begin within the elite. As you stated, political change is what is necessary.
My second question is, what happens if we simply eliminate the attack on Taiwan, and we merely say that the United States would become involved and that involvement would be declination for trade? Would not the rest take place? China's economy would collapse as exports to the United States suddenly stopped, unemployment would rise and, with it, arrests.
I have to assume the Chairman's chair, but I will be listening as I make that assumption.
Dr. WALDRON. Couldn't we bring that change about by economic sanctions? Isn't that what you are asking?
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Mr. HOSTETTLER. Yes.
Dr. WALDRON. I would say there has been a very clear change in the way that the American foreign policy elite approaches what used to be, until yesterday, called rogue states or violators of human rights and so forth. It used to be that we slapped sanctions on them, and we tried hard to bring about change from within. It didn't work.
If you look at Burma, where we have been busy doing this, which doesn't have a strong regime, we have not gotten anywhere. But, for whatever reason, there has been a shift in the last eight years, and now what we do is try to—ostensibly, we want to bring about change, but what we do is try to become engaged, become involved, get into the economy, get into all kinds of exchanges and so forth.
Now, that does have that advantage that it can stabilize things. A China that was in the midst of domestic turmoil would be a problem. It would be a different kind of problem from a China that is strong and capable of projecting military power. But we had China in turmoil for much of the first half of the 20th century.
I don't think that our foreign policymakers have really thought this one through, because the assumption is that change is going to follow quickly. We saw it with the Clinton Administration. They were not concerned with Russian arms sales initially. Likewise, we have the same approach with North Korea. It is not clear that this is going to be any more satisfactory than what we had before, and it does run the risk of creating a series of perverse incentives.
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I was in Mongolia a while ago, and they have a terrible time—I was kidding, but I said, you have uranium here. Why don't you start a nuclear program and you can get a billion dollars of U.S. aid if you do that? I was kidding. We do reward or at least help to keep alive regimes that perhaps would be better off collapsing.
What this brings us down to is that we can't do much about the domestic situation in countries, but we can keep the peace internationally, and that is what we have to focus on with China. How China changes domestically is going to depend on the Chinese, and if we cut off our—if we did what you are suggesting, that would create a different set of problems and possibly worse than what we have now. I don't see that as being a good road to go, but I do worry about the lack of attention we are paying to things that we can do, which means keeping security strong.
Mr. HOSTETTLER. You are saying in your statement that if we militarily confront them, things could happen for the betterment, political struggle—.
Dr. WALDRON. I didn't say happy outcome. I think that political struggle could lead to a happy outcome, but that is more likely in peacetime than in war.
Mr. HOSTETTLER. But that could happen, political struggle within the elite?
Dr. WALDRON. I think it is going to happen whether there is peace or war. I think the current situation is unsustainable. We have to keep the peace and let the change happen and hope that the change goes the right way but don't hang everything on it.
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The problem with the Clinton Administration is that they are postulating positive developments in China and staking the security of the region on that. We have to think, suppose it doesn't go right? We can still do things to keep peace.
Mr. HOSTETTLER. There are peaceful solutions; and if we are to follow Teddy Roosevelt's desire to speak softly and carry a big stick, that big stick can be a military stick or an economic stick. In one case, the economic stick being PNTR is a peaceful alternative to what we are hearing could be on the horizon for Taiwan, and that is conflict.
Dr. WALDRON. You are not going to make Taiwan secure by make cutting PNTR. You have to make it crystal clear to the Chinese that there is no way that the Americans are going to allow the future of the island to be determined by threats or any kind of violence; and that is a military question, not an economic one.
Mr. HOSTETTLER. The first question regarding why doesn't China tomorrow or today start trade with another partner if they desire the United States to have less impact on—not trade organizations as in the form of World Trade Organizations but in the trading of nations?
Admiral MCDEVITT. I think the way I would characterize and respond to your question would be that what you—what is reflected in this notion of and their assessment that the United States will continue to politically dominate the economic instruments of world power and what have you is much of a sense of resentment in wanting to have a seat at the table, as opposed to dissatisfaction necessarily with how things are being run.
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Now, the other, less charitable interpretation is that the individuals who are writing this and thinking this did this with some degree of ignorance of China's vulnerability or dependence, if you will, the dependence of China's economy on the U.S. market.
Now, if the U.S. market was closed to them, could China substitute and where would those exports go? The whole notion is that Chinese economic develop is export driven and where would they go. I have not an economist, I am a historian. So I am already on thin ice. But as I understand some of the theories, what would happen because of China's low labor rates and what have you, they probably would be able to undercut other Asian export-driven economies and be able to actually substitute those through markets elsewhere throughout the world. Would that be able to equate to the same pull that the U.S. market provides? I have no idea what the numbers would be. But it certainly would be the way that they would probably proceed if they needed to keep exporting, which is reduce prices, undercut the competition, go everywhere else but the United States and try to flood the market or do what you can to make up for the loss of U.S. markets. You would have to get a McLarty to tell you if that would work or not.
Dr. WORTZEL. I would like to add that we are not at war with China. We have some very, very serious differences, but we are not at war with them. We have got a lot—there are problems, and there are some areas that could create some conflict.
But, for the most part, if you go even—the President of Taiwan thinks that this form of trade, these kinds of relations are going eventually to help lead to some form of modus vivendi between Taiwan and China. So I would argue that the more dangerous course of action would be to do what the big nations did in 1921 with the Washington NATO conferences when everybody said, forget about deterrence, forget about our own military strength, we are all going to build down, and an arms control agreement that went five ways while all of this trade was going on. That is more dangerous.
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A good, strong military deterrence here in the United States and some balanced set of talks and that kind of trade, we don't know what the outcome is. But that is probably the most stable course of action that you are going to get, particularly with a country that you are not at war with. They actually do some very responsible things in the U.N.
Mr. HOSTETTLER. Thank you, gentlemen, for your patience and your enlightenment.
This hearing is now adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 12:57 p.m., the Committee was adjourned.]
A P P E N D I X
June 21, 2000
[This information is pending.]