Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

by Chalmers Johnson

  Meanwhile, America’s cold warriors continue to exacerbate tensions between the mainland and Taiwan through incessant saber rattling of various sorts. Some of this is done largely for partisan political advantage in the United States, some in hopes of selling extremely expensive if sometimes untested advanced weapons systems in the area. Some of it is instigated by paid lobbyists for Taiwan, which seeks to ensure that the United States would be drawn into any conflict in the area, even if Taiwan’s own policies provoked it. It must be stressed here that the United States has no basis in international law for intervening on Taiwan’s behalf in what is essentially a not-yet-fully-resolved civil war. Thus the tactics of American provocateurs in leaking false intelligence reports, prodding Japan into closer military cooperation with the United States, and promoting a theater missile defense (TMD) for the region are not only dangerous but potentially illegal.

  On February 11, 1999, for example, American newspapers quoted unnamed sources at the Pentagon claiming that the “Chinese government has deployed more than 120 ballistic missiles, and possibly as many as 200, on its side of the Taiwan Strait. . . . Analysts said the deployment—at least a doubling of the previous number of missiles massed on China’s southern coast—is sure to fuel calls in the U.S. for including Taiwan in . . . the TMD.”1 The following day, navy Captain Michael Doubleday, a Pentagon spokesman, publicly contradicted this by declaring that “China has not increased the number of missiles aimed at the island . . . since an early 1990s buildup.”2 On February 26, Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, fearing perhaps being pressured into a major investment in an unproven, essentially nonexistent antimissile system, proclaimed its appreciation of U.S. concerns about peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait but added, “The policy of the ROC government is that cross-strait issues should be resolved with peaceful means.” On the other hand, in a statement typical of Taiwanese pressures in the area, Shaw Yu-ming, a high-ranking ROC official now affiliated with the Institute of International Relations at National Chengchi University, suggested that Taiwan might want to use the (false) Pentagon assessment as a basis to seek more arms sales from the United States.3

  A missile defense system, if at all effective, would be particularly threatening from a mainland point of view. China lacks the capability to successfully invade and conquer Taiwan, but in the present highly nationalistic domestic climate, no mainland government could acquiesce in Taiwanese independence and survive. As a way to deter the island from declaring independence, China therefore threatens to respond with missiles. It does not want to do so, and it understands that Taiwan, in the face of an unprovoked attack from the mainland, would retaliate with massive force. The way to avoid conflict in the area is thus to perpetuate the status quo: continued self-government for Taiwan without a formal declaration of independence.

  The American government’s attempt to promote the TMD in this context is an unwelcome provocation. Its untested technology will not, in the end, reassure the Taiwanese, while the Chinese fear it as the basis for a strengthened military alliance between Taiwan and the United States. Wang Daohan, a senior adviser to President Jiang Zemin, said to the press of a possible future deployment of the TMD in Taiwan, “It is like playing with fire. That will completely disrupt the current world situation, and instead a new Cold War will appear.”4

  None of this is even slightly necessary. The United States needs to bring its own security apparatus under control and stop exaggerating the Chinese military threat. With regard to nuclear warheads, for example, between 1964, when China first tested a nuclear device, and 1996, when China signed the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty, it conducted 45 nuclear tests. The United States, in contrast, has conducted 1,030 nuclear tests, not including the actual atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Robert Walpole, the CIA’s national intelligence officer for strategic and nuclear programs, testified in September 1998 that China had at most twenty ICBMs, which were being maintained in an unfueled state and with their warheads unattached.5 Admiral Dennis C. Blair, commander in chief in the Pacific, testified before Congress in March 1999 that “China is not a military threat to U.S. interests. It will be many years before the People’s Liberation Army presents a major challenge to U.S. forces.”6 And yet, in that same month, the Senate voted 97-3 to build a “national missile defense” essentially against China and North Korea, and President Clinton endorsed spending some $10.6 billion on it over the coming five years. This is American overstretch, not a responsible national defense policy.

  Some members of Congress and Pentagon officials are also promoting worst-case scenarios about Chinese moves in the South China Sea. Through this waterway passes virtually all of the oil from the Middle East intended for China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. There are two sets of about a thousand islands, reefs, and rocks in the South China Sea, the Spratlys (Nansha in Chinese) and the Paracels (Xisha), which are claimed in part or in whole by seven different governments—those of China, Vietnam, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, and Indonesia. It was only in late 1987 that sovereignty over the Spratlys first became an issue in Chinese foreign policy, reflecting a shift to nationalism as the main legitimating principle of the regime. Most of these barren bits of land are unoccupied, but during the late 1980s and early 1990s, in pursuit of their various claims, China occupied six of them, Vietnam twenty-one, the Philippines six, Malaysia three, and Taiwan one.7

  In March 1988, China first occupied its six locations; later that same year it separated its large southern island, Hainan, from Guangdong Province, making it a special economic zone and a major military base. In February 1992, it passed the “Law of the People’s Republic of China on the Territorial Sea and the Contiguous Zone,” which laid down an exclusive claim to the entire Spratly archipelago, about 340,000 square miles of ocean, and authorized the Chinese navy to evict “trespassers” by force. In February 1995, China built a structure on a rocky formation claimed by the Philippines about 135 miles west of that country and hundreds of miles from the Chinese mainland. At that time the aptly named Mischief Reef was unoccupied. Although China has been verbally belligerent on the issue of the Spratlys, it has also been careful not to seize a rock or reef already occupied by some other nation.

  China and Vietnam have already clashed twice in the South China Sea, once in 1974 over the Paracels and again in a short but bloody naval battle over the Spratlys in 1988. China has staked its claim to the islands on a series of fifteenth-century voyages by Ming dynasty admiral Cheng Ho. According to Vietnam, China was even then infringing on its territory. Meanwhile, Malaysia is building a tourist resort on its island, known as Terumbu Layang-Layang. All the nations of the area have increased their defense postures significantly.

  China’s island policies certainly reflect the force of its new nationalism and its commitment to defend all claims to Chinese territory as a way of dramatizing its previous humiliations at the hands of imperialist powers. It is a policy that may also reflect incipient Chinese hege-monism, a response to the breakup of the USSR and to the American claims of being the “indispensable nation” in East Asia. And there may be oil under the Spratlys. China is now a net oil importer, reflecting its advancing industrialization and motorization, so it is interested in any potential new source of oil. Many experts doubt, however, that any significant reserves in the South China Sea will ever materialize, as the waters separating the Spratlys are about 2,000 meters deep. The deepest oceanic drilling for oil at present is only to a depth of 872 meters in the Gulf of Mexico.

  It is more than likely that the issues surrounding the South China Sea will be contained by ongoing negotiations between China and ASEAN, focusing not on sovereignty but on “confidence-building measures.” China has actually moderated its claims to the area over time. To date, this dispute is a classic example of the dangers of worst-case analysis—that is, of treating possibilities as probabilities or inevitabilities, particularly when doing so, in the American case, may someday contribute to a larger military bud
get.

  Tibet is another matter. As an independent state or even culture, it is probably doomed. China is currently implementing what the Dalai Lama calls its “final solution” for Tibet—an openly racist policy of state-sponsored Chinese emigration to the area and forced “assimilation” (the word used in the Chinese press is hanhua, literally “to make Chinese”) of what is left of the Tibetan people. Tibet’s only hope lies in the extraordinary efforts of the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s priest-king, and his followers in exile in Dharamsala, India, to internationalize their struggle. Combined with continuing Chinese blunders, it is possible (though not likely) that global concern will raise the costs to China of its obstinate and destructive behavior. Meanwhile, Sinophiles at many foreign academic institutions and ministries of foreign affairs continue to advise their political leaders that Tibet has always been a part of China, which is simply not so.

  The concept of irredentism does not apply to Tibet. It was never a province of China, nor was it even involved in the normal tributary relationships that vassal states of Imperial China traditionally maintained with Beijing. The Tibetans are of Mongol origin; their country emerged as a distinct place in the seventh century, when an early version of Mahayana Buddhism took root there. China first established relations with Tibet during the Tang dynasty (618-906). In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Tibet was heavily influenced by Indian Buddhists fleeing ahead of the Muslim invasion of the subcontinent. During the thirteenth century Mongol power came to predominate in Lhasa, just as the Mongols also ruled at that time in Beijing, but Mongol influence persisted in Tibet until the eighteenth century, much longer than in China itself. In 1270, Kublai Khan was converted to Lamaism by the abbot of the Sakya lamasery.

  In 1720 the Manchu dynasty in China replaced Mongol rule in Tibet, and from that time on China claimed a limited suzerainty over Tibet—actually a loose arrangement in which Beijing was responsible for foreign relations and defense while Lhasa was left entirely in charge of domestic affairs. After imperial rule collapsed in 1912, Tibet became something like an independent state with its own governing institutions and even a small army, although its nationhood was not recognized by any other country. During this period the Tibetans expelled most Chinese. All this changed with the Chinese Communist invasion in 1950.

  The legal status of Tibet today is clear and is similar in nature to the kind of colonial rule Japan imposed on Korea in 1910. A seventeen-point agreement, signed by Beijing and Tibetan representatives in 1950 at a moment when the Chinese People’s Liberation Army had occupied much of the country, incorporated Tibet into the Chinese state as a “national autonomous region.” This was an unprecedented status. Even then, the Tibetans never expected the Chinese to interfere in the actual running of their country. But a brutal occupation—including mass executions, forced labor, confiscations of property, and destruction of religious sites—led to a low-level revolt in the mid-1950s that exploded in March 1959 into open rebellion. The CIA covertly aided this rebellion, which may be part of the reason why the Chinese have shown so little flexibility in dealing with Tibet.8 Blowback from CIA support, which was cut off at about the time that President Nixon decided to pursue an opening to China, has been very costly to the Tibetans. In 1959, the Dalai Lama was forced into exile in India, where he has ever since devoted himself to a campaign to publicize the Tibetans’ plight. He turned sixty-three years old in 1999—and there is every sign that the Chinese will simply try to wait him out, believing that on his death they will be able to appoint a youthful successor, as they have done with the Panchen Lama, the second-holiest lama in the Tibetan hierarchy.

  China will probably succeed in maintaining its imperium over Tibet and ultimately assimilate both the Tibetan people and their culture. There are no powerful interests to save them. The Tibetans are in this sense similar to the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America. A continuing propaganda barrage from both Beijing and Taipei argues that the Tibetans are “feudal” and do not deserve to be saved. But the Chinese are very nervous about what they are doing and regularly make stupid mistakes.

  A typical example was the spectacle of officially atheist China attempting to name a pro-Chinese Panchen Lama. On May 15, 1995, from Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama designated a six-year-old shepherd boy as a “living Buddha” and the successor to the Panchen Lama, who had died in China in January 1989. The Chinese government responded that the Dalai Lama was interfering in China’s domestic affairs and in elaborately staged ceremonies in Beijing and Lhasa anointed a different six-year-old (evidently placing the Dalai Lama’s choice and his family under house arrest). They formally installed him on December 9, 1995, as the Eleventh Panchen Lama; he was quoted in the newspapers as having said, “Thank you, Jiang Zemin. Thank you, government of China. I will study hard and love the motherland.”9

  It is possible that, as they regain their national self-confidence, the Chinese will invite the Dalai Lama to return and allow him to re-create something like the relationship that existed in the past between Lhasa and Beijing. This would be clever of them. As matters stand now, people in Buddhist countries like Japan and Korea (or in Hollywood) could well become as emotionally involved with the fate of Tibet as others have been with the pandas, whose fate seems destined to be similar. The most likely scenario, unfortunately, is that Tibet will become Sinified and its lamaseries will be left as nothing more than crumbling museums, as most already are.

  A particular focus of foreign concern over Tibet as well as other areas of Communist Party rule is China’s record on human rights. This is a subtle and complex issue. As the prominent sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz wrote at the height of the Cold War,

  Politics is a game of vulnerabilities, and the human rights issue is clearly where the “socialist” world has proven most vulnerable, just as the economic rights issue is where the “capitalist” world is most open to criticism. . . . The debate on human rights can be conceptualized in part as a struggle between eighteenth century libertarian persuasions [the West] and nineteenth century egalitarian beliefs [China]—that is, from a vision of human rights having to do with the right of individual justice before the law to a recognition of the rights of individuals to social security and equitable conditions of work and standards of living.10

  During the Cold War, the West consistently used the issue of human rights as a weapon against the Communists—but always only in its first, eighteenth-century sense. The Communists consistently returned the favor, using the issue of human rights—but always in the second, nineteenth-century sense—as a weapon against the West. We in the United States may sometimes abuse our citizens’ political rights through police wiretaps or sting operations, but we are much more sensitive to these abuses than to economic abuses. The Chinese have generally taken an opposite stance.

  Americans hold that human rights are a universal matter, and in a philosophical sense of course they are, but we ignore how that universalism can sometimes disguise very specific agendas and the ways in which it can be wielded as a political weapon to advance our own interests. We conveniently fail to classify civilian safety from land mines, for example, among human rights; and we are regularly indifferent to or conveniently look the other way when human rights as we define them are suppressed by regimes like those in Turkey, Chile, or Guatemala that are important to us for political, strategic, or economic reasons. The selective linking of Most Favored Nation (MFN) trade status (that is, giving or withholding access to our market on the most preferential terms) to a regime’s human rights record is a prime example of this process. In December 1974, Congress first attached the Jackson-Vanik amendment to Nixon’s 1972 trade agreement with the USSR (which granted the Soviet Union MFN status, as well as access to U.S. Export-Import Bank financing) in order to help Jews emigrate from Russia. The amendment specified that the president had to certify annually that trade with Communist countries was consistent with freedom of emigration. In 1979, China was also granted MFN status, and Jackson-Vanik auto
matically applied because China is a Communist country. When Deng Xiaoping, on his first visit to the United States after we recognized the Beijing government, was asked about the freedom of Chinese to emigrate, he smiled broadly and replied, “How many do you want?”

  In the autumn of 1989, however, following China’s use of army troops to disperse demonstrators in Tiananmen Square and kill workers and students in the surrounding streets, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi of California sponsored legislation giving thousands of Chinese students in the United States permission to extend their stays. Congress later amended these provisions to require annual presidential certification that China was making “overall significant progress” in its human rights policies, in trade practices, and in weapons nonproliferation, backing all this with the threat of MFN withdrawal. But that threat was never credible, since its implementation would have meant putting at risk extensive American investments in China. Thus the withdrawal of MFN remains primarily a rhetorical device used by members of Congress for partisan political advantage at home without the serious intent of altering policy at all.11

  The selective way the U.S. government has wielded the human rights issue has had an unintended consequence. It has stimulated Asians of many different persuasions to develop an “Asian concept of human rights” and to attack the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights as not “universal” at all but only another manifestation of Western cultural imperialism. As so often is true whenever invidious comparisons between Asia and the West are involved, former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore gained a certain prominence as a spokesman for the Asian point of view. “Americans believe their ideas are universal—the supremacy of the individual and free, unfettered expression. But they are not. Never were . . . ,” he insisted. “The ideas of individual supremacy and the right to free expression, when carried to excess, have not worked. They have made it difficult to keep American society cohesive. Asia can see it is not working.”12