Asia's Cauldron

by Robert D. Kaplan

  Stilwell missed all of this. “In Stilwell’s mind,” writes Taylor, “Chiang had no values; no skills in government or generalship; no real interest in the modernization and welfare of China … no human qualities worth noting.… For Stilwell, life was categorical, nuances nonexistent.” While American officials, influenced by Stilwell, believed Chiang wanted to avoid fighting the Japanese in order to store arms to fight the communists later on, during the 1941–1942 Burma campaign Chiang’s troops suffered eighty thousand killed and wounded, whereas total American casualties around the world at that point were 33,000. By the end of fourteen years of war with Japan, China would sustain three million military casualties, 90 percent of them Chiang’s troops. Meanwhile, Mao’s communists were pursuing the very strategy Chiang was accused of: avoiding major military entanglements with the Japanese in order to hoard their strength to later fight the Nationalists. But this did not prevent foreign service officers like John Paton Davies and John Stewart Service, who were working for Stilwell, from describing Mao’s communists as “agrarian democrats” and “much more American than Russian in form and spirit.” Mao would go on to kill tens of millions of people—sixty million perhaps—in government-induced famines and other atrocities, which in absolute terms—along with the Mongol Conquests of the thirteenth century—counts as the second largest man-made carnage in history after World War II.22 What these foreign service officers and journalists overlooked was that Mao’s talent for creating a mass organization—the very thing that Chiang distrusted, according to Fenby—made Mao’s movement more dynamic, and thus more impressive to Western visitors, but also more dangerous should that mass organization pivot in a totalitarian direction.23

  Chiang would be proven right in his assessment, made near the end of World War II, that rather than agrarian democrats, Mao’s forces would prove to be “more communistic than the Russian communists.” Indeed, the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution would both occur within a quarter century of that statement. And yet Chiang’s Guomindang army failed utterly to meet Stilwell’s expectations, and thus remained the corrupt, inefficient force that went on to be vanquished by Mao. Barbara Tuchman, Stilwell’s sympathetic biographer, may have caught the imperfections of Chiang best by labeling him a master of “plots” who “governed for survival,” rather than for social change, even as among the Nationalists there was—as one Chinese academic put it—“no one better in sight.” Chiang’s seeming “infuriating absence of conscience” in the eyes of the Americans was, in part, Tuchman says, a consequence of Chiang’s resentment at China being treated as a minor theater in the war, with most of the aid and attention going to Europe.24

  Tuchman grasps what Stilwell didn’t. “The Kuomintang military structure could not be reformed without reform of the system from which it sprang,” but China was not “clay in the hands of the West.” Or as Fenby puts it, Stilwell “was behaving as if he were in a stable democracy, where a professional army is answerable to an elected government, fenced off from interference in politics.” Nobody understood China and Chiang’s tragedy as much as Chiang himself. In what Taylor calls his “remarkably candid” assessment, penned in January 1949, following the communist takeover of the mainland, Chiang wrote, “we are in a transitional period where the old system has been abolished but the new system is yet to be built.” He implies that the blame falls with the incoherent and fractious system he himself had managed, in turn a product of the warlord era.25

  Upon arriving in southwestern Taiwan in July 1949, Chiang proclaimed a reorganization of his party that stressed enlightened authoritarianism; that is, dictatorship plus good, responsive governance. His formerly mainland Chinese Nationalist security services arrested ten thousand indigenous Taiwanese and executed more than a thousand, as part of a vast repression that characterized the early years of his rule. At the same time, all financial matters were centralized in the hands of the military, thus eliminating many forms of graft. To further curtail corruption, Chiang ordered banks to provide information on all individual and company accounts to the tax authorities. Chiang also promulgated a wide-ranging land reform program, emphasizing a sharp reduction in rural rents, which immediately benefited the Taiwanese. This was only part of a shift to progressive policies that also included reformist political appointments. Chiang’s policies were often cruel and tough, but combined with the many examples of progressive governance, they earned political support in the United States to protect Taiwan from a communist invasion from the mainland, especially as Chiang’s land reform program stood in stark contrast to Mao’s revolutionary land confiscations, which led to over a million deaths in the early 1950s alone—even before the Great Leap Forward. It was in this period where one really saw the vast gulf between Mao’s utopian Marxist-Leninist precepts and Chiang’s Confucian ones: rarely was the gulf wider between one form of dictatorship and another.26

  Chiang had a motive for this combination of disciplined, iron-fisted rule and enlightened social and economic policies. It was to prepare Taiwan for a possible invasion by the mainland communists on one hand, and build American support for Taiwan on the other. Chiang breathed easier the moment he heard the news in June 1950 that North Korean troops had crossed the 38th Parallel and invaded South Korea, in a decision backed by mainland China. Chiang knew that with Mao’s focus now on the Korean Peninsula, Taiwan was probably out of danger. He was right. It was the Korean War that forced President Harry Truman to consider the defense of Taiwan a paramount U.S. interest in the Pacific.

  Taiwan’s path from that point forward was toward prosperity and eventual democracy. Meanwhile, China today becomes less and less autocratic and less and less centralized, having long ago discarded Mao’s Marxism-Leninism in all but name. Mao lives on as a nationalist icon mainly. If China continues in this liberal direction, and forges closer economic and cultural ties with Taiwan, Chiang Kai-shek may yet turn out to be a more important historical figure than Mao Zedong.

  CHAPTER VIII

  The State of Nature

  I am situated by a frozen lake, with gray pagodas and upward-curved roofs in the distance visible through the Beijing smog. There is the sickly sweet smell of coal burning. I walk inside a traditional tea house, filled with porcelain, rice paper paintings, lime wood furniture, and a massive red Turkish carpet. In other words, I am in a world of elegant and traditional aesthetics: a world with which sophisticated global elites are comfortable. This is China as seen through the pages of an expensive coffee-table book. My companions are members of an internationally renowned foreign policy institute in Beijing. The atmosphere is convivial. We talk to each other across a geopolitical divide, but actually less so across a cultural one, since we are all similarly educated, all frequently visit each other’s countries, and all consequently seek out compromise. Everyone here is equally worried about the stability of the North Korean regime and about the direction of both the American and Chinese economies. There is a discussion about how we can get our two countries’ navies to better cooperate. The get-together reminds me of how richly developed United States-China relations are. Millions of Americans and Chinese have visited each other’s countries, tens of thousands of American businessmen pass through Beijing and Shanghai. Chinese political elites send their children to be educated at American universities. This is not the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, when I was a lonely American in East European capitals. “Containment” is a word from a previous era, one that simply does not fit the American security approach to China, I tell myself.

  But that evening I am somewhere else in the Chinese capital. Rather than in a realm of quiet elegance, I am now in a loud and tacky new hotel under sharp and glaring lights. There is a lot of fake gold and plastic. I eat dinner with two members of a Communist Party foreign policy think tank. They are badly dressed and speak through an interpreter. They tell me that the Japanese national character has not changed since Pearl Harbor. They defend the nine-dashed line tha
t asserts China’s claim to virtually the entire South China Sea. They claim the right for China’s navy to protect its sea lines of communication across the Indian Ocean to the Middle East. The Vietnamese are unreasonable, they tell me. They warm up to me only after I provide a short disquisition about how much I am aware of the territorial violations inflicted upon China by the West and Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yes, here I could be back in Cold War Eastern Europe.

  As different as the American relationship with China from the Cold War one with the Soviet Union, the fact remains that China and the United States are two great powers with competing interests in the Western Pacific, and while the experts one meets at Beijing’s universities and institutes seem reassuringly flexible—members, as they are, of the global elite—they are not in power: and those that are in power are less flexible. Though, of course, the situation is far more complicated than that. For even within the ranks of China’s navy, there are significant voices for moderation alongside tougher assessments.1 Beijing is indeed rich in differences of opinion. However, throughout Beijing, one is inundated with the nostrum, While China only defends, the United States conquers. The South China Sea is the nub of the issue. Hard-liners and soft-liners alike in Beijing—deeply internalizing how China suffered at the hands of Western powers in the recent past—see the South China Sea as a domestic issue, as a blue-water extension of China’s territoriality. One night at a seminar I conducted for Chinese students, one shy, quivering young man blurted out: “Why does the United States meet our harmony and benevolence with hegemony? U.S. hegemony will lead to chaos in the face of China’s rise!”

  This is vaguely similar to a Middle Kingdom mentality, in which China must defend itself against barbarians. Indeed, the South China Sea and its environs are China’s near-abroad, where China is harmoniously reasserting the status quo, having survived the assault upon it by Western powers. But because the United States has come here from half a world away in order to seek continued influence in the South China Sea, it is demonstrably hegemonic. Likewise in the Indian Ocean, where China has legitimate commercial and geopolitical interests, while America’s interests, again, are merely hegemonic. It is the United States, so the reasoning in Beijing goes, “that attempts to keep Asia under its thumb and arrogantly throws its massive power projection capacity around.” Because Washington is seen as the “agitator” of South China Sea disputes, it is the United States, not China, that needs to be “deterred.”2 After all, China dominated a tribute system based on Confucian values that defined international relations in East Asia for many centuries, and resulted in more harmony and fewer wars than the balance of power system in Europe. So the West and the United States have nothing to teach China in regard to keeping the peace.3

  These are different worldviews informed by different geographical points of reference. They may have no ultimate resolution.

  Thus, we are back to containment, the wrong word that unfortunately harbors a great truth: that because China is geographically fundamental to Asia, its military and economic power must be hedged against to preserve the independence of smaller states in Asia that are U.S. allies. And that, in plain English, is a form of containment. A confident, businesslike official at the Foreign Ministry in Beijing understood completely the dilemma, when he half warned me: “Don’t let these small countries [Vietnam, the Philippines …] manipulate you.” China understands power, and thus it understands the power of the United States. But it will not tolerate a coalition of smaller powers allied with the United States against it: that, given the Chinese historical experience of the past two hundred years, is unacceptable. As for the nine-dashed line, as one university professor in Beijing told me: sophisticated people in government and in the foreign and defense policy institutes here recognize that there must be some compromise down the road, but they need a political strategy to sell such a compromise to a domestic audience, which harbors deep reservoirs of nationalism. In the meantime, the Chinese have doubled down on the nine-dashed line, establishing a prefecture of two hundred islets encompassing two million square kilometers of the South China Sea, with forty-five legislators to govern it.

  It may be, in fact, that the nationalism on display among the two Communist Party members I met at the hotel was a low-calorie version of what lies in store for China if the party itself weakens or fractures in the face of an unruly process of democratization and socioeconomic upheaval, aggravated by an overheated, debt-ridden domestic economy. No one can predict the future, but the early phases of transition to democracy often bring nationalism to the surface, unless democratization comes after the earlier establishment of bourgeois traditions, like in the case of former Warsaw Pact Central Europe; or after the complete defeat and subsequent occupation of a country—and delegitimization of extreme nationalism—as in the case of post-World War II Germany and Japan. The idea that China will suddenly be less nationalistic if it were only to become less autocratic has relatively few historical precedents. The current crop of dull, technocratic, and collegial party leaders in Beijing may constitute the most reasonable regime in the field of foreign policy that China may have for some time to come.

  Of course, China will be in a state of continued upheaval, if only because the vast economic expansion overseen by the Communist Party in the last thirty-five years has created a more complex society that requires both urgent reform and new institutions that a one-party state can no longer provide. But do not necessarily equate domestic disharmony and severe economic troubles with a weaker posture in China’s maritime near-abroad. The Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman has noted that China optimists and pessimists may both be right: China’s domestic upheaval could eventually strengthen Chinese power, in a vaguely similar way that the American Civil War produced the conditions for the United States to lead the industrial world.4 Big changes certainly lie in wait for China. Icons could be smashed and rebuilt. The gigantic poster of Mao that hangs before the upturned yellow roofs of the Forbidden City is there because, despite killing as many as sixty million Chinese, Mao unified China after a century of imperial decrepitude and civil war. Thus, he appeals to the nationalist element in China. The internal debate on Mao is yet to come. But whatever way the debate eventually turns out, it is likely to be integral to China’s political development along its path to greater power. And while China will be further integrated into a twenty-first-century global civilization—anchored to a significant degree by legal norms—do not altogether discount China’s historic view of its own, vast geographical sway.

  To wit, in 1754, the king of Java, well beyond the southern extremity of the South China Sea, requested that his lands be formally incorporated into those of China and its population entered into the Qing dynasty registers. But the Qing emperor, Qianlong, replied that this was not necessary, because—“at least in his eyes”—the lands and people of Java were “already within the compass of Our enlightened government.”5 Thus, from a Chinese historical vantage point, Beijing’s dominance of the South China Sea and even the Java Sea is altogether natural.

  Aristotle writes, in a manner that recalls Shakespeare, that conflicts arise “not over small things but from small things.”6 Claims and incidents, however petty they may seem to outsiders, if they are tied to the vital interests of those in positions of authority, can lead to war. The fact that archives from China’s twelfth-century Sung dynasty and from Vietnam’s seventeenth-century Nguyen dynasty refer to the Spratlys augments both China’s and Vietnam’s claims to those barren islands, the great majority of which lack freshwater: claims that on some future morrow the two nations may be willing to violently enforce. “War is normal,” intones America’s preeminent academic realist, the late Kenneth N. Waltz of Columbia University. And interdependence, which is synonymous with globalization, can mean more war, Waltz goes on, because highly similar people whose affairs are closely intertwined will occasionally fall into conflict. Moreover, “in the state of nature, there is no such thing as
an unjust war.”7 The South China Sea reflects a state of nature in that legal claims are in contradiction with each other and thus provide little basis for cooperation, even as calculations of power, tied partly to the movement of warships, provide the foundation for how the various states interact. This does not mean that war will break out in the South China Sea, or even that it is likely to break out. But it does mean that war there remains a possibility against which all regional powers must always be on guard.

  Alleviating the state of nature requires a new security order. A message of both Machiavelli’s Prince and Discourses on Livy is that the founding of a new order is the most difficult thing in politics.8 Indeed, the old order of American military unipolarity in the waters of the Western Pacific is slowly fading. Meanwhile, the United States demands a new order built on international legal norms that its warships will continue to enforce, even as Washington has not signed the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. But rather than an international order dominated by American warships, China now demands a regional order that it, as the dominant indigenous power, will do the most to maintain. Because Chinese naval power is rising, the situation is in serious flux.

  Truly, the map of the South China Sea is a classic document of geopolitics, in that geopolitics constitutes the influence of geography upon human divisions.9 It is a relatively shallow sea where the impediments to energy exploration are more political than technological. But the fact that it is a cartographic symbol of conflict does not prevent it from being captivating. This map clarifies a space dense with ships and shipping lanes: sixty thousand vessels each year pass through the Strait of Malacca, including tankers holding more than thirteen billion barrels of petroleum.10 The fetching names of many of the places in dispute are derived from the names of vessels wrecked on the islets, reefs, and shoals in question. With all of its features—islands and rocks, many of which disappear under high tide—and all of its broken and unbroken lines denoting various kinds of claims of sovereignty, the map is dizzying in its complexity. The Spratlys alone constitute 150 features, only forty-eight of which are above water all of the time.11 And it is true that the claims are so numerous and so often overlapping with other claims that the idea of a solution pales beside the more realistic hope of just managing the status quo to the benefit of all, so that all can pursue oil and natural gas exploration in the face of absolute rises in population that may help drive energy prices upward. But that will be difficult. For example, the Philippines’ Malampaya and Camago natural gas and condensate fields are in Chinese-claimed waters. Vietnam and China have overlapping claims to undeveloped energy blocks off the Vietnamese coast. China has announced that a potential new source of natural gas—frozen methane—was discovered on the seabed near the Paracels, in an area that China disputes with Vietnam. The claims just go on like this.12