Restless Empire (56 page)

Three events at the turn of the century symbolized these contradictions. In May 1999, during its war against Serbia, US bombers dropped five 2,000-pound precision-guided bombs on the Chinese embassy compound in Belgrade, killing three Chinese and wounding twenty-one. In April 2001 an American spy plane collided with a Chinese jet
fighter that was intercepting it seventy miles off the Chinese coast. The Chinese pilot was killed, and the US crew was held on an airbase in Hainan for almost two weeks before being released. But while these confrontations were taking place, China was also quietly negotiating with the United States and the world community for its accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). The resulting, unprecedented agreement gave China membership in WTO from November 2001, with full US support for its bid. Mistrust seemed to be driving the two governments apart, while economic interest seemed to be edging them closer.

The US bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade led to one of the most serious confrontations between China and the United States since Tian’anmen. Although there is no evidence for it, many Chinese believed that the attack was deliberate, rather than a result of miscommunication and outdated maps, as the American air force claimed. China had denounced the US and NATO attack on the Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic’s regime, saying that it constituted “a flagrant violation of the United Nations Charter.” The purpose of the bombing, some Chinese nationalists believed, was to warn China off opposing US international hegemony. The attack led to furious and sometimes violent demonstrations—some instigated by the authorities—in the main Chinese cities. In Chengdu, the US consul general’s residence was burned down. President Jiang Zemin stoked the flames, saying that the rallies stemmed from “the great patriotic spirit and cohesiveness of the Chinese nation and their strong will to maintain world peace and oppose hegemony. The great PRC will not be bullied.” The main official newspaper,
Renmin ribao
(People’s Daily), said that NATO had “become the heir to the evil heritage of Western culture” and headlined an editorial, with clear reference to the Boxer War, “This Is Not 1899 China.”
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A poll of university students in Beijing showed that more than seventy percent thought the US bombing was a deliberate act, and there were some slogans in their demonstration criticizing President
Jiang for being too weak on foreign affairs. A poem, of sorts, published in a Beijing daily caught the nationalist mood:

When we are wearing Pierre Cardin and Nike

When we are driving Cadillacs, Lincolns, and going to KFC and McDonald’s

Do we have a clear conscience?

No!!! . . .

Can we still find glory by using foreign products?

No!!!
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Pollsters working for foreign companies in China found a decided drop in the consumption of Western products immediately after the bombing. But the trend lasted only a week.

The midair collision between an American spy plan and a Chinese jet fighter two years later was interpreted by some Chinese in similar terms as the Belgrade bombing. When the new US administration of George W. Bush asserted that the US plane had been on a routine mission outside Chinese territorial waters,
Renmin ribao
shot back that it “sternly warns the US side that it should not absolve its domineering action with its hegemonic logic.” To most Chinese it was a question of fairness. China did not conduct reconnaissance flights up and down US coasts, and Bush’s denial of wrongdoing demonstrated what was wrong in international relations: The United States could do as it pleased, while every other country had to behave according to American rules. Chinese intelligence officials, though, were secretly pleased. The Yugoslavs had provided them with access to parts of a downed US stealth fighter from its war with NATO, and they had several months to dismantle and study the surveillance aircraft stranded on Hainan.
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But although the embassy bombing and the spy plane incident indicated increased conflict between China and the United States, the November 2001 US-sponsored Chinese accession to the WTO pointed
to a different kind of future. The concessions the Chinese government had to make to achieve their much-publicized aim of fully joining the world’s trade mechanisms were more staggering than any nationalist propaganda could imagine. China had to open up its domestic markets to foreign imports and foreign capital in all areas of production and services. Thus, the Chinese financial, telecommunications, distribution, and legal services sectors were now accessible to foreign firms. It had to stop preferential treatment for its state-owned enterprises. It had to eliminate quotas on most agricultural goods and to eliminate export subsidies for any of them. It had to build transparent financial regulations and laws that adhered to international standards. The changes the WTO agreement imposed on China went further than those for any other country, in part because of the complexities created by China insisting on being treated as a developing country. One South Asian WTO negotiator told me that seeing the glittering skyline of Pudong, Shanghai’s new financial district, from the negotiating room window did not help convince him of China’s “developing” status. The full protocol incorporated thousands of lines of tariffs and specific agreements and was put together after talks between China and every single one of the 142 members of the WTO. Having to negotiate with Haiti on beer and Fiji on sugar taught Chinese diplomats something about how international affairs worked beyond great power consultations. They learned from it. Even though top Chinese leaders were divided on the outcome, most of them agreed that WTO accession allowed them to do what they wanted to do anyway: abolish transfers to loss-making agriculture and industry and reduce tariffs on imported goods. As in other countries, it was easier for the Chinese leaders to blame foreign pressure for such unpopular decisions than to take the responsibility themselves.

When the new century began, Chinese and Americans were eyeing each other warily. Many Chinese, including some who had lived abroad, were surprised at the influence pressure groups on human rights issues
or on Tibet had on the US political system and the American public. Most Americans saw China, under its current government, as a future threat to the United States because it was undemocratic and oppressive. The fact that its economy was growing at more than twice the rate of the US economy, even through the boom years of the 1990s, began to worry some Americans. They did not realize the significance of the fundamental change that was taking place as China decided to accept integration into a US-led world economy. There was, in 2001, as George W. Bush was installed as US president and Hu Jintao was preparing to take over from Jiang Zemin (the first ever peaceful transition of power in mainland China), a sense that the Sino-American relationship was at a watershed, from where wild torrents threatened on one side and a slow but steady current flowed downriver on the other. But when the course was to be set, it was under very different winds of change than anyone had imagined in early 2001.

I
T MAY NOT BE TRUE
, as some historians claim, that the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington changed everything in international affairs. But they certainly changed the Sino-American relationship almost overnight. George W. Bush had attacked his election opponent, Vice President Al Gore, for having been complicit in what Bush called the Clinton Administration’s coddling of the Chinese Communists. But the authorities in Beijing had become used to such rhetoric during US election campaigns from whomever were not in office, and largely disregarded what Bush had said. Instead they chose to remember George W.’s long-standing ties to China, from when he came to stay with his father—the later president George H. W. Bush—when Bush
père
was US representative in the Chinese capital in 1974–1975. The spy plane crisis soon caused real concern for the Beijing leadership. But it was the new president’s insistence on referring to China as a “strategic competitor” and as the main challenge to US security that upset Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao most. Then came 11 September. The Bush administration
turned to fighting a “war on terror” in the Middle East and at home, which not only took its attention away from China but made that country’s regime a partner in another US global campaign. For the Chinese leadership it was a welcome break from the tensions in the relationship and from the US focus on the CCP’s human rights violations. Jiang called Bush by telephone on 12 September and told the US president that “China is ready to strengthen dialogue and cooperation with the United States and the international community in the joint efforts in combating all sorts of terrorist violence.”
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China supported the US attacks against terrorist bases in Afghanistan after 9/11. It accepted the overthrow of the Taliban regime because of the support Kabul had given to Osama bin Laden. In fact, Beijing was happy to see the Taliban go because of their suspected links to Islamist organizations in China’s own Muslim-populated northwestern province Xinjiang. The long lead-up to the US war against Iraq put more strains on the Sino-American relationship, but even in the case of a US invasion not supported by the UN Security Council the Chinese leaders saw their interests best served by not opposing it too strongly. As things turned out, China could verbally dissent from the invasion and occupation of Iraq from a safe distance, while leaving to Russia and the Americans’ own European allies Germany and France to provoke Washington’s ire by attempting to block military action. The new Chinese president, the buttoned-down bureaucrat Hu Jintao, did not want to take any risks over a war he believed was coming whatever China said or did. No surprise, then, that Bush’s Secretary of State, General Colin Powell, in September 2003 characterized relations with China as “the best they have been since President Nixon’s first visit.”
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Leaders in Beijing used the break from the attention of an aggressive and nationalistic new US administration to further build their economy and their military power. While the United States pursued its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, China’s GDP almost tripled. In 2010 it became the world’s second largest economy, after the United States, but ahead
of all others, including Japan and Germany. It is the largest exporter and the second largest importer of goods in the world, and will soon become the largest trading partner of the United States and the European Union. It is already the main trading partner of many leading countries, from Japan and Australia to India and Brazil. As could be expected, China’s trade surplus is massive, and Chinese investment is starting to flow outwards. During the 2008–2009 economic crisis, Chinese companies bought car manufacturers (Sweden’s Volvo and Britain’s Rover, for instance), financial companies, and technology firms abroad. Chinese institutions are the largest buyers of US government securities, holding an estimated twenty percent of the total.
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But not all is well with the Chinese economy. As we will see in the final chapter, China’s economic outlook is in no way certain, and the extensive links with the world economy bring risks as well as opportunities. Other countries, most importantly the United States, are complaining about Chinese currency manipulations and state interventions in the domestic economy, and want to see the Chinese trade surplus reduced. Inside China many people are concerned about rising inequality, atrocious labor conditions in some industries, and the need to create new jobs for the millions who enter the industrial job market every year. In terms of GDP per capita, China is still number 101 of all the countries in the world. Its $7,400 is right behind Albania, Ecuador, and Algeria. The US figure is $47,500.

China’s military modernization started, as we have seen, from a very low level. When the reform period began in 1980, China had a large conscript army of 4.5 million men and little combat effectiveness, as its war against Vietnam had shown. The PLA’s technological level was atrocious compared to armies elsewhere; its mechanized divisions were in disarray; its air defenses were mostly unserviceable; its air force and navy near nonexistent for purposes of modern warfare. It has taken China a generation to catch up, and its military capabilities today are still far behind those of the United States or even Japan. It does, however,
now for the first time since the fifteenth century have a blue-water navy, with fifty submarines (ten nuclear) and seventy major warships. In 2011 the Chinese air force tested a new stealth fighter, similar to the American F-117. While the PLA is extraordinarily proud of this achievement, it must jar a bit that its testing came two years after the US air force began retiring their F-117s, first tested in 1981. The chances for China to catch up with the United States in military terms for another generation are slim as long as the present pattern in military investment continues. US defense spending was at least one trillion dollars in 2010. The Chinese was one-tenth that, from a much lower starting point in terms of training or military hardware. China’s military power today is therefore much more comparable with that of Japan or Britain than that of the United States.
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What will happen to China’s emphasis on its military development will primarily be shaped by events in its own region, East Asia, which we will look at in the next chapter. But there is no doubt that China’s complicated relationship with the United States in the past will cast its shadow over all Chinese thinking about national security in the future.

T
HROUGHOUT THE LATE
twentieth century, China viewed the United States eagerly. It did so simply because America was the dominant force on most matters from medicine to music to military power. Many foreigners who visit China for the first time are astonished by the significance young Chinese give to the United States, for good or bad, and by the contradictory view of the world that this imagining of US positions creates: US global predominance is certainly visible all over the world, but people in Berlin or Buenos Aires pay less attention to it than do people in Beijing. Maybe this is because some Chinese think that the United States is occupying a global position that rightly belongs to China. Or is it because so many young Chinese want to become more like Americans as they see them—modern, independent, goal-driven, and wealthy, with a fair amount of ruthlessness (soap opera
style) thrown in for good measure? Whatever the reason for China’s current US obsession, it is influenced and shaped by the history the two countries share, not only in diplomatic and military terms, but in terms of how people think and behave. It is probable that in the future China will become more similar to what the United States looks like now. But political relations and the two people’s perceptions of each other will likely be strained.