When China Rules the World

Finally, there is the question of China ’s military strength. This has been persistently highlighted by the United States. The Americans attach greater emphasis to military power than anything else, a position which is reflected in their continuing huge military expenditure and the importance they place on maintaining overwhelming military strength in relation to the rest of the world. In the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States of America, such massive military expenditure is advocated in order to ‘dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equalling, the power of the United States ’. [1191] The fact is that American unipolarity is overwhelmingly a military phenomenon. [1192]

The American argument that China is determined to develop a strong military capacity of its own, beyond what is needed in the context of Taiwan, plays on the fears of many nations, especially in East Asia. China ’s size and cohesiveness, together with its history of authoritarian rule, arouse doubts enough in the minds of others, so the suspicion that China is also embarked on becoming a military superpower could help to tip the balance of perception towards something closer to paranoia. The political purpose behind the annual Pentagon statements on China ’s military spending, as well as the not infrequent warnings from members of the Bush administration, [1193] has been to create a mood of doubt and distrust, playing in part on old Cold War fears about the Soviet Union. [1194] In fact China, as we have seen, has hitherto opted for a different path, one that emphasizes economic growth rather than military capacity. Although it has undertaken a major modernization of its armed forces, the twin objects of this have been to ensure that China can respond by force if necessary to any declaration of independence by Taiwan, and to pose a sufficient deterrent to any external power that might otherwise contemplate attacking China. [1195] Both of these are long-established concerns, the first a product of the civil war, the second a function of China ’s ‘century of humiliation’ and its overriding concern for its national sovereignty. China ’s ability to develop a powerful military is also seriously constrained by the fact that its own technological level remains relatively low and that its only source of foreign arms, given the EU embargo and the US ban, is Russia. [1196] As a result, China is much weaker militarily than Japan. It still does not even possess an aircraft carrier, a crucial means of power-projection, unlike ten other countries in the world that do – including the UK, which has three. [1197] True, as China ’s power grows in East Asia and it acquires new responsibilities and commitments there and elsewhere, its military strength is likely to expand in tandem, but how much and in what ways is difficult to predict. [1198]

The danger is that at some point the United States and China will be drawn into the kind of arms race that characterized the Cold War and which produced such a climate of fear. There is no doubt that the United States feels rather more comfortable on the terrain of hard power than China, first because its military superiority is overwhelming and secondly because the language of hard power is deeply inscribed on the American psyche – partly as a result of the Cold War and partly as a consequence of the violent manner of the country’s birth and expansion, as exemplified by the frontier spirit – in a way that it is not on the Chinese. [1199] But there are dangers here for the United States too. The fundamental problem of China for the US is not its military strength but its economic prowess. This is what is slowly and irresistibly eroding American global pre-eminence. [1200] If the US comes to see China as primarily a military issue then it will be engaging in an act of self-deception which will divert its attention from addressing the real problems that it faces and in effect hasten the process of its own decline. [1201]