Why I disagree with Hugh White on China's rise
by: Paul Dibb
Paul Dibb is professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University
THERE is no more important policy challenge for Australia than the future relationship between the US and China.
Hugh White has raised serious questions about how to manage that relationship and, in particular, his view that the US should share power as an equal with China (discussed comprehensively in The Weekend Australian on August 11-12 ).
I disagree with much of his analysis and policy prescriptions for the following reasons.
First, he exaggerates the dangers in tensions between these two powers and, especially, the risks of conflict leading to nuclear war. He says competition between the US and China will inevitably lead to confrontation and military conflict. That did not happen in the more dangerous Cold War confrontation between the USSR and the US.
This was because it was clearly understood on both sides just how destructive a nuclear exchange would be. And yet, White
suggests a scenario in which a military incident in the South China Sea could lead to China dropping a nuclear weapon on American military bases in Guam, and the US doing nothing in retaliation.
In other words, the US, with more than 5000 strategic nuclear weapons, has backed down and accepted nuclear devastation on its territory with all the precedents that would set.
Second, there is little recognition of just how limited China's military capabilities are. It is simply not good enough to accept the pumped-up claims of the US Naval War College that US aircraft carriers are vulnerable to ballistic missile strikes by China.
I've heard all these exaggerated views before out of the US. Of course, China is developing some serious modern capabilities but do we actually believe that the US will sit on its hands and do nothing? Unlike America, China has no experience of modern war and much of its military technology is either reverse engineered from Western designs or bought from Russia, which has made no technological breakthroughs for more than 20 years.
Ballistic missile attacks on US aircraft carriers from China's mainland would simply invite devastating blows on targets inside China.
As for US power sharing and treating China as an equal, why should the US create what former prime minister Paul Keating calls "strategic space" for it? What is being implied here: giving China all the South China Sea or a sphere of influence in Southeast Asia or a free hand to threaten Japan?
The fact is that the correlation of forces in our region leaves China with no real friends other than Pakistan and North Korea.
Given China's aggressive posture, practically every other major country in the region is moving closer to the US. When China's foreign minister threatens members of ASEAN by stating that "China is a big country and other countries are small countries", he is acting like a bully. Little wonder that China's strategic space is limited.
Then there is the question of human rights and asserting, as do both Keating and White, some sort of moral equivalence between US values and those of China. Both seem to imply that because the Communist Party of China has taken hundreds of millions of people out of poverty this somehow cancels out its gross human rights abuses. Let's just remember that China's Communist Party was responsible in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution for more than 30 million deaths of its own people.
And, in recent memory, this was the party that rolled the tanks over students in Tiananmen Square. There is no way Washington will concede moral equivalence to a communist regime.
Finally, what about White's proposal for a Concert of Asia in which China and the US would share power? As he acknowledges in passing, this would risk sacrificing the security of middle and small powers.
It must be remembered that in the Concert of Europe in the 19th century middle powers such as Poland either disappeared or were carved up. Just what is proposed here for countries such as Vietnam? Moreover, the Concert of Europe worked because there was a common European culture, which does not exist today in Asia.
The fact is that the situation between China and the US is nowhere near as perilous as suggested by Keating and White.
Nuclear deterrence and increasing economic interdependence will act as a brake on military adventurism by both sides.
Moreover, as Australia's former ambassador to China, Geoff Raby, points out, China is utterly dependent on foreign markets and is in reality a highly constrained power.
Meanwhile, China will need to readjust to the fact that the US is refocusing on our region after been absent in the Middle East for the past decade. Beijing will no longer have the luxury of free kicks to unilaterally assert its power in the region.
The likely evolution is not some formal Concert of Asia but a mixture of good old-fashioned power balancing and prudent hedging on both sides.
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