Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions (2003) (37 page)

The United States has distorted Japan’s development in other important ways as well. Because the Tokyo War Crimes trials excluded any discussion of the role of the emperor (by decision of the United States, which thought it needed to govern Japan through the emperor), these trials have never been accepted as anything other than victor’s justice by the Japanese, and Japan has never come to grips with the history of the war. For the most part it doesn’t even teach this history in its schools. This has made it impossible for Japan to bring closure on the war in its relations with other countries. The visits in recent years by Japanese prime ministers to Yasukuni Shrine (where the spirits of Japan’s war dead, including convicted war criminals, are enshrined) cause outrage in many countries, but the outrage baffles many Japanese, who see it as similar to visiting tombs in Arlington National Cemetery. Beyond this, the United States has created the same kind of fantasyland in Japan as in Europe. Because it has no real responsibility for the defense of the oil routes or overall strategic issues in Asia, Japan can indulge in low defense expenditures – only 1 percent of GDP – and avoid difficult issues. (Interestingly, the United States no longer complains about the level of Japan’s defense expenditure even though it is far less than that of Europe.) The status of U.S. forces in Japan actually gives Japan’s authorities more de facto jurisdiction than they have in Korea, but the issue is similar. Japan is a protectorate and a client state of the United States. It also was not fully consulted about U.S. policy toward North Korea even though it would surely be a target for North Korean missiles.

None of this has given rise to displays of anti-American feelings like those expressed in Korea, partly because Japan is a bigger beneficiary of the U.S. economic relationship, partly because Japan’s democracy is not as well developed as Korea’s, and partly because the Japanese tend to be less outspoken. But there are significant signals that should be noted. For example, one of the biggest hit movies in Japan in recent years was
Pride
, a film glorifying General Hideki Tojo, who led Japan during most of World War II and was convicted and executed as a war criminal. The producer, Hideaki Kase, who is now writing a book about kamikaze pilots, said, ‘Tojo was a superstar and still is.’
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Then there is Yoshinori Kobayashi, Japan’s most popular cartoonist, who told me over coffee in Tokyo recently that for Japan World War II was about liberating Asia from western colonization. Most important of all is Shintaro Ishihara, the novelist and governor of Tokyo. Author with former Sony Chairman Akio Morita of the best-seller
The Japan That Can Say No
, Ishihara is an outspoken nationalist whose views, though sophisticated, are somewhat jingoistic. In the book, he suggested that Japan should cut off high-tech exports to the United States as an answer to U.S. complaints about Japanese trade barriers. In a country sick of the corruption and inarticulate leadership of the U.S.-backed LDP, he is now by far the most popular single political leader in the country, and his name keeps being mentioned as a possible prime minister. If he were elected, he would very likely join the South Koreans in moving to get the U.S. troops out. (I once debated him on Japanese TV, and he made sure to emphasize his opposition to U.S. military bases in his country.) Even without that there are increasing calls in Japan to reduce U.S. troop levels, and Japan’s Foreign Minister, Yoriko Kawaguchi, announced on February 2, 2003, that the Japanese government would strive to reduce the number of American troops on Okinawa.
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It is important to understand that Japan’s view of the role of the U.S. troops and bases is at great odds with that of most Americans’. While Americans think they are defending Japan and that Japanese should be grateful, the Japanese call the funds they provide for base maintenance ‘the sympathy budget.’ This budget is presented by political leaders in Japan not as the contribution of an ally to a critical joint mission but as a favor or a gift to the Americans, enabling them to indulge their hegemonic ambitions. Once again, perspective is of critical importance. Japanese like Americans. All the polls and all my forty years of contact with Japan confirm it. But we shouldn’t ignore views like those of a Japanese friend of mine, a former ambassador to Thailand, who told me, ‘America needs conflict to keep its economy going.’ Japan is not going to renounce America tomorrow or perhaps ever, but those in the U.S. government who insist on betting on Japan as America’s ‘strategic partner’ may find themselves sorely disappointed.

China

As with Russia, so with China, U.S. relations are distinctly better today than before September 11. This continues the oscillating pattern of U.S.-China relations since Nixon’s ‘opening to China’ in 1972. During the Reagan administration, China’s economic development and common interests in containing the Soviet Union drew the two countries together. As a Reagan administration official, I participated in some of the early economic negotiations with China and can attest to the immense interest of American business in the Chinese market. The end of the Cold War and the Tienanmen Square incident of 1989 then introduced a chill that the first Bush administration eventually corrected in response to business pressure as well as to broader strategic interests. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton accused the Bush administration of ‘mollycoddling’ the Chinese and promised to take a sterner line. As president he initially did take a tough line on human rights and other issues, but he soon succumbed to the logic of economic development and initiated the policy of ‘engagement,’ calling China a ‘strategic partner.’ This angered some in Japan, who thought Japan was the ‘strategic partner,’ and many on the right wing of the Republican Party who still harbor the old hatred of the Chinese communists.

With the advent of the second Bush administration in 2001, the U.S. line hardened again. China was relabeled a ‘strategic competitor,’ and U.S. military surveillance of China was increased. It looked to many Chinese as if America needed an enemy to replace the Soviet Union and had chosen China. Osama bin Laden appeared to Beijing as something of a godsend. They quickly voiced sympathy and offered cooperation to Washington, after which relations warmed considerably. But the Chinese remain concerned that once the threat of terror is under control, they could once again become a target of American hostility.

By far the most important piece of the U.S.-China puzzle is Taiwan. As noted earlier, for mainland Chinese, putting Taiwan under the Chinese flag represents the last step in re-establishing the sovereignty and integrity that were lost to western colonialism in the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century. Americas support of Taiwan is seen as intervention in a strictly internal matter and is inexplicable except in terms of a U.S. interest in weakening and containing China. In their view, every time a Taiwanese leader meets with a U.S. leader, and every time President Bush says something like ‘we will do whatever it takes’ to defend Taiwan, it simply encourages Taiwanese leaders to resist Chinas efforts at reunification and so puts more pressure on the leadership in Beijing to take a tougher line. The Chinese have told anyone who will listen (and most experts believe them) that the one thing that would almost certainly cause a war would be a declaration of independence by Taiwan. In a mirror image of the American view that China’s buildup of forces across from Taiwan poses a threat demanding a U.S. response, the Chinese see our gestures of support to Taiwan as posing a threat to which they have no choice but to respond. In their view, it was the United States that created the Taiwan problem in the first place, and they see our support for a separate Taiwan as part of a larger effort to contain and undermine China’s rising power and influence.

That brings us to the second piece of the puzzle – hegemonic competition. Whether apocryphal or not, the story of the Chinese professor who commented that ‘China has had 150 bad years, but now we’re back’ is very telling. Once one gets past the inevitable Taiwan discussion, the second major topic on the minds of Chinese elites is the country’s bright prospects and return to the front rank of nations. Without being Chinese you probably cannot fully understand the deep sense of historical humiliation brought by the troubles of the past century, but the sense of euphoria and anticipation in the wake of China’s current success is palpable. Yet there is also an anxiety in China that the United States fears this success and wants to limit it.

Again mirror images are at work. Recall, for example, the incident in early 2001 when a U.S. EP-3 electronic surveillance aircraft was forced to land on Hainan Island. Americans saw this as an unprovoked act of hostility that proved once more why we have to beware of China. But the Chinese asked why U.S. planes are constantly patrolling their coast, deliberately triggering Chinese defense communications in order to monitor China’s defense capabilities. They point out that they neither have such aircraft nor do they patrol the coasts of the United States or even neighboring countries in Asia. In their view, the United States gains benefits from being the hegemonic power and seeks to maintain that power, perhaps even by forcibly preventing the rise of a rival. This sense is powerfully reinforced by U.S. actions and, of course, by the president’s West Point speech and statements of other officials calling for preventive war and the abrogation of the rise of any competing power. Looking at the world from Beijing, the Chinese see U.S. troops and fleets all over the Pacific, advanced U.S. weapons being sent to Taiwan, U.S. detente with Russia, and U.S. forces based for the first time ever in several non-Democratic central Asian countries bordering China as a result of the conflict in Afghanistan. They see a U.S. National Missile Defense effort ostensibly aimed at ‘rogue nations’ like North Korea but also tending to negate the deterrent power of China’s nuclear missiles; a unilateral move without UN backing in Iraq; and an arsenal of unparalleled sophistication and power. Altogether that makes a scary picture for the Chinese, indicating to them that America thinks they are a threat. They insist they are not an expansionist power and never have been and pose no threat to the United States other than economic competition, which the United States says it welcomes. Indeed, they say the U.S. posture forces them to waste resources on defense that they would much rather put into economic development. Many suspect the American threats are part of a strategy to reduce China’s economic growth.

The third part of the puzzle is the issue of pride, respect, clash of cultures, and ultimate intent. The Chinese are perhaps more ambivalent about the United States than are any other people. Give a lecture at a Chinese university and, as an American, you will be sharply questioned and subjected to harsh criticism about American hegemonism, militarism, and intervention in Taiwan. But after the lecture, half of the students will crowd around to ask how they can go to M.I.T. or Stanford or get a job in America. They are endlessly fascinated by American technology, its industry and productivity, and its democratic government and spirit. Chinese also find Americans informal and expressive like themselves, easy to talk to. Yet they also have tremendous pride in their own culture and believe deeply that China must be ruled differently than America, and that Chinese ways must be incorporated into the framework of globalization. Time and again, Chinese officials, scholars, and students will express resentment that Americans take for granted that the American way or western way is the universally best way. They repeatedly insist that the world cannot run on an American standard only but must incorporate Chinese standards as well. In this discussion, they insist that China is no threat to anyone, that they have no desire to impose their standards.

This claim gets a mixed reaction in the rest of Asia. On the one hand, few in Asia outside of Taiwan fear a Chinese-armed attack. On the other hand, many have told me they feel threatened by the way China’s hierarchical, authoritarian system will tend to reorder global structures as its power increases. Such people feel more comfortable with the United States in the neighborhood as well. One reason they do is demonstrated by a long conversation I had with students and faculty at Tsinghua University and the Unirule Institute of Economics in the spring of 2002. After having been berated for quite some time about the arrogance of America and the deficiencies of western standards, I asked if they could tell me exactly what the Chinese standard or system of future political and geo-political organization would be. They honestly admitted they could not.

Here then is the major issue. China wants to be a great power, and it aches for American acceptance and respect, a desire that offers us great potential influence. Yet China does not yet have institutions that can handle change in a systematic, predictable fashion, a fact that inevitably contains an element of risk. China is certainly not an enemy of the United States today, yet it might become so in response to its interpretations of our actions. In other words, we could make the hostility of China a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is thus a matter of the highest importance that we step carefully and do all we can to assure that China continues on a path of development and liberalization.

That brings us finally to the last piece of the puzzle: the economy Chinas transformation since I went on that early trade mission in 1982 is staggering. It is not completely a market economy but it is getting there at high speed, and this development has dramatically changed Chinese society and politics. While it is still far from a democracy, for the average person, China today is a much, much freer place than it has perhaps ever been. This development has been powerfully promoted both by the United States government and U.S. industry through enormous investment and technology transfer. This trend is the best guarantee of peaceful, friendly U.S.-China relations in the future. Indeed, there is a great irony here. Even as we have swung back and forth on whether China is a ‘strategic partner’ or a ‘strategic competitor,’ the U.S. economy has grown increasingly dependent on China in two critical ways. First, the U.S. trade deficit with China has reached $85 billion as America has come to rely more and more on China as the low-cost quality supplier of everything from paint brushes to cell phones.
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Even more importantly, China is building up enormous dollar reserves and increasingly is an investor in U.S. securities. As we saw earlier, the U.S. economy is heavily dependent on a constant inflow of foreign capital, and as China becomes a bigger source of that capital, the United States will become more dependent on China. In Beijing, officials hope that by the time Osama bin Laden is out of the way, the United States will not be able to afford to see China as an enemy.