James H. Nolt

(Ed. Note: The U.S. visit of the Chinese premier, the ongoing discussions of China's request to join the World Trading Organization, unabated human rights violations in China, and revelations about probable security leaks at Los Alamos have raised the level of public and congressional concern about the Clinton administration possible of engagement with China. James Nolt, an expert in U.S.-China security relations, examines the persistent alarms about China's military threat to the United States. The following is excerpted from an updated (April 1999) FPIF policy brief, which is available online at: http://www.foreignpolicy-infocus.org/briefs/vol3/v3n19chi.html)

Although economically China has experienced rapid growth, militarily, China has been in relative decline since the 1970s. China does not and will not pose in the foreseeable future the kind of military threat to the U.S. that the Soviet Bloc did (exaggerated though that threat often was). China is not even an irritating "rogue state" as some consider Iraq, Iran, or North Korea. China has achieved normal commercial and diplomatic relations with the U.S. and most of China's neighbors. Even where there is tension, as in China's relations with Taiwan, India, and Vietnam, relations have improved considerably since the armed clashes of decades ago. Both the relative decline in China's military capabilities and the improvement of China's foreign relations should lead to U.S. optimism and confidence about the prospects for continued peaceful progress in Asia.

When Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978, he began a drastic shift in policy away from centralized socialist planning toward a market-influenced economy. Many commentators assume that rapid economic growth also ensures China's ascendancy as a military superpower. There are two reasons why we should be skeptical of such claims: 1) China's high growth rate is slowing, and 2) China's pattern of growth has actually undermined its ability to become an autonomous military power.

China's economy until 1978 was oriented around suppressing both consumerism and individual employment freedom in order to direct much of society's energy toward military production. This massive effort succeeded in making China a major producer of tanks, artillery, submarines, warplanes, and other weaponry, though all of 1950s Soviet design. This massive, obsolete arsenal still constitutes the overwhelming bulk of China's military hardware. Since the start of Deng's reforms, production of weaponry has fallen drastically. Except for limited production of obsolete warships, China's production of major weapons systems, including tanks and combat aircraft, has virtually ceased in the 1990s.

Many policymakers have voiced concern that the influx of U.S. dual-use technology into China will facilitate military modernization. However, in industries such as aerospace the trend has been for foreign involvement to relegate Chinese manufacturers to subcontracting low-tech components rather than manufacturing entire systems, let alone weapons systems. China's incapacity to design and manufacture most modern weapons has forced it to rely, like most developing countries, on arms imports. China's limited acquisition of modern foreign weapons (mostly Russian) has been a tiny fraction of what would be needed to replace China's aging arsenal.

China's armed forces are the world's largest, but smaller per capita than those of many countries, including the United States. The present size of its forces is actually a hindrance to military modernization because China cannot afford adequate pay, training, or modern weapons for most of its forces. China will not be able to develop modern military forces unless it either greatly increases military spending (which seems unlikely) or drastically cuts the size of its forces. China can defend its territory, but its capacity for external aggression is minimal given the low quality of its forces, the logistical difficulties of mobilizing these forces across China's vast expanse, and its declining strength relative to potential enemies.

Although China does have border disputes with most of its neighbors, it has not resorted to force to resolve them since its defeat in the 1979 war with Vietnam (except for a brief clash with Vietnam in the disputed Paracel Islands in 1988). China and Russia have made great progress in demilitarizing their common border, and China has shown more restraint than Taiwan in their mutual dispute with Japan over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands. China has extensive trading relations with all of its neighbors, including Taiwan and both North and South Korea. Unlike the U.S., China does not use economic boycott as a political weapon.

Since Chinese external relations have generally improved, its arms exports declined, and its own military forces deteriorated during the past decade, there should be both less fear and less criticism of China in the U.S., while in fact there is more of both. There are two reasons for this. The most obvious is the shock of the Tiananmen Square incident of 1989, which shattered for many Americans their progressive image of China. Less widely recognized is the second reason: the end of the Cold War has made China less useful to the U.S. as a military ally and more useful as a potential threat to justify U.S. military spending to the public.

There have been three major concerns in U.S.-China security relations in recent years: Taiwan, transfer of military-related technologies (including nuclear secrets), and Chinese arms export policies. In all three areas the emerging frictions have more to do with the post-Cold War changes in U.S. policy than they do with memories of Tiananmen or any changes in Chinese policies.

The U.S.-China rapprochement was founded in a fundamental realignment of U.S. foreign policy embodied in the Shanghai Communiqu of 1972. The U.S. began to transfer official recognition from the Kuomintang government in Taiwan to the Communist government in Beijing, culminating in the restoration of full diplomatic relations in 1979, just as Deng was beginning his momentous reforms. The U.S. withdrew its military forces and bases from Taiwan and terminated its defense treaty with the island. Yet the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 mandates continued U.S. relations with Taiwan virtually as if it were an independent country, while officially the U.S. does not dispute Beijing's claim that Taiwan is merely province of China. In 1982, the Reagan administration agreed to limit arms sales to Taiwan. China, in return, promised to resolve differences with Taiwan peacefully.

During the 1990s, however, the U.S. resumed sales of high-tech weapons to Taiwan, including 150 F-16 fighter aircraft. The ostensible reason for this sale was to counter China's purchase of 50 modern Russian Su-27 fighters, but the response was disproportionate, especially since Taiwan also acquired 60 modern Mirage fighters from France and manufacturers its own fighter (mostly from imported U.S. components) superior to anything made in mainland China. Now the U.S. is considering sharing with Taiwan and Japan a proposed theater missile defense (TMD) system. Similar systems were outlawed by the U.S.-Soviet ABM Treaty of 1972. Now that China has apparently developed MIRV technology (perhaps in part through spying), any TMD system could be inexpensively overwhelmed by multiple-warhead missiles. MIRV technology is what led the U.S. and USSR to ban ABMs as uneconomic. Excessive weapons sales to Taiwan--driven largely by the U.S. export drive and its pandering to arms manufacturers--remain an obstacle to consolidating peace in the Asia-Pacific region.

The second area of tension has been over U.S. restrictions on the transfer of military-related technologies to China since 1989. At that time, several major U.S. arms manufacturers had contracts with Chinese firms to upgrade Chinese weaponry, including fighter aircraft, tanks, and missiles. President Bush forced the cancellation of all these contracts as part of the sanctions imposed after Tiananmen. Despite the uproar over the supposed transfer of missile technology to China in the months prior to Clinton's June 1998 visit, projects to upgrade Chinese weaponry such as those of the 1980s have not resumed. Recently it has been alleged that China's spies have acquired U.S. nuclear weapons technology. Since Chinese production of missiles and nuclear weapons remains a tiny fraction of that of the U.S. and the former USSR, this should not portend a new nuclear arms race.

The third area of tension revolves around U.S. efforts to restrict Chinese arms exports. Ironically, Chinese exports were much greater in the 1980s, at a time when the U.S. did not complain. In fact, several of China's biggest arms customers then, including Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Thailand, were also U.S. allies and arms customers. China sold weapons to both sides during the Iran-Iraq war, but then the U.S. and its allies helped both sides too and the U.S. covertly sold arms to Iran.

During the 1990s, the low quality of Chinese weapons and end of the Iran-Iraq war led to a precipitous drop in Chinese arms sales. By the mid-1990s Chinese arms sales were one-sixth the peak level of 1987-88 and only 4% of U.S. arms sales. While the U.S. has its increased its market share of global weapons sales, China's sales and market share have decreased.

At the same time, the U.S. and its allies decided to restrict international sales of ballistic missiles with the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR). Although the MTCR was negotiated without Chinese input, China was asked to adhere to it and agreed to do so in 1992. The powerful Chinese military-industrial companies resent these restrictions because the MTCR limits the possibility of selling one of the few weapons that China can make that is in demand abroad. China regards U.S. arms control efforts as being one-sided. The U.S. makes demands on China, but does not offer reciprocal concessions, such as limiting arms sales to Taiwan. Foreign arms sales to Taiwan (mostly from the U.S.) have been more than twice as great as sales to China during the past decade.

(James H. Nolt (noltj@newschool.edu) is Senior Fellow at World Policy Institute specializing in East Asia relations.)