Neighbors Confront China's Power

Chinese jet fighters conduct live-fire exercises near an unidentified Chinese island. (AP/China News Service)

TAIPEI -- In ways large and small, subtle and heavy-handed, with the thud of a missile crashing to the sea and the imperceptible click of two ceramic teacups toasting another business deal, China is making itself felt across Asia with a weight not seen since the 18th century.

MILITARY STRENGTHS IN EAST ASIA CHINA Total armed forces * 2.93 million active (including 1.27 million conscripts) * 1.2 million reserves Armored vehicles * 7,500-8,000 main battle tanks, 1,200 light tanks * 2,800 armored personnel carriers (APCs) Naval vessels * 50 submarines (including 5 nuclear) * 18 destroyers * 37 frigates Aircraft * 120 medium-range bombers * About 350 light bombers * 600 ground-attack planes * 4,600 fighters Missiles * Intercontinental ballistic missiles: 14 (4 with multiple warhead capability) * Intermediate-range ballistic missiles: 60 TAIWAN Total armed forces * 425,000 active * 1.65 million reserves Armored vehicles * 309 main battle tanks * 230 light tanks * 650 APCs Naval vessels * 1 aircraft carrier * 4 submarines * 11 frigates Aircraft * 371 fighters SINGAPORE Total armed forces * 54,000 active * 262,000 reserves Armored vehicles * 350 light tanks * 720 APCs Naval vessels * 26 patrol and coastal combatants Aircraft * 69 ground-attack planes * 38 fighters MALAYSIA Total armed forces * 114,500 active * 58,300 reserves Armored vehicles * 26 light tanks * 184 APCs Naval vessels * 4 frigates * 37 patrol and coastal combatants Aircraft * 51 ground-attack planes * 13 fighters INDONESIA Total armed forces * 276,000 active * 400,000 reserves Armored vehicles * 275 light tanks * 200 APCs Naval vessels * 2 submarines * 13 frigates Aircraft * 39 ground-attack planes * 14 fighters VIETNAM Total armed forces * 572,000 active * 3 million to 4 million potential reserves Armored vehicles * 1,300 main battle tanks * 600 light tanks * 1,100 APCs Naval vessels * 7 frigates * 55 patrol and coastal combatants Aircraft * 65 ground-attack planes * 125 fighters THAILAND Total armed forces * 256,000 active * 200,000 reserves Armored vehicles * 253 main battle tanks * 154 light tanks * 373 APCs Naval vessels * 9 frigates * 62 patrol and coastal combatants Aircraft * 26 ground-attack planes * 43 fighters PHILIPPINES Total armed forces * 106,500 active * 131,000 reserves Armored vehicles * 41 light tanks * 185 APCs Naval vessels * 1 frigate * 44 patrol and coastal combatants Aircraft * 7 fighters JAPAN Total armed forces * 237,700 active * 47,900 reserves Armored vehicles * 1,160 main battle tanks * 400 APCs Naval vessels * 17 submarines * 7 destroyers * 55 frigates Aircraft * 50 ground-attack planes * 280 fighters NORTH KOREA Total armed forces * 1.13 million active * 540,000 reserves Armored vehicles * 3,700 main battle tanks * 500 light tanks * 2,500 APCs Naval vessels * 25 submarines * 3 frigates * 390 patrol and coastal combatants Aircraft * 80 bombers * 294 ground-attack planes * 360 fighters SOUTH KOREA Total armed forces * 633,000 active * 4.5 million reserves Armored vehicles * 1,960 main battle tanks * 2,060 APCs Naval vessels * 2 submarines * 8 destroyers * 32 frigates Aircraft * 238 ground-attack planes * 132 fighters NOTE: Partial list of key armaments SOURCES: The Military Balance 1994-1995, The Washington Post

Over the last three weeks, China has massed troops along its southern coast and conducted missile tests and live-ammunition military exercises in the 150-mile-wide strait separating it from Taiwan, a raw display of power that frayed nerves around the region. The Clinton administration, calling Beijing's maneuvers "reckless," has responded by dispatching two aircraft carrier groups to the area, one of the largest American forces assembled in the Pacific since the Vietnam War.

Taiwan and the United States see the saber rattling as part of a Chinese campaign to intimidate the island and its 21 million people as they prepare for their first democratic presidential election next Saturday. For the countries of East Asia, however, the military posturing confirms a larger shift in the geopolitics of a region stretching from Japan and South Korea in the north to the Southeast Asian belt bracketed by Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore and the island nations of Indonesia and the Philippines.

Since the end of the Cold War, China's explosive economic growth, the decline of senior leader Deng Xiaoping and the embrace of nationalism by Deng's insecure successors have moved Beijing actively to seek a place as Asia's principal economic, political and military player. The result has been profound changes in the way other East Asian countries understand their security, their economic and political interests, and their relationships with the United States.

For decades, the common cliche has been that China is the region's sleeping dragon, a giant too self-absorbed with its own internal turmoil to make its great weight felt. Now that the dragon has stirred, it is altering issues from regional trade patterns to manufacturing, from the decisions Asian governments make about upgrading their military hardware to the ways in which television programs and music videos are produced and packaged.

The effect of China's growing profile in the region is still being played out. But it raises two central and related sets of questions. First, how should Asia view this rising giant? Should China's belligerence toward Taiwan inspire fear? Or should the lure of the vast Chinese market and its potential as an economic engine for the next century inspire confidence?

"It's both. There's ambivalence," said Jusuf Wanandi, the director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta, Indonesia. "On the economic side, China is a big opportunity -- a competitor, of course, but an opportunity. It's a much tougher question on the political-security side."

"We cannot say that there is no chance they will be a serious military power after 10 years," said Hisahiko Okazaki, the former Japanese ambassador to Thailand and a frequent commentator on international affairs.

And that brings up the second, related set of questions: How to deal with this stirring power? Should the policy be one of engagement or containment? Should China be appeased, or does the dragon need to be tamed? The answers vary, depending on the differing views of China's intentions in the region.

Wanandi sees much of China's current assertiveness -- over Taiwan and in disputes with other Asian countries over the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea -- as motivated not by expansionist desires but by fear. China has a long and tortured history of invasion by outside powers. And Beijing's belligerence may be exacerbated by the parlous state of its leadership: Deng, 91, has not appeared in public for more than two years, and the stability and true policy plans of his successors, led by President Jiang Zemin and Premier Li Peng, are doubtful.

"They're paranoid," Wanandi said. "They're assertive on the one side and very vulnerable on the other. We have to reassure them and tame them as well. We have to let them know what the rules of the game are."

Said Rodolfo Severino, the Philippine undersecretary for foreign affairs and a longtime China-watcher: "We have to deal with them -- and hope they don't engage in that kind of radical nationalism."

The questions about China have taken on a new urgency with Beijing's Communist leaders now ratcheting up the pressure on Taiwan. For the first time in almost 40 years, there is a serious risk of war in the Taiwan Strait.

On one level, the likelihood of China resorting to armed conflict might seem slim, mainly because such a decision would be economically suicidal. Over the last five years, China and Taiwan have become more closely linked economically, with Taiwan integrated into the prosperous economy of the eastern and southern China coastal regions.

But for China, the risk of invasion, or of some smaller military confrontation, may seem the lesser evil when compared with the alternatives. One fear is that Taiwan, which China continues to view as one of its provinces, will agitate for secession -- something not even Taiwan's president, Lee Teng-hui, says is a possibility. Another fear is even greater: that with next Saturday's election, Taiwan is developing as a full-fledged democracy, forever puncturing the myth that Asians, especially Chinese, are unsuited for or uninterested in Western-style pluralism.

Asians are understandably viewing with alarm the tense drama being played out in the strait, though they are reluctant to criticize China directly. Indonesia -- battling its own independence movement in East Timor -- called for both China and Taiwan to show restraint. In Thailand, a new Defense Ministry white paper issued Friday said the country needed to strengthen its military capabilities and mentioned the conflicting claims by China and others over the Spratly Islands as one potential flash point for conflict.

Perhaps the strongest criticism came from Hong Kong's British governor, Chris Patten, who warned in diplomatic language that China's military intimidation of Taiwan was likely to affect sentiments in Hong Kong as it prepares to revert to Chinese control next year.

No country is watching more intently than Japan, which could find itself drawn into conflict with one of its largest trading partners if the United States uses bases in Japan to counter Chinese moves against Taiwan. Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto said China's military escalation was taking "an unfortunate direction," and called for peaceful dialogue.

Peaceful dialogue to engage a powerful new economic partner? Or containment for a neighborhood bully? Balancing the two seems to be the key to Asia's future stability.

China Rising

For most of the last century, China never took its seat at the regional table, so absorbed was the country in its internal upheavals -- the 1911 revolution, the Japanese invasion in 1937, the civil war and the Communist victory in 1949, then the long period of isolation, famine and the destructive Cultural Revolution of 1966-76.

Asian countries -- most of which only gained independence after World War II -- were able to develop and consolidate themselves as nations outside China's shadow, under the protection of the U.S. security umbrella. Staunchly anti-Communist governments in Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore viewed China warily, because of Beijing's past support for Communist insurgencies. Chinese troops had fought alongside their Communist allies in North Korea, and China aided Vietnamese Communists during the Vietnam War.

Most of the countries in East Asia did not have diplomatic relations with China until after the U.S.-China thaw in the mid-1970s. Even then, trade between China and the region remained limited.

Beginning in the 1970s, the economies of many of the nations around China began to grow at a rapid pace. The "Asian tigers" -- South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia -- emerged as new models of rapid, export-led development. Still China, embroiled in the succession struggle that followed the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, remained dormant.

Throughout the 1980s, any mention of the growing Asian economic challenge and the coming Pacific Century generally focused on Japan. As Sterling Seagrave wrote in his book "Lords of the Rim," about the Chinese diaspora: "When the 1990s began, the West was so spellbound by the economic threat of Japan that it took a while to realize there were more important things happening next door in China. What was stirring in China was potentially the greatest consumer boom in history."

Following Deng's economic liberalization, launched in 1979, China by the 1990s had become the world's fastest-growing economy, posting an incredible 12 percent average growth, nearly doubling its GDP over four years to $508 billion and building up a whopping trade surplus with the United States.

With its growing economic clout, China began casting about for a larger regional and global role. Beijing, for example, began to reassert historical claims to the Spratly Islands also claimed by the Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam. Last year, China sent naval ships to occupy a barren atoll called Mischief Reef. That move showed that China was willing to throw its weight around on what it considered a matter of national sovereignty and foreshadowed this year's military feints toward Taiwan.

Asian nations have simultaneously viewed China's emergence with envy, awe and a defensive preparedness. Most Southeast Asian nations have embarked on huge military modernization programs. Malaysia has bought Hawk mobile surface-to-air missile systems and two frigates from Britain, as well as American F/A-18 and Russian MiG-29 warplanes. Singapore has bought American F-16s. Thailand recently became the first country to buy an aircraft carrier, albeit a small one that will support only nine hand-me-down British Harrier jump jets.

While they have been arming themselves, the Asians largely have refrained from openly criticizing their giant neighbor.

One reason is that Asian economies, since the end of the 1980s, have grown more interrelated with China's.

By 1988, Sino-Malaysian trade had hit a record $800 million, and Sino-Philippine trade was $405 million, even though those two countries only began formally talking with Beijing in 1975. China's trade with Thailand doubled during the 1980s, to $1.1 billion by 1989, the year of the crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. And with trade came direct investment, led by Thailand, which by 1988 had 49 investment projects in the mainland worth $200 million, ranging from hotels to motorcycle plants.

The emerging pattern was clear. Yesterday's enemies were becoming today's trading partners.

China Fever

The Chinese have a name for it: "Zhongguo Re." Roughly translated, it means "China Fever."

China Fever means more and more ethnic Chinese scattered throughout the Asian diaspora taking new pride in their Chinese roots -- setting up a new Chinese cultural center in Bangkok, or enrolling in Mandarin Chinese language classes to learn, or in some cases brush up on, the mother tongue.

China Fever means the lobby of the Shangri-La Hotel in Manila hosting a noisy gong-clanging dragon dance in celebration of the Chinese lunar new year, Manila restaurants and stores offering "Year of the Rat" specials and sales, and the Philippine post office issuing a special "Year of the Rat" stamp. "All this never happened before," said Philippine-Chinese scholar Teresita Ang-See. "It's because of China's growing prominence."

And China Fever means a flamboyant Hong Kong businessman with an upper-crust British accent opening a department store that specializes in high-priced, high-quality China chic, from embroidered jackets and silk pants to Red Army caps, Mao Zedong wristwatches and postcards of old Shanghai.

"China is huge. Gigantic. A part of Asia. And something rather chic," said David Tang, the founder of the department store, Shanghai Tang's. Wearing a black silk Chinese pajama suit for an interview in his office, which is lined with more than 300 books, family pictures and a large porcelain statue of a Chinese soldier, Tang declared, "It's chic to wear a cloth cap with a star on it, or a Mao jacket."

Tang is not the only one trying to cash in on China's new regional prominence. It seems that potential profit, as much as piety to the Motherland, is behind the new rush to study Mandarin Chinese, learn more about Chinese culture and travel to China, particularly among the younger generation.

"Until China started booming, people didn't think of going back at all," said Theresa C. Carino, a Singaporean academic who runs the Philippine-China Development Resource Center in Manila. "Now that China is booming, they'd like to learn the Chinese language. They want to do business there, and being Chinese is always useful, especially if you speak the language."

China Fever is not just about silk pajamas and Mao caps. The interest, indeed excitement in some ways, is rooted in a deeply held belief around the region that the West is in decline, Asia is in the ascendancy, and China, with its phenomenal growth rates and huge market, will lead the way into a new Pacific Century.

What is emerging in China, many Asians believe, is a political system with which to compete with Western liberal democracy: an authoritarian, Confucian model premised on the existence of a distinct set of Asian values.

A decade ago, Massachusetts Institute of Technology political scientist Lucian W. Pye argued in his book "Asian Power and Politics" that East Asians shared a Confucian tradition of leadership that subordinated individual rights to the will of a paternalistic, authoritarian leader. "The prospects for democracy, as understood in the West, are not good," Pye wrote.

During most of the 1970s and '80s, authoritarian rule seemed to emerge as the Asian pattern, with almost every government asserting strong centralized control, stifling dissent and defending such measures as necessary for economic development.

Singapore Senior Minister Lee Kwan Yew, who continues to oversee Confucian-style authoritarianism there, is among the leading intellectuals who continue to maintain that Asia's remarkable decade-long, double-digit growth is vindication for a more heavy-handed approach to government. Democratic movements have been suppressed in Singapore, Burma and Vietnam, and there was little protest from Asia when China bloodily crushed the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square.

Still, a competing pattern has emerged in countries such as the Philippines, which became a democracy in 1986 after a "people power" revolt, and South Korea, which underwent a similar transition two years later.

Asia now stands deeply divided between those following the global trend toward democracy and pluralism, and the authoritarian holdouts, who see China as their anchor. Yet now Taiwan is practicing Western-style democracy and offering new evidence that such a system is not culturally unsuited for Asians or for Chinese. It is that ideological challenge, as much as the island's leanings toward independence, that threatens Beijing's Communist leadership.

Dealing With China

How then should Asia deal with China?

Singapore's Lee, at 72 one of the region's elder statesmen, offered a few ideas in a recent interview with Time magazine. Containment, Lee said, "will not succeed. Second, you will have absolutely no influence on how China -- and its attitudes -- develop. It will be hostile and xenophobic to the West, and that's not good for us."

What is needed, Lee said, is a military and industrial "counterweight," and that means the United States, anchored in an alliance with Japan.

Japan remains a key to any equation dealing with China, because only Japan has the economic clout to counter China's growing profile. But the United States remains central for security, because Japan without the U.S. security umbrella would rapidly have to rearm its military -- possibly with nuclear weapons -- and that prospect causes jitters among most Asian countries that recall Japan's World War II aggression.

One commonly held theory is that China needs to be corraled into the international system, in part through the trading regime of the new World Trade Organization. But on topics from nuclear proliferation to trade to protecting intellectual property against piracy, China has let it be known that while it wants to join international institutions, it will do so on its own terms and play by its own rules.

The smaller countries in Southeast Asia realize they cannot go it alone in facing China, so their military modernization programs -- costly as they are -- seem more like an attempt to buy time. The decision last year to invite Vietnam into the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) was seen as one more step to help shore up the alliance with another big country on China's southern flank.

China's growing military shadow has also finally moved Southeast Asians to begin talking more seriously about transforming ASEAN into some kind of a security alliance. In 1994, the ASEAN Regional Forum on security was formed, but the group already has hit snags, with some members wanting to move cautiously for fear of antagonizing China and some of their Western backers pushing for the group to form a more concrete structure.

And any effort by the neighbors to fashion a joint policy toward Beijing is complicated by differing historical and geographical circumstances.

Vietnam and China fought a bloody border war in 1979, and their naval forces clashed again a few years later in the South China Sea. Although relations have improved, the Hanoi regime remains cautious in dealing with Beijing. Indonesia also remains wary, because President Suharto still remembers China's backing for Indonesian Communists who tried to stage a coup three decades ago. Malaysia talks openly of China as an economic friend in the region, the Philippines remains wary of Chinese intentions in the Spratly Islands, and Thailand -- with vibrant economic links via its large Sino-Thai community -- has said it wants to be a moderator between China and the rest of the region.

Most countries, however, do believe they have the benefit of time. China has two dozen Su-27 fighters, but overall its air force is considered weak. The Chinese navy is also badly in need of modernization, with most of its 55 frigates and destroyers considered outdated. China has been shopping around for an aircraft carrier, but so far has none.

China "definitely has a lot of problems to face," said Jusuf Wanandi of Jakarta. "She is taking care of 22 percent of mankind. For that fact alone, we should be patient of her, and supportive. Who else is going to feed them, clothe them? We are lucky we have an ongoing government there."

And is China a friend or foe? "It's too soon, because of the transition they're going through, to make that judgment now," he said. "We still have 10 years to make up our mind."