TOM PLATE
Los Angeles -- As
Hongkongers can certainly testify, political parades in the public square or citizen
protests occupying a thoroughfare can hide as much as they reveal. Last week Beijing
put together for all the world to see a titanic military show, the first such
lavish one in years, designed to knock people’s eyes out - perhaps especially
on the mainland. Yet just before that, in central Tokyo, worried citizens ginned
up a vastly smaller but still potent peace appeal that caught the eye of a
world more familiar with Japan’s former militarism than widespread pacifism. The
Beijing celebration was an official government showing; the Tokyo protest was
anything but. Both events raise pressing questions for East Asia and the West.
Japan, once Asia’s leading military
power, held the region in fear until the cataclysmic end of the Second World
War. Its abject surrender was what the bombastic Beijing display was cheering; but
the Japanese need no help from anyone to recall that the end of their military
era was punctuated with the atomic leveling of two cities. Would not almost any future world war
necessarily trigger nuclear horror? Surely the collective conscience of the
Japanese people (though not of insensitive, posturing politicians) can honestly
say to the world - what is war for? The
Abe government’s aim to remilitarize by eviscerating its anti-war Constitution strikes
many Japanese as brutish arrogance, if not pathetic psychological denial.
Chinese who claim or brag they loathe all Japanese may not
fully appreciate that their closest archipelago neighbors in fact look, in an
anti-war respect, to be further down the evolutionary tunnel than China is.
“War is the sword of Damocles that still hangs over the head of mankind,” and when
President Xi Jinping made this remarkable utterance at the parade, China’s
president hit the nail on the head. The question now is whether his government
will steer a wise course that makes the militarism of the Abe government look
primitive and retro; or seek to go far beyond it and goad Japan into tragic but
seemingly justifiable action.
Indisputably, China was well within its rights to organize a showboat
parade on the 70th anniversary of the war’s end. After all, UN
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon himself, no noted warmonger, took his spot on the
reviewing stand; and that was a good decision. But no high-ranking U.S.
official from Washington was to be found; and that was a bad decision. What’s
more, let me argue that a truly far-thinking Japanese PM would be up there,
too. At some point East Asia needs
to come together, if it’s not to come apart.
What is Beijing’s game?
On the exact occasion of President Barack Obama’s well-publicized environmental
fact-finding visit to Alaska, five PLAN ships were bobbing off that state’s
coast. Yes, the naval quintet was totally within its rights to be in international
waters; and we all know the U.S. Pacific Command floats its own boats around
China as if no more than insouciantly sailing up the Potomac River. But this
ill-timed if harmless exercise invited ominous speculation. The Pentagon
announced that PLAN ships had never been spotted in the Bering Sea before;
others asserted China was “getting tougher in maritime space,"
as one U.S. analyst put it.
President Xi’s seemingly
dramatic announcement of a 15% cutback in PLA manpower did not elicit swoons of
gratitude in the U.S. Explained one senior policy insider who nonetheless urges
systematic de-tensioning with Beijing: “His cuts suggest only a greater and
continuing emphasis on PLAA and PLANN modernization, with a focus on advanced
technology, including anti-access, area-denial and other dimensions of
security. These are more threatening and hazardous for the U.S. than the 300,000
manpower cut is a reduction of same.”
Maybe so, but Xi’s cut was not
slight, and underscored his determined campaign to plant PLA/PLAN snugly under
the umbrella of the Party, where he is solidifying his spot as the boss of all
bosses. Predictably, the West is sounding the alarm that Xi bodes to become a Stalin.
But it
would be simplistic to assume that a stronger Xi is automatically a bad thing.
A seamlessly unified Beijing command would have the ability to unplug hotheaded
sectors of the military spoiling for a good dust-up with the U.S. A stronger Xi
can take a broader national-interest view in a serious crisis and communicate
authoritatively to Washington – not to mention to his PLA/PLAN – a decision to
negotiate, not escalate.
Keeping your military under
control during a crisis is not always the easiest part of a leader’s job, as revealed
in President Kennedy’s struggle to contain the feral testosterone of his Joint
Chiefs of Staff during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Today, it may be that it
is China that has the control-of-escalation problem, not Washington. So if the main point of the hardware
show in Tiananmen Square was to spotlight Xi as a man not to mess with, don’t
assume the worst. As defense analyst Michael Swaine, of the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace and one of the most prominent American
analysts of Chinese security issues, has put it: “During the Mao and Deng eras,
the power and prestige of the paramount leader were generally sufficient to
permit him to compromise on principle when necessary without admitting he was
doing so.”
The historic example, of
course, was when Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai executed that famous turn to Nixon
and Kissinger as if suddenly among dear friends. It is hard to imagine a
politburo committee coming to a timely decision of that magnitude and
imagination. So perhaps we need to observe Mr. Xi with more careful
attentiveness - and less ideology. We might even try to imagine that he understands
his China at least as well as we do.
Prof. Tom Plate, author
of the 'Giants of Asia' quartet and other books on Asia, is Distinguished
Scholar of Asian and Pacific Studies at LMU in Los Angeles. This appeared in
the Tuesday editions of the South China Morning Post, where his fortnight
columns on China have appeared exclusively since 1 June.
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