Overreach, page 21
At roughly the same time, defense secretary Robert Gates, traveling to China in preparation for Hu’s visit to Washington, ran head-on into a problem created by the cross purposes at which the PLA and civilians operate. In the weeks before Gates’s visit, the PLA had rolled out its new stealth fighter on the runway. The existence of the jet was no secret; photographs of it were the front-page news in popular newspapers and on blogs. But the Chinese Air Force chose the day of Gates’s visit to give the radar-evading fighter its first test flight. Photographs of the flight were posted on military websites a few hours before Gates was scheduled to meet with Hu. Gates was furious and came close to canceling the rest of his program to protest what appeared to be a hostile gesture targeted at the US or him personally. Ambassador Jon Huntsman convinced him not to do that, reminding him that after the meeting with Hu, he was scheduled to visit the headquarters of the Second Artillery, the unit in charge of China’s nuclear, missile, and space assets, which had rarely been opened to American officials in the past. (The only prior visit had been by defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld in 2005.)
Huntsman and Gates agreed that they would gently broach the topic of the test flight at the end of the meeting with Hu. According to the account of a meeting participant, Gates asked, “President Hu, I have to meet the press after our meeting. Can you please give me some advice about what I should say when they ask me about the first flight of your new jet fighter yesterday and whether I think it was aimed at me or my country?” Hu appeared startled by the question. He turned to his defense minister, Liang Guanglie, seated on his right, and asked, “Is it true?” The question was passed down the command chain of PLA officers sitting next to one another in the room. After scrambling to consult with one another, they handed Hu his talking point: “It was a ‘scientific research experiment’ and had absolutely nothing to do with your visit.” Gates later told journalists that the civilian leadership had seemed surprised by the test. Even if we assume that Hu had approved the J-20 program and was aware of its development, the military leadership had humiliated their chairman by not prepping him for an obvious question.
Military Hawks Go Public
The stance of the Chinese military toward Japan, Taiwan, and the United States is generally more hawkish than that of civilian officials, and this nudged China’s policies in a more confrontational direction during Hu Jintao’s leadership. Hu appeared unable or unwilling to stop the military from going public with its views. Stoking public anger against United States’ joint exercises with its allies in the region or against the territorial claims of Japan and other neighbors bolstered the PLA’s influence over foreign policy, and its claims that it needed bigger budgets.
The PLA press, including the PLA Daily, helps to create publicity that builds popular demand for a stronger military—without actually forcing it into a war. The PLA press typically takes a tougher line on Japan, Taiwan, and the United States than does the civilian press. Many of the commercial magazines that appeal to male audiences by highlighting the technological advances of the US, European, and other Asian militaries, thereby creating public support for China’s own military spending, are actually published by defense industrial firms.82 The most outspoken military commentators are PLA scholars based at defense research and educational institutions or retired officers. It’s hard to know how mainstream their views are, but their publication in the PLA Daily and other official journals and consistent presence on online media indicates official endorsement.
Major General Luo Yuan of the Academy of Military Science was one military expert who often called for China to stiffen its spine against foreign threats. In 2010, just two days before Premier Wen Jiabao was due to arrive on a state visit to India, where the border dispute with China remains festering, Major General Luo wrote that China could not call itself “a strong nation” unless it “recovered the land looted by neighbors.” The joint communiqué issued during the visit, for the first time in recent years, made no mention of military-to-military activities, suggesting that the PLA may have vetoed them over the territorial dispute; Luo’s point of view was representative of the hardliners in the PLA.83 One of Luo’s favorite themes was “containment”—how the US is “laying out forces across the Asia-Pacific region in advance to contain the rise of China.”84 He also frequently threatened the use of force to defend China’s territorial integrity in the South China Sea. “If other claimants continued to insult China beyond its limits, the Chinese people would have no choice but to ‘wield their swords,’ ” he said in a 2011 Xinhua interview.85 When in 2012 the Chinese government de-escalated a confrontation with the Philippines in Scarborough Shoal by promising to withdraw, the Chinese defense minister General Liang Guanglie said that the military would defer to the diplomats in handling the situation. Major General Luo, however, told the Global Times that it was a mistake to withdraw.86
Even in retirement, Luo continued to speak his mind, for example, calling for an Air Defense Identification Zone in the South China Sea.87 Other PLA hawks gave speeches with provocative titles like “2030: America Dismembers China,” wrote books such as C-Shaped Encirclement about the encirclement of China by America and its allies, and called for the “extermination of troublemakers in South China Sea.” When Washington announced arms sales to Taiwan, these hawks gave interviews calling for China to retaliate economically, even proposing that China dump US government bonds.88
The PLA pundits don’t disguise their role in the PLA’s external propaganda operations and or that they follow its internal rules. For example, all PLA staff were banned from engaging in Internet blogging in 2010; but in 2012, military scholars in frequent contact with foreigners and the media were allowed to open blog accounts on Weibo.89 One non-Chinese PLA expert describes the public statements of PLA hawks as “propaganda masquerading as PLA thought.”90
Taiwan Policy
Beijing’s confrontational attitude with regard to Taiwan, which exists to this day—and grows more tense with every passing day—is one dynamic that can’t be traced back to Hu Jintao’s tenure. Hu’s approach to Taiwan was “very flexible,” according to an international relations expert close to the Foreign Ministry. “Hu protected the policy because he was personally committed to it. He views it as his main achievement.” Hu sought to win the hearts and minds of the Taiwan people and draw them closer to the mainland. Preventing the island democracy from declaring its formal independence remains a crucial goal for any mainland leader; achieving its eventual reunification would guarantee the leader’s legacy in the history books. Hu and Xi shared the same goal, but Xi’s strategy relies on intimidation instead of the ingratiation that Hu attempted.
Hu’s agent in his accommodationist campaign toward Taiwan was Wang Yi, who, as noted, was the architect of the Foreign Ministry’s successful Asia diplomacy and who as China’s ambassador in Tokyo had negotiated with Japan’s prime minister Shinto Abe a pledge not to visit the Yasukuni Shrine where a few Japanese war criminals are honored. Hu selected Wang Yi to head the government Taiwan Affairs Office (“Taiban,” for short) in the expectation that as a good diplomatic deal-maker, he would unfreeze cross-Strait ties just as he had done earlier with Japan.
When Hu entered office in 2002, Beijing’s cross-Strait policy appeared to be failing. Taiwan’s president Chen Shui-bian was gesturing toward independence and threatening to hold a referendum to revise the constitution. Chen’s re-election victory in 2004 showed that Taiwan voters supported the right to decide Taiwan’s future on their own. A win for Chen’s Democratic Progressive Party in the December 2004 legislative elections would make a referendum to change the constitution more likely. The Chinese policy elite was starting to talk anxiously about the possibility of war. Wang Zaixi, a former major general who was vice-head of the mainland Taiwan Affairs Office, declared threateningly that “a referendum equals independence and independence means war.”91
To help China’s leaders head-off a Taiwan referendum without resorting to military force, the Chinese government, in 2005, legislated its own “Anti-Secession Law.” The law authorized use of “nonpeaceful means” if Taiwan were to secede, if “major incidents entailing Taiwan’s secession from China should occur,” or if “possibilities for a peaceful reunification” were “completely exhausted.” Some foreigners feared that this expansive set of contingencies might corner Hu into attacking Taiwan, but, according to Chinese experts, the intention of enacting the law was in fact to provide an alternative to war. Fortunately, the surprising win by Taiwan’s opposition parties in the legislative elections in December 2004 staved off a referendum, and the popular law gave Hu the domestic approval he needed to undertake friendly overtures toward the Taiwan people.
The strategic logic behind these overtures was to isolate Chen Shui-bian and build a united front with Taiwan’s opposition parties and economic interest groups. In 2005 Hu hosted two leading Taiwan politicians, Lian Chan, the head of the KMT (Guomindang) Party, and James Soong, head of the People’s First Party, to pay homecoming visits to the mainland; both had left as children in 1949. Invited to give live televised speeches, the politicians impressed the mainland audience, who found them to be more eloquent and genuine than the CCP politicians who were hosting them. Other benevolent gestures followed: establishing low-tariff imports of Taiwan fruit; extending a welcome to Taiwan tourists; allowing direct cargo flights across the Strait; making university tuition fees for Taiwan students equal to those paid by mainland students; recognizing Taiwan college degrees; and allowing Taiwan medical doctors to be licensed on the mainland.92 Hu was magnanimous toward Taiwan society despite Chen Shui-bian’s moves toward independence, adopting a disciplined long-term strategy that picked up steam during his second term when Taiwan was led by new KMT president, Ma Ying-jeou, who was more amenable to improving relations with the mainland.
Another benefit of Hu’s nonconfrontational strategy was getting Washington on his side. The more reasonable China’s approach, the more likely the US administration would be to pressure Chen Shui-bian not to risk war by holding a referendum. As noted, President Bush had criticized Chen for proposing a referendum back in 2003. Shortly before Taiwan’s 2008 election, when there were two referendums on the ballot along with the presidential choice, the PLA, according to a Pentagon official, “frantically asked the Defense Department’s help in reducing our mutual risk by discouraging the referendum.” Tom Christensen, the deputy assistant secretary of state, helped by saying publicly that the US government didn’t support the referendum. But then, just a day or so after Secretary Gates had visited China, the Bush administration announced the big Taiwan arms sales package, which led to the Thanksgiving port call incident.
At the time, Taiban officials often reminded me that “peace in the strait is good for US-China relations.” They asked me to pass messages to Washington requesting a public statement praising the current cross-Strait rapprochement and saying the US hoped it would continue. Such a statement would help them sustain domestic support for their engagement of Taiwan and constrain future Taiwan leaders from trying to alter the status quo. The Taiban officials also complained that the Foreign Ministry kept sticking its nose into Taiwan policy. The foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, and Wang Yi had long been bureaucratic rivals; and the Foreign Ministry typically took tough positions on issues like Taiwan and Tibet. For example, the Foreign Ministry had endorsed canceling the EU-China summit over French prime minister Sarkozy’s meeting with the Dalai Lama in 2008, and it made strong statements about the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo. The Foreign Ministry “wants to demonstrate that they are tough on these nationalist issues because they are always vulnerable to being criticized as too pro-foreign,” one expert explained. Another one noted that Foreign Ministry senior officials in their late fifties “have their own ambitions,” so they have to appear very tough. But with Hu so obviously siding with Wang Yi and the Taiban, the views of the Foreign Ministry found a deaf ear in Zhongnanhai.
Hu accelerated his engagement of Taiwan after Ma Ying-jeou was elected president in 2008. Unlike Chen Shui-bian, Ma endorsed what was known as the “1992 Consensus,” an informal agreement between the two sides that there is only “one China” even if they don’t agree on exactly what “one China” means. Until 2001, PRC leaders had insisted that Taiwan acknowledge the “one China principle” as a precondition for cross-Strait dialogue; the “1992 Consensus” was a compromise to finesse doctrinal differences and facilitate the talks that both Hu and Ma desired.93
Both sides were eager to pick up the pace of engagement to make as much progress as possible while Ma and Hu were in office; they agreed to direct air, mail, and shipping links in 2008 and signed an economic cooperation agreement called the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement in 2010. Both sides also went to great lengths to prevent any disruptions in the rapidly improving relationship. They enforced a tacit “diplomatic truce” in their competition for diplomatic recognition by other countries. The Foreign Ministry had objected to the diplomatic truce because it wanted to create more slots for ambassadors and show the ministry’s achievements.94 In 2009, when journalists questioned Wang Yi about a Taiwan film festival’s invitation to Ribiya Kadeer, a well-known émigré leader of the Uighur movement in Xinjiang, he played it down to avoid having to criticize the Taiwan government. After the two leaders left office, however, rapprochement stalled and then reversed. Cross-Strait relations today are as tense and dangerous as they have ever been. A leader like Xi Jinping has all the authority he needs to revive cross-strait dialogue and reduce the risk of having to use military force to prevent a formal declaration of independence by Taiwan if he were willing to compromise on the “1992 consensus” and show some goodwill to the Taiwanese public. But so far there is no indication that he is headed in that direction.
Japan
Besides extending an olive branch toward Taiwan, another hallmark of Hu Jintao’s foreign policy was his attempt to stabilize China’s relations with Japan—a policy that stood in contrast to the overall more confrontational approach of his administration and certainly to the situation today. In fact, Hu’s efforts to protect China’s relations with both Japan and Taiwan were acts of political bravery. These two issues always are the focal points of popular nationalism and easily exploited by the military and the security and propaganda bureaucracies. Yet despite his unwieldy oligarchy, Hu, assisted by Dai Bingguo and Wang Yi, succeeded in managing (or ignoring) public opinion and interest-group lobbying to generate some positive momentum in both relationships.
In the early 1980s, as I noted earlier, Hu had formed a positive impression of Japan as a member of various delegations organized by one of his mentors, Hu Yaobang, and had helped organize a return visit by three thousand Japanese students.95 When Hu rose to leadership in 2002, however, relations with Japan were fraught. In the 1990s, Jiang Zemin had stoked the younger generation’s anti-Japanese emotions by means of his Patriotic Education Campaign. The history of Japanese aggression against China during World War II became the focal point of a campaign led by the Propaganda Department and the Education Ministry to nurture a nationalist attachment to the Party. Schools organized reading contests featuring books on wartime history and arranged class visits to historical shrines from the Japanese occupation, including the one commemorating the Nanjing Massacre. During the annual anniversary of China’s victory against Japan in 1945, cinemas and television were saturated with anti-Japanese propaganda. Jiang visited Japan in 1998 and demanded a written apology like the one Tokyo had presented the South Korean president the month before, but he came home empty-handed and humiliated. The Japanese public resented, and resents still, China’s harping on historical issues related to its occupation of China during World War II and were beginning to view China as a growing threat. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was contemplating revising Japan’s postwar “peace constitution” to allow the government to beef up Japan’s military defenses.
In 2004, Hu agreed to Japan’s proposal to start negotiations to divide up the undersea oil and gas reserves around the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, claimed by both countries but under the longtime control of Japan. Because the East China Sea separating China and Japan is only 360 nautical miles across, the two countries’ 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zones overlap, and so reaching any kind of agreement was going to require bilateral compromise. Yet any deal that involved sharing oil and gas fields was likely to be resisted by the military and energy companies in both countries.
In April 2005, a wave of violent, large-scale anti-Japan protests, calling for a boycott of Japanese products, swept across China.96 Japan, together with India, Germany, and Brazil, had made a bid for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council and its efforts were gathering steam. Chinese anti-Japanese sentiment had already been aroused by Prime Minister Koizumi’s insistence on paying annual visits to the Yasukuni Shrine and on revisions of Japanese textbooks that were viewed in China as downplaying Japan’s wartime atrocities. A grassroots petition among mainland and overseas Chinese opposing Japan’s Security Council bid was publicized on official Chinese media, indicating the government’s tacit support, and thus encouraging demonstrators to believe they could protest on the street with impunity. Demonstrators threw stones at the Japanese embassy, the ambassador’s residence, and Japanese stores and restaurants and smashed cars as the police stood by.
The protests bolstered Beijing’s leverage in opposing Japanese Security Council membership and resulted in Koizumi’s declaring the most public apology for Japanese wartime atrocities in a decade.97 Had the protests been allowed to get out of hand, they could have turned against the Hu government or permanently damaged relations with China’s most important trade partner and neighbor. It took high-level meetings involving no fewer than 3,500 senior officials from the central government, the military, and the Party to urge students to express their patriotism in a more rational manner, to stifle the protests. Academics and experts were dispatched to local gatherings throughout the country to persuade the angry students to calm down. Most politicians, including Bo Xilai, then commerce minister, fell into line, aligning themselves with the indignation of the Chinese people but also arguing against a boycott of Japanese products that would harm the interests of both countries.98 There were some, however, who still insisted on grandstanding as staunch patriots: When China’s vice premier, Wu Yi, reluctantly visited Tokyo in June 2005, she made a show of refusing to meet with Prime Minister Koizumi because of remarks he had made about the Yasukuni Shrine.
