Chapter One
Reform, Repression, and the New China-Russia Alliance
The Parting of the Ways: June 4th, 1989
In the late 1980s there was a hopeful sense of positive developments within the two major Communist powers. In the Soviet Union, President Mikhail Gorbachev was attempting to institute limited political reforms and to permit some private economic activities that would not be directly controlled by the state. In China, there had been a shift from the fanatical extremism and brutal repression of the Mao years to pragmatic economic policies intended to gradually open the economic system, but in a manner that would keep the Chinese Communist Party in political control. This economic opening, in turn, led to a marked reduction in the regimentation of daily life in China and to some efforts at political liberalization.
These liberalizing trends produced severe frictions within the ruling Communist parties of each country, however, and on June 4, 1989, dramatic events in both empires, thousands of miles apart, led in two entirely different directions. In Poland, Solidarity, with Gorbachev's approval, competed in a reasonably free and fair election against the Communist Party for control of 35 percent of the seats in the existing parliament and for 100 percent of the seats in a newly established, but entirely symbolic, senate. The result was that Solidarity received overwhelming public support, winning 99 percent of the seats in parliament open for competition. Solidarity's dramatic electoral victory set in motion the events of 1989-90, through which most of the peoples of Central Europe peacefully liberated themselves from Communist one-party dictatorships-a geopolitical sea change symbolized by the opening of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.
Two years after Solidarity's victory, Boris Yeltsin won the first free presidential election in the thousand-year history of Russia and shortly thereafter turned back the August 1991 coup attempt by hard-line Soviet Communists seeking to remove Gorbachev-the leader of the Communist Party and president of the Soviet Union-and reverse the reform course upon which he had consciously set his nation. Ultimately, in December 1991, Gorbachev agreed to the dissolution of the USSR, allowing each of the fifteen constituent Soviet republics to become an independent state, responsible for its own destiny.
In stark contrast, on June 4, 1989, the Chinese Communist leadership decided to stamp out the democratic stirrings in its country, using the full power of the military and secret police to crush peaceful demonstrations by students and young workers in Tiananmen Square and throughout China. This use of brutal military force against unarmed civilians resulted in the deaths of an estimated five to ten thousand persons, with many thousands wounded throughout China. The Tiananmen massacre was accompanied by the arrest and imprisonment in the vast Chinese system of forced-labor camps and prisons of an estimated fifty to sixty thousand.
From the start of the post-Mao era, the Chinese leadership explicitly stated that its plans for economic modernization were to occur under the firm political control of the Communist Party. Contrary to many in the West who saw democratic evolution necessarily following economic liberalization, the Chinese Communist Party worked diligently to ensure that its controlled opening of the economy was not accompanied by the kind of political freedom that might threaten its rule.
In fact, the Chinese leadership viewed the subsequent peaceful removal of Communist dictatorships in Central Europe and the dissolution of the Soviet Union as confirmation that it had made the right choice at Tiananmen. Since then, any and all efforts by the people of China toward political liberalization have been met with swift and brutal repression. Even groups such as Christians, Buddhists, and members of other religions with no political agenda but which seek to exist independently of the Communist regime have been harshly persecuted. In 1999, the Chinese regime began the arrest and brutalization of members of a meditation/exercise association (Falun Gong), and in 2002 further increased the persecution of millions of Christians contending that they were instigated by "hostile Western powers headed by the USA" in order to "perpetuate infiltration."
The Ensuing Years
From the perspective of the Chinese leadership, the decision to crush freedom at Tiananmen has been validated by history. The Communist Party remains in political control and China has made enormous economic and technological progress. China's policy of restricting foreign access to its markets and skill in obtaining access for its exports to the U.S., the European Union, and Japan made it possible for Beijing to gain massive hard-currency trade surpluses totaling more than $1.1 trillion from 1990 to 2002. Those surpluses have financed China's military and technological modernization with its ever-growing military expenditure cumulatively estimated at about one trillion dollars for those same years. China has also obtained foreign direct investments of $340 billion and more than $50 billion in bilateral and multilateral economic aid from Western governments and institutions. In addition, China obtained the return of Hong Kong (1997) and Macao (1999).
There is an enormous irony in the differences in the evolution of Russia and China. The Russian government of Yeltsin attempted both to democratize and to establish a free-market-oriented economy. This led to important positive changes, including a real opening of the political system, freedom of political speech, assembly, and association, opportunities for Russian citizens to choose their political leaders through reasonably open elections, the broadening of civil society, and the avoidance of international conflict. Yet the negative trends of Yeltsin's eight years included a dramatic decline in overall economic production (50 percent), and severe inflation (cumulatively more than 2,400 percent), which virtually eliminated the life savings of most Russians. More than half the Russian population experienced reductions in the standard of living. This was accompanied by a sharp increase in the visibility and extent of the organized crime and corruption that had already been endemic in the Soviet system.
Despite real but fragile democratic changes, Russia's economic problems have led many to characterize it as a failure, a view best illustrated by the words of well-known financier George Soros, who, in 2000, said "Russia is hopeless and there is nothing to be done." That same year, on the other hand, a bipartisan majority of the U.S. Congress came to see China, a repressive Communist dictatorship with a partially open economy, as a country deserving of permanent normal trade relations-meaning full access to the U.S. market for products made by the unfree and coerced. It is noteworthy that the presidential candidates from both major parties in the United States in the year 2000 said that granting China permanent normal trade relations would not only provide economic benefits for both countries, but would lead to further economic liberalization in China, which would in turn lead to political liberalization.
This view-that giving China access to U.S. markets would lead to lessened tensions with that country and ultimately democratic reform-has been a cornerstone of U.S. policy toward that country since President Carter reestablished full diplomatic relations in 1979. It is worth tallying up the exact accomplishments that policy can claim.
The continuing crackdown on religious believers, human rights, and proponents of democracy has already been mentioned. The rule of the Communist Party continues and, in January 2000, then-President Jiang Zemin reiterated that China would remain Communist and that political democracy would never be permitted. He also said: "Western nations led by the United States have intensified their strategic plot to westernize and divide our country, using every conceivable means to attempt to influence us with their political views, ideology, and lifestyles." As to the economic benefits of trade, they have been largely one-sided for China. In addition, China virtually requires U.S. corporations that want to do business there to share their proprietary technology and to use their influence to promote U.S. policies toward China that the regime considers favorable. As a result of the economic benefits it has obtained from the U.S. and other industrial democracies, China has the second largest hard-currency reserves in the world, a resource it uses to buy advanced military weapons and technology and to gain political influence with many governments including that of the United States.
Along with internal repression, during the 1990s China became more aggressive internationally. The Communist regime has accelerated the modernization of its strategic and advanced military forces, continued the sale of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles to anti-U.S. regimes supporting terrorism, and increased its rhetoric against the U.S. China officially declared America its "main enemy" in 1990, with the official press saying that the U.S. is "a dangerous enemy" and a "superpower bully." Deng Xiaoping, China's paramount leader after Mao, propounded the view that China should "hide our capabilities and bide our time." The vice commandant of the Chinese Academy of Military Sciences said in 1996, "[As for the U.S.] it will be absolutely necessary that we quietly nurse our sense of vengeance ... we must conceal our abilities and bide our time." Most ominously, in December 1999, the Chinese minister of defense, General Chi Haotian, stated his view that "With the United States, war is inevitable." This was the same Chinese general who played a key role in China's invasion of Vietnam in 1979, led the brutal repression in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and who-during an official 1996 visit to Washington to meet with President Clinton in the White House-gave a speech denying that there were any deaths at Tiananmen Square.
The contrast between the disappointment with Russia by many in the Western business and financial world and the enthusiastic support for Communist China led the then-Russian ambassador to the U.S., Yuri Vorontsov, half in jest, to declare that China's success in obtaining economic benefits from the U.S. and the West suggested to many Russians that perhaps Russia might be more successful economically if it returned to Communist rule. Hopefully, Voronstov's jest will not prove to be prophetic.
The New China-Russia Strategic Alignment
The early failures of Yeltsin's economic program contributed to the political success of the reorganized Russian Communist Party, which won a plurality of seats in the 1993 parliamentary elections and then a near-majority in 1995. The Communists next hoped to win the powerful presidency in the June 1996 election. The Russian Communists, ultranationalists, and some elements of the military, security services, and state bureaucracy shared the view that the "Chinese model" of a political dictatorship with pragmatic economic policies would be better for Russia. Therefore, in part to broaden his domestic political support before the June 1996 Russian presidential election, Yeltsin visited China in April 1996 where the countries formalized a new "strategic partnership." This was the beginning of the movement of China and Russia from normalization to a new alignment that has evolved and deepened over the years through a number of summit meetings. Of note is that both have agreed in their meetings and said publicly that the United States and its alleged intentions to dominate the world-which Russia called "unipolarism" and China described as "hegemonism"-was the primary international problem each of them faced.
In 1998-99, Russia and China acted in concert to oppose U.S. and Western initiatives intended to persuade Iraq and Serbia to implement existing UN Security Council resolutions. Subsequently, the opposition of Russia and China in the UN Security Council prevented it from authorizing the use of force to compel Serbia to end the killing, persecution, and expulsion of one million ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. This in turn was followed by NATO air attacks in the spring of 1999, without explicit authority from the Security Council. Russia and China condemned those NATO military actions as illegal, took open and covert actions to help the Serbian regime, and objected vigorously to the argument made by President Clinton that massive human-rights abuses of their own citizens by regimes gave the international community, even without UN Security Council approval, the right to intervene on humanitarian grounds. Both Russia and China have concerns about internal separatist movements (Chechnya for Russia and Tibet and Xinjiang in China) and did not want any such precedent established.
At their December 1999 summit meeting, the leaders of Russia and China repeated that they opposed the U.S.-led NATO military campaign that brought an end to the Milosevic regime's persecution of Albanian Muslims, and that all states should "respect each other's sovereignty and not interfere in each other's internal affairs." At that December 1999 summit, the presidents of Russia and China also stated that Taiwan is part of Chinese territory and that "Russia supports Chinese reunification efforts," without limiting this endorsement to peaceful means. Russia also declared that it opposed "the inclusion of China's Taiwan province" in any theater missile defense plan in any form by any country. All of these positions were reiterated in the July 2000 summit held between President Jiang of China and Vladimir Putin, the newly elected and inaugurated president of Russia. Since the early 1990s, Russia has sold China increasing quantities of advanced weapons and has permitted thousands of Russian scientists and engineers to work for China on advanced military development and production. Russia and China have also acted in tandem for years providing components and expertise for weapons of mass destruction to Iran, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, North Korea, and other terrorist-sponsoring regimes.
In the year that followed this first meeting between Jiang and Putin, the governments of China and Russia signed significant documents. In June 2001, they, together with the leaders of what had been known as the Shanghai 5 plus Uzbekistan group, signed a treaty creating the Shanghai Cooperative Organization. In July 2001, Presidents Putin and Jiang signed the "Good-Neighborly Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation" between China and Russia. Although they claimed at the time that there was no military component to this treaty, Article 9 of the treaty reads as follows:
When a situation arises in which one of the contracting parties deems that peace is being threatened and undermined or its security interests are involved or when it is confronted with the threat of aggression, the contracting parties shall immediately hold contacts and consultations in order to eliminate such threats.
The first alliance between the Soviet Union and Communist China effectively ended in 1959 and the U.S. and its allies have not faced a concerted strategic challenge by the two major powers since. Though Russian conventional military forces at 1.2 million are far weaker than were those of the former USSR, current Russian military doctrine formally declares its large strategic nuclear arsenal may be used first in the event of major conflict. China has the world's largest army (2.3 million), with a growing arsenal of nuclear-armed, intercontinental, medium- and short-range ballistic missiles, and has been modernizing its naval and air forces with Russian and other weapons for the clear purpose of intimidating and countering U.S. air and naval forces in the Pacific.
It is also probable that the U.S. will deploy a theater missile defense in East Asia to protect Japan, South Korea, and the hundred thousand U.S. forces in the region. Given the April 27, 2001, statement by President George W. Bush that the U.S. would do "whatever it takes" to prevent China from using force to take control of Taiwan, it is possible that this deployed system might be used to defend Taiwan if China should decide to use force there. It is possible that Taiwan will obtain the means it needs to construct its own defense against the hundreds of ballistic missiles China has deployed within range of Taiwan. The strong opposition to all of these actions expressed by China and by Russia adds to the potential for serious conflict.
However, it is more likely that Russia and China will continue to align strategically by pursuing a two-level relationship with the United States: normal diplomatic and trade relations to ensure the continued flow of economic benefits, combined with selective opposition to the U.S. and its allies, using mostly methods of indirect conflict.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from CHINAby Constantine C. Menges Copyright © 2007 by Constantine C. Menges. Excerpted by permission.
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