A bitter China is marching to global domination which may lead to a conflict with the U.S. – and the worst world war in history . . .
WITH the busy lives that everybody leads and one eye on the clock for when the supermarket shuts, it is quite possible you have failed to notice that Beijing has this week been hosting the 19th Congress of the Communist Party.
From all over China, 2,300 unswervingly loyal apparatchiks have gathered, to cheer to the rafters President Xi Jinping, the most powerful man in the world.
Those last few words may cause some people to demand: but what about Donald Trump?
It is true that the leader of the United States commands a much larger nuclear arsenal, and that his country is still richer and stronger than China.
But Trump – thank goodness – is constrained in his excesses by advisers and cabinet members who have thus far prevented him from starting a war. America remains the world’s largest democracy; its system of checks and balances is sort of working.
In China, by contrast, there are no checks and balances, and there will be even fewer after this week’s slavish Party Congress, in which a new cult of personality has soared to unprecedented heights.
President Xi wields almost absolute power, with ever-more draconian restrictions on dissent and free speech. ‘China needs heroes,’ he has written, ‘such as Mao Zedong.’
He thus celebrates a predecessor who almost everybody outside China recognises as the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century, ahead even of Adolf Hitler.
The US strategy guru Edward Luttwak warns that China ‘poses a greater threat to world peace’ than America, because of its leader’s lack of accountability. The only Chinese institution with independent clout is the People’s Liberation Army.
While President Xi talks to the world – without being much believed – about his desire for China to be a good neighbour, part of the fellowship of nations, his commanders become ever more hawkish.
Countless billions are poured into armies, fleets and missile forces, with the defence budget rising by 10% last year. The country has established its first overseas military base, in the port of Djibouti on the Horn of Africa.
SOME 60,000 people are employed in military cyber-operations, of frightening sophistication; four years ago, 140 attacks on US institutions were traced to a single PLA unit in Shanghai. The Chinese now boast a formidable satellite-killer capability, which could inflict critical damage on American communications at an early stage of any clash.
It may be no coincidence that China’s big movie hit of 2017 has been Wolf Warriors 2, about a Chinese warrior mowing down his country’s enemies abroad, on a far more lavish scale than Britain’s James Bond.
Here is the Heavenly Kingdom, one of the oldest civilisations on earth, now seeking to reassert its long-lost might and majesty; why should it continue to tolerate the slights and insults of the West?
The US Navy still claims dominance of the Pacific, as it has done since 1945, and both Washington and Tokyo question China’s right to extend its frontiers in the South and East China Seas.
Above all, the West resists China’s insistence upon reclaiming Taiwan, where Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists established a bastion under American protection after they lost the Civil War to Mao in 1949.
The Chinese harbour profound resentments and insecurities about their past – what they call the ‘century of humiliation’, which began with the Opium Wars of the mid-19th century. Ed Luttwak writes of their deep sense of victimisation, which they are now determined to repair.
He is only one among a growing number of influential academics on both sides of the Atlantic who fear that the tensions between China and the US and its allies could lead to conflict – a big, horrible, potentially catastrophic war – in the decade or two ahead.
The latest of such seers is Christopher Coker, Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics. He writes in a new book, The Improbable War: ‘A Sino-American war could prove to be the most ruinous the world has ever witnessed, if not in terms of loss of life then certainly in terms of the disruption it would cause to the world economy, particularly if the conflict was at least partly conducted in space.’
Harvard professor Graham Allison suggests in his own recent book, The Thucydides Trap, that the two nations could emulate the city-states of ancient Greece, by getting into a war because of the inescapable tension between a declining power – once Sparta, now the US – and a rising one – then Athens, now China – as depicted by the great historian Thucydides.
In 2015, journalist August Cole joined with policy analyst Peter Singer to publish a fictional thriller, Ghost Fleet, which depicted a US-China clash precipitated by an energy crisis following a Saudi-Iranian war.
Sir Lawrence Freedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King’s College London, declares in his own new work, The Future Of War, his conviction that armed conflict between great powers is almost certain to continue ‘wherever there is a combination of an intensive dispute and available forms of violence’.
He writes: ‘At first it may bear little resemblance to our common views of war, but any continuing violence has the potential to turn into something bigger.’
Freedman means, of course, that a new great power clash is likely to start with an escalating, yet invisible and noiseless, cyber-exchange, which could aim to deliver a pre-emptive strike against the enemy’s hitech weapons systems, or even more broadly its civil infrastructure, for instance electricity grids or telecoms.
Back in 1991, Winn Schwartau, an American expert on security and cyber-warfare, wrote a futuristic novel suggesting the possibility of an ‘electronic Pearl Harbor’ surprise assault, and this has since become technologically more plausible.
Two other American experts, David Gompert and Martin Libicki, warned three years ago that ‘the prospect of cyberwarfare, to which both China and the US are increasingly committed, makes one or both sides that much more inclined to strike first’.
This is because each is terrified that failure to knock out the other’s hi-tech information and weapons-guidance systems early in a confrontation could fatally weaken the loser if hostilities heat up. Consider the effect if – for instance – a
Chinese cyber-thrust disables the catapults on a US aircraft-carrier: a €13.4billion platform suddenly becomes impotent.
Nobody suggests that either China’s President Xi at his most authoritarian, or America’s President Trump at his most unstable, consciously seek a big war. But Christopher Coker is only one of the authors highlights the peril of repeating 1914, when Austria and Germany precipitated a huge conflagration, because they started out with illusions that they risked only a small one, with Serbia.
This is a comparison I made myself a few years ago to a delegation of Chinese military men visiting London, who asked if I saw comparisons with 1914, about which I had just published a book.
I suggested that the huge irony of what happened a century ago was that if Germany had not gone to war, it could have achieved dominance of Europe within a generation, simply through its industrial and technological superiority.
Surely nothing at stake in the South China Sea or with Taiwan, I said to the Chinese, is worth risking all that you have achieved by peaceful means?
A Chinese officer, obviously unconvinced, responded: ‘But we have claims!’
In my own travels in China, I have often been impressed by how much real popular feeling exists, albeit stoked by propaganda, about the separation of Taiwan.
Beijing has a valid claim on the island, whose right to independence rests solely on the fact that it has existed as a separate society for 70 years, because the Americans had the power to make it so.
Both Professor Allison and Richard Haas, chairman of the US Council on Foreign Relations, insistently make the point that America can no longer expect to get its own way about absolutely everything, as its own relative power declines and that of China increases. Yet few of their fellow countrymen are reconciled to this reality – least of all President Trump.
THE Washington Post suggests that China’s President Xi, his personal power strengthened by this week’s 19th Congress, may start throwing his weight around in ways that could generate a crisis – for instance, setting a time limit for the return of Taiwan into Beijing’s control.
In the South China Sea, there are constant tensions and potential flashpoints between the Chinese building new bases in previously acknowledged international or Japanese waters, and American warships and planes asserting rights of navigation.
There is a real prospect of Japan not merely rearming, but seeking nuclear weapons, in response to the threat from North Korea, which Beijing seems unwilling or unable to defuse.
Christopher Coker agrees with strategist Ed Luttwak’s view that China, like Russia, is what they call an autistic power, meaning that it finds it extraordinarily difficult to relate to others, or to see things as others do.
Neither China nor Russia have allies, and thus lack the long experience that almost every Western nation enjoys, of working with neighbour states, confiding in friendly governments. They see things through a narrowly nationalistic cultural and political prism.
They are dangerous because they lack understanding of, and sympathy with, alternative points of view. The same can be said of President Trump, the most historically ignorant man ever to occupy the White House. I have, in the recent past, compared his personality to that of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, whose erratic behaviour did so much to cause World War I.
The chairman of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Francois Heisbourg, recently made the same comparison, and expressed matching fears about the impact of Trump’s personality on an international crisis.
NONE of the academics I have cited above suggests that a major war is inevitable. Some argue that Chinese ambitions are far more economic than globally strategic; that the country’s internal difficulties and resource shortages – especially of water – are likely to constrain its growth and keep President Xi too busy at home to gamble disastrously abroad.
Yet the combination of Donald Trump’s muddled mix of isolationism and assertiveness, alongside President Xi’s unconstrained dictatorship, poses great dangers to world stability and peace.
In the recent past, there have been episodes in which Chinese military commanders have adopted dangerous and provocative initiatives without reference to Beijing – for instance, launching a new satellite weapon.
Again and again, escalation has been averted by wise caution mostly on the part of the Americans, but sometimes also on that of the Chinese.
Statesmanship, which requires steady diplomacy and constant horse-trading, is indispensable to keep us all safe. Yet this is what is becoming ever harder to come by, when the US government is weekly making wastepaper of international agreements, and China is flexing its muscles.
On one side, we see a rising power impelled by a profound, centuriesold sense of grievance; on the other the US, with a sense of global entitlement that is no longer compatible with the aspirations and might of others.
In 1910, Brigadier Henry Wilson, commandant of the British Army’s staff college, told his students there was likely to be a big European war. One of his audience remonstrated, saying that only ‘inconceivable stupidity on the part of statesmen’ could make such a thing happen.
Wilson guffawed derisively: ‘Inconceivable stupidity is what you are going to get.’
So the world did. And could again.