Foreign Affairs Editorial Keywords: REAGAN, SOVIET UNION,
Source: INSIGHT magazine
Published: April 13, 2001 Author: J. Michael Waller
Posted on 04/13/2001 11:44:51 PDT by Stand Watch Listen
National-security insiders say strategies from the Reagan Doctrine, a factor in the fall of the Soviet Union, could be borrowed to pry open the Chinese political-control system and clear the way to freedom for the Chinese people.
The recent downing, seizure and release of 24 American military personnel aboard a U.S. reconnaissance plane has set off alarm bells in the United States about Chinese hostility and the potential for worse to come. But national-security experts tell Insight the People’s Republic of China (PRC) need not be the evil hegemon that its neighbors and many Americans increasingly are recognizing.
Under Communist rule for more than half a century, China shows some of the same vulnerabilities the Soviet Union displayed in the 1980s. Those vulnerabilities, Western analysts have noted and Chinese leaders have confirmed, are the Achilles’ heel of the Chinese Communist Party. If properly leveraged, national-security insiders say, they could open the way to freedom for the Chinese people and reduce or eliminate a growing military threat to much of Asia and the United States.
Similar to the Soviet Union, the PRC is an empire that has swallowed up neighbors of many races and languages. Those captive peoples, from Mongols to Uighurs to Tibetans and many more, are seeking to regain their national identities despite increasing repression. Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and other religious or spiritual movements find themselves similarly harassed and abused.
Support for armed-resistance movements is the last thing the United States should advocate, say sources close to senior national-security figures in the Bush administration. What is needed, they argue, is a carefully crafted strategy for using information to open up the Chinese political-control system, backed by diplomacy and thoughtful statecraft. Such an information strategy must be fortified by a comprehensive policy for reducing the access of the Chinese Communist Party leadership to hard currency, combined with a firm commitment to maintaining the military status quo in the volatile region. This strategy would deny the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) the military reach it is seeking to threaten, assault and “Finlandize” its neighbors, and ultimately to drive the United States out of the Pacific.
Though few are prepared to go on record at present, advocates say that such a plan is not a carbon copy of the Reagan Doctrine, though their strategy to free China borrows from Ronald Reagan’s successful playbook. “What the Reagan Doctrine really did was to break out of tired and failing modes of discourse with the Soviet Union, such as the engage/stalemate/concession cycle of dйtente and arms control, and instead to look at the situation as it was and to explore levers that might be pulled more fruitfully from both within and without,” Thor Ronay, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Security Policy, tells Insight.
Such levers were economic, diplomatic, political and ideological, and military. Economic levers include presidential national-security decision directives (NSDDs) aimed at oil, gas, gold and technology theft, and transferring and restricting or denying hard currency and military high technology to the Communist Party and its armed forces. A bipartisan coalition of human-rights groups, labor unions and conservative national-security figures has worked — with no small degree of success — to deny the U.S. capital market to Communist Chinese enterprises (see sidebar, p. 12).
Diplomatic mechanisms include strengthening U.S. alliances in the front-line states and rebuffing the other side’s efforts to weaken the alliances or build new counteralliances. Political and ideological measures include breaking barriers to the free flow and exchange of news and information; supporting minority and reformist individuals, organizations and movements inside the system; and publicly exposing the weaknesses, contradictions and internal costs and corruption of Beijing’s one-party regime.
The military components, Ronay says, include rebuilding the U.S. military at home, restoring morale among service personnel, improving intelligence collection and analytical capabilities, leaping forward to next-generation military technologies and neutralizing China’s missile threat with not only a national missile-defense shield for the United States, but allied missile-defense networks for friends and allies.
Many of these components already are in place. Currently, it’s merely a question of focus, commitment and leadership.
“This approach, updated as it is applied, would seek current levers rather than mime the old ones of the Cold War and try to force them to ‘fit’ China,” Ronay argues. “The United States should build new allies, like India; maintain our old allies, like the Philippines, Australia, Thailand, South Korea and Taiwan; and stop China from building hostile alliances against the U.S. and its allies with Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Russia and North Korea. It also means maintaining democratic solidarity while impugning the corruption and brutality of the PRC’s system and exposing it to light, such as through the U.N. and international broadcasting. It means maintaining a robust military presence and pursuing our edge in space while defending our technology, information and intelligence edge by denying the PRC access, by upgrading counterintelligence and export controls, by expelling spies, limiting their freedom of movement and so forth.”
One of the easiest and most cost-effective means of opening China’s communist system is to encourage a free flow of news and information, not only in the big cities full of foreign businessmen but even in far-flung areas of the PRC. In 1996, Congress chartered Radio Free Asia (RFA) on the model of the hugely successful Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/ RL) that received international acclaim for breaking the Soviet information blockade. RFA says it was chartered “to provide accurate and timely information, news and commentary for and about those Asian countries whose citizens otherwise lack adequate sources of information.”
The idea simply is to tell the truth. According to RFA: “Our underlying purpose is to promote the right of freedom of opinion and statement, including the freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media. RFA adheres to the highest standards of journalism and does not broadcast propaganda,” he says.
Broadcasts go not only into China but also Burma, Cambodia, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam. But, of course, it is the broadcasts into China — and not just those in China’s dominant Mandarin and Cantonese dialects — that rile Beijing. The long-subjugated Turkic Uighur minority in northwest China receives RFA broadcasts in its native Uighur language, and the people of Tibet listen to the news in their Tibetan tongue. These are not friends of Beijing’s colonial domination and, like the people of the Soviet empire before them, may seek their independence if the system opens up to them.
As the ancients put it: The mandate of heaven appears to be shaking in China. In recent months, Beijing has betrayed its internal instability with a litany of reactionary policies:
Increased Cold War-style jamming of foreign broadcasts. Last fall, PRC officials stepped up jamming of international broadcasts into China, including the Voice of America. Authorities even constructed new jamming facilities visible to public view.
Heightened censorship, especially on the Internet. Newspapers in the former British colony of Hong Kong, though promised total editorial freedom after the PRC’s absorption of the enclave, increasingly have exercised self-censorship. Commentators especially critical of Beijing, such as the South China Morning Post’s Willy Wo-Lap Lam, have been fired. From the capital, authorities stepped up censorship of Internet Websites and installed software technology designed to root out and destroy “subversive” messages and e-mails.
Increased repression of Christians. After a brief window of relative freedom, Chinese Christians and the foreign clergy and laypeople who minister there are suffering stronger persecution. Last year, Beijing arrested several Catholic bishops who refused to knuckle under to the Communist Party-controlled “Patriotic Church.” Hundreds of Catholic, Protestant and evangelical Christian churches have been closed by the regime.
Systematic repression of spiritual movements. The regime has waged a far-reaching crackdown on spiritual movements, especially the Falun Gong, whose members include Communist Party members and senior military officers. Chinese media even reported that Beijing’s foreign-intelligence service was deployed recently to spy on Falun Gong members abroad. Government-controlled, English-language Websites, such as ChinaDaily.net and PeoplesDaily.com, carry images titled “Falun Gong Cult” or related denunciations.
Unprecedented admissions of corruption. Official corruption is so endemic that the senior-party leadership has backed the imprisonment and execution of officials for corrupt practices. The punishment is highly selective and apparently politically motivated by intraparty rivalries, but the regime had to make public acknowledgement because of the overwhelming pervasiveness of standard corrupt practices that riddle the apparat from top to bottom.
All efforts, say Ronay and others, would be aimed at containing the regime’s outward expansion and encouraging reforms and reformers at home, while studiously avoiding any action in any sphere that would strengthen reactionary elements. “Ronald Reagan was not fooled about Yuri Andropov being a reformer,” Ronay says, “and the U.S. leadership today should not be fooled about [Chinese President] Jiang Zemin. He was chosen by the old guard precisely because of the iron he showed at Tiananmen Square [in 1989]. Since he could be trusted to be ruthless and worthy of the military’s support, he has kept power and rewarded the military ever since.”
A Reagan administration veteran now close to the Bush national-security community says, “Joining and moving the battle onto our terms, using weapons of statecraft of our choice that played to our strengths and values and uplifted the human spirit — not buying into formulas of the dictators’ choice —that was the essence of the Reagan Doctrine. It wasn’t just about fighting Contra wars.”
Those of the realist school who focus on the U.S. right to pursue peace through strength and to expand the frontiers of freedom urge that the battle of ideas be exported to mainland China, supported by U.S. diplomatic, economic and other levers of statecraft needed to encourage peaceful change.
An end to Communist rule in China does not necessarily mean Beijing will drop its great-power aspirations and become an ally of the West. Chinese nationalism is on the rise on the mainland, say Western intelligence specialists, as the regime finds Communist ideology losing its mass appeal. Even on the authorized Internet sites, much of the rhetoric concerning the downed U.S. Navy EP-3E intelligence airplane and its crew members held captive for 11 days was as hostile to the Communist Party as it was to the United States.
Chinese nationalists see the rot in the regime as well. According to one account, it was compared to the Qing Dynasty, which fell in 1911 because of its own weakness, internal decay and surrender to foreign domination. “The sad government! The incompetent government, is just like the Qing-dynasty government,” said one disgusted Chinese citizen after Beijing released the Americans. “You’ve just sold out the Chinese in this way again.”
Senior-party officials may sense their days are numbered. At the Communist Party’s annual National People’s Congress in March, Chairman Li Peng warned rubber-stamp lawmakers the huge bureaucratic system is so corrupt that it easily could collapse. In Li’s words, “If we fail to do a good job of fighting corruption and building a clean government, we’ll risk the destruction of the party and the destruction of the state.”
The United States lacks the flow of reliable information about China that it needs. Here are ways strategists determined to free China say U.S. decisionmakers can develop the information they need for sound policy:
1. Build a strong research-and-analysis component into Radio Free Asia (RFA), such as the excellent unit that so well served Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty during the Cold War. This is needed to bolster what is considered a weak analytical capability within the U.S. government and much of academia concerning ethnic minorities and nationalities in China, internal political movements and civil-society developments such as anger at environmental degradation and corruption. It also would enhance broadcasting depth. RFA has strong bipartisan support in Congress.
2. It took five decades to take Soviet disinformation and active measures seriously within the U.S. government. Under the Reagan administration, the U.S. Information Agency finally created an Office to Counter Soviet Active Measures, headed by the capable Herbert Romerstein, to speak seriously about the problem to policymakers and the news media.
China views all warfare as based on deception, with deception and denial heavily used in military and nonmilitary statecraft. U.S. decisionmakers need a specialized focus from an expert group to monitor and assess Chinese denial and deception.
3. Monitor growth of the People’s Liberation Army. The U.S. Department of Defense issued annual illustrated books on “Soviet Military Power” that dramatically informed decisionmakers and the public about the Soviet military threat. A Pentagon version for China, describing the current state and notable trends in Chinese military power and doctrine, would assist policymakers and the public today.
4. After the stream of China-related congressional reports on dual-use technology, ballistic-missile threats, proliferation and terrorism (the Cox, Cochran, Deutch and Rumsfeld reports), as well as campaign-finance and influence scandals, Congress realized that the U.S. government lacks adequate focus, coordination and resources fully to understand Beijing’s activities, intent and capabilities.
To begin addressing some of these issues, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) created the newly appointed U.S.-China Security Review Commission.
5. Improve U.S. intelligence collection and analysis. Sources tell Insight that after Congress repeatedly expressed its lack of confidence in CIA reporting on China, a “B Team” on CIA collection and analysis of China-related intelligence products was established and reports to CIA Director George Tenet.
