percent of our petroleum imports come from Africa, second only to the supply from the Middle East. Besides energy, China is also active in mining and forestry in Africa. Large areas of farmland are under contract to meet Chinese demands. China has also built roads, hospitals, harbors, airports, and communication networks. China has always advocated trade, friendship, and non-interference in other nations’ internal politics, and African leaders welcome this attitude. It is not surprising that our power and influence in Africa will soon surpass that of America, France, and Great Britain to become Africa’s number-one trading partner.
In South Asia and the Middle East, China has friendly relations with Iran and has expended a great deal of thought and money on its longtime friend Pakistan. This is an important strategic national-security consideration: to contain America’s ally India, our so-called “cold to India, warm to Islam” policy, and to protect our oil-supply lines- the shortest route for the shipment of African and Middle Eastern oil is by sea or overland to the port of Gwadar in southwest Pakistan, and then north along the Chinese-built Gwadar-Dalbandin railway to meet up with the Karakoram highway in China’s Xinjiang Province. This avoids a long sea journey from Africa or the Middle East, and bypasses the Indian Ocean and South China Sea shipping lanes-especially the narrow and busy Strait of Malacca, where the navies of India, the United States, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia, and Japan frequently conduct joint naval exercises.
China has also not failed to grab any energy resources that have slipped out of the grasp of other great powers. In 2008, when the price of oil fell from $147 to $33 a barrel, China greatly increased its oil imports from Venezuela and Iran. In 2009, when Russia reneged on its contract and stopped importing natural gas from Turkmenistan, China reached out its helping hand and signed a thirty-year contract with Turkmenistan that included building a gas pipeline across Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan all the way to China. The same goes for oil from Kazakhstan. China not only participated in its extraction, but built three thousand kilometers of oil pipelines. With the exception of Russia and Iran, the nations in the region are all landlocked, and their energy exports have to be shipped through other countries. Therefore they all support China’s ultimate strategic goal in Central Asia-that is, the construction of a “Pan Eurasian Energy Bridge,” an oil pipeline from the Middle East, through Iran, Russia, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan to Xinjiang.
Today, in its own national interest, China wants to promote regional stability in Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, Iran, and Pakistan. It wants to prevent any manipulation by other great powers and to block the influence of religious extremists, separatists, and terrorists who want to undermine or overthrow the governments in those regions. In order to isolate the Xinjiang independence forces, China has offered special friendship to the six “Stans” of Central Asia, and to Turkey. Turkey has long been denied entry into the European Union, but China has offered it observer status in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and has given Iran official membership. Most unexpectedly, even Israel has to be friendly toward China; because Israel is afraid that China will export high-tech weaponry, including nuclear weapons, to Islamic countries, it is selling sophisticated technology to China.
China also did not oppose Russian efforts to counteract American influence in the continental-heartland regions of Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Ukraine. These multiethnic nations didn’t, however, want to throw themselves back into the Russian embrace. Kazakhstan, for example, has not forgotten the great suffering it endured as a result of Stalin’s forced-removal policies and on the Soviet collective farms. Uzbekistan was even casting amorous glances toward the United States and NATO. All the Central Asian nations agreed that China had no political ambitions in the region, and so they felt more confident in doing business with China. On the contrary, it was China that didn’t want Russia to get the idea that they were trying to muscle in on Russia’s sphere of influence. The new foreign-policy term for the Chinese and Russian governments was “coordinated diplomacy,” and that explains why the Chinese provided a huge loan to the small nation of Moldova, to the west of the Black Sea, with which China had never had any affiliation. It was to collaborate with the Russians in their effort to prevent Western power from moving East.
China has for a long time endured much humiliation to accomplish the task of making Russia a friendly ally. Through more than a century, Russia has occupied over 1.5 million square kilometers of Chinese territory, an area three times the size of France. Many years ago China gave up any claim on these lands and the two nations jointly declared the Sino-Russian borders fixed. As long as China doesn’t bring this matter up again, there is no further reason why China and Russia should have any major conflicts. Russia is very large, its population is in decline, and it is under threat militarily from the power of NATO on its western front. It is expending all its strength on managing the instability of its income from energy resources, controlling its non-Russian ethnic-minority populations, and reasserting the power and influence of the former Soviet Union.
Russia is overdependent on energy exports, and so this latest round of global economic decline hit it very hard. Fortunately, when Europe reduced its imports of natural gas from Russia, China immediately increased its purchases of Russian energy. From then on, Russian oil and natural gas and other staple exports, such as heavy weaponry and Siberian timber, were guaranteed a Chinese market. In 2010, Russian oil was already flowing through the Siberian Pacific pipeline from Skovorodina to Daqing in Heilongjiang Province, and now natural gas also comes into China from Yakutia through the 6,700-kilometer Yakutia-Khabarovsk-Vladivostok gas pipeline. All this reduces Russia’s dependence on the European market, as well as diversifying China’s supplies of fossil-fuel resources. Due to their lack of capital and their close ties to the government, several Russian oligarchic enterprises competed to accept China’s friendly state-enterprise investments in joint monopolies of Russian titanium, gold, and other precious metals. We can thus say that in economic terms China and Russia are mutually supportive.
Having noticed this fact, recently many Russian regions bordering on China have altered their attitudes and tacitly allowed or even openly welcomed Chinese capital, businesses, and workers to come in and cooperate in their development. For the sake of our two nations’ core interests and in consideration of our grand strategies, as long as China doesn’t bring up the question of its lost territory, China and Russia are perfectly able to live in peaceful coexistence.
He Dongsheng said that this great recent shift in the global center of gravity presented China with the opportunity of a century. In the past few years, China had been developing quite smoothly, but in order to have long-term security and to “rule the nation and pacify the world” (as the traditional phrase goes), He Dongsheng believed there was still one key move remaining: an alliance with Japan, “to make ‘East Asia for the East Asians’ a reality,” he said.
Only when Japan changed its attitude, shook off the United States, and entered Asia could American imperialism be removed from East Asia, and the Cold War arrangements finally collapse. Once the two Asian superpowers, China and Japan, joined hands, a new world order appeared, and a new post-Western, post-white era was ineluctably created. There was nothing Europe and America could do but accept it. This prospect was what had motivated Sun Yat-sen in 1924, when he went to Japan to promote Asianism and urged the Japanese not to emulate Western imperialism, but instead to join hands with China and make the traditional Chinese “Kingly Way” a reality. Sun Yat-sen was a nationalist.
“Do you think he didn’t see Japan’s ambitions?” He Dongsheng asked his audience.
He did, but he understood that neither China nor Japan alone had the might to force the Western powers out of Asia, but if they worked together, nothing could stop the rejuvenation of Asia. Sadly, though, Japan didn’t heed Sun Yat-sen’s good advice, and went on to invade China and the rest of East Asia, ruining themselves and many others, and causing both countries to suffer tremendous losses.
Now the opportunity had come again. The leaders of China and Japan risked overwhelming internal opposition to conclude an alliance, signing the most comprehensive security treaty in the history of their two nations, and an extremely close bilateral economic-cooperation agreement.
“You probably don’t know,” said He Dongsheng, “that Japanese military might is second only to that of the United States and China.” He went on to relate that, in theory, Japan’s defense spending is only 1 percent of its GDP, but the Japanese economy is very large, and, just as in China, much of its military spending is hidden in other budget items. These include naval forces, its space program, and its weapons research and development, none of which show up in the national defense budget. Although Japan’s official military spending is slightly less than China’s, Japan leads in advanced technology, and many of Japan’s civilian industries can be easily converted to military use.
With Japan having a conventional military might equal to that of China and being so geographically close, it made China extremely nervous when it was not viewed as a friendly state-not to mention the continued presence of American troops in Japan, the island of Okinawa, and South Korea.
By the same token, Japan had a similar feeling of unease as it witnessed China’s rapid rise, which might have led it to abolish its “peace constitution,” become a normal country, start an arms race with China, accept the
