Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

strategic and nuclear programs, testified in September 1998 that China had at most twenty ICBMs, which were being maintained in an unfueled state and with their warheads unattached.⁵ Admiral Dennis C. Blair, commander in chief in the Pacific, testified before Congress in March 1999 that “China is not a military threat to U.S. interests. It will be many years before the People’s Liberation Army presents a major challenge to U.S. forces.”⁶ And yet, in that same month, the Senate voted 97-3 to build a “national missile defense” essentially against China and North Korea, and President Clinton endorsed spending some $10.6 billion on it over the coming five years. This is American overstretch, not a responsible national defense policy.

Some members of Congress and Pentagon officials are also promoting worst-case scenarios about Chinese moves in the South China Sea. Through this waterway passes virtually all of the oil from the Middle East intended for China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. There are two sets of about a thousand islands, reefs, and rocks in the South China Sea, the Spratlys (Nansha in Chinese) and the Paracels (Xisha), which are claimed in part or in whole by seven different governments—those of China, Vietnam, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, and Indonesia. It was only in late 1987 that sovereignty over the Spratlys first became an issue in Chinese foreign policy, reflecting a shift to nationalism as the main legitimating principle of the regime. Most of these barren bits of land are unoccupied, but during the late 1980s and early 1990s, in pursuit of their various claims, China occupied six of them, Vietnam twenty-one, the Philippines six, Malaysia three, and Taiwan one.⁷

In March 1988, China first occupied its six locations; later that same year it separated its large southern island, Hainan, from Guangdong Province, making it a special economic zone and a major military base. In February 1992, it passed the “Law of the People’s Republic of China on the Territorial Sea and the Contiguous Zone,” which laid down an exclusive claim to the entire Spratly archipelago, about 340,000 square miles of ocean, and authorized the Chinese navy to evict “trespassers” by force. In February 1995, China built a structure on a rocky formation claimed by the Philippines about 135 miles west of that country and hundreds of miles from the Chinese mainland. At that time the aptly named Mischief Reef was unoccupied. Although China has been verbally belligerent on the issue of the Spratlys, it has also been careful not to seize a rock or reef already occupied by some other nation.

China and Vietnam have already clashed twice in the South China Sea, once in 1974 over the Paracels and again in a short but bloody naval battle over the Spratlys in 1988. China has staked its claim to the islands on a series of fifteenth-century voyages by Ming dynasty admiral Cheng Ho. According to Vietnam, China was even then infringing on its territory. Meanwhile, Malaysia is building a tourist resort on its island, known as Terumbu Layang- Layang. All the nations of the area have increased their defense postures significantly.

China’s island policies certainly reflect the force of its new nationalism and its commitment to defend all claims to Chinese territory as a way of dramatizing its previous humiliations at the hands of imperialist powers. It is a policy that may also reflect incipient Chinese hege-monism, a response to the breakup of the USSR and to the American claims of being the “indispensable nation” in East Asia. And there may be oil under the Spratlys. China is now a net oil importer, reflecting its advancing industrialization and motorization, so it is interested in any potential new source of oil. Many experts doubt, however, that any significant reserves in the South China Sea will ever materialize, as the waters separating the Spratlys are about 2,000 meters deep. The deepest oceanic drilling for oil at present is only to a depth of 872 meters in the Gulf of Mexico.

It is more than likely that the issues surrounding the South China Sea will be contained by ongoing negotiations between China and ASEAN, focusing not on sovereignty but on “confidence-building measures.” China has actually moderated its claims to the area over time. To date, this dispute is a classic example of the dangers of worst-case analysis—that is, of treating possibilities as probabilities or inevitabilities, particularly when doing so, in the American case, may someday contribute to a larger military budget.

Tibet is another matter. As an independent state or even culture, it is probably doomed. China is currently implementing what the Dalai Lama calls its “final solution” for Tibet—an openly racist policy of state-sponsored Chinese emigration to the area and forced “assimilation” (the word used in the Chinese press is hanhua, literally “to make Chinese”) of what is left of the Tibetan people. Tibet’s only hope lies in the extraordinary efforts of the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s priest-king, and his followers in exile in Dharamsala, India, to internationalize their struggle. Combined with continuing Chinese blunders, it is possible (though not likely) that global concern will raise the costs to China of its obstinate and destructive behavior. Meanwhile, Sinophiles at many foreign academic institutions and ministries of foreign affairs continue to advise their political leaders that Tibet has always been a part of China, which is simply not so.

The concept of irredentism does not apply to Tibet. It was never a province of China, nor was it even involved in the normal tributary relationships that vassal states of Imperial China traditionally maintained with Beijing. The Tibetans are of Mongol origin; their country emerged as a distinct place in the seventh century, when an early version of Mahayana Buddhism took root there. China first established relations with Tibet during the Tang dynasty (618-906). In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Tibet was heavily influenced by Indian Buddhists fleeing ahead of the Muslim invasion of the subcontinent. During the thirteenth century Mongol power came to predominate in Lhasa, just as the Mongols also ruled at that time in Beijing, but Mongol influence persisted in Tibet until the eighteenth century, much longer than in China itself. In 1270, Kublai Khan was converted to Lamaism by the abbot of the Sakya lamasery.

In 1720 the Manchu dynasty in China replaced Mongol rule in Tibet, and from that time on China claimed a limited suzerainty over Tibet—actually a loose arrangement in which Beijing was responsible for foreign relations and defense while Lhasa was left entirely in charge of domestic affairs. After imperial rule collapsed in 1912, Tibet became something like an independent state with its own governing institutions and even a small army, although its nationhood was not recognized by any other country. During this period the Tibetans expelled most Chinese. All this changed with the Chinese Communist invasion in 1950.

The legal status of Tibet today is clear and is similar in nature to the kind of colonial rule Japan imposed on Korea in 1910. A seventeen-point agreement, signed by Beijing and Tibetan representatives in 1950 at a moment when the Chinese People’s Liberation Army had occupied much of the country, incorporated Tibet into the Chinese state as a “national autonomous region.” This was an unprecedented status. Even then, the Tibetans never expected the Chinese to interfere in the actual running of their country. But a brutal occupation—including mass executions, forced labor, confiscations of property, and destruction of religious sites—led to a low-level revolt in the mid-1950s that exploded in March 1959 into open rebellion. The CIA covertly aided this rebellion, which may be part of the reason why the Chinese have shown so little flexibility in dealing with Tibet.⁸ Blowback from CIA support, which was cut off at about the time that President Nixon decided to pursue an opening to China, has been very costly to the Tibetans. In 1959, the Dalai Lama was forced into exile in India, where he has ever since devoted himself to a campaign to publicize the Tibetans’ plight. He turned sixty-three years old in 1999—and there is every sign that the Chinese will simply try to wait him out, believing that on his death they will be able to appoint a youthful successor, as they have done with the Panchen Lama, the second-holiest lama in the Tibetan hierarchy.

China will probably succeed in maintaining its imperium over Tibet and ultimately assimilate both the Tibetan people and their culture. There are no powerful interests to save them. The Tibetans are in this sense similar to the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America. A continuing propaganda barrage from both Beijing and Taipei argues that the Tibetans are “feudal” and do not deserve to be saved. But the Chinese are very nervous about what they are doing and regularly make stupid mistakes.

A typical example was the spectacle of officially atheist China attempting to name a pro-Chinese Panchen Lama. On May 15, 1995, from Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama designated a six-year-old shepherd boy as a “living Buddha” and the successor to the Panchen Lama, who had died in China in January 1989. The Chinese government