> Thinking about China and War
>
> http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/apj/apj01/win01/record.html
>
> Dr. Jeffrey Record
>
> Editorial Abstract: The current focus on international terrorism does
> not mean that China has gone away. This thought-provoking piece by Dr.
> Record not only reminds us that China remains an area of potential
> future conflict but also uses the perspective of past conflict to paint
> a picture of what a future war with China might look like. China's
> leaders aren't as nai"ve as Saddam Hussein in their appreciation of
> America's high-tech capabilities.
>
> CHINA'S XENOPHOBIC AND increasingly strident nationalism reinforces the
> argument that it is destined to become America's next great strategic
> rival and, therefore, that the United States should begin to think
> seriously about the possibility of war with that country.1 The
> combination of continued autocracy in Beijing, China's militant
> assertiveness across the Taiwan Strait and in the South China Sea, and
> the growing influence of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) "in the
> development of China's national identity and security policy" all point
> to a determination to displace American power in East Asia and the
> Western Pacific.2
>
> The new Bush administration is certainly prepared to take a harder line
> than its predecessor on the noneconomic dimensions of the Sino-American
> relationship, including Beijing's myriad human-rights abuses and
> military bullying of its neighbors. The administration has rejected the
> illusion of strategic partnership with China, has been explicit on US
> protection of Taiwan against an attack from the mainland, and is openly
> reorienting America's primary strategic focus from Europe to Asia. It
> is, in short, moving to contain China even while it embraces expanded
> trade with that country. Indeed, for the Bush administration, trade
> serves as a means of containment; trade promotes economic
> democratization, which, in turn-or so it is believed- will undermine the
> very autocracy that has embraced extreme nationalism as a legitimizing
> substitute for failed communist ideology. The Bush administration sees
> eye to eye with its predecessor on the attractiveness of attempting to
> subvert China politically via trade-assisted economic democratization.
>
> A policy of containing Communist Chinese expansionism is hardly new. It
> began in 1950, when the Truman administration ordered the interposition
> of the Seventh Fleet between the mainland and what was then known as
> Formosa as a means of preventing Mao Ze-dong's takeover of that island.
> The administration subsequently fought Chinese forces to a standstill in
> Korea. Containment continued during the 1960s, when the Kennedy and
> Johnson administrations escalated US military intervention against the
> advance of Vietnamese communism, which they believed was a
> stalking-horse for Chinese imperialism in Southeast Asia. Even during
> the era of Sino-American tacit strategic alignment against the Soviet
> Union in the 1970s and early 1980s, the United States insisted on a
> nonviolent resolution of Taiwan's relationship with the mainland.
>
> But the China that the United States sought to contain during the Cold
> War was poor and preindustrial and, under Mao Ze-dong, periodically
> plunged into domestic political upheaval. For Mao, political
> purification was always more important than wealth creation, and his
> notions of industrialization were idiotic. Accordingly, the Chinese
> economy remained a shambles until the late 1980s. Moreover, for most of
> the Cold War's last two decades, China's military posture was defensive
> and focused northward on the Soviet Union.
>
> Although the emergence of China as a qualified strategic rival is far
> from inevitable, it is time to think about a future war with China.
> Beijing's core political values are hostile to everything America stands
> for; China is territorially unsatisfied; its military potential is
> impressive if only slowly mobilizable; and Sino-American flash points
> are present in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea. Moreover,
> history teaches that the relative power and influence the United States
> enjoys around the world today will inevitably decline at some point.
> That point may be 50 or even 200 years away, but it will come-because no
> great power remains so forever.
>
> The history of both China and the international political system as a
> whole also suggests that an emergent Chinese hegemon is unlikely to be a
> cooperative state willing to accept a continued American-dominated
> international order.3 For most of its long history, the Middle Kingdom
> was the dominant power in its world; only recently, beginning with the
> Opium Wars of the midnineteenth century, did China fall victim to over a
> century of Western and, later, Japanese intrusion and humiliation.
> China, notes Henry Kissinger, "has rarely had the experience of dealing
> with other societies on the basis of equality."4 Even unburdened of its
> profound sense of victimization by the West, China as a rising power is
> likely to insist on an international order that reflects its power
> growth relative to that of the United States.
>
> Precautionary thinking about a war with China must address at least four
> issues: the economic, political, military, and foreign-policy
> ingredients of China as a qualified strategic rival; the likely causes
> of a Sino-American war; the strengths and weaknesses each side would
> bring to the conflict; and the likely scope of combat. Thinking about a
> war with China also profits from an examination of the Korean War-the
> one and only Sino-American war to date and a marathon of mutual
> incomprehension and miscalculation.
> China as the Next Strategic Rival
>
> Postulation of China as the next functional equivalent of the Soviet
> Union rests on several necessarily speculative assumptions. The first is
> that China will continue to sustain high growth rates in gross national
> product. China's economic growth in the late 1980s and 1990s was
> impressive, to be sure, although it has slowed over the past several
> years. But the economic boom started from a very low base and has been
> jarringly uneven between the coastal provinces and the still-backward
> interior.5 Much of China's industrial production remains economically
> worthless, state-owned goods. Corruption is rampant throughout the
> economy, and levels of unemployment and underemployment are staggering
> and potentially destabilizing.6 Even if China's official statistics were
> reliable, no basis exists for a simple extrapolation of past growth
> rates into the future.
>
> Nonetheless, even the most conservatively estimated growth rates still
> significantly surpass those of the United States and reaffirm the
> strategic wisdom of Deng Xiaoping's momentous decision to unleash
> capitalism in China. Unlike his politically dreamy and romantic
> predecessor, the realist Deng understood that security could not be had
> without power and that the foundation of national power was wealth
> creation. Economic success remains a prerequisite for China's military
> competitiveness. The Soviet Union lost the Cold War because it became a
> one-dimensional superpower whose declining economic performance could
> not sustain its imperial ambitions.
>
> A second assumption is continued autocracy in Beijing. During the past
> two decades, dictatorial rule has taken a beating around the world,
> including East Asia, and both the history of Europe and recent political
> change in Taiwan and South Korea suggest that economic democratization
> can indeed exert a powerful and ultimately irresistible pressure for
> political democratization. Thus, prospects for a democratic China cannot
> be dismissed, and the evidence suggests that democracies are much less
> warlike toward one another than are autocracies to each other and to
> democracies. (This certainly does not mean a peaceful transition; more
> often than not, the road from autocracy to democracy is a violent one
> because autocrats are not disposed to relinquishing power without a fight.)
>
> Yet, even if Adam Smith and James Madison beat Lenin in China, the
> question remains whether a democratic China would be less fervently
> nationalist. The present regime in Beijing has both excited and curbed
> the expression of popular nationalist passions: witness the
> encouragement of street demonstrations after the accidental US bombing
> of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade and the subsequent suppression of
> such demonstrations following the Chinese ramming of a US
> electronic-surveillance aircraft. Could not a democratic regime become
> more a prisoner of nationalist passions than a dictatorial one?
>
> A third assumption is that China remains unified. Its long history has
> been one of cyclical alternation between effective central political
> control and degeneration into warlordism.7 Though ethnically homogeneous
> (except along its northern and western peripheries), China has always
> been difficult to govern, even in the absence of significant social and
> economic change. Post-Marxist China, however, has invited enormous
> change; never before has any regime tried to move so many people so
> quickly into economic modernity, and it is far from certain that
> Beijing's rulers can pull it off without revolutionary upheaval, which
> was the norm for China in the twentieth century. The ongoing crackdown
> on the seemingly harmless Falun Gong spiritual movement underscores the
> regime's insecurity and its preoccupation with preserving its own
> legitimacy, which in the post-Marxist period has rested heavily on
> economic progress as well as nationalism. Richard Betts and Thomas
> Christensen properly caution that "before one laments the rise of
> Chinese power, one should consider an even more uncertain alternative:
> Chinese weakness and collapse. Nothing ordains that China's march to
> great power status cannot be derailed."8
>
> A fourth assumption is that China has imperial ambitions whose
> realization would compromise fundamental American security interests.
> Unlike the Soviet Union, China has no pretensions to a global imperium.
> Its ambitions are neither global nor ideological but national and
> regional in scope, including the assertion of sovereignty over Taiwan
> and the South China Sea. The real issue is whether China is prepared to
> act on those ambitions in a way that would elicit a violent US response.
> The United States could hardly object to a peaceful incorporation of
> Taiwan on terms satisfactory to both the Chinese and Taiwanese, even
> though it would significantly increase China's economic and latent
> military power. American interest lies in the manner-not the fact-of
> China's reunification. As for the South China Sea, China has seized
> small bits of disputed rock there, but it has not challenged
> international freedom of navigation through the sea.
>
> Beyond Taiwan and the South China Sea are those territories over which
> Imperial China held sway at one time or another. They include much of
> Central Asia and the Russian Far East (RFE) as well as northern and
> central Vietnam (which China ruled for a millennium). Will China seek to
> recover these "lost" territories, and will it be prepared to use force
> to do so? Or has it come to understand, as do most modern industrial and
> postindustrial states, that extent of territory per se is not a key
> ingredient of modern national power? The scope of China's ultimate
> territorial and other ambitions in Asia is simply not evident at this
> juncture in history-probably not even to China itself.
>
> US security interests in East Asia are also subject to change. Indeed,
> they could evolve over the coming decade to the point where one could
> come to regard the present robust, forward American military presence as
> unnecessary. The bottom-line justifications for that presence today are
> deterrence of North Korean aggression against South Korea, any attack on
> Japan, and a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Yet, these justifications would
> be hard to sustain in the event of Korean reunification, a Sino-Japanese
> rapprochement, or Taiwan's willing return to governance by mainland
> China. Even in the absence of such events, there remains the possible
> emergence of irresistible domestic political pressure for US military
> retrenchment overseas. The American people have never lusted for the
> costly burdens of being a great power.
> War Starters
>
> The most obvious war starter would be a mainland assault on Taiwan in
> the form of either an overt military invasion or an attempt to wreck
> Taiwan's economy by blockade and other acts of intimidation of the kind
> Beijing employed in 1996 to influence Taiwan's first genuine
> presidential election. A forcible take-over of a democratic and
> economically vibrant Taiwan would be strategically unacceptable to the
> United States. Another casus belli would be Chinese attempts to
> challenge freedom of navigation in the South China Sea (or anywhere else
> in the western Pacific). Freedom of navigation is a bedrock principle of
> American statecraft, and through the South China Sea move oil and other
> commerce critical to the economies of Japan and other US allies and friends.
>
> Chinese military action against Asian mainland states not allied with
> the United States probably would not occasion a direct, armed US
> response. Sino-Russian, -Indian, and -Vietnamese war scenarios of the
> kind that transpired in 1962, 1969, and 1979, respectively, would not
> directly engage the vital interests of the United States-unless they
> spilled over into attacks on US forces and allies. Why would the United
> States intervene in such conflicts? To be sure, it has a general
> interest in peace and stability on the Asian mainland and a specific
> interest in deterring nuclear war between other states. But would it go
> to war to prevent a nuclear exchange between, say, Russia and China? It
> was certainly not prepared to do so to deter an Indo-Pakistani exchange
> during the South Asian nuclear-war scare of 1999.
>
> What if China began absorbing the RFE? This prospect is certainly
> plausible. Moscow's control over the RFE has steadily weakened since the
> Soviet Union's demise; the RFE's economy is fast becoming a subsidiary
> of China's; and Chinese demographic infiltration of the RFE could
> eventually raise the issue of the RFE's self-determination in China's favor.
>
> Yet, on what basis would the United States intervene against even an
> overt Chinese invasion of the RFE, and could it intervene effectively?
> To be sure, China's assumption of control over the RFE's littoral and
> Siberia's vast, if hard to extract, resources would call for a
> fundamental reassessment of Chinese intentions and capabilities in
> Asia-perhaps leading to the creation of new security alliances in South
> and Southeast Asia and major increases in defense expenditure. But it is
> difficult to imagine an American war on behalf of Russian attempts to
> hold on to nineteenth-century czarist territorial gains in the Far East.
> But for its long-range nuclear missiles, one could consider Russia
> finished as a great power; in any event, it is highly doubtful that US
> airpower alone could overturn a Chinese invasion of the RFE. During the
> Cold War, the United States and its Pacific allies lived with a hostile
> East Asian mainland littoral stretching from the Bering Sea to the South
> China Sea. Why should the United States fear Chinese nuclear missiles in
> the RFE more than it did Soviet missiles there?
>
> A Sino-Indian war, which for reasons of geography would be waged largely
> in the air (and potentially in space) and perhaps at sea, also would not
> engage US war-fighting interests. The same may be said of Chinese
> aggression against Vietnam, which has recurred throughout Vietnam's
> history-most recently in 1979.
>
> Obviously, a Chinese attack on Japan (or any other US treaty ally) would
> be an automatic war starter. Such an attack could be preventive, aimed
> at thwarting the resurrection of a militarist Japan. China is hardly the
> only victim of past Japanese aggression that is upset by a still
> unalterably racist Japan whose leaders and citizen inhabitants are in an
> increasingly disturbing state of denial of their nation's behavior in
> Asia from 1895 to 1945. In a Sino-American crisis, Japan might also
> invite attack, or at least armed intimidation, because of the access it
> provides US military power in Northeast Asia. Attempted coalition
> busting is a must for most American adversaries because the United
> States relies heavily on coalitions for political legitimacy and
> logistical access. Peeling off Japan from the United States in the
> middle of a Sino-American military confrontation in Asia would be an
> enormous coup for Beijing.
>
> One should not forget that the emergence of Japan as a great power in
> the first half of the twentieth century came largely at China's expense:
> first, the extraction of economic concessions, then the conversion of
> Manchuria into a Japanese puppet state, and finally the invasion and
> brutal occupation of much of China proper. Although China has only minor
> territorial disputes with Japan, the emergence of China as a great power
> will inevitably come in part at Japan's expense in terms of its economic
> and political clout in Asia. This will be especially the case if Japan's
> economic and demographic stagnation continues.
> Comparative Advantages
> and Disadvantages
>
> Primary Sino-American war starters seem to be Chinese aggression against
> Taiwan and in the South China Sea. Yet, a US defense of Taiwan and of
> freedom of navigation in the western Pacific would play greatly to
> America's traditional military strengths while at the same time exploit
> long-standing Chinese weaknesses.
>
> Historically, China's sole strategically impressive war-fighting suit
> has been the quantity of its ground forces, which counts for little in
> the pursuit of offshore imperial ambitions. Asserting and maintaining
> dominance over Taiwan and the South China Sea require mastery of air and
> naval power-arenas in which the United States is peerless and likely to
> remain so for decades (assuming no retreat to isolationism plus a
> determination to maintain both conventional military supremacy and a
> forward military presence in East Asia-neither to be taken for granted).
> Chinese naval and air forces are rudimentary by US standards, but
> perhaps an even greater deficiency is the absence of any modern combat
> experience. China has not fought a major war since Korea (where US
> airpower pummeled the PLA), whereas the United States has had a virtual
> cornucopia of such experience since the end of the Cold War. Practice
> may not make perfect, but it is surely better than sitting on the
> military bench for almost half a century. (China's brief and highly
> restricted invasion of Vietnam in 1979 pitted masses of poorly armed and
> trained Chinese troops against better-equipped North Vietnamese combat
> veterans.)
>
> Crucial to sound thinking about war with China is recognition that to
> shift America's primary strategic focus from Europe to Asia is to shift
> from a predominantly ground-air to a predominantly air-sea theater of
> operations. Why? Because of the asymmetrical distributions of wealth and
> power between the two regions. Most of Asia's wealth and power still
> lies in offshore and peninsular states, whereas in Europe it is
> concentrated ashore. Thus, maintaining a balance of power in Europe
> (i.e., preventing Europe's domination by a hostile power) mandated a
> willingness and capacity to wage ground warfare deeply inland. In
> contrast, maintaining an Asian balance of power requires performing the
> simpler task of keeping offshore and peninsular Asia outside a
> continental hegemon's grasp.9 Large land-warfare operations in the Asian
> interior are not just unnecessary; they are to be avoided at all costs
> because they would pit US weaknesses against a continental hegemon's
> strengths. Even Gen Douglas MacArthur, who in 1951 wanted to expand the
> Korean War into an air and sea assault on China, declared that "it would
> be a master folly to contemplate the use of United States ground troops
> in China," adding that "I can conceive of no strategic or tactical
> position where I would put in . . . units of American ground troops in
> continental China."10
>
> In addition to naval and air inferiority, China would approach war with
> the United States with significant strategic disadvantages. Regionwide
> suspicion of China's imperial ambitions has deprived Beijing of
> significant allies and even friends in East Asia, whereas the United
> States is rich in both. India remains a strategic competitor, and
> Chinese behavior in the South China Sea has alienated most of Southeast
> Asia. The post-Cold War rapprochement between China and Russia has not
> eliminated centuries-old national and racial animosities between the two
> countries, animosities that can be heightened only by the growth of
> Chinese economic influence and demographic "aggression" in the RFE. In
> any event, Russian military power has virtually evaporated in Asia. A
> robust, land-based strategic nuclear deterrent is the only real asset
> that Moscow could make available to China in a Sino-American war, but it
> staggers the mind to imagine that Russia would invite its own
> destruction on behalf of promoting Chinese interests in East Asia.
>
> Finally, a war with the United States could be economically and even
> politically catastrophic for the communist rulers in Beijing. Unlike the
> defunct Soviet Union, China has an enormous stake in the international
> capitalist trading order. Indeed, China's whopping annual trade
> surpluses with the United States have been indispensable to sustaining
> China's remarkable economic growth and have provided large amounts of
> hard currency with which to finance its selective military
> modernization. A war with the United States would destroy Sino-American
> commerce (as well as China's lucrative trade with and investment from
> Taiwan). China's attractiveness as a magnet for foreign capital would
> cease. The consequent effects of collapsed growth would not be just
> economic. Because the post-Marxist regime in Beijing has staked so much
> of its legitimacy on its ability to deliver higher living standards, a
> war-caused economic depression could topple the government itself.
>
> Over time, of course, China's stake in the international trading order
> could diminish if China shifted its primary focus from expanding its
> export markets to developing internal markets. The historic Middle
> Kingdom was more or less economically self-sufficient, and a future
> China bent on displacing an American-dominated international political
> and economic system would have a powerful interest in reducing its
> dependence on that system. Indeed, it is critical to distinguish between
> economic growth as an end in itself and economic growth as a means to a
> political end. Clearly, China has opted in the near term and midterm for
> the primacy of economic growth and its attendant dependency on the
> American- dominated international economic order. But to what end? For
> its own sake? Or for the purpose of putting China in a position some
> decades hence to assert political and military primacy in Asia?
>
> A recent RAND Corporation assessment of these questions concludes that a
> policy of assertiveness is likely for two reasons: "First, the unique
> and long-standing Chinese experience of geopolitical primacy and the
> association of that primacy with good order, civilization, virtue, and
> justice, may make the pursuit of geopolitical centrality through
> assertive behavior again attractive." Second, "an assertive China is
> likely to appear over the long haul . . . precisely because the United
> States, the established hegemon, will-if the historical record
> pertaining to previous declining hegemons holds-prepare to arrest its
> own gradual loss of relative power and influence."11 Both history and
> ideology inform the Chinese that the United States cannot avoid decline,
> and many people involved in managing Chinese security believe that the
> United States is already in military decline-a recipe for miscalculation
> if there ever was one.12
>
> Hope that China's participation in a globalizing economy will alter its
> approach to security issues may be misplaced. David Lampton believes
> that while "it is easy to assume that globalization will slowly erode
> Beijing's dedication to its narrow national interest and practice of
> realpolitik" and while "there is plenty of evidence of increasing
> Chinese cooperation and conformity with international norms, there is
> little evidence that considerations of national interest and realpolitik
> figure any less prominently in Chinese thinking than they always have."13
>
> To be sure, by any rational calculation of interest, China-now and for
> the foreseeable future-would be foolish to risk war with the United
> States over the future of Taiwan and the South China Sea. Yet, states
> are motivated by fear and honor as well as by calculations of interest,
> and China's hypernationalism could easily become an enemy of strategic
> prudence. The Chinese are exceptionally touchy about righting real and
> imagined wrongs visited upon them by Western, Japanese, and Russo-Soviet
> imperialism during the century stretching from the outbreak of the first
> Opium War to the consolidation of the Chinese Communist revolution.
> Betts and Christensen believe "there is little reason to assume that
> sober economic interest will necessarily override national honor in a
> crisis."14 Were a crisis to occur, Beijing's leaders could lose control
> of popular nationalist passions and find themselves facing the stark
> choice of making strategically reckless decisions or risking their own
> domestic political survival.15
>
> Moreover, China would bring to war some important advantages over the
> United States that might encourage a decision for war in a Sino-American
> crisis. First and foremost of them, especially in a fight over Taiwan,
> would be a greater strength of interest and, therefore, a willingness to
> sacrifice. The future of Taiwan can never be as important to the United
> States as it is to China, and China could be expected-as was the case in
> Korea, where it felt directly threatened by Mac-Arthur's advance to the
> Yalu River-to display a much higher tolerance of casualties than would
> the United States. The analogy most relevant here is the Vietnam War, in
> which superior American firepower and technology was defeated by an
> enemy whose greater strength of will to win manifested itself in a
> remarkable strategic patience and willingness to accept horrendous
> manpower losses.
>
> The Chinese are not afraid to threaten or use force, even in
> circumstances in which the objective military balance is weighted
> heavily against them, as it was in Korea in 1950 and the Taiwan Strait
> in 1996. Indeed, the Chinese appear to believe that military weakness
> requires a superior will to use force. John Garver argues that "Chinese
> strategic thinking has often concluded that periods of weakness required
> forceful policies precisely because the enemy may be tempted to exploit
> China's vulnerability." Examples of this inverse relationship between
> bellicosity and strength in Chinese foreign policy include "the decision
> for war with the United States in October 1950; the decision to launch
> an intense political struggle against Khrushchev in 1960 just as China's
> economy was collapsing; the 1962 decision for war with India when China
> was experiencing mass famine and its alliance with Moscow had collapsed;
> and the 1969 decision for military confrontation with the Soviets on the
> Ussuri River as the PLA was preoccupied with the chaos of the Cultural
> Revolution."16
>
> Nor do the Chinese confuse military success with casualty minimization.
> China has an excessive population and a long history of subordinating
> individual human lives to the imperatives of statecraft. Communist China
> has used force in Korea and Tibet; against islands held by the
> Nationalist Chinese off the mainland coast; and against India, Vietnam,
> and Soviet forces along the Ussuri River. China also accepts war as a
> continuation of politics rather than as a substitute for politics, and
> force as an indispensable companion to diplomacy with unfriendly states.
>
> China's geographic proximity to Taiwan and the South China Sea also
> works to its advantage. Chinese lines of communication are short
> compared to those separating East Asia from the United States. Even
> though Chinese naval and air forces would be no match for their American
> counterparts for the foreseeable future, China has an expanding missile
> force capable of striking Taiwan and targets in the South China Sea
> directly from mainland launch positions. Bringing Taiwan under sustained
> missile strikes could wreck Taiwan's economy, to say nothing of
> complicating the island's defense.
>
> A third advantage is the high probability that the Chinese would avoid
> challenging American military power on its own terms. The Chinese have
> learned from the Gulf War that trying to beat the Americans at their own
> game is a recipe for disaster. The Chinese almost certainly would pursue
> an asymmetric war against the United States involving attempted
> preemption of US military access to the region; disruption of US sea and
> air lines of communication; and attacks on US command, control, and
> communications, possibly including satellites. The Jominian American
> military would be confronted with the deceptive warfare of Sun Tzu. The
> Chinese recognize their technological-including
> informational-inferiority, but they also represent a military tradition,
> as Gerald Segal points out, that places an "unusual emphasis" on
> "cunning stratagems" and "minimizing brute force."17 They also have
> reoriented their strategic focus from continental defense to preparation
> for "local, limited war under high-tech conditions" (i.e., precisely the
> American threat they perceive).18
> Limited War by Default?
>
> Assuming the absence of mindless escalation to a general nuclear
> exchange, a war between China and the United States would be constrained
> by limited military capacity and political objectives. For openers,
> neither China nor the United States is capable of invading and
> subjugating the other, and even if the United States had the ability to
> do so, avoidance of a land war on the Asian mainland has long been an
> injunction of American strategy. The objectives of a Sino-American war
> over Taiwan or freedom of navigation in the South China Sea would be
> limited-just as they were in the Sino-American war in Korea. And since
> the outcome in either case would be decided by naval and air forces,
> with regular ground forces relegated to a distinctly secondary role, a
> war over Taiwan or the South China Sea would also be limited in terms of
> the type of force employed. This was not the case in the Korean War, in
> which ground combat dominated. (To be sure, the US position on the
> ground would have been untenable without air dominance.)
>
> During the Korean War, however, the United States refrained from
> attacking targets in China. (The Truman administration was feverishly
> rearming the United States and did not wish to escalate a war in Asia at
> a time when Europe remained defenseless against a possible Soviet
> invasion. Thus, it rejected MacArthur's call for what amounted to a
> limited war against China itself in place of the limited war being waged
> against Chinese forces in Korea.) Could an effective defense of Taiwan
> or freedom of navigation be mounted without attacks on mainland targets?
> Obviously, Chinese naval and air units approaching Taiwan or operating
> in the South China Sea could be attacked separately. But what about
> their operating bases on the mainland? And what about missile launch
> sites, especially in the absence of effective Taiwanese theater missile
> defenses? In circumstances of air and missile attacks on Taiwan,
> military and political pressures for counterattacks against associated
> targets on the mainland would likely prove irresistible. But such
> counterattacks, in turn, would invite Chinese escalation against US
> bases in the western Pacific and perhaps even terrorist assaults on
> population targets in the United States itself. How would an American
> president respond to a Chinese-suspected-but-not-provable biological or
> chemical attack on an American city?
> The Last Sino-American War
>
> China and the United States last warred in Korea from 1950 to 1953, and
> although each country's knowledge of the other has greatly expanded
> since then, cultural and historical barriers to effective communication
> remain formidable enough to provide grist for war via miscalculation.
> Henry Kissinger's depiction of the two countries' differing approaches
> to policy bears quoting at length:
>
> China's approach to policy is skeptical and prudent, America's
> optimistic and missionary. China's sense of time beats to a different
> rhythm from America's. When an American is asked to date a historical
> event, he refers to a specific day on the calendar; when a Chinese
> describes an event, he places it within a dynasty. And of the fourteen
> imperial dynasties, ten have lasted longer than the entire history of
> the United States.
>
> Americans think in terms of concrete solutions to specific problems.
> The Chinese think in terms of stages in a process that has no precise
> culmination. Americans believe that international disputes result either
> from misunderstandings or ill will; the remedy for the former is
> persuasion-occasionally quite insistent-and, for the latter, defeat or
> destruction for the evildoer. The Chinese approach is impersonal,
> patient, and aloof; the Middle Kingdom has a horror of appearing to be a
> supplicant. Where Washington looks to good faith and good will as the
> lubricant of international relations, Beijing assumes that statesmen
> have done their homework and will understand subtle indirections;
> insistence is therefore treated as a sign of weakness, and good personal
> relations are not themselves considered a lubricant of serious dialogue.
> To Americans, Chinese leaders seem polite but aloof and condescending.
> To the Chinese, Americans appear erratic and somewhat frivolous.19
>
> The Korean War stands as a case study in miscalculation by both
> Washington and Beijing, notwithstanding repeated attempts by both sides
> to signal intentions to each other. The United States grossly
> underestimated China's willingness and ability to defend its strategic
> interests in Korea; indeed, the Truman administration had difficulty
> accepting the very presence of such interests. Max Has-tings observes
> that because the "United States was convinced that its policies . . .
> presented no threat to any legitimate Chinese interest[,] Washington
> therefore persuaded itself that Peking would reach the same
> conclusion."20 As MacArthur's forces crossed the 38th parallel and
> advanced toward the Yalu, the administration believed it sufficient
> simply to declare that it had no designs on Chinese territory; it
> apparently never occurred to President Truman or Secretary of State Dean
> Acheson that Beijing might regard the establishment of a reunified,
> anticommunist Korea adjacent to China's industrial heartland as a
> strategic threat. (After all, had not the Japa-nese used Korea as a
> jumping-off point for their conquest of Manchuria?) This lack of
> imagination contributed in turn to the administration's virtual deafness
> to Beijing's numerous warnings that it was prepared to enter the war
> rather than accept an American client state along the Yalu. Even when
> first contact was made with Chinese forces, the administration refused
> to believe that it represented anything more than political posturing, a
> token intervention.21
>
> The administration's incomprehension of China's motives-specifically,
> its failure to grasp that country's strength of interest in Korea-was
> attended by disdain for China's military capacity. MacArthur and the
> rest of the American military had nothing but contempt for Chinese
> fighting power; indeed, MacArthur assured Truman that he would make
> short work of the Chinese if they tried to intervene. At his meeting
> with Truman on Wake Island, he said there was "very little" chance of
> Chinese intervention. "They have no air force. Now that we have bases
> for our Air Force in Korea, if the Chinese tried to get down to
> Pyongyang, there would be the greatest slaughter."22 From an American
> perspective, an army of simple peasants armed with bolt-action rifles
> and lacking air cover was no match for US forces, and if this fact was
> self-evident to the Americans, then obviously it would also be to the
> Chinese. MacArthur's pet corps commander, Gen Edward Almond, exhorted
> his Yalu-bound troops, "Don't let a bunch of Chinese laundrymen stop
> you."23 There was no appreciation of the strengths of the PLA-its superb
> discipline, tenacity, and capacity to endure hardship-or the degree to
> which terrain in northern Korea could be exploited by guerrilla tactics
> at the expense of a conventional, roadbound army.
>
> Yet, if the Americans miscalculated in Korea, so did the Chinese
> leadership. Mao Zedong not only believed that Chinese intervention was
> imperative, he also believed that the PLA could sweep the Americans off
> the peninsula-a conviction strengthened after the PLA routed the
> Americans along the Yalu.24 If the Americans placed excessive faith in
> material superiority, Mao believed that human factors-superior will,
> discipline, and fighting skills-and, above all, a superior cause could
> defeat firepower-rich US forces. He regarded US troops as roadbound,
> creature- comforted softies who were fighting for the evil cause of
> imperialism-and, therefore, were incapable of mustering the capacity for
> sacrifice characteristic of seasoned PLA forces.25
>
> The PLA's actual performance against US forces was impressive,
> especially the massive surprise assault in late November 1950, which
> inflicted upon MacArthur the longest retreat in American military
> history. In this and in subsequent operations, the PLA displayed a
> mastery of march discipline, night-infiltration tactics, concealment,
> and camouflage that partially offset the US advantage in firepower. PLA
> commanders also displayed an insensitivity to casualties relative to
> that of their American counterparts. Yet, the PLA's initial success
> along the Yalu owed much to MacArthur's own recklessness and the Truman
> administration's inability to control its vain Far Eastern commander.
> Moreover, US firepower, while unable to crush the Chinese, proved more
> than adequate to block any chance of a Chinese expulsion of US forces
> from Korea (only MacArthur was panicked into believing that US forces
> were headed for an Asian Dunkirk). By the spring of 1951, the
> combination of ceaseless aerial pounding of lengthy Chinese supply lines
> and the savage application of firepower against massed frontline Chinese
> forces had severely restricted the PLA's ability to sustain offensive
> operations over both space and time. Unfortunately for many PLA
> soldiers, the Chinese commander in Korea recognized this unpleasant fact
> well before Mao, who continued to believe that will alone was the key to
> victory and ordered yet additional-and doomed-offensives aimed at
> sweeping the Eighth Army into the sea. US troops, especially with the
> arrival of Gen Matthew Ridgway as Eighth Army commander, also fought
> with a degree of skill and determination that belied Mao's
> preintervention assumptions about the Americans' fighting qualities.
>
> Because the Korean War was fought to a military stalemate, neither side
> could claim a decisive victory. The United States restored South Korea's
> territorial integrity but failed to reunite the Korean peninsula under
> an anticommunist government. Likewise, China saved North Korea but
> failed to reunite the peninsula under communist auspices. But China, by
> far the weaker side, was nonetheless the relative winner of the
> conflict. That the Chinese David had even stalemated the American
> Goliath greatly elevated Chinese prestige throughout Asia and emboldened
> communist revolutionary movements everywhere. The war established China
> as a tough risk-taker and a force henceforth to be reckoned with, quite
> a contrast to China's prewar image as an object of contempt and a soft
> punching bag for the imperial powers. There would be no more talk of
> Chinese laundrymen.
>
> China's intervention and military perfor-mance in Korea also exerted a
> chilling effect on subsequent US military intervention in the Vietnam
> War. For fear of provoking a repetition of Chinese intervention, the
> Johnson administration limited the US war aim to the preservation of a
> noncommunist South Vietnam and placed significant restrictions on air
> operations against North Vietnam. As Premier Chou En-lai noted to
> President Nixon in 1972, "America [was] more careful about China in the
> Vietnam War than it had been in Korea."26
>
> The idiosyncrasies of the Korean War tell us nothing about how a future
> Sino-American war would come about and play out. But as distant as that
> war is, it remains an object lesson in cultural incomprehension and
> consequent political and military miscalculation. And while thinking
> about war with China is hardly predictive-China's emergence as America's
> next qualified strategic rival is not inevitable-ignoring the
> possibility of war would be a professional dereliction of duty.
>
> Notes
>
> 1. See, for example, Steven W. Mosher, Hegemon: China's Plan to Dominate
> Asia and the World (San Francisco,: Encounter Books, 2001); Richard
> Bernstein and Ross H. Munro, The Coming Conflict with China (New York:
> Alfred A. Knopf, 1997); and Robert Kagan, "What China Knows That We
> Don't," The Weekly Standard, 20 January 1997. For a more benign view of
> an emergent China's implications for US security, see Andrew J. Nathan
> and Robert S. Ross, The Great Wall and the Empty Fortress: China's
> Search for Security (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1997); Gerald
> Segal, "Does China Matter?" Foreign Affairs, September/October 1999,
> 24-36; and Nicholas Berry, "China Is Not an Imperialist Power,"
> Strategic Review, Winter 2001, 4-10.
>
> 2. Nan Li, From Revolutionary Internationalism to Conservative
> Nationalism: The Chinese Military's Discourse on National Security and
> Identity in the Post-Mao Era (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute
> for Peace, 2001), 12. See also Koro Bessho, Identities and Security in
> East Asia, Adelphi Paper 325 (London: International Institute for
> Strategic Studies, 1999), 27-37.
>
> 3. See Michael D. Swaine and Ashley J. Tellis, Interpreting China's
> Grand Strategy: Past, Present, and Future (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND
> Corporation, 2000), especially pages 151-241.
>
> 4. Henry Kissinger, Does America Need a Foreign Policy? Toward a
> Diplomacy for the 21st Century (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 139.
>
> 5. In 1997 gross domestic product per capita (in yuan) ranged from
> 25,750 in Shanghai Province to 2,215 in Guizhou Province. See Peter T.
> Y. Cheung and James T. H. Tang, "The External Relations of China's
> Provinces," in The Making of Chinese Foreign and Security Policy in the
> Era of Reform, 1978-2000, ed. David M. Lampton (Stanford, Calif.:
> Stanford University Press, 2001), 95.
>
> 6. See Bruce Gilley, "People's Republic of Cheats," Far Eastern Economic
> Review, 21 June 2001, 59-60.
>
> 7. The "Chinese state has been united as a single entity under Chinese
> rule for only approximately one-half of the period since the end of the
> Han Dynasty in 220 A.D. During the other half of this period, China has
> been embroiled in domestic conflict, divided between Chinese and
> non-Chinese regimes, or entirely ruled by non-Han Chinese invaders."
> Swaine and Tellis, 13.
>
> 8. Richard K. Betts and Thomas J. Christensen, "China: Getting the
> Questions Right," The National Interest, Winter 2000/2001, 29.
>
> 9. Imperial Japan's conquest of Manchuria and of coastal China proper
> did not pose a direct threat to core US security interests in Asia. That
> threat emerged only when Japan expanded its aggressive focus to offshore
> and peninsular Asia.
>
> 10. Senate, Testimony of General Douglas MacArthur before the Armed
> Services and Foreign Relations Committees of the United States Senate,
> 82d Cong., 1st sess., 103, 108 (3-5 May 1951; reprint, Pat-erson, N.J.:
> Hour-Glass Publishers, 1966).
>
> 11. Swaine and Tellis, 231, 233.
>
> 12. See Michael Pillsbury, China Debates the Future Security Environment
> (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 2000), 63-105.
>
> 13. David M. Lampton, "China's Foreign and National Security
> Policy-Making Process: Is It Changing and Does it matter?" in Lampton, 25.
>
> 14. Betts and Christensen, 22.
>
> 15. See James Miles, "Chinese Nationalism, U.S. Policy and Asian
> Security," Survival, Winter 2000-2001, 51-57; and Joseph Fewsmith and
> Stanley Rosen, "The Domestic Context of Chinese Foreign Policy: Does
> 'Public Opinion' Matter?" in Lampton, 151-87.
>
> 16. John W. Garver, Face Off: China, the United States, and Taiwan's
> Democratization (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 62-63.
>
> 17. Gerald Segal, Defending China (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
> 1985), 40.
>
> 18. See Paul H. B. Godwin, "The PLA Faces the Twenty-First Century:
> Reflections on Technology, Doctrine, Strategy, and Operations," in
> China's Military Faces the Future, ed. James R. Lilley and David L.
> Shambaugh (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1999), 39-63.
>
> 19. Kissinger, 137-38.
>
> 20. Max Hastings, The Korean War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 135.
>
> 21. Assessments of Chinese behavior and American miscalculations in the
> fall of 1950 appear in Allen S. Whiting, China Crosses the Yalu: The
> Decision to Enter the Korean War (New York: Macmillan, 1960); Chien
> Jian, China's Road to the Korean War: The Making of the Sino-American
> Confrontation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Hao Yufan and
> Zhai Zhihai, "China's Decision to Enter the Korean War: History
> Revisited," The China Quarterly, March 1990, 94-115; Thomas J.
> Christensen, "Threats, Assurances, and the Last Chance for Peace: The
> Lessons of Mao's Korean War Telegrams," International Security, Summer
> 1992, 122-54; Michael H. Hunt, "Beijing and the Korean Crisis, June
> 1950-June 1951," Political Science Quarterly, Fall 1992, 453-78; H. A.
> DeWeerd, "Strategic Surprise in the Korean War," Orbis, Fall 1962,
> 435-52; David S. McLellan, "Dean Acheson and the Korean War," Political
> Science Quarterly, March 1968, 16-39; Eliot A. Cohen, " 'Only Half the
> Battle': American Intelligence and the Chinese Intervention in Korea,
> 1950," Intelligence and National Security, January 1990, 129-49;
> Alexander L. George and Richard Smoke, Deterrence in American Foreign
> Policy: Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974),
> 140-234; and John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History
> (New York: Clarendon Press, 1997), 54-84.
>
> 22. Quoted in Clay Blair, The Forgotten War: America in Korea, 1950-1953
> (New York: Times Books, 1988), 348.
>
> 23. Quoted in Russell Spurr, Enter the Dragon: China's Undeclared War
> against the U.S. in Korea, 1950-51 (New York: Newmarket Press, 1988), 260.
>
> 24. Ibid., 239.
>
> 25. For the best work on Mao's excessive confidence in the PLA and
> incomprehension of the fighting power of American forces in Korea, see
> Shu Guang Zhang, Mao's Military Romanticism: China and the Korean War,
> 1950-1953 (Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 1995). See also
> Memoirs of a Chinese Marshal: The Autobiographical Notes of Peng Dehuai
> (1898-1974), trans. Zheng Longpu, ed. Sara Grimes (English text)
> (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1984); Bin Yu, "What China Learned
> from Its 'Forgotten War' in Korea," Strategic Review, Summer 1998, 4-16;
> and Xiaoming Zhang, "China and the Air War in Korea, 1950-1953," Journal
> of Military History, April 1998, 335-70.
>
> 26. Quoted in James Mann, About Face: A History of America's Curious
> Relationship with China, from Nixon to Clinton (New York: Vintage Books,
> 2000), 45.
>
> Contributor
>
> Dr. Jeffrey Record (BA, Occidental College; MA, PhD, Johns Hopkins
> School of Advanced International Studies) is professor of strategy and
> international security at the Air War College, Maxwell AFB, Alabama, and
> senior research fellow at the Center for International Strategy,
> Technology, and Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta,
> Georgia. He previously served as a professional staff member on the
> Senate Armed Services Committee; legislative assistant to Sen. Sam Nunn,
> Sen. Bob Krueger, and Sen. Lloyd Bentsen; senior fellow at BDM
> International, Hudson Institute, and Institute for Foreign Policy
> Analysis; advisor to Sen. William Cohen and Sen. Gary Hart; research
> associate and Rockefeller Younger Scholar at the Brookings Institution;
> and assistant province advisor in the Republic of Vietnam. Dr. Record is
> the author of The Wrong War: Why We Lost in Vietnam (Annapolis: Naval
> Institute Press, 1998) and Making War, Thinking History: Munich,
> Vietnam, and Presidential Uses of Force from Korea to Kosovo (Annapolis:
> Naval Institute Press, forthcoming).
>
> Disclaimer
>
> The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the
> author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of
> Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S.
> Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the
> Air University.
>
> http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/apj/apj01/win01/record.html