The Contest of the Century (6 page)

Gates was so angry that he suggested canceling the meeting with Hu Jintao, only to be persuaded to attend by Jon Huntsman, then the U.S. ambassador to Beijing. When Gates asked Hu about the test flight, he was greeted with a nervous silence. The president appeared to know nothing about it. They were seated in one of those U-shaped Chinese meeting rooms, with the principals at the top and a line of their aides on either side. Hu asked his defense minister, Liang Guanglie, who in turn asked
the PLA’s deputy chief of staff, Ma Xiaotian. No one seemed to know what had actually happened. Eventually, an air-force officer explained that the test flight of the stealth bomber had taken place by coincidence on that day. “I take President Hu at his word that the test had nothing to do with my visit,” Gates said rather curtly after the meeting.

Sometimes an uncomfortable silence can tell you as much about a political system as a library full of theses. At the very least, Hu’s reticence showed a lack of day-to-day coordination between the PLA and its political masters. Whenever a major U.S. naval vessel passes into the Asia-Pacific Region, the Asia director at the National Security Council receives a written note, so that the White House is not blindsided by activities of the Pentagon. China lacks such a coordinating mechanism. Yet it is equally possible that elements of the PLA were intending to send Gates precisely the message that he had imagined, and that the test flight was held on that day as a deliberate provocation. The Chengdu airfield has two landing strips—one far away from view and one visible from a public road. The test flight used the second runway, and when it was completed, the aircraft was parked beside the road, so that local military enthusiasts could take more pictures. In the past, China’s pervasive Internet censors have taken down images of new military technologies they do not want the world to see. This time, they let the photos remain. Andrew Scobell, an analyst with the Rand Corporation, later told a congressional hearing that the message from the test flight was: “America, take heed. The capabilities of our weaponry are ever improving, and we are not intimidated by your technologically superior military might.” If sending such a signal to the U.S. also caused a moment of acute diplomatic embarrassment for the country’s president, then so be it.

——

One of the ironies about Deng Xiaoping’s advice to “hide the brightness and nourish obscurity” is that it requires a decisive figure like Deng to implement. Playing nice with the neighbors involves making the sorts of concessions that can gall nationalists. It needs a strong leader who has the credibility to take a few blows on the chin, and who can face down the more ambitious and nationalistic of his colleagues, especially from the military. Yet Deng also made sure that China would never have
such a strongman again. After the quixotic disasters of the Mao era, the Communist Party has gone out of its way to reduce the space for another all-powerful leader. The party now has a fixed retirement age, and an entrenched process of leadership transitions that take place every decade (with some housecleaning every five years). The upside is that the party is much more predictable and professional. The downside is that it is now governed by committee, which can slow decision making and can make it much harder for the leadership to stand up to more strident voices. Over the last decade, China has seen a fracturing of power among the elite, with different vested interests from within the party-state starting to push their own foreign-policy agendas more openly and more aggressively. Cheng Li, a Chinese political scientist now at the Brookings Institution in Washington, uses three couplets to capture the new dynamic of power in China. “Weak leaders, strong factions; weak government, strong interest groups; weak party, strong country,” as he puts it.

China’s determined push to the seas is a product of its history and geography, to be sure, but it is also being driven by these shifts within the Chinese political system as more voices start to be heard. China’s leaders no longer enjoy the unquestioned authority over foreign policy that Deng was able to command. The cautious elite consensus on how to manage the country’s rise is gradually being undermined in favor of a more strident defense of national interests and a greater willingness to ruffle international feathers. The Foreign Ministry should be in charge of international relations but is actually the weakest ministry in Beijing, outgunned and out-politicked by other influential groups. Not one foreign-policy official is a member of the twenty-five-strong Communist Party Politburo. Like new great powers before it, China is finding that success creates its own expectations. China’s leaders now have to deal with the often raucous Internet nationalism of the urban middle class, which has been reared on stories about the “hundred years of humiliation.” The wealthier these urban professionals become, the more impatient they are for China’s leaders to assert a bigger role. Local governments and powerful state-owned companies want to have a say on important foreign-policy issues. And the civilian leaders also have to deal with a more restless and powerful military.

If there is one subject that is the hardest for foreign China-watchers to get a handle on, it is the relationship between the Communist Party and the military. Despite the breathtaking changes in Chinese society over the last three decades, high-level politics are still a black box, and that is even more the case for the People’s Liberation Army. The military is formally under control of the Communist Party rather than the state, which adds to its sense of mystery and autonomy. To most outside observers, and to many Chinese, the PLA seems like a separate world walled off from the rest of the party-state. The very brief glimpses into the PLA afforded to the foreign media confirm that sense of an institution following its own rules. In 2008, one of my colleagues managed to organize an interview with a senior PLA official. We were instructed to come to the PLA’s foreign-affairs office, north of the city center, an airy, palatial building with marble floors and long, empty corridors. As a journalist in China, you can tell a lot about a government official by the way he or she conducts an interview. Most government departments insist that you send over half a dozen sample questions beforehand, and they will reject an interview request if the topics are too controversial. The less secure the cadre, the longer they spend on the initial softball questions. I have conducted interviews in which the official in question proceeded to read out a twenty-five-page prepared answer to these questions, leaving only a few minutes for a real interview at the end. Major General Qian Lihua, director of the defense ministry’s foreign-affairs office, walked into the conference room where my colleagues and I were waiting and shook our hands. He picked up a paper that one of his aides had prepared and handed it to us. “This is a written response for the questions you sent over,” he said. “Now, what do you really want to ask me?” He went on to give the strongest indication yet that China was building an aircraft carrier.
“The navy of any great power… has the dream to have one or more aircraft carriers,” he said.

Like many of the party leaders of his generation, Deng was himself a veteran of the Communist Party’s war against the Nationalists and the Long March. Not only did he have strong personal relationships with the military top brass when he assumed power, but they also had a sense of shared sacrifice in defense of the party. Over the last couple of decades, however, the party and the military have taken different
paths. The party has become dominated by trained bureaucrats who have worked their way up the system, spending decades in provincial jobs learning the ropes. The new military leaders are also cut from a different cloth. Rather than party ideologues well schooled in the texts of Marxism-Leninism, they are now professional soldiers who are focused on honing their new skills. The PLA has less influence over domestic politics than it used to enjoy but, at the same time, the party is much less directly involved in the PLA than it once was. The PLA political commissars, who once enforced political orthodoxy among the rank and file, are now much more focused on boosting morale—one Chinese observer likens them to the equivalent of chaplains in a Western army. As Marxism has withered as a guiding force, the military has also developed a stronger sense of its role as a defender of the national interest. China now has a professional officer class with a slightly Prussian air, which is proud of the new capabilities at its disposal and was reared on a worldview that sees China as a powerful and strong nation.

The most dangerous situation would be if a few “rogue generals” started to freelance, using the perceived weakness of civilian leaders to push their own agenda outside of the formal policy process. That would be a large red-flag warning about looming future instability in China’s relations with the rest of the world. Most informed observers of China’s military believe that this is far from the case, and that the Communist Party leadership still remains firmly in control of the military. But every now and then, there are tantalizing glimpses of a restless military that is occasionally willing to push the boundaries. The test flight of the J-20 on the day Robert Gates was in town was one such case. Another incident happened in 2007, when China used a land-based missile to blow a weather satellite out of space. The test was a wake-up call for foreign militaries, a warning shot about China’s cyberwar capabilities. Just as illuminating was the way the test was discovered. With no word coming from the Chinese government, the story first appeared in a U.S. magazine, which was probably tipped off by U.S. or other Western intelligence agencies. And even when the news did break, the Foreign Ministry gave the impression that it had been left completely in the dark by the military.

These little glimpses of the interactions between the PLA and the
party suggest an occasionally confrontational streak, but they do not indicate a stark split. The real influence that the PLA is starting to have is more subtle, the result not of open lobbying but from the drip-feed effect of a military worldview that is both intensely proud of China and deeply skeptical about the U.S. military. It is this tide of hawkish views that is helping to gradually chip away at Deng’s call for self-restraint. By exposing big shifts in relative power that have taken place between the U.S. and China, the financial crisis encouraged some in China to believe that the time was theirs. Hu Jintao had few connections with the military before he became president in 2002, and Chinese academics and officials who attend regular foreign-policy gatherings with military officials would describe the openness with which Hu was criticized—something that would have been unthinkable only a few years earlier. One leading academic told me of a discussion with some of his military counterparts in which Hu had been attacked by name for being soft on Japan. “Arrogant people with a lot of ego,” the academic described them.

I got the full force of this worldview when I went to visit Senior Colonel Liu Mingfu. I wanted to meet Liu because a few months earlier he had caused something of a sensation when he published his first book,
China Dream
, a nationalist tract that called for the country to build a military force to rival and compete with the U.S. In his book he argued that the U.S. and China were embarking on a “marathon contest” for global leadership. Having spared no efforts to contain the rise of the Soviet Union and Japan, Liu argued that the U.S. would “fight a third battle to retain its title” against China. His book became a best seller both on the mainland and in Hong Kong. One large Chinese newspaper ran serializations of
China Dream
for a whole month. Yanghe, a company which makes one of the country’s best-known brands of liquor, ordered ten thousand copies to give to its clients. “The chairman described it as a textbook for patriotism,” Liu told me, not a little immodestly.

Liu lives in a complex of residential buildings reserved for military personnel, just along the road from the Defense Ministry’s huge building in central Beijing. Foreigners are not supposed to enter the compound, he said on the phone, so I should wear a woolly hat and keep my head down when passing through the gate. In the end, the car drove in without any problems at all, the guard airily waving us through. Inside
the compound, there were few signs of insecurity, but plenty of esprit de corps. There was a well-tended running track, and a theater that put on shows of revolutionary songs at the weekends. It was midmorning, and the exercise area was full of pensioners doing stretches on a series of yellow machines. A lithe fifty-year-old with dyed black hair and the rank of a senior colonel, Liu now teaches at the National Defense University, where he gives lectures on Marxist theory and U.S.-China relations. Liu said that on the very day he launched his book, in 2010, Barack Obama gave a speech saying that the U.S. would never be number two in the world. “It was such a coincidence. As an ordinary military man, I argue loudly that China should try to be the number one, should race to be the champion country,” Liu said.

A few months before we talked, a Chinese admiral called Yuan Youfei had caused a good deal of consternation at a high-profile U.S.-China summit when he launched into a long diatribe attacking the “hegemonic” U.S. According to American officials present, Yuan accused Washington of plotting to encircle China and treating Beijing as an enemy. Liu Mingfu said he agreed entirely with Yuan’s analysis. For Liu, the Chinese leadership faces a stark choice: either China develops the military capacity to challenge the U.S., or it will be forever bullied by its larger rival. “For China, a runner-up who does not want to be a champion is not a good runner-up,” he told me. “But the U.S. wants a mini-NATO to contain China.” As we talked in his flat, his wife sat next to him, eating sunflower seeds from a plastic bag and nodding vigorously every time he made a forceful point. A few weeks before, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett had visited Beijing to encourage Chinese entrepreneurs to do more for charity. “Chinese people enjoyed seeing the civilization of Gates and Buffett. America should send more cultural and peaceful ambassadors like that,” Liu told me. “But, instead, the American aircraft carriers make 1.3 billion Chinese people see America’s hegemony and barbarism.” As I was leaving, he gripped my hand firmly. “You British are reasonable people; Germans are very reasonable,” he said. “But the Americans?”