Moreover, while East Germans were not schooled in entrepreneurial ways, they knew some semblance of economic life. North Korea has virtually no civilian sector at all. Its people have no real idea how to function in a modern economy like that of South Korea. Sadly, the Cold War jest about Russian factory workers wondering why, if they work in a baby carriage factory, all they can assemble are machine guns likely describes much of the North Korean economy.
Finally there is massive malnutrition in the North. The estimates of people dying of starvation during Kim Jong-Il’s 17-year rule run over 2 million. The surviving population’s physical growth is stunted. The public health and economic implications are simply staggering. For the South, the ancient Chinese admonition about being careful what you wish for may prove all too applicable if the South absorbs the primitive Hermit Kingdom.
Only reunification can end the North Korean nuclear threat. Such would prove a security boon to South Korea and the U.S. as principal nuclear guarantor of the South. But reunification might bankrupt the South. At minimum, the economic strain would be severe, with ultimate success by no means guaranteed.
That the Hermit Kingdom has endured for more than sixty years, despite serial aggressive behavior, mass starvation of its people, and development of a rogue nuclear weapon capability, attests anew to the validity of the Fourth Lesson of nuclear-age history: NUCLEAR WEAPONS GIVE NATIONS A “DYING STING” CAPABILITY THAT VIRTUALLY PRECLUDES PREEMPTIVE ACTION AND CONFERS NEAR-TOTAL SURVIVAL INSURANCE.
7.
CHINA: IMPERIAL ASPIRATION AMIDST A SHIFTING NUCLEAR BALANCE
Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
CHINA’S DRIVE TO REGAIN ITS ERSTWHILE POSITION AS A PREEMINENT world power is but a generation old. Its effort to regain what it regards as its rightful place begins with supremacy in the western Pacific region. It is this intensely felt national ambition that makes ultimate confrontation between China and the United States, currently the world’s preeminent Pacific power, increasingly likely, though strategic accommodation remains a distinct possibility.
Such a confrontation could come as early as the end of this decade. And if it occurs, it could lead—even without either the U.S. or China desiring it—to a regional conflict, possibly involving the use of nuclear weapons. China is not a revolutionary power like Iran, with ambitions to remake the world order. Nor is it a rogue power like North Korea, utterly indifferent to world concerns. It is, as is Russia, a rivaclass="underline" it desires to supplant the U.S. as the most influential world power, starting in Asia, then projecting influence globally. It does not, like Iran, wish to destroy America; China’s fortunes are inextricably linked with ours in many ways.
But because China’s drive for ascendancy carries risk of a confrontation with the U.S., miscalculation during a crisis could lead to a war neither side desires. What emerges clearly in considering the U.S.-China relationship is the Fifth Lesson of nuclear-age history: THE NUCLEAR BALANCE MATTERS IF ANY PARTY TO A CONFLICT THINKS IT MATTERS, AND THUS ALTERS ITS BEHAVIOR.
China’s Half Millennium of Self-Isolation
TO SEE the roots of such a regional conflict one must begin with Chinese history, and the Chinese interpretation of it, which emphasized the harmful impact of its intercourse with the U.S. and other Western powers over the choices made by its own dictatorial rulers.
From the early nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, the European powers heaped serial humiliations upon China. The Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century led to Britain’s thuggish imposition of the degrading, enervating opium trade on the Chinese. The colonial powers pushed around the decaying Manchu Dynasty rulers at will. The crowning episode of this dolorous history was the Boxer Rebellion. Starting in 1898, the “Society of Fists of Righteous Harmony”—“Boxers” armed with guns, martial arts, and ecstatic spirit-possession—aimed to eject foreign powers and secure China’s release from imperial domination and exploitation. Allied with the Manchu empress Cixi, they laid siege to the foreign embassies in Beijing for 55 days in 1900. The Eight-Nation Alliance of Japan, Russia, Britain, France, America, Germany, Austria, and Italy crushed the uprising, offering the Manchu Dynasty a settlement in 1901 in which the Chinese paid heavy indemnities to the foreign powers, particularly Russia and Germany.
All this came as the United States was beginning to flex its muscles in the Pacific. U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry’s 1853 visit to Tokyo Bay ended Japan’s 250-year isolation and opened trade between the U.S. and the Far East. After the U.S. Navy defeated the Spanish Navy at Manila Bay (looking out at the South China Sea), Secretary of State John Hay’s 1899 Open Door Policy pressed for wider trade with China, thus increasing pressure on the decaying Manchu Dynasty to open up to all sources of Western trade.
Without in any way down playing the harm caused China by foreign powers, however, internal decisions and events were of immense consequence in retarding the global fortunes of China, arguably of greater impact than external pressures. In 1434 the Ming emperor (why remains unclear) suddenly halted the series of seven massive seagoing explorations begun in 1401, which had taken the great Admiral Zheng He as far as Africa, and dismantled the Chinese fleet. China’s fleet featured ships far larger than the tiny vessels in which Christopher Columbus sailed at the end of the century, and superior in many aspects of design and construction. The “treasure ships” of the fleet were purportedly 450 feet long and 180 feet wide—half the length of a World War II aircraft carrier. Unlike the voyages of European explorers, mounted in search of trade and treasure, China’s voyages, historian Daniel Boorstin explains, were simply to show the rest of the world how advanced and refined China’s civilization was.
Just 26 years after China destroyed its awesome fleet, Prince Henry the Navigator launched the first of Europe’s great explorations that eventually would take Christopher Columbus to the New World (in 1492) and Vasco de Gama to India (in 1498). As China began to retreat into its shell—sporadically banning private shipping and coastal settlement—the West began its 500-year rise to global supremacy.
The “Middle Kingdom” disdained “barbarians” from its perch at the center of the earth—China had a gross domestic product in 1820 that was, at 30 percent of world GDP, larger than that of the U.S. and Europe combined. (Chinese GDP was to be the world’s largest for 18 of the last 20 centuries.) But its feeble military position gave it few levers in the face of foreign aggression. A China that had stayed among the leaders in military power and influence would have been in a far stronger position to resist the incursions that began a full four centuries after the dismantling of its world’s-best fleet.
The next huge event impoverishing China came in the mid-nineteenth century: the 1850–1864 Tai Ping Rebellion, in which ethnic Chinese revolted against the Manchus who had ruled China since 1644. With the aid of the French and British imperial powers, the Manchu overlords prevailed over the Tai Ping rebels, but at a tremendous cost. The crushing of the rebellion, combined with other mid-nineteenth-century turmoil, resulted in a staggering 15 percent decline in China’s population between 1850 and 1873, from 410 to 350 million. (Ironically, Tai Ping means “Great Peace.”) By comparison, the American Civil War—which ran four years—killed 2 percent of America’s population of 30 million, a slightly lower annual percentage loss, but for one-quarter the time span. To recall the impact of the Civil War on American politics to this day suggests the long-term devastation the ethnic enmities of the Tai Ping Rebellion have caused.