Okay I'll admit it, I'm stumped. I just can't quite figure out what our (the U.S.) actual position is in relation to China. Do we want to foster closer ties? Are we alarmed by them? What's the deal?
Sometimes when going through the news, I have to search around to find articles about what's going on in China, what we are doing in relation to China. I find this kind of amazing considering that they a) have quite a large population b) have nuclear weapons c) have no real love for the U.S. and in fact have a way of life that we don't even begin to understand politically, culturally, or militarily and d) have been spending billions to build up their military. In an article at the Washington Post, we learn that the U.S. is considering ways to strengthen military ties with China. At first I thought this was a fairly idiotic proposal, but there might be some merit to it. First because I think we probably don't have a clue to the Chinese mentality, the real politics of China, and contact between nations can mean better understanding of each other in times of crisis. Second, as Brent Scowcroft is quoted as saying, "...it is useful for us to invite them over and show them what a great military we have." The idea that we let them see our military expertise, thereby making them think twice before doing something militarily that might involve the U.S. makes some sense. It just seems like a rather crude way of trying to influence a nation-state.
Of course if you are going to look at our military ties with China, its only fitting to bring into the mix the confusing relations of the U.S. and Taiwan, and how that affects our relations with China. It has seemed almost bizarre to me that for years we have been in this kind of suspended animation place with regard to Taiwan. Its a balancing act, of not giving too much support or recognition to Taiwan, even though they have a democratically elected government, and on the other side trying not to anger China by anything we do with Taiwan. A recent article at MSNBC.com discusses how China is angry at a Pentagon study that reports China as spending $80 billion on defense (for things like short and long range missiles and more submarines) rather than the $20 billion China said it was spending. Okay, if $20 billion sounds like a lot to me, $80 billion just makes me very suspicious of their intentions. Then we have the fact that the U.S. has sold arms to Taiwan, but we never really come out and say that we see Taiwan as its own sovereign state. I come away from reading these things shaking my head and thinking that the guys in Washington are as muddled as I am about our relations with China.
Then today in several newspapers there are articles about how China is upset about the U.S. cancelling payment to the U.N. Population Fund. The State Department evidently wanted the U.S. to make the payment - the White House disagreed. Due to the extreme population control measures China has had in place for some time, the issues of forced abortions, forced sterilizations and the like have made this a hot-button issue here in the States. Does our denying the U.N. Population Fund $34 million actually have an impact on China's population control policies? I seriously doubt that it does. What the denial of payment probably does mean is that family planning clinics, in other countries as well as in China, will have less money to work with. However, when considering that women may be forcibly sterilized, or that children are still being killed to deal with overpopulation, that there are hundreds of thousands of little girls each year abandoned to either be adopted by U.S. citizens or perhaps left to die, that abortions are indeed forced upon women, in light of all that, how can we not speak out in some way against these policies? I think the denial of payment to the U.N. fund is probably the only way the administration could see to do that at this point. It does speak though to the need to find some way to offer help/suggestions/new programs to China to deal with the population problem in a humane manner. The problem I see with this action is that it doesn't really do all that much to stop policies we disapprove of in China. In fact, a NYTimes article discussing anger other countries are expressing over this decision, states that reports do not indicate the money would be used in the way the Bush administration has said, and that it denies these monies to countries other than China for reproductive health programs. I think it is much more likely that the Bush team saw this as a way to appease conservative groups here in the U.S. rather than as an actual solution to a problem in China.
Finally, I have to state that my own views on China are slanted toward suspicion. Have I been too influenced by the popular Tom Clancy book The Bear and the Dragon, where China ultimately invades Russia and the U.S. goes to war with the Chinese? Perhaps. It is a good book, but what it mostly did was get me more interested in China and what's up over there. The age-old mindset of "them" vs. "us" comes to the forefront when dealing with China. We are more different from them than say the Europeans, we don't have the same approaches to fundamental ideas. Whenever we are confronted by differences, our tendency as humans is to fear "the other" the ones who aren't like us. Should we as a country be making judgments about Chinese policies? I think we have to. Human rights are something we have to fight for as humans for all humans. Just because a country is big or has a large army or has nuclear weapons doesn't mean we should back away from saying something is morally wrong, in the human rights sense. (I think not speaking out and standing up for what is right is how 6 million Jews and 20 million Russians ended up dead in WWII.) We also can't impose the ideas of a few when it comes to saying what is right morally. We are known as a superpower. Perhaps the only one left around these days. Unfortunately that does not mean we have super powers. We don't have the ability to have perfect knowledge of another country. We can't predict what a country will do. We can't right every wrong that is out there. And we also can't impose our will on other peoples simply because their beliefs differ from ours. What we can do, and must do, is stand up for human rights, and this is where I think our relations with China will ultimately come to a crisis point in the future.
Posted by pam at July 23, 2002 05:37 PM | Comments (0)