What About China?

In February, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said: "I don’t think anyone can make a case that missile defense is a particular problem for China" (Defense News, February 26, 2001). Many in China would disagree. In the view of the Chinese government, the U.S. missile plan probably ranks second only to U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan as a serious problem in U.S.-China relations. Dingli Shen, professor of international relations and deputy director of the Center for American Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai, has identified two key areas of concern with respect to the proposed missile plan. "One is that the NMD [National Missile Defense system] will destabilize the world order and harm international relations. The other is that NMD’s advertised technical capability will undermine China’s strategic deterrence, weakening China’s confidence in its strategic retaliatory capability" (Defense News, February 26, 2001).

Ambassador Chas. W. Freeman, former Assistant Secretary of Defense and U.S. diplomat in Beijing, observed, "If it is true that China’s nuclear deterrent consists of some 20 or so ancient, creaking DF-5’s [intercontinental ballistic missiles], the national missile defense system that the President plans to deploy will invalidate it...If you were a Chinese rocket scientist you would be thinking very seriously about how to preserve China’s nuclear deterrent." (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Issue Brief, March 22, 2001.).

The Chinese are not likely to sit idly by while the U.S. works to deploy an effective missile shield. There are reports that China has already begun to modernize its nuclear forces. If the U.S. provokes China to continue down this path, by 2011, China will have far more formidable nuclear weapons than it has now.

For the past two decades, the Chinese government has focused primarily on developing the nation’s economic power, rather than its military power. Leaders have made dramatic economic reforms and have increased China’s engagement with the other nations. The changes that this approach has wrought (both within China and in China’s relations with the world community) have, on balance, been positive.

Confrontational U.S. military policies such as the missile shield threaten continued economic and political reform within China. Such policies would likely lead the Chinese government to divert scarce resources to its military. These policies will provide fuel for anti-western Chinese nationalists and militarists who oppose continued economic and political reform. Is this the direction that we in the U.S. want our relations with China to take in the years ahead?