Non-Subscriber Extract
Iraq campaign alarms Beijing
- Article Tools
| 04 April 2003 |
John Hill
President Hu Jintao had been in post for just five days when the war began on 20 March, and the crisis came as China was completely absorbed in its own domestic political affairs.
Beijing called for an immediate halt to military action as soon as the conflict started. Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) spokesperson Kong Quan said: "The military operation against Iraq, in disregard of the opposition of majority of countries and bypassing the UN Security Council, constitutes a violation of the UN Charter and the basic norms of international law. The best way to solve the Iraqi question is political settlement within the UN framework."
For Hu, the immediate concern is whether Washington's new willingness to act pre-emptively will next be applied to North Korea, and whether this may signal the prelude to a US effort to counter Chinese ambitions.
According to China analyst Willy Wo-lop Lam, the Communist Party's Leading Group on National Security - which co-ordinates diplomatic, defence and intelligence policies, and is headed by Hu - is working on the possibility that Washington may turn to Asia as early as this summer. It is thought that Hu does not share Jiang Zemin's positive view of the USA, and even Jiang had his difficulties in balancing Chinese interests against US actions: when NATO accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo war in 1999, the Chinese leadership - which had ardently criticised the conflict - disappeared to hold three days of meetings before deciding to accept US apologies.
As much as Beijing aspires to 'great power' status in the international community, it has generally tried to avoid taking an overly active role in managing the international order, in line with Deng Xiaoping's diplomatic policy of 'keeping a low profile'. It must have been something of a challenge when then-president Jiang accepted George W Bush's hospitality in October, only to be confronted by a request to support Washington's Iraq policy, leaving Jiang balancing the competing virtues of good Sino-US relations against rising US unilateralism.
Lam suggested that the new leadership had hoped to maintain its low profile and concentrate on maintaining economic growth and social stability, but now must consider that an endgame in Asia may be coming sooner rather than later. Certainly Ellen Bork, deputy director of Project for the New American Century has stepped up the anti-China rhetoric. In March she suggested: "China has been a 'closet' ally of Saddam Hussein in the past," and wrote in the New York Times that US intelligence exists linking China to North Korea's nuclear weapons programme.
Hu must therefore formulate his response to the war in Iraq with the possibility of an increasingly anti-Chinese US administration in mind. Shen Dingli, Professor of American Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai, told JIR that a number of factors would drive Beijing's decision. On the positive side, Beijing does not envisage China's interests being harmed by the war in Iraq. Its economy and domestic political situation will not suffer directly as a result of the conflict, although rises in oil prices could do short term damage. However, in the longer term, China could reap such benefits as Iraq's disarmament and the stabilisation of oil supplies cost-free. On the other hand, Beijing is worried about the USA's use of pre-emption, its hegemonic ambitions, and the current serious split within the Security Council.
Had the Iraq issue come to a vote in the Security Council, China may have followed Russia and France and voted 'no' to military action, but the risk of damaging the international order, and - more importantly - damaging relatively healthy Sino-US relations, would have made this a hard choice. Robert Sutter of Georgetown University, Washington, told JIR: "The Chinese promised us for years that they wouldn't 'block' US military action against Iraq. How they played the issue in public was predictable, but they were careful not to be seen as crossing the US in a serious way."
However, the dangerous issue bubbling just below the surface is North Korea. The parallels that Washington has drawn between Iraq and North Korea lead inevitably to concerns that the issue will be dealt with in a similar manner, that is, through pre-emptive and non-UN sanctioned military action. Given the 'blood ties' that bind Pyongyang and Beijing, it is impossible to see how China could not use its UN veto if the tide went that way.
734 of 1,660 words