Nuclear escalation on the Korean Peninsula demands creative
solutions. With a 2,200-year history of non-aggression, China is in
the best position to take the lead — and relieve the United States
of a burden it has shouldered for too long.
In fact, no other nation has had as stable a pattern of
world citizenship. Over two millennia, China has not attempted to
conquer its neighbors or spread its system of government on any
scale remotely comparable to the Romans, Mongols, British, Germans,
French, Spanish, Russians, Japanese or even Americans. China does
brutally resist the secession of Tibet, which it considers part of
its ancient patrimony. But it has not grasped for lands beyond its
historical borders.
There is no reason to think the Middle Kingdom has merely been
biding its time. Indeed, if any nation can be said to have a
long-term strategy, it is China. Premier Zhou Enlai, when asked
what he thought of the French Revolution of 1789, allegedly
replied, “It’s too soon to tell.”
China also has a 2,200-year record of authoritarian rule. Even
so, it has become steadily more open — at its own glacial pace.
China’s government is more responsive to its people now than it was
under the Han, Ming or Qing dynasties, ending in 1911. After a long
period of civil war in the first half of the 20th century, worsened
by a brutal Japanese occupation, the dictator Mao Zedong restored
order.
Since 1979, the repressive government has slowly provided more
freedoms to its 1.3 billion citizens — beginning with what
President Franklin D. Roosevelt called “freedom from want.” Today,
the Chinese people are freer to save, accumulate, conduct business
and travel abroad than perhaps at any other time in China’s
2,200-year history as a coherent state.
Pundits and professional worriers tend to paint China as a
burgeoning military threat. This is a serious misinterpretation of
a very long track record that includes the peaceful re-annexation
of British Hong Kong and continuing restraint toward Taiwan (lost
first to the Japanese, and then as a result of civil war).
Unjustified suspicions blind policymakers to important security
options at a volatile time in Northeast Asia.
Like pioneers of yore, we need to read the trail to understand
where China is headed and how we might ease its path.
For centuries, China was the economic powerhouse of the globe.
As Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations, commented in 1776, “China is
a much richer country than any part of Europe.” Today, more than
anything else, the ancient nation wants to be rich again — though
in ways that do not leave commoners mired in squalor, as before.
Its commercial policies are aggressive, but it is not territorially
expansive. China understands that physical conquest — as Japan’s
World War II experience proved — can undermine economic success in
the modern world.
Instead, to achieve its goals, China needs regional peace and
stability. It has a far greater stake in capitalist South Korea’s
health and happiness than even the United States, which has
guaranteed Seoul’s safety for the past 60 years as part of its
campaign to stop the worldwide spread of communism — a task now
completed.
South Korean companies such as Samsung are among the world’s
largest producers of semiconductors, the electronic chips that
nourish everything in the electronic food chain from toys to
automobiles. Semiconductors are key to economic growth around the
globe.
Though China’s manufacturing base has gone viral, it does not
make these precious chips in any significant amount — partly
because foreign investors won’t set up shop, given the lax
enforcement of intellectual-property rights. China depends heavily
on imported semiconductors, for which its best and closest
suppliers are South Korea and Taiwan.
Semiconductor plants require enormous investment; a single factory costs $6
billion or more. They are geese, laying golden eggs. The last thing
China wants is a nuclear or conventional war between its immediate
neighbors that might destroy this industrial infrastructure. Li Baodong, China’s
envoy to the United Nations, said as much in early March, after the
last round of sanctions against North Korea to discourage Kim
Jong-Un’s nuclear ambitions. “We are formally committed,” Li
insisted, “to safeguarding peace and stability on the Korean
Peninsula.”
This statement is of critical importance to Washington, which
should do everything possible to encourage China to take on the
role of peacemaker and enforcer. The United States has played bad
cop in relation to North Korea for six decades. We still have
28,500 troops on the ground in a war without end.
An armistice brought the three-year civil war between North and
South to a temporary halt in 1953. The peace treaty, however, never
followed.
Modern world history shows that Band-Aids need to come off for
healing to happen — despite the sting. Japan’s recovery after World
War II was delayed for six years, until the allied countries
finally agreed to sign a peace treaty in 1951. Thirty years after
the surrender of Nazi Germany, the Helsinki Accords of 1975
formally established peace in Europe. The accords reduced tensions
across the continent and eventually led to the end of the Cold
War.
The 60-year delay in formally ending the Korean War has had
costly repercussions. No blue-helmeted U.N. troops patrol the demilitarized
zone, as in other post-conflict areas, to keep peace once it’s
been established. Instead, the United States has borne the
expensive military burden of enforcing another country’s day-to-day
defense for six decades — enabling South Korea to democratize and
flourish.
In addition to straining our national budget, this commitment
has bought us animosity on both sides of the 38th
parallel. A survey of South Korean military cadets in 2004 found
that more ranked the United States as the “country’s main
enemy” than ranked North Korea as the primary threat. Young
Americans who teach English in Seoul find signs at some restaurants
saying, “No Foreigners Allowed.”
If not an example of the axiom “No good deed goes unpunished,”
these reactions may belong in the category of nationalist responses
to the long-term presence of foreigners — regardless of
how helpful they may be.
A former graduate student at San Diego State University, where I
teach, recalls liking the cookies that friendly U.S. soldiers
brought to the South Korean orphanage where he was raised in the
1980s. But he also remembers being mystified as to why the “white
men” were there. It’s a question the majority of Americans might
have a hard time answering, given that the U.S. commitment predates
their birth.
The United States has given South Korea more in the way of
shelter than any competitive nation-state has given another in
perhaps all world history. But this effort has hit a point of
diminishing returns for everyone involved.
More of the same promises little in the way of progress. It’s
time for China to become umpire and peacemaker of the region,
consistent with its historical record and modern aspirations.
The 60th anniversary of the Korean Armistice is July 27, 2013.
Let’s celebrate with a peace treaty that allows Washington to bring
our troops home for good.
from reuters
