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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024
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Koreans See Expansionist Bull in the China Shop

LOS ANGELES , If John Kerry, the Democratic challenger for the White House, is admittedly the candidate of policy “nuances” (sometimes excessively so), and if President Bush is incontestably the candidate of policy “clarity” (sometimes frighteningly so), then the United States and the West require a combo-president (a Bush-Kerry, as it were) to deal successfully with the People’s Republic of China.

The China phenomenon is getting not less complicated but more so, and, thus, more, not less, difficult to deal with.

A pressing issue now facing the West is the continuing arms embargo on China that limits the kinds of weapon systems that can lawfully be sold to the world’s most populated nation and most obviously rising military power.

Several European Union states are eager to see the embargo lifted so that a profit-making arms bazaar can commence. Others are worried that eliminating the embargo will send the wrong signal to Beijing’s central government, which retains a repressive political system that still reminds many around the world of the 1989 Tiananmen Square tragedy.

Until relatively recently, a quick decision to trash the embargo as a relic of the Cold War would have made sense. China’s national priorities have appeared to be wholly economic: to raise living standards throughout the country , in urban as well as rural areas , while putting all other goals either on hold or in a deep freeze.

But China has been sending a chill throughout the region lately with quirky and unsettling diplomatic altercations with neighbors. The latest is the unseemly quarrel with South Korea, with whom diplomatic relations have been warm and economic trade relations positively torrid. The issue concerns the foolish Chinese effort to establish legal claim over territory known as the ancient Korean kingdom of Koguryo that has spanned the Chinese-Korean border for many centuries.

China regards this historic minority kingdom of ethnic Koreans as an integral part of mother China. For its part, Koreans regard the area and its several million ethnic Koreans as anything but part of China, and hope that in the wake of a long-awaited reunification with North Korea, the Chinese will understand the need for Koguryo to be returned to a united Korea , in the manner of Hong Kong in 1997 properly returning to China.

It needs to be emphasized the South Koreans have not reignited this controversy, but the Chinese. They have been reasserting Koguryo rights on Web sites and in official texts. What a terrible error for Beijing even to bother with this controversy. With more than a billion people, China has more problems than it can handle without creating new ones; and with its many economic needs, political frictions should take a back seat to all territorial disputes, with whose neighbors China has very many.

Thus, Beijing’s bumptious policy toward Seoul only stirs nervousness in Manila, Hanoi and Tokyo, which, among other capitals, have territory or island issues with Beijing.

What’s more, picking a fight with Seoul is especially unwise. For starters, South Korea is not going to back down; support for the Roh government’s position is multi-partisan and Koreanwide. And when the Koreans get agitated about an issue, you had better be sure it’s extremely important to you: Notice how even the Bush administration, under the ordinarily granitelike Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, has started to “adjust and refine” its troop redeployment plans in South Korea.

Another reason why China ought quickly to develop diplomatic amnesia about this anti-Korean claim is that people around the world might start to get the idea that China, for all its many peaceful pronouncements, nurtures a festering expansionist mentality after all.

One such claim , its most prominent and persistent , concerns Taiwan, of course. U.S. policy is to straddle the strait by endorsing the concept of “one” China while insisting that the mainland-island-eventual-integration dispute be settled “peacefully.”

The Bush administration has gone so far as to red-flag the current Taiwan government from pushing its own pro-independence line so aggressively and publicly.

But if China becomes viewed as the proverbial 800-pound gorilla suddenly malcontent with its current borders and needy of new territory to claim as rightful historic soil, the nervousness-level in Asia will rise dramatically, as will the global sympathy factor for Taiwan. Beijing should keep its eye on the big picture , elevating its country into a truly modern state , and stop messing around with side issues that only play into the hands of its enemies, here and abroad.

All this suggests the timing is wrong for embargo-lifting and indeed propitious for the reformulation of a U.S. policy toward China that is neither a neo-con relic of the Cold War nor the product of a blissful, wishful pro-China thinking. America needs a China policy that, in its many “nuances,” is clear.

Tom Plate is a UCLA professor, former editorial page editor of the Los Angeles Times, and a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy.

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