IHT Rendezvous: Talking Trust With China's Army

BEIJING ? China will soon publish a new country map that expands its claims to disputed territories. Japan has announced its first increase in defense spending in 11 years in a move widely perceived as countering China. Recently, fighter planes and other aircraft have been used by both countries as tensions grow over a group of islands in the East China Sea that both claim, called the Diaoyu in Chinese and Senkaku in Japanese.

With suspicion and escalation apparently the order of the day in East and Southeast Asia, and speculation growing if this year will see an armed skirmish between China and Japan, it is crucial to understand how the military of the rising nation sees the world. So a recent post by an American scholar who took part in a forum organized by China?s military in Beijing had some fascinating things to say.

A focus of the meeting, called ?Security in Asia: New Problems and New Thinking,? was trust. Yet with deeply divergent worldviews on display some discussions ended up ?modeling? distrust rather than overcoming it, wrote Christopher Ford, one of 60 security and defense specialists, including serving military men, from 21 countries, who gathered in November for the Fourth Xiangshan Forum. The event was organized by the China Association for Military Science, which is part of the Academy of Military Science of the People?s Liberation Army, and attendees on the Chinese side included the air force general Liu Chengjun, the state-run China Military Online reported.

?Indeed, our discussions quickly veered off course during the first day, from the presentation of prepared papers on the subject of trust into lengthy comment-and-response cycles in which the participants sometimes seemed to inhabit parallel universes of competing facts and historical claims,? Mr. Ford wrote in New Paradigms Forum, an issues and discussion Web site. Mr. Ford is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. and previously a principal deputy assistant Secretary of State, as well as a former U.S. special representative for Nuclear Nonproliferation, according to New Paradigms Forum.

?In particular, the Chinese and non-Chinese participants seemed to start from radically different starting points on surprisingly basic matters of fact,? including who started the 1950-53 Korean War, what happened in the South China Sea last year as tensions rose over disputed territories, and whether or not Japanese history textbooks acknowledge that country?s invasion of China in the 1930s, Mr. Ford noted.

?In principle, these questions were objectively ?knowable,? yet our hosts were not interested in empirical evaluation. Instead, our Roundtable discussions bogged down, for it was apparently central to the agenda of most PLA participants that their version of these facts ? and their accompanying characterizations about fault and blame ? be accepted by all others as a starting point for future-oriented discussions of ?mutual trust,?? Mr. Ford wrote.

?Significantly, no non-Chinese participant in our Roundtable presumed to tell the Chinese participants what China?s strategic intentions are,? he continued. ?Instead, non-Chinese participants explicitly referred to foreign concerns rooted in perceptions of Beijing?s intentions, and asked about how it might be possible to lessen foreign misperceptions that might exist in this regard if indeed the PRC?s rise is as benign as its leaders claim.?

The Chinese side behaved differently, Mr. Ford wrote, revealing profound differences in worldview.

?The PLA participants, however, were quite comfortable telling non-Chinese what their various governments? intentions are. We were told, for instance, that Japan wishes to return to imperialist adventurism of the sort that it displayed during the Second World War. The United States, we were further told, wishes to ?contain? China and obstruct its rise. These Chinese assumptions were not depicted as mere perceptions, but instead as matters of inarguable fact that we non-Chinese must accept ? and thereafter atone for ? in order to make future trust possible,? he wrote.

Mr. Ford?s conclusion? Here I simplify his argument for the sake of brevity, but it is essentially this: ?the emerging Chinese superpower hungers to control other peoples? narrative of China.?

Why?

?China?s fixation upon shaping others? accounts of China, then, is arguably not necessarily ?just? the result of insecurity or narcissism,? he writes. ?It?s actually a strategic objective, because it is assumed that status or role ascriptions and moral characterizations play a critical role in shaping the world they describe.?

?It seems to be felt, for instance, that if the world understands China ?properly,? it will tend to behave toward China as China?s rulers desire,? he wrote.

Of course, all this is from the point of view of a Western attendee.

But searching for accounts of the meeting from the Chinese point of view yielded reports from state-run media that focused mostly on the mechanics of the event itself but no inside, or deep, analysis.

One, from the People?s Liberation Army Daily, cited Qi Jianguo, deputy chief of general staff of the Chinese People?s Liberation Army, who attended, hinted at tensions but confined itself to generalities, such as: ?Facing deep and complicated changes in the Asia-Pacific security situation, we must stand for and uphold a new security view of ?mutual trust, mutual benefit, equality, cooperation,? of wanting peace and not war, of wanting development and not poverty, cooperation and not enmity.?

The more candid accounts from observers outside China was just one indication of the great divide between China and its neighbors as tensions fester in the region, with many of the animosities rooted in strikingly different views of history.

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Source: http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/15/talking-trust-with-chinas-army/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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