MAINLAND CHINA OVERRATED: BRITISH SCHOLAR
Washington, Aug. 18 (CNA) Communist China, home to a fifth of humankind, is overrated as a market and a world power that in reality is, at best, a second-rank middle power, said a United Kingdom expert in Asian affairs.
Gerald Segal, director of studies at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, wrote in the latest issue of "Foreign Affairs," that Beijing clearly is a serious menace to Taiwan, but even Taiwanese defense planners do not believe Communist China can successfully launch an invasion.
The mainland Chinese missile threat to Taiwan is much exaggerated, especially considering the very limited success of the far more massive and modern NATO missile strikes on Serbia. "If the Taiwanese have as much will to resist as did the Serbs, China will not be able to easily cow Taiwan," said Segal.
The expert pointed out that before strategic paranoia sets in, the West should note that the Chinese challenge is nothing like the Soviet one. "China is less like the Soviet Union in the 1950s than like Iraq in the 1990s: a regional threat to Western interests, not a global ideological rival. Such regional threats can be constrained."
Since the Middle Kingdom is merely a middle power, Segal wrote in the article titled "Does China Matter?" that it is not that Communist China does not matter at all, but that it matters far less than most of the West think. "China matters about as much as Brazil for the global economy. It is a medium-rank military power, and it exerts no political pull at all."
"China matters most for the West because it can make mischief, either by threatening its neighbors or assisting anti-Western forces further afield. Although these are problems, they will be more manageable if the West retains some sense of proportion about China's importance," he stressed.
A strategy of "containment" would lead to a new and very different Western approach to mainland China, Segal wrote, saying "One would expect robust deterrence of threats to Taiwan, but not pusillanimous efforts to ease Chinese concerns about Theater Missile Defense.
One would expect a tough negotiating stand on the terms of China's WTO entry, but not Western concessions merely because China made limited progress toward international transparency standards or make us feel guilty about bombing its embassy in Belgrade."
He continued that with such an approach to Communist China, one would expect Western leaders to tell Beijing leaders that their authoritarianism puts them on the wrong side of history, but one would not expect Western countries to stop trying in the United Nations to censure human rights abuses or to fall over themselves to compete for the right to lose money in the mainland China market.
Nevertheless, Segal concluded, until Communist China is cut down to size in Western imaginations and treated more like a Brazil or an India, the West stands little chance of sustaining a coherent and long-term policy toward it. (by Nelson Chung)
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