"Oh, what a relief to fight, to fight enemies who defend themselves, enemies who are awake!"
Ch’en Ta Erh
Man's Fate
Andre Malraux [8]
Latest from Uncle Sol, a version of which may appear in the Washington Times on Monday next. Chris
Follow the money No. 105 -- A confusion of roles
Sol Sanders <solsanders@cox.net [9]>
Minxin Pei, the most original of current Sinologists, makes the point authoritarian/totalitarian regimes inherently prioritize requirements for protecting regime leaders over long-term national interest. To preserve the former’s power, they sacrifice the latter’s needs. In the process, they encourage breakdown in the world order. Beijing is now demonstrating the phenomenon in spades.
By using its UN Security Council veto, Beijing exacerbated the already intractable problem of Syria. Under the propaganda rubric of non-interference in others’ internal affairs, it blocks [along with its camp follower, Moscow] a fumbling, U.S. “lead from behind”, international effort to force out a brutal, Damascus regime. Eroding, it nevertheless has troubling entangling political and ethnic tentacles to all the countries around it.
Tagging along, Russia’s fading Prime Minister -- but apparently president again to be -- Vladimir Putin is trying to pull a rabbit out of the hat: to preserve some semblance of the old Soviets’ strategic influence in the Arab world with its former Syrian satellite. It’s so much bluff. Russia neither has resources -- including military -- nor, in the end, can it be assured a guiding role on an unknowable successor regime despite the celebrated talents of Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. And, surprisingly, for once, the Arabs are united in wanting to dump Asaad and his problems before he spreads chaos to the whole region.
Whatever else motivates the Zhongnanhai, the one-party Chinese state Beijing GHQ, there’s paranoia about the North African Jasmine revolutions – so far away but instilling fear their infection might somehow ignite China’s own growing domestic political kindling. Furthermore, that scent of Jasmine further frightens China now turned acrid as an Arab Spring rapidly drifts into hands of Islamic radicals. With its own 25 million Muslims, especially the rebellious Turkic Uighurs of vast Singkiang bordering on Central Asia, it has experience with Islamic terrorism.
Communist Chinese leadership has plenty of other intruding realities. Obscured by events elsewhere, there is again a wave of protest among the repressed Tibetans in southwest China. With a deteriorating situation in neighboring Afghanistan and with its ally Pakistan in domestic turmoil, Beijing must worry about all its Central Asian borders. All that is above and beyond almost daily news of local dissidence as Beijing’s economy has to climb down rapidly off high growth. There is plenty of promise for tough decisions awaiting a still contested generational change of leadership this fall.
Chinese leaders repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot. No one is more dependent on Mideast stability and its oil supply than China’s economy. By siding with the crumbling Basher al-Asaad regime – rather than joining the belated Western and Arab League effort to finesse a negotiated succession to that Mideast powderkeg -- Beijing is threatening its own vital interests. Beijing also supports Assad’s sugardaddy, Iran, against an almost universal allied effort [again with Moscow’s notable exception] to block the mullahs’ nuclear weapons.
If a breakout of the escalating Syrian conflict or an Israel/U.S. military attempt to halt Iran’s progress toward nuclear weapons sets off even a 200-day regional conflict, it would be catastrophic for the Chinese economy. Han Xiaoping, chief information officer of the China Energy Resources Net, recently warned China's estimated reserve of only 110 million barrels would last only 46 days if there were a Persian Gulf closure. China's dependence upon imported crude is far greater than the United States’ with some 40% coming from the Gulf. But only a declining 11% actually comes from Iran, the rest from the Arab states now unsuccessfully lobbying China to help defuse the Syrian timebomb and halt Iran’s nukes.
Western leadership, notably among the U.S. naval military, has tried to persuade itself and the world Beijing’s growing power would be a “peaceful rise”. That was the phrase, now abandoned in the Beijing lexicon, formerly used by Chinese scholars and propagandists to describe how a renascent China would not repeat the bitter history of a burgeoning Germany’s bloody ascent into world leadership in the 19th and 20th century. Alas! Abandoning the phrase may be symptomatic of where Beijing leadership now thinks its primary interests lie.
Unfortunately, corrupt Chinese leadership – based on “revolutionary” genealogy, that is elevation of scions of old Communist families – increasingly dominates Beijing decision-making. If that continues to be the case, China will become an even greater source of international friction, threatening its world partners as well as its own future.
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