Hawks vs doves

His name doesn’t ring a bell for many here. Friends scratch their heads and mutter: “Kishore—who?”

Kishore Mahbubani is dean at National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. He served as ambassador to the United Nations. What he writes about China’s doves vs hawks will affect our grandchildren. Excerpts:

In just three decades, China emerged as the second world economic power. “It did so, without disrupting the world order. Suddenly, this sustained careful management of external challenges has been upset by three years of assertive, occasionally, reckless actions…. It’s on the verge of destroying a geopolitical miracle.”

The hawks are mostly young officers of the People’s Liberation Army. Beijing should confront those who question its claims to most of the China sea, they insist.

They’re taking control of strategy, as did young officers in Japan in the 1930s, recalls  Prof. Huang Jing, also with the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. “They are thinking what they can do, not what they should do. This is very dangerous.”

A surge of anti-China opinion stokes the hawks’ claim that there is a “containment conspiracy” by the West. Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping paid scant attention to public opinion. Both made concessions when they settled border disputes with Russia and Vietnam.

“Today, not even President Xi Jinping can make unilateral concessions of that kind.”

The “doves” use the current criticism to underscore the rising anxieties of Asian neighbors.

China’s 2012 decision to block a joint statement on the South China Sea alienated the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean). The Asean represents 600 million people and is now wary.

Deng’s advice was: Adopt a low profile as China emerges as a world power, the doves recall. It can afford to be patient while power grows. China’s leaders, in fact, spend perhaps 90 percent of their time focused on internal issues.

The need to shrink state-owned enterprises is a major concern. Chinese university graduates crest at 7 million a year. Many cannot find work. “This is a far bigger issue for China’s leaders than sovereignty over barren rocks in nearby seas,” the heart of Beijing’s defense of the “nine-dash line” map of territorial claims.

As the world’s largest trading power, China has larger interests in maintaining open seas globally. Instead, China’s behavior unleashed a “tiger” of anti-China sentiment. “That will be difficult to cage again.”

“As long as it breaks the law, that tiger will find it hard to escape the iron cage,” President Xi said. He meant the arrest of the feared security chief Zhou Yongkang.

Over the past 35 years, there has been an unwritten pact that those arriving at the top do not attack those departing from it, wrote BBC’s  Beijing correspondent Carrie Gracie. This would avoid Mao Zedong’s era of bloodbaths.

Xi tore up that rulebook. “China’s politics moves into uncharted territory.” For years, senior officials plundered billions. Many hid fortunes in offshore accounts and foreign assets. “It is impossible to exaggerate public cynicism about China’s political class. And the figures involved are staggering.”

Critics accuse Xi of hypocrisy. Some in his own family have got rich in these years, they charge. But his drive to cage “the tigers as well as the flies” has won the president public popularity.

Zhou’s downfall came in a terse one-line statement on the official news agency. It does not repair the tattered reputation of the Chinese Communist Party. However, it underscores “how little the Chinese public or the world is permitted to know about the internal politics of the world’s second-largest economy.”

President Xi’s anticorruption drive is hampered by factional struggles within the Communist Party’s highest circles. Senior army figures “may be stoking external tensions to save themselves from internal investigations. Corruption is the one force that could ruin the legitimacy of the Party.” Success is far from guaranteed.

In 2014, prosecutors accused Lt. Gen. Gu Junshan of a litany of crimes, including bribery, embezzlement and abuse of power, the New York Times reported. This exposed  widespread graft corroding the Chinese armed forces.

Gu is charged with presiding over a land development racket that hoarded kickbacks and bought promotions. These enabled him and family to “amass dozens of expensive residences, including places where investigators found stockpiles of high-end liquor, gold bullion and cash.”

President Xi’s goal is to transform a service larded with pet projects and patronage networks into a leaner fighting force. That would be more adept at projecting power abroad while buttressing party rule at home. It cements his authority over the military.

Unlike his immediate predecessors, Xi took over both the  military and party in November 2012. He hefts strong credentials. After university, he served as aide to a top military official. His father was a revolutionary guerrilla commander. His wife was a star in the PLA’s song-and-dance troupe.

While his predecessors struggled to manage the military, Xi regards it as a bastion of support and one that embraces his vision of China as a robust power, the Times adds.

In an internal speech, he blamed the Soviet Union’s collapse in part, on Mikhail Gorbachev’s losing control of the military. “His implication was: ‘I’m taking  charge…. I’m not going to be like the past administrations, putting up as you bumble around,’” an aide explained.

Chinese leaders want to focus on domestic problems? “The world should let it,” Mahbubani counsels. “The international community has a clear interest in the doves winning out over the hawks. What can we do to help the doves?

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