The United States and China in the Age of Globalization

Author: Yue Jianyong, Chinese Political Science, 27 July 2003

Source:
http://www.ccrs.org.cn/2233/ReadNews.htm

This is the second part of the article with the same title.  Footnotes
omitted in English translation.

The U.S. Strategy Toward China:

After the end of the Cold War, through promoting economic globalization, the United States has taken advantage of its superiority in economy and technology to influence, intervene or even control other countries' domestic political development. In the meantime, through maintaining its absolute superiority in military power, the United States has also sought to maintain the leadership position in the world. These dual htmects constitute the immutable foreign policy of the United States that aims to advance its national interests.

The bottom line of the U.S. strategy toward China is to contain China through military means and to precipitate China's domestic political transformation through the means of globalization. The rapid economic development in East Asia has resulted in a shift of the focus of international relations and power struggle since the 1990s to the Asian Pacific region. In terms of possessing global economy and strategic interests, the United States is in a position similar to the Great Britain before World War II. The difference is that in the case of the pre-WWII Great Britain, the British were hampered by a structural flaw that manifested itself in having a strong navy but a weak army, which forced London to play the game of balance of power in the European continent, the focal point of global politics. For example, at the end of the 19^th century, the Great Britain once implemented a policy of "splendid isolation" that sought to "avoid any alliance, maintain freedom of action, and manipulate European power balance." The goal of such "splendid isolation" policy was to protect British Empire's overseas colonies from being challenged by the newly risen continental powers in Europe at the time. "To manipulate European power balance" indicates an active process of constantly choosing enemies and friends. But "splendid isolation" was not sufficient enough to forever keep European powers in balance. Once European or even global powers lost balance, Great Britain would immediately end such "splendid isolation," form international alliance and confront newly risen or hostile powers. Even so, however, Britain's balance of power policy could still be overpowered by concentrated combined strengths of European continental powers. The smashing military victories that went to the Germans at the beginning of World War II almost led to the demise of the British Empire.

The United States today holds the strongest military power in the world. It has the strongest nuclear as well as conventional forces, with a military superiority that is comprehensive and overwhelming. Furthermore, the United States has its own plan with regard to post-bellum world order. It is not satisfied with merely playing the role of an "offshore balancer." On the contrary, it wants to play the role of world's leader. Since the end of World War II, the United States for a long time had only one adversary, the Soviet Union that was the only power that could break the strategic power balance in Europe. On an even deeper level, the United States took advantage of the threat posed by the Soviet Union and reconstructed the political and economic order of the Western capitalist world. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Russia, defunct economically, yet still powerful politically, and defiant psychologically, remains the enemy in the U.S. power politics. Therefore, the United States will continue to contain and weaken Russia and to prevent Russia from rising up again.

Economic globalization has deepened the developing countries' dependence upon the developed countries in areas of trade and investment, which has led to a further loss of balance of power. Such economic dependence often forces developing countries to care more about short-term domestic economic and political interests, making them unwilling or unable to pay attention to the pernicious effect caused by the loss of balance of power upon their nations' strategic interests. Consequently, an unprecedented pattern has appeared in international relations, i.e., instead of forming an alliance to protect themselves, China and Russia both rush to improve relations with the United States, the world's leading power, which makes the Sino-Russian strategic partnership existent on paper only, and thus letting the United States use the method of "divide and rule" to play China against Russia, and vice versa.

The fact that China and Russia could not forge a true strategic alliance, and the fact that their conflicting interests in long-term geo-political considerations have aggravated the security dilemma for both countries. The European Union has aimed at preventing a revival of Russia in the long run, while attempting to seek short-term economic interests from a weak Russia. In East Asia, situations are much more complicated. Geo-political interests shared by various nations are intertwined, with an unpredictable rise and fall of various nations' strengths. The balance of power in this region is extremely subtle. The rapid rise of China's economy and China's continuing growth in a foreseeable future has changed the international power structure greatly. Japan is increasingly hostile toward a rapidly rising China. The United States, on the other hand, has seen China as the number one strategic adversary. This U.S. stance toward China will not change despite China's appeasements toward the U.S., including sacrificing China's own diplomatic and geo-political interests, and supporting America's military actions in Afghanistan. The U.S. Department of Defense issued its quadrennial defense review, which concluded that East Asia and Northeast Asia are the "key areas" that concern the U.S. interests, and that these areas should never be allowed to fall into the hands of hostile forces.

The United States and Japan have mutually complementary geo-political interests in East Asia, i.e., to keep the balance of power in East Asia so that the U.S.-Japan strategic alliance's foundation remains strong and solid. In light of the fact that China has vast strategic rear and immense military potential, the United States to certain extent supports Japan to strengthen its military power. But a militarily strengthened Japan will also make South Korea and Southeast Asian nations nervous, which will result in an arms race. If this happens, the order in East Asia may be lost, threatening to disrupt economic globalization. Consequently, the United States has strengthened its military deployment in Asia and Pacific region. Especially, the return of the U.S. to Southeast Asia not only satisfies Southeast Asian nations' geo-political desires, but also allows the U.S. to enter the South China Sea, an area that is vital to China's interests.

Since the 1990s, America's military containment and strategic encirclement against China has never stopped. In addition to stationing 80,000 troops in Japan and South Korea, the United States has strengthened its military strike capability in Guan and Hawaii. The 9/11 Incident of 2001 has given the U.S. a perfect opportunity to penetrate into Central Asia, an area long considered being the backyard of China and Russia. After military victories in Afghanistan, the United States used the excuse of searching for Bin Laden and the residual Taliban forces, and helping the process of nation building to stay there and refused to withdraw its military forces. The objective of the U.S. has been to weaken the Russian-backed anti-Taliban warlords of the former Northern Alliance, while supporting pro-American forces to rise to controlling positions in Afghan politics. Political stability in Afghanistan will not only give the American oil tycoons the safe oil transportation routes from Central Asia and the Chtmian Sea areas, via Afghanistan, to the increasingly expanding oil market of India and Pakistan, but also pave the way for the United States to take advantage of the Central Asian nations' economic difficulties and their dependence on oil exports and take these nations into America's camp so that the "Shanghai Cooperative Organization" will be dismantled, thus threatening, from the western flank, China's geo-economic and geo-political security.

After the war in Afghanistan, the United States has also a "Second Front" against international terrorism in the Philippines. The U.S. has dispatched 600 troops there to deal with the tiny force of 500 under Abu Sayaf that would never be big enough to overthrow the Filipino government. The real objective of the U.S. for doing so is to return to the strategically important Subic Bay Naval Base and Clarke Air Force Base as quickly as possible. Russia is financially weak so it will have to abandon its naval base at Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam, thus creating a power vacuum. This situation will provide a good opportunity for the U.S. to use Vietnam's geopolitical concerns about China to lease the Cam Ranh Bay Naval Base. India's nuclear arms and the strong support for its military modernization India has received from Russia are making India a regional strong power. Russia's diplomatic motives are twofold: to extend Russia's interest in the Indian Ocean and to pin down China. While the United States feels worried about India's rise, it is more concerned about how to use India to confront China from South Asia. In recent years, the U.S.-Indian military cooperation has been steadily strengthening, which has strategically trapped China from three sides.

Taiwan is related to China's vital national interests. The Taiwan issue has been the focal point of the Sino-U.S. clash of interest. Taiwan is a bargaining chip in America's military strategy of containing China. The U.S. policy toward Taiwan corresponds to the development of the forces for independence in Taiwan, which is to say, that the U.S. encourages Taiwan to gradually move to independence while maintaining a subtle balance of power on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. The basic framework of America's power balancing policy in the Taiwan Strait is the promise of aiding Taiwan's defense, providing constant supply of advanced weaponry to Taiwan. To this date, the weapons the U.S. has sold to Taiwan have far surpassed the limits set by the August 17 Communiqué, both in terms of quantity, quality and in terms of cash amount. Furthermore, in recent years, what the Americans have provided to Taiwan also include weapons of offensive nature, the purpose of which is to force China to realize that once a war starts, the fighting will not be limited in the Taiwan Strait area. This is designed to scare the Chinese government that is dedicated to "peace and development," and to make China realize that using force will have "unimaginable" consequences. 

The fact that the United States has steadfastly refused to give up Taiwan has encouraged the forces for Taiwanese independence. America's military containment gesture against China, its joint development with Japan of the Theater Missile Defense (TMD) in East Asia, and its active research and development efforts for the National Missile Defense program that is designed to create a military dominance over the entire world, all have forced China to proportionally increase its military strength and its counter attack capabilities. Yet, because of the increasing gap in military technology between China and the United States, because of China's persistent giving-in to the United States on diplomatic front, and because of China's refusal to recognize the profound background behind the great changes taking place in Taiwanese politics and society, resulting in our complacency as reflected in a series of our policies toward Taiwan-all these factors have contributed to the deepening of the enormous gaps in national identity and governmental identity between China and Taiwan, which has in turn strengthened the self-confidence of the United States and the forces for Taiwan independence. In the past twenty years, the forces for Taiwan independence have developed rapidly to become a powerful social force that can control Taiwan's politics. Under this circumstance, despite the strengthening of the cross-Strait economic engagements, forces for Taiwan independence inside the island have not decreased but rather increased. Facing the rapid development of independence tendencies in Taiwan, the issue of national unification for China has become unprecedentedly urgent and unavoidable.

With regard to current Taiwanese politics, the reality is that Taiwan would become independent if China gave up the threat to use force. The diametrically opposed ways of expressing national and political identities in China and Taiwan have made the prospect of a peaceful settlement on the unification matter extremely remote. Therefore, using force to unify our nation as the second best solution becomes inevitable on our agenda. If we use force to compel Taiwan to a peaceful settlement, then we must first rapidly raise the level of our military strength to that of the United States, thus making the U.S. realize that any attempt to impede China's unification will also have "unimaginable" price to pay. Only this will force the United States to give up Taiwan. But China's large-scale advance in military strength does not have an advantage in time. And the pro-independence forces in Taiwan will undoubtedly use this disadvantage of ours to push for more space. Therefore, using force to scare Taiwan into a peaceful settlement is not a realistic solution in a foreseeable future. In light of this, China's forceful unification with Taiwan via means of arms must be based upon a strategy of rapid attacks and quick settlement through limited military superiority. Otherwise, any prolonged fighting, including vertical blockade against Taiwan, will not only fail to force Taiwan to surrender, but also lead to America's massive intervention, thus making China's limited military superiority quickly become all-out military disadvantage, bringing unpredictable consequences to China's domestic and international developments.

Since the 1990s, China's short-sighted utilitarian emphasis on economic development and the reform efforts along the line of market forces have led to an unbalanced growth of economy and severe gap between the rich and the poor. This situation has created a complicated pattern of interests, making the impetus to keep the economy constantly growing and to reform seriously insufficient. Because of the pressure to keep the economy growing to ease social crisis and because of the desire to use external forces to stimulate domestic reforms, China sped up its negotiation process to join the World Trade Organization. Yet during these WTO negotiations, China's concessions and its wistful willingness to concede have indicated a loss of self-confidence in reviving our nation through self-reliance. Our opponents in these negotiations were encouraged to ask for wild concessions from China. Since the utilization of America's superiority in economy and the expanding of free trade are decisive measures in influencing international politics, what the United States wants to achieve through China's bid to joining the WTO is to drag China's economy into the U.S.-led global system of capitalism so that the U.S. can control the directions of China's future political developments and make China completely lose its capability and will to challenge and confront the United States, and eventually advance America's economic, political and security interests from all sides.

Therefore, the United States has actively urged China to establish the so-called rule-based market mechanisms, forced China to carry out liberal policies on investments, to abandon China's insistence on transferring technologies from foreign investments to China, to give up special protection for China's state-owned enterprises, and to open up key industries such as finance and telecommunications within three to five years to foreign competition, so that China's industries will be completely placed in a "global level playing field," opening up a "new frontier" for the U.S. multinational corporations in their stride toward a global capitalism. That is to say, the complete compliance of these rules will to a great degree make it difficult for China to implement its own industrial policies, because all industrial policies that are meant to rapidly raise the level of international competitiveness among the domestic industries are inseparable from the necessary market-protecting measures, which is actually the success stories of countries such as the United States, Germany, Japan and South Korea and is why these countries have become economic power houses in the world. So, to repeat the obvious, the complete compliance of the WTO rules has constituted a further weakening of China's economic sovereignty.

What determines a country's economic status is the international competitiveness of the big enterprises in this country. China has not yet had one single big enterprise in the rank of the globally competitive multinational corporations. Despite the rapid developments of China's big enterprises in the last twenty years, their competitiveness, compared to foreign multinationals, has been extremely weak. Western developed countries such as the United States started an information revolution in the late 1970s, which has greatly strengthened these countries' industries, especially their high-tech industries, and their international competitiveness. At present, the multinationals from the Western developed countries have a monopolizing dominance in global industrial competitiveness, making small to medium-sized businesses unable to challenge these multinationals, no matter how good the businesses are. Control of the host country's key industries by foreign investors will inevitably lead to control of the host country's economy and politics, which is a self-evident truth. Therefore, the moment China's big industries are eliminated by Western multinationals, placing China's industries at the bottom level in the scheme of international division of labor, forcing China to become the assembly factory of the developed countries (the so-called "global manufacturing center), the moment for the Chinese nation to be defeated has come.

But in the early stage of China's entrance into the WTO, bankruptcies and expanding unemployment will be inevitable. This will aggravate social instability that is already a serious problem. In this case, those local governments that directly confront such crisis of instability should adopt economic protective measures to restrict foreign competition, thus refusing compliance of the WTO rules. According to the WTO agreements, local governments' actions are viewed as the same as the central government. But if the central government forces the frustrated local governments that are already at a rock and hard place to comply with the WTO rules, it will be unavoidable that mass grievances and social disenchantment will arise. To deal with this problem, the advisers at the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations has delivered a report to their government in Washington that suggests a top priority for the U.S. government to facilitate a smooth transformation of China's domestic relations and its economic and social relations with the international community. The suggested main policies include to educate and train provincial and local government officials directly in charge of implementing the WTO rules, through governmental and non-governmental channels, in close cooperation with China's officials and interest groups such as colleges and universities, and various think tanks connected to different ministries of the Central Government. The purpose of doing this is "to speed up the pace of China's reform (i.e., reform to comply with the WTO rules) and reaffirm its directions."

Secondly, the United States has endeavored to sponsor education and training programs for China to train some Chinese who will agree to comply with the WTO concessions. These trained Chinese will in turn train other Chinese inside China, so that a "culture of compliance" will be created among the Chinese.

Thirdly, the United States will try to make a multilateral approach to force China to comply the WTO rules, i.e., the Americans will make it look like an international common demand that the Chinese comply with the WTO rules, not just demand by the United States alone.  Obviously, the first two measures aim to train a cohort of political and cultural compradors, making them the spokesmen for the interests of the United States. The third measure is an exact copy of the hackneyed mantra held by some Chinese that we must "join our tracks with those of the international customs." Isn't this a curious coincidence?

In the same report by the Council on Foreign Relations, there is a didactic statement, "security issues, social and economic issues interact with China's implementation of the WTO agreements. This requires constant attention of the United States. The United States must also make sure to keep a cooperative framework among various responsible governmental agencies that have yet to be created jointly. Policies and discussions about these policies must adapt to the changing environment." Essentially, this is to give the U.S. government a hint that Washington should coordinate and combine its military as well as political strategies toward China. At present, the United States has sped up its cooperation with India, has penetrated into the South China Sea, severely threatening China's SLOCs and the oil transportation routes connecting China and the Middle East. Over one third of China's oil consumption relies on import, half of which comes from the Middle East. This situation has forced China to shift its strategic priorities to Central Asia and the Chtmian Sea areas to safeguard its economic security. But the United States took advantage of the war in Afghanistan to enter Central Asia. Almost at exactly the same time, the "Fortune" magazine of the United States listed the 100 largest companies in China, most of which are energy and petro-chemical related ones that are vitally important strategic enterprises central to our national livelihood and national security. These enterprises are the exact targets of costly mergers by the Western multinationals. What on earth motivated these Western multinationals to do so? Are they optimistic about China's economic growth? Or are they simply becoming more confident that they could control the future developments of China's politics and obtain monopolistic interests from the Chinese?

In post-WWII international politics, from the end of World War II to the 1970s, nations of the Third World started a tidal wave of nationalization movement with regard to Western multinationals so that they could protect their national economies and political independence. France under General Charles de Gaulle forced the United States in 1968 to completely withdraw from military bases in France, thus advancing a Franco-German joint resistance against political control by the Americans. Events such as this once impeded the process of America's building a post-WWII global system of capitalism. But the United States clearly understood that nationalists in any country would never tolerate an international division of labor that would be harmful to their own nation and willingly accept an international political order that corresponds to such division of labor. Therefore, in addition to training and supporting spokesmen for the U.S. interests among China's political and cultural elites, the United States, by using the opportunity of China's entrance into the World Trade Organization and its overwhelming advantage in information technology, has further strengthened its psychological warfare against China's ideology, with a particular focus on propagandizing the idea that the age of national industry and national sovereignty has become obsolete; promoting economically and politically charged  ideological concepts such as human rights, freedom and democracy; and creating a cult for American value and social systems, thus weakening the nationalist awareness among the Chinese people.

In sum, America's strategy against China consists of three interdependent components: to maintain and increase the U.S. military and geo-political strategic advantage; to control China's economy and politics from within through the process of globalization; and to weaken China's nationalism culturally and destroy China's national spirit. To use one single sentence to sum it up, the U.S.'s goal is to colonize China from within by using military threats. As such, America's strategic objective is to completely and forever obliterate any possibility of China, a country with vast territory, challenging the United States so that the U.S. can maintain its status as the world's hegemon.

The Foundation for China's Domestic Policies and China's Development Strategy

China's GDP has leaped to the position of the world's sixth largest. But China's per capita income and cultural development index are still ranked toward the bottom in the world. This reflects the far distance between China's present reality and real industrialization and complete modernization. The institutional rearrangements and policy orientation since China's reform movement started, especially since the 1990s, have resulted in large-scale power redistribution, causing severe polarization between rural and urban sectors, between Eastern China and Western China, and between various regions. They also have created a consistent weakening of the impetus for domestic economic growth. The rapid and enormous expansion of the size of the government, and the loosening of implementing family planning programs in the countryside have let the government spend far less money on education than what is needed for the huge uneducated, "low quality" rural population. The increasingly burdensome tax share, the decrease in agricultural income and the shrinking of rural industries since 1997, all have forced large number of unskilled surplus labor in the countryside to flood the major cities on the eastern coastal area. The power distribution pattern between the central government and local governments and the political encouragement for large volume economic output have led to grave low-level redundant construction and to the rise of a huge productive force that has become idle. This has not only tremendously impeded our ability to solve unemployment problem but also created a situation of consistent currency shortage, i.e., deflation. The huge supply of rural workers, combined with the already unemployed urban population, has kept the wage level in the labor intensive manufacturing industries along the east coast at essentially the same level in the past twenty years, and crime rate has also skyrocketed as a result.

China's enormous population pressure has aggravated its resources scarcity, environmental deterioration and rise in crimes. This situation has to a large degree been responsible for the inward orientation of China's politics. The population problem has become the biggest domestic problem plaguing China's current and future developments. Globalization as rigorously promoted by the developed countries exclusively prohibits unskilled labor force in developing countries from free movement among various nations.  Either the American-style capitalism that is based upon individualism, or the West European social democratic capitalism that seeks the so-called 'Third Way," is both uncompromising and adamant in refusing unskilled labor from the developing countries to cross their national borders to lower the living standards of their middle class. The process of making the whole society a middle class in the developed nations started out by way of colonialism in the past, and is now dependent upon the unproportional utilization of global resources and comprehensive exploitation of global labor force. All this is closely connected with western nations' absolute superiority in military force.

The polarization in China between the rich and the poor, and the low average wage has prevented China's market from further expansion. Overall backwardness of our technology has created an export advantage only in labor-intensive production, which is the main target of trade protectionism in the developed countries. China's relatively high dependency upon export has made us vulnerable to world economic fluctuations and to changes in international political relations. At the same time, strategic materials such as domestically produced oil and natural gas that have been buttressing China's continuing economic development are increasingly being exhausted. With expanding demand for energy, demand for import rapidly increases. Yet, world's oil and natural gas are located at the geopolitical centers of Euro-Asian landmass such as Central Asia and the Middle East. To obtain a steady supply of strategic energy requires obtaining the commanding height in geopolitics, which in turn is intrinsically tied up with a nation's economic strength and military force. In this great game, any retreat will necessarily result in the creation of "brittle ribs" unable to support China's economic development. Furthermore, China's economic openness has expanded greatly after China joined the WTO. With it, China's industry security, future political development and the continuing existence of our national spirit are all facing unprecedented challenges.

All these factors have made one thing clear-the previously touted strategy of "Bide Our Time, Build Our Capabilities" (taoguang yanghui) has become completely impossible to implement because it requires quiet development to enhance our national strength under certain degree of self-isolation.

In our time, it has become impractical to carry out industrialization by grhtming natural resources and moving population through overseas colonialism. This has become impossible both because of China's status in international power system and because of the existing moral principles of international relations. However, we can take another route toward industrialization, i.e., to improve our place in the international system of division of labor, to make our national industries at the cutting edge of worlds' capital market and technology, and to grhtm the needed resources through investments and trade. This is exactly the experience of post-WWII Japan and South Korea, both severely lacking in resources. The total volume of China's resources is not small, but per capita share stands far below the average level of the world. China's products are renowned for possessing low added value and consuming too much energy. In international trade, to exchange our large-volume resource-rich products for foreign resources bears an enormous cost. Once we exhaust our own resources, and our industrial technology has not yet completed its upgrading, China will be forced to spend tremendous amount of foreign currency reserve to import foreign resources in order to sustain production and employment. This will cause deterioration of international financial order, even leading to serious economic and political crisis.    

Industrialization is the foundation of a nation's wealth and strength. We cannot retake the path of the West toward industrialization. Yet we are facing severe challenges as a result of our wholesale plunge into economic globalization that threatens our industrial security. Under these circumstances, in order to protect our nation's political independence and the future of the Chinese nation, we have only one solution, i.e., we must work hard and be united in purpose, treating our current task as the life-and-death last battle for survival. To develop economy, we must first think of how to utilize our available resources rationally and efficiently. We must train a large number of technical experts and skilled work force; raise the overall level of our population's educational quality, through our enhanced education system, especially the education sector that focuses on vocational training. In the meantime, we must make sound social and economic policies, adjust income distribution to narrow the gap between the rich and the poor, and thus provide impetus for expanding our domestic market demands. To reach this goal, we must enact stringent legislations on the whole nation's family planning, resolutely control population growth.

However, even with a zero growth in population, China's number of people will still be extremely huge in the foreseeable future. At present, China has a rural population of about 800 millions, of which 150 to 200 millions are in a state of hidden unemployment. Let's suppose that this portion of unemployed rural population will be absorbed by industrialization and the establishment of small towns and cities, that will still leave us more than 600 million rural population, which makes it impossible to reach the level of productivity that can be found in the United States. Some economists have proposed to use privatization of land as a way to solve China's agriculture problems. Yet under China's current situation, this would very easily result in serious land speculation fever, forcing large number of peasants to become landless mobile population, thus pushing the entire society to the edge of great social disorder. Furthermore, the process of urbanization, designed to promote the movement of rural population and to raise peasants' income, will require the transformation of peasants' technology into urban worker's technology, which touches on the issue of education. But education is a long-term investment, requiring diligent efforts of several generations. Thus we will have to keep a considerable amount of peasant population as agricultural workers. Therefore, in light of this uniqueness of China's agriculture and the level of difficulty in solving unemployment problems in the cities and in the countryside, we must adopt national policies to strongly protect China's agriculture, to promote China's industries, to raise peasants' income level and to guarantee self-sufficiency in grains.

The industrialization of agriculture and the rise of peasants' income will stimulate domestic market demands, ease unemployment pressure in the cities, raise the wage for the manufacturing sector, and bring the entire industry to a higher level as a whole.  Industries should fully consider the reality that our nation suffers from oil shortage and our land resource has been constantly shrinking. In the strategic industries that determine our nation's economic self-strengthening, we must resolutely break the intra -regional and inter-trade barriers, implement internal coordination within strategic industries such as petro-chemical and aerospace enterprises. In the meantime, we must use our national will of steel to facilitate the rise of strategic industries and make them large corporations with international competitiveness. This is a mission related to our vital national interest that will determine our national security and the survival of our nation.  To accomplish this goal, if necessary, we must not be bound by international treaties.

Economic self-strengthening will defeat America's desire to control China from within. But our economic self-strengthening will be affected by our inferior position in geopolitical arena and our inferior power level compared with the American military power. The United States will never allow China to rise to challenge the international order under Washington's control. The clash of national interests between China and the United States has become inevitable. Under certain circumstances (e.g., to plot Taiwan's independence), it is completely possible for the United States to launch military strikes against China's economic centers and its strategic nuclear bases in the hinterland. This is especially the case when the U.S. achieves major breakthroughs in National Missile Defense technologies, which will severely threaten China's national security. Therefore, we must speed up R&D on new weapons system to counter the NMD; we must also enhance the quantity and quality of our strategic nuclear missiles, guaranteeing second-strike nuclear capability and our capabilities to obliterate nations in the Far East that are America's allies. In the meantime, we must enhance the comprehensive strength of our navy and air force, protecting our sea lanes of communications in the South China Sea, so that, when necessary, we can resolutely use military force to drive back the invaders, protecting our Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) and the resources at the ocean's bottom around those waters from being invaded by any country.

Sophisticated diplomatic maneuvers may, to a great extent, make up the inadequacies in one nation's comprehensive power. Therefore, while we strive to revive our national industry and strengthen our military power, we must actively conduct flexible diplomatic activities, unite great number of developing countries in a common effort to struggle against Western powers, strengthening our strategic rear echelon, and steadily and resolutely advance our geo-economic and geo-political interests, so that we can provide more resources, market and security guarantees for our country's economic development. Currently, China encounters unprecedented big challenges and strong pressure in conducting international competition, at a time when Chinese economy and society have become highly open. These challenges and pressure include not only the economic weakness compared with the Western developed countries such as the United States, but also, and more importantly, the erosion of our nation's spirit as a result of the ideological penetration of the Western world against China. A nation in grave crisis of survival must be united in common purpose; otherwise our national spirit of brave struggle is doomed to be subjugated.

Nationalism and statism both seek national interests. But at the different stages of nationalism and in different countries, the contents of nationalism can be different. China's nationalism was born in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, with its basic tenet being to fight against oppression and enslavement instigated by imperialism, to revive national independence and national dignity. The essence of "statism" is that "state reigns supreme," emphasizing the virtue of total submission to the power of the state. However, the fatal flaw of statism is that it can't see the true nature of clash between domestic and foreign forces, and arbitrarily and casually implementing the will of the state. The statism therefore may bring us hugely costly political price and pernicious harm to our nation's long-term interests. Especially, in a nation where power is not supervised, without checks and balances, statism often tends to become a tool for a few oligarchic clique to pursue private and oligarchic interests in the name of pursuing the "national interests." Different from statism, China's nationalism gains its vigor from vastly numerous people and their genuine awareness of national self-esteem, which has become the precious spiritual source of our unshakable national will, of our efforts to revive China and our Chinese nation. Facing enormous pressure and challenges to our nation's survival, brought to us by the current economic globalization and the United States as the sole superpower, China once again has come to a point when we must rejuvenate our national spirit and sing the March of the Volunteers!