China: The New Imperial Japan?
The centenary of World War I in 2014
provided the opportunity for scholars to reflect on parallels between the early
twentieth-century Anglo-German rivalry and today’s developing Sino-American
rivalry. There is much that must be learned from the road to war in 1914
if the statesmen of today are going to step off the road to
Sino-American conflict. Other analogies have also been used in an
attempt to understand China’s rise, and I have considered some of these elsewhere.
Yet there is another analogy, which has
not yet received the examination it deserves: is contemporary China following
in the footsteps of the Japan of the 1930s? Is today’s China bent on expansion
like the aggressive Japan that started the Pacific War? This analogy has not
received much press—for three reasons.
First, those who are wont to make such
comparisons (like former Philippine president Benigno Aquino) tend prefer to
default to the Hitler analogy,
presumably for the intellectual pull it can exert on Americans always fearing another
Munich. Second, given that the current prime minister of Japan,
Shinzo Abe, disputes that Japan
was responsible for the war (who is he to attempt to define aggression, he asks), bringing up
such a sensitive issue is not smart politics for those who desire closer
relations with Japan today to contain China. Finally, the academic scholarship
on the causes of the Pacific War is much less comprehensive than the
corresponding work on World War I and World War II in Europe. Indeed, the
number of books based on primary sources explaining the road to
Japanese-American conflict published in the last two decades can be counted on one
hand.
Given that one possible date for the
beginning of the Pacific War is 1937 (the other is the Pearl Harbor attack of
1941), 2017, the eightieth anniversary of that start, is an apt time to
reconsider the war’s causes and to compare Japan’s condition then with China’s
today. The simplest way to examine the applicability
of the analogy is to list the similarities and the differences, and so that is
how we shall proceed.
Similarities
Two similarities between Japan’s
geopolitical position in the 1930s and China’s position today immediately come
to mind. The first is that both countries expressed dissatisfaction with the
military balance of power. The second is that both nations, to varying degrees,
felt excluded from international society.
The Balance of Power
In the 1930s, Japan was locked into the
so-called Washington System of arms control, which mandated Japanese naval
inferiority at certain specified rates (under the 1922 Treaty: 60 percent of
American and British strength; under the 1930 Treaty, close to 70 percent).
These ratios had been carefully formulated with the intention of preventing
aggressive Japanese moves in the Pacific while likewise preventing American or
British challenges to Japan’s regional sea control. Even so, many Japanese
naval officers decried the limits, seeing them as a way to perpetuate Japanese
inferiority. The breakdown of the Washington System in the 1930s led to an arms
race between Japan and the United States, and was one of the contributing
factors to the outbreak of war between the two nations in 1941.
Today, China is dissatisfied with East
Asia’s regional balance of power, which since World War II has been based on
American primacy. As former secretary of defense Robert Gates remarked in 2012, the
Pacific had “for all practical purposes been an American lake for our navy since
the end of World War II.” In the last two decades, China has made tremendous
investments in its military capabilities in order to challenge American
primacy. China’s challenge has led to increased tensions with a United States
determined to hold on to its primacy. In response, the United States has
positioned greater forces in the Pacific and developed escalatory plans like
Air-Sea Battle (now renamed something innocuous, in an
apparent effort to avoid attention). The outcome is a burgeoning arms race
between the two nations.
International Society
Japan’s precarious position within
international society in the 1930s also has some parallels with China’s feeling
that it is excluded from international society today. At the Treaty of
Versailles in 1919, the Japanese sought to include a racial equality clause.
Such a clause was unpopular among many U.S. voters, so Wilson ensured the
Japanese effort failed, which the Japanese public interpreted as a national
humiliation. Since the 1880s, the United States had been excluding immigrants
from Asia, a practice confirmed in the 1924 Asian Exclusion Act. America’s
racist immigration policies had long been a burr in its relations with Japan,
and their continuance signaled to the Japanese that their nation would not be
fully welcomed into international society despite its heroic process of
modernization. Japan would not be accepted as a true great power; instead, it
was relegated to a position above other Asian states but below the Western
great powers.
Today, despite China’s heroic
modernization, the Middle Kingdom has not been fully welcomed into
international society. It remains excluded from the G-7/8, it is still denied
proportional representation in the World Bank and the IMF, and its every
action—even those consistent with the contemporary norms of international
society—is greeted with suspicion and often opposition
from the world’s superpower, the United States. Despite some recent important
steps forward—such as the Obama-Xi agreement for ten-year visas—a Trump
administration toying with a trade war with China and actions that the Chinese
perceive as threatening their sovereignty and national identity
seems unlikely to further welcome China into international society. China has
two alternatives to full integration into international society as a great
power equal to the United States. It could seek to construct a parallel society
even as it presses for acceptance in the American-led order, or it could try to
tear down the existing society. So far, China seems to be pursuing the first
course.
In summary, there are some significant
parallels between Japan’s dissatisfaction with the balance of power and its
nonacceptance within international society, and China’s dissatisfaction and
partial nonacceptance today. In both cases, arms races developed. Yet a key
difference is that Japan sought to tear down the existing order, while China
today seems to be seeking to construct a parallel order that does not so much
conflict with the present order, as serve as an alternative to it. As will be
seen in the next section, this is but one of many differences.
Differences
The ways in which the contemporary world
and China’s rise within it differ from the 1930s and Japan’s rise are numerous,
and can be reviewed by looking at the balance of power, economic order,
domestic political factors, motives for expansion, international society and
technological changes of each era.
First and foremost, in the 1930s, the
global balance of power was simultaneously undermined by Hitler’s Germany,
Italy’s Mussolini, Stalin’s Soviet Union and expansionist Japan. No combination
of global powers could oppose the ambitions of all four of these states. When
Germany allied itself with Italy and the Soviet Union, the balance of power
decisively favored the aggressors. Only Hitler’s foolish invasion of the USSR
changed this situation. Today there is no such challenge to the global balance
of power. Any state or conceivable combination of states that embarked on
regional conquest could be decisively checked by an overwhelming global
coalition. Despite the best efforts of alarmists like Aquino, a repetition of
the 1930s simply isn’t in the cards.
Attention to the local balance of power
reinforces this first point. In 1941, Japan attacked the United States out of
desperation. Japanese leaders believed they had a small window of opportunity,
and if they missed it, Japan would be always relegated to being a third-rate
nation. At the time, a U.S. oil embargo forcefully threatened Japan’s ability
to sustain its economy and move its military assets in the future. Furthermore,
America’s massive rearmament program, which it launched in the summer of 1940
following France’s unexpected fall, portended a tremendous shift in the balance
of power against Japan. As Prime Minister Tojo explained to the
president of the Privy Council, Hara Yoshimichi, at the Imperial Conference of
November 5:
Two years from now [1943] we will have no
petroleum for military use; ships will stop moving. When I think about the
strengthening of American defenses in the southwestern Pacific, the expansion
of the U.S. fleet, the unfinished China Incident, and so on, I see no end of
difficulties. . . . I fear that we would become a third-class
nation after two or three years if we merely sat tight.
Windows of opportunity force states to
make otherwise undesirable decisions, typically out of fear. Today, the balance
of power is currently shifting in China’s favor. This means that China has
no incentive to provoke a conflict with the United States in the short term.
Indeed, purely by this gauge, it is the United States that has an incentive to
attack China, before the regional balance of power comes to favor the Middle
Kingdom.
The Economic Order
A second structural variable is the
prevailing international economic order as well as the local conditions of
given states, here Japan and China. In the 1930s, the international economic
order was collapsing and vital
resources were ceasing to be effectively distributed through free trade. Since
Japan was a small island nation mostly devoid of natural resources with a
rapidly expanding population, the collapse of the economic order threatened its
national well-being. American embargoes enacted in response to Japanese
expansion further exacerbated this fear. If Japan could not trade for necessary
resources, such as oil, how was it to acquire them? Further expansion into
China and Southeast Asia was then the answer.
Today, the economic order, though
challenged by the 2008 financial crisis, is not on the verge of collapsing.
Neither is China a small island economy devoid of natural resources. China
successfully imports raw materials from Australia, oil from the Middle East and
Africa, and soybeans and cotton from the United States (to name just a few
resources). The Chinese understand that the international economic order
facilitated their rise, and Xi Jinping’s commitment to develop the economic
potential of other nations, through such initiatives as One Belt One Road,
expresses confidence in this order.
Domestic Political Factors
In the 1930s, Japan was run by “government
by assassination”: those who acted against the military’s wishes would be
eliminated. Japan’s first major foray into Manchuria in 1931 was directed by
local army officers without the consent of the prime minister. Following
reforms, the army and navy ministers could bring down a cabinet by resigning,
effectively preventing civilian control of the government. As a result, no one
leader was able to effectively govern Japan, and strategic and policy decisions
were often made “in the field” by unqualified mid-ranking officers. In
contrast, the central proposition of the Chinese government since Mao is that
“the Party controls the gun.” Unauthorized military adventures—such as Japan’s
expansion into Manchuria—are not plausible in contemporary China.
Motives for Expansion
From 1895–1941, Japan spent forty-five
years expanding its territories, acquiring colonies, and conquering other
peoples in the Pacific, China, Manchuria, Mongolia, Russia and Southeast Asia.
In contrast, neither China’s leaders nor its military have expressed any
interest whatsoever in annexing territory to which the nation has no historical
claim. As Andrew Nathan and Andrew Scobell, two leading scholars of China, have observed:
All of China’s remaining unrealized
territorial claims—the island of Taiwan, 45,000 square miles of territory in
three parcels disputed with India, smaller border claims with other neighbors,
and several sets of islands in the East and South China seas—are based on this
history of one-time possession or exploration. In Beijing’s official rhetoric,
maps, and history books, we see no signs of preparations to lodge claims to
additional irridenta. In this sense, China is not an “expansionist” power with
elastic territorial claims. Its claims appear fixed.
By contrast, Japanese expansion seemed
limitless because the island nation had no natural stopping point.
Every continental territory it acquired seemed to require a new buffer state to
protect it; and after every conquest, one faction or another would advocate
conquering somewhere else—e.g., the Army the Soviet Union, or the Navy
Southeast Asia. There is no evidence whatsoever that the same expansionist urge
defines Chinese policy today. Indeed, the fact that China has participated in
no major war since 1979 and that historically China has
not sought to expand into neighboring nation-states reinforces this.
International Society
In the 1930s, international society was
the weakest it had been since the outbreak of the First World War. The United
States was not a member of the League of Nations, leaving that institution
relatively impotent. The USSR, which did join the league in 1934, was still
excluded from international society, and until the last days of European peace
was seen as a greater menace than even Nazi Germany. In 1933, Japan left the
League of Nations in response to the league’s condemnation of its occupation of
Manchuria, and in January 1936 it withdrew from the Washington System.
Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia and the bloody civil war in Spain had made a
mockery of international order, and Hitler, Stalin and the Japanese all desired
to exploit the breakdown of order.
By contrast, today the UN is globally
recognized as a legitimate institution to preserve peace. It is of course true
that the UN has not been able to solve pressing international questions, such
as the civil war in Syria, nonetheless it remains an important body for
codifying international norms and coordinating opposition to international
conquest. Were China to pursue the course of expansion Japan chose in the
1930s, it would be shamed in international society and excluded from the clubs
and institutions it so desires to influence.
At the same time, nationalism, another
component of contemporary international society, has made occupation of a
foreign nation prohibitively costly. To understand the growing prominence of
nationalism today, consider this. The
United States spent ten times what its enemies spent in Vietnam, and achieved
something of a stalemate; in Iraq, the United States spent 350 times what the
insurgents spent, and lost. The kill ratio in the Vietnam conflict was four to
one; in the Iraq conflict, two to one. The age of colonialism is over. Those
who ignore this truth will be unpleasantly surprised.
Technological Changes
In the 1930s, after two decades of
defensive dominance, the offensive had become predominant. Airplanes, aircraft
carriers, submarines and tanks had interjected mobility into battlefronts that
had before been dominated by trenches, barbed wire and battleships.
Consequently, technology facilitated Hitler’s expansion into Europe,
Mussolini’s into Africa, where Italy had been soundly defeated before, and
Japan’s into China.
By contrast, today the defensive is
increasingly dominant, particularly in East Asia. Cheap precision guided
munitions, quiet submarines, and other A2/AD weapons and tactics give the defensive the advantage,
raising the costs—with nationalism—for any offensive operation. Above and
beyond this, nuclear weapons today prevent the conquest of any great power, and
targeted proliferation could be promoted—in, say, Japan, South Korea, or
Australia—to deter aggression.
For China’s contemporary behavior to match
that of Japan in the 1930s, China would need to launch an invasion and
occupation of a large neighboring country—say Indonesia—brutally murder its
civilians and suppress its people, and then, in an act of seeming desperation,
invade other neighboring countries, such as Vietnam or Japan. This scenario
sounds so absurd because the analogy is inaccurate. Despite some
similarities—dissatisfaction with the balance of power and incomplete
integration into international society—the analogy does not hold because the
similarities are vastly outweighed by the differences. Neither the global
balance of power nor the global economic order is in the process of collapsing.
China is not governed haphazardly and incoherently by militarists. The Middle
Kingdom has no motive for expansion outside of its traditional territory (e.g.,
Taiwan), and even if it did, the costs imposed by international society,
nationalism and the dominance of the defensive would render any such expansion
impracticable.
The analogy between pre–World War II Japan
and contemporary China does not hold, but there may yet be some useful lessons
that can be derived from considering Japan’s earlier failed rise. China, like
Japan, is not going to tolerate regional military inferiority to the United States
if it can in any way help it. Similarly, China is likely to resent its partial
exclusion from international society, as did Japan. Recognizing China as a
great-power equal, negotiating a balance of power in East Asia—in place of the
current American doctrine of primacy—and welcoming China into international
society, even when this means decreasing American influence, are all likely to
ease China into a peaceful rise. The alternative—a mounting arms race and
global, zero-sum competition with China—is likely to fuel the paranoia, fear,
instability and anger that so characterized the 1930s.
Jared McKinney is a non-resident fellow at
the Pangoal Institution in Beijing and a PhD student in International Relations
at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological
University, Singapore.
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