Opinion

America’s looming China challenge

A dangerous storm is brewing over the Pacific, as America and the People’s Republic of China enter what may be their tensest decade since President Richard Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972.

The latest flash is the running fight over Internet freedom, with Google this month withdrawing from China in protest against government censorship. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is hitting Beijing over the issue, but it may be the least of our worries.

On Jan. 11 China tested a new high-boost ballistic missile, the HQ-19, which some experts fear is part of China’s ongoing program to find ways to disable US military satellites. Another pending issue will fan the flames: arms sales to Taiwan.

Taiwan wants to upgrade its aging military air fleet with Blackhawk helicopters and F-16 fighters. It also holds a contract with the Raytheon Corp. for an anti-missile Patriot Missile System — with a separate contract for delivery of the missiles. And the Chinese are furious about it.

Yet who can blame the Taiwanese? Over the last decade, Communist China has aimed a vast, interlocking system of hundreds of ballistic missiles at its tiny but longstanding capitalist rival across the Taiwan Straits.

And the implications of this missile buildup go far beyond Taiwan. A Pentagon report last year concluded that Beijing now has the world’s biggest land-based ballistic-missile program.

What worries our military is that these missiles threaten not only Taiwan but also our ships at sea — and the most sophisticated are aimed at our military communication and control satellites. The HQ-19 test is a major leap in that capability.

Throw in the nearly 6,000 computer hackers the Chinese People’s Liberation Army employs daily to devise ways to crash FORCEnet and other US military-communications software: In a real crisis, our Army, Navy and Air Force could find themselves fighting blind.

Warning bells have been going off in the Pentagon for several years, but policymakers prefer to ignore them.

The governing assumption has been that Chinese-US relations would only get better as our economies became more interdependent. China experts told us how China and America were becoming more alike, even steadfast partners in globalization. They dismissed China’s steady military buildup as a vestige of China’s Cold War vulnerability.

Besides, in terms of dollars, China’s military budget is barely a seventh of ours. Yes, it has doubled in the last decade, and China two years ago became the world’s No. 2 military spender — but it would still take them decades to catch up to No. 1.

Now, it turns out that while we were playing checkers, the Chinese were playing chess. The largest land army in the world, the largest submarine fleet and the third-largest air force, plus an increasingly sophisticated multiple-warhead ballistic-missile arsenal: Having all that may not give Beijing the power to take what it wants (yet). But it’s developing the power to deny: deny us the ability to assist Taiwan and Japan militarily; deny us access to the East Asian land mass and the region’s major strategic choke points; possibly even deny us routes to and from Asia across the Indian Ocean as well as access to our own satellite and communications networks.

That positions them perfectly as a rival we dare not ignore — or displease.

Our Asian partners get it. India and Japan last month signed a strategic-cooperation pact, doubtless in order to plan how to deal with a potential Chinese foe.

And Japan has reversed course on its longstanding demand that we close our military base in Okinawa. Japan’s new prime minister now thinks our plans to shift forces to Guam might be a mistake. Guam is a long way from Tokyo — but also from China.

Unfortunately, we’re headed in the opposite direction. While China builds, we’re shedding ships, planes, nukes and strategic-weapons programs. As our Navy cuts its aircraft carriers from 11 to 10, it’s also committed to sinking its money into 50-plus new hi-tech Littoral Combat Ships — which are handy for fighting pirates and terrorists but useless against Chinese subs and missiles.

Meanwhile, President Obama’s domestic policies give China the whip hand over our economy and a mountain of US Treasury debt. The growing US reliance on China as its economic and fiscal savior is set to breed a lasting resentment and mistrust.

At best, China may become what Japan was in the ’80s: the economic challenger Americans love to hate. At worst, an even more drastic revision of US-China relations may be in the offing.

Either way, as the fight over Google and the looming one over Taiwan show, the trend line is far from encouraging.

Arthur Herman’s most recent book, “Gandhi and Churchill,” was a Pulitzer Prize finalist last year.