This past week, China launched three astronauts into space and announced that their plan to build a canal linking the Pacific and the Caribbean had been fast-tracked by the Nicaraguan government. China has also emerged as one of the world’s largest investors in Africa; is developing ports in other nations; and announced plans to globally expand production of state-run broadcasts, quintupling the staff of CCTV by 2016.
Such efforts, as low-tech as they sound, are “serious business,” says Noah Feldman, author of the new book “Cool War: The Future of Global Competition” (Random House). “In both scale and symbolic meaning, it sends a powerful message to the Western Hemisphere.”
And though the US built the Panama Canal over a century ago and mastered manned spaceflight nearly 50 years ago, China’s recent accomplishments, Feldman says, are not to be trivialized: “It’s like they’re [cramming] a century of American growth in a decade.”
The first summit meeting between President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping took place on June 7, and was widely acknowledged as an effort to tamp down rising tensions. On the agenda: cyber-threats, North Korea, and the level of respect that must be afforded to China.
As Feldman points out in a recent essay, “never before has a rising power been so economically interdependent with the nation challenging it”: China owns 8% of our national debt; Chinese exports are 25% of our market. Their expansion into other regions — Central America, Africa, even recently hosting Israeli and Palestinian diplomats — suggests that China is feeling out the idea of becoming a superpower.
“Their toehold in Africa is reminiscent of the British Empire,” Feldman says. “It’s driven by resources, and China’s tremendous growth demands it. It’s an experimental moment for them. It may be that they’d prefer to be the dominant player in Asia — but that is to be, by default, a world power.”
As the Obama administration pivots to Asia — by 2020, 60% of our naval forces will be based in the region, as will 60% of our overseas Air Force — China has methodically begun pivoting toward the rest of the world. “They won’t undergo a humiliating state of affairs where they are the world’s largest economy, but pushed around by us. It’s not going to happen,” says Feldman. “How do they take their rightful place on the world stage? Slowly and rationally.”
Here are the largest moves China has recently made:
RESOURCE GRAB IN AFRICA
China’s share of Africa’s exports has risen so considerably in the last decade alone — surpassing that of the US in 2009 — that Beijing is now Africa’s largest trading partner. Petroleum is the most common import from the region (for all countries, including the EU) but China also imports many other raw materials, mainly from the Sub-Saharan region, notably Zambia, South Africa and Angola.
China’s role in Africa has been coined “resource nationalism” and is considered to be “much more pragmatic” than other types of colonization.
“[China] doesn’t claim to do anything evangelical,” explained “Cool War” author Noah Feldman. “They’re not saying, ‘You are inferior and we will help you.’ Nor are they saying, ‘You are inferior and we’ll take what we want.’ ”
Instead, it seems to be a two-way street, with both sides profiting.
The Chinese government has issued more loans to African countries than even the World Bank and has built up infrastructure all over the area. Not everyone is happy about China’s emerging role on the continent, however.
“In much of Africa, they have set up huge mining operations. They have also built infrastructure. But, with exceptions, they have done so using equipment and labor imported from home, without transferring skills to local communities,” Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, wrote in an op-ed for the Financial Times.
“So China takes our primary goods and sells us manufactured ones. This was also the essence of colonialism. The British went to Africa and India to secure raw materials and markets. Africa is now willingly opening itself up to a new form of imperialism.”
GWADAR PORT
This year, China paid nearly $200 million for the right to control Pakistan’s strategically placed deep-water port, reigniting concerns about China’s overall plans to exert its influence around the Indian Ocean.
Pakistan’s Gwadar Port, located on the Arabian Sea in the troubled Balochistan province, is a meeting point among South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East, and lies near the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s oil travels. The new port will cut trade routes between China and Africa by thousands of miles and prove a secure pathway — via a road that China plans to build through Pakistan — for oil and gas supplies from the Middle East to China. But even more than the ready access to oil, the US fears the new port might also act as a naval base capable of monitoring our military presence in the region.
This would be the latest in the many new military and commerical locations acquired or built by the Chinese that dot the Indian Ocean and extend from China to Sudan, a tactic dubbed “the string of pearls.”
“If China is able to develop Gwadar and other such facilities in the Indian Ocean peripheral to India into viable strategic outposts, India’s options will be constrained significantly,” British political science professor Harsh V. Pant wrote in The Japanese Times in February.
SPACE 2020
Thursday, three Chinese astronauts docked in their space module, where they are scheduled to spend 15 days — the longest amount of time in space in the nation’s history. (China first sent a man to space in 2003.) The ultimate goal is to build a space station that will be fully operational by 2020.
Though the Chinese space program is where ours was half a century ago, there are reasons to be concerned: The US ended our space shuttle program in 2011, with an eye toward public-private partnerships funding manned flight in the future, and ceding space exploration to the Chinese — even if temporarily — slows the technological innovations that inevitably follow.
In 2010, Richard Fisher, a senior fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center in Virginia, warned of the dangers of China’s increasing strides in space travel. In a piece called “China’s Scary Space Ambitions,” he wrote, “Today, China is beginning to shed the cloak of deception over its own missile-defense efforts, and has all but declared its intention to build an aerospace power to rival that of the US.”
One potential solution: The US and China partner in space exploration. — even though NASA is currently prohibited from doing so. In 2011, senior White House adviser John Holdren testified that President Obama has considered the option. “[What] the president has deemed worth discussing with the Chinese and others is that when the time comes for humans to visit Mars, it’s going to be an extremely expensive proposition and the question is whether it will really make sense — at the time that we’re ready to do that — to do it as one nation rather than to do it in concert,” Holdren said.
CYBER WARFARE
Last month, Congress released a strongly-worded report attributing numerous cyber attacks around the globe to the Chinese government. The security breaches released were damning — and the fear is that the government-sponsored attacks are not only to extract information from high-tech sectors in Silicon Valley, but also to steal military secrets from the Pentagon.
“Differentiating between civil and military end-use is very challenging in China due to opaque corporate structures, hidden asset ownership and the connections of commercial personnel with the central government,” the report read.
So far, the China cyber attacks were able to access 37 top-secret Pentagon weapons programs, including Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, a missile-defense system deployed to Guam to help counter North Korea; drone video systems; the Osprey, a hybrid of an airplane and a helicopter; and many other fighter-jet programs.
Meanwhile, in February, Chinese espionage was at an “all-time high,” according to the White House. Yet nothing happens.
“There is no cost, there are no sanctions, no diplomatic actions, no financial disincentives,” Shawn Henry, former director of the FBI’s criminal and cyber programs, told the AP. The US needs to sit down with Chinese leaders and talk about “what the red lines are and what the repercussions will be for crossing those red lines,” he said.
NICARAGUA CANAL
On Thursday, the Nicaraguan government granted a private Chinese company the go-ahead to build a massive, 130-mile canal across its country. When completed (in roughly 40 years), the canal will be twice as long and wider than its direct competitor, the Panama Canal, completed by the US almost 100 years ago. The project will cost $40 billion and is estimated to capture 4.5% of the world’s freight traffic, doubling Nicaragua’s GDP and adding 40,000 construction jobs in the process, proponents of the project say.
But the profit margins might not be suitably high for such an expensive project, especially since the Panama Canal will finish its $5 billion expansion plan, which will double capacity and widen lanes, in 2014. And the Panama Canal, which handles 5% of the worldwide traffic, only nets about $1 billion per year in tolls, and has the ability to cost-cut if faced with direct competition.
“The motivation is less economic and more geopolitical,” financial advisor Charles Lewis Sizemore wrote in his capital investment report. “In Nicaragua, China has the potential to essentially bribe one of the poorest countries in the Western hemisphere into being a loyal ally.”
Their choice of Nicaragua, which has never been close to the US, is telling. China is saying, in essence, “If push comes to shove, if the US were ever to shut down the Panama Canal, we have our own canal,” Noah Feldman told The Post.