TALK ABOUT YOUR AXIS OF EVIL:

China watches the war and waits (Hsu Tung-ming, Apr 04, 2003,Taipei Times)

The collapse of the Soviet Union had a profound effect on China. Of all the many attempts to explain the Soviet collapse, the one most widely accepted in China is that constant US rearmament forced the Soviets to respond with a corresponding arms build-up, and that this broke the back of the Soviet economy.

Even though Chinese nationalism is surging high, and even though there is an urgent wish in China to become a great power and to do so quickly, the Soviet collapse taught Beijing's leaders to observe changes quietly while keeping their intentions to themselves and biding their time.

This is also the reason why the Chinese government in recent years has avoided playing the political card and has instead focused on economics. Chinese officialdom has all along maintained a low profile in bigger political disputes, such as the collision between a US Navy plane and a Chinese fighter in April 2001. On the economic front, China has promoted its favorable investment policies and the advantage of its huge markets to promote exchange with Southeast Asian and European nations. The effects of this policy seem to have been quite positive.

There are frequently political motives behind economic moves, and, in the eyes of some Chinese international-relations scholars, German and French disenchantment over the US-Iraq war seems to provide an opportunity. China is hoping for an international situation with a single superpower, ie, that the US will remain the one future superpower. That would leave Germany, France and China, all of which oppose the US, as the second strongest powers. Together, however, they would be able to constrain the US.

China, unable to face its own demographic crisis squarely, is not surprisingly deluding itself about the strength of Germany and France. Posted by Orrin Judd at April 4, 2003 8:50 PM