However, the US wants China’s support on some contentious international issues. For instance, Washington hopes Beijing will agree to new sanctions on Iran if they are deemed necessary. While Beijing supports nuclear nonproliferation and Iran’s inclusion in it, it is not keen on UN Security Council-mandated sanctions.
Indeed, China hosted an official visit from Iranian Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi only a few days ago. The Xinhua news agency reported that Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) commended the progress in Sino-Iranian relations at a meeting with Rahimi. Even with existing sanctions in place, two-way trade between China and Iran rose 35 percent last year, to US$27 billion. And in the last five years, China has reportedly signed about US$120 billion in oil deals with the Islamic republic.
North Korea, though, has become an area of shared concern. Washington relies heavily on China in persuading Pyongyang into giving up its nuclear ambitions. Despite Wen’s recent visit to North Korea, the latter remains obdurate, and Beijing is not willing to bring down the regime in Pyongyang for fear of a flood of refugees into China. Beijing’s political leverage is limited. Therefore, US reliance on China to reign in North Korea seems as unproductive as any other course.
Even though political rhetoric on China sounds quite positive, there is considerable concern about its rising military power. Lately, there has been a panic of sorts in US military circles over China’s development of a “killer missile,” believed to have “the range of a ballistic missile and the accuracy of a cruise missile,” to target US aircraft carriers.
Vice Admiral John Bird, commander of the Seventh Fleet, is worried.
“Challenged with that threat, you might adjust your approach, but that is a far cry from making carriers obsolete,” Bird said in Sydney.
He does think that China’s naval capability “has grown much faster than any of our predictions.” And many of these new capabilities “are intended to counter” the US Navy with weapons systems “targeted to our carriers and larger ships.”
Referring to some provocative naval incidents that recently occurred in the South China Sea, Bird said: “They [China] have made it clear they consider the South China Sea to be more or less theirs.”
And he is quite right because China passed legislation in the 1990s to assert that claim. The South China Sea is therefore likely to become the testing ground of China’s maritime power.
Basically, “the Chinese would like to see less of the Seventh Fleet in this part of the world,” Bird said.
He said that China ultimately aimed to displace the US in the Pacific. In other words, despite all the recent political bonhomie between the US and China, the inherent logic of an eventual naval showdown at some point in the future is hard to ignore.
Sushil Seth is a writer based in Australia.
RSS