No News Is Good News. Unless It Isn't.

Apart from an obvious difference in headlines, the New York Times and China Daily have similar takes on the recent meeting between the U.S. Secretary of Defense and his Chinese counterpart. That may simply be because the meeting took place behind closed doors. In the absence of new developments, stories about U.S.-China security issues always break down as follows: 1) Taiwan's status, 2) China's defense spending, and 3) the "chessboard" that is the Asia-Pacific region.

China's record of human rights abuses is an open sore, but painting the country as an "evil empire" doesn't work when transnational terrorism is the issue of the day, nor when the PRC borders a country best described as a criminal syndicate. As a result, the United States cannot easily rely on the Cold War playbook of taking the purported high road against an immoral enemy. For its part, China has couched its ambitions as a "peaceful rise," (和平崛起) and more recently as "peaceful development" (和平发展). After all, who could deny one's fundamental right to better oneself? That would be downright un-American.

Of course, the U.S. Defense Department would not be doing its job if it didn't keep a jaundiced eye on China's military, whose spending has more than tripled in the last ten years. Such a statistic is helpful when courting Congress during appropriations season but does not tell the whole story. For instance, China's military budget is still roughly one-sixth that of the United States. The question becomes one of strategy: can you envision a future in which the United States and China peacefully coexist in a world of dwindling natural resources, or would you rather plan for the possibility of war over food and energy security? Both countries, but particularly China, must consider the consequences of becoming net-importers of food. The United States has never been shy about using government subsidies in the name of "farm income stabilization" to ensure that U.S. agriculture is not priced out of existence. China, in addition to the pressures of international trade, is losing arable land from urbanization and desertification, and as it has with energy investments in Africa, is looking beyond its borders to address its basic needs.

As an aside, one of my favorite stories on the subject of China's military (the kind that makes me long for the Beijing cocktail parties I used to frequent) is how China got serious about its military technology after the first Gulf War, when the country's old guard--many of whom had been with Mao Zedong on the Long March--was shocked by the array of U.S. smart weapons it saw on CNN. The estimates on China's defense spending do nothing to contradict that rumor.