September 17, 2012
Panetta Seeks to Reassure Allies and Defuse China Tension
U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta left today on a mission to reassure Chinese leaders that the Obama administration’s pivot to Asia isn’t meant to provoke a confrontation over China’s increasingly assertive posture toward its neighbors.
Panetta will visit China Sept. 17 after stopping in Japan, a longtime U.S. ally in the Pacific. China, with the world’s second-biggest economy, is preparing for a leadership succession clouded by uncertainty.
Chinese leaders worry that the administration’s plan to reinforce the U.S. military presence in Asia is aimed at curbing China’s influence and encouraging countries to stand up to Beijing, according to Kenneth Lieberthal, a China specialist at the Brookings Institution in Washington. China’s claims to uninhabited islands and oil and natural gas fields in the East China and South China seas are disputed by nations including Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines.
“The U.S. does not take a position on territorial disputes,” Panetta told reporters on board a U.S. military airplane en route to Asia. “We do urge not just China but other countries to engage in a process to peacefully resolve these issues. What we don’t want is any provocative behavior either on the part of China or others that will result in a conflict.”
The U.S. military’s global strategy, announced in January, will result in positioning about 60 percent of the Pentagon’s naval assets in the Asia-Pacific region by 2020, up from about 50 percent now, Panetta told the region’s leaders in Singapore in June. As part of this “rebalancing,” the U.S. plans to redeploy to Guam military forces stationed in Japan and rotate a contingent of Marines through Australia, and probably also the Philippines.
CHINA'S CONCERN
Chinese leaders are concerned about the U.S. strategy, Lieberthal said. “In China, they’re pretty stoked up, at a time when they’re going through a difficult succession, that the U.S. is piling on by exacerbating China’s tensions with its neighbors,” he said in a phone interview. “They think it is purposeful and that’s what the U.S. means by rebalancing.”
One of Panetta’s tasks in China, which he will visit for the first time at the invitation of Defense Minister General Liang Guanglie, is to explain “what’s involved in rebalancing and try to take a little bit of air out of the heated rhetoric that’s increasingly characterizing the U.S.-China relationship,” Lieberthal said.
XI JINPING
Asked if Panetta would see Vice President Xi Jinping, who canceled meetings this month with visitors including U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Pentagon spokesman George Little said Sept. 13 that the itinerary wasn’t yet confirmed.
Xi, who is in line to be named president, appeared in public yesterday for the first time in two weeks, visiting an exhibition at the China Agricultural University in Beijing, according to the official Xinhua News Agency. China Central Television showed footage of him smiling and shaking hands with children.
In explaining U.S. strategy to his Chinese counterparts, Panetta must be careful not to appear to be placating China, as if its “emerging hard-line strategy” is paying off, said Patrick Cronin, an Asia specialist at the Center for New American Security, a policy center in Washington.
China appears to have abandoned Deng Xiaoping’s dictum “Hide your strength; bide your time” and instead is taking a more assertive approach toward its neighbors over territorial claims, Cronin said.
CHINA, JAPAN
China and Japan are deadlocked over ownership of a group of uninhabited islands in the East China Sea known as Senkaku in Japanese and Diaoyu in Chinese. On Sept. 13, China sent six government vessels near the islands into what Japan considers its territorial waters.
Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda announced last week that the country had bought the disputed islands from their private Japanese owner, a move China said it rejected.
The tension has led to Japanese citizens being attacked in parts of China, and also threatens the flow of Chinese tourists to Japan.
In April, China clashed with the Philippines over the Scarborough Shoals in the South China Sea. Chinese vessels last year cut the cables of a Vietnamese petroleum exploration ship.
“I am concerned that with these countries engaging in provocation of one kind or another over these various islands it raises the possibility that a misjudgment of one side or another could lead to violence,” Panetta told reporters today.
JAPAN, NEW ZEALAND
Panetta will stop first in Japan to meet his counterpart Satoshi Morimoto and Foreign MinisterKoichiro Gemba. After China, Panetta will travel to New Zealand.
New Zealand, once a U.S. treaty ally along with Australia, no longer has such a relationship after the South Pacific nation passed legislation in 1985 banning nuclear-powered ships or nuclear-armed vessels from calling at its ports.
While U.S. officials have said their military rebalancing isn’t aimed at containing China, “the circle around China orchestrated by the U.S. seems to be tightening,” Zhao Xiaozhuo, a senior colonel in the People’s Liberation Army, wrote in a Sept. 13 opinion piece in the China Daily, a state- run newspaper. An illustration accompanying the article showed Uncle Sam pouring gasoline on a fire.
The author wrote that the U.S. conducted a joint military exercise with the Philippines and encouraged Manila to take an “aggressive attitude” toward China during the two nations’ dispute over the Scarborough Shoals.
The U.S. also has held joint military exercises with Japan amid that country’s territorial dispute with China.
MILITARY BUDGET
In March, China’s announced an 11.2 percent increase in its annual military budget to about 670 billion yuan ($106.4 billion). The Pentagon’s proposed 2013 budget is $525 billion.
China’s increase in military spending continues “more than two decades of sustained annual increases,” according to the Pentagon’s annual report to Congress on China’s military.
“Analysis of 2000-2011 data indicates China’s officially disclosed military budget grew at an average of 11.8 percent per year in inflation-adjusted terms over the period,” according to the report prepared in May. The U.S. defense budget almost doubled in the decade ending 2010, fueled by spending on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Beyond Panetta’s challenge in explaining U.S. strategy, the “bigger issue is China’s growing nuclear capability,” said Larry Wortzel, a member of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a congressionally appointed panel that examines China’s military capabilities. “The major strategic concern for the U.S. ought to be the increase in their ballistic missile force.”
STEALTH FIGHTER
China is developing a stealth jet fighter that was first tested when U.S. Defense SecretaryRobert Gates visited Beijing in January 2011. It also is building the DF-21 anti-ship missile.
From China’s perspective, a top concern is the U.S. missile-defense capability in the region, as well as joint development under way with Japan, said Bonnie Glaser, a China specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
While relations with China demand attention, the U.S. should continue to tend to its long-standing ties with Japan, according to retired Navy Admiral Dennis Blair, a former U.S. Director of National Intelligence.
In discussing the rebalancing strategy with Japan, the U.S. must explain “what kind of Asia we want to see in the future,” Blair said.
NEW GENERATION
A new generation of Japanese is coming to power with a different view of China, said Blair, who also served as commander of the U.S. Pacific Command from 1999 to 2002. The Japanese once had “tremendous sympathy for China” and provided significant aid to the country, “but all that is gone now, and China is seen as a potential rival and possibly a threat,” he said.
Panetta also has to reassure Japan that the Marine Corps’ V-22 Osprey aircraft being deployed to U.S. bases in Japan will be safe. The Pentagon has delayed flying the V-22 in Japan while it investigates two crashes involving the aircraft, which lifts off like a helicopter and flies like an airplane.
Panetta will be the first U.S. defense secretary to visit New Zealand since Caspar Weinberger in the early 1980s. Panetta’s trip follows New Zealand Defense Minister Jonathan Coleman’s visit to Washington in June.
The increase in visits by U.S. officials to New Zealand “reflects American concern that China is gaining influence in the region, and the U.S. doesn’t want to cede that to China,” said Robert Ayson, a professor of strategic studies at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand’s capital. The U.S. is seeking to “bolster relations with New Zealand and the South Pacific.”
New Zealand, which has a free-trade agreement with China, and has substantial economic ties with the country, would like to “maintain a positive relationship” with both the U.S. and China, Ayson said. “If the U.S. and China get into a tense situation, it’s bad for all of us.”