Ch. 5: Crouching Tiger Serialization

A Revisionist Or Status Quo Power?

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Question: Which description is most likely to fit a rapidly militarizing China over the next several decades of the 21^st century?

1.     China will be a “status quo” power interested only in prosperous economic engagement, a peaceful rise, and the opportunity to become a responsible stakeholder in the international world order.

2.     China will behave like a “revisionist” power and use its growing economic and military might to expand its territory and hegemonic influence in Asia.

This question and clue really does cut to the heart of our “will there be war” matter.   On the one hand, if the answer is #1 and China benignly seeks only prosperous engagement and a “peaceful rise” as the rhetoric of the Chinese leadership has frequently emphasized,[i] there is a very low probability of conflict. 

On the other hand, if the answer is #2 and China does indeed intend to use force or coercion to seize new territories in Asia and to become, as Professor John Mearsheimer has warned, a “regional hegemon,” these revisionist and malign intentions will certainly be a recipe for military clashes, if not all-out war.

So how might we determine whether China will act as a status quo or revisionist power?  If the past is indeed often prologue, one possible way is to carefully analyze China’s behavior since the Chinese Communist Party seized power in 1949.  In fact, even the most casual review of such a history reveals a deep disconnect between the “peaceful rise” rhetoric of the Chinese leadership and the reality of a long history of aggression spanning more than six decades. 

This reality begins in 1950 with one of the largest imperial land grabs in world history: China’s military conquests of Tibet and Xinjiang.  Together, these two mineral-rich spoils of war span over one million square miles and today comprise fully 30% of the current Chinese land mass.

Both the invasions of these territories and the ongoing brutal treatment of their indigenous peoples shine a very bright light on the darkest side of Chinese authoritarianism.  These invasions are also highly symptomatic of China’s historically-based territorial claims that are at sharp odds with a body of modern international law that does not easily recognize such “revanchist” arguments.

In 1950, China also entered the Korean War with one of the most effective sneak attacks in modern warfare history.  Under cover of darkness, a full three-division army numbering more than 100,000 troops surreptitiously crossed the Yalu River into North Korea and caught allied forces completely by surprise.  The grim result: the slaughter of thousands of US and South Korean troops.

During the early 1950s, China would likewise help the Vietnamese drive the French colonialists out of Indochina. The defining battle at Dien Bien Phu, planned under the watchful eyes of Chinese strategists and prosecuted with large caches of Chinese weapons, led to a defeat no less humiliating for the French than Napoleon’s at Waterloo; and after the French withdrawal in 1954, Vietnam would be split into two nations, north and south.  This would set the stage for America’s own inglorious retreat from South Vietnam several decades later.

In 1962, China would begin the first of three surprise attacks on former friends and allies with an invasion of India.  This Sino-Indian War involved two separate border disputes over 1,000 miles apart, each with their own unique history and each, in no small way, an extension of China’s conquests of Tibet and Xinjiang twelve years earlier.

The first border dispute, in the western theater, focused on China’s seizure of the Aksai Chin portion of the Kashmir region. The second dispute, in the eastern theater of war, hinged around the Indian-held Arunachal Pradesh, an area China continues to claim as “Southern Tibet.” 

As for the war itself, it was pure Hobbes – nasty, brutish, and short. It was also India’s most humiliating defeat – one that has left the Indian populace with a deep and abiding distrust of China.