China Redux

First things first: Is this really possible? Well, sort of. According to the NYT’s David Sanger and Joseph Khan, Bush Adminstration officials are “uncertain whether China’s top leaders, including President Hu Jintao, were fully aware of the test or the reaction it would engender.” The authors go on to note that Hu could have approved the test in principle at an earlier date, but not been informed about its actual timing. Furthermore, administration officials believe that the Chinese foreign ministry was left in the dark about the test.

If Hu and the foreign ministry were aware of it, they surely miscalculated the reaction from the US and international community (Japan, Canada, and Australia are among the countries who filed protest). This is precisely the type of Cold War scenario hawks point to justify outsized rhetoric about the threat China poses to international security and US power.

“This is a wake-up call,” said Robert Joseph, the under secretary of state for arms control and international security. “A small number of states are pursuing capabilities to exploit our vulnerabilities.”

And it is exactly what is needed to pressure Congress into accelerating funding for US weapons systems aimed.

As a result, officials said, the Chinese test is likely to prompt an urgent new effort inside the Bush administration to find ways to counter China’s antisatellite technology. Among the options are efforts to “harden” vulnerable satellites, improve their maneuverability so that they can evade crude kinetic weapons like the one that destroyed the Chinese satellite and develop a backup system of replacement satellites that could be launched immediately if one in orbit is destroyed.

Are Chinese leaders speechless because they expected the test to fail and not turn the aging satellite into floating debris? If so, they aren’t saying. If it was indeed a miscalculation, China has every reason to come forward; doing so would allay the immediate concerns of the US, and China will have still gained critical knowledge of its technical capabilities.

China appears to be out of the loop in every way — no one does this sort of thing anymore. From the Times story:

American officials noted that the United States and Russia had not conducted such tests for two decades, and that the international norm had changed, in part because so many private satellites had been launched by many nations.

The anti-satellite test is certain to become a lynchpin for both sides in the argument about how to engage a rising China. Neoconservatives and China Threat wonks inside the administration will argue the test shows that China cannot be trusted to conform to international norms in the security arena. Here is a statement on MSNBC from an unidentified official at State:

Arms control is not a viable solution for space. For example, there is no agreement on how to define ’space weapon.’ Without a definition you are left with loopholes and meaningless limitations that endanger national security. No arms control is better than bad arms control.

On the other hand, advocates of engagement will argue that this test could have been avoided by earlier efforts to sign a new, more expansive space treaty. In theory, an agreement would create the means to punish any country that went ahead with activities such as this.

It’s still China’s move.

Michael Glosny wrote a piece for the December 2006 issue of CSIS’s Freeman Report that speculates on the motivations behind China’s growing foreign aid expenditures.

In the end, there is still much that is left unanswered about Chinese foreign aid – and that is the central problem. On the one hand, it may be difficult to draw stark conclusions about the intentions behind China’s foreign aid. However, it is clear that China’s foreign aid policy has become more active, sophisticated, and is driven by a range of different objectives.

It is safe to say that reducing poverty and promoting human development are not chief among those objectives. Following the recent announcement of the creation of a $5 billion China-Africa development fund, the China Daily reported that the purpose of the fund is “to encourage Chinese companies to invest in Africa and provide support to them.” So, China’s big foreign assistance push in Africa is actually an investment vehicle to assist Chinese companies overseas, cultivate export markets, and support the procurement of natural resources. On the other hand, China did pledge to cancel the debt of the least developed African countries.

Meanwhile, the US has a bona fide slogan for its foreign assistance strategy: reducing poverty through economic growth (!). Sure, it doesn’t always turn out that way, but the US can point to demonstrable achievements supporting human development in Africa and elsewhere. The Bush Administration’s malaria and HIV/AIDS initiatives are prominent examples of this. The US also has an independent agency set up to help US companies overseas, OPIC, but its budget is a tiny fraction of total US foreign assistance.

Glosny also points out that China’s actual foreign aid expenditures are unknowable, since official Chinese figures fail to provide data on individual programs. Sound familiar? China has a similar problem with its military expenditures — an issue that has garnered far more attention from the Bush Administration. But foreign assistance should not be overlooked in the debate over transparency. The US foreign aid budget, for example, includes funding for various security assistance and training programs. Perhaps so too for China.

Whatever China’s actual foreign aid expenditures and motivations, it would be overly generous to suggest that China is using foreign aid to improve governance and reduce poverty. For now, that task is left to the MCC.