A Short History of The Chinese Containment
For the past 16 years, American strategic bomber forces have flown sorties called “ elephant walks” aimed at China and North Korea. This is called the Continuous Bomber Presence, and was instituted to remind China and North Korea that American air power can reach their borders within hours.
In 2016 CNN interviewed Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson concerning flights towards North Korea conducted in response to North Korean ballistic missile tests:
“‘They absolutely took notice,’ Ripley said of the North Koreans. ‘A lot of North Korean military commanders find U.S. bombers especially threatening, given the destruction here in Pyongyang during the Korean War, when much of the city was flattened,’ Ripley said.”
According to the U.S. Air Force, 75% of Pyongyang was destroyed during the Korean War — many cities were 80% destroyed and a few were 100% destroyed. The United States would go on to bomb dams as well — destroying agricultural land and food supplies to encourage starvation.
In 1902 Winston Churchill delivered a revealing speech at the University of Michigan.
“I think we shall have to take the Chinese in hand and regulate them. I believe that as civilized nations become more powerful they will get more ruthless, and the time will come when the world will impatiently bear the existence of great barbaric nations who may at any time arm themselves and menace civilized nations. I believe in the ultimate partition of China — I mean ultimate. I hope we shall not have to do it in our day. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph.”
Just one year before Churchill’s speech, the British along with the Russians, French, Spanish, Germans, Belgians, Dutch, Americans, Italians, and the Japanese, signed the Boxer Protocol with the Qing dynasty after putting down the Boxer Rebellion. Claiming to have saved the city of Beijing from being conquered by the rebels, the European coalition proceeded to rape and bayonet the population.
The Sidney Morning Herald reported that it was a “ carnival of loot”, and even the missionaries and diplomats grabbed as much treasure as they could manage. For the next year the city was looted, and the coalition used Beijing as a staging area from which to range outward and claim more loot. Most of that loot found its way into museum collections.
This was not the first time Beijing had been looted by foreigners. In the course of the Second Opium War in 1860, in which a combined Franco-British fought its way to Beijing, the Old Summer Palace was looted as revenge for the torture and murder of members of a diplomatic party sent to negotiate the details of a truce with the Qin.
The European powers entered Asia by many routes — the Portuguese had located Indonesia in 1512, and the Dutch had managed to take over the island chain by 1595, agglomerating a number of private venture companies into one state-owned enterprise which would glean immense profits until 1945.
In 1853 the U.S. Navy sent the Perry Expedition to Japan in order to establish trade relations — an event which coincided with the death of the shōgun, Tokugawa Ieyoshi. A confused and leaderless Japanese government conceded after a succession of threats and shows of force. This decision eroded the legitimacy of the position of the shōgun, triggering a chain of events which plunged Japan into a civil war in 1868. By 1869 the shōgunate had been defeated and replaced as ruler by the Meiji emperor — the grandfather of Emperor Hirohito, who would preside over the attacks on Guam, the Phillipines, and Pearl Harbor in 1941.
In 1899 the United States invaded and took the Phillipines under the pretense that it was one of the Spanish possessions to be taken in the Spanish-American War of 1898. When the local population discovered that one imperial power would be replaced by another — that the Americans had not simply freed them — the situation devolved into the Phillipine-American War, or the “Phillipine Insurrection”. By the time Winston Churchill gave his speech in 1902, the Americans had re-conquered the country after three years of open battle and brutal counter-insurgency.
Chinese historiography remembers the period between 1840 and 1950 the “century of humiliation”, and the Boxer Protocol is considered one of the “ unequal treaties” imposed upon China.
The Boxer Protocol was essentially a peace treaty, signed by the Qin when they felt sure that the Western powers in Beijing did not intend to conquer the city per se. China agreed to pay a war indemnity which was to equal to, in 1901 dollars, $333 million USD paid over a period of 39 years at a 4% interest rate, split eight ways. By 1908 the United States had been convinced by the Chinese ambassador to use some of their plundered money for the education of Chinese-Americans.
The opening of China to the European powers has always been one of prying rather than welcome trade. The European nations of the Eight-Nation Alliance of the Boxer Rebellion had a presence in Beijing because they had negotiated their way to having trade legations in the city. The European powers used their considerable economic and military leverage to negotiate immense infrastructure deals, from building railways to electrification. The French had particularly entrenched themselves by assimilating pockets of the population to Christianity, which both caused unrest and allowed the French to lobby for the right to protect these people, serving as an excuse for a form of local rule within the Chinese state.
This is how China was approached, in a manner not dissimilar to how the Spanish and Portuguese first approached the “New World” — heavily armed and prepared to take the capitals of these nations under siege to secure favourable trade arrangements.
George Kennan, an American diplomat, infamously advocated and sought to implement a policy of “containment” as a geopolitical grand strategy following the Second World War. In a speech delivered at Johns Hopkins called “Certain Long Term Implications of Suez” in 1956, Kennan said of the progress of some communist states:
“‘I never said we would-or should-be able to hold equally everywhere. But I felt there was a good sporting chance that we would be able to hold in enough places, and in sufficiently strategic places, to accomplish our general purpose.’”
To “hold equally everywhere” is at odds with the notion of democratic intentions, and as a pragmatist Kennan was not concerned with the issue of backing the Chinese nationalists in Taiwan — the tiny “Republic of China” which held China’s U.N. seat — under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, who would impose a martial law in 1949 which would last until 1987. The Generalissimo had retreated to Taiwan during the Civil War and remained there, taking control of the pre-existing Japanese colonial infrastructure, already one of repression and assimilation.
This was not a contrarian position to Kennan, because the containment of China did not necessarily concern the welfare of the Chinese people, but rather the business prospects of the American mission. Iron-fisted repression was simply outweighed by strategic alliance and economic advantage, as Taiwan would be made to function as both an industrial center for American consumption and as a damsel in distress to provide context for the immense military containment apparatus encircling the Chinese mainland. Much like the French would claim that the protection of the Catholic Chinese was the real reason for sallying out into the countryside with troops, the Americans would time and again point to Taiwan as one of the reasons for the encirclement.
After a century of invasion and internal strife, China has unified and developed into a modern nation with its own economy. Nothing could be more alarming for the American strategic position in the region, held as it has been since the turn of the century. In turn the old American economic strategy in the region has been turned on its head. Where once it was supposed that the Chinese market, from its infrastructure to its general consumption, would provide profit to European powers, China survived the Cold War and emerged with the capability to develop its own infrastructure. Even more “alarming”, it now seeks to emulate the invaders, moving to expand its own political and economic sphere into the international realm.
In just three years, 2011–2013, China had used more concrete than the United States had consumed since 1900. In July of 2017, China used more concrete than the United States had used that year. In fact in 2017 they used more concrete than the rest of the world’s nations combined, at 2,400,000 metric tonnes to the world’s 1,728,300.
This is why the U.S. Navy’s 7th Fleet maintains a “ persistent presence” in the South China Sea — ostensibly maintaining the safety of the 21% of global maritime trade which passes through the region, as well as the many nations which contest the rights to sections of the sea. Coincidentally many of these nations, in combination with U.S. island possessions, host American military bases.
The U.S. Pacific Air Force (PACAF) administers a number of air bases, one of which — Anderson Air Force Base — is situated on the island of Guam. In April PACAF ended the CBP, which would ostensibly mean the end of this particular containment program. However the show of force will continue under the pretense of a new program, which stipulates that strategic bomber forces will fly out of bases in North and South Dakota and will base themselves at Guam in classified deployment cycles.
The primary reason for this redeployment is not one which will be loudly announced — North Korea and China now have ballistic missiles which can reach Guam. China even calls its DF-26 missile the “ Guam killer”, just to clear up any possibility of misinterpretation.
Why would North Korea or China want to launch a missile at the air bases which launch nuclear-capable bomber forces towards their countries at regular intervals? It seems likely they think the same way as the Americans, or any other nation really — such a show of dominance by a foreign power is both dangerous and politically unacceptable. North Korea can do nothing but wince at these flights while making a big show of their tests, but China is now big enough to throw its weight around.
China’s Civil War was won by the Communists, despite the best effort of American policy. Before the second phase of the Civil War began following the Second World War, President Truman lamented the communist expansion within China and explained his reasoning for allowing Japanese soldiers to remain armed and in place after surrendering:
“It was perfectly clear to us that if we told the Japanese to lay down their arms immediately and march to the seaboard, the entire country would be taken over by the Communists. We therefore had to take the unusual step of using the enemy as a garrison until we could airlift Chinese National troops to South China and send Marines to guard the seaports.”
In this context the American disdain for the Chinese government is not simply a holdover from the Cold War, but a leftover strategic truth which has persisted since the initial penetration into China. That the Chinese should determine their own government was unacceptable, and a government which was not democratic was one which destroyed the entire point of the successive invasions of China — to secure its markets for European powers.
Writing in The Diplomat, Francis P. Sempa argues in his article The Case for Containing China that:
“Foreign policy realists understood this better than most observers because they view international politics without using ideological, progressive, or sentimental lenses. China is a great power and will act like great powers have always acted: It will seek to expand its power and influence. Nothing the United States could have done after the end of the Cold War would have changed that. For some Americans, especially those who view the world through Wilsonian lenses, that is hard to admit. What Charles Krauthammer called America’s ‘unipolar moment’ was just that — a moment, and a brief one at that.”
While China’s construction of artificial islands is presented as a slow power-creep into the sea, it’s better understood as an attempt to secure its own forward air basing capabilities in an atmosphere of existing containment. Surrounded, China seeks to secure its own seaboard, and perhaps the legitimacy which would attend “protecting” maritime trade in the region in lieu of American sea power. It shouldn’t sound too much like science fiction to imagine that China would like its navy to secure the South China Sea, and that the American presence has been much like the Cuban Missile Crisis was for the United States. The barrel of a gun aimed squarely at the home country is too much for either America or China to bear for too long. For America that time was 12 days, for China it was about 120 years.
Originally published at https://reeducation.substack.com.
