The menacing giant

CHINA: THE GATHERING THREAT

By Constantine Menges

Nelson Current, $27.99,

554 pages

REVIEWED BY STEVEN W. MOSHER

In a sobering confirmation of the thesis of “China: The Gathering Threat,” a new book by Constantine Menges, the Pentagon will soon tell us that China’s military budget continues to skyrocket. It now has the third, some say second, largest military budget in the world and that it is ratcheting up its efforts to buy, build, and deploy new, hi-tech weapons systems. As Donald Rumsfeld put it at a recent Asian security conference, “Since no nation threatens China, why this growing investment? Why these continuing large weapons purchases?” These pointed questions elicited from the head of the Chinese delegation nothing more than a sarcastic retort. “Do you truly believe that the United States feels threatened by the so-called emergence of China?” jibed foreign ministry official Cui Tiankai at the American secretary of defense.

If we don’t yet feel threatened by China’s rapid and ongoing militarization, we certainly should, Menges argues. In a sense his last will and testament, Menges devoted the closing months of his life to the book’s completion, racing to finish the final chapters before he passed away last June. He calls China “a gathering danger hidden in plain view,” pointing out that the Beijing regime has, since 1990, “defined the United States as its ’main enemy;’ used espionage to steal the designs of nearly all U.S. nuclear warheads and many other military secrets; focused its military modernization, doctrine, and increasingly lethal advanced weapons on U.S. forces in the Pacific; and explicitly threatened to destroy entire American cities if the U.S. were to help the democratic country of Taiwan defend itself against Chinese military assault.” China’s ultimate goal, Menges points out, is to become the hegemon, dethroning the United States as the world’s dominant power.

Beijing’s grand strategy has been largely hidden from the West by a strategic disinformation campaign that has succeeded in convincing some in the ranks of American scholars, journalists and government officials that China poses no threat to the United States. But Menges, who dealt in fundamentals, was not fooled for an instant, frequently telling his friends that China will always be a threat as long as it remains a nuclear-armed communist dictatorship.

He was uniquely qualified, both personally and professionally, to speak on the subject of ideological dictatorships. A refugee from Nazi Germany, he was sent alone to America at the age of four. One of his earliest memories was of seeing the Statue of Liberty, her golden torch held high in the morning light, as his ship entered New York harbor. The sight lit a fire for liberty within his soul that would ever illuminate his life and work.

In 1978, Menges proposed the establishment of the National Endowment for Democracy to support democratic movements in countries languishing under communist and other dictatorships. President Reagan liked the idea, sold it to Congress, and in 1983 the NED came into existence. Joining the CIA in 1981, Menges successfully urged the agency to support democratic political movements as a way of containing, and even rolling back, communism, especially in Latin America. He moved to the White House in 1983 where, as a special assistant to the president for national security affairs, he drew up what became known as the “Menges Plan,” which restored democracy to Grenada after the communist coup there. Rollback had become a reality.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, he turned his attention to China. After the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre, he saw the Beijing regime become increasingly repressive at home and duplicitous in its dealings abroad. Chinese leaders signed international human rights agreements with great fanfare even as dissidents of all stripes daily disappeared into the Chinese gulag. They spoke incessantly of world peace and stability even as they secretly approved massive increases in their military budget. They encouraged Western investment and technology transfers even as they engaged in a kind of trade war with the United States and its Asian allies. By keeping their currency undervalued and paying their workers less than a dollar a day, they ran up a cumulative trade surplus of over a trillion dollars with the United States, and seemed intent upon relocating much of the world’s industrial infrastructure to within China’s borders. Perhaps most worrisomely, they began to draw a bankrupt Russia into their embrace.

All of these developments are masterfully presented by Menges. (Indeed, the nearly 200 pages on Russia, and the burgeoning Russia-China alliance, could easily have been published as a stand-alone book.) But the heart of the book, in my view, is a detailed scenario for the gradual extension of China’s writ throughout the world over the next 20 years. This 50-page tour de force defies easy summary, but involves such developments as a Chinese effort to win control of key maritime choke points (think Panama Canal), become a major player in the world’s energy supplies (think about the offer of China’s state-controlled energy company to buy Unocal), and to use international organizations for its own purposes (think about the Chinese-led effort to successfully remove the United States from the U.N. Human Rights Commission.)

This makes for absolutely chilling reading, primarily because it accords so well with what we in the China-watching community know about the long-term designs of this nuclear-armed communist dictatorship. As China achieved in Menges’ account first regional, and then pan-Asian, and then global hegemony, I found myself nodding in agreement with point after point. A global pax Sinica with devastating consequences for liberty could happen, and in just the way he describes. The current rulers of China yearn to be the center of the earth.

But this democratic revolutionary born and bred is not about to concede defeat. In the final section of the book, Menges presents a strategy for defeating this tyranny, just as Mao Zedong had earlier devised a strategy to create it. His strategy does not involve military force, but rather a potent combination of economic, cultural and political pressure exerted by the United States and its allies.

Some may not have the stomach for some of his suggestions that a Chinese parliament-in-exile be set up and funded, for example, to provide a democratic alternative to the Chinese Communist Party. Nearly everyone will agree with others, such as continuing to guarantee the security of a free Taiwan, where a democratically elected parliament, the Legislative Yuan, already exists. For the rest of Menges’ plan to democratize China, read the book. It’s time for rollback.

Steven W. Mosher is president of the Population Research Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to debunking the myth that the world is overpopulated.