2018-11-20
The following is from this week’s installment of the column that Yoshiko Sakurai, whom I have repeatedly said deserves the People’s Honour Award, writes for Shukan Shincho.
U.S.-China Confrontation: China’s Inescapable Weakness
On November 9, the U.S.-China Diplomatic and Security Dialogue was held in Washington.
U.S. Secretary of State Pompeo and Secretary of Defense Mattis participated on the American side, while Chinese Communist Party Politburo member Yang Jiechi and Defense Minister Wei Fenghe participated on the Chinese side.
This ministerial dialogue was established by agreement between President Trump and President Xi Jinping when Xi visited the United States last year.
The first meeting was held in June of last year, and this was the second.
In this dialogue, Mr. Pompeo stated, “The United States does not seek a new Cold War with China, nor does it intend to contain China,” while Mr. Yang replied, “China will continue to remain on the path of reform and peaceful development,” suggesting that both sides were sounding out the other’s intentions and making a certain effort to preserve appearances so as not to damage the relationship.
However, once one looks more deeply into the substance of the talks, the severity of the current U.S.-China relationship becomes obvious.
The clear points of confrontation are the South China Sea, Taiwan, human rights, and North Korea.
On the South China Sea issue, the United States expressed strong concern over China’s militarization of the islands.
In its briefing for the media, the State Department revealed the following important point.
“The United States demanded that China remove the missile systems it has deployed on artificial islands in the Spratly Islands, and confirmed that all countries must refrain from using coercion or intimidation as a means of resolving disputes.”
Since China reclaimed the Spratly Islands that it had taken from countries such as the Philippines and built military bases there, this is probably the first time that the United States has made such a specific demand that China remove its missile equipment.
It is reasonable to regard this as the Trump administration going one step further in its demands.
The United States also made clear that, as before, it would continue navigation and overflight in the South China Sea in accordance with international law.
In response, Mr. Yang brazenly claimed that most of the facilities China had deployed in the South China Sea were for civilian use and argued that the United States should stop sending warships there under the banner of “freedom of navigation.”
This is precisely a claim that demonstrates that China is a country of “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies,” while at the same time they continue to demonstrate that one-party Communist dictatorships, and the regimes on the Korean Peninsula whose actual nature is the totalitarianism of Nazism, are foolish and evil systems that cannot survive unless they call white black and black white.
It is outrageous that countries such as these should swagger about and run rampant.
They also know thoroughly the weaknesses of countries founded upon freedom and democracy…that is, pseudo-moralism and the like become rampant, and by exploiting precisely those weaknesses they have continued, for example, to conduct influence operations against the Japanese media.
Just as was made clear by the Mitrokhin Archive and Levchenko’s testimony during the era when the Soviet Union existed, I am convinced that if China’s foreign influence operations and the foreign influence operations of the Korean Peninsula were fully exposed, it would become clear that many such elements exist throughout the political world, the bureaucracy, academia, the media, the business world, and other sectors.
To be continued.