Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [110]
“American nuclear weapons could destroy China, so it has to make the U.S. understand clearly that China will not wait for them to strike first, but will itself attack. In other words, the United States cannot viciously threaten China with its nuclear weapons because it might provoke China into using nuclear weapons first. That is the essence of China’s preemptive first-strike strategy.
“China has sufficient first-strike nuclear capability to destroy only Hawaii and a few cities on the West Coast of the United States, but that is enough to inflict unacceptable levels of destruction on the Americans. Even if the U.S. counterattack could then produce a hundred times more destruction in China, the American people would still regard the damage on their own soil as too high a price to pay. China employs these two threats—preemptive first-strike and long-range unilateral attack—to frighten the Americans out of the idea of launching a nuclear war against it.
“Even the victor in a nuclear war will pay too great a price—this is also a tacit ‘live and die together’ agreement. China’s strategy is open and made perfectly clear to the United States in order to avoid any misunderstanding on their part. At the same time, China has consistently urged the Americans not to establish an antimissile defense network in the eastern Pacific because that would give rise to a Sino-American nuclear-arms race, and force China to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of breaking through the American antimissile shield, as well as build nuclear submarines and space-based weapons.”
He Dongsheng didn’t believe that nuclear war between the United States and China was likely, and he believed that the probability of the U.S. launching a conventional-warfare invasion of Chinese territory was virtually nil, despite the continued presence of the American military throughout East Asia.
Historically, he said, the Chinese nation’s greatest fear had always been invasion by non-Chinese ethnic groups, the division of China’s national territory, and rule by non-Chinese conquerors. Such fears are quite unnecessary now. China’s current national-defense systems are the strongest they have ever been in the five-thousand-year history of the Chinese race.
“Who would dare invade Chinese territory today?” he asked emphatically.
Since the founding of the People’s Republic, leaving aside conflicts involving Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang, China has had short-term military clashes on its borders with India, the Soviet Union, the former South Vietnam, and Vietnam. The only conflict that truly threatened Chinese national security was the “Resist the United States, Assist North Korea” conflict of sixty years ago.
There are fourteen nations with which China has land borders, and six with adjacent territorial waters. Since 1949 China has already settled fourteen land-border disputes and three offshore-island disputes, but there are still some disputes that cannot be settled in the immediate future. These include India’s refusal to recognize Chinese ownership of the 38,000-square-kilometer Aksai Chin region on the Tibetan plateau; China’s refusal to recognize the 84,000-square-kilometer South Tibet region as part of the Arunachal Pradesh