The great dragon that is China has certainly been making news lately! I predicted in March that, “If we get out of this century without the Islamofascists bringing down all of Western Civilization, we’ll still need to deal with China.” And, back in November just before the election, one of the architects of China’s foreign policy made this statement:

“The 21st century is not the ‘American century’. That does not mean that the United States does not want the dream. Rather it is incapable of realizing the goal.”

This highlighted a discussion of China’s prediction that the United States would soon cease to be a global power because its concentration on the GWOT would distract it and leave it vulnerable to a hungry and emergent China. Items in the news for the last week seem to show that the Dragon is fully awake and is engaged in implementing its long term strategies of world domination. If you were as taken aback as I was a couple of weeks ago when the 70% Chinese government owned CNOOK (China National Offshore Oil Corporation) made an $18.5 billion unsolicited bid for Unocal, imagine what the defense department was going through last Friday when Gen. Zhu, head of China’s National Defense University threatened that 100s of American cities would be destroyed by Chinese nuclear weapons if the US tried to interfere during a confrontation over Taiwan.

Today, at least it looks like Chevron is likely to prevail in its bid for Unocal, and the Unocal board is backing Chevron’s sweetened, but still lower than CNOOK’s bid. [h/t: Drudge] But, even if China fails in its attempt to acquire a strategic global resource like Unocal, they have a long-range plan that we need to pay attention to, and plan reactions to, before we look up from our own glorious-narcissistic stupor and suddenly realize that the whole world has turned Chinese!

Keeping this faupau in mind, once in a great while the Los Angeles Times lays out some info worth reading and contemplating. In Sunday’s edition, it was a long investigative story on China’s world-wide actions to acquire access to oil reserves.

To secure deals worth tens of billions of dollars, Beijing is cozying up to regimes in nations, including Iran and Sudan, that Washington labels pariahs. And it is flexing its military muscle to lay claim to contested fields in East Asia.

China’s aggressive search is putting it in growing competition with the United States, the world’s largest oil consumer. Some observers even warn of a possible showdown between the two economic giants.

“The Bush administration’s attitude toward China at the moment is to look for ways to work with them, but I don’t know how sustainable this policy is going to be,” said Gal Luft, executive director of the Washington-based Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, a conservative think tank. “At the end of the day, you’ve got two very large consumers competing over the same sandbox. Sooner or later the Chinese are going to run out of places they can look for oil.”

For one thing, China is being very aggressive in Africa, working with several countries up front with large infrastructure programs like roads, in exchange for contracts for oil and gas exploration. The LA Times article continues:

Besides diplomatic clout, China offers low-interest loans and promises of better roads and other aid that Western oil companies typically don’t.

Beijing has won friends in Africa with big gestures, including a $1.2-billion, continentwide debt-forgiveness program.

It has also addressed the needs of individual countries.

In the slums of Luanda, the capital of oil-rich Angola, residents living amid garbage and open sewers have witnessed the march of modern electricity pylons through their neighborhood, thanks to the Chinese. A few miles away, on the city’s outskirts, a modern village is set off from the surrounding shacks by a security fence, built to house government officials. It too was a gift from the Chinese.

Chinese-built roads, bridges and railroad installations are on the drawing board, part of a $2-billion infrastructure loan program Beijing signed with the country last year in return for oil.

Angola, which is China’s second-largest supplier after Saudi Arabia and accounts for about 300,000 barrels a day, may be one of the biggest African recipients of China’s largesse, but it’s hardly alone. China’s African footprint is growing — from the blue Chinese tiles adorning autocratic Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s palace roof and the smooth blacktop roads snaking across Rwanda to the new railways in Nigeria and a high-profile port project in Gabon.

The Chinese do what it takes to “lubricate their way into foreign oil deals,” said Luft of the Washington-based think tank.

Outside of Africa, China is active in Canada, South America, the Iran-India-gas pipeline, the China-Russia oil pipeline, plus, “the Saudis have opened an office of the state oil company, Aramco, in Beijing and a consulate in Hong Kong”. In the just released annual Pentagon Report on the Chinese military:

the Pentagon concluded that China was increasing its efforts to prepare for a conflict over Taiwan, including taking longer-term measures to defend itself from other countries who could get involved in a conflict over Taiwan, which Beijing regards as a renegade province.

“We see China facing a strategic crossroads,” the Pentagon report said. “Questions remain about the basic choices China’s leaders will make as China’s power and influence grow, particularly its military power.”

Today, the Chinese responded to the Pentagon report, and it wasn’t a positive one! But as much as they cry foul, there’s plenty of reasons to be concerned, and to be very wary as we weave our way through the tortured maze that is relations with China. Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, offers some insight and a few warnings in his signed opinion piece in today’s LA Times, China’s Stealth War on the U.S.:

Maj. Gen. Zhu Chenghu of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army caused quite a stir last week when he threatened to nuke “hundreds” of American cities if the U.S. dared to interfere with a Chinese attempt to conquer Taiwan.

This saber-rattling comes while China is building a lot of sabers. Although its defense budget, estimated to be as much as $90 billion, remains a fraction of the United States’, it is enough to make China the world’s third-biggest weapons buyer (behind Russia) and the biggest in Asia. Moreover, China’s spending has been increasing rapidly, and it is investing in the kind of systems — especially missiles and submarines — needed to challenge U.S. naval power in the Pacific.

There’s that Chinese naval power issue again. Never before has China had a “blue-water navy”, (one built for strategic naval warfare and oceanic control instead of coastal protection of home territory), but they are hell-bent on building one now. China is determined to have control of the high seas around southeast Asia, and the Indian Ocean Middle-East to Asia oil shipment routes with China and Pakistan together building a Deep Sea Port on the Arabian Sea at Gwadar and the Chinese plan for a submarine facility on one of the Indonesian islands close to the Malacca Straits, both of which are causing India and Australia fits.

Boot continues with these observations:

In 1998, an official People’s Liberation Army publishing house brought out a treatise called “Unrestricted Warfare,” written by two senior army colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. This book, which is available in English translation, is well known to the U.S. national security establishment but remains practically unheard of among the general public.

“Unrestricted Warfare” recognizes that it is practically impossible to challenge the U.S. on its own terms. No one else can afford to build mega-expensive weapons systems like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which will cost more than $200 billion to develop. “The way to extricate oneself from this predicament,” the authors write, “is to develop a different approach.”

Their different approaches include financial warfare (subverting banking systems and stock markets), drug warfare (attacking the fabric of society by flooding it with illicit drugs), psychological and media warfare (manipulating perceptions to break down enemy will), international law warfare (blocking enemy actions using multinational organizations), resource warfare (seizing control of vital natural resources), even ecological warfare (creating man-made earthquakes or other natural disasters).

Boot goes on to detail incidences where China has already, or is currently in the process, of using each of these devices of “Unrestricted Warfare”. Scary, but enlightening, so go there and read it! (free, but reg. req.)

I’m encouraged by the Chevron/Unocal news today, and I very much hope that CNOOK is unsuccessful in its attempt to tempt our lawyers and investment bankers to make a stupid, dangerous-to-our-national-security move, just for filthy lucre, but it wouldn’t be the first time, would it? If Chevron does not prevail at the shareholder’s meeting on Aug. 10, I hope that our Congress steps up and delays the deal until Unocal shareholders cry uncle and accept the Chevron deal.

This slope is so darn slippery that we can’t even begin to take the first step! (db)

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