[NV Greens] Fwd: [usgp-dx] Coming to terms with new superpower China
(Chalmers Johnson, TomDispatch)
Paul Etxeberri
eusko at greens.org
Wed Mar 16 22:25:11 PST 2005
>
>
>No Longer the "Lone" Superpower
>Coming to Terms with China
>By Chalmers Johnson
>
>TomDispatch
>Tuesday 15 March 2005
>http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/031505H.shtml
>
>
> I recall forty years ago, when I was a new
>professor working in the field of Chinese and
>Japanese international relations, that Edwin O.
>Reischauer once commented, "The great payoff from
>our victory of 1945 was a permanently disarmed
>Japan." Born in Japan and a Japanese historian at
>Harvard, Reischauer served as American ambassador
>to Tokyo in the Kennedy and Johnson
>administrations. Strange to say, since the end of
>the Cold War in 1991 and particularly under the
>administration of George W. Bush, the United
>States has been doing everything in its power to
>encourage and even accelerate Japanese
>rearmament.
>
> Such a development promotes hostility between
>China and Japan, the two superpowers of East
>Asia, sabotages possible peaceful solutions in
>those two problem areas, Taiwan and North Korea,
>left over from the Chinese and Korean civil wars,
>and lays the foundation for a possible future
>Sino-American conflict that the United States
>would almost surely lose. It is unclear whether
>the ideologues and war lovers of Washington
>understand what they are unleashing -- a possible
>confrontation between the world's fastest growing
>industrial economy, China, and the world's second
>most productive, albeit declining, economy,
>Japan; a confrontation which the United States
>would have both caused and in which it might well
>be consumed.
>
> Let me make clear that in East Asia we are
>not talking about a little regime-change war of
>the sort that Bush and Cheney advocate. After
>all, the most salient characteristic of
>international relations during the last century
>was the inability of the rich, established powers
>-- Great Britain and the United States -- to
>adjust peacefully to the emergence of new centers
>of power in Germany, Japan, and Russia. The
>result was two exceedingly bloody world wars, a
>forty-five-year-long Cold War between Russia and
>the "West," and innumerable wars of national
>liberation (such as the quarter-century long one
>in Vietnam) against the arrogance and racism of
>European, American, and Japanese imperialism and
>colonialism.
>
> The major question for the twenty-first
>century is whether this fateful inability to
>adjust to changes in the global power-structure
>can be overcome. Thus far the signs are negative.
>Can the United States and Japan, today's versions
>of rich, established powers, adjust to the
>reemergence of China -- the world's oldest,
>continuously extant civilization -- this time as
>a modern superpower? Or is China's ascendancy to
>be marked by yet another world war, when the
>pretensions of European civilization in its U.S.
>and Japanese projections are finally put to rest?
>That is what is at stake.
>
> Alice-in-Wonderland Policies and the Mother
>of All Financial Crises
>
>
> China, Japan, and the United States are the
>three most productive economies on Earth, but
>China is the fastest growing (at an average rate
>of 9.5% per annum for over two decades), whereas
>both the U.S. and Japan are saddled with huge and
>mounting debts and, in the case of Japan,
>stagnant growth rates. China is today the world's
>sixth most productive economy (the U.S. and Japan
>being first and second) and our third largest
>trading partner after Canada and Mexico.
>According to CIA statisticians in their Factbook
>2003, China is actually already the
>second-largest economy on Earth measured on a
>purchasing power parity basis -- that is, in
>terms of what China actually produces rather than
>prices and exchange rates. The CIA calculates the
>United States' gross domestic product (GDP) --
>the total value of all goods and services
>produced within a country -- for 2003 as $10.4
>trillion and China's $5.7 trillion. This gives
>China's 1.3 billion people a per capita GDP of
>$5,000.
>
> Between 1992 and 2003, Japan was China's
>largest trading partner, but in 2004 Japan fell
>to third place, behind the European Union (EU)
>and the United States. China's trade volume for
>2004 was $1.2 trillion, third in the world after
>the U.S. and Germany, and well ahead of Japan's
>$1.07 trillion. China's trade with the U.S. grew
>some 34% in 2004 and has turned Los Angeles, Long
>Beach, and Oakland into the three busiest
>seaports in America.
>
> The truly significant trade development of
>2004 was the EU's emergence as China's biggest
>economic partner, suggesting the possibility of a
>Sino-European cooperative bloc confronting a less
>vital Japanese-American one. As Britain's
>Financial Times observed, "Three years after its
>entry into the World Trade Organization [in
>2001], China's influence in global commerce is no
>longer merely significant. It is crucial." For
>example, most Dell Computers sold in the U.S. are
>made in China, as are the DVD players of Japan's
>Funai Electric Company. Funai annually exports
>some 10 million DVD players and television sets
>from China to the United States, where they are
>sold primarily in Wal-Mart stores. China's trade
>with Europe in 2004 was worth $177.2 billion,
>with the United States $169.6 billion, and with
>Japan $167.8 billion.
>
> China's growing economic weight in the world
>is widely recognized and applauded, but it is
>China's growth rates and their effect on the
>future global balance of power that the U.S. and
>Japan, rightly or wrongly, fear. The CIA's
>National Intelligence Council forecasts that
>China's GDP will equal Britain's in 2005,
>Germany's in 2009, Japan's in 2017, and the
>U.S.'s in 2042. But Shahid Javed Burki, former
>vice president of the World Bank's China
>Department and a former finance minister of
>Pakistan, predicts that by 2025 China will
>probably have a GDP of $25 trillion in terms of
>purchasing power parity and will have become the
>world's largest economy followed by the United
>States at $20 trillion and India at about $13
>trillion -- and Burki's analysis is based on a
>conservative prediction of a 6% Chinese growth
>rate sustained over the next two decades. He
>foresees Japan's inevitable decline because its
>population will begin to shrink drastically after
>about 2010. Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs
>reports that the number of men in Japan already
>declined by 0.01% in 2004; and some demographers,
>it notes, anticipate that by the end of the
>century the country's population could shrink by
>nearly two-thirds, from 127.7 million today to 45
>million, the same population it had in 1910.
>
> By contrast China's population is showing
>signs of stabilizing at approximately 1.4 billion
>people, and is heavily weighted toward males.
>(The government-imposed one-child-per-family
>policy and the availability of sonograms have
>resulted in a ratio of 129 boys born for every
>100 girls; 147 boys for every 100 girls for
>couples seeking second or third children.)
>Chinese domestic economic growth is expected to
>continue for decades, reflecting the pent-up
>demand of its huge population, relatively low
>levels of personal debt, and a dynamic
>underground economy not recorded in official
>statistics. Most important, China's external debt
>is relatively small and easily covered by its
>reserves; whereas both the U.S. and Japan are
>approximately $7 trillion in the red, which is
>worse for Japan with less than half the U.S.
>population and economic clout.
>
> Ironically, part of Japan's debt is a product
>of its efforts to help prop up America's global
>imperial stance. For example, in the period since
>the end of the Cold War, Japan has subsidized
>America's military bases in Japan to the
>staggering tune of approximately $70 billion.
>Refusing to pay for its profligate consumption
>patterns and military expenditures through taxes
>on its own citizens, the United States is
>financing these outlays by going into debt to
>Japan, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and
>India. This situation has become increasingly
>unstable as the U.S. requires capital imports of
>at least $2 billion per day to pay for its
>governmental expenditures. Any decision by East
>Asian central banks to move significant parts of
>their foreign exchange reserves out of the dollar
>and into the euro or other currencies in order to
>protect themselves from dollar depreciation would
>produce the mother of all financial crises.
>
> Japan still possesses the world's largest
>foreign exchange reserves, which at the end of
>January 2005 stood at around $841 billion. But
>China sits on a $609.9 billion pile of dollars
>(as of the end of 2004), earned from its trade
>surpluses with us. Meanwhile, the American
>government and Japanese followers of George W.
>Bush insult China in every way they can,
>particularly over the status of China's breakaway
>province, the island of Taiwan. The distinguished
>economic analyst William Greider recently noted,
>"Any profligate debtor who insults his banker is
>unwise, to put it mildly. . . . American
>leadership has . . . become increasingly
>delusional -- I mean that literally -- and blind
>to the adverse balance of power accumulating
>against it."
>
> The Bush administration is unwisely
>threatening China by urging Japan to rearm and by
>promising Taiwan that, should China use force to
>prevent a Taiwanese declaration of independence,
>the U.S. will go to war on its behalf. It is hard
>to imagine more shortsighted, irresponsible
>policies, but in light of the Bush
>administration's Alice-in-Wonderland war in Iraq,
>the acute anti-Americanism it has generated
>globally, and the politicization of America's
>intelligence services, it seems possible that the
>U.S. and Japan might actually precipitate a war
>with China over Taiwan.
>
> Japan Rearms
>
>
> Since the end of World War II, and
>particularly since gaining its independence in
>1952, Japan has subscribed to a pacifist foreign
>policy. It has resolutely refused to maintain
>offensive military forces or to become part of
>America's global military system. Japan did not,
>for example, participate in the 1991 war against
>Iraq, nor has it joined collective security
>agreements in which it would have to match the
>military contributions of its partners. Since the
>signing in 1952 of the Japan-United States
>Security Treaty, the country has officially been
>defended from so-called external threats by U.S.
>forces located on some 91 bases on the Japanese
>mainland and the island of Okinawa. The U.S.
>Seventh Fleet even has its home port at the old
>Japanese naval base of Yokosuka. Japan not only
>subsidizes these bases but subscribes to the
>public fiction that the American forces are
>present only for its defense. In fact, Japan has
>no control over how and where the U.S. employs
>its land, sea, and air forces based on Japanese
>territory, and the Japanese and American
>governments have until quite recently finessed
>the issue simply by never discussing it.
>
> Since the end of the Cold War in 1991, the
>United States has repeatedly pressured Japan to
>revise article nine of its Constitution
>(renouncing the use of force except as a matter
>of self-defense) and become what American
>officials call a "normal nation." For example, on
>August 13, 2004, Secretary of State Colin Powell
>stated baldly in Tokyo that if Japan ever hoped
>to become a permanent member of the U.N. Security
>Council it would first have to get rid of its
>pacifist Constitution. Japan's claim to a
>Security Council seat is based on the fact that,
>although its share of global GDP is only 14%, it
>pays 20% of the total U.N. budget. Powell's
>remark was blatant interference in Japan's
>internal affairs, but it merely echoed many
>messages delivered by former Deputy Secretary of
>State Richard Armitage, the leader of a
>reactionary clique in Washington that has worked
>for years to remilitarize Japan and so enlarge a
>major new market for American arms. Its members
>include Torkel Patterson, Robin Sakoda, David
>Asher, and James Kelly at State; Michael Green on
>the National Security Council's staff; and
>numerous uniformed military officers at the
>Pentagon and at the headquarters of the Pacific
>Command at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
>
> America's intention is to turn Japan into
>what Washington neo-conservatives like to call
>the "Britain of the Far East" -- and then use it
>as a proxy in checkmating North Korea and
>balancing China. On October 11, 2000, Michael
>Green, then a member of Armitage Associates,
>wrote, "We see the special relationship between
>the United States and Great Britain as a model
>for the [U.S.-Japan] alliance." Japan has so far
>not resisted this American pressure since it
>complements a renewed nationalism among Japanese
>voters and a fear that a burgeoning capitalist
>China threatens Japan's established position as
>the leading economic power in East Asia. Japanese
>officials also claim that the country feels
>threatened by North Korea's developing nuclear
>and missile programs, although they know that the
>North Korean stand-off could be resolved
>virtually overnight -- if the Bush administration
>would cease trying to overthrow the Pyongyang
>regime and instead deliver on American trade
>promises (in return for North Korea's agreement
>to give up its nuclear weapons program). Instead,
>on February 25, 2005, the State Department
>announced that "the U.S. will refuse North Korean
>leader Kim Jong-il's demand for a guarantee of
>'no hostile intent' to get Pyongyang back into
>negotiations over its nuclear weapons programs."
>And on March 7, Bush nominated John Bolton to be
>American ambassador to the United Nations even
>though North Korea has refused to negotiate with
>him because of his insulting remarks about the
>country.
>
> Japan's remilitarization worries a segment of
>the Japanese public and is opposed throughout
>East Asia by all the nations Japan victimized
>during World War II, including China, both
>Koreas, and even Australia. As a result, the
>Japanese government has launched a stealth
>program of incremental rearmament. Since 1992, it
>has enacted 21 major pieces of security-related
>legislation, 9 in 2004 alone. These began with
>the International Peace Cooperation Law of 1992,
>which for the first time authorized Japan to send
>troops to participate in U.N. peacekeeping
>operations.
>
> Remilitarization has since taken many forms,
>including expanding military budgets,
>legitimizing and legalizing the sending of
>military forces abroad, a commitment to join the
>American missile defense ("Star Wars") program --
>something the Canadians refused to do in February
>2005 -- and a growing acceptance of military
>solutions to international problems. This gradual
>process was greatly accelerated in 2001 by the
>simultaneous coming to power of President George
>Bush and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.
>Koizumi made his first visit to the United States
>in July of that year and, in May of 2003,
>received the ultimate imprimatur, an invitation
>to Bush's "ranch" in Crawford, Texas. Shortly
>thereafter, Koizumi agreed to send a contingent
>of 550 troops to Iraq for a year, extended their
>stay for another year in 2004, and on October 14,
>2004, personally endorsed George Bush's
>reelection.
>
> A New Nuclear Giant in the Making?
>
>
> Koizumi has appointed to his various cabinets
>hard-line anti-Chinese, pro-Taiwanese
>politicians. Phil Deans, director of the
>Contemporary China Institute in the School of
>Oriental and African Studies, University of
>London, observes, "There has been a remarkable
>growth of pro-Taiwan sentiment in Japan. There is
>not one pro-China figure in the Koizumi Cabinet."
>Members of the latest Koizumi Cabinet include the
>Defense Agency chief Yoshinori Ono, and the
>foreign minister Nobutaka Machimura, both ardent
>militarists; while Foreign Minister Machimura is
>a member of the right-wing faction of former
>Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori, which supports an
>independent Taiwan and maintains extensive covert
>ties with Taiwanese leaders and businessmen.
>
> Taiwan, it should be remembered, was a
>Japanese colony from 1895 to 1945. Unlike the
>harsh Japanese military rule over Korea from 1910
>to 1945, it experienced relatively benign
>governance by a civilian Japanese administration.
>The island, while bombed by the Allies, was not a
>battleground during World War II although it was
>harshly occupied by the Chinese Nationalists
>(Chiang Kai-shek's Guomindang) immediately after
>the war. Today, as a result, many Taiwanese speak
>Japanese and have a favorable view of Japan.
>Taiwan is virtually the only place in East Asia
>where Japanese are fully welcomed and liked.
>
> Bush and Koizumi have developed elaborate
>plans for military cooperation between their two
>countries. Crucial to such plans is the scrapping
>of the Japanese Constitution of 1947. If nothing
>gets in the way, Koizumi's ruling Liberal
>Democratic Party (LDP) intends to introduce a new
>constitution on the occasion of the party's
>fiftieth anniversary in November 2005. This has
>been deemed appropriate because the LDP's
>founding charter of 1955 set as a basic party
>goal the "establishment of Japan's own
>Constitution" -- a reference to the fact that
>General Douglas MacArthur's post-World War II
>occupation headquarters actually drafted the
>current Constitution. The original LDP policy
>statement also called for "the eventual removal
>of U.S. troops from Japanese territory," which
>may be one of the hidden purposes behind Japan's
>urge to rearm.
>
> A major goal of the Americans is to gain
>Japan's active participation in their massively
>expensive missile defense program. The Bush
>administration is seeking, among other things, an
>end to Japan's ban on the export of military
>technology, since it wants Japanese engineers to
>help solve some of the technical problems of its
>so far failing Star Wars system. The United
>States has also been actively negotiating with
>Japan to relocate the Army's 1st Corps from Fort
>Lewis, Washington, to Camp Zama, southwest of
>Tokyo in the densely populated prefecture of
>Kanagawa, whose capital is Yokohama. These U.S.
>forces in Japan would then be placed under the
>command of a four-star general, who would be on a
>par with regional commanders like Centcom
>commander John Abizaid, who lords it over Iraq
>and South Asia. The new command would be in
>charge of all Army "force projection" operations
>beyond East Asia and would inevitably implicate
>Japan in the daily military operations of the
>American empire. Garrisoning even a small
>headquarters, much less the whole 1st Corps made
>up of an estimated 40,000 soldiers, in a
>sophisticated and centrally located prefecture
>like Kanagawa is also guaranteed to generate
>intense public opposition as well as rapes,
>fights, car accidents and other incidents similar
>to the ones that occur daily in Okinawa.
>
> Meanwhile, Japan intends to upgrade its
>Defense Agency (Boeicho) into a ministry and
>possibly develop its own nuclear weapons
>capability. Goading the Japanese government to
>assert itself militarily may well cause the
>country to go nuclear in order to "deter" China
>and North Korea, while freeing Japan from its
>dependency on the American "nuclear umbrella."
>The military analyst Richard Tanter notes that
>Japan already has "the undoubted capacity to
>satisfy all three core requirements for a usable
>nuclear weapon: a military nuclear device, a
>sufficiently accurate targeting system, and at
>least one adequate delivery system." Japan's
>combination of fully functioning fission and
>breeder reactors plus nuclear fuel reprocessing
>facilities gives it the ability to build advanced
>thermonuclear weapons; its H-II and H-IIA
>rockets, in-flight refueling capacity for fighter
>bombers, and military-grade surveillance
>satellites assure that it could deliver its
>weapons accurately to regional targets. What it
>currently lacks are the platforms (such as
>submarines) for a secure retaliatory force in
>order to dissuade a nuclear adversary from
>launching a pre-emptive first-strike.
>
> The Taiwanese Knot
>
>
> Japan may talk a lot about the dangers of
>North Korea, but the real objective of its
>rearmament is China. This has become clear from
>the ways in which Japan has recently injected
>itself into the single most delicate and
>dangerous issue of East Asian international
>relations -- the problem of Taiwan. Japan invaded
>China in 1931 and was its wartime tormentor
>thereafter as well as Taiwan's colonial overlord.
>Even then, however, Taiwan was viewed as a part
>of China, as the United States has long
>recognized. What remains to be resolved are the
>terms and timing of Taiwan's reintegration with
>the Chinese mainland. This process was deeply
>complicated by the fact that in 1987 Chiang
>Kai-shek's Nationalists, who had retreated to
>Taiwan in 1949 at the end of the Chinese civil
>war (and were protected there by the American
>Seventh Fleet ever after), finally ended martial
>law on the island. Taiwan has since matured into
>a vibrant democracy and the Taiwanese are now
>starting to display their own mixed opinions
>about their future.
>
> In 2000, the Taiwanese people ended a long
>monopoly of power by the Nationalists and gave
>the Democratic Progressive Party, headed by
>President Chen Shui-bian, an electoral victory. A
>native Taiwanese (as distinct from the large
>contingent of mainlanders who came to Taiwan in
>the baggage train of Chiang's defeated armies),
>Chen stands for an independent Taiwan, as does
>his party. By contrast, the Nationalists,
>together with a powerful mainlander splinter
>party, the People First Party headed by James
>Soong (Song Chuyu), hope to see an eventual
>peaceful unification of Taiwan with China. On
>March 7, 2005, the Bush administration
>complicated these delicate relations by
>nominating John Bolton to be the American
>ambassador to the United Nations. He is an avowed
>advocate of Taiwanese independence and was once a
>paid consultant to the Taiwanese government.
>
> In May 2004, in a very close and contested
>election, Chen Shui-bian was reelected, and on
>May 20, the notorious right-wing Japanese
>politician Shintaro Ishihara attended his
>inauguration in Taipei. (Ishihara believes that
>Japan's 1937 Rape of Nanking was "a lie made up
>by the Chinese.") Though Chen won with only 50.1%
>of the vote, this was still a sizeable increase
>over his 33.9% in 2000, when the opposition was
>divided. The Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs
>immediately appointed Koh Se-kai as its informal
>ambassador to Japan. Koh has lived in Japan for
>some 33 years and maintains extensive ties to
>senior political and academic figures there.
>China responded that it would "completely
>annihilate" any moves toward Taiwanese
>independence -- even if it meant scuttling the
>2008 Beijing Olympics and good relations with the
>United States.
>
> Contrary to the machinations of American
>neo-cons and Japanese rightists, however, the
>Taiwanese people have revealed themselves to be
>open to negotiating with China over the timing
>and terms of reintegration. On August 23, 2004,
>the Legislative Yuan (Taiwan's parliament)
>enacted changes in its voting rules to prevent
>Chen from amending the Constitution to favor
>independence, as he had promised to do in his
>reelection campaign. This action drastically
>lowered the risk of conflict with China. Probably
>influencing the Legislative Yuan was the warning
>issued on August 22 by Singapore's new prime
>minister, Lee Hsien-loong: "If Taiwan goes for
>independence, Singapore will not recognize it. In
>fact, no Asian country will recognize it. China
>will fight. Win or lose, Taiwan will be
>devastated."
>
> The next important development was
>parliamentary elections on December 11, 2004.
>President Chen called his campaign a referendum
>on his pro-independence policy and asked for a
>mandate to carry out his reforms. Instead he lost
>decisively. The opposition Nationalists and the
>People First Party won 114 seats in the 225-seat
>parliament, while Chen's DPP and its allies took
>only 101. (Ten seats went to independents.) The
>Nationalist leader, Lien Chan, whose party won 79
>seats to the DPP's 89, said, "Today we saw
>extremely clearly that all the people want
>stability in this country."
>
> Chen's failure to capture control of
>parliament also meant that a proposed purchase of
>$19.6 billion worth of arms from the United
>States was doomed. The deal included
>guided-missile destroyers, P-3 anti-submarine
>aircraft, diesel submarines, and advanced Patriot
>PAC-3 anti-missile systems. The Nationalists and
>James Soong's supporters regard the price as too
>high and mostly a financial sop to the Bush
>administration, which has been pushing the sale
>since 2001. They also believe the weapons would
>not improve Taiwan's security.
>
> On December 27, 2004, mainland China issued
>its fifth Defense White Paper on the goals of the
>country's national defense efforts. As one
>long-time observer, Robert Bedeski, notes, "At
>first glance, the Defense White Paper is a
>hard-line statement on territorial sovereignty
>and emphasizes China's determination not to
>tolerate any moves at secession, independence, or
>separation. However, the next paragraph . . .
>indicates a willingness to reduce tensions in the
>Taiwan Strait: so long as the Taiwan authorities
>accept the one China principle and stop their
>separatist activities aimed at 'Taiwan
>independence,' cross-strait talks can be held at
>any time on officially ending the state of
>hostility between the two sides."
>
> It appears that this is also the way the
>Taiwanese read the message. On February 24, 2005,
>President Chen Shui-bian met for the first time
>since October 2000 with Chairman James Soong of
>the People First Party. The two leaders, holding
>diametrically opposed views on relations with the
>mainland, nonetheless signed a joint statement
>outlining ten points of consensus. They pledged
>to try to open full transport and commercial
>links across the Taiwan Strait, increase trade,
>and ease the ban on investments in China by many
>Taiwanese business sectors. The mainland reacted
>favorably at once. Astonishingly, this led Chen
>Shui-bian to say that he "would not rule out
>Taiwan's eventual reunion with China, provided
>Taiwan's 23 million people accepted it."
>
> If the United States and Japan left China and
>Taiwan to their own devices, it seems possible
>that they would work out a modus vivendi. Taiwan
>has already invested some $150 billion in the
>mainland, and the two economies are becoming more
>closely integrated every day. There also seems to
>be a growing recognition in Taiwan that it would
>be very difficult to live as an independent
>Chinese-speaking nation alongside a country with
>1.3 billion people, 3.7 million square miles of
>territory, a rapidly growing $1.4 trillion
>economy, and aspirations to regional leadership
>in East Asia. Rather than declaring its
>independence, Taiwan may try to seek a status
>somewhat like that of French Canada -- a kind of
>looser version of a Chinese Quebec under nominal
>central government control but maintaining
>separate institutions, laws, and customs.
>
> The mainland would be so relieved by this
>solution it would probably accept it,
>particularly if it could be achieved before the
>2008 Beijing Olympics. China fears that Taiwanese
>radicals want to declare independence a month or
>two before those Olympics, betting that China
>would not attack then because of its huge
>investment in the forthcoming games. Most
>observers believe, however, that China would have
>no choice but to go to war because failure to do
>so would invite a domestic revolution against the
>Chinese Communist Party for violating the
>national integrity of China.
>
> Sino-American and Sino-Japanese Relations
>Spiral Downward
>
>
> It has long been an article of neo-con faith
>that the U.S. must do everything in its power to
>prevent the development of rival power centers,
>whether friendly or hostile. After the collapse
>of the Soviet Union, this meant they turned their
>attention to China as one of our probable next
>enemies. In 2001, having come to power, the
>neo-conservatives shifted much of our nuclear
>targeting from Russia to China. They also began
>regular high-level military talks with Taiwan
>over defense of the island, ordered a shift of
>Army personnel and supplies to the Asia-Pacific
>region, and worked strenuously to promote the
>remilitarization of Japan.
>
> On April 1, 2001, a U.S. navy EP-3E Aries II
>electronic spy plane collided with a Chinese jet
>fighter off the south China coast. The American
>aircraft was on a mission to provoke Chinese
>radar defenses and then record the transmissions
>and procedures the Chinese used in sending up
>interceptors. The Chinese jet went down and the
>pilot lost his life, while the American plane
>landed safely on Hainan Island and its crew of
>twenty-four spies was well treated by the Chinese
>authorities.
>
> It soon became clear that China was not
>interested in a confrontation, since many of its
>most important investors have their headquarters
>in the United States. But it could not instantly
>return the crew of the spy plane without risking
>powerful domestic criticism for obsequiousness in
>the face of provocation. It therefore delayed
>eleven days until it received a pro forma
>American apology for causing the death of a
>Chinese pilot on the edge of the country's
>territorial air space and for making an
>unauthorized landing at a Chinese military
>airfield. Meanwhile, our media had labeled the
>crew as "hostages," encouraged their relatives to
>tie yellow ribbons around neighborhood trees,
>hailed the President for doing "a first-rate job"
>to free them, and endlessly criticized China for
>its "state-controlled media." They carefully
>avoided mentioning that the United States
>enforces around our country a 200-mile
>aircraft-intercept zone that stretches far beyond
>territorial waters.
>
> On April 25, 2001, during an interview on
>national television, President Bush was asked
>whether he would ever use "the full force of the
>American military" against China for the sake of
>Taiwan. He responded, "Whatever it takes to help
>Taiwan defend herself." This was American policy
>until 9/11, when China enthusiastically joined
>the "war on terrorism" and the President and his
>neo-cons became preoccupied with their "axis of
>evil" and making war on Iraq. The United States
>and China were also enjoying extremely close
>economic relations, which the big- business wing
>of the Republican Party did not want to
>jeopardize.
>
> The Middle East thus trumped the neo-cons'
>Asia policy. While the Americans were distracted,
>China went about its economic business for almost
>four years, emerging as a powerhouse of Asia and
>a potential organizing node for Asian economies.
>Rapidly industrializing China also developed a
>voracious appetite for petroleum and other raw
>materials, which brought it into direct
>competition with the world's largest importers,
>the U.S. and Japan.
>
> By the summer of 2004, Bush strategists,
>distracted as they were by Iraq, again became
>alarmed over China's growing power and its
>potential to challenge American hegemony in East
>Asia. The Republican Party platform unveiled at
>its convention in New York in August proclaimed
>that "America will help Taiwan defend itself."
>During that summer, the Navy also carried out
>exercises it dubbed "Operation Summer Pulse '04,"
>which involved the simultaneous deployment at sea
>of seven of our twelve carrier strike groups. An
>American carrier strike group includes an
>aircraft carrier (usually with 9 or 10 squadrons
>of planes, a total of about 85 aircraft in all),
>a guided missile cruiser, two guided missile
>destroyers, an attack submarine, and a
>combination ammunition-oiler-supply ship.
>Deploying seven such armadas at the same time was
>unprecedented -- and very expensive. Even though
>only three of the carrier strike groups were sent
>to the Pacific and no more than one was
>patrolling off Taiwan at a time, the Chinese
>became deeply alarmed that this marked the
>beginning of an attempted rerun of 19th century
>gunboat diplomacy aimed at them.
>
> This American show of force and Chen
>Shui-bian's polemics preceding the December
>elections also seemed to overstimulate the
>Taiwanese. On October 26 in Beijing, Secretary of
>State Colin Powell tried to calm things down by
>declaring to the press, "Taiwan is not
>independent. It does not enjoy sovereignty as a
>nation, and that remains our policy, our firm
>policy" We want to see both sides not take
>unilateral action that would prejudice an
>eventual outcome, a reunification that all
>parties are seeking."
>
> Powell's statement seemed unequivocal enough,
>but significant doubts persisted about whether he
>had much influence within the Bush administration
>or whether he could speak for Vice President
>Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
>Early in 2005, Porter Goss, the new director of
>the CIA, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and Admiral
>Lowell Jacoby, head of the Defense Intelligence
>Agency, all told Congress that China's military
>modernization was going ahead much faster than
>previously believed. They warned that the 2005
>Quadrennial Defense Review, the every four-year
>formal assessment of U.S. military policy, would
>take a much harsher view of the threat posed by
>China than the 2001 overview.
>
> In this context, the Bush administration,
>perhaps influenced by the election of November 2
>and the transition from Colin Powell's to Condi
>Rice's State Department, played its most
>dangerous card. On February 19, 2005 in
>Washington, it signed a new military agreement
>with Japan. For the first time, Japan joined the
>administration in identifying security in the
>Taiwan Strait as a "common strategic objective."
>Nothing could have been more alarming to China's
>leaders than the revelation that Japan had
>decisively ended six decades of official pacifism
>by claiming a right to intervene in the Taiwan
>Strait.
>
> It is possible that, in the years to come,
>Taiwan itself may recede in importance to be
>replaced by even more direct Sino-Japanese
>confrontations. This would be an ominous
>development indeed, one that the United States
>would be responsible for having abetted but would
>certainly be unable to control. The kindling for
>a Sino-Japanese explosion has long been in place.
>After all, during World War II the Japanese
>killed approximately 23 million Chinese
>throughout East Asia -- higher casualties than
>the staggering ones suffered by Russia at the
>hands of the Nazis -- and yet Japan refuses to
>atone for or even acknowledge its historical war
>crimes. Quite the opposite, it continues to
>rewrite history, portraying itself as the
>liberator of Asia and a victim of European and
>American imperialism.
>
> In -- for the Chinese -- a painful act of
>symbolism, after becoming Japanese prime minister
>in 2001, Junichiro Koizumi made his first
>official visit to Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, a
>practice that he has repeated every year since.
>Koizumi likes to say to foreigners that he is
>merely honoring Japan's war dead. Yasukuni,
>however, is anything but a military cemetery or a
>war memorial. It was established in 1869 by
>Emperor Meiji as a Shinto shrine (though with its
>torii archways made of steel rather than the
>traditional red-painted wood) to commemorate the
>lives lost in campaigns to return direct imperial
>rule to Japan. During World War II, Japanese
>militarists took over the shrine and used it to
>promote patriotic and nationalistic sentiments.
>Today, Yasukuni is said to be dedicated to the
>spirits of approximately 2.4 million Japanese who
>have died in the country's wars, both civil and
>foreign, since 1853.
>
> In 1978, for reasons that have never been
>made clear, General Hideki Tojo and six other
>wartime leaders who had been hanged by the Allied
>Powers as war criminals were collectively
>enshrined at Yasukuni. The current chief priest
>of the shrine denies that they were war
>criminals, saying, "The winner passed judgment on
>the loser." In a museum on the shrine's grounds,
>there is a fully restored Mitsubishi Zero Type 52
>fighter aircraft that a placard says made its
>combat debut in 1940 over Chongqing, then the
>wartime capital of the Republic of China. It was
>undoubtedly not an accident that, in Chongqing
>during the 2004 Asian Cup soccer finals, Chinese
>spectators booed the playing of the Japanese
>national anthem. Yasukuni's leaders have always
>claimed close ties to the imperial household, but
>the late Emperor Hirohito last visited the shrine
>in 1975 and Emperor Akihito has never been there.
>
>
> The Chinese regard Yasukuni visits by the
>Japanese prime minister as insulting, somewhat
>comparable perhaps to Britain's Prince Harry
>dressing up as a Nazi for a costume party.
>Nonetheless, Beijing has tried in recent years to
>appease Tokyo. Chinese President Hu Jintao rolled
>out the red carpet for Yohei Kono, speaker of the
>Japanese Diet's House of Representatives, when he
>visited China in September 2004; he appointed
>Wang Yi, a senior moderate in the Chinese foreign
>service, as ambassador to Japan; and he proposed
>joint Sino-Japanese exploration of possible oil
>resources in the offshore seas that both sides
>claim. All such gestures were ignored by Koizumi
>who insists that he intends to go on visiting
>Yasukuni.
>
> Matters came to a head in November 2004 at
>two important summit meetings: an Asia-Pacific
>Economic Cooperation (APEC) gathering in
>Santiago, Chile, followed immediately by an
>Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)
>meeting with the leaders of China, Japan, and
>South Korea that took place in Vientiane, Laos.
>In Santiago, Hu Jintao directly asked Koizumi to
>cease his Yasukuni visits for the sake of
>Sino-Japanese friendship. Seemingly as a reply,
>Koizumi went out of his way to insult Chinese
>Premier Wen Jiabao in Vientiane. He said to
>Premier Wen, "It's about time for [China's]
>graduation [as a recipient of Japanese foreign
>aid payments]," implying that Japan intended
>unilaterally to end its 25-year-old financial aid
>program. The word "graduation" also conveyed the
>insulting implication that Japan saw itself as a
>teacher guiding China, the student.
>
> Koizumi next gave a little speech about the
>history of Japanese efforts to normalize
>relations with China, to which Premier Wen
>replied, "Do you know how many Chinese people
>died in the Sino-Japanese war?" Wen went on to
>suggest that China had always regarded Japan's
>foreign aid, which he said China did not need, as
>payments in lieu of compensation for damage done
>by Japan in China during the war. He pointed out
>that China had never asked for reparations from
>Japan and that Japan's payments amounted to about
>$30 billion over 25 years, a fraction of the $80
>billion Germany has paid to the victims of Nazi
>atrocities even though Japan is the more populous
>and richer country.
>
> On November 10, 2004, the Japanese Navy
>discovered a Chinese nuclear submarine in
>Japanese territorial waters near Okinawa.
>Although the Chinese apologized and called the
>sub's intrusion a "mistake," Defense Agency
>Director Ono gave it wide publicity, further
>inflaming Japanese public opinion against China.
>>From that point on, relations between Beijing and
>Tokyo have gone steadily downhill, culminating in
>the Japanese-American announcement that Taiwan
>was of special military concern to both of them,
>which China denounced as an "abomination."
>
> Over time this downward spiral in relations
>will probably prove damaging to the interests of
>both the United States and Japan, but
>particularly to those of Japan. China is unlikely
>to retaliate directly but is even less likely to
>forget what has happened -- and it has a great
>deal of leverage over Japan. After all, Japanese
>prosperity increasingly depends on its ties to
>China. The reverse is not true. Contrary to what
>one might expect, Japanese exports to China
>jumped 70% between 2001 and 2004, providing the
>main impetus for a sputtering Japanese economic
>recovery. Some 18,000 Japanese companies have
>operations in China. In 2003, Japan passed the
>United States as the top destination for Chinese
>students going abroad for a university education.
>Nearly 70,000 Chinese students now study at
>Japanese universities compared to 65,000 at
>American academic institutions. These close and
>lucrative relations are at risk if the U.S. and
>Japan pursue their militarization of the region.
>
> A Multipolar World
>
>
> Tony Karon of Time magazine has observed,
>"All over the world, new bonds of trade and
>strategic cooperation are being forged around the
>U.S. China has not only begun to displace the
>U.S. as the dominant player in the Asia Pacific
>Economic Cooperation organization (APEC), it is
>fast emerging as the major trading partner to
>some of Latin America's largest economies. . . .
>French foreign policy think tanks have long
>promoted the goal of 'multipolarity' in a
>post-Cold War world, i.e., the preference for
>many different, competing power centers rather
>than the 'unipolarity' of the U.S. as a single
>hyper-power. Multipolarity is no longer simply a
>strategic goal. It is an emerging reality."
>
> Evidence is easily found of multipolarity and
>China's prominent role in promoting it. Just note
>China's expanding relations with Iran, the
>European Union, Latin America, and the
>Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Iran is
>the second largest OPEC oil producer after Saudi
>Arabia and has long had friendly relations with
>Japan, which is its leading trading partner.
>(Ninety-eight percent of Japan's imports from
>Iran are oil.) On February 18, 2004, a consortium
>of Japanese companies and the Iranian government
>signed a memorandum of agreement to develop
>jointly Iran's Azadegan oil field, one of the
>world's largest, in a project worth $2.8 billion.
>The U.S. has opposed Japan's support for Iran,
>causing Congressman Brad Sherman (D-CA) to charge
>that Bush had been bribed into accepting the
>Japanese-Iranian deal by Koizumi's dispatch of
>550 Japanese troops to Iraq, adding a veneer of
>international support for the American war there.
>
>
> But the long-standing Iranian-Japanese
>alignment began to change in late 2004. On
>October 28, China's oil major, the Sinopec Group,
>signed an agreement with Iran worth between $70
>and $100 billion to develop the giant Yadavaran
>natural gas field. China agreed to buy 250
>million tons of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from
>Iran over 25 years. It is the largest deal Iran
>has signed with a foreign country since 1996 and
>will include several other benefits, including
>China's assistance in building numerous ships to
>deliver the LNG to Chinese ports. Iran also
>committed itself to exporting 150,000 barrels of
>crude oil per day to China for 25 years at market
>prices.
>
> Iran's oil minister, Bijan Zanganeh, on a
>visit to Beijing noted that Iran is China's
>biggest foreign oil supplier and said that his
>country wants to be China's long-term business
>partner. He told China Business Weekly that
>Tehran would like to replace Japan with China as
>the biggest customer for its oil and gas. The
>reason is obvious: American pressure on Iran to
>give up its nuclear power development program and
>the Bush administration's declared intention to
>take Iran to the U.N. Security Council for the
>imposition of sanctions (which a Chinese vote
>could veto). On November 6, 2004, Chinese Foreign
>Minister Li Zhaoxing paid a rare visit to Tehran.
>In meetings with Iranian President Mohammad
>Khatami, Li said that Beijing would indeed
>consider vetoing any American effort to sanction
>Iran at the Security Council. The U.S. has also
>charged China with selling nuclear and missile
>technology to Iran.
>
> China and Iran already did a record $4
>billion worth of two-way business in 2003.
>Projects included China's building of the first
>stage of Tehran's Metro and a contract to build a
>second link worth $836 million. China will be the
>top contender to build four other planned lines,
>including a 19 mile track to the airport. In
>February 2003, Chery Automobile Company, the
>eighth largest automaker in China, opened its
>first overseas production plant in Iran. Today,
>it manufactures 30,000 Chery cars annually in
>northeastern Iran. Beijing is also negotiating to
>construct a 240 mile pipeline from Iran to the
>northern Caspian Sea to connect with the
>long-distance Kazakhstan to Xinjiang pipeline
>that it began building in October 2004. The
>Kazakh pipeline has a capacity to deliver 10
>million tons of oil to China per year. Despite
>American bluster and belligerence, Iran is
>anything but isolated in today's world.
>
> The EU is China's largest trading partner and
>China is the EU's second largest trading partner
>(after the United States). Back in 1989, to
>protest the suppression of pro-democracy
>demonstrators in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, the
>EU imposed a ban on military sales to China. The
>only other countries so treated are true
>international pariahs like Burma, Sudan, and
>Zimbabwe. Even North Korea is not subject to a
>formal European arms embargo. Given that the
>Chinese leadership has changed several times
>since 1989 and as a gesture of goodwill, the EU
>has announced its intention to lift the embargo.
>Jacques Chirac, the French president, is one of
>the strongest proponents of the idea of replacing
>American hegemony with a "multipolar world." On a
>visit to Beijing in October 2004, he said that
>China and France share "a common vision of the
>world" and that lifting the embargo will "mark a
>significant milestone: a moment when Europe had
>to make a choice between the strategic interests
>of America and China -- and chose China."
>
> In his trip to Western Europe in February
>2005, Bush repeatedly said, "There is deep
>concern in our country that a transfer of weapons
>would be a transfer of technology to China, which
>would change the balance of relations between
>China and Taiwan." In early February, the House
>of Representatives voted 411 to 3 in favor of a
>resolution condemning the potential EU move. The
>Europeans and Chinese contend that the Bush
>administration has vastly overstated its case,
>that no weapons capable of changing the balance
>of power are involved, and that the EU is not
>aiming to win massive new defense contracts from
>China but to strengthen mutual economic relations
>in general. Immediately following Bush's tour of
>Europe, the EU Trade Commissioner, Peter
>Mandelson, arrived in Beijing for his first
>official visit. The purpose of his trip, he said,
>was to stress the need to create a new strategic
>partnership between China and Europe.
>
> Washington has buttressed its hard-line
>stance with the release of many new intelligence
>estimates depicting China as a formidable
>military threat. Whether this intelligence is
>politicized or not, it argues that China's
>military modernization is aimed precisely at
>countering the Navy's carrier strike groups,
>which would assumedly be used in the Taiwan
>Strait in case of war. China is certainly
>building a large fleet of nuclear submarines and
>is an active participant in the EU's Galileo
>Project to produce a satellite navigation system
>not controlled by the American military. The
>Defense Department worries that Beijing might
>adapt the Galileo technology to anti-satellite
>purposes. American military analysts are also
>impressed by China's launch, on October 15, 2003,
>of a spacecraft containing a single astronaut who
>was successfully returned to Earth the following
>day. Only the former USSR and the United States
>had previously sent humans into outer space.
>
> China already has 500 to 550 short-range
>ballistic missiles deployed opposite Taiwan and
>has 24 CSS-4 ICBMs with a range of 13,000 km to
>deter an American missile attack on the Chinese
>mainland. According to Richard Fisher, a
>researcher at the U.S.-based Center for Security
>Policy, "The forces that China is putting in
>place right now will probably be more than
>sufficient to deal with a single American
>aircraft carrier battle group." Arthur Lauder, a
>professor of international relations at the
>University of Pennsylvania, concurs. He says that
>the Chinese military "is the only one being
>developed anywhere in the world today that is
>specifically configured to fight the United
>States of America."
>
> The U.S. obviously cannot wish away this
>capability, but it has no evidence that China is
>doing anything more than countering the threats
>coming from the Bush administration. It seeks to
>avoid war with Taiwan and the U.S. by deterring
>them from separating Taiwan from China. For this
>reason, in March 2005, China's pro-forma
>legislature, the National People's Congress,
>passed a law making secession from China illegal
>and authorizing the use of force in case a
>territory tried to leave the country.
>
> The Japanese government, of course, backs the
>American position that China constitutes a
>military threat to the entire region.
>Interestingly enough, however, the Australian
>government of John Howard, a loyal American ally
>when it comes to Iraq, has decided to defy Bush
>on the issue of lifting the European arms
>embargo. Australia places a high premium on good
>relations with China and is hoping to negotiate a
>free trade agreement between the two countries.
>Canberra has therefore decided to support the EU
>in lifting the 15-year-old embargo. Chirac and
>German Chancellor Gerhard Schr–der both say, "It
>will happen."
>
> The United States has long proclaimed that
>Latin America is part of its "sphere of
>influence," and because of that most foreign
>countries have tread carefully in doing business
>there. However, in the search for fuel and
>minerals for its booming economy, China is openly
>courting many Latin American countries regardless
>of what Washington thinks. On November 15, 2004,
>President Hu Jintao ended a five day visit to
>Brazil during which he signed more than a dozen
>accords aimed at expanding Brazil's sales to
>China and Chinese investment in Brazil. Under one
>agreement Brazil will export to China as much as
>$800 million annually in beef and poultry. In
>turn, China agreed with Brazil's state-controlled
>oil company to finance a $1.3 billion gas
>pipeline between Rio de Janeiro and Bahia once
>technical studies are completed. China and Brazil
>also entered into a "strategic partnership" with
>the objective of raising the value of bilateral
>trade from $10 billion in 2004 to $20 billion by
>2007. President Hu said that this partnership
>symbolized "a new international political order
>that favored developing countries."
>
> In the weeks that followed, China signed
>important investment and trade agreements with
>Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia, Chile, and Cuba.
>Of particular interest, in December 2004,
>President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela visited China
>and agreed to give it wide-ranging access to his
>country's oil reserves. Venezuela is the world's
>fifth largest oil exporter and normally sells
>about 60% of its output to the United States, but
>under the new agreements China will be allowed to
>operate 15 mature oil fields in eastern
>Venezuela. China will invest around $350 million
>to extract oil and another $60 million in natural
>gas wells.
>
> China is also working to integrate East
>Asia's smaller countries into some form of new
>economic and political community. Such an
>alignment, if it comes into being, will certainly
>erode American and Japanese influence in the
>area. In November 2004, the ten nations that make
>up ASEAN or the Association of Southeast Asian
>Nations (Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia,
>Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore,
>Thailand, and Vietnam), met in the Laotian
>capital of Vientiane, joined by the leaders of
>China, Japan, and South Korea. The United States
>was not invited and the Japanese officials seemed
>uncomfortable being there. The purpose was to
>plan for an East Asian summit meeting to be held
>in November 2005 to begin creating an "East Asia
>Community." In December 2004, the ASEAN countries
>and China also agreed to create a free-trade zone
>among themselves by 2010.
>
> According to Edward Cody of the Washington
>Post, "Trade between China and the 10 ASEAN
>countries has increased about 20% a year since
>1990, and the pace has picked up in the last
>several years." This trade hit $78.2 billion in
>2003 and was reported to be about $100 billion by
>the end of 2004. As the senior Japanese political
>commentator Yoichi Funabashi observes, "The ratio
>of intra-regional trade [in East Asia] to
>worldwide trade was nearly 52% in 2002. Though
>this figure is lower than the 62% in the EU, it
>tops the 46% of NAFTA [the North American Free
>Trade Agreement]. East Asia is thus becoming less
>dependent on the U.S. in terms of trade."
>
> China is the primary moving force behind
>these efforts. According to Funabashi China's
>leadership plans to use the country's explosive
>economic growth and its ever more powerful links
>to regional trading partners to marginalize the
>United States and isolate Japan in East Asia. He
>argues that the United States underestimated how
>deeply distrusted it had become in the region
>thanks to its narrow-minded and ideological
>response to the East Asian financial crisis of
>1997, which it largely caused. On November 30,
>2004, Michael Reiss, the director of policy
>planning in the State Department, said in Tokyo,
>"The U.S., as a power in the Western Pacific, has
>an interest in East Asia. We would be unhappy
>about any plans to exclude the U.S. from the
>framework of dialogue and cooperation in this
>region." But it is probably already too late for
>the Bush administration to do much more than
>delay the arrival of a China-dominated East Asian
>community, particularly because of declining
>American economic and financial strength.
>
> For Japan, the choices are more difficult
>still. Sino-Japanese enmity has had a long
>history in East Asia, always with disastrous
>outcomes. Before World War II, one of Japan's
>most influential writers on Chinese affairs,
>Hotsumi Ozaki, prophetically warned that Japan,
>by refusing to adjust to the Chinese revolution
>and instead making war on it, would only
>radicalize the Chinese people and contribute to
>the coming to power of the Chinese Communist
>Party. He spent his life working on the question
>"Why should the success of the Chinese revolution
>be to Japan's disadvantage?" In 1944, the
>Japanese government hanged Ozaki as a traitor,
>but his question remains as relevant today as it
>was in the late 1930s.
>
> Why should China's emergence as a rich,
>successful country be to the disadvantage of
>either Japan or the United States? History
>teaches us that the least intelligent response to
>this development would be to try to stop it
>through military force. As a Hong Kong wisecrack
>has it, China has just had a couple of bad
>centuries and now it's back. The world needs to
>adjust peacefully to its legitimate claims -- one
>of which is for other nations to stop
>militarizing the Taiwan problem -- while checking
>unreasonable Chinese efforts to impose its will
>on the region. Unfortunately, the trend of events
>in East Asia suggests we may yet see a repetition
>of the last Sino-Japanese conflict, only this
>time the U.S. is unlikely to be on the winning
>side.
>
>--------
> Source citations and other references for
>this Tomgram are available on the web site of the
>Japan Policy Research Institute.
>
>
>--------
> Chalmers Johnson is president of the Japan
>Policy Research Institute. The first two books in
>his Blowback Trilogy -- Blowback: The Costs and
>Consequences of American Empire and The Sorrows
>of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of
>the Republic -- are now available in paperback.
>The third volume is being written.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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Paul Etxeberri
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