The geopolitical genius of China's satellite kill

By Victor Mallet

China's successful launch of a ballistic missile this month to destroy a satellite in orbit has been variously portrayed by defense analysts and commentators as a damaging blow to Beijing's relations with Washington, a sign that China has overreached itself and just "a big mistake".

These conclusions suggest a fundamental misunderstanding of how Chinese leaders have behaved in the past, how they will behave in the future and how they will probably continue to get the better of their western counterparts in the chess game of international diplomacy.

On this occasion, as before, China has put into practice a ruthless, rational and legally defensible strategy that exploits a key weakness of the world's biggest economy and sole military superpower.

For years - a period coinciding with the rise of China - the US has failed to provide moral or political leadership in tackling the big challenges facing humankind, whether they concern global warming or the peaceful use of space. Crucially, the US has been reluctant to subsume its national interests into multinational efforts to benefit the wider world.

Sure of its ground, the Chinese government - after a test whose only aim was to prove it could obliterate enemy satellites in low earth orbit - even had the gall to declare that "China has never, and will never, participate in any form of space arms race". This was no more truthful than President George W. Bush's insistence that "we do not torture" detainees.

There are at least three areas in which China is happy to ride on America's coattails and the first is human rights. Until the US began detaining people without trial at Guantánamo Bay five years ago, it was possible for US politicians, without hypocrisy, to criticize Chinese Communist leaders for jailing their political opponents. The US could exert real influence on Chinese behavior. Exchanges of presidential visits between the two countries were in those days preceded by the ritual release of Chinese dissidents into US care; today such visits are more likely to be marked by the ritual purchase of Boeing aircraft as part of China's efforts to reduce the US trade deficit.

The second issue is economic nationalism. China, along with several other Asian nations, is rightly accused of using dubious stratagems - including peculiar product standards and health and safety scares - to protect its domestic market from foreign competitors. Yet whenever this issue is raised, China has only to recall a two-year-old dispute that still rankles with Chinese officials: CNOOC, the state-controlled oil group, was stopped from buying Unocal, the US oil company, on spurious national security grounds.

Third is the environment. True, air pollution from China has been detected on the US side of the Pacific and Chinese industrialization threatens the global environment. But why should China take action when the US, still the world's biggest contributor to global warming, has refused to adopt the Kyoto protocol on climate change and has barely begun to take the matter seriously?

If China is to be held to account for its actions - whether in polluting the world, persecuting its dissidents, supporting dictators or disturbing the peace in space by blowing up satellites - the US must re-arm itself with credibility, moral conviction and a willingness to help craft and then submit to international law.

China is not the only nation to have taken advantage of the plight of the US since it became obsessed by Iraq and Islamic fundamentalism. Authoritarians everywhere - from Russia to Venezuela - have done the same. This month's satellite kill, however, is another sign that no big nation has learned to play the game of geopolitics as skillfully as China.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007