林中斌 部落格 / Blog Chong-Pin Lin

Even China and America Can Coexist

accessed Feb 6, 2020

解放軍給人的印象是好戰。但

The image of the PLA is a military force rapidly modernizing and eager to seek war to prove its raison d'être: Therefore,it is quite a surprise that a PLA senior colonel took a peace-seeking posture with the U.S. by publishing an oped in the New York Times.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/opinion/pla-us-china-cold-war-military-sea.html

觀察者網中文翻譯：https://twgreatdaily.com/UqKjDXAB3uTiws8KPUP3.html

Quotes from his oped:

● “The United States, for its part, has historically vowed not to take sides in these disputes over sovereignty (in the South China Sea), arguing that it only wants to protect free navigation in the region’s waters….. as academics like M. Taylor Fravel have argued, there seems to be something of an inherent contradiction in the United States’ policy: between its claim to want to stay out of local disputes and the resurgence of its operations in the region…”

●”In the early years of that protracted standoff (in Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union), American and Soviet aircrafts didn’t hesitate to fire at one another. There were three crises over the status of divided Berlin, in 1948, 1958 and 1961…. In 1972, Washington and Moscow signed the Agreement on the Prevention of Incidents on and Over the High Seas ….. The accord didn’t prevent two Soviet ships from bumping into two American ships in Soviet territorial waters in February 1988, ….Within two years of its entry into force, according to a 2012 paper by Raul (Pete) Pedrozo, then a law professor at the United States Naval War College, the number of incidents per year had dropped from 100 to 40.”

● “If the Soviet Union and the United States managed to avoid a major conflict during the Cold War, then some degree of confidence seems in order today about the far less confrontational relations between China and the United States.

Unlike the military rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, which was global, any military competition between the United States and China is confined to the western Pacific.”

● “ Officials in Washington and other Western capitals have expressed dismay that China hasn’t become more like the United States, or at least more democratic. But did China ever pledge to become like the United States?”