How China Accidentally Turned THAAD into a Political Weapon

Robert E Kelly

Security, Asia

THAAD is not about missile defense anymore; it’s about a Chinese veto over South Korean foreign policy.

The South Korean decision to install the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system has prompted a major Chinese reaction. The Chinese government has used a wide range of economic pressure against South Korea to reverse its decision. It has severely restricted tourist travel to the country, cancelled cultural events, pursued fatuous regulatory action against the company (Lotte), which sold the land to the South Korean government on which THAAD will be stationed, and, in a move worthy of the “freedom fries” of yore, staged a public bulldozing of bottles of the Korean national alcohol soju.

Campy, Yet Serious

This effort is simultaneously ridiculous and clever, campy and serious. On the one hand, it is preposterously obvious that these “protests” are staged. Once again, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has demonstrated how woefully out of touch it is with modern democratic opinion. The same apparatchiks who mistake “praise” of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un in the Onion as the real thing are those who think that a video of a bulldozer driving over soju bottles might somehow appear authentic. If China’s increasing bullying of South Korea over THAAD were not so serious, these hijinks would be comedy material. Indeed, my students here in South Korea laugh over this in discussion even as they worry about it.

On the other hand, this a wise way to pressure South Korea if the CCP is absolutely dead set against a THAAD emplacement in South Korea, which it appears to be. South Korea is a midsize economy with a few very large exporters selling to a few very large markets. This makes it highly sensitive to the politics of its biggest export markets, of which China is one. Japan, too, has been targeted in this way by China, but it is more economically diversified than South Korea and has more flexibility to ride out Chinese displeasure. China has also used these tactics in Southeast Asia.

The CCP also retains plausible deniability by routing this pressure obliquely through nongovernmental actors. There has been little overt, “Track 1” pressure, likely because Beijing is hoping South Korea will back down without an open breach. But the mercantilist-dictatorial state can “encourage” patriotic action in an economy where about 80 percent of firms have some amount of state ownership.

Read full article