Source: https://medium.com/china-and-the-world/49025a8aa648
Written by
The
world’s last remaining empire is expanding. More than fifty years after
the European, Japanese, and American colonial powers largely abandoned
their holds on far-flung territories, and more than twenty years after
the Soviet collapse, one colonial power remains: China. To its portfolio
of Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, Beijing has now added the
near-entirety of the South China Sea. Why? Because it can. How? By
simply announcing it.
The U.S. and the nations
bordering the South China Sea are simply too hobbled or militarily weak
to stand up to China’s bald territory grab.
The Obama
administration appears, in public at least, not to hear the
announcement, continuing to refer instead to amorphous needs for freedom
of navigation and codes of conduct. But here is the crystalline
statement by China’s Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi in early September:
“China has sovereignty over the islands in the South China Sea and the
adjacent waters.”
If that isn’t clear enough, an
earlier statement by China’s state news agency Xinhua in July was more
precise; a newly announced Chinese prefecture called Sansha, the Chinese
name for one of the Paracel Islands, will administer “2 million square
kilometers of water” in addition to the hundreds of islets and shoals
within the sea. That adds up to an expanse almost equal to the
Mediterranean.
It is no longer possible to pretend
that this annexation is something nuanced or limited, especially in
light of China’s recent printing of passports that include a map showing
the South China Sea as belonging to China, and the recent announcement
by the foreign affairs office of China’s Hainan Province that Chinese
ships would be allowed to search and deny transit to foreign vessels if
they were engaged in any “illegal activities” within the
12-nautical-mile zone surrounding any of the hundreds of islands claimed
by China.
How could the “peaceful rise” of an
inwardly focused China possibly lead to strident hegemony over other
territories? For decades, Western Sinologists and China’s communist
party leaders have framed the middle kingdom as a self-centered entity,
never on the hunt for foreign properties. If you lived in Boston or
Berkeley, the argument was more credible than if you lived in Lhasa,
Kashgar or Hohhot (or Vietnam in 1979, when Chinese forces invaded).
Beijing’s latest imperial move will bury the illusion of a self-occupied
benevolence.
The Chinese Communist Party and the
People’s Liberation Army Navy have been biding their time for this
moment. The South China Sea has long been a backwater of unresolved
borders, disputed exclusive economic zones, and competing claims on
fishing and petroleum rights. In addition to China, Vietnam, Malaysia,
Taiwan, the Philippines, and Brunei all have long-standing overlapping
claims. Why is it not still a sleepy backwater?
Two reasons: The muscling-up of China’s navy, and America’s epic military diversion to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Despite
its history of having a mostly ground-based military with marine
capabilities limited to its shores, over the past twenty years China has
built a major naval force with “blue water” reach, anchored by
substantial submarine bases at Ningbo, Qingdao (which U.S. Defense
Secretary Leon Panetta visited in September) and Sanya, the latter two
bases having underground sub facilities. The assortment of submarines is
complemented by 13 destroyers and 65 frigates, as well as
precision-guided ballistic and cruise missiles that the U.S. worries
could disable its aircraft carriers and bases in the region. Measured
against these advanced weapons, China’s recently launched relic of a
small aircraft carrier, the Varyag (renamed Liaoning), is nothing more
than a photo-op.
China’s newly expressed territorial
ambitions find support beyond the leadership of the Chinese Communist
Party, extending well into the national psyche. The CEO of China’s
state-controlled oil company Cnooc announced in August, vis-à-vis the
South China Sea, that “deep-water [oil] rigs are our mobile national
territory and a strategic weapon.”
In recent weeks the
South China Sea story has been overshadowed by heated frictions between
China and Japan regarding the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands in the East China
Sea. In this dispute China has a claim of ambiguous validity that can be
used to harness long-standing anti-Japan and nationalist sentiment, to
the benefit of a Chinese Communist Party that must legitimize itself.
This tussle provides two other benefits to Beijing—it keeps attention
off the South China Sea grab, and provides a robust warning to Vietnam,
Malaysia, Brunei, Taiwan and the Philippines of the consequences of
resisting.
What a difference a decade makes.
China’s
neighboring countries on the South China Sea have sailed through the
past decade with inadequate defense preparations, lulled by the
dissipating notion of a U.S. security umbrella.
The
Philippine government’s announcement in August that it is negotiating
with Italy to acquire two used Maestrale-class anti-sub cruisers,
possibly a year from now, illustrates the feebleness of its maritime
position. Two decommissioned coastguard cutters—stripped of weapons—that
have been recently transferred from the U.S. to the Philippine navy are
Manila’s most advanced ships.
The Scorpène-class
submarine sighted at dock by this observer in September at Malaysia’s
Sabah naval base still requires French naval personnel to operate
properly, according to a well-informed individual in Malaysia. (The
country received its first two submarines in 2009-2010, a procurement
that is now the subject of a corruption investigation in France.) One of
the submarines was deemed unable to submerge by the country’s defense
minister shortly after its delivery; the government now claims it can
dive.
Belatedly, Vietnam has begun a serious naval
rebuilding, deploying in 2011 its first two Gepard-class light frigates.
More significantly, in 2009 Vietnam ordered six Russian-built
kilo-class submarines, the first of which was launched for initial sea
trials four months ago at St. Petersburg. With their stealth
capabilities, extended combat range, and weapons for land and sea
strikes, these subs will markedly complicate Beijing’s regional naval
posture. But deliveries of the vessels are not likely to be completed
before 2016, which is all the more reason for an assertive Beijing to
make its South China Sea move now.
The nations in the
neighborhood are obviously weak compared to Beijing’s forces, so what
about the historical protector and stabilizer, the United States? Its
draining wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have created a decade-long vacuum
in East Asia. Beijing has likely calibrated its latest imperial move to
occur just prior to the U.S. military’s final extraction from
Afghanistan, after which the U.S. will theoretically have more
capabilities to deploy elsewhere.
Now the U.S. is
urgently trying to fill in the vacuum with a loudly broadcast “pivot”
that so far is more talk than substance. Will it be sufficient to deter
Beijing from taking a bite out of mineral-rich Mongolia on its northern
border, or colonizing rickety Myanmar to the south, with its
hydroelectric potential and Indian Ocean access? These questions are
open for consideration only because of the self-injurious actions of the
world’s current superpower over the past ten years.
An
overused phrase of officials in the administration that launched the
U.S. into the bog of Iraq was “Weakness is provocative.” With painful
irony, it is the debilitating lost decade in Iraq and Afghanistan that
enabled Beijing’s recent nimble territory grab. It is time to see the
Beijing Empire for what it is: a hegemon that has been emboldened by
America’s folly and is expanding.
Victor Robert Lee is the author of the debut spy novel Performance Anomalies, released by Perimeter Six Press in January 2013.
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