At 10 am on 30 January 2013, in the cold gunmetal-grey waters of the East China Sea, a Chinese Jiangwei-II frigate locked its fire-control radar onto the Yudachi, the largest destroyer in the potent Japanese navy, 3 kilometres away. Fire-control radar calculates the range, velocity and size of an enemy target and is the prelude to firing a lethal missile.1 The Yudachi immediately took evasive action. The confrontation resulted in little more than angry denunciations from Tokyo and Beijing, but it could have had much more dramatic consequences. The Yudachi could have activated its fire-control radar and perhaps even fired at the Chinese frigate in self-defence. With no crisis-management mechanism in place between Asia’s two most powerful countries, and with uncompromising territorial claims and nationalism at fever pitch at home, the chances of such an incident escalating into a major conflict are relatively high. Given that the United States is an ally of Japan, the possibility that it could have developed into a nuclear standoff was uncomfortably real.2
Just over a century before this incident, in waters 1500 kilometres to the north, a naval exchange of fire began a war that was to plunge East Asia into almost continuous conflict for the next half century, claiming millions of lives and sowing the seeds of the region’s current tensions. On 25 July 1894, three Japanese cruisers attacked two Chinese warships and a troop transport near Feng Island on the Korean coast. In the war that followed, the chaotic forces of the tottering Qing empire were quickly dispatched by the industrial efficiency of Japan’s army and navy. Korea, the Ryukyu Islands and Taiwan, for centuries under Chinese suzerainty, would become the first territories of the Japanese Empire. The shock of Japan’s defeat of China reverberated across the world. Following the stunning Japanese victory in the battle of Yalu River, the Parisian Le Journal des Débats Politiques et Littéraires proclaimed, ‘The Battle of the Yalu is an important date in history … if Goethe had participated in the Battle of the Yalu, it is probable he would have said as he did to his compatriots at Valmy, “Here and today begins a new historical era and you can say that you have witnessed it”.’3
The shock of the first Sino-Japanese war was so much greater because it was so unexpected. East Asia had experienced almost three centuries of tranquility and prosperity after the signing of a peace treaty between Korea and Japan in 1609. Thereafter, China, Japan, Korea and the Ryukyu Kingdom managed their diplomatic and trade relations carefully and in accordance with shared Confucian precepts of order and obligation. Each society existed as an independent kingdom, while acknowledging its debt to the fount of learning and cultural refinement of China. Trade and tribute flowed in a regular and regulated way between the four kingdoms, even as all four moved, from the early seventeenth century, to shut out disturbing influences from further afield.
By the mid-nineteenth century, however, this insular subregion of East Asia was under assault. Instead of the nomadic raiders of old, Imperial China faced the ruthless efficiency of an industrialising Russian empire that was seizing territory on its inner borders. Nibbling at China’s southern coasts were avaricious and arrogant Europeans: the British, French, Dutch, Portuguese and Germans. The Dutch and the Portuguese had been greedily eyeing Japan as well. The most insistent, for the Japanese and Koreans at least, were a sanctimonious and acquisitive people from the other side of the Pacific Ocean – the Americans. Acute observers in Japan, Korea and China soon realised that the great demand for what they produced – silver, silks, porcelain, metalware – would make assaults on their seclusion unceasing; their seclusion and lack of interest in western goods in turn made them vulnerable.
While elites in China and Korea regarded the west with haughty contempt, the forces of reform quickly gained the upper hand in Japan, overthrowing the centuries-old regime of the shoguns. The rapidity with which the Meiji reformers replaced Japan’s feudal order with the institutions and industries of modern European societies has few parallels in history. Japan adopted western models of mass society and urbanisation, universal education, industrial development, democracy and constitutional monarchy, and military organisation and training. What distinguished these reforms was not just their rapidity but also their comprehensiveness. While China’s and Korea’s reformers had been able to bring about minor improvements – a modern shipyard here or a state-of-the-art railway line there – their societies remained stubbornly resistant to renovation or change. The result was stagnation and decline in Korea and China, while Japan’s economy and population expanded astonishingly quickly. In the quarter century between the Meiji Restoration and the outbreak of the first Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese economy grew by 65 per cent; it would take just another fifteen years for it to double in size.4 During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Japan’s rate of economic growth, at an average of 7 per cent per annum, was matched only by that of the United States. The industrial share of the Japanese economy would grow from one-fifth in 1887 to over one-half in 1940.5
The most important effect of the sudden divergence in the economic fortunes of Japan and its neighbours was on mutual perceptions. Watching the Europeans’ cavalier humiliation of China, and the hidebound Qing Dynasty’s inability to respond effectively, Japanese admiration for Chinese culture and learning curdled into contempt. A mid-seventh-century slogan ‘Japanese spirit and Chinese learning’ was revived and changed to ‘Japanese spirit and Western learning’.6 Almost overnight, all vestiges of Confucian learning were ridiculed and rejected, and replaced by the most advanced western techniques and doctrines. Chinese elites were horrified; having long thought of the Japanese as their younger brothers, they saw this as the ultimate rejection of the core Confucian principle of filial piety. The relationship soon degenerated to an exchange of insults, with official Chinese letters referring to the Japanese as woren (dwarf pirates). The attitudes and capabilities of the industrial age played out on a terrain etched with old cultural rivalries and stereotypes. The Qing court saw its duty as pulling the wayward Japanese into line, while Japan felt it needed to decisively demonstrate its superiority over China or else it would continue to be treated as an abject and backward Asian nation.
Yet for all the shock of its eruption in July 1894, there was something oddly familiar about the first Sino-Japanese War: the terrain on which it was fought. Chinese and Japanese forces had fought over the Korean Peninsula before. In the late thirteenth century, in the waters of the East China Sea, the Japanese desperately fought off two successive invasion attempts launched from the Korean Peninsula by the forces of China’s Mongol Yuan Dynasty. Then, in the late sixteenth century, Chinese and Korean forces combined to fight a Japanese invasion force led by the shogun Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Media commentary in Japan and China made frequent reference to heroes and villains of previous wars. Little wonder that a member of the Japanese Diet mused after the end of the first Sino-Japanese War, ‘What the Balkan Peninsula has so long been to Europe, the peninsula of Korea has for centuries been to the Far East – a “haunted place” wherein lurked the unceasing source of danger to the peace of the Orient’.7 How right he was. Within a decade, Japan and Russia would fight a full-scale conflict in the East China Sea and China’s Liaotung Peninsula, and then, having formally annexed Korea in 1910, Japanese forces would push deep into Manchuria and China itself. Even after the Japanese were defeated and expelled in 1945, the Korean Peninsula would be plunged into a brutal war from 1950 to 1953.
Hindsight is seductive. It is tempting to conclude that statesmen and strategists should have realised that the outbreak of hostilities off Feng Island in July 1894 was likely to blaze into a region-wide war within decades. Surely contemporary observers could see that the three centuries of peace in East Asia had crumbled? That the rapid change in the relative strengths of Japan, China and Korea – and, more importantly, the effects on long-held self-perceptions and cultural rivalries – contained the seeds of decades of incessant warfare and brutality? That the geography of the Korean Peninsula would once more become the epicentre of a bloody struggle?
Of course such expectations are unreasonable. Underlying trends and conditions are necessary but not sufficient conditions of history. There is so much serendipity, so many decisions and confluences, that the best we can do as we look into the future is to identify the emerging trends and structural conditions that the serendipitous events are inspired by. Are the Yudachi incident of 2013 and other recent dangerous confrontations in the East and South China seas marginal distractions at the dawn of another age of stability and prosperity, or are they the harbingers of an era of rivalry and conflict?
What sort of future awaits the world’s largest continent as it enters an age of global wealth and power? Has Asia’s recent past, an era of remarkable peace and prosperity, set the pattern for the continent’s future? Will the stable economic miracle years between the end of the Vietnam War and now be seen as a temporary golden age? This last question animates the first chapter of Restless Continent: Wealth, Rivalry and Asia’s New Geopolitics. Specifically, it asks what brought about four decades of peace and stability after the fall of Saigon and how likely these conditions are to endure.
In this book, I argue that the future of this restless continent will be shaped by two trends and two conditions. Chapter 2 investigates the first trend, the deepening interdependence of Asia’s economies; in particular, the deepening mutual dependence related to manufacturing and services, as well as flows of energy, which are beginning to unite Asia’s subregions in ways that are likely to have far-ranging economic and strategic effects.
Economic interdependence is the good news story of the recent past – it allowed Western Europe to transform itself from a realm of constant conflict to one of peace and prosperity. But Chapter 3 raises important questions about whether Asia’s interdependence will bring similar results. As their economies grow, Asian states rely on the global economy for markets, resources, energy and investment. But the scale and pace of their rise means that Asia’s larger states are often afflicted by ‘strategic claustrophobia’ – a fear that, either by accident or by design, they will be denied the markets, resources, energy and investment they need to continue their brittle internal evolution. It is inevitable that Asian states, for so long compliant with regional and global rules and rules designed by others, will increasingly insist that these change to be more conducive to their continued economic development and security.
Chapter 4 examines the reawakening sensitivity to civilisational hierarchies. A sense of cultural pride, often harkening back to pre-colonial golden ages, has been a powerful rallying symbol for many new states in Asia as they grapple with overcoming their colonial past and forging unity from ethnic and religious diversity. These recovered histories have imbued Asia’s international relations with prickly rivalry. Assertions of civilisational pride, and even hints of condescension, are met with vigorous resistance and loud counter-claims. Territorial disagreements, war histories and differential rates of economic growth quickly acquire undertones of uncompromising nationalism. Alongside the growing interdependence and assertiveness of Asia’s rising powers is the constant tension of deep cultural rivalries that erode trust and compromise.
The fifth chapter considers the geographic stage on which Asia’s rivalries will play out. It argues that, even during long periods of peace, the rules and understandings of international affairs are underpinned by a subterranean structure of force that determines which rules can be ignored or challenged and which will be enforced. The growing wealth and assertiveness of Asia’s states creates a power paradox: the more powerful countries become, the more vulnerable they feel. Fears of encirclement are driving an escalating arms race across the continent, leading to a shift in the latent structure of force that underpins the continent’s rules and institutions; a shift that is playing out across two different geographic settings. One is predominantly littoral and maritime. Asia’s crowded and booming Indian and Pacific Ocean coasts and waterways have become a source of nagging anxiety as well strategic opportunity for the continent’s jostling powers, and the collective result is an ever-more contested and crowded maritime domain, particularly around Asia’s distinctive bays and peninsulas. The other setting is terrestrial. On the vast steppes of north and central Asia, two continental empires face each other warily across a landlocked archipelago of small, isolated and internally unstable states. Although this realm appears more peaceful than the maritime realm, it could spin into strategic rivalry every bit as intense and complicated.
Chapter 6 draws together these trends and structural conditions. A new era of international affairs has already dawned in Asia in which the two opposed dynamics of rivalry and interdependence constrain each other. The collective interest of Asian states in peace and development will likely make for a rough but shifting equilibrium, one that relies increasingly on innovations in statecraft and institutions for its continuance. Asia’s international relations will more and more shape those of the world, but as the ambit of Asia’s influence widens this will also create opportunities for other states and institutions to shape in turn the compromises and understandings of a restless continent.