American strategists may have been surprised by the deteriorating situation in Europe, but they have long expected problems in East Asia. They have tended to see Europe as America’s past, the Middle East as its present, and East Asia as its future, both in terms of threats and opportunities. The more optimistic point to the incredible economic dynamism of the region as a whole and the necessity of a holistic approach that will deepen U.S. engagement there economically, culturally, and militarily. The more pessimistic worry about how China’s spectacular ascent seems to neatly fit preexisting narratives, dating back to ancient Greece, about the dangers inherent in the rise and fall of great powers. There seems to be an endless supply of books, articles, and reports on whether war with China is inevitable or avoidable.
China is very different from Russia. It is a rising power and deeply integrated in the global economy, which ties its fate to that of the United States. Beijing has historical grievances but they are not as recent as Moscow’s. China has a strong military but does not rely on hard power alone—it has emerged as the most important economic power for other Asian nations, which gives it special leverage in discussions on the future of the region. The United States has never before faced a competitor as complicated and multi-faceted as China. To understand the challenge China poses, we must start with understanding a key contradiction in its behavior—should it be judged by its foreign policy regionally or globally?
REVISIONIST OR NOT? DECIPHERING A CONTRADICTION
On April 8, 2012, a Philippine surveillance plane spotted eight Chinese fishing vessels near Scarborough Reef, an area in the South China Sea that is claimed by the Philippines, China, and Taiwan. The Philippines used a decommissioned U.S. Coast Guard cutter ship it had received from the United States to inspect the vessels and found them to be illegally carrying endangered sea life. The crew were arrested and detained. China reacted furiously and sent vessels of its own. The Chinese navy worked closely with Chinese fishermen to trap the Philippine vessels inside the reef. China also retaliated in other ways—it prevented Philippine banana imports from reaching their markets in China and it issued a travel ban that reduced the number of Chinese tourists to the Philippines.1
The United States intervened as an intermediary to negotiate a mutual withdrawal and de-escalation of tensions. The talks were led on the U.S. side by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell, a veteran Asia expert, and on the Chinese side by Fu Ying, a hardliner who was the second-ever woman to hold the position of China’s vice foreign minister. In an article on the Scarborough Reef crisis, Ely Ratner, who served in the State Department’s Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs at the time, wrote, “After weeks of discussions, demarches and negotiations, US officials in mid-June brokered what they thought was a deal for a mutual withdrawal. Exhausted, outnumbered and lacking viable alternatives, Manila withdrew its remaining ships under the face-saving auspices of an oncoming typhoon. China, on the other hand, failed to comply with the agreed-upon deadline and retained its maritime vessels at the shoal, where they remain today on near-constant patrol.”2
A senior U.S. official involved in the talks would later say privately that being unable to stop China from reneging on its commitment was the single greatest regret of his tenure.3 In his account of the crisis, Ratner noted that China relied on nonmilitary vessels as the “leading edge” of its coercion. Beijing also understood the importance of calibrating its assertiveness—it pressed its “advantage right up to—but still below—the line of militarization, which would have increased the likelihood of response by the US Navy.”4
In the years that followed, China pressed its advantage throughout the South China Sea and then began to reclaim land by building islands where there were none. China’s primary instrument was its civilian power, which includes the world’s largest coast guard fleet.5 In 2014 and 2015, China reclaimed over 2,900 acres of land, which is over seventeen times that reclaimed by all other claimants combined. This was no accident. As researchers Andrew Erickson and Kevin Bond have shown, China used to lag far behind other nations in its “dredging” capability, but it carefully built it up in the 2000s to over three times its 2000 size and has now “created a fleet capable of literally altering geography, creating ‘islands’ in the span of eighteen months where before there were only reefs and shoals.”6
Over the past two years, China has sabotaged a Vietnamese fishing boat around the Paracel Islands, patrolled around the disputed James Reef, used its coast guard to fire a water cannon at two Philippine fishery ships around Scarborough Reef, launched an oil rig near the Paracel Islands before removing it six weeks later, and expanded its land-reclamation efforts to the extent of preparing to install military installations on them, including a three-thousand-meter airstrip on Fiery Cross Reef and a runway on Subi Reef.
Throughout this time, China’s neighbors have sought to engage Beijing diplomatically to agree to a Code of Conduct or another means of ensuring that territorial disputes do not spiral out of control. China displayed no interest in reaching a binding agreement and instead concentrated on pressing its advantage to gain control of the South China Sea, which Beijing sees as Chinese. The 2013 edition of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) influential publication The Science of Military Strategy asserted that “around 1.5 million square km of [China’s] jurisdictional waters are under the actual control of other nations, and over 50 islands and reefs have been occupied by other states.”7
Beijing also reacted angrily to U.S. efforts to reassure its allies and discourage China’s unilateral actions. Fu Ying, who had gone on to chair the Foreign Affairs Committee of China’s National People’s Congress, wrote an op-ed in the Financial Times titled “The US World Order Is a Suit That No Longer Fits.” Fu accused the United States of wanting “to fuel a geopolitical contest by elbowing its way into regional disputes.” To “meddle in the problems China has with its neighbors,” Fu wrote, “risks elevating territorial disputes into strategic rivalry.”8
Few analysts, even those who take a benign view of China’s rise, would disagree with the claim that China has become much more assertive and revisionist in its actions in the South China Sea. Most would also acknowledge that China is more confident and pushy throughout East Asia. But many point to countervailing evidence outside of East Asia. Over the past five years China has been much more cooperative and responsible about addressing global challenges, including economic crises, climate change, nuclear proliferation, and counterterrorism. China has been a constructive member of the G20—indeed America’s greatest critic on economic policy has been its ally Germany, not China. China has abided by the rulings of the World Trade Organization (WTO). And when Beijing set up its own institution—the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB)—it built on the rules of the World Bank.
China was cooperative with Western countries in the Paris climate talks, in stark contrast to its combative behavior at the Copenhagen climate change summit in 2009. And as Beijing faces the threat of violent extremism to its west, it has grown closer to Washington on counterterrorism, with many Westerners believing that increased Chinese engagement in Central Asia and the Middle East would be consistent with U.S. and European interests. China was also a responsible member of the P5+1 talks on stopping Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. More generally, unlike Vladimir Putin, China has not articulated a harsh critique of American global power, and it has demonstrated little desire to overturn the U.S.-led global order.
A great deal has been written on China’s rise and what it means for U.S. foreign policy. Much of this analysis involves calculated guesswork about China’s intentions and what countries do when they rise rapidly. But the key to unlocking China’s effect on the global order has received remarkably little attention. There is contradictory evidence on China’s intentions. It is very assertive in the South China Sea, somewhat assertive in the rest of East Asia, and generally cooperative on global issues. How should we think about this contradiction? The answer lies in another question: What are we really worried about as China rises? Are we worried about regional disputes, the integrity of the global order, or something in between? Is greater Chinese influence on the international system always bad for the United States, or is it only bad when directed or expressed in a certain way?
Many scholars believe that China will truly threaten the global order only if and when it becomes assertive on global issues. The regional challenge can be managed, or so the argument goes. Princeton University professor G. John Ikenberry is optimistic about China’s rise not only because China needs an open global economy for its own economic growth, but also because the global order “is easy to join but hard to overturn.”9 Ikenberry points out that China does not have an alternative vision for how to structure the global economy, tackle climate change, or deal with nuclear proliferation. It does not want to abolish the United Nations, the IMF, or the World Bank. It may want reform so it has a greater voice but this is consistent with strengthening the order.
Globally, U.S. hegemony has been very good news for the Chinese Communist Party, certainly economically, but also geopolitically. The U.S.-led international order created an environment in which China could grow rapidly. This was not an accident; in fact, it was an intended consequence of U.S. strategy. As another Princeton professor, Thomas Christensen, has put it: “With a few rare exceptions, such as restrictions on arms sales and military relevant technologies, US China policy in the past few decades has been nearly the opposite of our containment policy toward the Soviets throughout the Cold War and toward China itself in the 1950s and 1990s.”10 The United States has actively promoted and facilitated Chinese growth, partly because of a belief that prosperity would shape China’s choices in a positive way.
Christensen, who served in the State Department in the George W. Bush administration, argues that the challenge with China is less that Beijing will overturn the order and more that it will not play its part in upholding it. He calls this global governance issue “the biggest challenge of all.”11 Brookings Institution scholar Jeffrey Bader, who served as senior director for Asia in the Obama administration, poses the question another way: “Do China’s unacceptable actions in the South China Sea portend how China will behave more broadly in the world if and when it acquires the military capacity to do so?”12 Bader’s answer is no. China lacks the capacity to project power and has no allies other than Pakistan and North Korea. For Bader, it is only if and when China uses military force to achieve its objectives that the West will need to worry that it is seeking to destabilize the regional order in East Asia. These experts believe that the regional challenges—including the maritime tensions and China’s assertiveness—are important but can be, and are being, adequately dealt with under current policy approaches.
We have been conditioned to think about China as part of a long-running historical drama about the rise and fall of great powers. The story always goes like this: a country is on top of the heap, with the world at its fingertips, until one day it is challenged by the new power on the block, which then has its moment in the sun. This notion is very prevalent in international relations theory and also in popular culture—in 2006 Chinese television broadcast a twelve-part documentary on the rise and fall of the great powers.13 The question we continually ask ourselves is, Is this happening now? Is China about to replace the United States as the global superpower? In this context, China’s acceptance of global institutions offers reassurance. However, this rise-and-fall view is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what the global order is and how it may come apart. As described in Chapter 1, the global order depends on healthy regional orders. How China behaves toward its neighbors and on the matter of territorial borders is much more indicative of its disposition toward the order than is its behavior in the IMF, the WTO, or the World Bank, as important as that is.
The geopolitical risk is that a Chinese attempt to overturn the regional order will destabilize East Asia, which consists of some of the most economically advanced, militarily capable, and populous countries in the world. East Asia is also a region where nationalist sentiment and historical grievances run deep. China’s neighbors worry that Beijing is looking to reconstitute its old tributary system whereby it exercises great influence over the foreign and domestic policies of many of its neighbors. Were the United States to be pushed out of East Asia, security competition would immediately intensify and the risk of war would increase significantly. A conflict in this part of the world would be a calamity on a par with the major European wars of the first half of the twentieth century. Such a regional challenge would also have catastrophic consequences for the global economy and change how China behaves globally, because it will be more motivated to develop a foreign policy that helps it advance its regional interests. It may not seek to overturn the global order but it might, for instance, choose to drive a wedge between the United States and Europe on East Asian security, build economic institutions that are independent of the United States, or make the world safe for authoritarian capitalism.
It is important to realize, however, that just because a Chinese challenge in East Asia would pose a severe geopolitical problem for the United States, this does not mean that Chinese activism in other regions is equally problematic. China is located in a particularly complex geographical position. It shares a land border with eleven states but is contiguous with twenty when one counts maritime territory. According to China specialists Andrew Nathan of Columbia University and Andrew Scobell of the RAND Corporation, China is part of six separate regional subsystems, which consist of forty-five countries in total.14 China has had difficult relations with many of these nations in the past. And today it faces many challenges. Take China’s western neighborhood as an example. In contrast to the east, in the west China faces threats from Uighur militants in Xinjiang, fueled by instability in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and even Syria and Iraq. In a book on the China-Pakistan relationship, German Marshall Fund senior fellow Andrew Small wrote that “looking west from China, the obvious images that come to mind are fragile states, rising forces of Islamic militancy, major narcotics flows, and the world’s fastest growing nuclear arsenals.”15 In other words, these are the same challenges that the United States and its allies are invested in confronting in South and Central Asia and in the Middle East. The risk of a major interstate war is much lower. Some people warn about China-India tensions but their escalation is unlikely because India actually benefits from leaving the door open to China’s steadying hand in Pakistan.
Yet China is remarkably passive, particularly when compared with other East Asian nations. As Small put it, “Shifts in the economic and military balance of power in the Asia Pacific have so far moved inexorably in China’s favor. It is Beijing’s impatience, its assertiveness, that is the greatest risk to China’s rising power. In China’s western neighborhood by contrast, it has been Beijing’s caution and its unwillingness to try to steer developments in a direction consonant with Chinese interest that pose the greater problem.”16 Small concludes: “Unlike Beijing’s carefully calibrated escalations in East Asia, the threats emerging in its west have caught it looking seriously unprepared.”17
These observations highlight that the problem is not rising Chinese influence per se as much as the effects of China’s strategy and behavior in particular regions. The effects of this influence are very dangerous in East Asia but much less so to China’s west. This also applies to other parts of the world. As a rising power, China is increasing its ties to Africa, Latin America, and Europe. This may pose specific problems for the United States but it is not a major challenge to the global order. The challenge China poses to the U.S.-led liberal order is in East Asia. So what exactly is China up to?
UNDERSTANDING CHINA’S EAST ASIA STRATEGY
It used to be said that China’s strategic intentions were a mystery, not a secret. A mystery is something that is unknown, even to Chinese leaders. A secret you can steal, but a mystery will only unfold over time, if at all. The mystery versus secret analogy was supposed to show that China’s intentions could change as its power rose (or fell). Some of this remains plausible of course, but China’s strategic goals, and its strategy, have come into sharper focus over the past five years.
It is clear now that China is not satisfied with the status quo but is also aware that a major strategic offensive would be massively counterproductive—it would provide the cohesive glue for a coordinated response by the United States and its allies, which China does not have the capabilities to match. Chinese leaders must design a strategy that stands a reasonable chance of success. And they appear to have found one. Based on its behavior over the past five years and scholarly assessments of the Chinese debate on strategy, China’s regional strategy can be stated as achieving power parity with the United States in East Asia and the Western Pacific. This is the minimum objective. Ideally, Beijing would like to enjoy an advantage over the United States in East Asia and the Western Pacific.18 There are two elements of this strategy: (1) build a Chinese sphere of influence up to the second island chain by means short of the use of force, and (2) persuade the United States to accept power parity with China.
What is not widely appreciated about Chinese strategy is that to succeed it requires the absence of conflict with the United States and Japan.19 China is looking to revise the regional order by means short of war—not only out of preference but also out of necessity. It cannot afford an escalation to war at this time. In the event of conflict, China’s new islands would become strategic liabilities and would be destroyed. The Chinese regime would be endangered, and the region would be mobilized against it. But if peace prevails, and if China can accrue enough marginal gains without consequence, that would amount to a fundamental change in the region.20 At some future point—maybe in ten or fifteen years—the rest of the region and the United States would either have to accept China’s newly acquired influence and role or initiate a conflict to roll it back. China knows that the United States would be extremely unlikely to use force in such circumstances. In fact, China repeatedly raises the question of whether the United States really wants to risk a conflict—one that would destroy the U.S.-China relationship—over territorial issues in which the United States has no claim.
This is a very sophisticated strategy that maximizes China’s advantages, puts the United States in a difficult position, and manipulates the legitimate concerns that Americans have about a conflict with a major power. It has an attainable goal: not to kick the United States out of East Asia, but to put China in a position whereby the two countries share the region between them. Based on its track record so far, is has a good prospect of success. If China succeeds, it would transform East Asia. China would be in a position to control the sea and airspace within its sphere of influence; it could dictate key economic, political, and foreign-policy decisions to its neighbors; it would most likely roll over its neighbors’ territorial claims and weaken U.S. alliances; and it would have a platform for future assertiveness. The two elements of this strategy, then, merit a closer look.
Creating a Sphere of Influence in East Asia
China recognizes that the United States will not leave the Asia Pacific anytime soon but it is determined to change the fact that U.S. forces are the preeminent power in all of East Asia, including right up to Chinese shores. Chinese strategists find U.S. surveillance missions intolerable. They resent their neighbors using American preeminence as a license to advance territorial claims in waters they regard as Chinese. And they feel that Beijing’s regional influence and standing have been artificially constrained by the U.S.-led regional order. The first step toward righting these wrongs, in Beijing’s view, is to build a sphere of influence in East Asia—a sphere where it is China that calls the shots, not the United States. The contours of this sphere are widely known. China wants to gain control of the maritime space up to the first island chain, and it wants to prevent the U.S. Navy from controlling the seas between the first and second island chains. This means controlling the South China Sea, being the dominant force in the East China Sea, being the most influential external power compared to many of its neighbors, and having a clear strategic advantage over Japan. Admiral Harry Harris, the commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, described China’s goal as being to dominate East Asia out to the second island chain, which he labeled “hegemony” in East Asia.21
China enjoys great advantages over its neighbors, especially in Southeast Asia, because it is so much larger than all of them. This affords China the opportunity to extend its influence without resorting to the use of military force. For example, China has a far larger civilian fleet than other nations. According to U.S. experts Andrew Erickson and Conor Kennedy, the already-large fleet of the China Coast Guard (CCG) greatly outnumbers the fleets of Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines com-bined, and was projected to grow by 25 percent from 2012 to 2015 as newer and larger ships replaced smaller, older ones.22 China has trained its fishermen to sail deliberately into disputed waters as part of a “fishing militia.” An adviser to the government of the port town of Hainan Island where this training takes place said, “The maritime militia is expanding because of the country’s need for it, and because of the desire of the fishermen to engage in national service, protecting our country’s interests.”23
Avoiding the overt use of military force has been, and is still, the key feature of Chinese revisionism. China, for instance, has not forcibly removed other country’s forces from disputed islands. Since 1999 Philippine marines have been on the BRP Sierra Madre, a dilapidated ship that the Philippine navy ran aground on a contested shoal in the Spratly Archipelago merely to stake a claim.24 China could easily kick them off but it does not, preferring simply to make life difficult for them by obstructing the resupply lines. China has also eschewed the use of force against Taiwan and against Japan in the East China Sea.
Even though it avoids military force, China is using its raw power to create a new reality in the South China Sea. It spurns efforts at arbitration, rejects the notion that disputes must be settled multilaterally, and is using the vast resources and capabilities at its disposal to act unilaterally and create new realities in the region. As a matter of principle, this is not fundamentally different than what the other claimants have done in the past. If Vietnam or the Philippines had the capability to change the status quo in its favor, it’s a fair bet that they would do so. But they do not. Of all the claimants, only China has the power to act truly unilaterally and upset the equilibrium.
China is choosing to use its power to beat the other claimants, albeit in a gradual and subtle way. As Patrick Cronin of the Center for a New American Security put it, “China is enhancing its strategic position through its incremental salami slicing tactics, which accrete to major changes to the status quo while warding off escalation.”25 This is a crucial difference between Chinese and Russian strategy. Russia violated international norms in Crimea. China is using a precedent set by others but it is doing so on such a scale that it has a massive strategic effect. In effect, it is taking a small opening and driving a truck (or in this case, a navy) through it.
Over the past five years, China has used a variety of tactics to shift the maritime balance in its favor. China has used its coast guard fleet and fishing vessels to bully and push other countries off contested territory.26 Whenever the region reacted, China would make some modest concessions—such as engaging in discussions on a code of conduct—until the next time. Then Beijing shifted tack to construct islands in disputed waters. China was not the first to engage in land reclamation—Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Taiwan have done so in the past. But as the then U.S. secretary of defense Ash Carter explained, “One country has gone much further and much faster than any other. And that’s China. China has reclaimed over 2,000 acres, more than all other claimants combined … and more than in the entire history of the region. And China did so in only the last 18 months. It is unclear how much farther China will go.”27
Indeed, some estimates put Chinese reclamation at over 2,900 acres in 2014 and the first half of 2015 alone. For comparison, Vietnam reclaimed 80 acres over many decades, Malaysia reclaimed 70, the Philippines 40, and Taiwan just 8. Thus China reclaimed seventeen times more land in twenty months than all other claimants had over forty years.28 And it has not stopped yet. China has since begun to build military features on these islands.
So why does China’s maritime assertiveness matter? After all, as we have seen, many claimants, not just China, have acted unilaterally. China just has more capability. Should it be treated differently for being larger than the others? The short answer is yes. China’s size means that it alone has the capacity to remake the geopolitical map of Southeast Asia. Control would give it great influence over its smaller neighbors. There are other factors too. China’s actions—forcing its neighbors off reefs and building islands—increase the risk of a military clash that could poison geopolitics in the region with dangerous long-term consequences. If China takes control of the South China Sea, it also stands to benefit from vast resources—the United Nations estimates that 10 percent of global fisheries are located in the South China Sea while the U.S. Energy Information Administration says that the region contains approximately 11 billion barrels of oil and 190 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves.29
Some people say that U.S. concerns are overblown because it would never be in China’s interest to cut off access to crucial sea lanes—after all, China relies on international trade (30 percent of which transits the South China Sea), so a cutoff would come at an enormous cost to China.30 But this misses the point. From China’s perspective, the contest for the Asia Pacific is about a gradual struggle for preeminence; it is not the first step in a plan to shut down maritime commerce. Joint custody of the sea lanes would give China great influence over its neighbors, just as it enhances U.S. prestige now (even though it is unthinkable that the United States would use that role for geopolitical leverage outside of a full-blown conflict). China’s maritime assertiveness is a crucial component of its strategy to build a sphere of influence in Southeast Asia and to increase its influence in the region.
China has also become much more assertive and aggressive around the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands since those islands were purchased by the Japanese government and nationalized in 2012. There have been 144 Chinese intrusions into Japanese territorial waters since September 2012.31 In 2015, Japanese aircraft scrambled 571 times to intercept Chinese aircraft.32 In November 2013, China unilaterally declared an Air Defense Identification Zone in the East China Sea. Chinese aircraft became increasingly adventurous and passed through Japanese airspace in the Bashi Channel in March 2015 and the Miyako Strait in May 2015 for the first time.33 The Japanese believe that China is looking to establish dominance over the East China Sea, which would have dire implications for Japan’s security. As one senior Japanese official put it, “China’s history of being invaded has left it with a psychological need for a buffer zone. In this, China is similar to Russia. But, it has adopted this buffer zone mentality for its maritime space, not just its land borders. China is determined to create a great wall in the sea.”34
Compelling the United States to Accept Power Parity
The centerpiece of this component of China’s strategy is its concept of a new model of major power relations. This concept was first rolled out in 2012 but is closely associated with President Xi Jinping. The basic notion is attractive: nations are not destined to repeat the mistakes of great powers in bygone eras, especially when they have so many shared interests and are interdependent with each other. The Obama administration initially welcomed this concept but then grew more wary of it. It is a curious proposition because it proposes a new trajectory for a relationship whose characteristics are not new at all. U.S.-China relations tick many of the boxes of previous tragic episodes of a rising power meeting an established power: the United States and China have very different political regimes and distrust one another; China feels aggrieved that it has been taken advantage of over the past two centuries and has been denied its rightful role in its region and maybe the world; East Asia is home to several competing nationalisms and most of China’s neighbors are distrustful of its rise. The only truly successful example of a rising power taking over the mantle from an established power was Britain and the United States in the 1940s, which was the result of a truly unique situation: both were democracies, they faced a common threat, and Britain recognized that it was a spent force.
In truth, though, this does not matter because China never intended the concept to mean that some special dynamic or features in the relationship would produce a good outcome.35 What Xi means by it is that the leaders of the two countries can avoid conflict or a cold war by making different choices than the leaders did in previous situations. The problem is that both Washington and Beijing differ on what those decisions are. In Washington, it means that as China rises its leaders will accept the legitimacy of the international order—including at the regional level—and so forsake the strategic goals held by past rising powers. In Beijing, by contrast, it means that as China rises, the United States will accommodate it by respecting its “core interests.”
China’s core interests have multiplied over the past decade.36 The phrase was first used in 2003 to highlight Chinese concerns about Taiwan seeking independence. In 2006, Tibet and Xinjiang were added to the list of China’s core interests. And in July 2009, at the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, State Councilor Dai Bingguo listed three, much more expansive, core interests: to “uphold our basic systems, our national security; and secondly, the sovereignty and territorial integrity; and thirdly, economic and social sustained development.”37 Various other statements leave no doubt that the first of these refers to the continuation in power of the Chinese Communist Party. The second remains vague but is widely understood to encompass the nine-dash line in the South China Sea in addition to Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang.38 In 2015, these three interests were codified in a sweeping National Security Law.39
As they are understood, of these three core interests, the United States accepts only the third—economic development. Chinese strategists recognize this and have highlighted it. In a 2012 article on how China understood the new model of great power relations, Cui Tiankai and his co-author Pang Hanzhao wrote: “China has never done anything to undermine the US core interests and major concerns, yet what the United States has done in matters concerning China’s core and important interests and major concerns is unsatisfactory.”40
There is absolutely nothing new about a rising power calling on an established power to accommodate its core interests. Virtually all rising powers in modern history have made the same argument. If the United States and China differ over core interests, why bother with the concept of a new model of great power relations? The reason is that Beijing sees it as a useful diplomatic tool to gradually socialize the region and the United States to its ambition. Perhaps its most pernicious aspect is its assumption that no other country in Asia is a great power, so those countries should be subservient to China and the United States. The concept also assumes a linear project of Chinese power relative to the United States. The message is unambiguous: China’s rise is inevitable, so accept these core interests and overcome the centuries of history that suggest rivalry between emerging and established powers is inevitable. Right now, the United States will not accept this deal. But if China can undermine the alliance system, create new realities in the region, and gain leverage over the United States, Beijing hopes that a future American president will accept it as a necessary evil to reduce tensions and maintain a constructive relationship with China.41
The flip side to China’s new model is the risk of war if the United States rejects it. China may require the absence of war to build its sphere of influence in East Asia, but China also wants to maintain the illusion that the two countries are close to an inadvertent conflict. Such an illusion induces an abundance of caution among American policymakers. For instance, in 2011, the Chinese vice foreign minister Cui Tiankai warned that Southeast Asian nations “are actually playing with fire” in the South China Sea, “and I hope the fire will not be drawn to the United States.”42 Cui would go on to serve as ambassador to the United States. It was in that capacity that he authored an article urging Americans to focus on areas of global cooperation with China instead of the more competitive aspects of the relationship.43
Beijing is also trying to sow seeds of doubt in the region about America’s staying power. It is using its military capability to deny access to maritime regions—what is known in security circles as anti-access and area denial (A2/AD)—as a way of undermining the credibility of U.S. security guarantees well before the United States formally accepts the Chinese sphere of influence. Beijing also hopes that its economic leverage—it serves as a market for the rest of the region and a source of growth—will sugarcoat the pill of revisionism and help socialize its neighbors to its new role as co-manager of the East Asian order.
Without the United States, the balance of power fundamentally shifts and China is in the ascendant. One way of illustrating this is to look at diplomatic ties between the United States and China and what happens when China’s neighbors deal with China on their own. Asian nations struggle to have a frank dialogue with Beijing. China resists multilateral discussions on thorny issues because it does not want to be put in a position where it is outnumbered. Beijing also knows that the cards are stacked in its favor in one-on-one discussions given that it is much bigger than all of its neighbors except India. But even in one-on-one talks, China’s neighbors find that Beijing is not very forthcoming. Meetings with Xi Jinping are allowed to focus only on soft issues, and criticism of China’s behavior, especially in the South China Sea, is not allowed. One senior Japanese diplomat pointed out to China that Presidents Obama and Xi felt free to criticize each other and exchange views frankly and was told by the Chinese side, “Japan is not the United States. Only the United States is the United States.”44 The meaning was clear. China would deal with the United States on different terms because it was a superpower (and because of this status China had no choice in the matter), but smaller countries should not have such pretensions. They must respect Beijing’s superior power and preferences, much as foreign peoples did in the tributary system of the Middle Kingdom.
If China can reach an accommodation with the United States whereby Washington recognizes power parity in Asia, including a Chinese sphere of influence in the western part of the western Pacific, Beijing can turn to the rest of Asia and say something to the effect of “We have come to an arrangement with the United States to co-manage the region. You must stop resisting and recognize the new reality.” At that point, most countries in the region would have little option but to acquiesce. Japan would likely try to balance against China, especially in the East China Sea, but the other countries in the region would not have enough power or leverage to do so on their own. They would be compelled to bandwagon with Beijing and accept Chinese preeminence in East Asia. The struggle to preserve the U.S.-led regional order would be lost.
A BALANCING ACT
If China’s audacious bid to share East Asia with the United States fails, it will be because of a counter-reaction. The United States and most of China’s neighbors are increasingly anxious about China’s behavior and they are balancing against it. The United States is looking to capitalize on this anxiety by deepening its engagement with East Asian nations to strengthen security and economic cooperation among like-minded nations. Japan’s nationalist prime minister, Shinzō Abe, is using the opportunity to introduce domestic reforms that will enable Japan to do more to balance against China, both on its own and with other nations. And the region as a whole is working with the United States and one another—through arms sales, training exercises, joint patrols, and diplomatic cooperation—to balance against China.
Washington and Tokyo hope that this balancing will be enough to deny China its strategic objective, but it may not be enough. Before we look at why it might fail, let’s first look at what the balancing effort entails.
A U.S. Pivot
After the initial attempt at convergence with China in 2009, the Obama administration’s strategy shifted dramatically as it began to implement its most famous strategic innovation: the pivot, or rebalance, to Asia. Announced by President Obama to the Australian Parliament in 2011, the pivot has been presented as increasing America’s investment in the world’s most dynamic and vibrant region.45 But in fact the United States began to increase its engagement in the region from the mid-2000s on.46 That is, even though officials go to great lengths to say that China is not the target of the pivot, there is no doubt that the primary driver of current U.S. policy is a desire to counter-balance China’s challenge to the regional order.
When one looks at the various components of the pivot, it becomes clear that they are primarily in the military realm.47 The United States is deepening security cooperation with its allies and what it calls its partners—countries, like Vietnam, that are not formal allies but share America’s concern over China’s rise. In practice, this means that the U.S. Navy has been invited back to places like Subic Bay in the Philippines and Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam, both of which it had been excluded from for many decades. The Philippines and Vietnam understand very clearly why the change has taken place: to bolster the deterrent to China in the South China Sea.
Another component of the rebalance is sustaining the capability to project power into the area to support U.S. allies. Again, this sounds relatively innocuous, as if the U.S. Navy were struggling to cope with a severe weather pattern rather than inhibited navigation. But, of course, it is nothing of the sort. The Chinese military has been pouring resources into means of blunting America’s ability to project power into the region. In the jargon of the navy, they have been investing in A2/AD capabilities, like anti-ship missiles. One purpose of the U.S. pivot, then, is to come up with clever ways of circumventing or defeating these measures.
Even the nonmilitary parts of the pivot are about balancing against China. Increasing U.S. diplomatic engagement in East Asian institutions serves the general purpose of strengthening the regional order but it is also about using multilateral forums to put pressure on China not to act unilaterally to change the status quo. The since-abandoned Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was about promoting economic growth and it was open to China in principle, but there is no getting around the fact that the Obama administration’s primary selling point was that “if the United States does not set the rules, China will.”48
As it pivoted, Washington sought to deepen its dialogue with Beijing along a parallel track, through forums like the Strategic and Economic Dialogue. Balancing is not containment. It does not seek to stop China from rising. It only aims to push back against specific Chinese policies that challenge the regional order. The purpose of the engagement track is to clearly communicate this to China and to keep open avenues of cooperation on vitally important shared interests—like climate change, the global economy, and nonproliferation—even as the regional competition heats up.
The purpose of the U.S. pivot to Asia was very clear. It is to take advantage of regional concerns about Chinese foreign policy to balance against China so it is unable to overturn the U.S.-led regional order. More than any other metric, U.S. engagement in Asia, whether called a pivot or not, will rise or fall on whether it achieves that goal, regardless of how it may be sugarcoated in the public presentation.
Japan
Shinzō Abe served as Japan’s prime minister for twelve months in 2006–2007 and returned to power in December 2012 after a particularly volatile period in Japanese politics in which five prime ministers served in five years. Abe’s formative experience was as a six-year-old when he sat on the lap of his grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, who was then prime minister of Japan. Kishi had previously served in Tojo’s cabinet in World War II and had been arrested by U.S. forces as a suspected war criminal. On the day that the young Shinzō was with his grandfather, he could hear tens of thousands of people protesting loudly outside Kishi’s office against his effort to revise and ratify the U.S.-Japan security treaty.49 Kishi would succeed in his goal, but only by using strong-arm tactics that led to his resignation and loss of power. It was an experience that Abe would never forget.
When Abe returned to power in 2012, relations with China had already turned sour. In fact, it was the souring of relations of China that propelled Abe back into office. His party, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), wanted a strong national security leader to challenge the incumbent Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) and restore Japan’s position vis-à-vis China. Abe’s view is that China is seeking a sphere of influence in East Asia, in order to weaken the U.S. alliance system and create a regional order in which other countries are subservient to China. He set out on a mission to transform Japan’s strategy and its capabilities, so it could effectively balance China and prevent it from achieving its goal.50
Abe’s grand strategy has three components. First, he seeks to preserve the balance of power in Asia whereby there is an effective counterweight to China. Japan’s military shares the assessment offered here that to succeed, China’s strategy requires the absence of war. As one senior Japanese naval officer put it, “The Chinese are expansionist and revisionist but they are also pragmatic and a believer in the balance of power. Unless they believe they have achieved superiority over U.S. forces they will not wage war to expand.”51 The linchpin of this counterweight is the U.S.-led alliance system, but it also includes closer bilateral ties with China’s neighbors. Japan has deepened its cooperation with Australia, India, and the Philippines in a myriad of ways—with joint military exercises, closer diplomatic ties, and by relaxing its restrictions on arms sales. Abe has led an effort to normalize Japanese security policy by revising the post–War World II restrictions on what Japan can do in the world. In early 2016 he secured passage of controversial security legislation that allows Japanese armed forces to intervene overseas if strict criteria are met. He is hoping to revise Article 9 of the constitution, which caps Japanese military spending at 1 percent of GDP and forbids the country from having an army. The Japanese public is uneasy about the security reforms, but it is unlikely that they will be reversed if introduced.52
Second, Abe wants to promote economic integration within the region, both with China and with other nations in the Asia Pacific. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, a mega trade deal between twelve Pacific countries including the United States but not including China, was at the heart of this vision. Third, Abe seeks to make democracy and the rule of law a central part of his strategy. This approach has helped to consolidate and unify America’s allies in the area. As one senior naval official put it, “This is not a dispute over rocks. It is a war over international norms.”53 European countries should be concerned about the South China Sea because of what it says about Ukraine and Crimea. It also provides an ideological underpinning and positive message for the competition with China. As China cracks down on dissent and opposition, most of China’s neighbors are committed to a very different model—liberal democracy. As one senior Japanese official explained, “We tell the Chinese time is on our side, not yours. We will never go communist but some day you will become a democracy.”54
Abe’s strategic shift has not been without difficulties. The greatest has been the revival of Japanese nationalism that has renewed controversies over World War II and thus alienated South Korea while hardening attitudes in China. American friends of Japan have put considerable pressure on Japanese officials to moderate their tone and to reach out to Japan’s neighbors, especially South Korea but also China. These efforts have enjoyed some success. In 2015 Abe met with Xi Jinping for the first time, and in early 2016, Japan and South Korea reached an agreement over the “comfort women” issue.
The Regional Web
Some of China’s smallest neighbors—Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos—already have demonstrated an inclination to accept Chinese leadership, or accepted it outright, but the rest are determined to resist. By most metrics, these are large countries. Vietnam has 90 million people, the Philippines has over 100 million people, and Japan has more than 150 million people. By contrast, Germany has 70 million, Britain has 58 million, and France has 50 million. China is so large that all other nations seem small by comparison, however, and none are fully capable of standing up to China on their own. Consequently, they are deepening their security cooperation with the United States and are increasingly working with each other to build networks of cooperation that make it more difficult for China to overturn the regional security order. They are moving beyond the old hub-and-spoke model whereby East Asian states worked bilaterally with the United States but not with each other to create instead what researchers from the Center for a New American Security have dubbed an “Asia Power Web.”55
This web of cooperation cuts across defense, economics, and diplomacy. In the defense realm it means much greater cooperation on intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), undersea warfare, and amphibious operations, as well as the development of joint capabilities. Countries like Japan, Australia, and India are at the forefront of this effort but it also includes Vietnam, which opened its key naval base, Cam Ranh Bay, to its partners, Singapore and South Korea. On the diplomatic front, Asian nations have developed the so-called ASEAN plus process, which provides numerous forums for cooperation among defense ministers, foreign ministers, and heads of government. Asian countries are also cooperating with each other to promote norms and the rule of law, particularly in the maritime domain, as a way of pressuring China. In addition, we see much closer bilateral ties between Australia and Japan, Australia and India, and India and Japan. The December 2015 agreement between Japan and South Korea raised the prospect that those two countries may be able to put the painful legacy of World War II behind them and work more closely together on shared interests in Northeast Asia. And finally, Asian nations are looking to diversify their economic ties so they will be less dependent on China. The Trans-Pacific Partnership was supposed to be a key component of this broader economic web.
Some people believe that the very fact that China’s strategy has triggered counter-balancing by the United States and the region means that Beijing will fail in its bid to overturn the regional order. As Edward Luttwak succinctly put it, “China’s rising power necessarily evokes increasing resistance, so that it may well become weaker at the level of grand strategy because of its own rising military strength—a paradoxical outcome rather common in the realm of strategy.”56 But the situation is not so clear-cut. Balancing has some problems and Beijing has some moves of its own.
The first problem with balancing is that it does not offer a way of deterring China from revisionist actions or of rolling them back once they occur. China has decided it is willing to pay the costs being imposed on it so far, and it is not clear that upping the ante will cause Beijing to have a change of heart. Just as China stops short of using force to establish its sphere of influence, the balancing coalition will never initiate the use of force against China to prevent it from building an island or placing an oil rig in disputed waters. In fact, if one state did take military action against China, the coalition would quickly fall apart.
The second problem is that the regional coalition is not as strong as it appears. Only the United States and Japan are capable of continuing to balance against China regardless of circumstances. Other nations are heavily dependent on China for economic growth and do not want to have to choose between Beijing and Washington. They may have a hardline position regarding their own red lines, but they may run for cover if someone else’s red line is threatened. Moreover, smaller Asian nations may balk at being asked to do too much in regional security cooperation, which means that the United States must strike the right balance in what it asks others to do.
The third problem with balancing is that the United States is torn over how much to push back against China over regional differences given that it needs Beijing’s help on global issues. Few Americans understand why regional territorial disputes—particularly those in which the United States has no formal position—should be so central to the relationship. When crises occur, as they surely will, China may be able to manipulate public opinion in the United States to cast doubt on Washington’s commitment to regional stability.
The fourth problem is that there are real doubts about whether U.S. internationalism will endure. The election of Donald Trump and the failure of TPP have contributed to a sense of uncertainty about America’s long-term intentions.
The struggle between China’s revisionism and regional counter-balancing is not the only thing going on in East Asia. There are common challenges of economic growth, infrastructural development, climate change, terrorism, disaster relief, development, and, of course, the North Korean nuclear threat. How China and the United States help the region in addressing these problems will also play a crucial role in shaping the competition for the region’s future.
Consider a few examples. U.S. opposition to the Asian Infra-structure Investment Bank and the failure to ratify TPP undermined America’s claim to have the best economic interests of East Asia at heart. If China is able to take advantage of this hesitancy by the United States and show itself to be a responsible leader of a financial institution, it could increase its relative influence. By contrast, the persistence of the North Korean nuclear threat is a major liability for Beijing. China’s long-term goal is to neutralize South Korea and pry it away from the U.S. alliance, but this is impossible as long as Seoul faces an existential threat from the North. In addition, the prospect for a new Taiwan crisis increased with the election in 2016 of Tsai Ing-wen of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party. Early signals from Tsai are that she is keen to avoid precipitating a crisis, but if Beijing overplays its hand and tries to undermine her government on principle, its strategy could backfire.
Meanwhile, Russia is beginning to play an active role in East Asia. Putin has sought to deepen relations with China with mixed results. But he has not stopped there. Japan is keen to reopen a diplomatic dialogue with Moscow to settle its territorial dispute over the Kuril Islands and to finally agree to a post–World War II peace treaty. Abe is determined to prevent Russia from moving strategically closer to China because it has no other options and he sees this diplomacy as a means of achieving that. Putin seems receptive, yet he has also been willing to make mischief when it serves his interests—he moved closer to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in response to South Korea’s support for a UN resolution condemning Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Japan’s outreach to Russia has also been complicated by its desire to maintain a united front with the United States and the West on the annexation of Crimea.
WHAT IF CHINA’S RISE STOPS?
What if China’s rise has stopped? Several leading experts on China are warning that it is headed for severe trouble domestically. Minxin Pei, a professor at Claremont McKenna College, argues that the Chinese system is riven with corruption and social tensions and is remarkably fragile as a result.57 David Shambaugh, a professor at George Washington University, has predicted the collapse of the “badly broken” Chinese Communist Party regime.58 Others, like Ruchir Sharma of Morgan Stanley, warn of severe economic turmoil in the years to come as China comes to terms with rising debt and major economic mistakes.59 But this does not mean a less assertive China in East Asia. In fact, the opposite could occur.
The emerging strategic competition with China in East Asia is not purely a function of China’s rise. Yes, its rise has given China the confidence and capability to challenge the status quo. But countries in decline or in crisis can be even more dangerous than powers that are rising.60 A rising power believes that tomorrow will be better than today and it can wait. A rising authoritarian power derives legitimacy from economic growth and does not have to stoke the fires of nationalism. By contrast, a country in crisis or decline, especially after rising for many years, has a very different set of incentives. It can worry that its window of opportunity for geopolitical gains is closing so it is better to act sooner than later. It may need to mobilize the country behind a nationalist message to garner legitimacy for one-party rule. And the instability at home could easily spill over into instability in its behavior overseas. It is for this reason that predictions of a coming crisis or decline in China could make matters much worse than they would otherwise be.
Whichever path China takes, the future of East Asia is no longer settled. It is contested. There are multiple actors but the contest is between two very different visions of regional order: the continuation of the U.S.-led liberal order, or a Chinese spheres-of-influence system. As we have seen, China will seek to deter the United States from pushing back against it by raising the specter of an inadvertent conflict along the lines of 1914. Yet the great-power peace in East Asia is quite durable. Neither China nor the United States has any intention of waging a war against each other, as long as they respect each other’s true red lines. For China, these are Taiwan, territorial integrity, and regime stability. On other matters, there may be crises and moments of drama, but this competition will play out in peacetime, so the United States can and should take the time and effort to respond to China’s actions in the South China Sea with measures of its own to deny Beijing its strategic objective. This means moving beyond the tit-for-tat imposition of costs on Beijing toward a strategy that will prevent China from controlling the South China Sea: a strategy including arms sales to its neighbors, increased military cooperation between Asian nations, and even competitive island-building if necessary. More broadly, further integration of the U.S.-led order, especially in the economic realm, is crucial.
It is important that competition between the United States and China is limited and controlled given the degree of shared interests between the two nations. Transnational challenges like climate change and nuclear proliferation are especially important, and the key to maintaining high levels of cooperation on these and other issues is to insist that such cooperation not be linked to geopolitical actions. Likewise, the United States should welcome Chinese initiatives on institution building, even if U.S. diplomats disagree with the specifics. The United States should make it clear that it does not oppose rising Chinese influence on principle, but it does have serious concerns about attempts to build a sphere of influence in East Asia, given the region’s strategic importance to global order. If China were looking westward, a more accommodating position could be taken. Thus far, however, China has shown that it would like to avoid becoming embroiled in the troubles of the Middle East, the region to which we now turn.