Chinese elite leaders are prone to bouts of nostalgia and harking back to a golden age when life was simpler, the sunshine nicer, the food better and people happier – just like the leaders of any other country. Perhaps it was for this reason that China started to make references to the ‘Silk Road’ around 2013, a usage that some historians had queried. On the outskirts of Xi’an (the location of Chang’an, meaning ‘eternal peace’, which was the capital of central China in ancient times), through the myriad of old and new streets and the chaos of busy crossings, alleys and lorries jostling with old tractors for space on the roads, is a sign declaring ‘Start of the Ancient Silk Road’. The sign includes a painting of a statue of a group of people dressed in old-fashioned merchants’ clothes, with camels laden with goods, and is almost bucolic in its nature.
Those standing to gaze at the sign (if they can find a safe place among the chaotic traffic) have to occupy two worlds – the one in their head, and the one in which they are standing. With its frequent pollution and a population of close to seven million people, most of them currently working in heavy industry and with moderate per capita wealth levels, Xi’an is an unlikely place to start growing ruminative and sentimental. Frequently blighted either by searing heat in the summer or bitter cold in the winter, this is hardly the field of dreams. And yet, over a millennium ago, Xi’an was almost certainly the world’s most advanced and populous metropolis during the high era of the great Tang, one of the most glorious and fondly remembered of the dynasties of ancient China.
It is certainly true that there were trade links between the city and the outside world then, some reaching deep into what is currently the Middle East, with spices and silk being traded as far afield as modern-day Europe. Marco Polo reached the city in the thirteenth century, recording details of it in his travels. Even at this late date, it was an impressive place. But its decline afterwards was long and painful, and its only reappearance in the course of modern history is as the place where, briefly, Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek was kidnapped in 1936.
The phrase ‘Silk Road’ conjures up an image of a unified thoroughfare, neatly running from Imperial China up through Central Asia, through the vast nomadic lands and into the deserts of Arabia and the land of the Thousand and One Nights. The reality, as uncovered by archaeologists in modern times, is more complex. A historian of Imperial China, Mark Edward Lewis, referred to the genealogy of the idea in his book on the ancient Qin and Han era. ‘There is no evidence of substantial trade between China and the western region prior to the first century BC,’ he writes, adding, ‘the term “Silk Road” itself was coined by a German geographer in the late nineteenth century.’1
Aware of this complicated history but also evidently intrigued and tempted by the resonances and symbolic resources that the Silk Road concept offered, almost out of the blue Xi Jinping started referring more often to the concept closely related to it: ‘One Belt, One Road’. He first used this term in 2013 while travelling through South East Asia, only months after becoming the country’s president. Mentioning the ‘shared destiny’ of the region while addressing the Indonesian parliament, he went on to say that China was ready to open itself up to ASEAN countries and to enable them to benefit more from its development.2 This stress on commonality and a shared regional vision between China and the countries around it was the key. It exposed China’s aspirations to become a fully regional power with more autonomy and strategic space around it and greater security, but it also raised tough questions about what precisely China had in mind for the era of new pre-eminence it was enjoying with partners like Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and further afield down to Australia and New Zealand. Beyond the rosy optimism of the Belt Road Initiative rubric, with its epic ambition and its invitation for all and sundry to enjoy greater links and better relations with China, there were thorny questions – some from history, some from current squabbles over land and sea borders, and some arising from areas of distrust between neighbouring countries and China – about its long-term intentions. The ‘One Belt, One Road’ had its name changed in 2015 to the more official-sounding ‘Belt Road Initiative’ (BRI).
Geographical closeness alone means that China’s imprint on the Asian region, across into South and Central Asia, is immense – and increasing. And this alone poses one of the greatest modern conundrums. Almost every country in the region clearly has very strong reasons for pursuing positive economic and trade relations with China. A glance at figures across the different countries involved shows that for almost all of them, China is their largest trading partner. China’s market of urban, emerging middle-class potential customers is the greatest engine of prospective growth for the foreseeable future, not just for its regional partners but for the rest of the world. It is difficult – for some, perhaps, impossible – not to engage with this opportunity. Despite this, there is a low level of trust among the same countries when it comes to security; China’s ambitions make many uneasy, and there is some outright opposition. All of this uncertainty is focused on the South and East China Seas, the periphery immediately around China’s vast south and eastern coastal region.
The South and East China Seas are the ultimate geopolitical headache, involving a constellation of issues. These include notions of international law and competing rights; claims of one historical narrative having pre-eminence over another; the residue of colonial interference; and the potential clash between the world’s current superpower, the United States, and the other that is most keenly seeking to contest its role, at least in this region. Added to this is the involvement of international arbitration, the possible location of highly lucrative and important natural resources within the area, and the endlessly complex relationship between the People’s Republic and the Republic of China on Taiwan. The Taiwanese have a saying: ‘A bad soap opera never ends,’ and on this issue, each week the plot simply thickens. This is the closest analogy to the story of China’s maritime borders.
The South and East China Sea clashes are best seen as a space in which there is a clear collision of mentalities and world views. For China, its claims are epitomized by the infamous ‘nine-dash line’, which strikes down deep into maritime territory so that at its farthest extent it reaches the coast of Malaysia and sweeps down to Indonesia, 2,000 miles from the furthest shores of China’s southern island of Hainan. Xi himself has articulated the idea that China’s claims are immemorial, stating that ‘islands in the South China Sea since ancient times are China’s territory.’3 This sense of history and longevity is meant to trump all other claims, particularly those which have arisen from colonial meddling in the era after 1840 and the century of humiliation. The framework within which this area is conceptualized in Beijing, therefore, is from the position of a large country, and behind this lurks the sense of other partners in the region being akin to vassal states, a throwback once more to the imperial era.
Scattered around the South and East China Seas are various small islets, shoals, tiny promontories and submerged features. Depending on how these are defined, they can either give rise to claims over 12 nautical miles of space around them (a submerged feature which is sometimes above water) or 200 nautical miles for a whole island that is regarded as being permanently above sea level. That, at least, is the ruling of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). For some of these entities, China risks a conflict with Vietnam; for others with the Philippines or Malaysia, in one small area with Indonesia, and in the East China Sea over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands with Japan. The Republic of China on Taiwan, as the signatory of the San Francisco Treaty of 1952 which granted ownership of some of these areas, is also a highly active and important partner, bringing it sometimes into unusual alliances with the PRC, and sometimes creating clashes.
For decades, this area was sleepy and largely unnoticed, with only sporadic bursts of tension.4 But as China has grown more powerful and its military and economic resources have increased, so too has its interest in developing naval capacity. In the 1980s, the most influential figure was Liu Huaqing, commander of the Chinese navy in that era and deputy of the powerful and important Central Military Commission, the final authority over all China’s military strategy. Liu articulated the idea that China needed a ‘blue water’ capacity. For a nation which had not shown interest in developing any naval capacity to speak of in the five centuries prior to this, Liu’s ideas were revolutionary. But over the next two decades, China was to acquire its first aircraft carrier, and to modernize and build up its navy as an integral part of the reconstruction and improvement of the PLA generally. Liu was to die at the age of 94 in 2011, just as his ideas were starting to have real global impact.
The South China Sea is predominantly a major logistics route. Most of the trade to and from Chinese ports goes through these waters, as do the energy resources that China needs, imported from the Middle East but also (in smaller quantities) from Africa and elsewhere in Asia. In the boom years, enormous amounts of iron ore came from Australia in the south, as did liquid natural gas from Indonesia. Chinese worries about their inability to control this area have been long-standing. The possibility that the United States and its allies could simply blockade the country in times of conflict figures regularly in disaster planning scenarios. The natural response has been to increase Chinese capacity in the region, and start a process of pushing back incrementally. This, in effect, started before Xi Jinping came to power, but it has only increased since 2013.
The most tangible sign of this is the construction of huge new facilities on some of the most minor of maritime features – protruding rocks, reefs and sandbanks – so that they now figure as substantial islands, some of them with their own airstrips and quasi-military bases. This in particular has infuriated the United States, causing it in late 2015 to send a destroyer out to some of the features, demonstrating the importance of freedom of navigation and showing that it did not regard Chinese claims over this territory as legitimate. Things are complicated by the fact that the United States has yet to ratify UNCLOS, which makes the appeal to usual arbitration through international law difficult. The other problem is that it has proved impossible for those countries contesting this territory with China to reach a unified position. As of 2016, therefore, the whole region had become subject to a mishmash of different claims, on different historic and legal bases, by half a dozen different countries, none of whom show any appetite to back down.
When the US destroyer came out to do its exercises in 2015, the interesting issue was not so much the United States’ actions, but the Chinese response to them. Weeks before, China’s military leaders had issued blood-curdling threats about what might happen if areas regarded as its strategic space were violated by foreign powers (and particularly the United States). When the United States did precisely this, the MFA resorted to further stern-sounding rhetoric but did nothing else. There is a very good reason for this. At the moment, China simply does not have the capacity to oppose the United States even in its own backyard; if things really did escalate to out-and-out conflict between itself and its neighbours, it would be the ultimate case of lose–lose. The South and East China Sea issues, therefore, have so far been dealt with by proxy players like coastguard vessels and fishing boats acting as provocateurs and defendants, with varying amounts of evidence about how much they have been sanctioned by the state. In this way, the seaways around the region have become like a vast aquatic version of Chinese-style chess, with tiny incremental moves, slight assertions of superiority, and tactical advances and withdrawals.
A major development occurred in July 2016 when a case brought by the Philippines to the International Court of Arbitration in The Hague, Holland, received judgement. While the court’s decision had no prescriptive force, it did carry great moral authority. And when its judges stated that the Chinese claims on the disputed islands had no historic basis, and that some of the installations and activities undertaken by the PRC or their agents were illegal under the UNCLOS convention, Beijing responded immediately with a powerful rebuttal. Despite this, it was significant that there had now been a decision made by an international body largely regarded as neutral. However, the Philippines, under their newly elected president Dutarte, started to row back from their more aggressive position prior to the judgement. During a visit to Beijing in late 2016, Dutarte expressed the view that the US alliance was no longer as important as it had been for his country, and that China now mattered more. There is every possibility that this sort of rhetoric will play into the hands of President Trump and make it clear why they need to expect Asian partners to deliver more of their own security.
Does Chinese behaviour in this region reveal anything profound about Chinese long-term strategy? It is natural enough that it should want security and greater predictability around its borders. We might expect greater wealth and resources to lead to more assertive behaviour, too. In many ways, Beijing has no desire for this tit-for-tat uncertainty. The lives of their leaders would be easier if there was a negotiated settlement and they could concentrate on other issues. But the other partners involved share their stubbornness, with no one wishing to talk about sovereignty and final resolutions through fear of being seen to lose all credibility among domestic constituencies in their home countries. The South and East China Sea is the ultimate ‘Asian face-off’, with everyone making shrill denunciations but also knowing that any solution will involve compromise and that things can’t continue this way forever. In its land border negotiations, China has often shown flexibility and finally made concessions. Why are its maritime borders so much more contentious? The ongoing dispute with Japan, with the shadow of history looming over them, perhaps illustrates why they are so intractable.
The maritime Belt Road Initiative would, in a perfect world, include Japan. But since the mid-2000s, Sino–Japanese relations have been a political minefield, lurching from sporadic tepid expressions of unity to snarling mutual aggression. This relationship is the ultimate geopolitical version of Go, the ancient chess game that Kissinger refers to as typifying Chinese strategic thinking, involving tiny incremental moves and barely a flicker of compromise on the surface. The great burden China carries is its memory of the war from 1937 onwards, pitting imperial Japan’s industrialized might against the agrarian vulnerability of China. Around 20 million died, and many more were made homeless by the onslaught. These memories keep resurfacing, particularly because – in Chinese eyes, at least – Japan has refused to adequately apologize. For many Chinese, no matter what apology might one day be given, nothing can eradicate the humiliation and suffering of this event, perhaps the most pitiless and vicious war of modern times. As the late Lee Kuan Yew, founding leader of Singapore, was to acerbically comment, the essential problem in the modern relationship between the two is that China forgets nothing, and Japan seems to remember nothing. This causes endless bad feeling and clashes.
Anniversaries like the celebrations of the 70th year since the ending of the war in Asia, held in early September 2015, bring out the complexities of the memories of the conflict, and its residual meaning and influence in regional politics. Hardly any people survive from this era, and yet the CCP held a massive event in Beijing, at which Xi Jinping inspected serried ranks of troops and, more importantly, advertised China’s new combat assets to the outside world, some 70 per cent of which were supposedly new. World leaders (Americans and Europeans conspicuous by their absence) were present to watch this symbolic display. But there were plenty of questions a more sceptical onlooker might start asking – for example, who exactly is the audience for this sort of mass event? Elite leaders need these performances to bolster their legitimacy, for sure, and there are core parts of the public that are impressed (and need) these shows of national might. But for the outside world, such jingoistic Soviet-style parades are either interpreted as a sign of China’s latent aggressive intent, or as indications that its language about ‘peaceful rise’ is empty rhetoric. Why would a peaceful rise need so much state-of-the-art military kit to support it?
Beyond these questions are more specific ones about what Japan and China truly mean to each other in the twenty-first century, and the best kind of relationship they can have, if liberated from the shackles of historic issues. The first hurdle to overcome would be to find out how that liberation from history might be achieved. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, a group of Japanese and Chinese scholars tried to work together on establishing an historic record of the Sino–Japanese War, using archive materials from both countries. One of the problems they skirted around was more on the Chinese side than the Japanese: the role of the Communist Party in the final great victory over the imperial aggressors. Most of the propaganda and historiography that is presented in modern China would lead observers to believe that it had been the Communist armies that had brought this success home. But as work by Oxford University’s Rana Mitter and others has shown, it was the Nationalist armies under Chiang Kai-shek and his generals who had been the real victors; the Communists had only fought in a number of minor battles. The brunt of the Japanese attack was taken, and ultimately rebuffed, by the reviled Nationalists, whose successor regime is now resident in Taiwan.5 Its revelations would shatter the fundamental beliefs held by both Japan and China.
This contentiousness doesn’t just seep into attempts to establish the facts around the war, but also Chinese politicians’ later manipulation of the memory of the war. Mao Zedong actually thanked Kakuei Tanaka in 1972 when he became the first Japanese prime minister to visit the People’s Republic. When they met in Nanjing – the site of the 1937 Rape of Nanjing, the most extensive and tragic massacre perpetrated by the Japanese armies on Chinese citizens during the war – Mao stated to Kakuei that
[Japan] doesn’t have to say sorry, you contributed towards China, why? Because had Imperial Japan not started the war of invasion, how could we Communists become powerful? How could we stage the coup d’état? How could we defeat Chiang Kai-shek? How are we going to pay back you guys? No, we do not want your war reparations!6
If this quote is true (and some dispute its veracity), then it proves that Mao was as wily and amoral an historian as he was a guerrilla tactician. The Japanese may have radicalized the Chinese in ways that the Nationalists never did. And this may have led to the vast cohort of victimized, suffering peasants becoming the foot soldiers for Mao’s armies. But the idea of claiming that Chinese people paid a fair price in the war in order to bring the Communist Party to power is morally repugnant, especially coming from someone in Mao’s position.
In the 1980s, Deng and his fellow leaders looked to Japan in far less controversial ways for inspiration in how to modernize their country. They were impressed in particular by the reforms implemented by Shigeru Yoshida, one of the most prominent of postwar Japanese leaders, who had promoted rapid industrialization and heavy export-led growth. On the basis of this, throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s Japan experienced an era of huge expansion and reconstruction, becoming the world’s second-largest economy by the 1980s, and so successful that some suspected it would overtake the United States. These hopes, we now know, proved a little overblown. But the Deng leadership looked hard at the ways in which the Japanese had created modern, effective corporations and built up innovative technologies. It was an appealing model.7
Japan was a dynamic partner throughout this era, contributing hugely in terms of aid and investment. In the 1980s it was a far greater investor in China than the United States or Taiwan (whose involvement only really took off in the 1990s). Japanese corporations like car manufacturers Toyota and appliance and technology giants Sony produced vast amounts in the People’s Republic for export elsewhere in the world. During this period, the phrase ‘Made in Japan’ started to really mean ‘Made by Japanese corporations in China’. This strong trade and investment relationship prevailed up to the 2000s, when a more strident nationalist tone in the politics of both countries corroded it. Much of the bad feeling between the two was generated by clashes over symbolic issues that related to underlying historic resentments. Junichiro Koizumi, one of postwar Japan’s longest-serving prime ministers, exemplified this in his period in office from 2000–5. At a time when China’s entry to the WTO had provoked breakneck economic growth, Japan was still stuck in a period of low inflation, low growth and a seemingly perpetual depression, and the two countries should have been creating a new kind of relationship in which they used each other’s strengths to mutual benefit. Instead, they remained bogged down in political–historical issues. One of the most provocative acts proved to be Koizumi’s insistence on visiting the infamous Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, where Class A war criminals are buried. The Chinese were appalled.
For several years, all high-level contact between the two countries was frozen. A brief rapprochement after Koizumi’s retirement in 2006 led to Premier Wen Jiabao visiting their maritime neighbour in April 2007 and President Hu Jintao following with a visit the year after that. The two countries talked of ‘a warm spring’ when Hu was there in 2008.8 Almost immediately, however, clashes began to occur in the East China Sea, following on from the sale of the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands by their private owner to the Japanese government, a move taken as provocative in Beijing. (The issue had been blurred before by the fact that the islands had been in private hands, albeit those of a Japanese citizen.)
For Xi Jinping, the relationship with Japan is perhaps the toughest of his international priorities to deal with. With the United States, the situation is complex – but at least the United States is more remote. Japan sits in the region that China aims to economically dominate. Any moves China makes, therefore, must reckon with how to handle what still remains a hugely important economy, and a very considerable potential diplomatic opponent. Public sentiment towards Japan in China can prove explosive, too, with rallies and protests in the 2000s and most recently in 2014, when even people choosing to eat in Japanese restaurants in China were castigated and some of them physically attacked and humiliated. Despite Xi’s frequent-flying style of presidency, Tokyo has conspicuously not been on the list of destinations for his visits. And when, at the APEC meeting in 2014, Xi and the Japanese prime minister Abe finally managed to meet, the photos of their encounter were almost comical because of the frosty expressions on both leaders’ faces and their cool handshake with each other. Chinese netizens started circulating photos of a grumpy cartoon Winnie-the-Pooh standing next to a down-at-heel Eeyore, an image that bore an uncanny similarity to the Xi–Abe encounter.
There have been costs to this fractiousness. Japanese investment in China has fallen since 2010, with more of it going to the United States and other destinations. The Japanese have so far refused to be members of the AIIB, though the AIIB’s first two major projects in 2016 were done in partnership with the Asia Development Bank, an entity in which Japan is a major stakeholder. On the other hand, people-to-people links remain strong, with 2015 proving to be a bumper year for tourism as more than four million Chinese people visited Japan.9 At the elite level, therefore, Japan might be problematic; but among the Chinese urban young, it is still an appealing place. And for them, without the nearly constant government reminders, the history of World War II would probably be growing fainter by the day.
Alongside Japan, there is another close neighbour of China’s which Xi Jinping has not visited: the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), otherwise known as North Korea. Separate from the south part of the peninsula since World War II and the Korean War from 1950 to 1953, a formal peace treaty has yet to be signed (there is only an armistice in place at the moment). North Korea’s early history after 1953 saw relative economic success. With the Soviet Union and some Chinese help it was able to industrialize and build new cities. Indeed, it had a larger economy than the south up until the 1970s. But with the reformation of South Korean industry, and that country’s political transformation to a democracy, the two countries’ fortunes were reversed. By 2013, the North Korean economy was equivalent to a paltry 2.5 per cent of its southern neighbour.
Beyond the People’s Republic, Pyongyang has no other significant diplomatic friends. And even with Beijing, there are huge question marks over what sort of relationship these two actually have. On the level of diplomatic sound bites, they appear deeply committed to each other. In the 2000s, Hu Jintao grew surprisingly poetic when he congratulated the DPRK on the 60th anniversary of its founding by stating that its achievements were ‘delightful’. His reward for this was to see a nuclear test the next year, the first of four before 2016. Pyongyang’s leader, Kim Jong-il, was taken to China’s Special Economic Zones in 2000 and then again a few years later, and granted a tour of Shanghai in 2010 where he was subjected to an advertisement about the wisdom of Chinese-style development under the socialist rubric. But tepid experiments with marketization in North Korea led to a major collapse of its currency, loss of face and the execution of one of its chief finance officials in 2010. With the arrival in power in 2011 of the new leader, Kim Jong-il’s son Kim Yong-un, after the former’s demise, things have grown even more volatile.
In the Standing Committee of the Politburo, out of the seven members appointed in 2012 the only one with experience with North Korea of any depth was Zhang Dejiang, who had spent two years studying economics at the Kim Il-sung University in Pyongyang in the late 1970s. The idea, however, that this would make the DPRK–China relationship a little easier proved fallacious. Nuclear tests in the first days of 2016 only highlighted just how much the impoverished neighbour of the mighty China wanted its own autonomy. The fundamental characteristic of the bond between these two countries is that while it is true they are ‘as close as lips and teeth’ (in Mao Zedong’s words), like the relationship between lips and teeth, this is not a matter of willing choice but enforced inevitability. The two countries are tied not by bonds of affection and mutual respect, but ones of necessity. They cannot separate and divorce; their geography, economy, history and politics are so wrapped up in each other’s that they are almost tied to a single destiny. For North Korea, the strategy for the last seven decades has been to ensure that it balances dependency on its neighbour with defence of its own clear needs and avoidance of complete domination by China. In the recent years of its impoverishment, that has meant facing down its utter reliance on Chinese economic power with a single-track hard-power route, the endpoint of which is to become a nuclear power. Nuclear weapons figure not just to protect the DPRK from the United States; they are also there to save it from complete annexation by China.
In 2017, at least at the elite level, there is an eerie (and for China, unflattering) parallelism. Kim Yong-un, like Xi, is a member of the ruling aristocracy. Both have an almost imperial mandate and imperious personal style. Both are regarded as ambitious and impetuous, and both – in very different ways and in different environments – have been prosecuting purges and attacks against those they see as inimical to their vision, clearing political space around them. The one leader most closely linked to the Chinese in the DPRK system, and regarded as knowledgeable about their economic reforms (and to some extent sympathetic to these) was Kim’s uncle, Jang Song-thaek, regarded as the real authority behind the throne when the young regent was elevated to supreme power in 2011. But he was brutally removed from power in late 2013 and summarily executed. Of course, parallels between cleaning up the ranks in the Korean Workers Party and those of the CCP in recent years must be qualified: the CCP is a far vaster, more complex organization. Its days of liquidating opponents in such a transparently old-fashioned, vicious fashion are over. Now it tends to use the outward trappings of due process and quasi-legality. But just as Jang’s execution in the DPRK caused a sharp intake of breath and a realization that the world was not dealing with a benign joke in the country’s new ruler, Xi’s sanctioning of the prosecution, expulsion from the Party and imprisonment of former Standing Committee colleague Zhou Yongkang in 2014 sent the same message.
The DPRK’s nuclear aspirations are the key area of conflict here. Its hopes to become a nuclear state are opposed internationally, violate non-proliferation rules and go against the interests of almost every country in the region, from Japan, to South Korea, to China itself. Why China, even under Xi, has been so passive while Pyongyang has ratcheted up its programme is puzzling. From time to time there have been indications of irritation from Beijing – reports of gas or energy supply being stopped (90 per cent of this comes to North Korea from China), or a postponement of aid – but such periods are brief. Most surmise that China genuinely feels it must endure the status quo because a collapse of the DPRK would mean an unwanted refugee crisis on its north-eastern border or a unification with South Korea and, in effect, a US ally coming right up to China’s border, enclosing its space even more.
On North Korea’s 2016 nuclear weapons tests, Foreign Minister Wang Yi, when meeting with US Secretary of State John Kerry, came out with bland, formulaic platitudes. According to the New York Times, he stated that China ‘will not be swayed by specific events or the temporary mood of the moment’, going on to say, ‘Sanctions are not an end in themselves,’ and that the best idea was for the DPRK to return to the negotiating table with the United States and others.10 This meeting at least made clear that China was willing to tolerate a North Korea with nuclear technology and the ballistics capacity to get it to the West Coast of the United States. The static quality of Chinese policy making on such an important issue is particularly striking because with North Korea, China does have a leadership role, and is the most influential player. The fact that even under Xi it continues to show impotence about this matter and unwillingness to act raises questions about just how much real commitment and resolve China has. If it cannot show mettle over an issue of such immense importance to it so close to home, why expect it to be able to be forceful on issues further from its shores?
There are plenty of analysts in China who argue that North Korea is just part of a larger geopolitical game, and one that is useful as a spoiler against the United States, constraining and limiting its strategic space, preoccupying it and distracting its allies Japan and South Korea. While appealing on a Machiavellian level, this line is flattering to China’s overall ability to control circumstances and underestimates the real power of North Korea to spoil its neighbour’s backyard, create headaches and generally be an irritant. Life would be much easier for China if the DPRK did not have any nuclear capacity. The fact that China has not done more to stop the DPRK’s ambitions is possibly more down to the complex emotional bonds between the two entities and dexterous manipulation of them by all three Kims: Kim Il-sung had been masterful at playing the Soviet Union off against the PRC, and Kim Jong-il had proved as adept at movements of sporadic bad behaviour to extract concessions as he was at demonstrating compliance and apparent outward cooperation. Capriciousness has been the best strategic posture for Pyongyang. It has been predictable solely in its unpredictability. As Andrei Lankov, expert on North Korea, has shown, however, all this indicates is that for the Pyongyang regime there is no plan B.11 Modest reforms could quickly lead to an endgame for them. Making sure the DPRK’s 100,000-strong elite are looked after is the best bet, no matter what vile costs this passes on to the masses of the Korean people. Blackmail and bad behaviour are the only strategic means for it to ensure it survives. This is not sustainable, and one day will need to change. But at the moment, no one in Beijing has the appetite, or the vision, to think about the DPRK in a different way. Historic links are too deep and strong, and challenging them means, in a strange way, challenging the Communist Party’s narrative of its own history and identity, because for so much of the time it has said it is engaged in a common socialist cause with its neighbour, and it fought so hard in the war from 1950 to 1953 that cemented the Pyongyang regime. For that reason, North Korea shows more powerfully than any other country the real limits of Chinese foreign policy, even as it (China) rises to become a regional and global power. As the great ancient legalist philosopher Han Fei said, while harm comes from your enemies, calamity will come from those you love. For China, its ‘indissoluble’ bond with its little brother may, in the very end, prove the source of its undoing – just as the historic prize of becoming a global power is finally within reach.
An ancient civilizational state, with huge ethnic diversity and a proud sense of its cultural assets: such a description applies to both China and its western neighbour India. On the surface, they have a lot in common: over one billion inhabitants, economies that have grown over the last three decades, and shared issues such as entrenched poverty, severe pollution and a history complicated by colonialism. However, anyone looking at the relationship today is struck by their clear differences and, in foreign policy and diplomacy, an almost wilful mutual misunderstanding.
China’s sole remaining land border disputes are with India, and they look unlikely to be resolved any time soon. India hosts the exiled Dalai Lama, an issue which has been a bone of contention since 1959 when he fled Tibet. It also operates as the world’s largest democracy, disproving the assertions of Communist Party officials in China that a country needs to be wealthy and developed in order to allow its citizens the freedom to have a say in who governs them. Indians look at China with puzzlement. China’s rapid growth and the fact that its economy is now three times the size of that of India lies at the heart of this. So too does a certain guarded admiration for Chinese developmental success on the part of many Indians, including some in government. On measures from health, to literacy, to urbanization, China outperforms India.12 And even though in 2016 India was predicted to have stronger annual GDP growth than China, rising to more than 7 per cent, those who foresee a time when India will overtake China as the world’s most dynamic economy, at least in the coming one or two decades, are few and far between.
India and China are not easy bedfellows. They clashed in a war in 1962 which left profound scars on the defeated India and laid the basis for the wary nature of their partnership, which continues to this day. India remains a net importer from its neighbour, with a technology, infrastructure and investment deficit. And even as Xi Jinping and the newly elected prime minister of India, Modi, visited each other’s countries over 2014 and into 2015, this wariness did not disappear, despite the evident mutual admiration and personal chemistry between the two. Part of this is down to their respective global position. In the mid-2000s, under US president George W. Bush, there had been hope that India would figure in a new version of trilateralism, counterbalancing China’s role in the region and building a closer alliance with the United States.13 But a combination at that time of India’s diffidence and the sheer disparity with China meant this arrangement never gained much traction. Very soon, the United States was distracted by the economic crisis, and the moment of closeness passed.
Under Xi and Modi, however, it is clear that somehow the two have to work out a way of gaining more from each other’s respective economies and the potential they offer each other. China is seeing the emergence of perhaps three quarters of a billion higher-consuming, urban-living, service-sector working middle class. That market is of interest to everyone, particularly Indian manufacturers. The rising costs of wages and daily living in China mean that India stands well placed to become a new manufacturing hub. It has the advantage of rule of law and greater transparency, even if its parlous road and rail networks and its often corrupt and byzantine decision-making processes can be intimidating. Modi has attempted to create a better business environment in India, but it has proved challenging. Having partnerships with Chinese companies, with their knowledge of development and wealth creation, would, in theory, prove beneficial. Better access for the Chinese to the emerging India market would also be good. After all, they are so close to each other, both physically and in terms of common ground.
However, is the region big enough for these two? They do not have an easy mutual narrative, and are prone to the same kind of conceit. Both like to be looked up to, and both are seeking regional dominance and status commensurate with their geographical and population size, and strong sense of cultural pride. There is one clear area where India does have a significant advantage, and that is in its cultural reach and appeal. Ironically, Buddhism, which was founded within India, is now overwhelmingly practised more in Communist China. Historically, India’s influence on the Asian region has been profound, in its art, literature and music. This is true even into the twenty-first century, where Indian regional cuisines, Indian mysticism and Indian cultural appeal and soft power still outperform China. India, for instance, does not suffer from the image problems that Beijing often complains about, despite the country suffering from huge issues of gender imbalance, sporadic violence against members of low castes, and poor social mobility.
It is striking that while Chinese universities and think tanks are full of specialists on the United States, the EU and the rest of the world (there are 150 study centres focusing on Australia alone), finding experts on India can be extremely difficult. Chinese students seem to have little interest in looking at Indian culture and history, and not many (though the numbers are increasing) travel the relatively short distance to their vast neighbour for holidays. The dominant mindset towards India within China is indifference bordering on sheer ignorance. And while India does put more effort into the understanding of Chinese language, politics and society, it is again underwhelming for two such huge regional partners.
It is highly symbolic, therefore, that when Xi Jinping did eventually visit India in 2014, almost the same moment as his flight was touching down there were violent border clashes between the two countries, which were blamed on the PLA. Speculation continues that these were deliberate, and intended to underline a message that China has the upper hand in military assets. Certainly, it seemed an extraordinary coincidence that this happened when it did. But it was also telling that the rest of the visit, and Modi’s return visit to China, proceeded smoothly.
Where China can needle India effectively is in its relationship with Pakistan, one of the most curious of its neighbours. Pakistan’s alliance with China is predictable and steadfast. Like the DPRK, Pakistan also declares itself ‘as close as lips and teeth’. And for the Belt Road Initiative, Pakistan occupies a key strategic position. Pakistan, as British analyst Andrew Small made clear in a highly readable recent study of the bilateral relationship with Beijing, was a constant ally of the PRC from the earliest days, and the most crucial intermediary during the period of rapprochement with the United States. It is telling that Henry Kissinger made his secret detour to see Mao and Zhou Enlai when pretending to be holed up with an illness in Karachi in 1971.
Pakistan has been a recipient of Chinese largesse as it has grown richer. But its importance to the United States, especially since the 11 September terrorist attacks, has only complicated things. Pakistan’s internal instability, and its political and diplomatic complexity, means those declarations that it is a reliable friend to Beijing have been met, in recent years, with what looks a little like weary resignation by elite leaders there. The years of Pakistani prime ministers expecting to extract investments, loans and aid as a matter of course when they visited Beijing were ended under Hu, who refused to commit funds. Gwadar Port, a significant logistics centre in Pakistan, has been talked of as a subject of Chinese interest, creating a strategic Western focus and freeing China up from reliance on its eastern ports and naval supply lines. But the immense amounts of Chinese capital and involvement promised did not live up to expectations. A large part of this was the poor performance on the Pakistani side, with important parts of the project either delayed or not delivered.14
It is one of the great paradoxes of the modern world that in Westphalia in Europe, the very place where the concept of nation and sovereignty was first codified in 1648, notions of sovereignty are being contested, questioned and eroded. The European Union, with its free trade, employment and free movement of people, has been called a ‘post-modernist’ entity. The migration crisis from 2015 onwards may well be about to change some of that pooling of sovereignty. Even so, as a multilateral experiment, the EU has been the boldest, and in many areas the most successful. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations might aspire to this level of connectivity and cooperation in the legal, social and commercial sphere, but it operates in many ways as a very much more restricted and circumscribed experiment in cooperation.
Part of this is simply due to the ASEAN member states’ attitudes towards the very concept of pooling sovereignty. For all ten members of ASEAN, sovereignty has been hard won, and attempts to even remotely subvert or seem to weaken it end up being short-lived. The mantra of China – ‘non-interference in the affairs of others’ – has particular resonance in countries like Myanmar, Singapore, Vietnam and Cambodia, all with sharp memories of the experience of colonization and each of which had, to some degree, to engage in fights for their eventual autonomy and nation-state identity. Established in 1967, with membership increasing up to the late 1990s, ASEAN matters to China because it includes some of the disputants in the South China Sea arguments, and also because these nations cover a hugely important strategic area, stretching from the country’s south-western border deep into the southern hemisphere. Throughout this region, there is an important ethnically Chinese diaspora, a group that contributed hugely to the great call to invest, trade and work with the motherland when reform and opening up started in 1978.
ASEAN has great diversity, embracing Communist governments (Vietnam), democracies (Indonesia), profoundly Buddhist countries (Thailand) and one containing the world’s largest population of Muslims (Indonesia). Through the subgroups ASEAN + 1 and then ASEAN + 3, China engages with this group, having signed a free trade agreement in 2002 which came into effect three years later. This tangible point of contact between the two illustrates how ASEAN figures most simply to Chinese leaders as a market, and as a trading block. On that level, at least, the story is straightforward enough.
In the 2000s, journalists and writers like the American Joshua Kurlantzick noticed that Chinese investment was increasing in the ASEAN region, particularly in places like Cambodia, Myanmar and the Philippines.15 This was attached to attempts to improve China’s profile in countries which had experienced complex historic links with imperial and modern China. Vietnam typified these – a country which had figured in interlinked histories in the region going back more than 1,000 years and which, for some historians in modern China at least, had enjoyed something approaching a vassal–state relationship with imperial courts, either in Beijing or elsewhere. But Vietnam has also been prosecuting an energetic attempt to maintain its own identity, eschewing the use of Chinese written characters and ensuring that any attempts to influence its politics and domestic society are carefully rebutted, even despite it sharing a similar political system to China post-World War II and the Vietnam War.
Vietnam has what can only be described as a carefully policed, cautious relationship with the PRC in the twenty-first century. Plenty of Vietnamese leaders and business people look to China for interesting ideas about how they can develop their own economy while maintaining a socialist system. But as was proved by the riots in 2015 in Saigon and Hanoi targeting what were thought to be Chinese investments and interests (caused by the Chinese government shifting vast oil prospecting equipment into an area claimed as Vietnamese), such courtesy runs skin-deep. Vietnam, Myanmar, Laos and others have to pursue the ultimate divided strategy, on the one hand embracing economic opportunities with China, and on the other maintaining firm diplomatic and political ‘red lines’. As China has grown more prominent, this has become harder.
State Councillor Yang Jiechi, in effect the most senior foreign policy representative in the Chinese government system, stated directly to ASEAN members in 2010 that ‘China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that’s just a fact.’16 Such a declaration, before such a forum, betrayed for many a contemporary Chinese elitist mindset that they were powerful, important and dominant, and that all other parties in the region had to queue up behind them. That ASEAN within itself has often been divided has not helped in articulating an ASEAN consistent policy stance on issues that might counterbalance China. In its annual meeting in 2012, for the first time ever its membership proved unable to publish a press release, because of the desire by four attending nations who had disputes over the South China Sea to express language slightly critical of China in the formal statement.17 It also downgraded some of its language criticizing Beijing on territorial matters in its communiqué in 2016, reportedly on Cambodia’s insistence.
China certainly looms large in the politics of this region, with its influence clearly visible in places like Phnom Penh, where one of the main thoroughfares is named Mao Zedong Boulevard. Large amounts of Chinese investment have been going into Cambodia, and into Myanmar, in recent years. But it is unclear whether the equation that Chinese investment equals immediate political influence is ever as neat as commentators like Kurlantzick make out. As the account of China’s activities in Africa and the Middle East will show, rather than money buying love, it often buys scepticism and antagonism. Myanmar is the classic example, a country which for years had a close relationship with China and which was protected by its huge neighbour throughout the years of isolation when its governing military junta had made it an international pariah. China’s almost amoral stance meant that it continued to be a conduit for trade and goods when almost no one else was active in the country. This was not due to any profound allegiance in Beijing to their south-western partner, but because of interest in its plentiful energy resources. With reforms from 2012, however, the political opening up of Myanmar to the outside world transformed it, introducing the EU, then the United States, as new actors there, seeing a visit by President Obama and in effect integrating the country into a much more diverse group of relations. It was clear that reliance on China was regarded as a huge strategic vulnerability. The years of superficial declarations of allegiance and closeness from the Myanmar state therefore, proved just that – rhetoric with no real depth.
That cautiousness among smaller nations in Asia – a desire for diversity and to reduce reliance on China – is testified to in the investment flows across the region as a whole. Apart from Singapore, in 2014 China only accounted for 2.4 per cent of overall investment stock in the ten countries, at least according to one report. And while China is important as a manufacturing, exporting country, the relationship is less overwhelming than might be imagined: ‘It is fair to say,’ the report stated, that ‘Chinese outbound investment in ASEAN is still early-stage.’18 The conclusion has to be that even in the region closest to China, where the gains of trading and investing in each other are most tangible, and the motivations strongest, there is an ambiguity to China’s relationships and its role.
In the realm of security, this ambiguity grows even stronger. Paradoxically, the greater China’s wealth, the more willing it is to spend this on its neighbouring ASEAN countries, and the more reservations and doubts these countries have towards their newly generous partner. This seems to be a modern Chinese trap, a devil’s gambit where China is damned if it shows its hand, and damned if it doesn’t.
The Soviet Union served as the most influential international patron and partner to the Chinese Communist Party during its rise to power. And after 1949, the USSR still exercised great control, despite Mao Zedong’s clear attempts in the realms of ideology and practice to differentiate the movement in China from that in Russia. Russian troops, for instance, did not leave the north-eastern region of the country until the mid-1950s,19 and Russian experts helped the PRC to eventually construct its own hydrogen bomb. Even so, the political relationship was always prickly, and as Chapter 3 made clear, part of China’s motivation in the late 1960s for rapprochement with the United States came from real fears on the Chinese side of Russian intervention and bullying.
With the resolution of the border disputes in the 2000s between Russia and China, one major area of uncertainty and contention was removed. Under Putin, China has also been able to deal with a more secure and stable leader in Moscow. Rumours in 2012 that Xi Jinping felt Putin’s style of leadership was something he wanted to mimic were perhaps overblown; even so, the highly centralizing style of these two leaders is striking, as is their annexation of political space in their respective countries. More practically, Russian isolation over the annexation of Crimea in 2014 pushed Putin neatly towards closer relations with the PRC. He visited China in May that year and signed a major deal for gas supply from Siberia on terms which were regarded as generous. As of early 2017, however, nothing much has materialized from this deal.
Russia’s contemporary relationship with China has been described as an axis of convenience.20 The question has increasingly become who is more convenient to whom, however. Russian antagonism towards the United States and Europe is useful up to a point for Beijing in distracting the two major powers, although speculation about Chinese support for Putin’s aggression towards Ukraine was just that – speculation. This is simply because a more assertive Russia in the long term would clearly be a bad thing for China, creating rivalries both in the Asia region and throughout Central Asia, where China is now becoming an increasingly important player. The relationship is currently a profoundly distrustful one, however, despite Xi Jinping according the country the honour of his first visit abroad as president in early 2013. (Hu Jintao had done the same a decade earlier on his elevation, indicating the kind of continuities in Chinese strategy that persist despite all the editorials and arguments about radical change.)
In what ways are China and Russia (in the terminology favoured by the foreign-policy establishment in Beijing) ‘comprehensive strategic partners’? For Russia, Chinese designs on Siberia and the Far East are regarded with unease. The 150,000 Chinese business people now working in this region are viewed as potential agents for a Beijing grab on territory which is vulnerable and contains plenty of resources China would like to get its hands on. These fears of Chinese creeping control of the region are long-standing, and go back to before the founding of the PRC. Even so, they still figure in Russian thinking – though they are important more as a perception than a reality. Even so, they still figure in Russian thinking – though they are important more as a perception than a reality. As one Russian academic stated at a London conference about Russia–China relations in the mid-2000s, ‘There is one good reason why Chinese are unlikely to want to take over Siberia: It is not a very nice place, and a hard one to live and work in. Why take responsibility for that?’
When visiting Moscow in 2013, Xi Jinping went out of the way to burnish his Russian literary credentials, mentioning in one speech a phenomenal list of writers and intellectuals, from Dostoyevsky to Tolstoy and Gogol.21 One of his predecessors, Jiang Zemin, was even able to speak good Russian, gained from a two-year stint studying there in the 1950s, when the relationship between the two countries was good. This was not unusual for people of his generation. However, despite this appearance of mutual warmth towards each other, do Russian and Chinese elites really share reciprocal complementary visions for their nations, ones that they each can buy into and work towards? Russian resentment at its loss of status after the collapse of the USSR resembles Chinese anger over what it views as its humiliation at the hands of the West in an earlier era. The only difference is that the memories for Russia are more recent, and therefore stronger.
There are ways in which this suits Chinese aims. It means they are never considered to be (at least at the moment) a target for Russian frustrations. They are factored in as more supportive and useful. But that sort of strategic ‘marriage of convenience’ could easily dissipate. Russia’s more imperial, nationalist dreams are not ones the Chinese would share because they carry clear territorial aims that China would disagree with and find threatening.
In that sense, a weak but stable Russia is a Russia that China under Xi would support. That means a country that does not cause it problems within its region, has a benign economic relationship with China, largely figures as a resource supplier, and continues to distract the attention of countries like the United States. In that framework, Putin’s Russia is almost ideal, except for its worrying upward trend of nationalism and its own inherent economic woes. There too, it reflects China – compensating for internal challenges and weaknesses by presenting a pushy, assertive face to the outside world. Does the Asian region have space for two such huge, assertive actors? History strongly suggests not.
One of the dynamics playing into China’s extension of diplomatic and political reach in the Central Asian period after 2010 is an attempt to diversify its space, to seek other arenas and means of influence beyond the coastal areas, beyond the current realm of security, where it feels boxed in by the United States. Turning attention to the western region of China works on many levels. It is an area where China’s own domestic configuration is vulnerable, with the Tibet and Xinjiang autonomous regions in particular figuring as places of instability and sensitivity. From 1999, the central government promoted a grand new initiative, called ‘Opening Up the West’, in many ways something that prefigured the Belt Road Initiative ideas of over a decade later but mapped out in the domestic rather than international space.
This kind of paradigm shift has meant China now works in areas it has never properly been exposed in. Through the Central Asian states, it has sent out diplomatic and economic feelers, with Xi Jinping himself undertaking an extensive tour there in 2013 and visiting Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Resources were of course uppermost in his mind, along with securing allies in a region which figures as a potential supply route.
From 2000, the Opening Up the West initiative had aimed to develop 11 of China’s western provinces, places which had been left behind by the extraordinary pace of reform on the coast. While Fujian, Guangdong, Zhejiang and other eastern suburbs had created manufacturing clusters, raised GDP, built large amounts of infrastructure and become integrated into global supply chains, and middle provinces like Henan, Hunan, Hebei and Hubei had seen some trickle-down effects of this process, further west the state-owned enterprises still dominated, GDP levels were low, poverty was common and the infrastructure poor. Even asking wealthier provinces to pair up with these western ones proved challenging. They were, in the end, very remote, even from other places in China.
In terms of ethnicity, culture, history and other links, however, a natural place to look for partnerships was in the closer Central Asian area. Trying to build bridges here gave the Opening Up the West story greater vibrancy, so what initially looked like a domestic issue came eventually to have profoundly international dimensions. The Belt Road Initiative story can be seen as a continuation of this, even to the extent of sharing some of its haziness and epic quality. And like Opening Up the West, BRI operates more as an attempt to create a framework, a normative environment, rather than something which has detailed, prescriptive policies. It is an endeavour by China to carve out meaningful, sympathetic space for itself in areas that matter to it.
When touring Central Asia, Xi did refer to the ‘win–win’ rubric, a phrase that had appeared about all sorts of foreign-affairs issues until then. The SCO, which had been created in the late 1990s, was resurrected by Xi’s foreign-policy activism and as a result of the new, more intense interest in this region. It figured as part of an attempt to create a world of valid and viable Chinese activity away from the constant intervention and interference of others, particularly the United States. It meant that China was able to demonstrate leadership in areas where it wanted to do so, but in ways and about issues that did not make others too suspicious and at least protected its interests. And it also meant it could link important domestic and external issues with each other. With rising restiveness in the Islamic areas of Xinjiang, and with major riots there in 2009, it was important to have at least some conduit for dialogue with partners in the region who could help it in controlling its own security issues.
Locating the genealogy of the Belt Road Initiative in the Opening Up the West policy of over a decade before at least helps to understand a bit better what sort of thing it is: an initiative rather than a policy, one involving a raft of different proposals and funding streams and where there are multiple angles of engagement, combined by all working within one ‘master story’.
BRI also operates as part of a grand Chinese external narrative, one which has been presented at events like the huge Boao gathering in the southern island of Hainan each April. In this context, BRI is a contribution to Asia’s hunt for a common destiny. Boao was also a good place to confront some of the problems of this grand idea, however – an unconvincing attempt to influence international foreign-policy thinking and debates by stuffing various musty halls in a somewhat remote, purpose-built function centre with individuals who, mostly, could be trusted to say the right thing. Squadrons of largely Chinese media were unleashed onto speakers once they had finished their sessions, with the great event being a declaration by a major leader – usually Xi himself, or, some years, Li Keqiang.
Anyone wandering around the halls of Boao would be struck by the idea that they were witnessing China’s confusion over and fleshing out of its message to the world. Friendly Japanese, Taiwanese and some other representatives of neighbouring countries were granted access, but on the whole the absence of major figures from the United States, Japan or Europe has shown that there are some misgivings about exactly what Boao is trying to achieve both on the part of the organizers, who clearly want a massive PR project, and the audience, who often come away feeling like they have been unwittingly recruited as walk-on parts in a promotional event rather than taken part in any meaningful discussions. In any case, the notions of common destiny in Asia have grown more vapid since 2013: ‘environment’, ‘stability’ and ‘sustainability’ are all good buzzwords and attract no dissent; the region certainly needs to focus on all of these. But once it gets down to detail, things tend to rapidly disintegrate. China is seen by some living in the same area as a power simply manipulating its new-found wealth in order to shape a region convenient and malleable to its political aims. And for all the talk about ‘win–win’, in the end China’s military imprint is increasing, and its attempts to influence space right out to the edges of Malaysia are regarded as being nothing more than the behaviour of a revisionist superpower-in-waiting (ready to dominate, settle some historic scores and impose a new imperium where the US one had left off). Some have caustically commented that ‘win–win’ has a simple definition: China wins twice!
The point made here is not so much about what China has been saying and how it has been behaving, but about the clear lack of consensus among those outside its borders – from ASEAN to India to others – about what relative weight to give to each side of the economics and security equation. There were clearly many who felt that China as an economic actor was a good thing, and something to be supported and worked with. But there were others who also saw its economic ascendancy clearly linked to a major political agenda, with the two marching side by side with each other. In 2014, a year marking the centenary of the start of World War I, the Japanese prime minister explicitly referred to the situation in Asia mirroring that which had prevailed in Europe so many years before. ‘The comparison,’ a journalist writing for the Financial Times commented on hearing this, ‘lies in the fact that Britain and Germany – like China and Japan – had a strong trading relationship. But in 1914, this had not prevented strategic tensions leading to the outbreak of conflict.’22
Such parallels were seen at the time as far-fetched. But the suspicion about Chinese intentions in the long term in the region have not shifted, even when something like the Belt Road Initiative tries to concentrate on pure economic space. In terms of reputation, image and trust, China seems unable to remove deep-seated opposition and suspicion. This is also a characteristic of its relations with the third zone: the European Union.