THE DISPUTED SOUTH CHINA SEA ISLANDS PRESENT US WITH A ONCE-in-a-generation opportunity. Beijing has no more reason to use its islands to threaten international shipping than America has reason to take them out with air strikes. Beijing needs the trade routes to stay open. The United States needs China for a myriad of issues that stretch far beyond seven garrisoned outposts in international waters.
The standoff, and its accompanying rhetoric, is a mark of how carefully both governments need to choreograph their disagreements to avoid sudden conflict, because any open hostility risks global turmoil. The advantage offered by the islands is that they are garrisoned, uninhabited, or very sparsely populated. In news terms, this is not a story in which human suffering propels foreign policy, as has happened often in the Middle East, allowing for decisions to be made on a clearer and more pragmatic canvas.
China has propelled itself, rocket-like, from being a shambolic near-failing state to becoming the factory of the world. It is now a crucible for ideas, a juggernaut of which almost everyone wants to be part. Beijing’s five-year plan to 2020 includes an ambition to lead in computer chips, robotics, satellites, and aviation equipment. China’s technology in clean-air products, electric cars, and solar energy is already competing head-on with developed countries, and it is significant that the United States is currently reversing laws from the era of President Barack Obama in order to bring back more polluting measures, such as coal-fired power. Automation, artificial intelligence, and robots are at the heart of sweeping reforms to its factories and manufacturing industries, and the United States concedes that China is already ahead in areas such as high-speed rail, supercomputing, and advanced energy technologies.
Yet none of that would have been possible without the US-led world order that provided a security umbrella and the rule of law through which China could regain its historical strength and become rich.
By challenging this world order before it is ready, Beijing is taking a gamble and, for their part, Western democracies are being too slow to adapt to the new reality that China presents. The South China Sea island building is symbolic in that it allows the world’s most populous country to move away from its Century of Humiliation and embrace an era of opportunity. They are symbols of dignity. Mischief Reef, with its harbor and twenty-six-hundred-meter runway, underlines the restoration of China’s vigor and renders irrelevant the argument over maps, history, possession, and court rulings on tidal flows. As America and Europe before it, China has done what it has because it can.
The islands serve as a reminder of what could go wrong, how it might spread and the catastrophe a bad decision could bring. They are also a political reality for China’s neighbors who are having to think carefully about where their long-term future and allegiance really lie and balance accordingly.
The past few years have proven that money and development are not enough, either in the West or in Asia. The overarching concept of dignity needs to be addressed, posing the challenge of how to slot Eastphalia into Westphalia without conflict.
During the writing of Asian Waters, each regional fault line has been tested. Chinese and Indian troops have been deployed to the disputed border in the Himalayas. Chinese war planes have buzzed Taiwanese military exercises in the Taiwan Strait. Chinese and Japanese ships and planes have skirted closely around each other in the East China Sea. North Korea has tested nuclear bombs and missiles while Japan, South Korea, and the United States drew up plans to invade. China and the United States have challenged each other in the South China Sea. China has threatened Vietnam with military action over contested drilling near the Paracel Islands. And so on, and so on, amid repeated warnings about risks of miscalculation.
Historically, major reforms to the global system have been implemented only after war. Both the 1815 Congress of Vienna after the defeat of Napoleonic France and the 1919 Treaty of Versailles that ended the First World War failed to keep a lasting peace. The 1947 Treaties of Paris and the 1951 Treaty of San Francisco were drawn up after the Second World War and have been more enduring, leading to the creation of the UN, NATO, the European Union, and other financial and political institutions. This is the system from which China has benefited and against which it is now rebelling.
A clamor for reform goes far beyond China and coincides with increased connectivity through the Internet, air travel, and infrastructure that is diminishing the relevance of frontiers, diluting national identity and creating a more transparent, borderless system that controls so much now in trade and politics. But it comes during a political cycle when America and Europe are having to address unrest among their own citizens over damaged economies, disparities of wealth, and a political class perceived as being privileged, out of touch, and ineffective.
There is a growing, albeit exaggerated, perception that the West lies weakened against a rising China, filled with ideas about building a rival system to liberal democracy, one of a wealth-creating, infrastructure-building, high-achieving, hard-driving one-party state.
In the long term the Communist Party will need to update its pact with its citizens and make itself more accountable and transparent, but it is no longer enough for Western democracies to say that China is at fault because it is not a democracy. Nor can the West keep arguing that liberal democracy is the only government system that all successful nations should follow. For billions around the world, Winston Churchill’s maxim that democracy is the worst form of government except for all others has been proven wrong.
These contradictions of how the world currently operates underline the need for change. The economic system jumps across frontiers, while the political one still emanates from the writ of nation-states ultimately controlled by five countries that won a war more than seventy years ago. It is too outdated to last. In 2018, as the United States was still fighting the Korean War, Beijing was laying down its big future vision of a modern global society.
Through that prism, the South China Sea islands lie not so much in one or another’s sovereign territory but in international trade routes of which China will become the ultimate guarantor. It is an issue less about borders and more of responsibility, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the long-ago unfurling of flags by colonial sea captains.
While this challenge can be compared to the emergence of Germany in the early twentieth century, or the rise of Athens that threatened Sparta in the fifth century BC, China’s method of step-by-step salami slicing can also be used to avoid war. China claims it wants respect, security for its supply chains, and a bigger seat at the top table that controls the world order. But if the United States will not let it fully inside the tent, China will go it alone and build its own. It has now abandoned its “new model” of great power relations’ to concentrate on the Belt and Road Initiative, the AIIB and a raft of other projects which signal its determination.
That, in itself, creates a more confrontational slant, reaffirming that the 1940s-designed world order is crying out for change and that to delay longer could make the world a more dangerous place. Any initiative to restructure the UN and its related institutions should begin now before major conflict breaks out rather than afterward, when cities have been flattened and the lives of millions lost or ruined.
Trade negotiations are an example of how it could work. Sessions of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade began in 1947. They became the World Trade Organization, which has instilled order in global trade with a constant regeneration of ideas and change through continuing negotiation. A similar forum could be created to examine the international architecture and its myriad of financial, political, and humanitarian institutions.
Some would try to block reform. Others would describe it as naïve nonsense. Why, when America is the top dog, should it concede ground to a potential enemy? Some would cry appeasement, unfurling the banners of democracy and pointing to China’s bans on religion and discussion, to its prison camps, executions, and rubber stamp parliaments. In the long term they may be right. But China is not Germany in the early twentieth century or Japan in the 1930s, nor the Soviet Union in the 1940s or Iraq or Libya in the early twenty-first century. Nor is it an expanding ancient Athens, any more than the United States is a retreating ancient Sparta. China is claiming great power status, and the West should address it exactly for what it is.
Negotiations to restructure the world order would be best based on pragmatism rather than fear and self-interest, and they would take decades. Everyone, whether an American or Chinese president, a Brazilian sugarcane cutter, Indian brick kiln worker, or a Vietnamese fisherman, should feel in some way involved. Such a forum would be fraught with obstacles, breakdowns, and challenges. But even if progress runs at a snail’s pace and is so incremental to be barely noticed, it would show that change was underway.
Without such a project the drums of war will get louder because the human race, when faced with insecurity, has a tendency to fight. Black swans will circle, and one will strike, as it did in 1914, 1941, and 2001. The West talks about accommodating China’s rise, and Asia talks about the West’s descent. There is no need to see it through such a prism. Managed skillfully, the transition could be seamless. Managed badly, and we would have to think the unthinkable.
If China does sees itself as the new force in the world, it is up to China to get it right. The first step would be to initiate a peaceful and pragmatic end to the disputes in Asian waters.