“Whosoever commands the sea commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself.”
—SIR WALTER RALEIGH, The History of the World,
Walter Burre, London, 1614
Imagine gazing down from the heavens on the continent of Asia as if it were an elegant table laid out for a banquet, an array of dishes displayed for the feast about to take place. In taste, texture and position on the table, each dish contributes to the overall well-being of the diners who are to be satiated with good food and ambience. If one dish is too highly spiced, too lightly cooked, or eaten out of sequence, the banquet will not be the best. It might even fail.
Such is the way in which Europe gazed upon Asia in the nineteenth century, each tine of the fork polished and sharpened to pick at what it wished. Japan followed in the early twentieth century, and after that two rival powers fought over the banquet until the Soviet Union got sick and only America was left at head of the table.
Now China examines the spread that Asia presents, because here is the feast that it needs to own to keep its people secure. To take the top seat, it plans to introduce a new style of table manners with Chinese characteristics that reflect Asian culture. Whereas America—driven by speed, certainty, and determination—cuts through with sharpened steak knives, China approaches carefully, chopsticks raised, taking time to think about which dishes it prefers and how the tastes and delicacies should be blended together. For the moment, at least, it knows the table must be shared between two hosts. But at some stage the other host will have to leave because such is the cycle of life.
The Asian banquet in this current era will predominantly be a seafood feast, so the waiters will replace American-style deep-fried squid with delicacies of sharks’-fin soup and abalone. The new host will decide how many dishes it needs, of what quality and whether the table itself should to be expanded. Where the feast begins and ends can only be loosely defined because Asia is a continent without a cohesive identity.
Its vast shimmering waters stretch from the east coast of Africa to the west coast of America, from the Arctic and the Russian Far East down to the southern tip of New Zealand and to the Antarctic beyond. Its geographical frontiers of mountain ranges, rivers, and oceans are contradictory and clumsy. To the west, Turkey’s narrow Bosphorus strait links the Sea of Marmara with the Black Sea and divides the country in two; Turkey is part Europe and part Asia. To the north, Asia rolls upward through the Himalayas, across the Muslim nations of the former Soviet Union, and into Russia, which itself straddles two continents. To the west it unfolds through India, China, and surrounding countries into Japan and the islands of the Pacific Ocean.
The name itself comes from no Asian language, but from the Greek, referring to “sunrise” or “east,” thus placing Asia not within its own context but within Europe’s. Yet, unlike in Europe and America, where Christianity predominates, Asia is not embedded by any one culture or religion. Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims rub up against animists, Confucianists, and those of other sects. Asians communicate in more than two thousand languages, whereas Europeans have barely more than two hundred.
There is no basket of shared values, no single overarching system of government or common aspiration. Democracies jostle on equal ground with dictatorships and there are many shades in between. Asia’s citizens are among the world’s poorest and most repressed, but more billionaires live here than on any other continent. In one part of Asia, tribespeople hunt with bows and arrows. In another, a city gleams with high-rise office blocks. The world is now turning to this spread of dishes that Asia offers, for its ideas, its money, and its energy, and how Asia evolves in the coming years will impact all our lives.
Asian Waters covers only a small part of what is unfolding. But it is important to understand this backdrop to a region that is punching into the headlines with increasing frequency, whether about Asian money, North Korean bombs, or a tide-washed rock barely jutting from the surface of a faraway sea that can so quickly lead to talk of war.
Asia is a story about contested water as much as Europe is one about contested land. Asia’s seas carry global trade in the trillions of dollars. Oil tankers from the Middle East deliver fuel needed for the continent’s astounding growth, plying through the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea to huge ports in China, Japan, and elsewhere. Asia’s factories send their products by sea to markets around the world, and any disruption to this free flow of maritime trade would shake us all.
Its array of bays, oceans and seas run across the equator and through the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, conjuring images of an exotic Orient, of typhoons and temples, of sun-drenched coral coastlines, of language, food, architecture, and culture. Some carry names that fire the imagination, like the Straits of Malacca and the Sea of Okhotsk. Others have more functional names like the East China Sea and the South China Sea, where crews of American and Chinese warships skirt suspiciously around each other, tasked with protecting their national interests.
Much mistrust stems of unresolved issues dating back to last century. Critical areas within these waters are contested between governments because there is no agreement on who owns what. China warns Japan; Vietnam challenges China; garrisons from China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam stake sovereign claims on remote atolls and rocks. Beijing has been upping the stakes by reclaiming land to build military bases far out in the South China Sea.
It is this issue, above all, that has acted as a new lightning rod of tension. In English, these rocks and reefs go by the names of colonial seafarers or their ships: Johnson, Mischief, Spratly, Woody, and so on. Over the centuries the British, Chinese, Filipinos, French, Japanese, Malays, Portuguese, and Vietnamese have raised national flags on them. There is no agreed-upon history. Old charts prove this and that; new ones are contentious. Legal rulings go one way or another. At first glance, disagreement is about alternative readings of history, ancient maps and tidal flows. But peel back that layer and these rocky islets represent a battle for the soul of Asia that is already rippling across thousands of miles to challenge governments on every continent. It is a contest that comprises opposing visions and values, shifting power, competition for control, and structures of government, and at stake is the familiar system that has dominated the global order for more than seventy years—since the end of the Second World War.
We are at the stage where the dishes of the banquet have been replenished and rearranged in a way that the rival host is being asked to move aside from its top table seat. China believes its turn has come—or, to be accurate, has come around again. The advance of China onto the world stage has been a step-by-step process: not one of invasion or colonization but instead of buying countries and winning control through trade. Its ambition is riddled with contradictions. China has become rich beyond its dreams precisely because of US predominance in Asia and its military security umbrella, which has mostly kept the peace since 1975. The US-led system of international law has also given China the freedom to sell to American and European markets.
Yet it is this system that China is now challenging. With its wealth it plans to reform the financial architecture by moving the renminbi to reduce the global dominance of the US dollar. In 2016 China won its first round when the International Monetary Fund awarded the renminbi the status of a reserve currency along with the US dollar, the euro, British sterling, and the yen, raising the question as to when we might switch from being an economy dominated by the greenback to one of the “redback.”
With its military, China plans to ease American supremacy from the Pacific, match Russia’s defense capabilities and replace the US security umbrella with a Chinese one. With its science, it intends to lead in everything from space exploration, nuclear energy, and environmental technology to combatting climate change.
For China, none of this ambition is seen as new; it is merely a return to its rightful position. This is not an American-style spearing of a rib-eye steak. This is the Middle Kingdom, with its millennia of experience, understanding the subtleties of spices and sauces, of seafood and vegetable, of culture, politics, and government. This is how it was before. Centuries earlier, China’s technological and economic power had dwarfed that of Europe’s. In the eleventh century, as the Normans conquered feudal Britain, China was the world’s biggest producer of steel. Until the fifteenth century, it led the way in agriculture, health care, housing, transportation, and many other areas until overtaken—first by Italy and then by the rest of Europe.
China was the dominant global maritime power, sending large and sophisticated ships through Asia and across the Indian Ocean to Africa. Marco Polo, the thirteenth century Venetian explorer, reported seeing four-masted Chinese oceangoing junks with three hundred crew, far more robust than any European vessels. But by the end of the fifteenth century, in one of its political upheavals, China became inward looking and only now is seeking to rebuild its maritime presence.
China prides itself in having the world’s oldest civilization, dating back five thousand years, earning it the title of Zhonghou, which translates as Middle (or Central) Kingdom. A China-ordered system dominated Asia until it was overtaken by the European one in the nineteenth century. The two systems stand at opposite poles. One believes the most efficient form of government emanates from a central command ruling a compliant population, while the other believes that power should be balanced through the rule of law, whether between nation-states or individuals. The West has rolled its system into the concept of democracy. China’s has yet to be branded. It is not a dictatorship, and it governs through a series of mandates, reaching back into history and its ancient concept of the Mandate of Heaven, albeit using the term loosely, given the atheistic doctrine of the Communist Party.
Long ago, leaders from Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere were expected to travel to China to pay tribute to its emperor. In return, the emperor would confer legitimacy on their rule, a protection and status that would be recognized by their subjects. As a resuscitated China grows, so we now see the modern Mandate of Heaven at work as power flows from Beijing to its provinces and then into smaller neighboring countries, expected to bend to the ruler’s will. They become, in effect, vassal states and accepting Chinese control of the South China Sea is but one part of that process.
Embedded in China’s thinking is securing itself against foreign intervention, thus correcting the weaknesses that allowed it to be invaded by European powers in the nineteenth century. The policy to militarize islands is drawn from a mind-set forged from historical experience that the country needs to be self-contained and able to protect itself.
As the world becomes more connected, China’s arc of self-protection has to spread wider, far beyond its borders. To defend itself properly, it needs to establish from where it will gather its food, raw materials, and energy and how to keep its trade routes and supply chains safe. This expanding Chinese writ has sparked concern among neighbors and foreign governments, all of which have experienced the lethal consequences of the rise of Japan in the 1930s. For Beijing, it is self-protection. For Washington, DC, it is aggression.
Until the mid-nineteenth century, the predominant Han Chinese sheltered themselves from land intrusion in the north by controlling a series of buffer regions inhabited by different races, the Uighurs of Xinjiang in the far west, the Tibetans, the Mongolians, and so on. When the European threat came in the form of British gunboats in 1839, it had not yet constructed solid sea defenses and by then energy had drained from the Chinese empire. Political structures were shredded with corruption and lack of imagination. Science, technology, ambition, and military innovation no longer lay in China but in Europe.
The consequence of China’s frailty led to the foreign occupation of its coastal cities, first by Britain and then by others, including Japan, the only Asian power that had developed a European-style industrial economy. The period from 1839 to 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party seized power, is referred to as the Century of Humiliation, a defeat that must never be allowed to happen again.
It was with this resolve that at the end of last century China turned its mind back to its coastal defenses. In 1995, fishermen raised the Chinese flag on the then little-known rocks of Mischief Reef off the coast of the Philippines. In 1999 Beijing declared an annual May–August fishing ban in areas of the South China Sea and still sends its coast guard to police it every year. In 2012 it deployed engineers to reclaim land in the Spratly Islands and build military bases, pitting itself not only against its immediate neighbors but also against the United States, which sees itself as the guarantor of security in the region. It was a brazen act of self-confidence, risky also because China needs American markets to sustain its wealth, and the US Navy can outgun China many times over.
One catalyst was an American announcement in 2011 that the United States would shift much of its military focus from the Middle East to the Pacific. China believed that the Pacific lay in its rightful arc of influence. The US policy became known as the Pivot to Asia, and the view from Beijing was that Washington aimed to contain China as it once had the Soviet Union.
There were other triggers, and if none had appeared, they would most likely have been found because as Rome, Athens, and Washington had before, Beijing felt strong and ambitious enough to disrupt the global status quo. The islands might have been an early military act of bald-faced audacity, but for decades soft power had been preparing the way.
More than a decade earlier, China had made its mark with multinational companies such as the tech giant Huawei, which competes head-on with Apple in the smartphone industry while also providing critical software to Britain’s telecom and Internet sectors. China’s building of infrastructure is transforming landscapes of the developing world and has recently been consolidated into a single plan known as the Belt and Road Initiative. China now matches or has overtaken the United States as the biggest donor in international aid. President Xi Jinping is presenting himself as a global leader, talking up China’s vision of joining hands to “march arm-in-arm toward a bright future.” Industries and governments need to factor China into almost all their decisions. In Hollywood, should they change the villain from Chinese to Mexican so the movie can sell into China’s billion-dollar market? In Vietnam, how much protest can be made over an illegal Chinese drilling rig off its coastline when it needs Beijing’s support to sustain its economic growth?
China has marketed its philosophies of government by setting up some five hundred Confucius Institutes around the world explaining nondemocratic Chinese values across every continent, rivaling the British Council, the Goethe Institut, and the US Information Agency. Confucius, familiar for his long beard, flowing robes, and thoughtful eyes, was a Chinese statesman some two and half thousand years ago. Even today his pithy wisdom is widely quoted; for instance, “Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.” After being shelved for many years, he has been revived by the Communist Party to underpin its doctrine for good government, with an emphasis on hierarchy, community, and respect for age, tradition, and culture. Democracy is not a factor.
China has become—inescapably—a big country with vast power. All other countries are smaller. Indonesia’s population of 260 million, even though three times that of Germany, is still five times smaller than China’s 1.4 billion. Vietnam’s population of less than 100 million is fifteen times smaller. Only India comes close in population size, but its billion-plus people have achieved little against China when it comes to economic or military might.
With this in mind, the present volume comprises five parts; the first four identify trends and triggers that, if activated, could change all our lives in a dramatic and possibly catastrophic way.
Part 1 examines the competing claims in the South China Sea and America’s determination to uphold international law, defend its predominance, and protect the independence of smaller countries to prevent them becoming vassal states. It is here that the Chinese and US militaries routinely come face-to-face. From Beijing’s side, I will illustrate the reasoning behind the military outposts and to what extent they do threaten international shipping routes.
Part 2 looks at Southeast Asia, which forms a horseshoe around the South China Sea and whose countries are once again having to choose between the will of opposing superpowers. Some have succumbed; others are putting up a fight. But unlike in the Cold War, when both Moscow and Washington were distant capitals, China is on the doorstep, indeed with its foot already inside the door. It is here where priorities and issues blur. Development, terrorism, and trade merge into defense and national security. China may be a partner in one and a threat in another. This is not Europe dealing with Russia. Each Southeast Asian country is having to make its own independent decision about China.
In part 3, I move to South Asia, where India views the South China Sea dispute as an early stage of China’s military expansion into the Indian Ocean, the world’s third largest body of water and crucial to shipping that serves the global economy. It is here that the massive democracies of America and India come together, with the United States describing India as “a key security and economic partner.”1 While China funds and builds Indian Ocean ports, America is selling India some of the latest defense systems. It is here, too, that Asian democracy will be tested. Can Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, New Zealand, the Philippines, and South Korea create a cohesive enough front to prevent the South China Sea and Indian Ocean from falling under Chinese control? Or is Asia too diverse for democracy to be the force that bonds?
Part 4 covers East Asia, where China and Japan have revived their historic rivalry, using contested and uninhabited islands with no identifiable value as the fuse. The hostility underlines a truth that economic growth and rising living standards are not enough to bury bad and unresolved history. In East Asia lie two more triggers: North Korea and Taiwan. North Korea, with its bombs and concentration camps, has delivered us a real-life, dystopian scenario of nuclear war. The crisis draws in rival powers from opposing sides. But, North Korea is a strategic issue for Beijing, whereas Taiwan, that renegade leftover from the 1949 communist victory, is emotional and heartfelt, and invasion plans remain on the table. Taiwan is an energetic, lively, and rich democracy that sits across a narrow stretch of water as a robust reminder of China’s failure to return it to the fold of the motherland. Taiwan is a symbol of Chinese weakness.
Part 5 ends the book with an attempt to show how these two parallel forces of western and eastern values might learn to live together or what the stakes would be if they choose to clash. As Western democracies become more inward-looking, so China is reaching out to sell its message around the world. There is wide agreement, that the current global architecture designed in the nineteen fifties is creaking to breaking point, but no understanding yet on how to fix it.
There has been much discussion on how the shifting power balance resembles that of the 1930s, or even Europe in the early years of the twentieth century. That is partly correct because of the cycle of some societies strengthening while others weaken. It is also very different because our thinking has changed about patriotism, race, loyalty, who we are, where and to whom we belong, and the way we communicate with each other.
The dishes of the banquet are already being rearranged. The tines of the European fork are tarnished and weakened. The developed West is becoming fractured, inward-looking, with political populism, an uncertain Europe, and an unpredictable America. China is filling many voids.
But it has its own style and it is casting shadows of vulnerability over Asia because the continent itself does not speak with one voice, enjoy the same flavors or wish to be the obsequious guest of a new preeminent table host. The dishes are not yet in perfect sequence; spices and sauces jar to leave an uneasy taste. One day we hear of Chinese and Indian troops in a standoff high in the Himalayas; the next, the China Coast Guard has attacked a fishing boat. Then Chinese and Japanese warships lock guns on each other. China claims to lead the world in national strength and international influence. But how exactly will it lead, or will it even be allowed to?
In order to find a way forward there needs to be a clear-eyed understanding of the past, why governments do what they do, where they are heading, how we got it wrong before, and what we should do now. We know what China intends. Other governments have yet to work out how to deal with it. We also know from history that a single isolated event can signify that something far more dangerous is afoot, which is why Asian Waters begins with a fisherman being blasted by a Chinese water cannon.