Gordon G. Chang's Blog, page 13

India Blocks China’s Attempt to Take Over South Asian Group

In late November, New Delhi blocked Beijing’s attempt to gain membership in the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Maldives, and Afghanistan are the seven other full members of what some call a club of poor nations.

At the group’s 18th summit, held in the Nepalese capital of Kathmandu, Beijing allies Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka pushed for China’s upgrading from observer status to full membership. India sought to defeat the initiative because SAARC, as the organization is known, operates on consensus and New Delhi feared that China would block its initiatives in the future.

The last thing the group needs is more obstructionism. By all accounts, the Kathmandu meeting, whose motto was “Deeper Integration for Peace and Prosperity,” was not a success. That is not especially surprising because SAARC is itself considered a failure, with little to show since it was formed in 1985. “SAARC represents the EU approach to South Asia,” writes M. A. Niazi, an Indian journalist, but unfortunately South Asia is not Europe, where leaders are intent on integrating their economies and societies.

Yet, despite everything, the South Asian grouping is becoming an important platform for India, now intent on countering China’s attempts to dominate South Asia.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi signaled that SAARC would play a big role in his foreign policy from the very beginning. Creating a great deal of optimism at the time, he invited the leaders of the seven other nations—including Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif—to his inauguration in late May. Since then, not much has been accomplished in furthering SAARC’s objectives.

For one thing, Pakistan is unsure about integration within the group, especially since India, considered its primary adversary, is SAARC’s dominate member. Ultimately, Islamabad’s reluctance may not matter. Modi appears increasingly impatient with the Pakistanis. He and Sharif slighted each other in Kathmandu and then Modi indicated India was going to go ahead with his initiatives, with SAARC or without it. “The bonds will grow,” the Indian prime minister told the seven other leaders at the Kathmandu summit. “Through SAARC or outside it. Among us all or some of us.”

Yet Pakistani obstinance is not the only barrier to progress. Local Indian politics during Modi’s short tenure has hindered India playing its natural role as leader of the region. In 2014, he let opposition in the state of West Bengal halt links with Bangladesh, and let resistance in Tamil Nadu slow outreach to Sri Lanka.

Modi may think of India as the core of South Asia and the center of SAARC, but China is moving into the region fast, marginalizing New Delhi. Take Nepal, the host of the recent summit. At the end of December, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi arrived in Kathmandu for a three-day visit to deliver help to Nepal, especially assistance in generating electricity.  Beijing will increase official annual aid more than five-fold, from $24 million to $128 million. Moreover, China will spend additional money to build a police academy for Nepal.

Across the region, India sees more and more evidence of Chinese involvement. Beijing’s officials first build relationships with small states on India’s periphery with aid and trade and then move on to establishing military ties. “China’s strategy toward South Asia is premised on encircling India and confining her within the geographical coordinates of the region,” writes Harsh Pant of King’s College London. “This strategy of using proxies started off with Pakistan and has gradually evolved to include other states in the region, including Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal.” If India is now surrounded, it is largely New Delhi’s fault. As Pant notes, “India’s protectionist tendencies have allowed China to don the mantle of regional economic leader.”

China’s penetration of South Asia and the rest of the continent is so complete that Akhilesh Pillalamarri, who writes at the Diplomat, believes New Delhi has no real choice but to sign onto “Asia’s emerging ‘Chinese Order.’” Beijing, he says, is rearranging trade routes through the continent so that they run through China. “There is no alternative for India but to become a part of this order or remain unintegrated, since it is too late for India to set up its own Asian order.”

China is certainly using its trade prowess, but pronouncements that the game is over for New Delhi are premature. Businessweek believes India’s growth rate could overtake China’s in 2016, in what the magazine calls “a world-turned-upside-down moment.” In reality, that point has probably passed, as Chinese reports of economic performance look exaggerated.

In any event, India can, through a combination of fast growth and progressive trade policies, win back its region from Beijing. China can afford to buy the loyalty of South Asian leaders for only a few more years if its economy is as bad as it now appears.

“The truth is, India comes into its own on the world stage when it carries the neighborhood with it,” correctly notes the Hindu, an English-language daily in the Indian city of Chennai, in an editorial at the end of November. That is the crucial test for the Modi government.

OG Image: Asia PacificSouth AsiaIndiaChinaPakistanBangladeshNepalMaldivesAfghanistanSri Lanka

Is a ‘Proportional Response’ to North Korea a Good Idea?

Last Monday, North Korea lost all Internet connectivity for about nine and a half hours. Tuesday, service was interrupted again, for a half hour. The outages were apparently the results of low-tech denial-of-service attacks. The North's network then went out over the weekend.

So far, a few hackers have claimed responsibility, but some believe the incidents to be the handiwork of US Cyber Command. Yet whether or not the American military was behind the extraordinary events—Obama administration officials are issuing both denials and non-denials—the unusual takedown of the North’s Internet has raised the issue as to what constitutes a “proportional” response.

The concept was aired many times last week. “We will respond proportionally, and we’ll respond in a place and time and manner that we choose,” said President Obama at his year-end press briefing Friday, referring to North Korean hackers. The president blamed them for attacks on Sony Pictures Entertainment beginning last month.

Should America’s response to North Korea be “proportional”? As an initial matter, it is hard to figure out what America could do that would approximate the damage that the hackers, calling themselves the Guardians of Peace and thought to be working for or on behalf of the Kim regime, inflicted.

They destroyed Sony’s data, shared five movies with peer-to-peer networks, released sensitive internal correspondence, and generally paralyzed the studio. Moreover, they threatened the core interests of American society by making terrorist-type threats designed to prevent the release of The Interview, a comedy starring Seth Rogen and James Franco about the assassination of Kim Jong Un and the change of North Korea’s political system.

“Proportional” may be Obama administration code for “mild.” The White House, the New York Times reported last Wednesday, is concerned about escalation and hopes that moderate countermeasures will end the spat over what Michael Lynton, chief executive of the Sony subsidiary, termed “the worst cyber attack in American history.” 

“There are a lot of constraints on us, because we live in a giant glass house,” said an official involved in the administration’s internal debates. In short, our wired society is particularly vulnerable to cyber assaults while dark and destitute North Korea is not.

Yet the premise that the US can avoid escalation is, at best, questionable. The Kim regime, over a period spanning eight decades, has shown that it can and will raise the stakes at a time and a place of its choosing. That was evident Sunday. “Our toughest counteraction will be boldly taken against the White House, the Pentagon, and the whole US mainland, the cesspool of terrorism, by far surpassing the ‘symmetric counteraction’ declared by Obama,” stated the National Defense Commission, the North’s powerful organ, in comments carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.

The promised attacks sound fanciful, but no one thought the North Koreans would snatch the Pueblo, an unarmed US Navy reconnaissance vessel, in international water in 1968. No one thought they would shoot down a Navy EC-121 reconnaissance plane in 1969, killing all 31 on board, in international air space.  No one thought they would start the Korean War in 1950. There are too many no-one-thoughts in our dealings with the Kim family regime.

Most everyone is saying North Korea’s threats made last week are unserious, but we have to remember that everyone, including Sony and the State Department, thought that Pyongyang’s threats in the middle of the year were bluster and need not be taken seriously.  We all know what happened beginning in late November to Sony.

So what should we do? We should implement an effective response.  We should impose the financial sanctions the Bush administration put in place in 2005 to cut the North off from the international financial system; interdict North Korea’s weapons sales, the main source of the Kim regime’s revenue; put the North back on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism; and help South Korean activists who want to get DVDs of The Interview into the hands of the North Korean people.

North Korea will stop hacking American companies only when the costs it incurs are greater than the benefits it receives. A proportional response sounds like a good idea, but in practice it will not deter the regime from engaging in even more destructive acts.

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India’s ‘Annihilator of Enemies’ Takes to the Sea

On Monday, Indian Defense Minister Manohar Parrikar approved sea trials of the INS Arihant, his country’s first indigenously built nuclear-powered submarine. The boat, which first slipped into harbor water in July 2009, is designed to launch ballistic missiles carrying nuclear warheads. “Arihant” means “annihilator of enemies.”

The Indian Navy already operates a nuclear-powered sub. INS Chakra, however, is a Russian Akula-2, leased for 10 years from Moscow and commissioned in April 2012. This “attack” boat, designed primarily to kill other submarines, carries only conventional weapons, most notably torpedoes and cruise missiles.

India is now going all-in on a nuclear sub force. Shipyards are already building two other “boomers” of the Arihant class. Moreover, New Delhi will soon authorize the construction of six nuclear-powered attack boats. At the moment, only five other nations operate nuclear-powered subs: the US, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China.

The last on the list is particularly on the minds of Indian political leaders and defense planners. China and India call each other “strategic partners,” but Beijing acts like anything but. So there was consternation in New Delhi when a Chinese nuclear attack boat made a port call in Sri Lanka last month, closely following a port call there by a Chinese diesel-electric sub in September.

The Chinese are far ahead of the Indians. The People’s Liberation Army Navy, known as PLAN in defense circles, is thought to have 10 nuclear-powered subs. Three of them, of the Jin class, can fire ballistic missiles.

China’s Navy, if it has not done so already, will this month begin “deterrence patrols,” a bland-sounding phrase for long deployments of submarines carrying the ultimate weapon strapped to the top of long-range missiles. 

India won’t be able to do that for years. The Arihant is scheduled to begin service in late 2016, but if its overly long harbor-acceptance trials are any indication, the date could be pushed back well beyond that year.

“We should be worried, the way we have run down our submarine fleet,” said Arun Prakash, former head of the Indian Navy, to Reuters recently. “But with China bearing down on us, the way it is on the Himalayas, the South China Sea, and now the Indian Ocean, we should be even more worried.”

Until the Arihant joins the fleet, Parkash suggests New Delhi will use diplomacy to keep the Chinese “in check.”

So what will India use after the Arihant begins its service under the waves? The US and Soviet Union took decades to work out understandings, guidelines, and agreements to prevent accidents and encounters at sea from escalating into Armageddon. Chinese and Indian submarines—some carrying nukes and all bearing fearsome weapons—are bound to surge into the same waters in the near future, as will surface combatants. We can only hope the two navies can work out accommodations that will keep vessels apart, and disagreements within bounds.

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Obama Cites Dangers in Xi’s Consolidation of Power

At the beginning of the month, President Obama, in comments to the Business Roundtable in Washington, displayed his command of Chinese Communist Party politics. “He has consolidated power faster and more comprehensively than probably anybody since Deng Xiaoping,” he said of his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping. “And everybody’s been impressed by his … clout inside of China after only a year and a half or two years.”

“There are dangers in that,” Obama then remarked.

Yes, there are, and it was important for the president to have said so, even if it was unusual for the leader of the free world to comment on the political standing of an authoritarian supremo.

Beijing was not particularly happy, of course. The Foreign Ministry sidestepped responding directly, but Chinese academics, regularly used to voice controversial government views, were not so diplomatic. The oft-quoted Jin Canrong of Renmin University in Beijing told the South China Morning Post that the words of the American leader were “careless.” Tao Wenzhao of the prestigious Chinese Academy of Social Sciences put it this way to the same paper: “The president of the United States, even with some constraints, has great powers, yet you don’t see China giving comments on that issue.”

Maybe so, but Obama was right to point out troubling trends in the leadership of the Chinese state. Xi has been conducting a political purge, in the guise of an anti-corruption campaign, without precedent since the era of Mao Zedong, the willful founder of the People’s Republic of China.

Yet however the effort is categorized—purge or law enforcement effort—the result is a virtual reign of terror. Officials are “effectively on strike,” afraid to make decisions. Some are taking early retirement; others are committing suicide. The Chinese central government has been paralyzed for months.

Xi obviously means business. His latest target is Zhou Yongkang, the once-feared internal security czar, who stepped down in November 2012. State media announced his expulsion from the Communist Party over the weekend. At the same time, his case has been formally transferred to state prosecutors. It appears he will be charged with, among other crimes, taking bribes and leaking state secrets. The party said he “committed adultery with a number of women and traded his power for sex and money.”

Zhou has been called the biggest of the “tigers”—Xi Jinping’s code for corrupt officials—yet there are even larger beasts. Many are waiting to see if China’s leader will try to bring down his predecessors Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin.

There are indications that Xi is trying to defang both men by targeting their subordinates. The bold leader’s investigators are looking at the relatives of Ling Jihua, one of Hu’s closest associates, with the apparent goal of eventually jailing Ling himself.

And with the detention of Zhou, Xi has taken an important step in isolating Jiang from his vast patronage network. “Mr. Xi’s step-by-step destruction of Mr. Jiang’s three most dangerous protégés has been a display of cunning and decisiveness that has not been seen since Mao,” writes journalist John Garnaut, referring to Zhou and the now jailed Xu Caihou and Bo Xilai.

The eventual conviction of Zhou—there is no chance he will be found innocent as long as Xi rules China—suggests that the newish ruler is finally getting close to consolidating power, as Obama suggested in his candid remarks.

Yet by pushing party powerbrokers too hard, Xi is setting the scene for an all-out fight. “What Xi is doing is, to put it mildly, disliked by the establishment, particularly retired standing committee members,” said Steve Tsang of the University of Nottingham to Bloomberg News. “If Xi stumbles, the knives will be out for him.”

Deng Xiaoping, Mao’s successor and Jiang’s predecessor, reduced the cost of losing political struggles. Moreover, while Jiang and Hu ruled, powerbrokers maintained a rough balance among the party’s factions. Yet Xi, by upping the stakes, is giving his opponents incentive to fight to the end. With little or nothing to lose, they can push the political system beyond the edge.

Xi, by going for broke, has started a rumble, and in these circumstances he can rest only after vanquishing every adversary in sight. “In short, this is a very complicated and difficult fight,” said Hu Muying, a longtime friend of Xi’s, to Garnaut, the journalist. “It is a struggle of ‘You die, I live.’”

OG Image: Asia PacificChinaXi Jinping

Taiwan Voters Reject China-Centric Policies

Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou bowed for 10 seconds Wednesday as he confirmed his resignation as chairman of the ruling Kuomintang, taking responsibility for the party’s worst drubbing since 1949, when Chiang Kai-shek fled to the island after defeat in the Chinese civil war. On Saturday, voters thoroughly rejected the KMT, as the organization is known, in elections for 11,130 local posts across the island.

Voters turned down KMT candidates in seats that had been safely “blue” for decades. It was not so much that the electorate had gone “green”—the color adopted by the opposition Democratic Progressive Party and its allies—as much as they had rejected Ma, who was nearing the end of his second and last term.

As the president said while announcing his resignation, “The results of the election tell us our reforms were not made fast enough and have yet to meet the expectations of the people, which is why the KMT failed to win the support of most voters.”

Ma is only half right. True, his government had been seen as corrupt and, worse, incompetent, and he had not met overly ambitious campaign promises in his two successful runs for the presidency.

Yet Ma apparently has not come to terms with the fundamental reason for his party’s failure in Saturday’s election, in which 67.6 percent of the eligible voters participated. His China policies, after six years in office, have become extremely unpopular.  

During his tenure, 21 trade, transit, and investment pacts have been put in place. They have resulted in economic integration with the “mainland,” as Ma’s allies call it, or “China,” the term used by those who do not see Taiwan as Chinese. Ma has worked for a political accommodation with Beijing, but an overwhelming majority of people on the island want no part of the People’s Republic even in the best of times, and now there is a general perception that China ties have worked to Taiwan’s disadvantage.

Despite the perception, Ma this year tried to ram the ratification of the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement through the Legislative Yuan. This 22nd China pact stalled, however, when students and others occupied the national legislature for 24 days in the spring. The Sunflower Movement since then has taken on a life of its own, crystalizing thinking in society.

And it did not help the Kuomintang when Beijing in recent months overreached in Hong Kong as it tried to write the rules for the 2017 election of the territory’s chief executive, the top political official there. Moreover, Chinese leader Xi Jinping did Ma no favors when he said in September that the “one country, two systems” formula put in place for that city should be applied to Taiwan, thereby painting a future that many in Taiwan viewed as dark.

Ma, to his credit, criticized Beijing for its Hong Kong policies and said one country, two systems had no applicability to his island republic, but by then the Taiwan leader had become tone deaf—or perhaps desperate. About 10 days before his country’s election, when it became clear that his party was heading for defeat across the board, he played the China card, trying to turn the contest into a referendum on his cross-strait policies.

Although “all politics are local” applies to Taiwan—the nine levels of public office that were up for grabs on Saturday had almost nothing to do with China policy—the injection of an unpopular issue probably cost the ruling party even more support. As it turned out, the Kuomintang ended up with only 40.7 percent of the vote.

The KMT is now in disarray. Ma’s successor as party chairman will not be picked until January at the earliest, and many additional posts will have to be filled as others also took the resignation route in the last few days. Many predict the KMT will be wracked by fierce power struggles as party stalwarts scramble to fill the newly vacant slots.

The party’s to-do list is daunting, as it will have to reconstitute itself, come up with candidates for the 2016 election, and most difficult of all, find a message that resonates. As a practical matter, the KMT cannot develop an attractive message unless its China policies start producing more growth for Taiwan and the benefits of that growth are spread more evenly throughout society.

Meanwhile, the normally fractured opposition looks unusually united behind a reenergized Tsai Ing-wen, who led the Democratic Progressive Party to defeat in the 2012 presidential contest. Her task list has only one major item: don’t fall while riding the anti-blue tidal wave.

Many say she also has to convince Washington that a DPP victory will not upset the status quo, but that may be a misreading of sentiments in Taiwan. After all, Washington’s open backing of Ma in his 2012 reelection bid is now viewed by many on the island as unwarranted interference. 

In any event, the election calendar favors Tsai. The next presidential contest occurs January 2016, probably not enough time for a battered Kuomintang to recover.

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Criminal States Protecting Their Proxies at UN

On November 18, the United Nations Third Committee adopted a resolution recommending the referral of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the International Criminal Court, alleging crimes against humanity. This was the first time a U.N. resolution recommended sending North Korea to The Hague.

The General Assembly is expected to accept the committee’s report next month and formally pass the matter to the Security Council.

 China and Russia, among the 19 voting against the Third Committee resolution, will undoubtedly use their Security Council vetoes to make sure the ICC does not get an opportunity to hear the case.

South Korea, which has been pushing hard for the ICC referral, is not dismayed by the intransigence of Beijing and Moscow. “This is just the beginning,” said Lee Jung-hoon, South Korea’s human rights ambassador, to the Wall Street Journal. “The fact that the Security Council will discuss this, and talk about Kim Jong Un and the International Criminal Court in one sentence—that’s a huge step forward.”

Lee is right, but a conversation about human rights in North Korea is not complete without talking about Pyongyang’s long-time accomplice. The regime in Pyongyang could not brutalize its population without the active support of its northern neighbor, the People’s Republic of China.

In February, the U.N.’s Commission of Inquiry cited China for possibly “aiding and abetting of crimes against humanity” by, among other things, forcibly repatriating refugees to the North.

As Roberta Cohen of the Brookings Institution tells us, the U.N., for the first time, put China “under broad international censure” for the return of refugees. The U.N. report was damning, pointing out, in Cohen’s words, “that over a period of two decades, China has forcibly returned tens of thousands of North Koreans almost all of whom have been subjected to inhuman treatment and punishment in the form of ‘imprisonment, execution, torture, arbitrary detention, deliberate starvation, illegal cavity searches, forced abortions, and other sexual violence.’ ”

Beijing, which said the report was “divorced from reality,” has been blatantly violating its international obligations for years by refusing to consider refugee status for fleeing North Koreans, but neither America nor any other nation was willing to hold China accountable.

Therefore, it is no surprise the Third Committee did not recommend referring the Chinese state to the ICC. No one, it seems, wants to take on a seemingly powerful Beijing, but there is another reason for the failure to enforce norms and rules. In short, there is an enduring hope that Chinese communists will one day become responsible actors. “How many times is China going to veto this down?” South Korea’s Lee asked, referring to the Third Committee’s recommendation. “If China wants to be a world leader with the U.S., it needs to take a moral stance.”

Lee miscomprehends China’s Communist Party, which thinks it can become a world leader without making bows to morality, at least as the concept is understood around the world. The Chinese people are undoubtedly as moral as any other, but the one-party state that rules them has its own imperatives.

One of those imperatives is supporting Pyongyang to the hilt when it comes to refugees. Last Thursday, the lawyer for Peter Hahn, a Korean-American running a Christian charity and school in China just across the Tumen River from North Korea, said the activist had been detained by authorities. Hahn’s detention follows the taking into custody of Kevin and Julie Garratt three months ago in Dandong, along the Yalu River, which also separates the two people’s republics. Both Hahn and the Garratts were aiding refugees fleeing the North.

These detentions are part of an intensified crackdown on aid agencies and networks in border areas, and are a reminder that China’s support for Kim family crimes remains strong—surely a crime against humanity itself.

OG Image: Asia PacificSouth KoreaChinaNorth KoreaHuman Rights

China: Socialist, Democratic, Harmonious by 2050?

“I have never heard a Chinese leader declare that his country would be fully democratic by 2050,” said Tony Abbott, the Australian prime minister, on Monday evening as he toasted Xi Jinping. “I have never heard a Chinese leader commit so explicitly to a rule-based international order founded on the principle that we should all treat others as we would be treated ourselves.” And Abbott said this: “I thank you, Mr. President, for this historic, historic statement, which I hope will echo right around the world.”

What prompted the effusive compliment? Earlier in the day, Xi had addressed the Australian Parliament, and he did make sweeping statements. “We have set two goals for China’s future development,” the Chinese leader said. “The first is to double the 2010 GDP and per-capita income of urban and rural residents and build a society of initial prosperity in all respects by 2020. The second is to turn China into a modern socialist country that is prosperous, democratic, culturally advanced, and harmonious by the middle of the century.”

Xi did use the word “democratic” and he talked about “the middle of the century,” but it is unlikely the Mao-spouting autocrat had a recent change of outlook. After all, during his tenure as China’s supremo he has intensified a prolonged attack on civil society begun by predecessor Hu Jintao.

Moreover, Xi has made it clear he believes China can progress only under the firm tutelage of the Communist Party, which he heads as general secretary. Most China watchers even think he has reversed the multi-decade trend toward weaker central leadership, a trend beginning with the historic transition from Mao Zedong, the founder of the People’s Republic, to economic reformer Deng Xiaoping. If anything, the return to something resembling one-man rule under Xi has to be considered a move away from what most of the world considers “democracy.”

In these circumstances, it is clear Xi made no commitment to democratize by 2050, or for that matter, any date. Unfortunately, in Xi’s speech there was “nothing new” about China’s political system, as Jean-Pierre Cabestan of Hong Kong Baptist University noted in comments to London’s Guardian. “I’m afraid Abbott has been a bit too optimistic.”

It appears most observers, like the oft-quoted Cabestan, believe Abbott was taken in by Xi’s verbiage. There is, however, one other possibility, that the Australian leader was creating a marker by which the actions of his Chinese counterpart would be measured. Foreign presidents and prime ministers have, by employing this tactic, often tried to goad the Chinese political establishment to move in better directions.

Yet whatever is the truth—whether Abbott assigned too much significance to the words he heard or was being diplomatic for good ends—the prime minister missed an opportunity. Ronald Reagan did not praise Mikhail Gorbachev at first; he called the USSR what it was, an “evil empire.” He did not plead with the Soviet boss. Reagan demanded he “tear down this wall.”

“Here’s my strategy on the Cold War: We win, they lose,” Reagan said. And the world, as a result of the determination evident in those words, won soon after. Xi Jinping, for all his apparent strength, is insecure. We can see that from the Communist Party’s coercion at home and hostility abroad.

We need clear-thinking, plain-speaking leaders who will challenge those who seek dominion over others, even if—especially if—they are considered to own this century.

Mr. Xi, open your gates, tear down your walls.

OG Image: Asia PacificChinaAustraliaXi JinpingTony AbbottDemocracy

China and Japan: Breakthrough or Breakdown?

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On Tuesday, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said his country and China had agreed to establish a “maritime communication mechanism.” The announcement came the day after he and Chinese President Xi Jinping shook hands at a symbolically powerful public event on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Beijing and then met for about 25 minutes. On the proceeding Friday, China and Japan announced a vague four-point plan that looked like a roadmap to improve ties.

Most analysts see a gradual warming in relations between the two nations. Given political distress in Communist Party circles in China, that’s unlikely, however.

Why the need for a maritime mechanism? The most visible dispute between the two countries involves eight Japanese-administered outcroppings in the East China Sea. Tokyo calls the uninhabited islands the Senkakus, but Beijing, which knows them as the Diaoyus, claims them as well. In recent years, China has attempted to wrest the islets from Japanese control by sending its vessels into Japan’s territorial waters surrounding them and flying its planes through territorial airspace there. Beijing’s aggressive actions are, in the minds of many Chinese, justified by the notion that Japan stole the islands from China. Moreover, there is no shortage of other insults, injustices, and crimes the Communist Party perceives.

Pile one incident on top of another, and you can see why many have worried about armed conflict. Therefore, the handshake at the beginning of the week brought relief.

The event, however, was less significant than it appears. First, Xi, as host of APEC, was obliged  to officially welcome all visiting heads of state to the summit in his capital. Not to extend a hand to Abe—in the literal sense—would have severely undermined the notion that China is the big-brother leader of Asia to whom all regional nations must visit. Chinese leaders now appear to understand how their recent truculence has undermined China’s centrality in the region, and their hosting of the APEC forum, on the 25th anniversary of the organization, gave them an opportunity to show a different face.

Second, Xi’s obvious distaste for meeting Abe was evident from the numerous breaches of protocol. The Japanese prime minister was positioned first in the meeting room and then waited momentarily for Xi, a reversal of custom. When Xi came into the room, Abe spoke words of greeting to him. The Chinese leader, however, not only did not speak to his Japanese counterpart, he also looked away with a pained expression. It was a disgraceful response to Tokyo’s overture.

Contrast that with Mao Zedong’s February1972 greeting of visiting American President Richard Nixon. The Great Helmsmen was warm and gracious, even though he had long viewed the US as his enemy—and even though his son, Anying, was killed in the Korean War by an American airstrike.

Both Mao and his successor, Deng Xiaoping, maintained cordial ties with the Japanese throughout their long periods of rule. The first two leaders of the People’s Republic, for all their faults and failings, were from the first generation of Chinese Communist revolutionaries and so were not especially concerned about legitimacy. Relations with Tokyo soured during Jiang Zemin’s period at the top. Jiang, not nearly as secure as Deng, needed adversaries to bolster himself, and as a result he stoked tensions with Japan. The same was true of Jiang’s weaker successor, Hu Jintao.

Xi is said to be a strong leader, but his policies toward Tokyo more resemble those of Jiang and Hu than Mao and Deng. His poor relations with Japan—a country China needs to keep its economy going—suggests either he is not as politically secure as he is portrayed or that he personally harbors ill feelings toward Abe. Given that Chinese diplomacy is ruthlessly pragmatic, it would seem the former is the case.

In any event, China’s relations with Japan will only get better when Chinese leaders feel confident enough to want them to get better, not because Xi grudgingly shook the hand of Abe in Beijing.

OG Image: Asia PacificChinaJapanShinzo AbeXi Jinping

Railway Wars in the Himalayas

On October 31st, China’s official Xinhua News Agency announced that the National Development and Reform Commission had approved a new rail line running from Lhasa, capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region, east to Nyingchi.

Toward its eastern end, the line will come close to India’s state of Arunachal Pradesh. Beijing claims most of Arunachal as its own, calling it “South Tibet.” Therefore, the Lhasa-Nyingchi section, part of the Sichuan-Tibet railway, is bound to heighten concern in New Delhi.

Beijing has been expending substantial sums for more than a decade on transportation infrastructure in the Tibetan homeland. The new 402-kilometer-long line is billed as Tibet’s second railway. The first one, the controversial Qinghai-Tibet railway, went into operation in 2006.

Why is China busy building transportation links to Tibet? First, the Xinhua story implied the Lhasa-Nyingchi line will increase tourism and spur economic development. All this is true, yet there are more important reasons.

For instance, Beijing leaders, insecure about their grip over the Tibetan plateau, have felt a need to bring troops into Tibet quickly and efficiently. The essential problem is that the Chinese have been unwilling to accommodate the people they now rule in Tibet. “We Tibetans say that although the Chinese may have been able to swallow Tibet, they’re not able to digest it,” said Bhuchung Tsering of the International Campaign for Tibet last month, referring to Mao Zedong’s invasion of Tibet in 1950 and its subsequent annexation.

Beijing, therefore, has been forced to commit substantial forces to control Tibet’s vast spaces. “The Lhasa to Nyingchi railway section is conducive to improving the regional road network and transportation capacity to better integrate Tibet with other parts of China,” said Yang Yulin, a Tibet railway official, to Xinhua, speaking most diplomatically.

Most important from Beijing’s perspective is that troops ferried to Tibet to suppress dissent and revolts can also be used to harass Indian forces in areas that both China and India claim. The two countries maintain two significant competing territorial claims, one in the Ladakh region of the state of Jammu and Kashmir in the west and Arunachal Pradesh in the east, and these disputes bring two large armies into close proximity high in the Himalayas.

Chinese incursions south of the Line of Actual Control, the temporary and ill-defined border between India and China along their western boundary, appear to be on the rise, not only in number but also in scope. In April 2013, for instance, a platoon-size force camped far south of the line in Ladakh, and this September about a thousand troops moved south, also in that district.

China sees its recent moves to add to the rail infrastructure as balancing India’s, but India is playing catchup in the Himalayas, “a wide asymmetry in infrastructure” as India Today put it. “Our projects were in hibernation in the last 15 years,” said Minister of State for External Affairs V. K. Singh, a retired general. New Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has promised to accelerate overdue infrastructure building. At the same time, he is thinking both short-term—reinforcing Indian forces in disputed areas—and far into the future—planning civilian settlements there.

New Delhi is far behind China’s efforts to build roads and railroads near disputed territory. Modi, supported by a reviving economy, may be able to make up some ground in building transport links. Yet one thing is certain: two giants are competing with each other to build the logistical infrastructure that will be used to supply two large armies high in the Himalayas.

OG Image: Asia PacificChinaTibetIndia

Countering the Threat of North Korean Warheads

On Friday, General Curtis Scaparrotti, commander of UN and US forces in Korea, told reporters that he believes Pyongyang has developed the “capability” to miniaturize a nuclear device. The regime, he said during a Pentagon press briefing, also has the “technology” to deliver that device by ballistic missile. The general did not claim North Korea had actually mounted a warhead on a missile or that it had in fact tested the combination, but of course it is only a matter of time before it does so.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, as the North likes to call itself, has claimed that its February 2013 atomic test was of a “miniaturized and lighter nuclear device.”

Were the North Koreans telling the truth? Defense analysts have, at various times, argued about the North’s capabilities. For instance, in April of last year the US Defense Intelligence Agency noted it had “moderate confidence” that Pyongyang had miniaturized a nuclear device. Many, at the time, disagreed, and President Obama himself tried to minimize the appearance of North Korea’s technological advances.

Beyond the North’s claims, the evidence underpinning the DIA’s assessment and Scaparrotti’s belief is not publicly known. Regardless, it is well established that North Korea has long pursued the development of the world’s most destructive weaponry. In January 2011, then Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the regime would, within five years, develop a ballistic missile capable of reaching the continental US. Moreover, in January of last year Leon Panetta, his successor, made refreshingly candid remarks about the North Koreans. “Who the hell knows what they’re going to do from day to day?” he said. “And right now, you know, North Korea just fired a missile. It’s an intercontinental ballistic missile, for God sakes. That means they have the capability to strike the United States.”

So, applying Gates’s timetable and keeping in mind Panetta’s comments, it would be prudent for defense policymakers, and the public at large, to assume that one of the world’s most volatile and unpredictable regimes will likely have the capacity to strike the continental US from coast-to-coast in the foreseeable future. There is, unfortunately, a tendency of analysts and politicians to vociferously argue over the North’s present capabilities and ignore the implications of long-term trends. For instance, the Obama administration, reluctant to spend money on missile defense, has tried to downplay the threat.

In March of last year, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel backed a minimal response, the authorization of 14 additional interceptors in California and Alaska because of the North’s display of the KN-08, the North’s newest ballistic missile, in April 2012.

There is, unfortunately, still a reluctance to acknowledge the full scope of the challenges we face. “We’ve not seen it tested at this point,” said Scaparrotti about the KN-08 on Friday. “And as you know, for something that that’s complex, without it being tested, the probability of it being effective is pretty darn low.”

Everything he said is correct and it was right for him not to speculate further than he already had, yet the KN-08 appears to be a variant of a missile China sold to Pakistan (pdf). In fact, the Chinese military sold at least parts of the KN-08 launcher Pyongyang displayed in April 2012—and perhaps the entire launcher. And because China sold at least most of the launcher, it is likely it sold the KN-08 itself. The North Koreans have not needed to test the KN-08 because the Pakistanis and the Chinese have already done so.

Scaparrotti, in explaining North Korea’s progress on Friday, noted that the Kim regime has “proliferation relationships with other countries, Iran and Pakistan in particular.” Yes, it does, but North Korea is almost always a seller to Tehran, not a buyer. And with regard to Pakistan, China has been facilitating the trade between the two states. Not once did Scaparrotti utter the words “China” or “Chinese” during his press briefing. Yet as Panetta testified in April 2012, when he was still secretary of defense, “I’m sure there’s been some help coming from China.”

Soon, North Korea will have the ability to launch ballistic missiles tipped with nuclear warheads straight at large concentrations of Americans. That means we need to continue the conversation that Scaparrotti started on Friday, but this time with frankness and seriousness of purpose. We need to talk about the North, of course, but also its enablers, Pakistan and China.

 

OG Image: Asia PacificSouth KoreaNorth KoreaUS