Easternisation: War and Peace in the Asian Century

by Gideon Rachman

But President Obama knows this is not how it should be. He sees through eyes clouded by the smoke of Middle Eastern fires that the rise of China is an epochal event that requires a response. That response must be both forceful and sustained if the US is to preserve its privileged position in global affairs. But it must be measured and nuanced if it is to avoid plunging America into a potentially disastrous conflict in Asia.

But the West’s centuries-long domination of world affairs is now coming to a close. The root cause of this change is the extraordinary economic development in Asia over the last fifty years. Western political power was founded on technological, military and economic dominance – but these advantages are fast eroding.

But the red thread connecting these seemingly disparate events is the West’s growing inability to function as a pole of stability and power, imposing order on a chaotic world. Of course, even in the heyday of American or European power, there were always wars, conflicts and revolutions that perplexed and frustrated the powerbrokers of the West. But what is new is that the political, strategic and ideological dominance of the West is now under challenge in entire regions, all over the world

The global balance of power began to tip with the great European voyages of exploration of the 1490s.

It is economic might that allows nations to generate the military, diplomatic and technological resources that translate into international political power. But, over the past fifty years, the West’s dominance of the global economy has steadily eroded.

the population of Japan, at just over 120 million in 1990, was too small to shift the global balance of economic power on its own. The rise of China and India – two countries each with populations of over 1 billion people – is a different matter.

Hans Rosling of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute puts it nicely when he describes the world’s pin code as 1114 – meaning that of the planet’s 7 billion people, roughly 1 billion live in Europe, 1 billion live in the Americas, 1 billion in Africa and 4 billion in Asia.

By 2014, China was already the world’s leading manufacturer and its largest exporter. China was also the biggest export market for forty-three countries in the world; whereas the US was the biggest market for just thirty-two countries.

In 2012 for the first time in over a century, Asian nations spent more money on armaments and troops than European countries. India was, by then, competing with Saudi Arabia for the title of the world’s largest arms importer.

Even worse, the economic success and stability of the West itself was thrown into question by the financial and economic crisis that began with the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 – just four months before Obama took the oath of office.

In Europe, Russia’s occupation of Crimea in 2014 represented the first forcible annexation of territory on the European land mass since 1945.

By the middle of the Obama years, the US accounted for almost 75% of the military spending of the twenty-eight-member Nato alliance, up from 50% in the year 2000.

However, politicians and intellectuals who anticipate that a weakened West will now cede global power to an ascendant East are embracing a seriously oversimplified view of the world.

There are two main impediments to Eastern power. The first is the internal political problems of the emerging Asian superpowers. Popular rage about corruption is a common theme that links democratic India and undemocratic China.

For the moment, the West’s institutional advantage has led to a continuing American and European dominance of international finance and law – which, in turn, translates into a form of political power.

The second and even more serious obstacle to the smooth Easternisation of global political power is the divisions and rivalries within Asia itself.

The American ‘pivot’ to Asia makes sense in this context – as an effort to buy time for Western power in the Pacific, while waiting for China to change.

A second reason for the US to play for time in China is less easy to articulate at an official level – although it is much discussed in academia. This is the belief that China is fundamentally unstable and that some combination of economic problems, political upheaval and regional tensions may eventually stop the country’s rise – or even cause it to break up.

The history of the American republic has only moved one way, towards greater prosperity and global power. The notion of national decline – or even of cyclical rises and falls in power – seems much stranger and more alien to Americans than to the Chinese.

In 1405 the Chinese admiral Zheng He led a fleet of nearly 300 vessels and 27,000 sailors from Nanjing to Sri Lanka. In other voyages, Zheng He reached the Malacca Strait, East Africa and Java. The contrast between the size of the Chinese admiral’s expeditions and the early voyages of Christopher Columbus is striking. When Columbus set sail from Cadiz in 1492, ‘he led just ninety men in three ships’.

the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century led to technological advances and a drive for new markets that moved European imperialism in Asia into a new and more expansionist phase.

In 1757, East India Company forces defeated the Nawab of Bengal and his French allies at the Battle of Plassey, establishing the basis for British domination of the Indian subcontinent.

In 1842 the notorious ‘unequal’ Treaty of Nanjing was signed, forcing the Chinese to cede Hong Kong island to Britain in perpetuity (it was returned in 1997) and to open five ‘treaty ports’ to European trade.

In Japan’s case, however, confrontation with the West and the internal political turmoil that it set off inspired a successful domestic reform movement.

The vision of an Asian nation defeating a European power inspired Asian intellectuals as diverse as Kemal Ataturk in Turkey and Jawaharlal Nehru of India, both of whom were to go on to lead their nations.

The First World War marked the beginning of the end of European dominance of the world.

‘The end of British rule in India in 1947 and the withdrawal two years later of Europe’s navies from China marked the end of the “Vasco da Gama epoch” in Asian history.’

The fact that decolonisation in Asia had laid the basis for a shift of global political power to Asia was disguised for decades by two crucial developments. The first was that the United States had succeeded European powers as the dominant political and military power in Asia and the Pacific.

The second critical development was that Asia’s two giants – China and India – turned inwards in the 1940s and pursued economic policies that thwarted their economic potential.

Or imagine how the British would feel if Buckingham Palace had been built by the Indians – and had, in living memory, been the base for an Indian viceroy, governing the United Kingdom.

The humiliations inflicted on China by Britain and other imperial powers may be barely remembered in the UK, but Chinese leaders and intellectuals are intensely conscious of the idea that they are now righting historic wrongs – from the Opium War of 1839–42, to the burning of the Summer Palace.

Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, is often described as a ‘Hindu nationalist’, and he has even broached the subject of the British paying reparations for colonising India.

Bombay’ was a corruption of Bom Bahia, or ‘good bay’ in Portuguese.)

America became the world’s largest economy in 1871, and held that title until 2014.

In the judgement of diplomats, Abe would be the most nationalistic prime minister to lead Japan since 1945.

The Americans had a delicate, and potentially contradictory, task. They had to convince both China and Japan that America’s security guarantees were rock solid. But they also had to avoid taking steps that could bring America closer to war.

‘In the Asia-Pacific in the twenty-first century, the United States of America is all in.’ The president’s ringing declaration reflected a bipartisan consensus in Washington. This holds that if America is to remain the world’s dominant global power, it must continue to be the pre-eminent power in the Pacific.

Ian Morris of Stanford University notes cheerily that ‘Geopolitical shifts on the scale of China’s take-off have always been accompanied by massive violence.

Allison, one of the foremost scholars of the connections between nuclear weapons and foreign policy, argues that it is dangerously complacent to believe that major powers will never fight a nuclear war.

The ‘realist’ school of foreign-policy analysis – which holds that international relations are driven by a struggle for power between nations – tends to be particularly gloomy about the likelihood of war between China and the United States. John Mearsheimer, a professor at Chicago University who is regarded as the doyen of realist theorists, has set out the argument that ‘China cannot rise peacefully’ in a much-discussed book, published in 2014, called The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.

In 2000, Japan’s annual defence spending had been three times as large as China’s. By 2015, China’s defence budget was double that of Japan – and the gap was increasing each year.

However, there are also some important categories of ship – such as submarines – in which the Chinese navy already easily outnumbers the Americans in the western Pacific.

The difficulty with the doctrine of Air-Sea Battle is that carrying it out would probably require America to escalate any conflict quickly – by attacking missile and surveillance systems based on the Chinese mainland in extensive bombing raids.

Like Steinberg, Nye, Hadley and Armitage on their mission to Beijing, Kissinger was drawn to the parallel between US and Chinese relations at the beginning of the twenty-first century and the rivalry between Britain and Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Kissinger noted that Crowe believed that the very fact of a German naval build-up would inevitably become a threat to the British Empire, almost regardless of German intentions. But he also rejected the idea that China and the US were doomed to slip into a similar military rivalry. Nonetheless, the starkness of the 1914 parallel was something that American analysts of China seemed unable to shrug off.

Visitors are told how in the nineteenth century ‘imperial powers descended on China like a swarm of bees, looting our treasures and killing our people’. Acres of space are devoted to the suffering inflicted by the Japanese invasion and occupation of China from 1937–45, when some 15 million Chinese people died. There is, however, almost no space given over to the even larger numbers of people who lost their lives during the famines and state-sponsored killings of Mao’s Great Leap Forward from 1958–62.

It was also Deng who gave his Communist Party colleagues some famous advice on how a rising China should deal with the outside world. Deng’s dictum – ‘Coolly observe, calmly deal with things, hold your position, hide your capacities, bide your time, accomplish things where possible’ – became famous and was often abbreviated in Western foreign-policy circles as ‘hide and bide’.

The new face of China’s foreign policy was Yang Jiechi, a man with a much more abrasive style. Yang is a former ambassador to the US, fluent in English and comfortable in Washington. But he had also shown a willingness to use confrontational language avoided by an earlier generation of Chinese diplomats, brought up in the tradition of ‘hide and bide’.

In 2010, while still foreign minister (a position junior to that of state councillor), Yang issued a blunt warning to other Asian nations not to get above themselves in their various territorial disputes with China. At a summit of Asia-Pacific nations in Vietnam, he announced ‘China is a big country. And you are all small countries. And that is a fact.’

Xi himself came to power with a reputation as a ‘military hugger’ – a man with much closer ties to the armed forces than his predecessor, Hu Jintao.