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May 2 - May 3, 2018
The evidence that Beijing had embarked on a new and more aggressive course seemed to be mounting. In his first eighteen months in office, Xi paid more official visits to the People’s Liberation Army than his predecessor had done in a decade. But China was also capable of blending charm with menace, combining threats with the promise of lucrative ‘win-win’ deals.
To some, President Xi’s new emphasis looked like a pronounced shift from the alarming militarism of his first few months in office and a return to the older policies based around economic co-operation. Perhaps, it was argued, President Xi had noticed that his more aggressive policies were driving Asian nations into the arms of the US and had thought again? Yet, in truth, the economic and military aspects of Chinese foreign policy under Xi served the same strategic goal – to build and extend China’s claim to be the dominant force in Asia and the Pacific.
there was already a body of new ideas and emerging policies that he could draw upon as the basis for a more assertive foreign policy. Three related ideas were particularly important: a sense of aggrieved nationalism; increasing confidence in China’s strength relative to the United States; and a deep fear about China’s own domestic political stability and the potentially subversive role of the West.
In the years after 1989, the idea that China had undergone a ‘century of humiliation’, only to be saved by the Communist Party from a predatory world, was drilled into a generation of school and university students through new history textbooks and museums.
By the time President Xi was elected General Secretary of the Communist Party a whole generation of young Chinese had been raised on this ‘wolf’s milk’ of nationalism.
Yet, well before either Friedman or Xi had uttered the phrase, many Chinese would have become familiar with the idea of a ‘China Dream’ through the best-selling work of Colonel Liu Mingfu.
Another view is that while China’s leaders may retain a certain cynical distance from nationalist rhetoric in private, they are nonetheless in danger of being trapped by it.
Chinese leadership know their history and well remember that in 1919, demonstrations by nationalist students – outraged by the terms the country’s leaders had accepted at the Treaty of Versailles – led indirectly to the founding of the Communist Party itself.
In 2011, one British diplomat – recently returned from a trip to China – told me with a laugh that China was the only country where he had been told, ‘What you have to remember is that you come from a weak and declining nation.’
Popular risings against undemocratic regimes – and the chaos they could unleash – became a central focus of China’s political thinking. The role of Western activists, institutions and technology in stoking these revolts was noted in Beijing.
As soon as he came to power, President Xi made clear that the ‘great rejuvenation’ of China must include a crackdown on corruption. If the system was not cleansed, he argued, the survival of the Communist Party itself was at stake. Many foreign and Chinese observers assumed, nonetheless, that the anti-corruption campaign would not go very deep or last very long. They were wrong.
both Republicans and Democrats had operated on the assumption that China’s rise could be managed, by giving the nation a clear stake in the maintenance of the post-war international system – a system that had essentially been designed and maintained by the United States. Thus America supported China’s application to join the World Trade Organization
At least initially, the main goal of Obama’s China policy was therefore to gain Beijing’s co-operation on a dazzling range of transnational issues, listed by Bader: ‘denuclearisation of Iran and North Korea, restoring the world economy, combating climate change, fighting terrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan, ending the civil war and genocide in Sudan and achieving energy security’.
American hopes for closer co-operation with China were doomed to disappointment, then India’s role as an alternative partner in Asia would become much more important.
Even more important, as far as the Americans were concerned, was that the South East Asian nations present in Hanoi all seemed to welcome the US’s firm riposte to China.
Nothing illustrated this problem better than the debacle over the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) that unfolded in 2015. When China announced its intention to set up an AIIB in Beijing, the reaction in Washington was suspicious and hostile.
After the debacle of the AIIB, it became clearer than ever that the US needed a more powerful economic component to the pivot. That component was called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) – a giant new free-trade deal for the Asia-Pacific region which was first mooted in 2005, and which became the most ambitious venture in the Obama administration’s international economic policy.
Today’s Japan, while still rich and technologically advanced, is an ageing society with a shrinking population and an economy that has been stagnating for twenty years. It is also a country with a strong nationalist faction and a worryingly ambiguous relationship with its wartime past. No man better embodied that ambiguity than the leader who stood up to address Congress in April 2015 – Shinzo Abe.
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Nobusuke Kishi, Abe’s grandfather and political mentor, was one of Japan’s chief administrators in occupied Manchuria in northern China. Xi Zhongxun, the Chinese president’s father, was also in Manchuria – as a senior comrade of Mao, fighting with the Communist forces against Japan.
For Abe, radical economic policies are ultimately needed to make Japan robust enough to stand up to China. As one analyst in Tokyo put it to me, ‘Abenomics is not about deflation. It’s about China.’
In the grounds of the shrine, there was a relatively new memorial to Radhabinod Pal, an Indian judge who dissented from the majority guilty verdict at the Tokyo war-crimes tribunal in 1946.
On a trip to India in an earlier brief stint as prime minister, in 2007, Abe had taken the time to visit Justice Pal’s son in Kolkata.
Abe also sought to change Japan’s legal and administrative structure to prepare it for a potential cold war with China. In 2013, his government set up a National Security Council, centralising crucial security decisions around the prime minister’s office – and mirroring the structures in the White House.
met a senior member of the Singaporean political elite and asked him if he thought Abe’s ‘ 731 moment’ had been deliberate. ‘Of course it was,’ he exclaimed. ‘And it was utterly disgusting.’ If Abe’s action was indeed deliberate, it was probably intended as a knowing wink towards the nationalist right – who make up an important part of his political coalition and who insist that Japan’s wartime record is unfairly distorted by the nation’s current and former enemies.
But by naming the new vessel the Izumo – the same name as one of the ships that had led the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s – Japan handed a propaganda gift to the Chinese.
Taro Aso, talking about the need to revise his country’s pacifist constitution, cited the Nazis’ rewriting of the German constitution as a possible model.
One long-time resident of Tokyo, much consulted by Western governments, told me caustically that for some senior members of the Abe administration, ‘The only thing wrong with the Second World War was that Japan lost.’
The mood of the Japanese public still looked strongly pacifist – which made a striking contrast with the nationalism that often flared amongst China’s netizens.
Just as in post-war Germany, where the left has long been suspicious of American militarism, so liberal and left-wing opinion in Japan still harbours deep reservations about America’s reliance on military strength as the basis of its foreign policy in the Pacific. The continuing strength of that sentiment raises the possibility that the assertive nationalism of the Abe government might just be a phase.
Obama came decisively down on the Japanese side on his visit to Tokyo in May 2014. On that trip, he became the first US president explicitly to confirm that the US–Japan Security Treaty covered the Senkaku Islands. It was a commitment that one of the president’s close aides described colourfully to me as ‘giving the middle-finger to China’. It was also exactly the kind of reassurance that the Abe government was looking for.
Nixon had decided to try to mend fences with China in the 1970s as part of a broader geopolitical strategy. His real concern was to outflank the Soviet Union in the Cold War, by splitting off Moscow from Beijing. In the same way, Tokyo’s efforts to reach a rapprochement with Seoul were part of a broader strategic game.
STANDING ON THE roof of the Marina Bay Sands hotel in Singapore, I had a perfect view over the most important trade route in the world. It was the spring of 2014 and scores of cargo ships and oil tankers were visible through the morning haze, as they waited to pass through the narrow stretch of water that links the Pacific and Indian oceans. Every year, one-third of the world’s traded goods pass through the straits of Malacca and Singapore
Singapore was first established as a trading post by the British in the early nineteenth century.
The goods that flow through the Strait of Malacca have become a foundation of Singapore’s prosperity and a symbol of a peaceful era of booming global trade. But, under different circumstances, the Strait of Malacca could become an international flash point. At its narrowest point – between Singapore and Indonesia – the strait is just two and a half miles wide. And yet most of the oil that China imports from the outside world must pass through this thin windpipe. Three times as much oil passes through the Malacca Strait every year – en route to East Asia – as goes through the Suez Canal.2
a conflict were ever to break out, the US navy could attempt to strangle the Chinese economy at the Strait of Malacca and the three other less-used straits (Sunda, Lombok and Makassar) that connect the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean.
Japan’s capture of Singapore on 15 February 1942 ‘shattered the myth of white invulnerability’ and dealt a catastrophic blow to Britain’s international image – setting the stage for the end of empire, after the war.
As the historians Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper put it, ‘It was not really until the 1980s with the economic renaissance of Japan, the rise of Singapore and Malaysia and the transformation of Asian Communist regimes towards free-market capitalism that Asia began to claim its place in the sun as the dominant continent of the twenty-first century.’
And firms from South East Asia itself were among the early foreign investors in China. My first trip to Shanghai was to report on the investments made by Charoen Pokphand, a Thai conglomerate whose interests spanned everything from processed chicken to motorbikes.
To safeguard its future, Singapore has sought successfully to cultivate warm relations with the regional giants. Indeed, it is perhaps the only country in the world that could claim to have a special relationship with both China and the United States.
The Singaporeans were early investors in China and many of Beijing’s high-flying civil servants have come to the country to be trained.
As far as the Singaporeans are concerned, the US navy is not based in their city state – it is simply using the facilities.
And indeed Kishore Mahbubani, a former head of the Singaporean foreign ministry, was fond of remarking, ‘We know that China will still be our neighbour in 1,000 years. We don’t know if the Americans will still be here in 100 years’ time.’
The Chinese argue, controversially, that states are entitled to stop foreign navies from sailing through an ‘Exclusive Economic Zone’ that stretches 200 miles out from their coasts. If China were able to control all the islands and reefs in the South China Sea, it could create a legal claim for shutting the US military out of those waters.
Yet for all the apparent firmness of American rhetoric, many in South East Asia doubt America’s long-term ability to deter China’s island-building.
After Scarborough Shoal, the next rock of contention between Manila and Beijing is the Second Thomas Shoal, a rocky outcrop on which the Filipinos deliberately grounded a ship in 1999.
Another big maritime conflict in South East Asia also looked to be carefully chosen. When the Chinese moved a large oil rig into disputed waters 120 miles from the Vietnamese coast in May 2014 (the Chinese said the rig was in the South China Sea, the Vietnamese call the same waters the East Sea), the reaction in Vietnam was fierce. Anti-Chinese riots broke out across the country, with factories destroyed and at least four deaths.
Within this confusing firmament, the position of Indonesia is critical because it is the largest country in the region and the fourth most populous in the world. Indonesia often displays the insularity typical of many large countries. Its presidential election in 2014, which was regarded as a landmark in the country’s democratic development, was fought almost entirely on domestic issues.
His argument is that rather than confronting China, the US ‘should seek an agreement with China about a new order in Asia, an order that would allow China a bigger role’.
