Asian Waters: The Struggle Over the South China Sea and the Strategy of Chinese Expansion

by Humphrey Hawksley

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 upped the stakes by building military bases far out in the South China Sea, the equivalent of permanently deploying four aircraft carriers to one of world’s busiest trade routes.

The advance of China onto the world stage has been a step-by-step process: not one of invasion or colonization but instead of winning influence through trade. Its ambition is riddled with contradictions. China has become rich beyond its dreams precisely because of US predominance in Asia and the American 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 now challenges. With its wealth it plans to reform the financial architecture by moving the renminbi to reduce the global supremacy of the US dollar.

But between 2013 and 2018 there was no such gathering of forces. America’s Asian allies—Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand—had little unity of purpose, and certainly nothing that began to resemble the US-led military umbrella that protected Europe. All Asian defense threads led to Washington, DC, where President Barack Obama believed that American global interests were better served through cooperation with China, even if that risked diminishing US power in Asia. On his watch, China succeeded in militarizing the South China Sea with its newly built island bases.

Illiberal governments are becoming increasingly assertive and illiberal political movements are on the rise. While democracy is deeply embedded within American culture, it is a relatively new idea in most parts of the world, barely two hundred years old, one that emerged from the violent regimes which originally forged the now developed West. In China’s eyes, through its millenia-long prism of history, the Western concept of democracy may well turn out to be just another short cycle of history.

If China can claim a thousand miles from its shorelines because it has bigger boats and bigger guns, what will the Russians claim in the Arctic? What will the Iranians do in the Persian Gulf? Everyone will walk away from this system of global law, because if the Chinese are not bound by it, why should anyone else be?”

When in July 2016 new Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte asked the American ambassador to Manila for help over Scarborough Shoal, he was told that the United States would not go to war over a fishing reef. So, after an initial bout of patriotic bluster, Duterte chose to cut a deal. He flew to the Chinese capital with a planeload of businessmen, signed deals for China to build infrastructure throughout the poorer part of his country, and declared that the future lay not with the United States but with China.

William Gladstone, who went on to become prime minister, told the House of Commons that the policy of trafficking narcotics covered his country in a “permanent disgrace.” The British flag had become a pirate flag, he argued. But Parliament ignored him.

For China, it was as if a Mexican drug cartel had blasted its way into the southern United States, demanding that Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas open themselves up to cocaine sales while forcing a weakened America to sign agreements that defined an alternative, modern way in which trade and law operated.

Britain’s National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, near London, also displays exhibits of the Opium Wars. They take up a small, uncrowded corner with the story told in the wider context of the colonization of India. The account is accurate, but as in the school curricula of Western democracies, the Opium Wars story is but a part, while for China this is the story that propels the policies it now implements. China has never hidden its own historical weaknesses. In a speech on July 1, 2017, to mark the twentieth anniversary of China regaining control of Hong Kong, President Xi Jinping raised the Opium Wars and put Britain’s victory down to “a weak China under corrupt and incompetent feudal rule.”3

The museum fails to explain exactly how broken China was in the middle of the eighteenth century. For twenty years, from 1851 to 1871, the Taiping Rebellion, led by a man who claimed to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ, left millions dead in the southern part of the country. The casualties from Britain’s military action were by comparison minuscule, but drove home the point that without a better internal system of government China would never be able to withstand foreign invasion. It is this narrative of strong, forward-looking internal government coupled with effective military defense that mirrors much of China’s argument today and flows directly to Beijing’s South China Sea activities.

The United States used the United Nations, then less than five years old, to authorize a US-led coalition force against the North Korean offensive. The American military soon controlled most of the north, unnerving Joseph Stalin, who asked for Mao’s help. Mao was reluctant—he had enough on his plate with Taiwan and Tibet—but he also needed to keep in with Stalin. American and Chinese troops fought brutally, face to face, often in close-quarter combat; so equally matched were they that it took more than two years before both sides accepted a stalemate. Fighting ended on July 27, 1953, but with a cease-fire, not a truce, and the hostile atmosphere continues today.

For long spells China would send over artillery shells stuffed not with shrapnel and explosives but with propaganda flyers containing quotations from Mao’s Little Red Book and proclaiming how Chinese families were so much better off, with shiny bicycles and color televisions.

The 1959 Australian intelligence note concluded, “Provided the United States maintains its present air and sea supremacy in the area, it could, if it wished, quickly neutralize any Communist Chinese military bases on the islands.”

Sixty years later, as the prophecy has materialized, plans are slowly formulating to create a pro-Western security alliance led by the Australia, India, Japan, and the United States, loosely known as the Quad. Even so, delicate judgments need to be made on how to keep China onside for their economies while attempting to implement the international rule of law that China is violating. Australia, New Zealand, and the United States are also part of the Five Eyes intelligence-gathering network of English-speaking Western democracies together with Canada and the United Kingdom.

In 2013, the Philippines, infuriated by China’s intrusion at Scarborough Shoal, filed a case with an international tribunal, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague. Three years later the tribunal found the Nine-Dash Line to be invalid under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and favored the Philippines on nearly every point. China had no entitlement in the disputed areas; it needed to “respect the rights and freedoms of the Philippines.” But, of course, it didn’t. Beijing declared the ruling null and void. By then, with an incredible feat of engineering, China’s island bases were up and running and there was no dismantling of jetties, hangars, and missile silos. Through commissioning regular satellite overflights, Gregory B. Poling at the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative chronicled how far and fast China transformed these seven reefs into thirty-two hundred acres of land to give it a significant military advantage in the region.

No region is more vulnerable to China’s rise than Southeast Asia, which cannot challenge it militarily, needs its trade for its economies, and is uncertain how much it can rely on the United States or even if that would be a wise path to pursue. The echoing theme is that Southeast Asia does not want a throwback to the Cold War when each country was forced to choose between superpowers, although without clear thinking and straight talking, that is exactly what is unfolding now.

The gross domestic product (GDP) per capita of the city-state trading center of Singapore is close to $87,000, against Cambodia’s $3,700. In the European Union the GDP of the poorest country—Bulgaria—stands at $20,100 against Luxembourg’s $102,000, a difference of five to one against Southeast Asia’s almost twenty-five to one.1

“The Confucianist idea of society being one big happy family is programmed into young minds. The political idea of one China is also a cultural idea. This distinguishes Chinese cultures from other ancient cultures. For example, Jewish culture is as tenacious as Chinese culture but it does not put the same emphasis on political unity. While Hindu culture encompasses political ideals, it does not program into all Hindus the idea of one India, as Chinese culture does.”2

The Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) came about in 1955, but the region was too diverse, the governments too new, weak, and corrupt to hold it together. In 1977 SEATO was officially dissolved, and further attempts to revive the idea of a regional defense alliance in Asia have failed to get off the ground. Instead, there is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which was created in 1961 and carries an ambitious slogan, “One Vision, One Identity, One Community.” This grouping has worked better, partly because it has a policy of not interfering in the running of each country. It has worked toward setting up a free trade area, declaring the region a nuclear-weapons-free zone, and has an emphasis on quiet, nonargumentative diplomacy and consensual decision making.

Both were controlled by American-backed Cold War dictators. The Philippines had President Ferdinand Marcos, who was overthrown in 1986, and Indonesia was ruled by President Suharto, who oversaw anticommunist massacres in the 1960s and was ousted in 1998.

Cambodia has been ruled by the same leader since 1979, and is one of the world’s poorest and most corrupt countries.

Tiny oil-rich Brunei, nestled within Malaysia on the northern Borneo coast, is run top-down by Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah who showed worrying signs of accommodating pressures of extreme Islam in 2019 by announcing the death penalty for homosexuals and adulterers, a policy he was later forced to rescind.

More than 75 percent of its six million people are Chinese, and it is because of this demographic that Singapore was forced to separate from Malaysia in 1965. It had been one of the fourteen Malay states, but would have economically smothered the newly independent Malaysia. Here was evidence that Chinese communities and ethnic tensions were part and parcel of Southeast Asian life. Singapore went on to forge itself into an Asian trading hub. Its authoritarianism tempered racial tension and delivered an exceptionally high living standard. China drew on this Singaporean model when it embarked on its own reforms in the 1980s. Although far from being a compact city-state, China has achieved comparable levels of success, and now has the wealth and confidence to challenge a long-held Western argument that elections and democracy deliver the most stable form of government.

“With few exceptions, democracy has not brought good government to new developing countries,” said the late Lee Kuan Yew, founding leader of Singapore, whose position over the decades had underpinned the intellectual argument for authoritarian government. “Asian values may not necessarily be what Americans or Europeans value. Westerners value the freedoms and liberties of the individual. As an Asian of Chinese cultural background, my values are for a government which is honest, effective, and efficient.”

Over the past decade, Chinese money has transformed Cambodia’s landscape. Between 2011 and 2015, it accounted for 70 percent of all industrial investment. Long before that, in 2006, Hun Sen described China as Cambodia’s “most trustworthy friend,” a compliment returned by President Xi Jinping, who categorized Cambodia as “an iron clad friend.”

Since then China’s grip on Cambodia has only tightened, and Beijing scored another win in 2017 when Cambodia canceled routine joint exercises with the United States and held them with China instead.

Thailand’s southern neighbor, Malaysia, became vulnerable to China because of a corruption scandal in which hundreds of millions of dollars were stolen from a state-owned investment fund. Malaysia was once hailed as a pioneering Asian tiger, but the scandal revealed a country rotten at the highest level. China stepped in with four billion dollars to buy out assets held by the broken fund.

If Singapore is Southeast Asia’s intellectual heart, Indonesia, with its eighteen thousand islands and 260 million people, is its litmus test. Forty percent of the population lives on less than two dollars a day. More than 85 percent are Muslim. Some seven million, just 3 percent, are Chinese, but various studies over the past quarter century have put the Chinese community as controlling up to 70 percent of the Indonesian economy. Indonesia swings between embracing and rejecting its Chinese community, and there has always been friction. During the Cold War, the Chinese were suspected of supporting communism. In the 1960s, they became targets of anticommunist killings in which at least half a million died. Muslim gangs were responsible for much of the slaughter.

Two views of Southeast Asia have emerged in recent years. One is of sun-drenched tourist beaches, cityscapes of glass-fronted skyscrapers, and factories feeding global supply chains while wealth spreads through communities. Southeast Asia as a developing region prides itself on being far removed from the bloodshed of the Middle East and the poverty of Africa and South Asia. That is accurate just as another view is also accurate, of a region that has been trampled by outside powers for centuries, has failed to break through decisively on tackling the negative forces of poverty, corruption, and ethnic tension, and is now bracing itself for another Cold War–style conflict.

Obama, too, tried to stress that this was not an anti-China policy. “We’ll seek more opportunities for cooperation with Beijing, including greater communication between our militaries, to promote understanding and avoid miscalculation,” he told the Australian Parliament. “With most of the world’s nuclear powers and some half of humanity, Asia will largely define whether the century ahead will be marked by conflict or cooperation, needless suffering or human progress.”12 Beijing was having none of it. Yes, there was cooperation with the United States at many levels, including finance and climate change. But the Pivot was about the West breaching its defenses again, leading to another Century of Humiliation.

“It divides ASEAN countries, and damages the US-China relationship. We ask them, For what? What is this pivot? They tell us that the US only wants to reassure its allies in the region. We say, For what? So, they can think they have Uncle Sam behind them so they can kick China around?”

Southeast Asia’s confrontation with China has been led by the Philippines and Vietnam, who were the region’s bookends during the Cold War. Philippine troops fought with the Americans in Vietnam. American planes and warships were based in the Philippines, and Soviet ones in Vietnam. Both have put up a brave front against China, but both have already been forced into compromises.

After losing Scarborough Shoal, President Aquino tore up the diplomatic rule book and compared China to Nazi Germany. “At what point do you say, ‘Enough is enough’?” Aquino asked in a New York Times interview. “Well, the world has to say it—remember that the Sudetenland was given in an attempt to appease Hitler to prevent World War II.”13 He repeated the comparison during a visit to Japan: “Unfortunately, up to the annexation of the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia . . . nobody said stop. If somebody said stop to Hitler at that point in time, or to Germany at that time, would we have avoided World War II?”14

Duterte won power in May 2016 on a populist vote of the style that delivered Donald Trump to the White House and, two years earlier, Narendra Modi to India’s top job. All three men appear to be rough-and-ready, sleeves-rolled-up leaders who could get things done. Duterte, an acknowledged killer, won by skirting conventional channels and speaking straight to the common people, often in the language of the grassroots villages. He won by six million votes more than his closest rival, a huge electoral mandate that he used to justify a much condemned shoot-to-kill program with the aim of wiping out the drug trade. Duterte had earned his spurs by grittily taming the vast unruly southern city of Davao.

As he boarded his plane for Laos, Duterte was asked by reporters what he would do if Obama pressed him on the antidrug killings. He answered, “I am a president of a sovereign state and we have long ceased to be a colony.” His voice was raised and he tapped his chest to make his point. “I do not have any master except the Filipino people, nobody, but nobody. You must be respectful. Don’t just throw around questions.” He switched to the local language, Tagalog, to say “Putang ina” (meaning “son of a bitch”), then continued in English: “I do not want to pick a quarrel with Obama but, certainly, I do not want to appear to be beholden to anybody.”

The Philippines had been down this anti-American road before. Like many developing countries, it loved baseball hats, green cards, Disney, and aid money but resented being told what to do and the sense of being beholden to a foreign country. Duterte’s sudden switch of policy was less the grinding of global tectonic plates and more a symptom of unpredictable democracy and the Philippines’ own haphazard way of doing things. In March 2016, less than six months before dramatically shifting his allegiance from the United States to China, Manila and Washington, DC, had signed the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, a military support package that gave the United States the use of five air bases, specifically for South China Sea operations.19

First to go was Clark Air Base, fifty miles north of Manila, in what appeared to be an act of God. As the Philippines was debating the expulsion of the US military, the nearby Mount Pinatubo volcano erupted, covering Clark’s sprawling fourteen-square-mile military metropolis with thick, impenetrable ash.

The US bases had been a focus for nationalist Philippine discontent. But shutting them down didn’t bring closure about the Philippine history and its place in the world, the stigma exposed by Duterte of being treated like a colony. It was not too long before the government was asking the Americans back. For a moment, it was a win-win: America needed an extra foothold in Asia, and the Philippines needed help against Islamic extremism. The 9/11 attacks motivated a resurgence of centuries-old Islamic unrest in the south. American special forces became a fixture in training and intelligence gathering. Then came China’s resurgence and the Scarborough Shoal incursion. That not only underlined the country’s military weakness but also exposed how much the Philippines, indeed each Southeast Asian nation, relied on China for its economy.

The pitfalls of the dictatorship-democracy transition are weak institutions, entrenched interests, ethnic divisions, and an ignorance of how legislative checks and balances are meant to work. Since 1986, the Philippines has attempted to build democratic institutions. China meanwhile has rejected the concept in favor of the path of authoritarianism. What unfolded in the Philippines after 1986 has been repeated in similar ways in Egypt, Libya, Ukraine, and other places which have attempted this perilous transition.

But before the day was out, Marcos had gone. At 10:00 p.m. a US military helicopter took the presidential entourage to Clark Air Base, where they were given two US military passenger jets needed for their cronies, booty, and families to fly to Hawaii. Marcos was so sick and exhausted that he traveled lying down on a stretcher. Honasan was far from happy. He was furious that Aquino’s ceremony had been held at the Club Filipino instead of somewhere more accessible to ordinary families. He had planned to create a military-led government that would clean out the system and oversee new elections after about a year. Instead, the cry to recognize Cory Aquino’s swearing-in and for her to continue as president became too strong to resist.

“A populist leader claims to represent the people and seeks to weaken or destroy institutions such as legislatures, judiciaries, and the press,”

Seen from Beijing, the Philippines under Duterte was vulnerable for turning. First China had taught the Philippines a lesson with its attacks on its fishermen and economic boycott, then it befriended it. The voters’ decision to put in office an authoritarian strongman played right into Beijing’s hands. The ballot box was producing exactly the type of government that suited the interests of an antidemocratic government.

Duterte has courted Chinese investment in the hope that high-speed railways and sweeping highways would give the southern Philippines the employment needed to deter rebellion. The military’s job was to make sure none of the flagship projects, ports, airports, telecommunications, fiber optic cabling, and the rest got sabotaged as they were being built.

“So, is America’s tone toward China a help or a hindrance?” I asked. “It is a hindrance. America’s pursuit of its international policy tries to get us involved in whatever quarrel they have with China. It is not worth our while risking our economy because of sovereignty rights around a fishing reef. If the US feels that Chinese aggression needs to be addressed to protect the trade that goes through these waters, let them do that in their own international interests. That’s their concern. They must settle their differences with China by themselves, not with countries like the Philippines that have other national interests to pursue.”

China has made its presence known across the western side of the South China Sea with Vietnam, which has suffered none of the Philippines’ democratic growing pains. In its wars against world powers, Vietnam has shown that it is not a country to be messed with. That does not, however, mean it can take on Beijing over the South China Sea.

China might be bigger, richer, and more powerful, but Vietnam has a stubborn warrior streak that has been employed many times before, not only against China but also against France and the United States. Vietnam is the only country to have taken on these three permanent members of the UN Security Council in open warfare and won. Of all the countries of Southeast Asia, it has a track record of prioritizing national dignity above the economy.

Far from being praised for ending the Khmer Rouge genocide, Vietnam was ostracized. Despite the atrocities being well chronicled, the Khmer Rouge kept its seat at the UN, as if, after Berlin had fallen in 1945, the Nazis were still recognized as Germany’s legitimate government and allowed by the international community to govern large swaths of the country.

As the conversation played out, two things became clear. First, as in Masinloc, few of the younger generation wanted to follow their parents into the fishing industry. Vo Van Chuc’s thirty-six-year-old son, Phan Thi Hue, began work as a fisherman but had now gone into tourism while his wife ran a shoe shop. Vo Van Giau had a seventeen-year-old son and two daughters, aged thirteen and eight. They used to go on short fishing trips with him. After seeing his injuries, neither has stepped on a boat. The second point was that if they were going to fish around the Paracels they needed their government to protect them, and that wasn’t happening. “Fishing is too hard, with very little money,” explained Vo Van Chuc. “It is also becoming dangerous.”

With Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand already under China’s sway, Vietnam was hemmed in. If it opposed China outright, it would lose. If it compromised too much, it risked returning to being a vassal state. “In our history, they tried to use military power to make us a province of China,” Tran Cong Truc, former head of the National Border Committee, told me. “Our kings used to travel to Beijing and brought them gifts so we could keep our independence. We may have to do a little of that again.”

Poverty goes hand in hand with corruption, lack of infrastructure, and bad governance creating a weakness that limits what it can achieve with its foreign policy, thus giving China ample room to operate in the India Ocean.