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

by Humphrey Hawksley

A newborn baby in India is more than three times likely to die in its first year than one in China and nine times more likely than one in Taiwan. Indians are more than twice as poor as Chinese and seven times worse off than Taiwanese. India has been a democracy since independence in 1947. Its neighbors in Bangladesh and Pakistan have swung between democracy and dictatorship, and life for the very worst-off is about the same in all of them. Pakistanis are slightly poorer, with a $5,100 gross domestic product per capita against India’s $6,700, and Bangladeshis are way down at $3,900, more on a par with Cambodia.

There was no Pan-Asian identity that united Chinese, Indians, Japanese, or Papua New Guineans, and very little in culture, food, language, or religion that gave India and China shared common ground. Instead there was the mistrust of neighbors. South Asia still tolerates practices like forced marriage or the stoning to death of couples who fall in love and thereby offend family honor;4 the tradition of chhaupadi, when a menstruating girl or woman is banned from the home, from touching others, or from going to school5; and bonded labor, in which millions of the very poorest live in conditions defined by the UN as slavery.6 While these practices are technically illegal and have been cleared up in many parts of the modernizing world, governments of South Asia have done little or nothing to stop them.

Bonded labor has been formally banned since 1976, and twenty years earlier had been categorized by the UN as slavery. But the UN’s International Labour Organization estimates that twenty-one million people are in forced labor worldwide, at least half of them in India. If Bangladesh and Pakistan are taken into account, South Asia is by far the worst regional offender as regards modern-day slavery.

In the eyes of many activists, India’s labor contractors are the modern-day equivalent of slave traders. In the eyes of others, they are employment agents giving people an opportunity to work. They advance loans, and through black market muscle ensure the workers do their bidding. They calculate interest and payment schedules in sums that rarely add up, thus producing a debt that puts the worker and his or her family into bondage. With illiteracy rampant and education minimal, most have no idea what they are getting into.

slavery in India is not regarded as a serious human rights violation. “No political party includes human rights in its manifesto,” he said. “Even if a labor contractor or brick kiln owner is charged, it will take four to six years to go through the courts, usually resulting in a thirty-dollar fine.”

Like bonded workers, their salaries vanished in levies for food, accommodation, and health care that they barely understood. In many ways they were even more disadvantaged than the bonded workers because the system cocooned them from the outside world. Issues like child trafficking, forced marriage, domestic violence, and ill health went unchecked.

Modi’s election has emboldened associated grassroots organizations whose members stand accused of violence against Muslims that has included killings for violating the sacred status of cows and punishing Hindu-Muslim couples for falling in love.

The origins of mistrust between India and Sri Lanka go back to India’s role in fueling Sri Lanka’s crippling quarter-century-long war with its Tamil minority who wanted an independent homeland in yet another South Asian ethnic and religious conflict which Sri Lanka only ended with China’s help, in 2009.

India stepped in by supplying weapons and training to Sri Lankan Tamil insurgents. The plan backfired. After infighting between Tamil groups, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam became the lone predominant force and evolved into one of the most sophisticated and feared terrorist groups anywhere. The Tigers invented the suicide vest, used child soldiers, ran a totalitarian state in the north of the country, carried out civilian massacres of women and children, and made a godlike figure of their leader Velupillai Prabhakaran.

In its rush for postwar construction Sri Lanka took on so much unmanageable debt that in 2016 it had to secure a $1.5 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund to handle the repayment schedule. In all it owed $65 billion, $8 billion of which was due to China. The borrowing reached a stage where 95 percent of government revenue was going toward debt repayment.

“China has only two purposes in the Indian Ocean,” explained Zhou Bo of the Academy of Military Science of the People’s Liberation Army. “Economic gains and the security of sea lines of communication. The first objective is achieved through commercial interactions with littoral states. For the second purpose, the Chinese Navy has, since the end of 2008, joined international military efforts in combating piracy in the waters off the coast of Somalia. [China is] a country standing tall in the center of the world, strong yet benign, and friendly to all.”21 There is credibility to this argument. China has been working closely with the European Union, NATO, and the United States on antipiracy operations. It has twenty-five hundred troops in six African UN peacekeeping missions and, in recent years, the Chinese Air Force and Navy have been deployed to rescue civilians, from Libya in 2011 and Yemen in 2015. There are an estimated five million Chinese citizens living and working outside the country for some thirty thousand Chinese businesses, with more than a hundred million traveling abroad every year.

Crucially, while China has single-mindedly committed to military expansion, India has muddled along. Its defense industry operates like much else in government with blockages in the defense establishment vested interests, executive indecision, and bribes. Over the past thirty years, scandals involving bribes and corrupt procurement include German submarines, French fighter jets, Israeli missiles, Italian helicopters, Singaporean small arms, and Swedish artillery.

The editorial was significant in the public lambasting it gave to India, shifting quickly from India’s military weakness on land to its vulnerability at sea: “If India fancies the idea that it has a strategic card to play in the Indian Ocean, it could not be more naive. China does hold a lot of cards and can hit India’s Achilles’ heel, but India has no leverage at all to have a strategic showdown with China.”

The Japanese government stepped in and purchased the islands itself, paying $20 million. China reacted angrily, setting off a chain of events that turned the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands into a global flashpoint, bringing to mind an image of two well-heeled billionaires fighting over a cigarette butt in a trash can. The thought that these desolate blots of maritime nothingness could be the cause of such disagreement between two of the world’s biggest economies beggars belief. Yet, that is what has happened because, even while riding the crest of a wave of wealth, an uneasiness deep inside each country has refreshed old hostilities that have yet to be dealt with. Japan’s announcement that it was taking ownership of the islands prompted protests in China, with crowds breaching a security cordon at the Japanese embassy in Beijing and trashing and burning factories owned by Honda, Panasonic, Toyota, and other Japanese companies. “Return our islands! Japanese devils get out!” was a chant of the rioters. One placard read, “For the respect of the motherland, we must go to war with Japan.”

Japan’s only outside military protection came from its 1952 security treaty with the United States; thus, by threatening Japan with a ship-to-ship missile, Beijing sent a message to the Pentagon. Drawing America into even a skirmish with China was a dangerous move. Abe’s view was that Japan needed the wherewithal to handle China itself, but to achieve that he would have to amend the country’s pacifist constitution. He led a parliamentary coalition, which meant horse trading with the New Komeito Party, his Buddhist-based, pacifist-minded coalition partner. In July 2014, after much bargaining, Abe succeeded in winning cabinet approval for constitutional changes. Japan would be able to engage in “collective self-defense” and come to the aid of an ally under attack. Japanese troops could also serve overseas, although only in peacekeeping operations. “The global situation surrounding Japan is becoming ever more difficult,” Abe explained. “Being fully prepared is effective in discouraging any attempt to wage a war on Japan. The cabinet decision today will further lessen the chance of Japan being engaged in war. That is my conviction.”4

The Sino-Japanese tension revived a sense throughout East Asia that although Japan had apologized time and again, its expressions of regret were not enough. The difference with how Germany had behaved was subtle and almost impossible to quantify. It was as if German politicians regularly visited the graves of Nazi war criminals in order to bolster their poll ratings. In Asia there was a sentiment that Japan did not yet understand how brutal its colonization had been, nor what it needed to do to move on.

“Beijing has sought to convince the world that Japan is reassuming its militaristic past,” says Richard Javad Heydarian of Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines. “Any sober analysis, however, would suggest that the real bone of contention is an emerging Chinese-Japanese contest for regional leadership.”

The change came in 1842, with Britain’s victory against China in the First Opium War. Japan took note of British determination and how better guns, bigger ships, more sophisticated technology, and disciplined soldiers had defeated China. Twelve years later, an American naval commander, Commodore Matthew Perry, led a flotilla of ships to Japan and, under threat of military action, insisted Japan open its ports for American whalers to resupply. Japan complied, prompting Perry to expand his brief and insist that Japanese ports open for American trade. In March 1854 Perry signed the Kanagawa Treaty, which ended Japan’s isolation and allocated a handful of ports for international trade. The treaty sparked a civil war between those who supported the existing militaristic system of shogunates that had controlled Japan pretty much from the end of the twelfth century and those who wanted reform. By now, Britain and France hovered behind America to get a slice of Japanese trade and took different sides in the conflict. Britain armed the reformists, while France supported forces loyal to the shogunate. Fighting continued on and off for fifteen years, but by 1869 shogunate rule ended and Japan began the era of the Meiji Restoration.

In a style that would be repeated at Pearl Harbor thirty-seven years later, Japan carried out a lightning preemptive strike on Port Arthur and put it under siege. It fought a stream of battles with Russia, which surrendered in September 1905 with a peace agreement brokered by the United States and for which President Theodore Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize. Japan’s decisive defeat of a European country stunned the international defense community and catapulted Japan from a regional to a world power.

Japan stunned the world with the victory over Russia at Port Arthur in northwest China and the US Naval War College initiated War Plan Orange, examining both containment scenarios and, if necessary, a strategy to defeat Japan.10 In barely fifty years, this once backward Asian country had listened, watched, and learned and molded itself into a European style industrial and military power, going head-to-head first with Russia and now, it seemed, with the United States. It is little wonder that President Theodore Roosevelt was anxious.

To underpin how layered both the Japanese-American relationship was early last century and the Sino-American relationship is now, the commander of the Japanese Fleet, Isoroku Yamamoto, visited the college in 1924 and went on to serve as naval attaché at the Japanese embassy in Washington, DC. Ninety years later, in 2006, Wu Shengli, then head of the Chinese Navy, was also a guest at the college. Yamamoto went on to mastermind the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack, and Wu oversaw the growth of the Chinese Navy to become a sea power that is now keeping American admirals up at night. He stepped down in 2016.

In today’s scenario, America has commitments in Africa, Europe, and Latin America, while focusing on Islamist terrorism and the Middle East. China, on the other hand, can choose where it concentrates it resources and planning.

Isoroku Yamamoto, who seventeen years earlier had been a guest of the Naval War College, planned the Pearl Harbor attack with two ideas in mind. One was that success would be decided by aircraft carriers. The other was that if Japan could not defeat the United States within a year, it was likely to lose. He was right on both counts.

In his 2007 book War Plan Orange Edward Miller neatly lays out the cause of the war. I ask readers to go through this passage, substituting China for Japan: The geopolitical premises of the plan held that, in spite of historically friendly relations, a war would erupt someday between the United States and Japan, a war in which neither could rely on the help of allies. The root cause would be Japan’s quest for national greatness by attempting to dominate the land, people, and resources of the Far East. America regarded itself as the guardian of Western influence in the Orient. Its popular dogma favored self-determination of peoples and open international trade. To achieve its goal, Japan would feel it necessary to expunge American power from its sea flank.12

From 1905 to 1941, War Plan Orange had undergone countless dogged revisions and scenarios, and it is widely credited with giving the United States the road map it needed to defeat Japan. The surprise Pearl Harbor attack, of course, had not been factored in and was categorized by military analysts as a black swan, a hard-to-predict, unexpected, and rare event that happens regardless of how much planning has been done. A second omission was the nuclear weapon that led to Japan’s surrender, which had not been invented in 1941. A third was the kamikaze suicide pilots deployed at the end of the war to crash Japanese planes into American ships.

“Yes,” I answered. “And to think people have walked on it.” The guide stiffened and said, “You are wrong. No man has ever walked on the moon. Under the guidance of our Great Leader, Kim Il-sung, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea will be the first nation to send a man to the moon.”

The antagonism revolves around Japan’s colonial brutality, symbolized by the forcing of Koreans into prostitution to become what are known as “comfort women.”

The experience of Southeast Asia and the South China Sea islands presents a lesson of what unfolds if regional governments fail to build strong, united fronts. As discussed earlier, despite the Association of Southeast Asian Nations being a long-established institution, its ten members have been too weak to deal with China’s building of military bases in the South China Sea. The result is that these shipping lanes, a lifeblood of global trade, are policed by American warships that routinely come face-to-face with the Chinese military, thus giving food to the new Cold War narrative.

The way China and Taiwan handle each other is choreographed through careful parameters, overseen by the United States. In the 2008 presidential campaign, President George W. Bush felt compelled to intervene when Tsai’s party argued strongly for full recognition and a seat at the UN. Bush told them to stay quiet. Eight years later, when Tsai came to power, she refused to commit to a long-standing agreement, known as the 1992 consensus, that Taiwan was part of China. In the consensus, using opaque language typical of face-saving Chinese techniques, Beijing stated, “Both sides of the Taiwan Strait uphold the One China Principle and strive to seek national unification.” Taiwan added its caveat: “Although the two sides uphold the One China Principle in the process of striving for cross-Strait national unification, each side has its own understanding of the meaning of One China.”

At many levels this scenario feeds into the current Chinese threat to Taiwan which is not military but economic and ranged on two fronts. First, some 40 percent of Taiwan’s trade relies on mainland trade. Second, it has had difficulty in becoming more self-sufficient because China blocks its attempts to win independent trade deals by threatening reprisals against governments that offer one. In 2013, after a painstaking wait, China allowed Taiwan a free trade agreement with Singapore and New Zealand. But it blocked similar ones with Malaysia and Chile. If Chile had signed with Taiwan, for example, it would have found Chinese investment abruptly halted. Beijing refers to this strategy as the three warfares—economic, legal, and psychological—to bring a country under its control, similar to the tactics it has been using against the Philippines, Vietnam, and other Southeast Asian governments over the South China Sea.

Taiwan’s biggest trade has been in semiconductors, a key element of any electronic gadget, accounting for up to a quarter of all exports to mainland China worth about $20 billion a year. But since 2015, China has been building its own official semiconductor industry development plan with the aim of having 35 percent of its needs met by local producers. At one level, this is a natural development of any economy. But in Taiwan’s case it is damaging, because China tries to control to whom else Taiwan can and cannot sell.

trade with China gave incentives to keep the peace. Now, however, Taiwan believes it has passed a tipping point and that its survival may be at risk precisely because it is doing too much business with the enemy, which will never accept its existence as an independent entity and continues to try to isolate it even more from the international community.

Xiamen, meaning “Mansion Gate,” has four million. Bold in ambition and determination, the city itself is a statement of intent. Hotels and office blocks have risen at an astonishing pace. In part it evokes the forging of the nineteenth century and the American West and carries a whiff of California, with palm trees, highways, and yachting marinas. In another way it resembles a world of our imaginations—Gotham City from the Batman movies, Blade Runner’s dystopian Los Angeles, or the majestic King’s Landing from Game of Thrones. We haven’t seen anything like it before, a ragged history of corruption, crime, cruelty, power, ideology, weakness, insecurity, creativity, optimism, audacity, and daring, all underpinned with a laser ambition to escape from a bad past and stamp itself with a new identity. For many in Kinmen, Xiamen is their view of the future, already their first stop for shopping, health care, and real estate investment. Families on both sides try to ignore the divide bequeathed by their ancestors and share food, language, and culture—and above all, to make money together.

For generations, these poorer regions of the world had put their trust in Western guidance, receiving chunks of aid dollars, holding elections (usually flawed and corrupt), and receiving often unpoliced investment from multinational corporations. China doggedly stuck to its own way forward, building cities from shanty villages and connecting people by road, rail, and air. It did so with such determination that in three years, from 2010 to 2013, it used more cement than the United States had in the whole of the twentieth century.37

No longer is it about the two sides of the Berlin Wall; for hundreds of millions around the world it is whether they prefer the democracy of the Central African Republic, where they are ridden with malaria and scrambling around for a pair of sandals, or the repression of authoritarian China, where they need to keep their thoughts to themselves but can apply for a home loan on their first apartment.

“The Taiwanese people were never looking for war,” Isaac said. “We are not interested in it.” “That’s what they all say,” I replied. “In Bosnia, in Syria, in Lebanon, the citizens say they are never interested in war, but they ended up fighting it.” Isaac raised his forefinger. “Ah, what was it that Lenin said? No, it was Trotsky. Something like, ‘You might not be interested in war. But war is interested in you.’”

The Asian giants of China, India, and Japan make up three of the four biggest global economies after the United States. The US National Intelligence Council estimates that, by 2030, Asia will be wealthier, have a bigger population and greater purchasing power, and spend more on defense than Europe and North America combined. The European, Japanese, and US share of global income is projected to fall from 56 percent today to well under half by 2030.44

Harvard University professor Graham Allison reached far back into history with his 2017 book, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?, using an example from the fifth century BC, when there were no nuclear weapons, smartphones, or satellites in space. It was the time of city-states when the expansion and growth of power in Athens alarmed Sparta, 130 miles to the southwest, to such an extent that it led to war. In all, Allison studied sixteen similar cases over a five-hundred-year period and found that twelve had ended in bloodshed. To avoid war, he concludes, there had to be “huge, painful adjustments in attitudes and actions” on both sides.47

Allison’s use of a crisis that happened two and half thousand years ago is also unsettling because it underlines that human nature itself has failed to evolve along with our education, technology, and political mechanisms. Thucydides argued that relations between states were constructed not on pragmatism but on fear and self-interest.

There was also China’s maritime militia, deployed as a lead military element in Beijing’s South China Sea operations. The United States categorizes this as classic insurgency tactics, using civilians as soldiers, the difference being that this militia operates at sea and not on land in deserts or jungles. “It is irregular warfare at sea,” Tom Culora of the Naval War College told me. “You don’t have a very clear idea of who’s a combatant and who’s not a combatant and what role they’re playing. It’s hard to discern what people are doing, and that creates limitation on the norms of the Geneva Convention and the traditional law of war of what a navy can and cannot do.”

We import more than eighty million metric tonnes of soybeans from the US, not to mention wheat and many agricultural products. One-fifth of the arable land of the US is there to grow food for China. The US is stronger. Its domestic economy and industrial and energy base would remain intact if there were war. China is not prepared. Chinese troops are not properly trained. The US has strong allies, while China maintains a non-allied diplomatic policy. If you count how many countries are China’s friends, you don’t really have a large list. The US has us encircled and could still impose strategic containment over China in terms of trade embargo and world financial market manipulation. Cyberspace is still heavily dependent on the US architecture, encryption codes, the Internet, the banking industry, the financial world—all that is in the hands of the US. We are getting close to being equal to the US, even overtaking it in ten to fifteen years. Therefore, it is unthinkable that China would initiate such a war. Why would we?

law. “The Westphalian peace reflected a practical accommodation to reality, not a unique moral insight,” writes Henry Kissinger in his book World Order. “It relied on a system of independent states refraining from interference in each other’s domestic affairs and checking each other’s ambitions through a general equilibrium of power.” The Westphalian agreement became “the hallmark of a new system of international order,” he argues.54 A later attempt to forge a European peace came after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars with the 1814–15 Congress of Vienna aimed at settling differences.

As seen from Washington, the Westphalian view is a belief in democratic checks and balances, tempered by elections and the rule of law. The Eastphalian counterpart, as seen from Beijing, advocates a strong, appointed government where control flows from a politburo or a single leader, operating under a united governing party; in other words, the Chinese Mandate of Heaven against the West’s Will of the People.

Globalization has taken wealth from people in the richer countries and propelled it into the developing world, enabling countries like Brazil, China, and India to improve the lives of their citizens and become regional powers. A single job for a Bangladeshi garment worker making shirts that would previously have been made in the United States opened up a chance for the family’s education and health care, even though it might put an American worker onto food stamps. China and Asia championed globalization, while a critical mass within the Western democracies resented this spread of opportunity and blamed it for the fall in their own living standards.

It found that those in areas exposed to a high level of imports from China were more inclined to vote for radical right-wing parties. “The unequal sharing of the welfare gains brought about by globalization has resulted in widespread concerns and a general opposition to free trade,”

A 2015 Oxfam study found that from 2009 to 2013 the number of Europeans living with “severe material deprivation” rose by 7.5 percent, to fifty million people. Oxfam blamed an increasing inequality in the distribution of wealth.

Americans and Europeans are feeling themselves victims of globalization, leading to a cry to restrict borders and put the brakes on the free flow of goods and people. Elected largely on protectionist and anti-China rhetoric, Trump immediately shelved the embryonic Trans-Pacific Partnership, announced that he would redesign the North American Free Trade Agreement and build a wall between Mexico and the United States.

During the Brexit campaign, professional after professional delivered advice warning that, should Britain sever its ties to such international institutions, living standards would suffer. A key Brexit campaigner, cabinet minister Michael Gove, caught the public mood on both sides of the Atlantic when he said sharply, “People have had enough of experts.”64 The repercussions of this thinking cannot be overestimated. “The idea that the expert was giving considered, experienced advice worth taking seriously was simply dismissed,” writes US national security analyst Tom Nichols. “To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to demonstrate their independence. They want to weigh in and have their opinions treated with deep respect and their preferences honored not on the strength of their arguments or on the evidence they present, but based on their feelings, emotions, and whatever stray information they may have picked up here or there along the way.”

Xi Jinping stepped onto the World Economic Forum podium at Davos, Switzerland, that beacon of Western capitalism, and held the banner high for values once championed by the democratic world. He advocated the ripping down of barriers and the boosting of international trade. He flew the flag for globalization, carrying the very same argument that two centuries earlier had brought British gunboats to Chinese ports demanding the right to buy and sell merchandise on Britain’s terms and under its rules.

“No difficulty, however daunting, will stop mankind from advancing. When encountering difficulties, we should not complain about ourselves, blame others, lose confidence, or run away from responsibilities. We should join hands and rise to the challenge. History is created by the brave. Let us boost confidence, take action, and march arm-in-arm toward a bright future.”2