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

by Humphrey Hawksley

The Belt and Road Initiative talked up shared prosperity, open borders, free trade, and glittering skyscrapers, all derived from legends of the ancient Silk Road that connected diverse civilizations. “Opening up brings progress while isolation results in backwardness,” declared Xi. “Global growth requires new drivers, development needs to be more inclusive and balanced, and the gap between the rich and the poor needs to be narrowed.”4

But, behind the much-hailed economic miracle lie numerous stories of abuse and mistreatment, of staff being forced to work in regimented factories making products for Western multinational companies, in conditions so dismal that wire netting covers balconies and windows to prevent suicide; of lethal dangers in the construction, mining, and other industries; of an absence of health and safety provisions; of inhumane hours, physical abuse, and bullying, and arbitrary payment, with wages deducted for food and shelter that leave workers with no or little income.5 China’s modernization has led to thousands of protests around the country. Land and labor disputes are common.

Parag Khanna, argues in Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization that what is unfolding today with China’s expansion cannot be compared to colonization because countries are no longer invaded. Instead they are bought. “The path to wealth and peace is for trade to supersede the nation-state,” he writes. “We need a more borderless world because we can’t afford destructive territorial conflict, because correcting the mismatch of people and resources can unlock incredible human and economic potential. Human society is undergoing a fundamental transformation by which functional infrastructure tells us more about how the world works than political borders.”

“There is a new generation that finds its calling beyond national boundaries and pledges allegiance to the Independent Republic of the Supply Chain,” Khanna sums up.

“China is now the world’s second largest economy,” he argued. “But the international system doesn’t take into account our interests. The US economy is about eighteen trillion dollars and China’s is ten trillion dollars, yet our stake in the International Monetary Fund is less than Britain’s, less than France’s, less than Japan’s. The current international and regional architecture is still dominated by the US.”

Britain’s declaration of a Marine Protected Area, ostensibly to safeguard fish stocks, was the last straw for Mauritius which, like the Philippines, took its dispute to the Permanent Court of Arbitration. After four years of hearings, the tribunal ruled that Britain had failed to give due regard to the rights of the Chagos islanders and had breached its obligations under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Unlike China, Britain took part in the hearings and said it accepted the decision. But since then, apart from a single brief meeting when I last checked, nothing has happened. The ruling was ignored. Britain continued to intercept and order away fishing boats that entered the disputed area.

The South China Sea dispute, therefore, goes to the core of Beijing’s demand for an overhaul of the current global order. What legitimacy does America have to challenge China’s foreign policy when it, too, has weaponized the international rules-based order to suit its national interests? Why should the head of the World Bank always be an American, and the head of the International Monetary Fund a European? And it is not only China asking these questions. Brazil, India, South Africa, and others are challenging the lopsidedness of global institutions and of the UN Security Council itself.

In economic and diplomatic terms, China’s launch of the AIIB sits up there with its building of runways on the Spratly Islands. Both challenge the existing world order that Beijing did not trust to protect its interests, raising the question as to what red lines, if any, have been crossed as officials from Western democracies line up to get on its payroll.

Is this a nation unable to confront its own history, an accusation that China so readily levels against Japan, and that the United States levels against China? Or is this what all nations do—lie and forget in order to succeed? In my own school classes, teachers not only failed to tell me about the Opium Wars but also omitted mentions of a raft of other methods Britain had used in its control of other countries. I was taught about the 1415 Battle of Agincourt and the 1860s American Civil War, but not Britain’s 1814 burning of the White House. There was no mention either of the 1919 massacre of civilians in Amritsar, when Colonel Reginald Dyer ordered the continuous shooting for ten minutes of civilians, resulting in the murder of 379 people; and nothing of atrocities against Mau Mau insurgents in Kenya in the 1950s and 1960s. In 2013 Britain agreed to pay $30 million in compensation to a trust set up for the victims’ families in Kenya for carrying out “unspeakable and horrific gross violation of human rights,” including “massacres, torture and sexual violence.”23 And when Mao Zedong is condemned for the famine of the Great Leap Forward, there is usually no reference to the famine in Bengal in 1943 when, under British rule, three million died.24

The era that has just closed began around 1990 when the Soviet system broke. It was widely believed then that democracy would become a natural end goal for all societies and that even China and other autocratic nations would eventually reform and subscribe to these values and style of governance. This didn’t happen and not just in China; from Moscow to Ankara to Manila, it has not been the case. China’s prison camps in Xinjiang are evidence of its continuing authoritarian repression, while its South China Sea bases show it is prepared to flout the international rules-based order and, if necessary, take on America’s military to achieve its long-term goals.

This alone lays out an argument for the restructuring of global institutions. There has, for example, been no reform to the UN Security Council since it first met in 1946. The latest change of any note was in 1965 when the number of rotating members was increased from ten to fifteen and since then, nothing. The five permanent members, which include the United States and China, do not discuss reform because it would involve surrendering power.

In the long term, in order to survive, the Chinese Communist Party will have to renew its pact with its citizens and make itself more accountable and less brutal. But, as of now, its record of poverty alleviation and modernization is unprecedented. China is not Germany or Japan of the 1930s, nor is it the Soviet Union in the 1940s or Iraq or Libya in the early twenty-first century. Nor is it an expanding ancient Athens, any more than the United States is a retreating ancient Sparta.