In December, the Chinese province of Hainan announced an exclusive Chinese fishing zone covering much of the South China Sea. Protests against the exclusive zone drew the response that this was not a matter of Chinese national policy, merely a policy broached by a provincial government. But there has been no retreat on China’s part. This move, moreover, followed not long after the Chinese government announced an Air Defense Identification Zone covering the whole South China Sea, impinging on similar zones operated by Japan and Korea.
Some commentators have pointed out that individual Chinese officers seem eager to push matters through provocative acts against U.S. military aircraft (such as the EP-3 downed by collision in 2001) and naval vessels in the South China Sea. Chinese troops have laid claim to several small islands also claimed by other countries, such as the Philippines. In at least one case, off Malaysia, the claim was unsupported by military presence, but trumpeted by China’s media, indicating that the policy is intended to buttress the popularity of the Chinese regime.
During the Cold War, Western strategists often worried that the Soviets would adopt similar “salami tactics,” slicing away at Western security bit by bit until they had achieved considerable leverage, for example the ability to seize a West German city like Hamburg. The fear was that the West could not respond to any one slice because no one would consider that slice worth risking nuclear war. It was generally understood that any military response to Soviet action risked such escalation. No one ever came up with a viable solution, but the Soviets themselves were unwilling to chance making the slices. They relied instead on weakening European morale to the point that entire countries would fall into their hands. They also supported revolutionary movements to that end, and came fairly close to seizing control of Portugal after its 1975 revolution. Thus the Soviets had an alternative to salami tactics, via their ideology and Western European Communist parties (and their sympathizers). They also faced a meaningful Western deterrent to military action.
The Chinese have no equivalent to the Communist parties of the West; they are not an ideological power. They do have considerable economic leverage, but it is not at all clear that this translates into political influence in Southeast Asian countries. That is particularly the case because there is also significant Western investment in these nations. On the other hand, Chinese economic power seems to discourage Western action. The U.S. economy in particular is far too closely integrated with that of China for any American President to seriously contemplate resistance to Chinese salami tactics. By the time we decide that the Chinese have gone too far, the reality may be that we have been ejected from East Asia, and that our main trading partners have become, in effect, Chinese dependencies.
That is only one of several possible outcomes, however, and there must be some question as to whether the Chinese feel entirely safe in the course they are pursuing. The countries of Southeast Asia clearly understand what the Chinese are doing. For some of them, the threat is already mortal, because they depend heavily on the fishery of the South China Sea to feed their populations. Some years ago, for example, a Malaysian minister spoke emotionally about fish “thefts” by Thai fishermen. That was before he had to deal with Chinese seizures farther offshore.
Strength in Numbers
Although none of the small countries of the area can match Chinese strength on an individual basis, together they could act as a counterweight. They may also be displacing China as a major area of offshore U.S. investment, because in nearly all of them the rule of law offers foreign companies a degree of safety not evident in China. For example, it has long been known that the designs and other trade secrets of Western companies operating in China are not only insecure, but will not be protected by Chinese courts. Patents often offer little or no protection. Boeing uses Chinese sub-contractors, and China has now entered the world airliner market. That is not a uniquely Chinese problem, but the reality that the Chinese Communist Party is above any law is a key factor.
The smaller nations in the region can band together. They have long done so under the banner of ASEAN, the Association of South East Asian Nations, which was formed to maintain stability in the area as the Vietnam War ended. ASEAN always tried to bind China to the interests of other states in the area while steering clear of any kind of military association. Now neither idea may continue to make much sense. Obviously the ASEAN states cannot by themselves face down the Chinese, but they may be well placed to connect with more powerful friends. The obvious one is the United States, but our unwillingness to confront China may be a major problem. Other options are India, South Korea, and Japan.
In the past, memories of Japan’s World War II record have precluded a connection between Japan and other countries in Asia, but the current Japanese administration is more activist than its predecessors, and it could finally repudiate the anti-war clauses of the U.S.-imposed postwar Japanese Constitution. As an indication of what may be happening, for several years Japanese prime ministers have visited the Yasukui Shrine in Tokyo, which is spiritual home to the souls of dead Japanese servicemen, including those executed by the United States after World War II. The message the shrine embodies is that Japan’s role in World War II was to free Asia from European colonial domination. That is not exactly popular in China, where the Japanese killed about 15 million people, but is likely to be better received in Indonesia, where the Japanese handover of power to nationalists made the creation of that country inevitable, and even in Vietnam, where a similar handover helped Ho Chi Minh. On the other hand, Koreans tend to remember the brutal evils visited upon them during Japanese colonial rule between 1905 and 1945.
For their part, the Japanese are clearly concerned that the U.S. umbrella that has shielded them since 1945 is becoming less effective. Although the Japanese economy has been in trouble for decades, Japan is still wealthy enough to rearm with little difficulty. The country consistently produces virtually all of its own weapons, albeit in small numbers at grossly inflated prices. The willingness to pay the price for domestically made weapons might be read as a determination to maintain a mobilization base as a vital national need. The most important weapons Japan currently lacks are, of course, nuclear weapons and the missiles that might deliver them. However, Japan has a large nuclear-power industry that has irradiated enough uranium to produce sufficient plutonium for a large nuclear stockpile, and a cynic might view the active Japanese space research program as a basis for long-range rockets.
From a Chinese point of view, the main deterrent to salami slicing in the South China Sea may be the vision of a rearmed Japan leading a regional coalition that would provide it with bases around southern China. This Japan might become allied with India, which is also a potential enemy. The Indians, for example, are now developing a submarine-launched strategic missile, which seems to be intended largely to deter the Chinese.
Eroding U.S. Influence?
Where does all of this lead? Right now, the Chinese seem to be doing a good job of squeezing us out of the Far East. We talk about how illegal the Chinese actions are, for example in terms of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, but we have not been very willing to send our warships into the waters the Chinese increasingly claim. We seem to imagine that the economic connection will hold the Chinese back. That appears less and less likely. The problem is that the push into the South China Sea expresses one of the two most important arguments the Chinese Communist Party makes to justify its one-party rule: that it can overcome the humiliations the West imposed on China over the previous century. For example, the South China Sea claims express the “nine dash line” on the map that Chiang Kai-shek was granted as a victorious ally in 1945, only to be withdrawn once Mao ruled China. The situation is tricky in that the party’s other justification is that it alone can guarantee Chinese prosperity, but presumably the nationalist argument carries greater weight.
The same nationalism that the Chinese government promotes as a way to cement its power could have effects on other countries in the region. In the past, nationalism in one country has often triggered nationalism in another. How effective will that possibility be as a deterrent? Unfortunately in the Chinese case it seems far more likely that the risk of Japanese rearmament will be underestimated, as the Chinese may be relying on the United States to hold its ally back. The weakening of U.S. influence the Chinese seek, however, could also reduce any ability we have to restrain our allies in Asia, principally Japan and South Korea. If they sense that the U.S. nuclear shield has been devalued, that would necessarily encourage both Japan and South Korea to pursue nuclear arms, despite current policies that disavow them (it might have similar effects on Taiwan).
None of this is about war breaking out. The Chinese do not currently seem anxious to find out whether their modernizing military is as good as the world often seems to think it is. But aggressive behavior intended to make gains short of war can sometimes entail serious miscalculation. In the West, 2014 will be a year of remembering the military miscalculations that led to World War I a century ago. China was certainly the victim of gruesome wars and upheavals from 1931 on. However, it did not start the war in the Pacific. There may be only a limited sense of how badly military promises can go awry (Korea being the chief example). Will future generations remember 2014 as the beginning of another slide into an abyss due to governmental ineptitude and the failure of deterrence?