In March Chinese ships intercepted and tried to drive off two U.S. Navy ocean surveillance ships operating off Hainan and northern China in international waters. The Chinese leveled the most violent threats against the USNS Impeccable (T-AGOS-23), operating near the new submarine base at Hainan. Her master showed great resourcefulness, using fire hoses to drive off the Chinese ships. To justify their action, the Chinese cited the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea treaty, which provides countries with a 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) but has no impact whatever on the right to operate warships outside the six-mile territorial limit. These incidents can be viewed either as tests of the new Obama administration (which soon assigned a guided-missile destroyer to escort one of the ships) or as a seaborne equivalent to the harassment of the U.S. Navy EP-3E electronic intelligence aircraft early in the Bush administration. At roughly the same time, the Chinese president expressed his "disquiet" over the strength of the American dollar, in effect threatening to destabilize the U.S. economy further by dumping the vast number of dollar-denominated U.S. government bonds his banks hold.
The Chinese certainly had reason to resent the presence of the two surveillance ships. They were built during the Cold War to monitor the Soviet submarine fleet, and presumably the Impeccable was in place to develop acoustic signature data on the growing Chinese submarine force, particularly the new Type 094 that is intended to carry long-range JL-2 missiles. Signature data is the basis of much of Western antisubmarine capability. Through the Cold War the West, particularly the United States and the United Kingdom, learned to detect submarines passively, often at impressively long ranges, by comparing detected sounds with a painstakingly assembled library of signatures. The more detailed the signature, the better it can be picked out of the surrounding noise. The Soviets learned to silence their submarines, but it is not at all clear that their efforts sufficed. It seems unlikely that the Chinese have done as well.
To the extent that the Chinese leadership sees its ballistic-missile submarines as the primary deterrent against U.S. interference in its plans for Taiwan, it must want to fend off operations like that of the Impeccable. However, its desires are of little moment as long as China is not at war with the United States; what the Impeccable (and, for that matter, the EP-3E) was doing was entirely legal. It is probably not in China's real interest to make it clear that its government favors international agreements only to the extent that they benefit China. It probably has not helped that the United States has repeatedly failed to enforce missile technology-transfer agreements against Chinese firms with official connections.
During the Cold War the Soviets often operated aggressively against U.S. warships and aircraft in areas of interest. Ultimately the United States and the Soviet Union concluded agreements concerning incidents at sea, which reduced the mutual dangers involved. Remarkably, that happened not during a period of good relations between the two superpowers, but while the Soviet navy was building up and planning to fight. It may be that increased U.S. aggressiveness will be needed before the Chinese decide that it is in their own interest not to interfere with our Fleet in the open sea. The Chinese would not be the first to misinterpret U.S. restraint as weakness.
Party on Shaky Ground?
It is not at all certain that senior Chinese officials have any particular interest in (or awareness of) the details of antisubmarine warfare. For the two decades since the 1989 crushing of the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square, many have reported that the ruling Chinese Communist Party has little of its original idealistic legitimacy left. It has resorted to two rationales for retaining sole power in China. One is its economic success. The other is nationalism: for centuries before communism, China was oppressed by the West (and by the Russians). Now the situation has been reversed, with Taiwan's de facto independence the only obvious reminder of the shameful past.
Despite the rosy statistics of the past, the party may not have understood how to manage the Chinese economy. Some observers, for example, have noted that the shiny new skyscrapers are often built for national prestige rather than for any discernible economic purpose. That really did not matter to the rising Chinese middle class as it produced what the West wanted. So much money was flowing in that inefficiencies (including rampant corruption) could not preclude rapidly-increasing prosperity.
Few in China realized (or perhaps now realize) that their own prosperity was linked to that of the West, particularly the United States. The Western economic meltdown has caused much more unemployment in China and elsewhere in East Asia than in the West itself, and these countries have a much flimsier social safety net. Suffering is already evident. For the Chinese leadership, economic disaster can easily translate into political trouble. Political control is already much weaker than in the old Soviet Union, as fairly frequent reports of riots and demonstrations show.
The Chinese Communist Party gained power, it is said, as a clean alternative to the corrupt Kuomintang, which was forced to flee to Taiwan. Once in power, the party behaved like all others: it maintained its power by patronage. As long as China was poor, the only way to get even minimal comforts was via the party. As the country began to prosper, the only reward the party could offer was a share of that prosperity, achieved through much the same kind of rapacity for which the Kuomintang had been notorious. Now that the Chinese economy is in trouble, those who became prosperous see their rewards taken by the corrupt party, and they are unlikely to be very understanding.
Nationalism
The only lever left to the Party is nationalism. Hence the Impeccable incident, and the accompanying hysterical claims that it was a matter of protecting Chinese territorial seas. The rub is that the Chinese economy is still joined at the hip to that of the United States. This is not some sort of neo-colonialism; it is a two-way street. If the Chinese do not realize that the relationship benefits them as well as us, they may try to destroy it to maintain their power inside China. That may be the real meaning of the threat to dump U.S. government securities (there is also a vague demand for a new world currency to replace the dollar). China was certainly growing rapidly before the meltdown, but it is not yet an economic superpower, and its leverage may be easy to overstate.
Conversely, if the Chinese leadership really does understand its deep connection with the United States, our own fears of a future clash with China may prove happily unrealistic, because the two countries may have a relationship of economic mutual assured destruction. That is, they may have a very stable mutual deterrence. Unfortunately the Chinese have not shown much restraint in their economic relationships elsewhere in the world, so it will not be clear for some time how they understand their situation.
The other question is whether the Chinese leadership really values prosperity, to the point of risking the loss of political power. In the West, we assume that political leaders automatically seek prosperity since leaders presiding over economic disaster are usually ejected. That sort of fate does not necessarily apply to single-party dictatorships, in which what counts is whether party members are satisfied. All over East Asia, rising prosperity and the creation of a viable middle class led to the destruction of single-party states, because those earning the money demanded a stake in what happened to it (and, for that matter, in policies that might maintain their prosperity). China is unlikely to be the sole exception. How serious a strain on party control is the current economic mess? If it is a mortal strain, does it motivate the leadership to turn toward ever-more strident nationalism, culminating in an attack on, say, Taiwan or elsewhere in the East?
The Chinese can combine economics and nationalism in another way. Although they have played it down, the single country that seized the most historically Chinese land was Russia. Moreover, the Soviets extorted considerable (and humiliating) concessions from Mao after the civil war, and later they clashed with the Chinese on their Siberian border. Although Russia is a major Chinese trading partner, it offers nothing like the economic advantages that trade with the West entails, because it is far poorer. Thirty years ago the Chinese merely demanded that the Soviets admit that the border had been drawn illegitimately (by force) and that it should be rectified. But they admitted that without Chinese ethnics in place there was little point in demanding the return of Siberian lands seized by tsarist Russia a century or more in the past. Now ethnic Chinese are a majority in some areas on the Siberian border.