How China Is Winning The South China Sea
Playing the long game
In 2009, China asserted a claim to a huge swath of the South China Sea, including areas deep within other countries’ exclusive economic zones. It was a deft and calculated political move, leaving affected nations with a confounding set of retaliatory options almost none have been willing to implement.
Facts On The Ground
In 2009, China began moving research vessels into largely undefended portions of the South China Sea, particularly amongst the unpopulated archipelagos and submerged reefs and shoals off the coast of Malaysia, Brunei and the Philippines. Those waters includes areas that, according to the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea, constitute those countries’ 200 mile Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), entitling them to the “exploration and use of marine resources, including energy production from wind and water.”
The number of Chinese research vessels methodically increased over time, eventually complemented by naval escorts under the guise of protecting those vessels. This encroachment did not go unnoticed by affected nations. The Philippines, in a bizarre if not helpless campaign, tried to maintain its sovereignty by air-dropping supplies to a ship it purposely ran aground there many years ago on what is now little more than a rusting hulk of iron disintegrating in the sea.
Western media often paints China as an unequivocal aggressor, but the other nations’ claims also overlap. China, Vietnam and Taiwan all lay claim to the 10,000 square mile area that comprise the Paracel islands, even though Taiwan is over 500 miles from the islands and China has occupied them since 1974. The Spratly islands, which cover over 150,000 square miles, are claimed in their entirety by China, Taiwan and Vietnam and partially by the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei. All but the latter have established military installations there — Vietnam has the most, followed by the Philippines, with China ranking 3rd.
While China may have a tenuous physical claim to much of this territory, its land “reclamation” activity is proceeding at a much faster pace than its competitors, and its scope is more ambitious. Solitary military outposts with basic structures have little strategic value compared to the airfields China is constructing, which allow the Chinese to reinforce their outposts and project power far beyond the islands. 50 lighthouses with a dock are less important than one well-defended airstrip.
Opposing powers have not prevented China’s reclamation activity, effectively acquiescing to the new status quo. It’s one thing to protest the construction of artificial islands — quite another to shut them down after they’re developed. The Chinese correctly reckon that regional countries, and the United States, are reluctant to counter their reclamation efforts with force.
Retaliatory action requires the resources to continue such a campaign to its logical conclusion. Repelling an “incursion” means little if that effort cannot be secured. China understands that the military prowess of its neighbors preclude such an eventuality.
A policy of incremental encroachment, therefore, avoids the type of significant alteration to the status quo that would trigger defensive measures or ignite the international communities’ collective empathy. As Henry Kissinger wrote in On China:
China’s strategy generally exhibits three characteristics: meticulous analysis of long-term trends, careful study of tactical options, and detached exploration of operational decisions.
Patience. It is the key advantage China has in bending the facts on the ground to its favor. If Western pundits characterize China’s place in the modern world as that of a developing country industriously making up for hundreds of years of a regressive inward orientation, Chinese scholars see it as the inevitable swing of the pendulum back to the country’s natural position as the “Middle Kingdom.” The election cycles of the Western world may accurately reflect the current national mood, they would argue, but the march of progress more accurately reflects the national interest.
Economic Integration
If artificial islands represent the physical manifestation of China’s expansionist tendencies, favorable commerce represents the silk glove. While the country’s position as an inexpensive and reliable manufacturing hub may cause heartburn in neighboring nations competing for low-wage production, the demand of China’s middle class for goods and services far outweighs that calculus. This segment of Chinese society has already expanded dramatically and still has an enormous growth potential, providing Southeast Asian nations with a commensurate surge in tourism and exports.
Hong Kong is a perfect example. Mainland China accounts for a clear majority of the recent increase in tourism, much of it coming from its cross-border neighbor, Shenzhen. And the tourism is primarily economic — mainlanders stocking up on goods and services ranging from New Zealand dairy and baby food to life insurance policies.
But while the influx of mainland Chinese has often been a source of friction for Hong Kong natives, restrictions on cross-border travel coupled with the rapid growth in Chinese wealth reveals a natural and increasing economic dependency of the territory on its political parent.
Taiwan’s economy has become similarly interdependent. While economic figures from the Chinese mainland are difficult to verify, the country’s government-sponsored, English-language media enterprise, China Daily, reported in 2014 that bilateral trade between the two “regions” has reached near $200B annually, representing almost 30% of Taiwan’s total trade.
Taiwanese nationals operate tens of thousands of large and small businesses, including manufacturing giants like Foxconn, which represents a critical part of Apple and Samsung’s international supply chains.
But expatriates haven’t been the only ones benefiting from economic integration. After Taiwan elected pro-independence candidate Tsai Ing-Wen, the Chinese government ordered a throttling of tourism to the island, resulting in a drop of almost 30% in the ubiquitous “group tours” within just a couple months.
Tsai’s government has been deft at mitigating the impact of this economic loss by attracting new visitors from Southeast Asia, but with China still accounting for more than double the next closest visitor (Hong Kong, which is a Chinese territory), it’s clear that a robust position against Chinese territorial claims is, at best, complicated by several decades of economic integration that accounts for far less of China’s total economy than it does for Taiwan’s.
China’s economic muscle also extends to the Philippines. In October of 2016, Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte accepted almost $25B in investment and financing agreements, diversified across a range of industries from infrastructure to agribusiness. This agreement came in spite of a ruling by an international tribunal in The Hague — issued just days before Duterte’s inauguration — in favor of the Philippines to invalidate China’s territorial claims represented by their “nine-dash line.”
Among the controversial beneficiaries of this patronage is Duterte’s hometown of Davao, which can expect the development, perhaps not ironically, of three artificial islands to house government buildings and port facilities, built by none other than CCCC Dredging, a Beijing company involved in the development of China’s artificial islands in the South China Sea. The deal is deeply unpopular with many ordinary Filipinos. And while there’s been little progress on these investments thus far, it’s likely China will follow through on the commitment.
China’s economic opportunism reflects its island building strategy in the South China Sea: expand influence where possible and establish economic facts on the ground that shape others’ behavior.
The United States’ recent withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Parternship (TPP) agreement represents a perfect opportunity for this one-two punch, creating a vacuum in regional economic leadership that China will be all too willing to fill.
Resurgent Nationalism
Chinese nationalism is the animating force behind Chinese foreign policy and deserves more attention.
Western media’s focus on nationalism in Europe and the United States generally reflects the struggle to define a national identity as rapidly changing demographics strain existing cultural and political institutions. By comparison, with a one-party system and government control of the media, minority ethnic and religious groups are less able to jockey for space in China’s culture. Chinese Nationalism is rather defined by China’s relations with other nations and particularly their historical experiences of the last 150 years.
China’s inability to ward off a string of humiliating incursions, occupations, and maltreatment on the part of its Asian neighbors and foreign powers still rests heavily on the national conscience. This includes:
- French and English incursions in the first and second Opium wars.
- Great Britain’s 150+ year occupation of Hong Kong.
- Japanese annexation of what is now Taiwan.
- The brutal Japanese occupation of Manchuria — including widespread exploitation of unwilling “comfort girls.”
- American support for the Kuomintang in the Chinese civil war.
- American support for the south in the Korean war and continued presence in South Korea.
- And the Soviet Union treating China as a secondary client state in the Communist movement.
China has undergone a tremendous transformation in the last few decades — raising hundreds of millions out of poverty, catapulting itself past Japan as the world’s second largest economy, and sending astronauts into space. But while these achievements have earned the country status as a great power, they don’t avenge China’s past subjugation in the collective memory.
No apologies from Japanese leaders for wartime atrocities is deemed acceptable by the government and ordinary citizens alike. As Public Radio International reported in a 2014 story, “‘to be patriotic is to be anti-Japanese’ is a current theme that runs through Weibo and various Chinese blogs.” The same sentiment emerges in response to the country’s recent border disputes over the Doklam Plateau with India:
Viewed in a historical context, the South China Sea represents a vehicle for this aggressive nationalist sentiment. The body of water bears the country’s name. It’s surrounded by potential tributary nations and a rogue secessionist territory, and exemplifies the regional military dominance of the country’s prime geopolitical competitor, the United States.
The Communist Party of China has been so effective stoking nationalism that it recently implemented a campaign of censoring ultra-nationalist content online that threatens to reduce its options in managing potential conflict with other state actors. It’s not a stretch to suggest a decisive military victory in the South China Sea against a historical aggressor is a necessary psychological component in China’s ascension to great power status. Whether or not that and/or a recognizable territorial capitulation by its neighbors is inevitable — or enough to satiate the nationalists— remains to be seen. But Chinese expansion in the South China sea is about much more than oil exploration or fishing rights.
One thing is clear: China is playing the long game.
And China does that really, really well.
