So what's up with China? Alarmists all over the media are talking about China's ambition at sea and the danger of sparking off an accidental war as a result. If, a US ally gets involved, a Sino-US war might not be unthinkable. Since they both possess nuclear weapons, this is worrying indeed.
But what is it China really wants? Looking at maps showing what they are after, one overwhelming feeling is that they are dreaming of restoration of the ancient world.
Many people are keen on pointing out China's maritime ambitions to dominate the seas around China itself and even to extend its naval presence into the Indian Ocean and beyond. One such example, a map showing the supposed Chinese ambition is like this:-
But to historians, this map looks familiar. This is exactly what the maritime trade routes have always been like, since the middle of the first millennium BC. By the time of the rise of the Roman Empire and Han China, this was a well-established route traversed by Arab, Jewish and Greek sailors in the western half and the Chinese and the Indians in the eastern half. The typical pattern of trade was that the Chinese merchants and their Greco-Roman-Arab counterparts met up in the middle, in India or Sri Lanka, to exchange goods. The Romans were after Chinese silk and Indian steel; the Chinese got Egyptian glassware; the Indians got Roman coins (as far as archaeological finds can confirm.) It is believed that Emperor Marcus Aurelius sent a letter addressed to the Emperor of China, possibly handed over to a Chinese agent in India and delivered to the Chinese capital.
These maritime trade routes are still important in this age of air travel and shifting focus of economic activities to the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. Massive volume of goods are still being carried by numerous ships in the Indian Ocean. Many countries in East Asia rely on this trade to obtain raw materials, especially oil.
For any US ally, security of this maritime route is a matter of cooperation with the US. The biggest naval power in the region is still the US 5th fleet. Yet, attested by the case of the Somali situation, its safety cannot be assured nowadays with a presence of conventional naval forces. With the Cold War over, we are facing low level threats of pirates and terrorists in rubber boats and disguised by commercial vessels, which cannot be eradicated easily. Regional naval powers are also proliferating, adding another dimension to the security question.
So, if you are not even an US ally, naturally, you seek to increase your own naval presence to ensure supplies of raw materials brought in by cargo ships. Yet it's not like China is seeking to provoke conflict by butting in in the Indian Ocean with warships. With their larger naval fleet, China seeks to get noticed as a naval power; at the same time, they mount diplomatic offensive to increase ties with countries in Asia and Africa.
Indeed, they tried this maritime strategy before. In the first half of the 15th century, Ming China sent a massive armed merchantmen fleet down in the Indian Ocean. It was to demonstrate power of China; and to establish good diplomatic and commercial relations with kingdoms in the region. It was not gunboat diplomacy either; they thought that the sheer scale of the fleet was enough to impress locals. But soon afterwards, China's naval power in the Indian Ocean collapsed. Although it maintained some naval presence closer home, and managed to hold off incursions by western colonial powers, gradually its ability to control the sea trade routes was lost. When the western navies finally got an upper hand, China's final demise started, and in the 19th century, the Opium Wars and the Sino-Japanese wars totally destroyed Chinese naval power. Only after WW2, during which, the Chinese navy wasn't even a factor for Japanese military planning, under the communist rule, the Chinese navy was revived.
Any Chinese who remember these would wish to re-establish naval presence in the China Sea and the Indian Ocean. In the Roman times, the two empires were so far away from each other, there was no hostility between them. China could let Rome look after the western half of the trade routes, and vice versa. Now, as they say, the world has got smaller; and global politics makes things vastly more complicated. China has no intention of letting the US dominate the Indian Ocean, let alone the China Sea, when Sino-US friendship is tenuous at best. Chinese behaviour might look as if provoking unnecessary rivalry at sea, but at least there is certain logic behind it.
Is the talk of war exaggerated? My answer would be a qualified yes, but, there are some worrying aspects too. I think it was the UK Economist magazine that pointed out that, if anything, it is China that is behaving more like militarist Japan of the 1930s. That is ironic when the Chinese often protest against the supposed militarism in Japan today.
There are similarities. Japan suddenly became the third biggest military power in the 1920s, in the wake of WW1. China has just become the third biggest economic power, in the aftermaths of the Cold War and War on Terror.
But Japan would soon suffer from economic downturn, compounded by a massive earthquake in Tokyo. The gap between the rich and the poor widened; while Japan looked strong on paper, social disturbances, riots and political assassinations threatened to destabilise the country. Today, despite all its achievements, it is reported that Chinese society is in turmoil, with the majority of population not benefitting from the recent economic boom. The rich got super rich, but the poor remained as poor as ever. Prospects for young people are grim. The recent anti-Japanese riots got much airtime, but, many more riots have been taking place, in protest of corruption by state officials, pollution by corporate plants and poverty. Perhaps this war against Japan! talk was pretty much an expression of anxiety and sense of vulnerability on the part of the Chinese populace.
Back in 1924, California passed a law limiting immigration from Japan. The Japanese went berserk, shouting war with America! all over newspapers. Worn down by own their economic and social problems, the Japanese were rather touchy, unable to take the slightest perceived insult from the US. Are the Chinese showing the same symptom of economic growth fatigue? Social stresses resulting from a rapid rise in state power can make people rather irrational and sentimental.
Now, the most worrying parallel is that Japan actually went to war with America 17 years after their war rhetoric was their popular pastime. So, as it so happens in international relations, things can go horribly wrong, even leading to war. In all likelihood however, China is just claiming its rightful place justified by history of the last two millennia, not two centuries.
But I found the whole situation ironic. We've seen this before: a rising great power getting so assertive and repeating mistakes of great powers in the past.
As great powers always reshape the world; their very emergence changes the world so old assumptions will no longer be valid once their rules have been established. The Roman Empire discovered this at a steep cost. As Roman civilization made Europe, Africa and Asia, peoples in these regions developed more sophisticated, civilized state systems and could no longer tolerate being bossed around by the big bro of Rome. Western Europe left the Empire and so did Egypt and Syria. The Empire tried to recover these regions again and again, but, this was not like conquering some barbarians. They were up against more confident and developed states. And they’ve got only themselves to blame. Romans saw themselves as civilizer of the world, but they should have realised that once their mission was accomplished, newly civilized peoples wanted to be treated as equals. Rome’s decline is not really its own decline. It is a story of the world surrounding Rome growing. Rome disappeared when it no longer required civilizing by Rome. Not realising this cost them a lot.
The Chinese often attack Japan for not acknowledging its responsibility to start WW2 in the Pacific, let alone for the Sino-Japanese wars in the 30s. But exactly why they think did Japan do what it did? One of the main factors is that the Japanese, like the Romans, did not realise how the world was changing in the early 20th century. The age of colonialism and imperialism abruptly ended in 1918, but they failed to appreciate that old colonial behaviour could no longer be tolerated. (They still don't get it, I suppose – that’s why their view of world history is so skewed.) Most other colonial powers stopped their designs for China, leaving Japan the sole colonial power seeking to grab lands and resources. They just saw this as an opportunity as western powers were more concerned with economic recovery, disarmament and maintaining of status quo. In 1931, the Japanese army orchestrated an ‘incident’ in Manchuria to set up a colony there. The methods employed are learnt from the British; indeed, South Africa was a colony created by similar tactic. They did not even imagine that this would be perceived as undeclared war on China at all. It was a mere colonial enterprise. Such was the worldview learnt during pre-WW1 years; yet by the 30s, such action was taken as an act of aggression and even a threat to world peace. They should have known better.
So it is sad to see that the Chinese are behaving a bit like the Japanese in the 30s. Their methods are of course shrewder; they refrain from actually using force in face of opposition – at least this part is reassuring. They maintain that borders drawn in the 20th century as nothing but unjust and unfair; but justification for these claims is based on strategic vision out of ancient chronicles. Restoration from their point of view, yes, but this could also destabilise the modern world as it is, which is teemed with new players that have come into play since the time of Arabs, Mongols and the Ming China. Their more pragmatic rationale might be China's maritime security and territorial integrity, but, by trying to force other nations to accept changes in favour of China can only heighten tensions between nations with potential for an arms race. Their actions are at best self-defeating unless they have some cunning plan up in their sleeves.
Perhaps the Chinese are thinking that they are just making sure there will be no going back to the time when other major powers were humiliating them by grabbing their territories. After all, national boundaries today were determined by brutal power game in the 19th and the 20th centuries (Japan conquered Okinawa, together with the Senkakus in question, which used to be an independent kingdom called Ryuku, when China’s naval power was at its low ebb in the 19th century).
Also they seem so confident of their growing power, capable of intimidating smaller neighbours and even of challenging the greatest military power. Here again, they are behaving like the Japanese in the past. Their aggressive expansionism was originally a defensive strategy, in order to deal with threat of imperialism in the 19th century. Then, having become the third greatest naval power in 1918, Japan thought that it could just get whatever it wanted by intimidation. As Britain and the US were busy in Europe (the US and Britain had 10:3 naval superiority to Japan, but the US fleet was split between the Atlantic and the Pacific and the most of the British fleet was in the European theatre of war; and the Anglo-American naval forces were divided between the Pacific and the Indian Ocean, giving the Japanese a local superiority in the western Pacific), the Japanese nationalists believed that they could even take on the greatest naval powers of the day. Look what this led to.
Talking about the Japanese nationalists, the very person who precipitated this territorial dispute between China and Japan, Mr. Ishihara, must be laughing, saying, it is so easy to provoke China. Now that furious protests by China's 'ordinary people', aggressive utterances of the Chinese government officials and the perceived threat of containment by China, Taiwan and Korea, are all over the Japanese media (while he keeps a low profile), alarmist talks in Japan will grow. Then, quite possibly, Japan’s pacifist foreign policy principles could come under pressure from those with more extreme views. The trend of weakening US-Japan military ties (due to, among other things, disputes over US bases on Japanese soil) might be reversed. Even though the Japanese public keeps their cool head over the issue (and is busy with their own economic problems), at least, that China could threaten Japan's territorial integrity unless they do something has been firmly imprinted in Japanese minds. So, China has turned out to be the best friend of the Japanese right.
Mr. Abe, considered as ultra-right by the Koreans and others, has just been elected as the leader of the opposition. Was he aided by this crisis? And, are the Chinese, on their part, trying to pre-empt domestic critics as they are commissioning a big, expensive ex-Soviet aircraft carrier? In any case, my feeling is that ordinary people mobilised for protests will be the ultimate losers getting absolutely nothing out of all this ....
