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My Strategist post on Monday has stimulated considerable interest from readers in respect of the claimed People’s Liberation Army (PLA) connections with Landbridge. To provide further information and allow people to make their own assessments of the connections, I present below an English translation of a page from the Landbridge Group’s Chinese-language website:
The Formal Establishment of the Landbridge Group’s Armed Militia
On the morning of 8 August 2014, a meeting to formally establish the Armed Militia of the Landbridge Group was solemnly convened in the Landbridge Group’s Meeting Room 101.
Gao Yong, the political commissar of the Rizhao Military Sub-District; and Wang Hao, the chief of staff of the same military sub-district; Gai Weixing, the CPC party secretary of the Lanshan District; Wang Jijun the deputy head of the Lanshan district; Liu Yusong, the political commissar of the Lanshan District People’s Armed Militia; Zhang Fengrun, the commander of the militia; Ye Cheng, the chairman of the Landbridge Group; and He Zhaoqing, the party secretary of the Landbridge Group’s CPC Committee all attended this meeting.
In addition, related service personnel from the Rizhao Military Sub-District and the Lanshan District People’s Armed Militia, personnel from the Landbridge Group Armed Militia, personnel from the people’s militia emergency response squad and some staff members from the Landbridge Group also participated in the meeting.
The meeting was chaired by Colonel Liu Yusong, political commissar of the Lanshan District People’s Armed Militia. During the meeting Colonel Zhang Fengrun, commander of the Lanshan District’s People’s Armed Militia publicly read the “Official Reply on the Establishment of an Armed Militia in the Landbridge Corporation” and “Orders on the Appointment of He Zhaoqing and Others”. Gao Yong, the political commissar of the Rizhao Military Sub-District; and Gai Weixing, the CPC party secretary of the Lanshan District unveiled the signboard for the Landbridge Group’s Armed Militia.
After the meeting, the Landbridge Group’s chairman Ye Cheng and the Group’s party secretary He Zhaoqing accompanied Gao Yong, the political commissar of the Rizhao Military Sub-District; Wang Hao, the chief of staff of the same military sub-district, Gai Weixing, the CPC party secretary of the Lanshan District, Wang Jijun the deputy head of the Lanshan district and other leaders on a tour of the Group’s facilities.
The Landbridge Group, as a large-scale civilian enterprise has, through 20 years of unstinting effort, established its four major commercial planks of petrochemicals, port logistics, real estate and tourism and international trade. Its assets total close to 17 billion yuan renminbi. Throughout, the Landbridge Group has firmly upheld the ideal of “A strong enterprise does not forget to repay the country, while a prosperous enterprise does not forget national defence.” It has actively supported the army through culture and supported the army through science and technology. It has resolved difficulties and served as a logistic backup for military units engaged in maritime training, and for the military units based in Rizhao. The Landbridge Group has been assigned the appellation of a double model for “Loving Lanshan and Putting Efforts into Strengthening the Military”. In 2013, the Landbridge Group chairman Comrade Ye Cheng was cited by the Provincial CPC Committee and the Provincial Government as one of the 10 outstanding individuals of Shandong province who have concerned themselves with national defence construction.
The establishment of the Landbridge Group’s Armed Militia manifests the true melding of a strong enterprise and an active armed militia under the Landbridge Group. It also injects new blood into the national defence project of Rizhao City and Lanshan District.
China’s land reclamation in the South China Sea has generated concern across Asia about China’s challenge to US strategic primacy in the Western Pacific. The US has belatedly responded to this challenge with a single ‘Freedom of Navigation’ operation (FONOP) that saw the deployment of the USS Lassen within the 12nm limit of Subi Reef on 27 October. So what might happen next?
The US has indicated further FONOPs will occur at roughly the rate of two every quarter, which hopefully will send a clear message that clarifies mixed signals emerging from the first deployment. Australia must choose whether it will join this effort by deploying its own vessels to reinforce a collective message that China’s claims to maritime rights under UNCLOS around artificial islands are not accepted by the region. Japan must also consider its response, given that Chinese assertion of control over the South China Sea—through which vital Japanese sea-lanes of communication run—would be an intolerable threat to Japan’s economic stability and national security.
When those events are taken together with the Philippine’s recent success in the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, which has declared it has jurisdiction and will hold hearings on the dispute, it’s clear that at a political and strategic level, China’s heavy handedness in building new islands is counter-productive.
China however doesn’t look set to back down, with the Chinese Foreign Ministry reasserting its ‘indisputable sovereignty’ and calling on the US to ‘refrain from dangerous or provocative actions’ in the future. John Chen and Bonnie Glaser suggest three possible paths forward for China should it choose to militarise its new islands. The first would involve deployment of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities to the new islands that would give China superior situational awareness, intelligence gathering and vital targeting information when necessary. The second path could involve deployment of missile systems—surface to air missiles (SAMs) and land-based anti-ship cruise missile (ASCMs) capabilities which could threaten aircraft and naval vessels of regional states, the US Navy and its allies including Australia. Finally, China could use airstrips and deep-water ports to support PLA Navy and PLA Air Force (PLAAF) operations within the South China Sea and beyond, including potentially against Australia in a future crisis. Notably, Chen and Glaser cite the example of PLAAF H-6K bombers equipped with land-attack cruise missiles (LACMs) bringing Australia within range.
Furthermore, the islands may continue to expand in size, with Andrew Erickson and Austin Strange suggesting Fiery Cross Reef may be potentially transformed into a military base twice the size of Diego Garcia. Erickson recently stated that the reclaimed land could be used to support the imposition of a South China Sea Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ) in a manner that would allow China to: claim airspace within its self-declared nine-dash line as its territorial airspace; strengthen its anti-submarine warfare (ASW) capabilities to support bastions for its Jin-class SSBNs; and, reinforce its anti-access and area denial (A2AD) capability.
Clearly things have moved on from the rather rosy and optimistic perspective on China’s rise suggested in Australia’s 2013 Defence White Paper. The next Defence White Paper must acknowledge that Australia’s security environment is now more challenging, uncertain and complex, with greater risk for major power competition in coming years. The cockpit of this competition is likely to be the South China Sea, given its geostrategic significance in terms of energy and commerce. In this environment the US will expect, and Australia must be prepared, to do more to deter and dissuade China from more opportunistic land grabs in the future.
What does this mean for Defence planning after the next White Paper? While Australian defence planning should never be determined by a single issue, it would be unwise for the next Defence White Paper to downplay China’s challenge in the same way that the 2013 White Paper did. Most importantly, the idea of Australia distancing itself from the US, or promoting an accommodation of an assertive and rising China through convincing the US to cede strategic presence and influence, should be strongly resisted. Instead, Australia’s future defence policy needs to be more forward orientated and focused on Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. Australia must strengthen its ability to support the US, as well as its key regional allies in ASEAN, Japan, India and South Korea, including in asserting key principles such as freedom of navigation of the seas.
Our traditional defence strategy that focuses on the defence of Australia’s air and maritime approaches needs to be updated because the potential military threat is no longer distant. China’s construction of new islands which could be militarised in a manner suggested above, its expanding naval, air and long-range missile capabilities, and its growing strategic interests along the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road means that far from Australia benefiting from a historical tyranny of distance, our proximity and relevance to events in a contested Asia has never been closer.
China’s desire to project military power and presence at long range have forced the US to consider new strategic approaches, notably the ‘Third Offset’ strategy as part of the Defense Innovation Initiative, to mitigate risks posed by PLA counter-intervention (A2AD) capabilities. Australia now faces similar risks as Chinese military power extends from the South China Sea, through the vital waterways in Southeast Asia and out into the Indian Ocean.
Therefore Australia would be wise to expand its efforts to reinforce the US rebalance to Asia not only by offering greater access to Australian facilities for US air, land and naval forces, but also to seek opportunities for participation in the Defense Innovation Initiative. This could realise future long-range military capabilities to offset growing Chinese A2AD and power projection potential, and which could lead to future ADF force structure development beyond the limits envisaged under Force 2035.
Peter Jennings’ ‘Darwin: storm in a port’ has brought to broader attention the apparent nonchalance with which the lease of the port of Darwin by Chinese firm Landbridge has been treated by many parts of the Australian Government.
Landbridge came to Australian public attention in mid-2014 with its share offer and purchase of Brisbane-based gas producer Westside Corporation. The purchase was celebrated by PRC newsagency Xinhua, and widely by the Australian government. The signing of this agreement by Landbridge principal Ye Cheng was held at Parliament House in front of Xi Jinping and Tony Abbott during Xi’s November visit to Australia. Westside soon set about pursuing Armour Energy.
Last month, Landbridge agreed to pay $506 million for a 99-year lease of the Port of Darwin. Labor has suggested that the deal be scrutinised by the Foreign Investment Review Board and some ADF officials have registered security concerns. However, the long-term ramifications of this century-long deal haven’t even begun to be considered by Australia.
What then is the nature of Landbridge? Northern Territory Chief Minister Adam Giles calls it a ‘private sector partner’, and both the Australian Financial Review and the Sydney Morning Herald have adopted the ‘private enterprise’ description. However, given that ownership of major economic entities in China is always murky, it behoves us to look at this entity a little more closely.
The company itself asserts that it is a ‘private’ enterprise. Landbridge Chairman Ye Cheng is, however, intimately tied to the PRC party-state as a member of the 12th National CPPCC Committee, a PRC united front body, in which he represents the All China Federation of Taiwan Compatriots.
More importantly, the company—like any organisation of influence in China—is guided by a powerful branch of the Communist Party of China. This 200-member body takes its orders—through a dendritic structure—from the party central committee and ensures that the company acts in accordance with the party-state’s interests and strategies.
The Secretary of Landbridge’s CPC branch committee is He Zhaoqing, an ex-PLA officer, who has been deputy political commissar of the Public Security office at Shijiu Port, and head of the party committee office of Rizhao Port. He’s now also the general manager, a director and party committee member of the Rizhao Port Group. It’s thus He Zhaoqing and the CPC who control the port development activities of Landbridge.
And, as if to underline the party-state links of the company, in August last year, with the support of the People’s Liberation Army, Landbridge established a people’s armed militia within the company with He Zhaoqing being appointed to lead it. He Zhaoqing had also been cited by the provincial government in 2013 as one of the ten outstanding figures of Shandong province who have devoted themselves to the building of national defence. In short, Landbridge is a commercial front intimately tied to state-owned operations, the party and the PLA.
But this should come as a surprise to no-one. Party control within nominally commercial operations is precisely how the PRC ensures that Chinese economic activity abroad is fully in accord with and serves PRC strategic interests. That is obvious from Chinese efforts to develop Sri Lanka’s Hambantota Port, Pakistan’s Gwadar Port (only a 40-year lease) and the port of Djibouti.
Darwin is intended to be a key link in China’s new 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, providing Chinese access to both the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific, as well as to Indonesia and PNG. China’s ‘sister port’ tie ups with Kuantan, Melaka, Kedah and Port Klang in Malaysia and with Townsville Port in Queensland are readying further nodes in the network. It’s no surprise that Landbridge Infrastructure Australia’s director, Mike Hughes, says the Darwin port project aims to ‘put Darwin on the map for Chinese business.’ And even less surprising is it that Landbridge CPC Committee Secretary He spoke to his members of the company’s role in achieving the ‘dream of a strong nation‘, the ‘dream of renaissance.’
The Maritime Silk Road, along with associated Chinese initiatives such as the $100 billion Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the $40 billion Silk Road fund, as well as offshore infrastructure projects such as ports, dams, farms and industrial zones are intended, through realising regional economic domination and subsequent client dependency, to achieve this Chinese renaissance, the ‘China dream’. This in turn will facilitate contention for regional and then global primacy with the United States. The PLA sees one of its key roles as being to protect these economic initiatives offshore. The Darwin deal is thus, among other things, a key element in the PRC’s efforts to weaken the Australian alliance with the US. For these reasons there must be great security concerns about the Darwin deal.
That the Federal Government and the Northern Territory administration should repeatedly claim that Landbridge is a private company and that its investment in Darwin is simply an economic decision suggests either targeted disingenuousness or woeful ignorance. In either case it underlines the urgent need for both much further investigation of the Darwin contract with Landbridge and the creation within Australia of a public database which records and analyses the swiftly-expanding breadth of the interconnected PRC economic, cultural and political activities across Australia, Southeast Asia and Oceania.
Graeme Dobell and Matt Davies have both written engaging contributions respectively for and against Australia’s possible future membership of ASEAN. I’m grateful to Graeme for presenting so cogently the arguments for Australia’s seeking admission. But Matt reminds us of the difficulties involved—difficulties that Graeme’s most recent post on the topic seems to acknowledge, though he clearly still has more to say on the subject. Personally, I believe Australia should be trying to strengthen its relationships with key Southeast Asian states. But I’m unconvinced we have to join ASEAN to do that. We already have a close working relationship with ASEAN. And, I suspect our entreaties to Southeast Asian partners for closer strategic relationships are probably more credible if our motives are pure—that is, if we’re not simultaneously mendicants for admission to ASEAN.
As with most big questions related to strategic policy, it pays to come at this one from an understanding of Australian interests. What does Australia want from Southeast Asia? Good neighbours, certainly—and a shared sense of community is the foundation stone of a peaceful, interactive sub-region. We also want good trade relationships with regional states, a shared willingness to invest political and economic capital in addressing common challenges, and a stronger, more developed and more resilient sub-region. But there’s something else we want too, and it’s perhaps the most important of all our interests. We want a Southeast Asia that’s a positive contributor to a stable, liberal, prosperous Asian security order.
What do the adjectives stable, liberal and prosperous mean in that context? ‘Stable’ means we strive for an environment where guns are largely silent and where military budgets can be kept at small percentages of rapidly-growing GDPs. ‘Liberal’ means an order that’s inclusive and open and characterised by laws and rules; it doesn’t mean that all regional governments have to be democratically elected, though naturally Australia hopes that more will adopt that form over time. And ‘prosperous’ means an order in which all boats can rise, an environment in which development is a shared priority.
We’ve been the beneficiaries of such an order in the past and hope to continue our good strategic fortune in the future. But as US relative strategic weight in the region ebbs, and as we slide towards an Asia of skewed multipolarity, we’re hoping to see emerge a stable, liberal, prosperous strategic order that turns less on US centrality. Obviously the US is going to remain a strong player in the region for many years. But the US-centred order we’ve enjoyed in the past is buckling. So Australia’s looking for new sources of inputs to that order. Former Prime Minister Abbott’s interest in Japan, for example, seemed to derive from a belief that a regionally-engaged Japan would be an important contributor to such an order.
Still, Asia’s a big place. A more engaged Japan—even a more engaged India—wouldn’t offset a deficit of strategic leadership in Southeast Asia. Southeast Asia needs to find its own local champions. We should aspire to work with those emerging players to help foster the notion that a sub-regional power core does exist in Southeast Asia, one that is a positive contributor to a stable, liberal, prosperous security order. We want an optimistic, future-oriented Southeast Asia. In the vernacular of the film Tomorrowland, we want a Southeast Asia that feeds the right wolf.
I doubt ASEAN can be the vehicle for achieving that. While it’s been a useful institution for building regional resilience, it’s typically been a responsibility-diffuser rather than a responsibility-enhancer in strategic terms. It was built for a different purpose—to strengthen intra-regional linkages in Southeast Asia. As such, it moves at the speed of its slowest members. It’s reluctant to adopt regional positions on contentious issues. It finds it hard to point the finger of blame even in relation to overt transgressions. And—especially noticeable in these transformational times—its members don’t share a single strategic vision of the regional future. As Donald Emmerson recently observed, if US–China strategic rivalry were to escalate, ASEAN could easily split into two camps—the China-defiers and the China-deferrers.
Our joining the organisation wouldn’t change those characteristics. So, horses for courses: we’ll probably get better mileage in relation to our current strategic ambitions to work with a more limited number of key players, like Indonesia, Singapore and Vietnam. After all, not all Southeast Asian countries want to be players in the bigger geopolitical matrix. Of those that do, not all share our goal. Let’s work with those who do.
While China’s unilateral declaration of an Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ) over disputed waters in the East China Sea (ECS) caught many by surprise, today’s debate circles around the likelihood that Beijing might take the same action over the South China Sea (SCS). In its pursuit of maritime primacy in Northeast Asia, China has strayed far from the international norms that dictate the implementation and use of an ADIZ.
An ADIZ is an airspace beyond a country’s sovereign territory within which the state requires the identification, location and air traffic control of aircraft in the interest of national security. The mechanism is a legacy of the Cold War, having first been declared by the US in 1950; Over 20 states now administer their own ADIZ.
According to the Chinese Ministry of National Defense, when entering the zone, such as the one declared over the ECS, all aircraft are required to identify themselves, report flight plans and inform ground control of their exact position. Such regulations apply to commercial aircraft as well as military aircraft. On the latter count, China’s ADIZ fails to uphold the normative principle that military aircraft simply transiting through an ADIZ shouldn’t be obliged to report to the host country. China has threatened to meet non-compliance with ‘military defensive measures’. The US State Department was highly critical of the coercive measure, claiming that ‘the US does not apply its ADIZ procedures to foreign aircraft not intending to enter the US national airspace.’ The State Department urged China ‘not to implement its threat to take actions against aircraft that do not identify themselves or obey orders from Beijing.’
China’s reinterpretation of how an ADIZ is declared and operates raises questions about the legality, legitimacy and intentions of its controversial efforts over the ECS. ADIZs are legally ambiguous, and aren’t regulated by any defined international regime. Although there’s no explicit prohibition on ADIZs, they can be used in ways that violate other international legal provisions. China’s specific identification requirements placed on military aircraft are in violation of Article 87 of the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) that protects ‘freedom of overflight’ and to which China is a signatory. The 1944 Convention on International Civil Aviation—the Chicago Convention—also rules against unilateral attempts to restrict air navigation beyond a state’s territorial seas. Therein lies the danger: China’s attempt to maintain de-facto control of its surrounding waters will contribute to establishing a precedent outside of current international law.
Worryingly, China has recently signalled its willingness to treat its ADIZ as an extension of its sovereign territory. According to Air Transport World a Laos Airlines plane flying through China’s ADIZ in late July was requested to fly back as it hadn’t met its reporting requirements. Despite vehement denials from China’s Ministry of National Defense that the ‘event has no connection with the ADIZ in the East China Sea’ and silence from the Laotian government, presumably due to fear associated with upsetting Sino-Laos trade relations, the incident is potentially a sign of things to come. Moreover, the possibility that China may declare an ADIZ over the South China Sea only brings more uncertainty to the protection of freedom of overflight in international waters.
So what can be done to mitigate the chances of escalation in the ECS and the possibility that China will announce an ADIZ over the SCS?
Despite tough rhetoric emanating from the US immediately after the declaration of the ADIZ over the ECS and later dispatch of two American B-52 bombers to fly through the zone, the US response has been relatively quiet overall. Although President Obama employed tough rhetoric when pledging that Article V of ‘US–Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security’ provided an ‘ironclad’ security guarantee to protect the Senkakus in the ECS, a lack of tangible US action has hardened China’s claims of sovereignty over the disputed waters. It’s imperative that the US continues to fully exercise its right to fly its military aircraft through the East China Sea.
As a regional power in the Indo–Pacific region, Australia also has a role in upholding freedom of overflight in its neighbourhood. The initial condemnation of China’s ECS effort by Australia’s Foreign Minister Julie Bishop must be bolstered with action so as to avoid Chinese de-facto control over the ECS. It’s important that Australia unilaterally flies its military aircraft through the ECS ADIZ, or publicly demonstrates support for allies who do so to avoid the emergence of a new status quo where China rules its surrounding seas. Inaction has the potential to encourage China to declare a South China Sea ADIZ in the foreseeable future.
Now that Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington is out of the way, China might see a window of opportunity to declare an ADIZ in the SCS before the International Court of Arbitration rules on the Philippines’ territorial claim in the near future. Australia must act sooner, rather than later, to protect its right of overflight or it may one day face a situation where it requires permission from China to exercise its own international freedoms.
Michael Auslin has called for a ‘new realism’ in US foreign policy toward China, one that ‘begins with an official acceptance that we are locked in a competition with China that is of Beijing’s choosing’. Moreover he suggests that Sino-US dialogue must be ‘reset’ and ‘conducted not as an unearned gift to Beijing, but only when there are concrete goals to be achieved’.
While some, such US National Security Advisor Susan Rice, may dispute the first claim as ‘lazy rhetoric’, the second admonition to structure the relationship through a focus on the concrete goals and interests of each party isn’t as easily dismissed.
The problem in the current climate of Sino–US relations, however, is to identify areas in which those interests overlap to ‘mutual benefit’ more than they diverge. China’s ‘One Belt, One Road’ (OBOR) strategy is an area that holds potential.
According to John Hudson, where US officials see China’s resurgence and ambition in the Asia–Pacific as the core driver of regional insecurity, in Eurasia they see a ‘surprising convergence of US and Chinese interests’ that ‘boils down to one mutual goal: security’.
From this perspective, Beijing shares Washington’s desires to see a stable and secure Afghanistan and Pakistan due primarily to Beijing’s own concerns with Uyghur terrorism in Xinjiang.
The strength of this view is based on two major factors.
First, the OBOR itself, while growing out of a decades-long agenda to firmly integrate Xinjiang and overcome Uyghur separatism and terrorism through the delivery of economic development, looks set to engage China more directly in the problems of the region. With its focus on the development of trans-regional infrastructure links and investment, such as the ‘China-Pakistan Economic Corridor’, the OBOR would give China a greater stake in the future security and prosperity of Central Asia, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Obama administration officials have approvingly noted that China’s plan mirrors the intent of its own aborted ‘New Silk Road Initiative’ of 2011. Indeed, the logic of that effort suggests some complementarity between US and Chinese interests.
Second, the increasing number of terrorist attacks in Xinjiang, which China has attributed to militants based in the Af-Pak tribal areas, has arguably revealed to Beijing that it can no longer rely on the partial ‘outsourcing’ of its security to the US military presence in Afghanistan nor the Pakistani military along the Af-Pak frontier. Instead, Beijing must revise its to-date largely ‘hands off’ approach to the security situation in Afghanistan as it pursues the OBOR strategy.
Yet deeper consideration of both of these factors suggests that the potential overlap between US and Chinese interests shouldn’t be overstated.
Afghanistan, in particular, is deeply problematic for China in terms of the security of Xinjiang, its geopolitical interests and its reputation. China’s aloof approach to the country since the US and NATO intervention began, as Andrew Small has noted, has been dictated by a conflicted mindset:
‘China sat out the conflict in Afghanistan. It wanted neither a Western victory that might entrench a US military presence in its backyard, nor a Taliban victory that would pose risks to Xinjiang and the wider region. As a result, its financial and political contributions to Afghanistan were at best tokenistic, the minimum necessary to avoid alienating anyone.’
Greater Chinese security engagement in Afghanistan promises not only to make it a more overt target for radical Islamists, impacting negatively in the security of Xinjiang, but also to damage Beijing geopolitically by bringing it into conflict with its ‘all weather’ friend, Pakistan. Beijing has emerged as an active proponent of a negotiated political settlement between the Taliban and Kabul—even brokering secret negotiations between the two—in the interests of ‘stability’, while Pakistan ‘has been keener to see a level of consistent instability in Afghanistan’ rather than a secure and independent Kabul. The scope for this divide between the ‘all weather’ friends to widen was underlined by the multiple bomb attacks in the Afghan capital on 10 and 12 August. The Ghani government explicitly blamed the attacks on Pakistan and Beijing offered to extend greater security assistance to Kabul in response.
Speculation that China would actively consider a more overt security presence or engagement in Afghanistan, however, ignores the reputational costs this would impose on Beijing. Much of Beijing’s diplomatic success throughout Eurasia over the past decade has been built not only on its undoubted economic weight but also its ability to counter-pose its doctrine of ‘non-intervention’ to that of the West’s recent record of direct intervention into the affairs of others. The continued strength of this particular peculiarity of Chinese diplomacy has been most recently exhibited in Beijing’s response to the NATO-led intervention in Libya and its approach to the ongoing Syrian crisis.
Despite recent developments on the ground in Afghanistan—including the possible fracturing of the Taliban in the face of the emergence of Islamic State, in the country—it appears that China’s approach to the country remains cautious. Indeed it is difficult to discern a fundamental shift in approach to that described by Beijing’s Special Envoy to Afghanistan, Sun Yuxi, when he noted in 2014 that ‘preserving Afghanistan’s stability is not a matter of adding troops but of helping Afghanistan to quickly rebuild’.
This was never going to be an easy meeting between the leaders of one of the oldest democracies and the world’s largest dictatorship. The two countries have an increasingly conflicted relationship: on the one hand, they are global partners, especially but not solely in the international economic sphere, but, on the other hand, their strategic rivalry, particularly in the Indo–Pacific region, is becoming worrisome. Accordingly, the meeting went as well as one could expect. But given the trajectory of the bilateral relationship this summit may well be the last one with a veneer of courtesy.
This meeting was, without any doubt, more important for Xi than Obama. This gave the Chinese president a public platform from which to be perceived back home as an equal (whether true or not) to the president of the sole superpower. It also gave Xi the opportunity to state publicly and forcefully—as he did—China’s position on issues on which the two countries disagree. Let me focus on just three of these.
The first issue on which the Obama administration has been particularly irritated about is cyber-theft. This was made abundantly clear when Obama suggested at a recent business roundtable, that the issue of cyberattacks would ‘probably be one of the biggest topics‘ during President Xi’s visit. And indeed it was. At their joint press conference, Obama said that he had told Xi that cyberattacks against US targets ‘had to stop’. In response, Xi pledged that the Chinese government wouldn’t ‘in whatever form engage in commercial theft and hacking against government networks’.
Given that, according to US officials, China was behind the recent theft of the security files of some 22 million Americans, not too many people are convinced in Washington that the Chinese government will stop cyber theft, or prevent Chinese companies from doing so against US companies. There’s little doubt that were the Chinese caught once again hacking and stealing American trade secrets that the US administration would impose a package of economic sanctions against China, as per an executive order signed by President Obama in April.
The second issue, of particular interest to Australia, is China’s aggressive behaviour in the South China Sea. President Obama broached the issue directly at the joint press conference, stating that he ‘had significant concerns’ over China’s reclamation activities which made it more difficult to resolve disagreements peacefully’. Xi didn’t budge and instead asserted that China was acting within its rights and that it wasn’t pursuing any militarisation. Any wishful thinking that China would embrace Washington’s recent proposal for Beijing to halt land reclamation and end militarization was put to rest absolutely there and then.
A third issue on which there was unsurprisingly no movement was human rights in China. Obama forcefully re-iterated his ‘deep concerns’ over this matter, and, in return, Xi, as all previous Chinese leaders have done in the past, repeated the well-worn mantra that ‘countries have different historical processes’. Given Xi’s heavy-handed approach to any opposition since he came to power in 2012, it’s no surprise that thousands of political prisoners are languishing in jails and will remain there for the foreseeable future.
Still, the summit wasn’t all bad news. The big surprise was of course Xi’s announcement of a selective cap-and-trade emission plan that would kick in by 2017. Given China’s massive environmental problems and its status as the world’s biggest polluter, this was welcomed by US officials and environmentalists. But many are sceptical that this ambitious plan can be implemented so quickly. Nevertheless, it’s a step in the right direction, and it now puts pressure on the US Congress to also take stronger action on climate change.
However, the good news on the climate change front did little to dispel Washington’s concerns about China’s overall behaviour. And some of its latest actions have done nothing to assuage those feelings. Aside from the issues discussed above, it’s obvious that China is increasingly flexing its muscles well beyond its immediate neighbourhood.
The PLA Navy has been making deep forays into the Indian Ocean, including having submarines berth in Sri Lanka and Pakistan earlier this year. Even more worrisome is the report that a Chinese aircraft carrier has been sited off the Syrian coast in the last few days and Chinese advisers are on their way. But to demonstrate that they too can hug the other’s coastline, Chinese navy ships were spotted inside US territorial waters off Alaska during Obama’s visit to that state earlier this month.
Needless to say, all this is grist for the Republican Party mill. A number of presidential candidates, with Trump leading the pack, even suggested that Obama cancel the summit. Even Hillary Clinton has jumped on the anti-Chinese bandwagon.
So while there are areas where China and the US can work together, strategic competition between the two nations is real and is more than likely to become nasty down the road. The recent Xi–Obama summit has done nothing to dispel this perception.
In the first instalment of this two-part series I reflected on the CCP’s anti-corruption drive as part of an effort to underwrite the long-term legitimacy of CCP rule beyond the Xi leadership. But if enduring legitimacy is the motivation, it’s often asked why the focus is on anti-corruption and not also on other aspects of national policy, like the economy and the environment? But that question overlooks the fact that anti-corruption is in fact not the sole focus of the Xi leadership.
In order to fully appreciate the role of anti-corruption in Xi’s new strategy of national governance, one must understand the so-called ‘four comprehensives’ theory proposed by the leadership early this year. The ‘four comprehensives’ are: comprehensively building a well-off (xiaokang) society, comprehensively deepening reform, comprehensively ruling by law, and comprehensively disciplining the party. The theory is now presented by the leadership as a new strategy for governing the country under the current circumstances. It’s almost a kind of grand strategy for CCP rule in China.
The ‘four comprehensives’ have logical connections with one another. Building a well-off society is the overarching goal, and deepening reform and ruling by law are two major means for achieving this goal. The CCP is the designer as well as executor of this strategy. But in order to enhance its legitimacy in this role, it must achieve self-restraint, self-innovation and self-development by comprehensively disciplining itself. Anti-corruption is a key strategic means of disciplining party members, and part of a broader—comprehensive—strategy for maintaining and enhancing CCP rule in China.
Viewed from the perspective of the ‘four comprehensives’, one can also detect an intriguing relationship between ruling by law and disciplining the party. In CCP politics, it’s often asked whether national laws or party rules take priority in practice. This is an extremely important question for understanding the nature of Chinese politics. But with respect to anti-corruption, the question is somewhat misleading. The CCP’s anti-corruption strategy is never about the rule of law: it’s fundamentally a political question about whether the party can successfully restrain its members and about the extent to which the leadership is willing to go to clean up the party.
Huge political risks and costs lie in wait, as is apparent from the arrests of top political and military leaders such as Zhou Yongkang and Xu Caihou. But the party is compelled to undertake the project, and even to elevate a specific strategy of anti-corruption to a comprehensive approach of ‘disciplining the party’. For, as Mr. Wang Qishan recognised, the legitimacy of the CCP as the sole ruling party of China requires it to discipline itself in order to gain and enhance the trust of the people. For this reason, party rules and regulations, and associated moral education programs, necessarily come before national laws, although laws can play a useful complementary function of punishing and containing the spread of corruption. To CCP members, however, party rules lay down higher and stricter moral and behavioral standards than required by national laws. The CCP must maintain its purity and keep itself in the vanguard.
Wang Qishan and the top CCP leadership should be applauded for deploying a political vocabulary that is conducive to international and cross-cultural exchange. Breaking the taboo of examining the legitimacy of CCP rule demonstrates the self-confidence and candidness of the leadership, as well as its sincerity to conduct a meaningful dialogue with the outside world. To make the narrative of a CCP accountable to the people more persuasive, however, the party must take the idea of the ‘endorsement of the people’ much more seriously.
How to deal with and respond to the ‘endorsement of the people’ is a huge challenge to the CCP. In essence, the CCP must create a mechanism or a set of institutions for measuring the degree of satisfaction of the Chinese people with a good degree of independence and fairness, and then to respond to public needs in a timely, creative and effectively manner. Only by doing so can the CCP build the long-term support of the people and maintain the legitimacy of its rule. Such moves will also help to foster a far more positive image of the CCP to the outside world than it is capable of projecting now.
The red carpet was rolled out in Washington DC this week as some A-list visitors hit the town. On Thursday, Pope Francis became the first pontiff to address US Congress—full text and video here. In his speech, the Pope challenged US policymakers to ‘make a difference’ on a wide range of issues, from environmental degradation to the abolition of the death penalty. DefenseOne carries an interesting piece on the Catholic Church’s zero tolerance stance on nuclear weapons, which sits in contradiction to Ash Carter’s defence of the US nuclear budget last week. For more on the papal visit, check out this excellent photo essay from Sam Ellis, and The Atlantic’s break-down of the address to Congress. And for all the transportation fans out there, The Washington Post has a short history of the Popemobile.
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s much-anticipated first state visit to the US began within hours of the Pope’s departure on Thursday, after the GOP failed to have the visit cancelled. US National Security Advisor Susan Rice defended the visit on Monday, branding alternative views as ‘dangerous and short-sighted’—a burn that was reportedly directed at ex-GOP presidential candidate Scott Walker, who dropped out of the race earlier this week. Check out CSIS for some quality reads on two of the meatier topics expected to be addressed at the Summit: cybersecurity and US–China economic relations.
The Climate Council this week released a cracking new report called ‘Be Prepared: Climate Change, Security and Australia’s Defence Force. Their effort is well worth a read.
If you love a good map as much as we do, head over to The True Size to play around with an interactive map that will give you a real sense of country size—a perspective that you won’t get from the familiar Mercator presentation. The project was inspired by the West Wing and a similar infographic that focused on Africa (PDF).
Dark Fields of the Republic, a new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in DC, shines a light on the battlefield photography of Alexander Gardener, whose dramatic images show the ravages of the US Civil War. The BBC carries a compelling piece that highlights the collection, Gardner’s story and some of the abiding questions around the appropriateness of war photography.
CSIS’s drip-feed of South China Sea satellite images has been collected by the ABC, which has compiled some handy before-and-after snapshots of China’s land reclamation work across seven different reefs. Catch up with it here. New PM Malcolm Turnbull this week said that China’s efforts in the South China Sea have been ‘pushing the envelope’.
Foreign Policy has given a whole new meaning to #flashbackfriday by shredding Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s Instagram account @syrianpresidency. Sifting through pages of happy, shiny images taken around Syria, FP has chosen some choice shots from the account, and contrasted them with what was actually happening in Syria at the time they were captured.
Head over to The Economist for a primer on Japan’s recently passed security bills, as well as some consideration of the Chinese reception to the legislative changes.
Laser-drones: the future is nigh—and it’s awesome! San Diego-based General Atomics Aeronautical Systems is aiming to mount a 150-kilowatt solid-state laser onto an Avenger drone to create a new generation of military weapon by 2017. Or, if mounting weaponry on drones is too high-tech for your taste, why not try dogs? Visual Engineering has created the Cerberus camera system, which can be attached to the backs of military and police dogs to give their human counterparts advantages in warzones.
Podcasts
As part of its Global Thinkers series, Foreign Policy’s Elizabeth Dickinson and Yemeni activist Farea al-Muslimi sat down to chat about how the West could contribute to a solution for the Middle East’s proxy wars, and why Saudi Arabia is taking big risks in Yemen. Listen here.
The Bridge recently featured a piece which argued that returning foreign fighters actually present a marginal threat to their homelands, and evaluated counter-radicalisation efforts. The author, Collin Hunt, was recently interviewed by The Loopcast.
Videos
Brookings recently hosted a discussion with Will McCants on ISIS’s strategy and the future of jihadi terrorism, on the back of the launch of his recent book, The ISIS Apocalypse.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter, sat down with Jon Alterman and Ben Daus-Haberle as part of a three-part series on foreign policy, global politics and global crisis. In part one (6 mins), Brzezinski thinks about how the US should approach its relations with China and Russia.
Events
Canberra: The AIIA’s National Conference will kick off on 19 October, and is set to include a stellar line-up of speakers, such as Julie Bishop, Tanya Plibersek, Gareth Evans and Brian Schmidt. Be sure to register your interest here.
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) anti-corruption drive is of staggering scale, reach and audacity. From the powerful ‘tigers’ to the low-ranking ‘flies’, the anti-corruption policy of Xi Jinping’s leadership has targeted and frightened multiple segments of the party, government, military, and state-owned enterprises.
Many have since wondered about the motivation and nature of the wide-ranging and ambitious anti-corruption policy unleashed by President Xi and carried out by Wang Qishan, who is Secretary of the powerful CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) and one of the seven members in the Politburo Standing Committee.
On 9 September, I attended a now-annual conference co-hosted by the International Department of the CCP Central Committee and the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the CCP Central Committee. This year’s theme was To Discipline the Party: Responsibility of the Party. It was appropriate that Wang—who’s in charge of the party’s anti-corruption drive and the broader strategy of ‘comprehensively disciplining the party’—agreed to offer his views to a select group of scholars and officials from China and abroad.
As I listened to Wang’s remarks at the Great Hall of the People, I realized that he was making a revolutionary statement in the history of the CCP. Wang raised an extremely provocative and hitherto taboo idea in CCP political discourse: he spoke of the legitimacy of CCP rule. Never before has the CCP leadership openly raised and even questioned the legitimacy of its own rule. Moreover, Wang actually set out to explain the legitimacy of CCP’s long one-party rule in China, which he pointed out to be the key distinguishing characteristic of Chinese politics. The legitimacy of CCP rule, Wang explained, is based on the ‘endorsement of the people’ and the ‘choice made by the people.’ He elaborated that the CCP depends on the people being satisfied and happy.
Through his comments, Wang was trying to imply that the anti-corruption effort was much more than a short-term expedient for the new leadership to win favor from the public or to establish political authority through factional or interest-groups-related struggles—just some of the hypotheses offered by outside observers for the push. He pointed out that anti-corruption isn’t a political campaign or movement—Mao’s Cultural Revolution taught the CCP that campaigns and movements eventually cease to exist. Anti-corruption, this time, will ‘always be on the road’, and ‘there is only a beginning, never an end’.
Those remarks, together with the invocation of the all-important concept of CCP legitimacy, suggest that Wang is seeing anti-corruption as a long-term strategy to maintain and enhance the legitimacy of CCP rule in China; it’s not just a temporary device for consolidating the rule of the new Xi leadership. Such an explanation would refute many existing hypotheses about anti-corruption. According to this view, what’s at stake in anti-corruption is nothing less than the legitimacy and survival of the CCP as the sole ruling party in China—something much more significant than the survival of the current Xi leadership, which, after all, has an implicit two-term limit of 10 years.
But is that explanation credible? Wang struck many of us in attendance at the meeting as a deeply impressive political leader and as an intellectual. His remarks on the many issues of dissatisfaction the Chinese people have with CCP rule left the impression that the current generation of CCP leaders face significant governance challenges in China. He spoke of the difficulties and complexities of CCP rule in today’s ‘extraordinary difficulty’ period, and he even said that the new leadership hasn’t taken rest for a single day since it took office.
His legitimacy-based explanation of the anti-corruption strategy would be readily comprehensible to a Western audience. The term ‘legitimacy’—Wang used the Chinese translation of hefaxing—is, after all, of Western origin. The difference between Wang’s narrative and many existing explanations for the anti-corruption effort comes down to the timeline: one takes a short-term tactical perspective, the other a long-term strategic view. While many Western analyses focus on the short-term interest maximization and political survival of the new Xi leadership, Wang takes a strategic view geared toward the long-term legitimacy of CCP rule beyond the expediencies of the current leadership.
A second, and final, instalment will look at CCP rule and legitimacy in the context of the party’s new ‘four comprehensives’ governing strategy advanced early this year.