China Archives - Page 66 of 76

China challenges Philippines in the South China Sea

19 March 2014/in Strategist Article

While much of the world was busy watching Russia swallow Crimea, few realised that an also dangerous territorial tit-for-tat had begun to unfold earlier this month more in the South China Sea.

At Second Thomas Shoal, a handful of Philippine marines have long been stationed and re-provisioned on the rusting deck of the BRP Sierra Madre, a Philippine naval ship half-sunk into the reef in 1999. Ever since, the vessel and the marines have served to embody Manila’s claim of sovereignty over the shoal. More recently, China has tried to raise the salience of its own claim by intensively patrolling the area.

On 9 March 2014, China made a move to end the status quo at the shoal. For the first time in 15 years, Beijing stopped Manila from delivering supplies to the Sierra Madre. The Chinese Coast Guard forced two Philippine ships to turn away. Manila answered the blockade by successfully dropping food and water to the marines by air. It was then up to Manila whether to send in another supply ship or plane, and up to Beijing whether to leave it alone, chase it away, sink it, or shoot it down. Read more

ASPI suggests

14 March 2014/in Strategist Article

This week, Chair of the US Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Dianne Feinstein (pictured above), made a bold speech that accused the CIA of hacking into a stand-alone network used for an investigation into the agency’s Bush-era rendition, detention and interrogation program (Senator Feinstein’s full statement is available here, with video here). This is the latest development in an ongoing feud between the CIA and the Senate over a report that demonstrates the CIA misled Congress, the White House and the Justice Department and overstated the program’s success. The CIA believes the Senate Committee took secret documents without permission, prompting the search of the network without the committee’s knowledge. CIA director John Brennan has defended his organisation, stating ‘nothing could be further from the truth. I mean we wouldn’t do that.’ Meanwhile, political satirist Jon Stewart has weighed into the controversy, ridiculing what he sees as Senator Feinstein’s hypocrisy as in the past she has defended the NSA’s surveillance programs and poking holes in Director Brennan’s defence in light of the CIA’s history.

IISS’ Mark Fitzpatrick is calling out what he sees is China’s hypocrisy in objecting to Japan’s stockpile of plutonium, 331 kg of which is weapons-grade. Japan has planned to return the weapons-grade material to the US (an announcement of the repatriation was to be made at the 2014 Nuclear Security Summit) yet China accuses Japan of holding onto the material as a nuclear hedge. The irony, Fitzpatrick notes, is that, Japan is compliant with IAEA verification measures but:

China possesses about 200 nuclear weapons and is cagey about nuclear transparency. There are valid reasons to criticise Japan’s stockpile of plutonium, but China’s exaggerations in this regard undermine its own arguments for pursuing plutonium reprocessing.

Reader response: Power sharing and risk management in Hugh White’s ‘China Choice’

10 March 2014/in Strategist Article

Over the past few years I’ve developed arguments for three linked but separate propositions about relations between the US and China, and what Australia should do about them. First, America faces a serious challenge to its primacy in Asia from China. Second, America should respond to that challenge by trying to negotiate a power-sharing arrangement with China, rather than by competing with China for primacy or withdrawing from Asia. Third, Australia should encourage America to share power rather than take one of the other two options.

Almost all the responses I’ve received here and in America focus on the first of these propositions, with relatively few engaging the second and even fewer addressing the third. I’m therefore especially grateful to Mark for his characteristically thoughtful and rigorous post on this issue. Of course his focus on the third issue doesn’t necessarily mean he agrees with the first two. I’m pretty sure he agrees that China’s challenge is serious, but he foreshadows his disagreement with my analysis of the best US response to it. I’m looking forward to hearing his reasons for that, but meanwhile he’s presented an important argument for the idea that even if sharing power was the best response for America to make, encouraging the US to share power isn’t the smartest thing for Australia to do. Read more

A rising power looks down under: Chinese perspectives on Australia

5 March 2014/in Strategist Article

Today ASPI has released a Strategy paper examining Chinese perspectives on Australia. Dr Jingdong Yuan has drawn from official Chinese documents, leaders’ statements, media coverage, academic analyses, and interviews with specialists to provide a detailed insight into Chinese views of Sino-Australian relations. Using this insight, Dr Yuan provides recommendations to the government on the continued development of the growing relationship between Australia and China. Here’s the executive summary:

Sino-Australian diplomatic, economic and security ties have experienced significant growth over the past four decades. The general trends have been positive, especially in the economic area, where the two countries have developed strong and mutually beneficial interdependence. China has become Australia’s largest trading partner, and its growing demands for resources will continue to affect Australian economic wellbeing. Australia, in turn, has become a major destination for Chinese tourists and a favoured choice for higher education. Canberra has played an important role in encouraging and drawing China into regional multilateral institutions such as APEC, and the two countries have cooperated on major international and regional issues. However, bilateral relations periodically encounter difficulties and occasionally suffer major setbacks, largely due to differences in ideologies and sociopolitical systems, issues such as Tibet, Taiwan and human rights, and emerging challenges ranging from cybersecurity to the geostrategic shift in the region marked by China’s rise and the US’s rebalancing to Asia. Read more

China’s rise: the strategic climate is getting colder

2 March 2014/in Strategist Article

Last week I spoke at a conference on ‘Peace and Security in East Asia’ in Taipei, jointly organised by the Taiwanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and National Chengchi University. The main topic discussed was China’s announcement in November last year of the establishment of an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) over parts of the East China Sea. My speech focused on the strategic implications of the ADIZ for regional stability and on possible responses. As I’ve argued here on The Strategist, the ADIZ adds fuel to an already volatile security situation. And the conference reinforced my impression that China’s rise is leading us to a colder strategic climate in East Asia, and possibly Southeast Asia.

There are three particularly worrying, interrelated trends. Firstly, China appears to have abandoned its foreign policy doctrine of a ‘peaceful rise’. Instead, the ADIZ can be regarded as just one element in a larger strategy of trying to assert sovereignty in the East China Sea and vast parts of the South China Sea, as reflected in Beijing’s ‘nine-dashed line’. Read more

Shaping the narrative: new Chinese documentary revisits Indonesia and the South China Sea

26 February 2014/in Strategist Article

Several months ago I wrote on The Strategist about a March 2013 incident between Indonesian and Chinese maritime law enforcement vessels in the South China Sea. Local Indonesian news sources confirmed the incident but Indonesian Defense Ministry officials reportedly ‘claimed that the fishing boat incident never took place’. Several weeks after my post was published, Commander Agus Heryana, commander of the Indonesian naval base in Tanjung Pinang, stated that the situation in the South China Sea remained safe despite ‘efforts blowing it out of proportion’, noting that ‘the navies deployed in the area are not operating aggressively’.

The latter part of this statement is undoubtedly accurate: the incident didn’t directly involve any naval vessels from either nation. But one’s left wondering about the veracity of, and rationale behind, the Defense Ministry’s denials about the incident. Taken together, the comments suggest a possible effort to downplay such incidents or to limit their exposure in the media. Like its neighbour Malaysia, Indonesia has preferred to employ quiet diplomacy in regard to the South China Sea disputes more broadly, keeping any confrontations or encounters at sea out of the press for fear of needlessly stoking tensions or damaging its image of neutrality. Read more

Reader response: China’s new dream

25 February 2014/in Strategist Article

David Hale’s ‘China’s new dream‘ offers a tremendously rich picture of China’s economic and financial situation at home and globally. It’s probably the fullest, most up-to-date account available on the ‘re-rise of China’, which affects us all.

Hale makes excellent suggestions, such as raising the retirement age, and makes important points about the growing relation between the Internet and financial services, and other matters. His tourism figures are stunning; Chinese will soon strut the global shopping stage as Americans did in the 1950s and 1960s, bringing both profits and resentment to cities on every continent.

Global markets permit a jump start for poor countries but the process comes to an end. Understandably, Hale isn’t sure China can become a high-income country, but regardless of per capita levels, China has become an economic giant. Not even political setbacks are going to change that reality. And Hale is surely correct to warn that even a democratic China would ‘still be vulnerable to populism and nationalism’. Read more

ASPI suggests

14 February 2014/in Strategist Article

We’re kicking off today’s round-up with a useful primer from the Center for International Maritime Security (CIMSEC) on five strategic architectures that can be applied to the case of US–China confrontation. For an illustration of one of the concepts, check out the map above (click to enlarge, source: globalita.com via CIMSEC).

Also on CIMSEC, Zachary Keck has just published a piece on the limits of AirSea Battle (ASB) and what this means for the United States. He argues that China’s recent successes in expanding influence in the South and East China Seas (known as ‘small-stick diplomacy’) using non-naval assets renders ASB inadequate. Read more here.

What’s it like to be an ‘alliance manager’? Over at War on the Rocks, Patrick Cronin from CNAS takes a look at a day in the life of Japan’s Foreign Minister, Fumio Kishida, who also has the unenviable task of managing US–Japan relations amidst diplomatic challenges that include Prime Minister Abe’s recent visit to Yasukuni shrine. Read more

Rising China, troubled America, crouching Australia

13 February 2014/in Strategist Article

Not too far back in Australian history, large amounts of anger and angst—buried not too deep in the national psyche—would have arisen if Chinese warships had conducted exercises in Australia’s maritime approaches.

Now, for the first time, China’s Navy has done just that. Two Chinese destroyers and a landing ship carried out the exercise—as legal as it was unannounced—between Christmas Island and Java, before heading out into the Indian Ocean. Little wonder the Australian Air Force ‘scrambled’ and did some surveillance.

No public anger is on show but some low-level angst is about. Rory Medcalf and C.Raja Mohan argue that China’s going Indo-Pacific and the exercise is ‘a wake-up call to anyone still doubting China’s long-term intention to be able to project force in the Indian Ocean.’ Read more

Pushing back on China: a rational approach

13 February 2014/in Strategist Article

I appreciated Jake Douglas’ response to the article Ely Ratner and I co-authored, ‘Roiling the Waters‘, in the January/February edition of Foreign Policy. Douglas’ constructive engagement helps to focus and clarify arguments within this important debate.

His basic argument is that the kind of firmer response Ratner and I (among others) are advocating to Chinese assertiveness is misguided because it is pointless. According to his assessment, Beijing is both unswervingly resolute in pursuing its ambitions in the Asia-Pacific and will inevitably be the stronger party as it grows economically. As Douglas writes:

First, China’s resolve is at least as strong as America’s…Backing down now…would be absolutely humiliating for Beijing…Second, China is rapidly acquiring the edge in operational capability in Asia, and there’s little the United States can or is willing to do about it.

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