China continues to play a long game in asserting its territorial claims and hegemonic ambitions in the South China Sea (SCS). After its confrontation with Vietnam over the Haiyang Shiyou 981 oil rig in May this year, Beijing has recently announced that it intends to build lighthouses on five islands in the SCS, two of which appear to be in waters also claimed by Vietnam. Indeed, China’s traditional position of ‘strategic ambiguity’ regarding its willingness to compromise on its territorial claims within what it calls the ‘nine-dash line’ looks increasingly obsolete.

Its assertiveness in the SCS needs to be seen as part of a new framework of Chinese foreign policy emerging under President Xi Xinping. China watchers point out that the new leadership appears to have conducted a reassessment of China’s security environment, its relative position and policy responses. Predecessor Hu Jintao’s description of the international environment as a ‘harmonious world’ has disappeared. So too has Deng Xiaoping’s guideline to ‘hide our capabilities and bide our time, be good at maintaining a low profile and never claim leadership.’ Instead, the security environment is assessed to be ‘under a new situation’ and according to Xi, China ‘needs to protect and make the best use of the strategic opportunity period to safeguard China’s national sovereignty, security and development interests.’ Read more

Hugh White writes ‘I don’t believe that Australia must make a choice between America and China’ and adds another perilous twist to his ‘China-Choice’ journey. Well, you could have fooled me! Hugh and I agree that the future great-power balance in the Asia-Pacific is critical to Australia’s interests, but it’s dismaying that there seems so little else about which we might find ourselves on the same bus. While this debate is enjoyable there’s surely a need at some point to quit the word-play and aim for a common understanding about what the correct policy settings should be for Australia and the great powers. In that spirit, I appreciate Hugh setting out as clearly as he can the differences between his thinking and mine. Here are my thoughts about the limitations of Hugh’s argument.

First, I can’t find an empirical basis for Hugh’s claim that a US–China clash is inevitable unless we accommodate Chinese aspirations for more power and influence. In The China Choice the closest Hugh comes to demonstrating the inevitability of a US–China confrontation is to refer to Thucydides: ‘the growth of the power of Athens and the alarm which this inspired in Sparta, made war inevitable.’ Hugh says ‘we may wonder at the power of these beliefs and motives but we cannot dismiss them.’ True, but the remarkable thing about ‘inevitability’ is that it’s impervious to fact. The reality of US–China relations is that they are overwhelmingly positive. Hugh’s answer to that is simply to reassert that the logic of great power competition means that sooner or later hostility will break out unless America starts accommodating China. But when will that happen, 2015, 2020? There’s no compelling analogy between Athens–Sparta and Washington–Beijing. Read more

Peter’s sprightly post leaves no room for doubt: he doesn’t buy the argument that he thinks I’m making about how we should respond to China’s rise. I’m glad to hear that because I don’t buy the argument he thinks I’m making either. Like him, I don’t believe that Australia must make a choice between America and China—or at least not the kind of once-and-for-all, all-or-nothing choice he has in mind. On the contrary, like Peter, I think the key aim of Australian policy should be to avoid having to make that kind of choice.

Where we differ, I think, is over what we should do to avoid being forced to make that ‘big choice’ between America and China. Peter would, I expect, agree that whether we can avoid making the big choice depends mainly on the trajectory of the US–China relationship. If they get on okay with one another, we can get on okay with both of them. But the worse they get on, the starker the choice we’ll face between them. And in the event of a conflict we would face a big choice indeed. Read more

A journey even more remarkable than the Chinese Ming Dynasty fleets’ discovery of Australia in the 1420s (at least according to Hu Jintao in 2003) is Hugh White’s journey of discovery on the China Choice road. Readers will be familiar with the bleak landscape of this voyage: confronted with a growing China determined to dominate its region, Australia must choose between its biggest market or its American ally. The choice is either to give China breathing space to manifest its destiny or ultimately go to war to stifle Beijing’s ambition. The prospect of war is so terrible that Australia’s only sensible option is not to cooperate with Japan or, most likely, any other partner in the region, because to engage with others is to encroach on Chinese breathing space. And that will take us to war.

The latest staging post on the China Choice road, is an article in the Fairfax broadsheets lamenting Tony Abbott’s commitment to closer defence and economic cooperation with Japan. This is a bad thing, Hugh argues, because Japan’s interest is to gather around it countries that will fight alongside it against China. In the White world of international security, where countries behave like the planets set on their immutable orbits, there’s no other outcome than that China and Japan will go to war over rocks in the sea while the US, Australia and any other country silly enough to limit China’s breathing space will be drawn into the conflict. So obvious is this desolate outcome, Hugh concludes, that either Tony Abbott just doesn’t understand the celestial movements of countries in White’s world, or:

A second possibility is that Mr Abbott is just pretending not to understand. He does understand what is going on in Asia, and has decided that, as regional strategic rivalries escalate, Australia’s best move is to spur them on—not just by strengthening our alliance with America, but by becoming Japan’s ally against China.

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Japan has quickly risen to become a defence partner for Australia that ranks beside New Zealand and Britain. Thus, Japan sits on the second tier, with the traditional Anglo allies, below the peak where the US presides as the prime, principal and paramount ally.

To see Japan as one of Australia’s closest security partners is to describe a set of changes that have arrived with great speed in only two decades.

When Shinzo Abe told Australia’s Parliament on Tuesday that he wanted to ‘make a truly new basis for our relations’, he was stating a future ambition for Japan, but building on a structure already in place.

The key fact of that structure was in this sentence: ‘There are many things Japan and Australia can do together by each of us joining hands with the United States, an ally for both our nations’. As my previous post noted, Australia and Japan are becoming allies, without a formal when-the-shooting-starts-bilateral-alliance, because of the trilateral that expresses their alliances with the US. Read more