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

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

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

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.

Read more

Australia’s regional foreign policy seems to have recently veered in the direction of closer support for Japan and away from a more neutral approach to the rise of China—presumably the result of a yet unannounced shift on the part of the Abbott Government. This has been the subject of a fair bit of debate, including an excellent piece by Robert Ayson here on The Strategist and by Hugh White in the Fairfax media the next day. To test the views of another country with a strong interest in the north Asia dynamic, I recently had the opportunity to speak at length to Singapore’s impressive Defence Minister, Dr Ng Eng Hen, to find that he and his Government have a far more nuanced view of the situation than that expressed by many Australian politicians.

Firstly, he explained that the rise of China is a simple fact and that the country is now a global power whose size, aspirations and strength needs to be accommodated and that everyone is going to have to adjust to this new reality. Despite having a very close military relationship with the US—particularly after a 1990 basing agreement—Singapore sees absolutely no need to chose sides over matters such as regional territorial disputes. When pushed on what appears to be Beijing’s aggressive style, he declined to do any finger pointing, instead saying that issues of territoriality in places such as the South China Sea involve a number of parties. Additionally, he took the view that Asia in particular owes China a debt of economic gratitude for saving the region from the worst effects of the global financial crisis. Read more