The Contest of the Century (11 page)

In 2005, the U.S. and India signed a nuclear deal which, at first sight, appeared to herald an exciting era of close relations. In return for Washington’s turning a blind eye to India’s new nuclear weapons, the U.S. hoped that New Delhi would become an important partner in its regional diplomacy. Commentators in the U.S. gushed about the meeting of minds between the two biggest democracies in the world, multicultural U.S. and opinionated, querulous India. Since then, those high hopes have been dashed. Washington has become frustrated at India’s willingness to trade with Iran and to side with China at the Copenhagen climate-change conference. The more enthusiastic U.S. supporters of the deal were surprised to find that India still wants to conduct an independent foreign policy. India remains intensely proud of its hard-won autonomy and history of neutrality. The last thing it wants to be is a full-fledged American ally, to play the sort of loyal lieutenant role that Britain does. Nevertheless, New Delhi remains deeply suspicious about the nature of a rising China, and its relationship with Beijing will be shaped by how China decides to pursue its interests in its Indian Ocean backyard. The “String of Pearls” has had more resonance in India than in the U.S., because the idea anticipates India’s fear that China will attempt to encircle it. The prospect of a Chinese naval base on its eastern flank (Burma) or its southern tip (Sri Lanka) plays into those fears. And nothing could exacerbate India’s anxieties more than a permanent Chinese presence in Pakistan, which would be interpreted in New Delhi as a deliberate move against India. If China makes a concerted push to establish a permanent presence in the Indian Ocean, India will be pushed closer to the U.S.

AMERICAN PARTNERS?

As China’s interests and ambitions expand, it is only natural that it will start to think about how to project naval power in the Indian Ocean, yet
at every stage it finds itself facing obstacles that will not be easily overcome. It is years away from a naval fleet that could genuinely challenge the U.S., and it will be very hard to establish the sort of permanent naval bases that would undergird a real military presence. And if it does make a big push into the Indian Ocean, it is likely to pour oil on the slow-burning rivalry with India. Given such formidable obstacles, it is possible to imagine that China will take a very different path in the Indian Ocean, and that it will look to collaborate more with the U.S. Navy. Washington has an opportunity to build a different sort of relationship with Beijing in the Indian Ocean, one that is much less inherently confrontational. Admiral Michael Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, used to talk about a thousand-ship navy, a global maritime network that would share the tasks of policing the oceans and of responding to disasters like the 2004 Asian tsunami. There is a chance China could be gradually drawn into the framework of burden sharing in the Indian Ocean that already exists. These exercises would be naval confidence-building measures, a way for the two navies to get to know each other and to learn how to rub up against each other. The rivalry in the Near Seas will not disappear, of course, but it is possible that collaboration in the Indian Ocean could take some of the edge off that competition. Or, as retired U.S. Admiral Eric McVadon once put it: “One can readily imagine a scenario in which U.S. Navy F-18s from carriers are in air-to-air combat with Chinese planes over Taiwan. One can just as readily imagine those same planes… protecting sea-lanes from pirates and terrorists.”

In small ways, this is already happening. For the last two decades, the most dangerous place in the world for commercial shipping has been the coast off Somalia, including the Gulf of Aden, where pirates have been able to operate freely. Chinese ships have been among those kidnapped. As a result, since 2009, China has been taking part in the international anti-piracy operations in the region. With the U.S. Seventh Fleet based in Bahrain often in the lead, the operations are an organized show of force by more than twenty of the world’s largest navies, which escort commercial vessels through the most vulnerable waters. The contributing countries include Denmark, the U.K., Netherlands, Pakistan, and South Korea—in other words, a broad cross-section of the international community. Chinese naval officials now attend the meetings in Bahrain
of the international anti-piracy coalition, which goes by the name Shared Awareness and Deconfliction Group (SHADE), a ghoulish acronym that bears the fingerprints of Pentagon bureaucrats. From 2009 to 2012, Chinese warships escorted more than five thousand commercial ships, most of them not Chinese, through the Gulf of Aden. In the larger anti-piracy operations, a convoy of ships from various countries travels up and down the East African coast in a carefully organized pattern, usually with a U.S. destroyer at the helm. The Chinese ships have never operated under U.S. command, but on occasion they have tagged along on these larger drills. The Chinese captains sail five nautical miles to the north or south of the convoy, maintaining a discreet and wary distance—a powerful metaphor for a country that is still not quite sure whether it wants to collaborate with, or challenge, the U.S. maritime order.

Tone-Deaf in Hanoi

W
HEN YANG JIECHI STOOD
to speak, he was almost shaking with anger. China’s foreign minister launched into a twenty-five-minute diatribe aimed at most of the other governments at the 2010 Asia-Pacific Summit. “China is a big country,” he fumed. “And you are all small countries. And that is a fact.” The other ministers were arranged in a square at the Hanoi Convention Center and seated in large leather armchairs, which made it look as if they were slouching, even recoiling. But their mood was very different. A group of Asian ministers had just demonstrated a rare and powerful act of solidarity in defiance of Beijing. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had declared that the U.S. viewed the stability of the South China Sea as a fundamental U.S. interest—a pointed rebuke to China, which argues that the disputes in the area have nothing to do with Washington. After she sat down, representatives of twelve other nations, including the host, Vietnam, stood to issue similar statements, some of them with even more direct criticisms of China.

Yang, who started out as an English translator, built his career in part on strong personal connections with the U.S. Back in the late 1970s, he translated for George H. W. Bush and James Baker on a trip to Tibet
and became close enough to the Bush family to earn the nickname “Tiger” Yang. After Tiananmen, when Beijing wanted to mend fences with Washington, it was Yang who was dispatched to talk to then president Bush. It is an indication of how far the mood has changed in Beijing that by 2010 Yang felt the need to deliver such a public smack-down; to make sure he got the message right, he was overheard by some diplomats in the corridor beforehand rehearsing lines. Looking directly at Hillary Clinton, Yang told her that “outside powers” should not get involved in the South China Sea. He lectured the nations from Southeast Asia not to become a cabal organized by an outside power. And then he turned to his Vietnamese hosts, the only other government present run by a Communist party. Yang told them they were behaving like a “capitalist sinner.” “As a fellow socialist country, you should be fraternal. Don’t let yourself be used by an ideological enemy,” he said. In the words of one of the diplomats present, it was a “bullying, eloquent, intimidating” speech. But the effect was disastrous. In less than half an hour, Yang managed to tear up more than a decade of subtle, diligent, and highly effective Chinese diplomacy.

More often than not, ministerial summits are all about the smiling photo, especially in Asia, where great emphasis is placed on presenting a unified front. The July 2010 ASEAN Regional Forum in Hanoi has often been cited as the start of the Obama administration’s “pivot” to Asia, a broader shift in strategic priorities away from the Middle East and toward addressing the rise of China. But the real significance was elsewhere, in the mini–Asian revolt that prompted Yang’s outburst. The summit lifted the lid on the profound anxieties that China’s rise has started to prompt across Asia. From Vietnam to Mongolia, from Japan to Australia, China’s expanding military might and political confidence are now producing an existential crisis, the perennial angst of “small countries” living alongside a “big country” they do not quite trust.

The central geopolitical assumption about China’s rise is that economic heft will bring with it political influence, starting in Asia. During the last ten years, China has become the biggest trading partner of almost every Asian economy, in lots of cases pushing the U.S. out of that position. Yet Asian leaders have started to turn that logic on its head. The dozen governments which lined up behind Hillary Clinton
in Hanoi were setting out a new dynamic of Asian diplomacy. Rather than acquiesce to China, most Asian governments will look to counter its influence if it tries to throw its weight around, enlisting the help of the U.S. There is no natural Chinese sphere of influence in Asia. The defining story in Asia in recent years is not the U.S. “pivot”; it is the Asian backlash.

During the Mao period, China supported Communist insurrections across the region in a bid to destabilize unfriendly governments, and during his first few years in power, Deng Xiaoping was equally careless of the opinions of his neighbors. In 1979, he ordered an invasion of Vietnam, and China fought a short skirmish with Vietnam in the South China Sea in 1988. Over time, however, Deng started to take the advice of Lee Kuan Yew, the Singaporean leader, who has at times been an unofficial mentor to China’s leaders, and who warned him of the need to mend fences with the rest of the region. Deng’s “hiding the brightness” strategy came to have as one of its central priorities establishing good relations with the rest of Asia; if China was going to be accepted as a participant in the global economy, diplomacy in Asia would be an essential task. In particular, Deng wanted Chinese exporters to be plugged into the network of Asian manufacturing that had sprung up since the 1960s in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. As China’s economy started to take off, Deng instructed his colleagues to be careful about antagonizing their neighbors. For much of the 1990s and 2000s, China went out of its way to ease the concerns of the rest of Asia about its expanding power and wealth, a strategy that came to be known as its “charm offensive.”
It settled the outstanding land-border disputes with almost all of its neighbors, including Russia, Mongolia, Vietnam, and Burma, often with significant concessions (Burma, for instance, got 82 percent of the disputed land).

The Asian financial crisis in 1997 provided a huge tactical opening. From Bangkok to Seoul, Asian capitals were incensed at the high-handed and dogmatic way they were treated by the U.S. Treasury Department and the International Monetary Fund. Leaders complained loudly that Washington paid no attention to the particular conditions of their countries, opting instead to push the same cookie-cutter solution for everyone’s problems. At the same time, China won respect for resisting
the urge to devalue its currency and for its calm stewardship during the crisis. China also started to offer cheap loans and aid packages across the region. Anyone traveling through Southeast Asia these days can hardly miss the Chinese-made schools, government buildings, or football stadiums.
The mood toward China shifted dramatically. Asian students started to come in large numbers to Chinese universities. Anti-Chinese sentiment had been so intense in Indonesia in the 1970s that Suharto banned the use of Chinese characters in newspapers for the country’s large ethnic Chinese population. Yet, when my wife, Angelica, enrolled at a Chinese-language course in 2005 at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, almost half her classmates were Indonesians.

Chinese diplomats even had a poetic phrase to frame the policy—“
mulin, fulin, anlin
,” “establish good neighbors, make them feel prosperous, and make them feel secure.” Diplomats from other countries would marvel at the patience and long-term strategy they witnessed in their Chinese counterparts. After 9/11, when the U.S. became obsessed with the threat from terrorism and embroiled in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Chinese stepped up their efforts to present themselves to the rest of Asia as a reliable and trustworthy regional leader. Beijing also promoted regional organizations that excluded the U.S.—with some success, given that senior Bush-administration officials did not even bother to attend a handful of the regional summits. (President George W. Bush annoyed some of his colleagues by pushing to have Islamist terrorism on the agenda at Asia-Pacific summits.) Across the region, America’s friends and allies started to doubt its commitment, providing an opening for China to cultivate its own supporters. During much of the 2000s, it was easy to imagine that Asia was gradually slipping into a Chinese sphere of influence, and it became fashionable to write obituaries for American influence in the region. “We are happy to have China as our big brother,” Gloria Arroyo, the president of the Philippines—once a U.S. colony and still a treaty ally—said in 2007.