We’ve had a fair bit of coverage recently on the question of whether the Obama administration is starting to push back against China after it came in for widespread criticism early on for supposedly appeasing Beijing.
Further evidence that it is came shortly after we published a strongly worded (and convincing) op-ed by Patrick Cronin arguing that China was going too far with its South China Sea claims and threatening the freedom of movement that's a lifeline of free trade in the region.
Cronin is right that China’s decision to claim the sea as a core interest (alongside Tibet and Taiwan) is troubling and arbitrary, with Beijing claiming, as he notes, the ‘right to control navigation and research activities, not just fishing and seabed resources, within their Exclusive Economic Zones.’
And US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appears to agree, saying Friday in Hanoi that resolving territorial disputes off China’s southern coast is ‘a leading diplomatic priority.’ The announcement will have infuriated China as much as it will have pleased Vietnam, which has for some time now been battling (in diplomatic terms) an increasingly assertive Beijing that has claimed 80 percent of the South China Sea, including the disputed Spratlys and Paracels and having its vessels ram Vietnamese fishing boats.
Clinton’s comments came just days before planned military exercises with South Korea involving the aircraft carrier the USS George Washington and F-22 stealth fighters among other aircraft, exercises that have also irritated Beijing.
So how will China respond? A good indicator of the way the situation is viewed by policymakers in China came with a Global Times opinion piece on the ‘American shadow over South China Sea.’ The Times warned that it will be difficult to maintain regional stability if South-east Asian nations allow themselves to ‘be controlled by the strategic guidance of the US’ and warned: 'With growing economic power, China and the US may encounter more clashes in China's adjacent sea.'
I asked Dan Lynch, a China specialist with the University of Southern California, for his take on the issue, and he was in no doubt about the importance of what’s unfolding.
‘The United States has now effectively declared that its national interest can’t accommodate exclusive Chinese sovereignty over the South China Sea territories’, thereby willfully frustrating a key Chinese Communist Party ambition, he told me.
Lynch said this will likely have a two-stage effect, with Chinese leaders set to be ‘extremely angry’ and ‘searching for ways to counter the US move’ but probably not coming up with anything effective. ‘The thing to watch out for in this phase would be radical Chinese steps that end up doing China more harm than good.’
And the second stage? He suggested:
‘As it becomes more widely apparent that the US has blocked Chinese attainment of a self-declared core national interest, China will suffer a loss of international prestige—a major blow to the reputation of a realist state striving to accelerate its rise through the inspiration of awe, near and far. China will no longer seem so invincible.It will, in fact, appear humiliated, depending on how the development is spun.’
So what can China do now? Lynch told me it’s difficult to say, simply because there isn’t really a logical move that Beijing can make.
‘I note that the foreign minister in his statement tried to appeal to pan-Asianism.That will likely fall very flat…So we could get a series of seemingly disconnected tactics that ultimately fail to change the basic situation,’ he said.
I also asked Lynch, who has studied Chinese state propaganda in some depth, how the leadership is likely to respond for a domestic audience, and whether it will be tempted to ramp up the rhetoric over the issue.
He said the Communist Party will have to ‘be careful not to rouse too MUCH anger among Chinese citizens precisely because there's not much it can do about the situation. If it does decide to make a lot of hay out of the development, it will be a mistake, because it would put the limitations of its power on display for the Chinese people to see.’
Reddit
Digg
StumbleUpon
Delicious
Technorati
Yahoo
Google
Plurk
Andrew Wilson
Indeed, this is a very interesting development. This development seems to coincide with Donald Kagan’s advice in his book ” On the Causes of War and the Preservation of Peace”. By not allowing Beijing to keep claiming “core national interests” as its military power begins to catch up with its economic power, the U.S. is effectively curbing, for the time being anyhow, China’s notion of what it “can and can’t” get away with.
Certainly there are core national interests, and the three previous ones certainly fit the bill. If the U.S. allowed China’s rhetoric to turn into action and then tried to reverse it in the following years, this could have ended up like the Second Punic War, in which the Romans didn’t draw a clear line in the sand with Hannibal.
This is a good tactical move by the U.S. Hopefully, a regional mechanism can be initiated which allows the problem to be solved. If not, this issue will re-surface in a few years as Beijing’s power projection abilities grow and it tests the U.S. resolve on this front.
harry
lol now I know what hypocricy really is, lol refusing to post my comment.
123 Abc
China should stop dreaming about the 16th century Qung-Ming-Ching dynasty and .. it better could wake up to the reality.
And China should keep it’s core interests and deep big dreams in deeper pockets. Nobody is willing to believe those interests.
Posterman
What I don’t understand is how China can make such extreme claims over not only islands but the ocean between them. This is so far from Hainan, and so close to other countries, that looking at a to scale map (most Chinese maps showing the claims have an insert at a much smaller scale than the mainland, so the claims don’t look so ridiculous). Imagine if the UK claimed sovereignty over all oceans between the UK and the Falklands in the same way? Or the US and Hawaii etc?
I suspect that the Chinese claims of full sovereignty and core national interest are meant to strengthen their hand in any negotiations with other states about resource extraction / sharing agreements. They can’t afford to have Japan, Korea drawing closer to Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, Etc (ASEAN + the latter) which is likely to happen if China attempts to exert full control over such a large area of ocean. The Hainan spy plane incident (well timed to focus a new US president on China) and the 2009 Naval collision (well timed to focus a new US president on China) may be forerunners of similar well timed isolated incidents, but China still has too far to go economically.
Vietnamese
If the world has less one US., the world will be much more peaceful than what we have now. Americans behaves just like what they show in Hollywood, nothing but ugly cowboys.
VGM
China is just going to push all these Asian countries back into the arms of the Americans if they push on with this policy of core national interests. The only way to counter the menace of the PRC is for the like minded South East Asian democracies (including non democratic ones like Vietnam) to work together with the US/Australia/Japan & India). In the long run even Russia will realize, that the PRC will be a threat to them and not an ally. China is a great country nation & culture, but it must learn to respect its smaller neighbours . At this moment in time the USA is definitely the lesser evil.