The Contest of the Century Read online

  The confrontation was significant not just because of the risk that it might have escalated, but because it amplified one of the big underlying political issues in the western Pacific. China’s new naval capabilities are interlaced with a broader political strategy designed to exert more control over its maritime reaches. Beijing’s most extravagant claim is in the South China Sea, where a series of islets, reefs, and rocks are disputed by a number of countries, including Vietnam, the Philippines, and China. Beijing argues it has a historical right to be the dominant power in the area, a claim expressed in China’s now famous “nine-dash-line” map, which assumes ownership of 80 to 90 percent of the South China Sea. (Chapter 3 will have a more detailed discussion of some of these disputes.) At the same time, China is pushing a version of international law which would potentially give it the right to exclude foreign militaries from large sections of the seas that surround it. A United Nations convention called the Law of the Sea tries to codify rules for national ownership of the world’s oceans. The law gives countries an “exclusive economic zone”—or EEZ—that runs two hundred nautical miles from their coastline, where they have the rights to resources in the water or under the seabed. According to the U.S.—and a majority of other governments—there is a right to freedom of navigation in this zone that includes military vessels. However, China is the leading member of a smaller but significant group of countries which think that foreign militaries should be excluded from their EEZ unless they have permission. In particular, China objects to surveillance vessels operating too near to its coast, just as the U.S.’s Impeccable was doing.

  Taken together, the two claims have huge implications. China argues that many of the islands in the South China Sea qualify to have their own exclusive economic zones, even though some are no more than largely submerged rocks and many are administered by other countries. As a result, China argues that most of the South China Sea is part of its exclusive economic zone. If it takes control of all the islands, and if its legal interpretation of the Law of the Sea stands, China would be giving itself the political case to turn away the vessels of foreign navies from most of the South China Sea. Given the centrality of the sea to the global economy, this is a far-reaching claim that has enormous implications for everyone in the region—and especially for the United States. Although China’s ultimate aims are still not entirely clear, the evidence of growing ambitions is unnerving the U.S. military.

  “China is knowingly, operationally and incrementally seizing maritime rights of its neighbors under the rubric of a maritime history that is not only contested in the international community but has largely been fabricated,” Captain James Fanell, deputy chief of staff for intelligence for the U.S. Pacific Fleet told a conference in 2013. He described an intelligence briefing he attends every morning at 6 a.m. which brings together the U.S. military’s leading Asia-Pacific analysts. “Every day it is about China,” he said, adding: “They are taking control of maritime areas that have never before been administered or controlled in the last 5,000 years by any regime called ‘China.’… China’s conduct is destabilizing the Asian maritime environment.”

  Even with these claims, it might seem improbable that China would seek to tamper with the right to freedom of navigation. China has been an enormous beneficiary of open seas; its economy is based on the free flow of imported raw materials into the country and the export of manufactured products. The assumption among many governments in the region had always been that, even if China would defend its territorial claims fiercely, it would not let those political disputes contaminate its booming commercial links with the rest of the region. Few worried that China would use its growing power to act as a toll keeper of naval traffic in the western Pacific.

  Yet confidence in such an assumption is gradually beginning to weaken. Over the last few years, China has shown a willingness to use a form of economic blackmail and bullying during political disputes that raises real questions about how it would behave if it were ever to control the sea-lanes through the South China Sea. During a standoff with Tokyo in 2010, after the Japanese coast guard arrested a Chinese fisherman who had rammed one of its vessels in disputed waters, China limited exports to Japan of rare earths—a group of commodities which China controls and which are central to the manufacture of many products, such as cell phones. When ships from China and the Philippines clashed in 2012 over control of a small island in the South China Sea, Beijing refused to accept imports of bananas from the Philippines, leaving large shipments to rot in a harbor. The local government on Hainan Island has declared it has the power to board vessels which “illegally enter” Chinese waters—one in a string of announcements that have added to the sense of uncertainty about how China will use its growing power. The expansive and ambiguous claims China has made in the South China Sea, combined with its willingness to hold trade hostage to political arguments, have, at the very least, raised questions about freedom of navigation in the region. As Peter Dutton, a U.S. expert on maritime law, argues, China’s approach to the Near Seas has already created “hairline fractures in the global order.”

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  Shortly before he retired as head of the U.S. Pacific Command in 2009, Admiral Timothy Keating revealed a conversation he had had with a senior Chinese naval officer, who effectively offered to split the Pacific with the U.S.

  “You, the US, take Hawaii East and we, China, will take Hawaii West and the Indian Ocean,” Keating recalled the officer, whom he refused to name, as saying. “Then you will not need to come to the western Pacific and the Indian Ocean and we will not need to go to the eastern Pacific. If anything happens there, you can let us know and if something happens here, we will let you know.” Keating admitted that the offer was perhaps made “tongue-in-cheek,” but it was revealing. One reason that tensions in the region are rising is the substantial gap between U.S. and Chinese views of America’s natural role in Asia. For many in China, a U.S. retreat from the region is an inevitable response to the revival of Asia. Yet the view is very different from Washington. Since the early years of the republic, the western Pacific has played a large role in America’s sense of its own security.

  America’s first Pacific alliance was signed as far back as 1833, a full two decades before Commodore Matthew Perry more famously first set anchor in Japan. President Andrew Jackson sent a sloop-of-war called the USS Peacock on a mission around parts of the South China Sea, including a stop at the kingdom of Siam, modern-day Thailand. During the visit, his envoy, Edmund Roberts, signed the Siamese-American Treaty of Amity and Commerce with a representative of King Rama III. Jackson sent as a present a sword whose gold handle had an elephant and an eagle emblazoned on it. The pool of people at the time in either country who spoke both Siamese and English was almost nonexistent, so, in order to make sure the treaty would not be questioned, it was also translated into Chinese and Portuguese.

  The prominence of the Pacific in the American mind accelerated sharply in the 1890s, in the era of Mahan and another of his disciples, Theodore Roosevelt, who a century before Barack Obama was really America’s first Pacific president. Roosevelt was the first to predict that Asia would become a center of global power, initially as a result of the rise of Japan, but later as China and India caught up. And he placed the maintenance of a favorable balance of power in Asia at the center of America’s priorities.

  “The commerce and command of the Pacific will be factors of incalculable moment in the world’s history,” Roosevelt predicted.

  America’s Pacific role did not fall temporarily into its lap at the end of the Second World War and the decline of the British Empire, nor is it a product of the Cold War. Instead, it is much more deeply rooted in the U.S.’s own history and vision of the world. Over the last century, America has defined its vital interest as preventing any one power from dominating the other main regions of the world and turning them into a private sphere of influence, whether in Europe or in Asia. The U.S. eventually fought the First and Second World Wa
rs because it did not want Germany to dominate Europe—and, in the second war, also to stop Japan from controlling Asia. Washington’s ultimate goal in the Cold War was to prevent the Soviet Union from exercising control across the whole of Eurasia.

  It should come as no surprise that the rise of China is beginning to stir something deep in the American psyche. Relative decline or not, Washington will be determined to prevent any other country from dominating such a central part of the world. China’s naval push strikes to the core of how America understands both its security and its prosperity. The Obama administration’s desire to “pivot” toward Asia, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan end, might seem like a new departure to address the rise of China, but it is also a very traditional American response to a shifting balance of power in Asia. Unless America suffers a much deeper economic collapse, it is difficult to imagine the U.S.’s not wanting to play a significant role in Asia in the coming decades. Washington was never going to acquiesce in a proposal to split the Pacific.

  “If the U.S. does not hold its ground in the Pacific, it cannot be a world leader,” as Lee Kuan Yew, the former Singaporean leader, puts it in a cold assessment of the political stakes. “The 21st century will be a contest for supremacy in the Pacific because that is where the growth will be.”

  WEAK PARTY, STRONG MILITARY

  Robert Gates was about to go into a meeting with President Hu Jintao when one of his aides showed him some images that had just appeared on a Chinese Web site that specializes in military gossip. It was January 2011, and the U.S. defense secretary had traveled to Beijing to try and mend fences after China had suspended military contacts between the two countries’ militaries in protest of U.S. arms sales to Taiwan. The photos purported to show a test flight for the J-20, China’s attempt to develop a “fifth generation” stealth bomber that can evade conventional radar. “It’s flying!” wrote an Internet user with the name Little Bird King in one of the chat rooms for military issues run by the People’s Daily group, publisher of the party’s mouthpiece newspaper. A large crowd of onlookers watched the test run from outside the fence at a military airfield in Chengdu, some standing on the back of a white pickup truck to get a better view. For Gates, the timing seemed a deliberate insult: the Chinese military were rubbing his nose in one of their new high-tech capabilities.

  The photos were a particular embarrassment to Gates, who had publicly dismissed the idea of a Chinese stealth bomber only two years earlier. China would have “no fifth-generation aircraft by 2020,” he had told an audience in Chicago. Most American observers thought that China’s jets were mediocre copies of old Russian models. A month earlier some grainy photos had appeared on another Chinese military-fan Web site showing the J-20 being pulled out on the Chengdu airfield. Soon after, the photos reappeared on the Aviation Week Web site in the U.S., after blogger Bill Sweetman posted them at 7:30 a.m. on Christmas Day and talked about rumors of a test flight. Yet the Pentagon did not believe the new Chinese jet fighter was ready to fly.

  Gates was so angry that he suggested canceling the meeting with Hu Jintao, only to be persuaded to attend by Jon Huntsman, then the U.S. ambassador to Beijing. When Gates asked Hu about the test flight, he was greeted with a nervous silence. The president appeared to know nothing about it. They were seated in one of those U-shaped Chinese meeting rooms, with the principals at the top and a line of their aides on either side. Hu asked his defense minister, Liang Guanglie, who in turn asked the PLA’s deputy chief of staff, Ma Xiaotian. No one seemed to know what had actually happened. Eventually, an air-force officer explained that the test flight of the stealth bomber had taken place by coincidence on that day. “I take President Hu at his word that the test had nothing to do with my visit,” Gates said rather curtly after the meeting.

  Sometimes an uncomfortable silence can tell you as much about a political system as a library full of theses. At the very least, Hu’s reticence showed a lack of day-to-day coordination between the PLA and its political masters. Whenever a major U.S. naval vessel passes into the Asia-Pacific Region, the Asia director at the National Security Council receives a written note, so that the White House is not blindsided by activities of the Pentagon. China lacks such a coordinating mechanism. Yet it is equally possible that elements of the PLA were intending to send Gates precisely the message that he had imagined, and that the test flight was held on that day as a deliberate provocation. The Chengdu airfield has two landing strips—one far away from view and one visible from a public road. The test flight used the second runway, and when it was completed, the aircraft was parked beside the road, so that local military enthusiasts could take more pictures. In the past, China’s pervasive Internet censors have taken down images of new military technologies they do not want the world to see. This time, they let the photos remain. Andrew Scobell, an analyst with the Rand Corporation, later told a congressional hearing that the message from the test flight was: “America, take heed. The capabilities of our weaponry are ever improving, and we are not intimidated by your technologically superior military might.” If sending such a signal to the U.S. also caused a moment of acute diplomatic embarrassment for the country’s president, then so be it.

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  One of the ironies about Deng Xiaoping’s advice to “hide the brightness and nourish obscurity” is that it requires a decisive figure like Deng to implement. Playing nice with the neighbors involves making the sorts of concessions that can gall nationalists. It needs a strong leader who has the credibility to take a few blows on the chin, and who can face down the more ambitious and nationalistic of his colleagues, especially from the military. Yet Deng also made sure that China would never have such a strongman again. After the quixotic disasters of the Mao era, the Communist Party has gone out of its way to reduce the space for another all-powerful leader. The party now has a fixed retirement age, and an entrenched process of leadership transitions that take place every decade (with some housecleaning every five years). The upside is that the party is much more predictable and professional. The downside is that it is now governed by committee, which can slow decision making and can make it much harder for the leadership to stand up to more strident voices. Over the last decade, China has seen a fracturing of power among the elite, with different vested interests from within the party-state starting to push their own foreign-policy agendas more openly and more aggressively. Cheng Li, a Chinese political scientist now at the Brookings Institution in Washington, uses three couplets to capture the new dynamic of power in China. “Weak leaders, strong factions; weak government, strong interest groups; weak party, strong country,” as he puts it.

  China’s determined push to the seas is a product of its history and geography, to be sure, but it is also being driven by these shifts within the Chinese political system as more voices start to be heard. China’s leaders no longer enjoy the unquestioned authority over foreign policy that Deng was able to command. The cautious elite consensus on how to manage the country’s rise is gradually being undermined in favor of a more strident defense of national interests and a greater willingness to ruffle international feathers. The Foreign Ministry should be in charge of international relations but is actually the weakest ministry in Beijing, outgunned and out-politicked by other influential groups. Not one foreign-policy official is a member of the twenty-five-strong Communist Party Politburo. Like new great powers before it, China is finding that success creates its own expectations. China’s leaders now have to deal with the often raucous Internet nationalism of the urban middle class, which has been reared on stories about the “hundred years of humiliation.” The wealthier these urban professionals become, the more impatient they are for China’s leaders to assert a bigger role. Local governments and powerful state-owned companies want to have a say on important foreign-policy issues. And the civilian leaders also have to deal with a more restless and powerful military.

  If there is one subject that is the hardest for foreign China-watchers to get a handle on, it is the
relationship between the Communist Party and the military. Despite the breathtaking changes in Chinese society over the last three decades, high-level politics are still a black box, and that is even more the case for the People’s Liberation Army. The military is formally under control of the Communist Party rather than the state, which adds to its sense of mystery and autonomy. To most outside observers, and to many Chinese, the PLA seems like a separate world walled off from the rest of the party-state. The very brief glimpses into the PLA afforded to the foreign media confirm that sense of an institution following its own rules. In 2008, one of my colleagues managed to organize an interview with a senior PLA official. We were instructed to come to the PLA’s foreign-affairs office, north of the city center, an airy, palatial building with marble floors and long, empty corridors. As a journalist in China, you can tell a lot about a government official by the way he or she conducts an interview. Most government departments insist that you send over half a dozen sample questions beforehand, and they will reject an interview request if the topics are too controversial. The less secure the cadre, the longer they spend on the initial softball questions. I have conducted interviews in which the official in question proceeded to read out a twenty-five-page prepared answer to these questions, leaving only a few minutes for a real interview at the end. Major General Qian Lihua, director of the defense ministry’s foreign-affairs office, walked into the conference room where my colleagues and I were waiting and shook our hands. He picked up a paper that one of his aides had prepared and handed it to us. “This is a written response for the questions you sent over,” he said. “Now, what do you really want to ask me?” He went on to give the strongest indication yet that China was building an aircraft carrier.