Asia's Cauldron

by Robert D. Kaplan

  Copyright © 2014 by Robert D. Kaplan

  Maps copyright © 2014 by David Lindroth Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Chapter VI, “America’s Colonial Burden,” contains material from an earlier title by Robert D. Kaplan, Imperial Grunts (New York: Random House, 2005).

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Kaplan, Robert D., author.

  Asia’s cauldron : the South China Sea and the end of a stable Pacific / Robert D. Kaplan.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-8129-9432-2

  eBook ISBN 978-0-8129-9433-9

  1. Pacific Area—Foreign relations. 2. Pacific Area—Politics and government. 3. South China Sea Region—Strategic aspects. 4. South China Sea—International status. I. Title.

  JZ1980.K37 2014

  327.59—dc23 2013036100

  www.atrandom.com

  Title-page photograph and border art: © iStockphoto.com

  Jacket design: Will Brown

  Jacket photographs: (top) Harald Sund/Getty Images; (bottom) Stewart Sutton/Getty Images

  Web asset: Excerpted from Asia’s Cauldron by Robert D. Kaplan, copyright © 2014 by Robert D. Kaplan. Published by Random House, an imprint and division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  v3.1

  Whoever is able to write of the great number and infinity of islands there are from the straits of Kampar to Banda and from the straits of Singapore to the islands of Japan, which are beyond China—and between this island and Banda, there must be an area of more than two or three thousand leagues round—whoever is able let him speak of it. And it is certain that many of the islands are worth speaking about, because many have gold, but it would be never ending and tedious. I will only speak of the few in this great abundance with which Malacca is in communication now, or was in the past, and I will touch on others in general terms, so that my project may be completed, and if my project does not carry sufficient weight, may I be forgiven.

  THE SUMA ORIENTAL OF TOMÉ PIRES, AN ACCOUNT OF THE EAST, FROM THE RED SEA TO CHINA, WRITTEN IN MALACCA AND INDIA IN 1512–1515

  For there is no question but a just fear of an imminent danger, though there be no blow given, is a lawful cause of war.

  FRANCIS BACON,

  “OF EMPIRE,” 1612

  To view a full-size version of this image, click HERE.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Map 1

  PROLOGUE: The Ruins of Champa

  Map 2

  CHAPTER I: The Humanist Dilemma

  CHAPTER II: China’s Caribbean

  CHAPTER III: The Fate of Vietnam

  CHAPTER IV: Concert of Civilizations?

  CHAPTER V: The Good Autocrat

  CHAPTER VI: America’s Colonial Burden

  CHAPTER VII: Asia’s Berlin

  CHAPTER VIII: The State of Nature

  EPILOGUE: The Slums of Borneo

  Dedication

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  The Ruins of Champa

  I walk along jungle trails in the heat-inflicted silence. Blackened, redbrick humps lie strangled in greenery against steep mountains devoured by rain clouds. I am in My Son, in central Vietnam, forty miles inland from the coast of the South China Sea. Flowers and grass grow out of every nonvertical surface of each monument where altars, lamps, and lingas used to be placed, swimming in incense and camphor. Half-destroyed statues that recall India deep in Southeast Asia are embraced by columns in the walls, blotched blue and white with lichen. There are headless gods and time-mottled dancing figures now ferociously explored by insects. The loose bricks are like missing teeth: the monuments so hacked and battered that what remains recall the abstract shapes of modernist sculpture. A lichen-coated linga, the phallic symbol of Shiva’s manhood, stands alone and sentinel against the ages.

  The size and abundance of Temple Groups B and C hold out the promise of a Vietnamese Angkor Wat, but once I come upon the other temple groups I realize just how little is left of nine centuries of religious life here, stretching from late antiquity to the high Middle Ages. Group A is a mere low pile of rubble, testimony to American helicopter-borne destruction in a war of less relevance to Southeast Asia’s future than are these ruins and what they represent.

  The fiercest nationalisms are often begot by what, in Freudian terminology, is the narcissism of small differences. What rescues Vietnam from being a mere southern redoubt of Sinic culture is its Khmer and Indian heritage, which allows for a unique confection that is ever so similar and yet ever so different from the civilization of China. Invoking Champa, from the fourth through thirteenth centuries, is to expose the lie of Cold War area studies with which Washington remains enamored, which place Southeast Asia firmly in an East Asia and Pacific realm; while in fact this region is part of an organic continuum that is more properly labeled the Indo-Pacific, whose maritime heart is the South China Sea: for Champa represents a seafaring, piratical race. Squeezed between the Central Highlands and the sea, with numerous rivers and natural harbors at their disposal, with woods, spices, textiles, honey, wax, and metals to trade, the Chams were well placed to benefit from the commerce between the Indian Ocean and the Western Pacific. The French had it right when they designated this region not Southeast Asia, but Indochina.

  Witness the medieval Chola Empire of the Hindu Tamils, based in southern India, which sent its fleets throughout this seaboard as far north as China; even as ancient Chinese pottery has been found as far south as Java, and Chinese ships under the medieval Tang and Yuan dynasties ventured as far as Odisha in northeastern India. Long before the North and South Vietnams of the Cold War era, there were northern and southern Vietnams that had existed across this civilizational fault line and across the chasm of the centuries between antiquity and modern times: Dai Viet being a young and insecure kingdom in the north after having been a province of the Chinese Empire for over a thousand years; while to the south lay the Khmer Empire and Champa. Champa, in particular, was the enemy of Dai Viet, preventing the latter’s expansion to the south, until Champa was finally reduced to near ashes by the majority Kinh in the north, with an underlying sense of guilt felt by northern Vietnam toward southern Vietnam ever since. Champa, as the historical and cultural representation of southern Vietnam, was always more closely connected to the Khmer and Malay worlds than to Sinicized Dai Viet to the north.

  In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there were, again, effectively two Vietnams: Tonkin in the north ruled by the Le dynasty, and Cochin China in the south ruled by the Nguyen dynasty. All this, ultimately, because Vietnam’s nearly one-thousand-mile-long coast lay astride two great civilizations: those of India and China.

  Champa entered my consciousness through an illustrated book I had come upon in a shop in Hanoi years back: The Art of Champa by Jean-François Hubert. Because of its beauty, it was a volume I instantly wanted to own. Champa, writes Hubert, exists “in defiance of time,” its legacy rescued by French archaeologists from the École Française d’Extrême-Orient in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who studied and excavated at My Son and other sites, providing concrete evidence of what is only written about in the Chinese Dynastic Annals and Embassy Reports. Hubert’s text, as elegant as the accompanying ph
otography, exposed me to this Sanskrit culture, with its delicious Hindu-Buddhist syncretism (though weighted heavily in favor of Hinduism). “In the eighth century,” says Hubert, “Champa stretched from the Gate of Annam in the north to the Donnai basin in the south,” that is, from just north of the former demilitarized zone (DMZ) southward to Saigon. So Hubert’s medieval map suggests a Cold War one. After a Grand Guignol of wars and invasions, the wages of being located on a civilizational fault line, Hindu Champa finally disappeared under the shadow of the Viets.1 Vietnam as we think of it was thus created, even though it is the legacy of this conquered Hindu world that provides Vietnam with its uniquely non-Chinese cultural identity.

  Hubert’s book led me to Da Nang, near the old DMZ, the busiest air base during the Vietnam War. That world is dead, buried under the reality of American-style gated communities, celebrity-brand golf courses, and half-finished five-star resorts and casino complexes that fly the American flag at their entrances stretched along China Beach, south of the city. There are eco-retreats, too. The GIs’ jungly hell has become a backpacker’s paradise—the country that symbolized war to a generation now has a smile and an intoxicating beat to it.

  Situated in downtown Da Nang is the Museum of Cham Sculpture, a 1915 mustard yellow French colonial building where hundreds of statuary recovered by the archaeologists Henri Parmentier and Charles Carpeaux during excavations in 1903 and 1904 at My Son and elsewhere are warehoused in crowded, badly lit, and sweltering conditions, with windows open to the soot and traffic. My obsession with ancient Champa deepened here. Alongside the statuary were coppery black-and-white photographs, taken by these same archaeologists, that represented their subjects better than any color photos could.2 For the sculptures themselves bear that indeterminate milk-gray hue in some cases, and pale ocher in others, that are more beautiful than any primary color, and are best rendered as a lightened earthen contrast with the darkness all around. Each statue came alive for me, as though it were posing for a photographer in his studio. The Indian world deifies dance, and many of these pieces looked caught in freeze-frame movement.

  There was Gajasimha, the mount of Shiva, with an elephant’s head and a lion’s body, the embodiment of the intelligence of gods and the strength of kings. And Shiva the deity itself, with a gigantic head whose nose was completely broken off, and whose eyes were mightily accepting of all the creations and destructions of the universe. There was a small Vishnu, the Protector, its features so worn away by time that there was only the hint of an eye, which, nevertheless, was frightening in its gaze. Brahma, the god of creation, had three heads rather than the usual four, representing the different directions of the universe, and, with its four arms, holding the various volumes of the Vedas. Yaksa, the nature spirit; Balarama, Vishnu’s avatar; Kala, a god of death: the entire Hindu pantheon is here in Da Nang—a place where these Indian gods ruled for close to a thousand years. The most vivid bas-reliefs from a temple at My Son, moved here by the French, recall the German-Jewish intellectual Walter Benjamin’s famous vision of history as a vast heap of wreckage of incidents and events that keeps piling higher and higher into infinity, with progress signifying merely more wreckage waiting to happen.

  I was not done. The History Museum in Saigon, where there was a room full of Champa sculpture, required a visit. Here amid the dioramas and other exhibits of Song, Yuan, and Ming depredations—in other words, the struggle against China as the thematic core of Vietnamese history—I found Cham remains from as far back as the second century and as far forward as the seventeenth: more evidence of how, despite its overwhelming cultural similarities with China, Vietnam was nevertheless distinct. And it was, to a significant extent, Indian influence that made it so. Without the Indian Subcontinent, in other words, there could not have been a Vietnam in any cultural or aesthetic sense. I turn my head to café au lait dancing stone goddesses with four arms—with full breasts and narrow-yet-fleshy waists: they match exactly the sculptures I once saw in the caves of Ellora east of Mumbai. Lakshmi, a tenth-century statue, an invitation to wealth and sensuality; Shiva, fifteenth century, an iconic stylization that overtakes realism, so that artistic abstraction reigns. Though this Shiva is half carved, such a force of character emerges out of the stone!

  I compare the Cham sculptures with the twelfth-century Khmer ones in an adjoining room, themselves confections of Buddhist-Brahminist styles. The beige brown Khmer faces come alive with their mystical acceptance of fate—nothing I have ever seen is so suggestive of being at peace—the shallow brows, the flattish noses, the wide and full lips, the eyes open, even as they seem closed. Khmer, like Champa, is another variant of the confluence of Indian and Chinese civilizations. And yet sometimes so close to one civilization one finds a piece that manifests the other civilization in its entirety: for example, a tenth-century Devi, the female form of the Supreme Lord, from Huong Que in central Vietnam, with the sharpest Aryan features, cast in stunning chocolate orange. This statue is purely of India. It is the only one I saw suited for color rather than black-and-white rendering.

  How odd that I begin a geopolitical study of the South China Sea with the delectable, mythic legacy of India. But that is the point. Champa is the lesson I must keep in mind in the course of this report about China’s growing influence. My description of the art of Champa is lavish by necessity: for I must never lose sight of the vividness of India’s presence in this part of the world at a time when China’s gaze seems so overpowering. Yes, as I write, China’s advancing presence continues to be the story in the South China Sea region, testimony to Beijing’s demographic and economic heft. If I do not confront China’s rise—if I do not confront the signal trends of recent decades—then there can be no relevance to my observations. Because the future is unknowable, all one can do is write about the present. But the fact that the future is unknowable also means it is open to all manner of possibilities—such as, perhaps, the dramatic weakening or even collapse of the Communist Party (and China, too) from internal economic and social stresses. Thus, Champa offers a lesson in humility: an awareness that because the present is ephemeral, even at its best my analysis can only constitute a period piece. Though I will refer only rarely to Champa again, I hope that my brief albeit intense allusion to it will rescue what follows from mere topicality. Champa represents the long view: for by going back in time we look forward over the horizon. The shadow of China presently looms large, but if at some point very soon China dramatically falters the South China Sea may once again live up to its French colonial description of Indochina, where China competes on an equal—rather than a dominant—footing with India and other powers and civilizations.

  Moreover, while my study points to a military rivalry between the United States and China, the future—in military as well as economic terms—may be distinctly multipolar, with a country like Vietnam—or Malaysia, Australia, or Singapore—playing off a host of powers against each other. The United States fought against the prospect of a Vietnam unified by the communist North. But once that unification became fact, the new and enlarged Vietnamese state became a much greater threat to communist China than to the United States. Such can be the ironies of history. Champa, because it tells of the centrality of one power at a time when another is now still ascendant, is a symbol of surprises and possibilities yet unseen to the conventional analyst.

  The American GIs’ Saigon of loud bars and strip joints is gone: entombed in memory under gleaming, backlit facades of Gucci, Lacoste, Versace. But these wondrously enigmatic statues in the dusty godown of a museum live on.

  To view a full-size version of this image, click HERE.

  CHAPTER I

  The Humanist Dilemma

  Europe is a landscape; East Asia a seascape. Therein lies a crucial difference between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The most contested areas of the globe in the last century lay on dry land in Europe, particularly in the flat expanse that rendered the eastern and western borders of Germany artificial, and thus exposed
to the intensive to-ing and fro-ing of armies. But starting in the last phase of the Cold War the demographic, economic, and military axis of the earth has measurably shifted to the opposite end of Eurasia, where the spaces between the principal nodes of population are overwhelmingly maritime. By maritime I mean sea, air, and outer space: for ever since the emergence of aircraft carriers in the early decades of the twentieth century, sea and air battle formations have become increasingly inextricable, with outer space now added to the mix because of navigational and other assistance to ships and planes from satellites. Hence naval has become shorthand for several dimensions of military activity. And make no mistake, naval is the operative word. Because of the way that geography illuminates and sets priorities, the physical contours of East Asia argue for a naval century, with the remote possibility of land warfare on the Korean Peninsula being the striking exception.

  East Asia is a vast, yawning expanse, stretching from Arctic to Antarctic reaches—from the Kuril Islands southward to New Zealand—and characterized by a shattered array of coastlines and archipelagoes, themselves separated by great seas and distances. Even accounting for the fact of how technology has compressed distance, with missiles and fighter jets—the latter easily refueled in the air—rendering any geography closed and claustrophobic, the sea acts as a barrier to aggression, at least to the degree that dry land does not. The sea, unlike land, creates clearly defined borders, and thus has the potential to reduce conflict. Then there is speed to consider. Even the fastest warships travel comparatively slowly, 35 knots, say, reducing the chance of miscalculations and thus giving diplomats more hours—and days even—to reconsider decisions. Moreover, navies and air forces simply do not occupy territory the way armies do. It is because of the seas around East Asia that the twenty-first century has a better chance than the twentieth of avoiding great military conflagrations.