Europe’s empires were not created overnight by grand design. Instead, they evolved through a gradual creeping process that started with trade and investment and ended with the use of military power to protect those business interests. The British Raj had its roots in the perceived need to protect the operations of the East India Company, and it was to defend those very same interests that the British invaded Burma in 1824. After defeating the Burmese forces—and ending Burmese independence for much of the next century—the British briefly moved the country’s capital to Sittwe, on the northwest coast, just north of Ramree Island. It is facile to suggest, as some do, that China is trying to re-create an old-fashioned empire, but it is fair to say that China’s overseas investments are repeating elements of the same imperial dynamic, the old story of the flag following the trade. In a political system in which some of the lines of control have eroded, ambitious local governments and connected state-owned corporations are pushing projects that involve substantial international commitments, the local economic tail wagging the Beijing diplomatic dog. In the case of the Burma pipeline, the project won the backing of Beijing even though its strategic benefits are really something of a mirage. If there ever were some form of conflict between the U.S. and China, then the pipeline would be much more vulnerable than the sea-lanes through the Strait of Malacca. It would take the permanent presence of a significant fleet to enforce a blockade of the strait, but only one bombing run to destroy the pipeline. The Ramree Island investment brings no actual security for China.
On Ramree Island itself, there is widespread suspicion about China’s eventual plans for the area. Common among locals I talked to was the assumption that China would eventually want to have a naval base there, to help secure its interests and protect the commercial traffic to the port. In Yangon, I heard the same story, a constant refrain that the pipeline is some sort of Trojan Horse that will justify a Chinese military presence. There is no evidence that this is happening—and such an idea would likely spark considerable resistance in Burma, including from the new civilian government. But the reality is that China is now building a huge oil facility looking onto the Bay of Bengal, which it needs to protect. Its commercial interests are pulling it into the Indian Ocean in ways that were not originally anticipated.
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Whether by secret design or by the inertia of its advancing business interests, China is likely to push for a much stronger presence in the Indian Ocean. But just as there are enormous operational challenges ahead if China wants to construct a navy that can contend in the Indian Ocean, so there are huge political obstacles if it tries to establish the sort of military basing rights that would allow it to project power far from its home base. If China really aspires to a stealth “String of Pearls” strategy, it will be very difficult to turn this into reality, because few countries will want to be seen taking sides. Every government in the region knows that, even with the huge investments China is making in its navy, the U.S. will have a superior fighting ability in the Indian Ocean for several decades to come. This means that a Chinese base on their territory would turn them into a highly vulnerable target in the first days of a conflict. Burma’s new government has tilted away from China in a way that makes it very hard to imagine its accepting a Chinese base, despite the incessant rumor mill in the country. Sri Lanka, too, knows how vulnerable it would be if Chinese vessels were permanently based at Hambantota. “There may or may not be a Chinese string in the region, but we will not be one of their pearls,” as one Sri Lankan official puts it.
Pakistan is the one country that has expressed some interest in hosting a Chinese base. But the idea is a lot less attractive than it seems. Gwadar is occasionally referred to in the press as “the most important place you have never heard of,” given its closeness to the Persian Gulf. But on closer inspection, it is of much less strategic use than it seems. Gwadar is an isolated city in the southwestern province of Baluchistan, squeezed in between Iran and Afghanistan, where an insurgency against the state has been running for decades, becoming particularly ugly in recent years. The roads and rail links to the more prosperous parts of Pakistan, around Karachi and Lahore, are, at best, precarious. The port itself is also vulnerable, as it is on a small island, connected to the mainland by one bridge. In the event of a conflict, a single bomb could take it out of action.
Just as the U.S. did in an earlier era, China has long shunned the idea of foreign “entanglements.” Beijing has persistently denounced alliance building as a destabilizing form of power politics. We are not that sort of government, Chinese leaders insist. As a result, the establishment of an overseas base would be a Rubicon moment for China, one that cuts to the core of the question about how China really interprets its future role. Foreign bases are not just an exercise in logistics; they are sovereign territory within another nation. A base is the bridgehead to a very different relationship, the sort of defense alliance whereby the bigger nation offers to provide security in return for access and support. In other words, China would need formal allies. But the question every government would ask Beijing is, whom are we defending ourselves from? If China moves down this path, it could start a process of dividing the region between countries that rely on the U.S. for their security, and those that lean toward China. Asian governments would increasingly find themselves asked to take sides, the outcome they fear the most. For that very reason, some in China view it as an extremely dangerous step, one that would lead to greater isolation for China. “It is a self-fulfilling, delusionary idea to build our own bases and our own alliances,” Zhu Feng, an international-relations professor at Peking University, told me. “I totally disagree with the idea. We would create a geographic split in the region. It really would be the start of a new Cold War.”
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Of course, the Indian Ocean already has a billion-person-plus rising power, with a growing navy and a strong sense of its own role in the modern world. India is another important reason why China will have to tread very carefully in the Indian Ocean. Washington is by no means the only capital where the rapid expansion in China’s navy has provoked anxiety; New Delhi has also been watching the developments with some alarm. India and China share a tradition of fraternal ties rooted in the language of anti-colonialism and the Non-Aligned Movement. In 1927, two decades before he became the leader of a newly independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru signed a joint manifesto with delegates from the Chinese Communist Party at an anti-imperialist congress in Brussels. In 1962, however, the two countries fought a brief but fierce war over a border in the Himalayas that is still under dispute, and since then have viewed each other warily. Now that sense of competition is shifting to the Indian Ocean. “Rivalry has been a defining element of India’s relations with China for 60 years,” says Raja Mohan, one of India’s leading foreign-policy analysts. “But it is now beginning to move from the Himalayas to the waters of the Indo-Pacific.”
Just like China, India is also turning to the seas, and for many of the same reasons. As India has morphed since the early 1990s from an inward-looking and highly regulated economy to a more open, trading nation, it, too, has begun to fret about the safety of the sea-lanes that its new wealth depends upon. (Alfred Thayer Mahan is now the subject of great interest in India, too.) Having acquired its first aircraft carrier as far back as the 1950s, India now has three, and another which is a museum in Mumbai. Yet India’s naval buildup has had a different quality. Although New Delhi considers the Indian Ocean to be its natural backyard, it does not have the same sort of sweeping ownership claim that China presents. India is neither as suspicious of the U.S. as is China, nor is it building a navy specifically designed to challenge the U.S. The Indian navy has also been much more willing to take part in joint exercises with the U.S., signaling its willingness to carry some of the security burdens in the existing U.S.-led system.
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 fo
r 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.
3
The Asian Backlash
Tone-Deaf in Hanoi
WHEN 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).
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