One of the problems with the official Chinese story about Zheng He is that it contrasts so dramatically with how China treated other parts of the region in the same era. In 1406, at the same time that Zheng He was on one of his seven voyages, supposedly bringing the marvels of Chinese culture to Southeast Asia, Ming China launched an invasion of what is today northern Vietnam. The Chinese forces disguised their horses with images of lions in order to frighten the elephants that led the Vietnamese forces. A year later, they declared victory after a conflict which by some accounts had killed several hundred thousand Vietnamese. It was a full-blown colonial occupation: China levied taxes on gold and salt, as well as lacquer, sappan wood, kingfisher feathers, fans, and aromatics. In this broader context, Zheng He’s voyages seem less like an exercise in benevolent exploration than a crude expression of Ming power. As Zheng He has been quoted as saying, “When we reached foreign countries, we captured barbarian kings who were disrespectful and resisted Chinese civilization.”
The competing myths about Zheng He are more than just historical curiosity; they are also hugely important for present-day discussions of Asia. They lay bare some of the fault lines in the region’s politics, which are becoming ever more apparent. Behind Beijing’s revival of Zheng He, there is a curious disconnect between how China views itself and the way others in the region often view it. Chinese elite and popular views are laced with the sort of sentiments contained in the official Zheng He story, that China’s imperial record was benevolent and that it was widely appreciated across the region. Chinese accounts stress that the country was a benign great power, which never sought hegemony, and which attracted others only through the sophistication of its culture and the innovation of its economy. A sense of entitlement lies behind Chinese descriptions of its past “greatness,” a feeling that China’s centrality and superiority are preordained. “The rise of China is granted by nature,” as the Tsinghua University scholar Yan Xuetong once put it. With such a narrow view of the past, there is little understanding of the violence and interference that sometimes accompanied the dominant role China historically played in East Asian affairs. Beijing had hoped the new interest in Zheng He would help make the case for revived Chinese leadership in the region. Yet the same events also serve as a reminder of the subservient position in which other Asian nations were once placed.
Whether the legend is accurate or not, China’s revival of it misses the broader point about modern Asia. Countries such as Indonesia, South Korea, and Vietnam do not see themselves as “small nations” alongside a naturally dominant bigger power. They are proud, modern nation-states, which believe that they should be treated on the international stage as equals. In many cases, they have emerged from their own experiences of colonialism to construct resilient states with a strong taste for their own independence. They are not looking for a new era of Chinese protection, benevolent or otherwise. Zheng He is a figure from a world of hierarchy and deference that they do not wish to return to.
THE YEAR IT ALL WENT WRONG
“If Bismarck were in Beijing today, he would say this was our worst nightmare,” Shi Yinhong, a scholar at Renmin University in Beijing, once told me. We were talking toward the end of 2010, the year when Beijing managed to alienate pretty much every one of its neighbors in ways that will be very hard to repair over the next decade. Every step China took to pursue its interests or to push back against American influence caused Asian anxieties to rise further. In 2010, Asia’s fear of creeping Chinese domination became one of the dominant driving forces in regional politics. Shi Yinhong is one of the cooler-headed realist voices among the foreign-policy community in Beijing, a keen observer of the balance-of-power dynamics that were at the heart of Deng’s strategy. He believes China should be doing everything it can to avoid encouraging a coalition of neighboring states that will club together against it. But as he looked around the region in 2010, he could sense that the tide might be starting to turn against China. “Bismarck’s advice was always that, if you have five neighbors, you need to be on good terms with at least three,” Shi said. “That is not our case.”
The Bismarck playbook for China in Asia is pretty straightforward: chip away at America’s alliances in the region. The U.S. overcomes the huge distances that separate San Diego and Hawaii from the western Pacific by maintaining a substantial presence in Northeast Asia. That presence is anchored in its decades-old alliances with Japan, where around fifty thousand U.S. soldiers are based, and South Korea, where there are around twenty-eight thousand. For China to assume quietly a much stronger role in the region, one of the quickest routes would be to engineer the gradual erosion of support for America in Japan and South Korea. Throughout the 2000s, there were plenty of warning signs that these alliances were coming under pressure, in part because of the allure of the growing Chinese economy, and in part because of American missteps. Beijing had a game-changing opening to weaken American standing in the region. But, rather than driving a wedge between the U.S. and its most important allies, China has managed to push them much closer together. In its effort to start throwing its weight around, China has reinforced the balance of power in the region in America’s direction.
In Japan, the immediate bone of contention was the relocation of the U.S. base Futenma in Okinawa, a long-running and poisonous political argument that has been raging ever since three U.S. servicemen raped a twelve-year-old Japanese girl in Okinawa in 1995. But the Futenma issue reflected a broader unease about the alliance with the U.S. In 2009, voters threw out the Liberal Democratic Party, which had been in power for fifty years, and installed the Democratic Party of Japan, many of whose leaders had grown up in the era of anti–Vietnam War campaigns. The new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, openly flirted with the idea of a new East Asian cooperation forum that would bring Japan much closer to China and would cut out the U.S. The U.S.-Japan alliance had never looked so rocky, even during the intense economic disputes of the 1980s. In early 2010, Ichiro Ozawa, the power-behind-the-throne of the new government, took a group of 143 lawmakers to Beijing on a visit that had a deferential air. A smiling Hu Jintao posed for photos and shook the hands of every single member of the Japanese delegation.
Yet Japan was jolted out of its drift away from the U.S. by Beijing’s behavior. In August, the two governments found themselves at loggerheads after the Japanese coast guard arrested a Chinese fishing-boat captain who had barged their vessels close to a group of disputed islands, which the Japanese call the Senkaku and in China are called the Diaoyu. (Japan has had administrative control of the islands since the end of the Second World War, though the actual land title was owned by private citizens.) The Chinese response stunned Japan. While the government launched an aggressive diplomatic campaign to get the captain released, large anti-Japanese demonstrations broke out across China. At one stage, the Japanese ambassador was hauled in to receive a formal complaint in what the Xinhua News Agency gleefully described as “the wee hours”—the fourth such dressing-down he had received. At the same time, China also started to block some exports to Japan of rare earths, metals which are widely used in high-tech manufacturing; this was one of the first times Beijing had so blatantly used economic coercion in a dispute.
China insisted that Japan was using the legal process of the arrest to advance its claim over the islands. But the aggressiveness of the Chinese reaction sent a deep chill through Japanese politics. Support in Tokyo for the idea that Japan should seek greater rapprochement with China and should start to distance itself from the U.S. has withered. Yoichi Funabashi, the editor-in-chief of the Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan’s leading newspapers, likened the Chinese reaction to a “shock-and-awe campaign.” Funabashi had once worked actively to encourage student exchanges between the two countries and had been one of the more liberal voices calling on Japan to make amends with China for its wartime crimes. But in a letter shortly after the dispute, he revealed the sense of disillusionment. “Japan and China now stand at ground zero, and the landscape
is a bleak, vast nothingness,” he wrote. In an interview shortly afterward, he warned that Asia risked regressing to a “rule of the jungle.”
The situation deteriorated further in 2012 over a new argument about the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. Japan opened the new dispute. When the nationalist firebrand governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, suggested he would buy the islands, the national government intervened and purchased some of the land. Japan thought this less provocative than Ishihara’s acquiring the islands, but China’s reaction was even more furious than two years before. Beijing accused Tokyo of trying to change the informal status quo surrounding the islands and has maintained a constant stream of patrol vessels around the islands to reinforce its sovereignty claim. At the time of writing, tensions have escalated to such an extent that there is a genuine risk that a mistake or miscalculation between vessels or aircraft of either country could start a broader conflict.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the immediate dispute, Beijing’s reaction has helped consolidate the anti-Chinese shift in Japanese politics. At the end of 2012, the LDP was returned to power, with longtime China skeptic Shinzo Abe as prime minister. Prime ministers may come and go in Japan, but public opinion is now deeply suspicious of China. There is a broad consensus in Japan to shift its military from the north, which was its Cold War focus, to its maritime reaches in the southwest, a direct response to China. Tokyo is now pushing the limits of its espoused pacifism, talking about “dynamic defense cooperation.” China’s chance to slowly dislodge Japan from its U.S. alliance has been lost.
——
In South Korea, Beijing was presented a similar opening to peel the country away from the U.S. In 2002, riots broke out in Seoul after two middle-school-aged girls were run over by a U.S. armored vehicle, a signal of long-festering resentments about the heavy U.S. military presence in the country. Popular campaigns sprouted over the next decade calling for an end to the American bases. Among younger South Koreans, who had no memory of the war, it became common to suggest that the U.S. soldiers were a greater threat to the country than the North Koreans, whose vast armory of missiles is aimed directly at Seoul. Psy, the South Korean rapper, had the most-watched-ever YouTube video in 2012 with “Gangnam Style.” But a decade earlier, his music captured the anti-American mood of his generation of South Koreans. The lyrics to his song “Dear American” included the lines “Kill those fucking Yankees who have been torturing Iraqi captives, Kill those fucking Yankees who ordered them to torture.” In one 2002 performance, he smashed a model U.S. tank on the stage.
This popular sentiment found political expression in the “sunshine” policy, introduced in 1998 by President Kim Dae-jung, who had been a dissident while South Korea was a dictatorship. He sought to engage North Korea and to coax it toward Chinese-style reforms. For nearly a decade, Seoul played down human-rights abuses and did everything it could to assuage the hypersensitivity of the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il. At the same time that George W. Bush was including North Korea in his “axis of evil,” the South Korean government was sending Pyongyang hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes—delivered, it was later revealed, by the Hyundai Corporation.
Yet, through its close support of North Korea, China has lost its chance to weaken South Korea’s ties to Washington. Beijing’s indulgence of Pyongyang has become self-defeating, a triumph of ideology and anti-American paranoia over the country’s long-term strategic interests. One of the key turning points was in March 2010, when a South Korean warship called the Cheonan was sunk by a torpedo, killing forty-six sailors. An investigation team, which included experts from Sweden and Australia, concluded that the Cheonan had been attacked by North Korea. International condemnation quickly followed, yet China demurred. While diplomats from the countries involved in the inquiry toured the world to show other governments their findings, Beijing declined a chance to survey the evidence. The cause of the Cheonan’s sinking was unclear, it said. The Chinese government also took five weeks to express condolences to South Korea for the loss of so many soldiers, causing deep offense in Seoul. Nuclear-armed and miserably poor, the Stalinist regime in North Korea relies on Chinese aid to fend off complete collapse. It is also the one country in the region that might plausibly be called an ally of China. The implication seemed clear: Beijing was simply unwilling to criticize its North Korean ally, no matter how dangerous that ally’s behavior.
To outsiders, the Chinese position appeared rigid and dogmatic. On the inside, however, China’s links with North Korea had been the subject of intense discussion, with many senior officials calling for the government to distance itself from Pyongyang. The alliance had been forged during the Korean War, when China fought alongside Kim Il-sung’s army to push back the Americans. Several hundred thousand Chinese died in brutal fighting, including one of Mao Zedong’s sons, who was buried there. From that day, Chinese propagandists described the relationship with Pyongyang as being as close as “lips and teeth.”
By the early 2000s, however, the sense of comradeship had been replaced by a gnawing embarrassment. Millions were starving in North Korea while cronies of the vulgar, despotic regime of Kim Jong-il nipped across the Chinese border to buy Louis Vuitton goods at the new luxury malls in Shenyang, in the northeast of China. For many Chinese, it was an uncomfortable reminder of the worst days of China under Mao—the mixture of power worship and public misery from which modern China had escaped under Deng. The few scholars I knew who had been allowed contact with North Korea would quietly hint at a sort of shame that China was propping up such a regime. Popular views ran in a similar direction. The Internet in China almost never misses a chance to denounce American policy in the region, but in the case of North Korea, comments would often sympathize with the U.S. and openly mock China’s ally.
The booming economic relationship with South Korea also pushed China to question its ties with Pyongyang. Tens of thousands of South Korean companies have invested in China, many of them around the east-coast city of Qingdao, and the flows of goods and people between the two countries have become one of the brightest constellations in the Asian manufacturing network. Two decades ago, there was one flight a week between South Korea and mainland China: by 2010, there were 642. In economic terms, South Korea will be a big part of China’s future, not the sclerotic North. Courtesy of WikiLeaks, we know that this frustration occasionally spilled over into the conversations Chinese officials had with other governments. In 2009, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei told an American diplomat that North Korea behaves like a “spoiled child.” In another cable, a South Korean minister described two conversations with senior Chinese officials who said that they supported the idea of a unified Korea, rather than continuing to prop up Pyongyang. Of course, the Chinese diplomats were doing what good diplomats are supposed to do, presenting a version of events that the South Koreans wanted to hear. But the comments also seem to have reflected the view of significant parts of the foreign-policy establishment. According to Peking University Professor Zhu Feng, no question in Chinese foreign policy has been more hotly debated than the ties with North Korea.
Yet, by the time the Cheonan was sunk in early 2010, the party leadership had already ended the debate. China’s leaders were given a mortal scare by two developments in North Korea. Kim Jong-il’s stroke in 2008 reminded them of the political frailties of the regime. At the same time, a failed currency revaluation in late 2009 underlined the ever-present potential for economic implosion. Faced with the actual prospect of the regime’s collapsing, China decided this was something it could not tolerate. Ever since Mao ordered his troops to fight in the Korean War, China has seen North Korea as a sort of buffer, a placeholder that keeps the U.S. military presence at a distance from its borders. The passage of time and the decrepitude of the Pyongyang regime have not changed that fundamental reality. During a period when China was looking to try and push back against U.S. influence in the region, the last thing Beijing wanted was the end of the North Korean regime and its
replacement by an America-friendly, united Korea. Beijing decided to double down on its support for the Kim family regime. Xi Jinping, then China’s vice president, gave an extraordinary speech in October 2010, six months after the Cheonan sinking, describing the Korean War as “great and just”—a retreat to the 1950s orthodoxy that the U.S. had started the war, and a signal that the fraternal Communist links with the North would trump the economic pull of the modern South. When Kim Jong-il eventually died in 2011, Beijing had already given its support for the dynastic succession plan to hand over North Korea’s nuclear keys to his twenty-something son, Kim Jong-un. China, in effect, has pledged to underwrite the North Korean regime for another generation.
The sinking of the Cheonan was the moment when South Korea’s worst suspicions about China were confirmed. By then, South Korea had a different government, which was much more skeptical about the North and more supportive of Washington. Not only was Seoul outraged at the length of time it took for Beijing to send condolences, but China’s continued tolerance for Pyongyang’s truculence seemed to suggest to many in the South that it could not be trusted to uphold basic rules of international behavior if they conflicted with its interests. Beijing managed to make things worse with some ham-fisted diplomacy. In November 2010, North Korea shelled the small island of Yeonpyeong, near the sea frontier between the two countries, killing four South Koreans and causing an even more anguished reaction in Seoul. Under pressure to rein in its ally, Beijing decided to call for a meeting of the so-called six-party talks—the diplomatic forum that had been operating for the previous decade to resolve the North Korean nuclear issue. The Chinese government knew that Seoul would not accept talks until it received a public apology from North Korea, but it calculated that the gesture might help deflect some of the blame for the standoff onto South Korea. With no formal warning, Dai Bingguo, the senior Chinese foreign-policy official, turned up in Seoul to discuss the proposal. He did not have a visa, so South Korean Foreign Ministry officials had to rush out to the airport to get him into the country. Dai insisted on meeting with President Lee Myung-bak that evening, even though he did not have an appointment. And even though he asked that the meeting be off the record, he brought a group of Chinese journalists along with him. Lee told him that Seoul would not agree to a meeting involving the North Koreans, but Dai went out and announced the proposed summit anyway. The ill-feeling that Dai generated in Seoul summed up the broader setback to China’s long-term interests. By giving so much support to Pyongyang, Beijing was actually doing some of Washington’s own diplomatic work. South Korea’s unease about the American military presence has not ended, but the alliance between the two countries has been reinforced.
The Contest of the Century Page 10
