China has been trying to bully its way to dominance in Asia for years and it seems that not even an international tribunal in The Hague, the Netherlands, is going to stand in its way.
China has rebuffed a landmark ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration, which knocked the bottom out of expansive Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea and ruled that some of the nation’s practices were in violation of international law. Recognizing that there is no mechanism to enforce the court’s ruling, Beijing does not intend to give even an inch on its claims on everything that falls within its unilaterally drawn “nine-dash line.”
Clearly, China values its territorial gains — which provide everything from major oil and gas reserves to fisheries, accounting for 12 percent of the global catch, to strategic depth — more than its international reputation. Unfortunately, this could mean more trouble for the region than for China itself.
China is not just aiming for uncontested control in the South China Sea, it is also working relentlessly to challenge the territorial “status quo” in the East China Sea and the Himalayas, and to re-engineer the cross-border flows of international rivers that originate on the Tibetan Plateau. In its leaders’ view, success means reducing Southeast Asian nations to tributary status — and there seems to be little anyone can do to stop them from pursuing that outcome.
Indeed, China’s obvious disdain for international mediation, arbitration, or adjudication essentially takes peaceful resolution off the table and, because none of its regional neighbors wants to face off with the mighty China, all are vulnerable to Chinese hegemony.
China does not seek to dominate Asia overnight. Instead, it is pursuing an incremental approach to shaping the region according to its interests. Rather than launching an old-fashioned invasion — an approach that could trigger a direct confrontation with the US — China is creating new facts on the ground by confounding, bullying and bribing adversaries.
To scuttle the efforts to build an international consensus against its unilateralism, China initiates and maintains generous aid and investment arrangements with countries in need. In the run-up to the arbitration ruling, China used its clout to force ASEAN to retract a joint statement critical of its role in the South China Sea.
However, China’s bribery and manipulation has its limits. Beijing has few friends in Asia, a point made by US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter in his warning that China is erecting a “Great Wall of self-isolation.” The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded by citing support for its positions from distant nations such as Sierra Leone and Kenya.
However, in a world where domination is often conflated with leadership and where money talks, China might not have all that much to worry about. Consider how normal diplomatic relations with China were quickly restored in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989.
Criticisms of China’s territorial grabs focus on dissuading its leaders from further expansionary activities, rather than forcing it to vacate the seven reefs and outcroppings it has already turned into nascent military outposts in the South China Sea. The international community migth not like what China has done, but it seems willing to accept it.
That reality has not been lost on China, which was emboldened by the absence of any meaningful international push against two particularly audacious moves: Its 2012 seizure of the Scarborough Shoal (Huangyan Island, 黃岩島), just 120 nautical miles (222km) from the Philippines, and its establishment in 2013 of an air-defense identification zone (ADIZ) over areas of the East China Sea that it does not control. Since then, China’s leaders have considerably ramped up their island-building spree in the South China Sea.
Although the Philippines did fight back, invoking the dispute-settlement provision of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), its efforts seem unlikely to yield much.
On the contrary, China can now double down on its defiance, by establishing an ADIZ in the South China Sea — a move that would effectively prohibit flights through the region without the permission of Beijing. Given that China has already militarized the area, including by building radar facilities on islets and deploying the 100km-range HQ-9 surface-to-air missiles on Woody Island (Yongxing Island, 永興島), it is well-positioned to enforce an ADIZ.
China’s defiance of the court’s ruling would deal a crushing blow to international law.
As French Minister of Defense Jean-Yves Le Drian said, if UNCLOS is openly flouted in the South China Sea, “it will be in jeopardy in the Arctic, the Mediterranean and elsewhere tomorrow.”
Given that international law is crucial to protect smaller states by keeping major powers in check, the immediate question is what happens when simmering tensions with China’s Asian neighbors — and with the US — finally boil over.
Mao Zedong (毛澤東) said “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
Taiwanese might like to think that they are better than that, or that the world has progressed beyond sheer coercion by great powers. However, as China’s actions suggest, the essence of geopolitics has not changed. The bullies still run the schoolyard.
Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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