Asia's Cauldron (8 page)

In particular, China, according to the U.S. Department of Defense, “has the most active land-based ballistic and cruise missile program in the world.”
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China's new land-based antiship ballistic missiles—using information from space-based tracking systems—may threaten U.S. surface warships, particularly aircraft carriers. Though the United States retains the power of massive retaliation, the very idea that its carriers, cruisers, destroyers, and frigates are not as inviolate as they used to be could affect the deployment patterns of America's carrier strike groups. And affecting the behavior of your competitor is the essence of power.

According to Yale professor of management and political science Paul Bracken, China isn't so much building a conventional navy as an “anti-navy” navy, designed to push U.S. sea and air forces away from
the East Asian coastline. Chinese drones putting lasers on U.S. warships, sonar pings from Chinese submarines, the noisy activation of Chinese smart mines, and so on are all designed to signal to American warships that Beijing knows about their movements and the United States risks a crisis if such warships get closer to Chinese waters. Because “relations with China are too important to jeopardize with a military confrontation,” this anti-access strategy has a significant political effect on Washington. “The strategic impact of China's agility is not so much to tilt the military balance in its direction and away from the United States. Rather,” Bracken goes on, “it introduces new risks into the American decision-making calculus.”
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None of these developments is lost on U.S. military planners. For despite the headlines in North Africa and the Middle East, the United States maintains the preponderant amount of its naval forces in the Pacific, Indian, and Arctic oceans—all in Asia or close to it. Of the eleven U.S. aircraft carrier strike groups currently in existence, six are usually focused on the Pacific and Indian oceans. The U.S. Fleet Marine Force, Pacific, is the largest of the Marine Corps' field commands. The Pacific Air Forces is the largest U.S. Air Force Command. While technically speaking all these American air and sea forces range over 50 percent of the globe, in fact they are primarily focused on balancing against China. For in addition to China's subs and fighter jets, included in its arsenal are seventy-five major surface warships and its new-old aircraft carrier, with plans to acquire four to six additional carriers in the near and mid-term future.
¹⁹

The Pentagon's deployment strategy
against
China (even as it would publicly deny such a characterization) is a fact of life in the Pacific, not really because China has this or that number of submarines, surface warships, and fighter jets, but because China's “sheer size [in terms of geography, demography, and economics] and presence at the very heart of Asia make it a potential threat to virtually all of its neighbors,” writes Princeton professor Aaron L. Friedberg. At the same time, Friedberg goes on, “unlike the United States, China has no option to withdraw from the region. This fact alone cannot help but give pause to any smaller nation that might contemplate
defying Beijing's will.”
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To be sure, China, despite “its steadily expanding global involvement,” is enveloping Asia.
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In the words of U.S. Naval War College professor Andrew S. Erickson, while the American Navy and Air Force are spread thin around the planet, “China inherently enjoys theater concentration.”
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This is true not only militarily but economically as well. Even as China's defense budget has soared, its bilateral trade with the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations jumped by 640 percent during the first decade of the twenty-first century.
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In other words, to avoid Finlandization, the countries of the South China Sea must rely on the constancy of U.S. naval and air power in an age of declining American defense budgets; or on the possibility that China's own economic and domestic security will itself at some point suddenly deteriorate to the level where it adversely affects the growth of Beijing's defense budget. To clarify: it is not China's burgeoning air and naval forces per se, nor its burgeoning Asian trade patterns per se, but the combination of the two that threatens the de facto independence of other Asian states, particularly those in the South China Sea region.

Whereas Northeast Asia enjoys a rough balance of power between China, Japan, and South Korea (the latter two supported by the presence of the U.S. military) in the South China Sea, China is a much greater threat because in this rapidly militarizing age of ours the U.S. military and body politic simply do not have quite the same attachment to countries like Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines as they do to Japan and South Korea. While the United States has fought wars in the past in Vietnam and the Philippines, it presently has tens of thousands of troops stationed in Japan and South Korea. Japan and South Korea have formidable military-industrial complexes of their own, far superior to the budding arsenals of the weaker nations to the south. That is why the South China Sea will be among the most salient political and moral registers of any future U.S. defense retrenchment. Here is where everyone is arming to the teeth, even as China's military is pulling further and further ahead of every other in the region.

The South China Sea, to use an alternative geographical definition from the one used in the last chapter, connects the Strait of Malacca in the southwest to the Bashi and Balintang channels and the Taiwan Strait to the north and northeast: that is, it connects the maritime world of the Middle East and Indian Subcontinent to that of Northeast Asia. It is as central to Asia as the Mediterranean is to Europe. If one assumes that the Persian Gulf and Northeast Asia are the two critical areas of the non-Western world that the United States should never let another great power dominate, consider the energy-rich South China Sea, which lies between them, the third. In fact, in geopolitical terms it might arguably be the most critical geographical juncture of the non-Western world; the reason will become apparent shortly.

First, consider how the South China Sea is uniquely crucial to China. As the analyst Mingjiang Li writes, it is a “natural shield” for China's security in the south, China's most densely populated and developed region. A “strong foothold” in the South China Sea gives China a strategic “hinterland” of over a thousand miles stretching to Indonesia, and would thus act as a “restraining factor” for the U.S. Navy's Seventh Fleet transiting the Pacific and Indian oceans. A strong foothold in the South China Sea also helps China's navy break through the straitjacket of the American-dominated First Island Chain in the Western Pacific. Moreover, Chinese observers complain that other competing states have dug over a thousand oil wells in the South China Sea, which exceeds China's own offshore production by several times.
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Control over the South China Sea's oil and natural gas reserves would make China a little less dependent on Middle East energy.
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China claims “indisputable sovereignty” over the South China Sea. “How would you feel if I cut off your arms and legs?” asked Chinese navy commander Wu Shengli at a forum in Singapore. “That's how China feels about the South China Sea,” which Chinese officials refer to as “blue national soil.”
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China's claim to the South China Sea is, in its own words, historical. Chinese analysts argue that their forebears discovered the islands in the South China Sea during China's Han dynasty in the second
century bc. They argue that in the third century ad, a Chinese mission to Cambodia made accounts of the Paracels and Spratlys; that in the tenth through fourteenth centuries during the Song and Yuan dynasties many official and unofficial Chinese accounts indicated that the South China Sea came within China's national boundaries; that during the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries the various maps of the Ming and Qing dynasties included the Spratlys in Chinese territory; and that in the early twentieth century during the late Qing dynasty the Chinese government took action to exercise jurisdiction over the Paracels. This is to say nothing of the de facto rights Chinese fishermen have enjoyed in the South China Sea for centuries, and the detailed records they have kept of islands, islets, and shoals.
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Then there were the various official maps made by the Nationalist Guomindang government before and after World War II, incorporating South China Sea dry-land formations into Chinese territory. These maps also featured the U-shaped cow's tongue, a historical nine-dashed line that, as Chinese analysts argue, preceded the interpretations of contemporary international law as stipulated in the United Nations' Convention on the Law of the Sea. Nevertheless, as the analyst Mingjiang Li points out, many Chinese experts accept that the historical nine-dashed line does “not translate to full sovereignty over the whole South China Sea.” An example of China's willingness to compromise is its 2004 maritime boundary agreement with Vietnam over the Gulf of Tonkin, where China is entitled to 46.77 percent of the Gulf and Vietnam 53.23 percent.
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However, the Gulf of Tonkin is a special geographical case: a semi-enclosed appendage of the South China Sea where Vietnam and China are in such claustrophobic proximity that it makes sense for China to compromise on the issue, without giving up its claims on the larger sea. Though China seeks dominance, do not assume it will be unreasonable. On the other hand, the cow's tongue cannot be conceded too easily for fear of a nationalist backlash in China.

China is following up its historical claims with military movements. It has relocated its new SSN nuclear attack submarines and SSBN nuclear ballistic missile submarines from Qingdao in the north,
across the Yellow Sea from South Korea, to Yulin, on Hainan Island in the heart of the South China Sea, where Chinese subs have been able to roam at will since the 1990s.
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China has stationed troops of the People's Liberation Army on many of the disputed islands and atolls in the region, where China has built elaborate signal stations.
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Hainan, in particular, has an extensive electronic military infrastructure in place. By home-porting its newest submarines in Hainan, alongside its extensive communications and intelligence-gathering infrastructure, China, write Bussert and Elleman, is “exerting regional maritime control incrementally.”
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In effect, China is using its land to control the sea.
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Though far out at sea, too, China is ambitious—as it develops its aerial refueling program to project military power from the sea throughout the South China Sea.
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Indeed, while the South China Sea fleet is historically the last of China's fleets to modernize, that is rapidly changing as China for the last decade has been sending its newest naval combatants and aircraft to the region. Hainan Island, jutting out in the direction of Vietnam, allows China its most proximate perch on the South China Sea. The new naval base at Yalong Bay “sprawls across a spacious tract of land” with one-thousand-meter-long piers for surface warships and 230-meter piers for submarines, which will also be serviced by a special submarine tunnel to ward off aerial surveillance. Even as Southeast Asian countries modernize their own air and sea forces, most notably Malaysia—with its new F-15SG fighter jets,
Archer
-class submarines, and
Formidable
-class frigates—they continue to fall behind China.
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Actually, there is nothing unusually aggressive about anything China is doing. China is a great demographic and economic power, enjoying the geography of a vast continent with a long seaboard in the tropics and temperate zone. The fact that it seeks to dominate an adjacent sea crowded with smaller and much weaker powers, where there is possibly a plentitude of oil and natural gas, is altogether natural. If it weren't, great power politics over the course of the past few millennia would not have been as they have. University of Chicago political
scientist John Mearsheimer offers this challenging assertion: “An increasingly powerful China is likely to try to push the U.S. out of Asia, much the way the U.S. pushed the European powers out of the Western Hemisphere. Why should we expect China to act any differently than the United States did? Are they more principled than we are? More ethical? Less nationalistic?”
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In sum, unless China is stopped or slowed in its track by a domestic socioeconomic upheaval, the U.S. military will have to make some serious accommodation with a rising Chinese military power, with great political ramifications for the states in the region.

What would be the larger strategic effect of China becoming the dominant military power in the South China Sea? In other words, does the South China Sea represent something existential for the Middle Kingdom? It is at this point where one should bring the American experience in the Caribbean more fully into the discussion, so as to provide historical context for the deployment of all these submarines, fighter jets, and so on. The history of the Caribbean adds another dimension to the current tensions in the South China Sea.

We might call the Caribbean stretching from Florida to Venezuela, together with the Gulf of Mexico, the Greater Caribbean. This Greater Caribbean, which unites North and South America into a single coherent geopolitical system, is roughly the size of the South China Sea—fifteen hundred miles in one direction and one thousand miles in the other. But the two seas have the opposite visual effect on the map: whereas the South China Sea is defined by continental and island masses around it, the Caribbean is defined by the cluster of islands, big and small, in its very center. But as we know, the map is deceptive unless we peer very closely at it: for the South China Sea is indeed filled with many geographical features, however microscopic, even as they hold the key to significant energy resources.