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By Ying Ma
Apr 22, 2014
A Japan Coast Guard vessel, left, sails along with a Chinese surveillance ship near the disputed islands called Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China in the East China Sea n April 23.
Associated Press
As territorial tensions continue to hover over the Asia-Pacific, Beijing has grown increasingly agitated at what it sees as Western efforts to portray it as a bully in the region. China’s territorial conflicts have indeed prompted negative coverage in the foreign press, but how much of that is due to anti-China bias and how much falls on the shoulders of Beijing itself?
According to one veteran strategist, Beijing itself is largely to blame.
In picking fights with so many of its neighbors, China is practicing “bad strategy,” Edward Luttwak, a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, recently told me.
With Barack Obama about to arrive in Asia for a week-long visit, Mr. Luttwak argued that it would make much more strategic sense if Beijing were to “for example, focus on the Japanese,” emphasize their reluctance to fully own up to their sins from World War II, and “shut up about everybody else.”
Of course, China is no slouch when it comes to criticizing Japan. It has devoted vast resources—both in its domestic state-owned media apparatus and in public diplomacy campaigns–to paint Japan as an aggressor intent on whitewashing its war-time history and pursuing a path of militarism.
The problem for China, Luttwak explains, is that Beijing is “demanding the cession of lands, reefs, rocks and sea waters from India, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam”—all at the same time. This has created the incentives and conditions for countries in Asia to gang up on and encircle China.
Were China to focus its ire on Japan, it could draw on a wide array of valid historical grievances. For instance, in asserting its claims on the hotly disputed Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea (known as the Senkaku in Japan), Beijing insists that Japan stole the islands from China in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 and failed to return them after World War II.
Beijing’s case is bolstered by the fact that other actors in East Asia harbor similar grievances against Japan. Taiwan, which also claims the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands, normally enjoys warm relations with Japan, but makes the same complaints as Beijing about Japan’s war-time theft.
Meanwhile, South Korea has its own set of nasty disputes with Japan. South Korea administers the Dokdo islands (known as the Takeshima islands in Japan) that Japan also claims. Much like China, South Korea suffered tremendously under Japan during World War II, and has regularly condemned statements or actions from the Japanese right that seek to gloss over or deny Japan’s past aggressions.
The Japanese right’s penchant for historical revisionism has provided China with plenty of fodder. “Japan’s conservatives are doing themselves and the rest of the global community a tremendous disservice by feeding a parallel narrative that sees Japan as the primary destabilizing force in East Asia,” Phillip Lipscy, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, recently wrote.
That’s not to say China would find it easy to turn global opinion against Japan as an impediment to regional stability. Whatever Japan’s past sins and current flaws, it remains a stable democracy that has contributed to peace and development around the world and is not guilty of the egregious human rights abuses that China regularly inflicts on its own citizens.
China, however, seems not at all eager to give its neighbors the proper incentives to ponder Japan’s transgressions. Instead, it has engaged in heated territorial disputes with many neighboring countries and given them plenty of reasons to worry about China itself.
In Southeast Asia, for example, China claims sovereignty over virtually all of the waters of South China Sea and has grown increasingly aggressive in asserting claims over islands and underwater resources. In January of this year, the southern Chinese province of Hainan enacted regulations requiring all non-Chinese fishing vessels operating in the claimed waters to first obtain permission from Beijing. In 2012, China dislodged the Philippines from the Scarborough Shoal, a reef contested by the two countries, and in recent years, has repeatedly detained Vietnamese fishermen and cut the cables of Vietnamese vessels operating near island groups disputed between Beijing and Hanoi.
The result of these moves, argues Toshi Yoshihara of the U.S. Naval War College, is that Asian countries such as Vietnam, the Philippines, Cambodia and India are actively forging closer ties to the United States and Japan.
Luttwak agrees. “Because [the Chinese] are making concurrent demands on everyone, the Japanese, instead of being isolated, are being handed allies all over the place and are being welcomed everywhere.”
Certainly, China’s territorial claims are not new, nor is it alone in asserting some of the most controversial ones. Some also claim that China has not provoked any of the recent crises with its neighbors but have merely overreacted to them. Regardless, China is undermining its own interests by pursuing so many of territorial claims so aggressively at the same time.
Many attribute China’s growing assertiveness to the abandonment of its foreign policy strategy, described in Foreign Affairs in 2005 by Chinese scholar Zheng Bijian, of a “peaceful rise” to great-power status.
In that vein, Chinese President Xi Jinping recently portrayed China as a lion that has awakened. Though he insists the lion is “peaceful, friendly and civil,” outside observers see in Chinese behavior a growing sense among the leadership in Beijing that China’s time in the sun has finally come. That more muscular foreign policy has coincided with the growing influence of the view—widely discussed in China’s foreign policy circles since the global financial crisis of 2008-09–that the United States is a power in decline.
These perceptions have spurred more than a few worries in Asian capitals and will animate many of President Obama discussions with regional leaders on his impending visit to Malaysia, South Korea, the Philippines and Japan. As America’s friends and allies in Asia eagerly to seek reassurances that Washington will honor its security commitments in the face of a rising China, Luttwak contends that “it would behoove the Chinese–it would suit the Chinese–to continue with its previous policy called ‘peaceful rise,’ shut up about islands and places, ask for nothing and simply continue growing.”
Luttwak himself acknowledges that Beijing is unlikely to heed his advice. Keeping quiet doesn’t dovetail with the “China Dream” that Xi has encouraged Chinese citizens to pursue in the 21st century — a key componentof which is building a strong, assertive country that never again has to experience the indignities it suffered in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Yet even strong countries must wield and nurture their strength wisely. It was China’s late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping who set forth the foreign policy doctrine of “bide our time; hide our capabilities” in order to avoid triggering efforts by the United States and others to contain China’s rise. Though China is now much stronger than during Deng’s era, it is still not strong enough to take on the United States and much of Asia. That may be worth remembering in Beijing’s pursuit of the “China Dream.”
Ying Ma is the author of “Chinese Girl in the Ghetto” and the host of “China Takes Over the World” on RTHK, Hong Kong’s public broadcast station. Follow her on Twitter @gztoghetto.
Should China just ‘Shut Up’ about its territorial ambitions?
Apr 22, 2014
A Japan Coast Guard vessel, left, sails along with a Chinese surveillance ship near the disputed islands called Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China in the East China Sea n April 23.
Associated Press
As territorial tensions continue to hover over the Asia-Pacific, Beijing has grown increasingly agitated at what it sees as Western efforts to portray it as a bully in the region. China’s territorial conflicts have indeed prompted negative coverage in the foreign press, but how much of that is due to anti-China bias and how much falls on the shoulders of Beijing itself?
According to one veteran strategist, Beijing itself is largely to blame.
In picking fights with so many of its neighbors, China is practicing “bad strategy,” Edward Luttwak, a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, recently told me.
With Barack Obama about to arrive in Asia for a week-long visit, Mr. Luttwak argued that it would make much more strategic sense if Beijing were to “for example, focus on the Japanese,” emphasize their reluctance to fully own up to their sins from World War II, and “shut up about everybody else.”
Of course, China is no slouch when it comes to criticizing Japan. It has devoted vast resources—both in its domestic state-owned media apparatus and in public diplomacy campaigns–to paint Japan as an aggressor intent on whitewashing its war-time history and pursuing a path of militarism.
The problem for China, Luttwak explains, is that Beijing is “demanding the cession of lands, reefs, rocks and sea waters from India, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam”—all at the same time. This has created the incentives and conditions for countries in Asia to gang up on and encircle China.
Were China to focus its ire on Japan, it could draw on a wide array of valid historical grievances. For instance, in asserting its claims on the hotly disputed Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea (known as the Senkaku in Japan), Beijing insists that Japan stole the islands from China in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 and failed to return them after World War II.
Beijing’s case is bolstered by the fact that other actors in East Asia harbor similar grievances against Japan. Taiwan, which also claims the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands, normally enjoys warm relations with Japan, but makes the same complaints as Beijing about Japan’s war-time theft.
Meanwhile, South Korea has its own set of nasty disputes with Japan. South Korea administers the Dokdo islands (known as the Takeshima islands in Japan) that Japan also claims. Much like China, South Korea suffered tremendously under Japan during World War II, and has regularly condemned statements or actions from the Japanese right that seek to gloss over or deny Japan’s past aggressions.
The Japanese right’s penchant for historical revisionism has provided China with plenty of fodder. “Japan’s conservatives are doing themselves and the rest of the global community a tremendous disservice by feeding a parallel narrative that sees Japan as the primary destabilizing force in East Asia,” Phillip Lipscy, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, recently wrote.
That’s not to say China would find it easy to turn global opinion against Japan as an impediment to regional stability. Whatever Japan’s past sins and current flaws, it remains a stable democracy that has contributed to peace and development around the world and is not guilty of the egregious human rights abuses that China regularly inflicts on its own citizens.
China, however, seems not at all eager to give its neighbors the proper incentives to ponder Japan’s transgressions. Instead, it has engaged in heated territorial disputes with many neighboring countries and given them plenty of reasons to worry about China itself.
In Southeast Asia, for example, China claims sovereignty over virtually all of the waters of South China Sea and has grown increasingly aggressive in asserting claims over islands and underwater resources. In January of this year, the southern Chinese province of Hainan enacted regulations requiring all non-Chinese fishing vessels operating in the claimed waters to first obtain permission from Beijing. In 2012, China dislodged the Philippines from the Scarborough Shoal, a reef contested by the two countries, and in recent years, has repeatedly detained Vietnamese fishermen and cut the cables of Vietnamese vessels operating near island groups disputed between Beijing and Hanoi.
The result of these moves, argues Toshi Yoshihara of the U.S. Naval War College, is that Asian countries such as Vietnam, the Philippines, Cambodia and India are actively forging closer ties to the United States and Japan.
Luttwak agrees. “Because [the Chinese] are making concurrent demands on everyone, the Japanese, instead of being isolated, are being handed allies all over the place and are being welcomed everywhere.”
Certainly, China’s territorial claims are not new, nor is it alone in asserting some of the most controversial ones. Some also claim that China has not provoked any of the recent crises with its neighbors but have merely overreacted to them. Regardless, China is undermining its own interests by pursuing so many of territorial claims so aggressively at the same time.
Many attribute China’s growing assertiveness to the abandonment of its foreign policy strategy, described in Foreign Affairs in 2005 by Chinese scholar Zheng Bijian, of a “peaceful rise” to great-power status.
In that vein, Chinese President Xi Jinping recently portrayed China as a lion that has awakened. Though he insists the lion is “peaceful, friendly and civil,” outside observers see in Chinese behavior a growing sense among the leadership in Beijing that China’s time in the sun has finally come. That more muscular foreign policy has coincided with the growing influence of the view—widely discussed in China’s foreign policy circles since the global financial crisis of 2008-09–that the United States is a power in decline.
These perceptions have spurred more than a few worries in Asian capitals and will animate many of President Obama discussions with regional leaders on his impending visit to Malaysia, South Korea, the Philippines and Japan. As America’s friends and allies in Asia eagerly to seek reassurances that Washington will honor its security commitments in the face of a rising China, Luttwak contends that “it would behoove the Chinese–it would suit the Chinese–to continue with its previous policy called ‘peaceful rise,’ shut up about islands and places, ask for nothing and simply continue growing.”
Luttwak himself acknowledges that Beijing is unlikely to heed his advice. Keeping quiet doesn’t dovetail with the “China Dream” that Xi has encouraged Chinese citizens to pursue in the 21st century — a key componentof which is building a strong, assertive country that never again has to experience the indignities it suffered in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Yet even strong countries must wield and nurture their strength wisely. It was China’s late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping who set forth the foreign policy doctrine of “bide our time; hide our capabilities” in order to avoid triggering efforts by the United States and others to contain China’s rise. Though China is now much stronger than during Deng’s era, it is still not strong enough to take on the United States and much of Asia. That may be worth remembering in Beijing’s pursuit of the “China Dream.”
Ying Ma is the author of “Chinese Girl in the Ghetto” and the host of “China Takes Over the World” on RTHK, Hong Kong’s public broadcast station. Follow her on Twitter @gztoghetto.
Should China just ‘Shut Up’ about its territorial ambitions?
