The cancellation of U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit
to South-East Asia, and the two separate tours of Chinese President Xi
Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang to the region can be seen as geopolitical
markers of our times. The energetic Chinese foreign policy — which has
seen Xi hop across a dozen nations in three of the world’s six
continents this year, including an intriguing trip to the Caribbean —
contrasts with the seeming American lassitude all around.
This
is most evident in Asia, where the self-declared American pivot to the
region — already diluted by being renamed a “rebalance” has become
hostage to a virtual civil war between the Republican and the Democratic
parties. In the meantime, China has moved to shore up relations with
strategic neighbours Russia and Central Asia and now to repair ties in
South-East Asia that have been frayed by its muscular assertion of
territorial claims in the South China Sea.
Xi
undertook a whirlwind tour of South-East Asia beginning with a two-day
visit to Indonesia earlier this month, followed by a visit to Malaysia
and culminating in his participation at the 21st informal leaders
meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation at Bali. To underscore
the Chinese determination in wooing the ASEAN bloc, this visit has been
followed by Premier Li Keqiang’s October 9-15 tour which saw him first
in Brunei to attend the 16th China-ASEAN leaders meeting, the 16th ASEAN
plus three (China, Japan, South Korea) summit and the eighth East Asia
summit, and then in Thailand and Vietnam.
Overwhelmed by crises
There
is more than an element of irony in the fact that at the same time
President Obama was compelled to cancel his four-nation, weeklong trip
to the region on account of the political crisis in the U.S. He had
planned to visit Malaysia and the Philippines, as well as attend the
APEC meeting in Bali, followed by the Brunei East Asia summit. It is not
clear when Mr. Obama will finally find time to visit the region which
has a key role in America’s Asian “rebalance.” As for Central Asia, the
Americans seem to have disengaged entirely; even in Afghanistan, there
is continuing and discomfiting talk of the “zero option” or the total
pullout in 2014.
It is difficult to avoid the sense
that the U.S. is being overwhelmed by the double whammy of domestic
political and economic crises, accompanied by external developments.
America may be the world’s sole superpower, but that also means bearing a
disproportionate share of the world’s headaches be it in Syria, Yemen,
Egypt, Afghanistan, Pakistan, North Korea and island disputes of China.
The domestic political crisis is more insidious because it could be
signalling a desire of the deep establishment to retrench foreign
commitments on a longer term basis. The U.S. has a huge domestic agenda,
both political and economic, and there is little indication that it is
anywhere near evolving ways to deal with them. With some variations, the
same could be said of Europe and Japan.
The U.S. is
deeply aware of the geopolitical challenge that China poses. The
articulation of the Asian pivot was one manifestation of this. Another
was the call to press new trade arrangements through the TransAtlantic
Trade and Investment Partnership and the Trans-Pacific Partnership which
would bypass the blockade on the Doha round of the WTO and provide a
fresh economic impetus to the western world.
Washington
got off the blocks first in 2009-2010 by challenging Beijing over its
handling of its maritime disputes in the South China Sea with a clutch
of ASEAN nations and with Japan in the East China Sea. In 2010, China
reportedly conveyed to the U.S. that the South China Sea now constituted
a “core interest,” implying that it was non-negotiable. At the ASEAN
Regional Forum meet in Hanoi, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
riposted that “the United States has a national interest in freedom of
navigation, open access to Asia’s maritime commons and respect for
international law in the South China Sea,” and called for a multilateral
mechanism to resolve the disputes arising from China’s outlandish
claims in the South China Sea in relation to the Philippines, Brunei,
Malaysia and Vietnam. The American stand was welcomed by the ASEAN
states that were locked in the seemingly hopeless struggle against
China. This, in turn, encouraged the U.S. to capitalise on the sentiment
and declare its pivot to Asia.
In all this, the
Senkaku/Diaoyu dispute between Japan and China occupies a special space
because the situation there remains fraught and little has been done to
address the issues. However, it has led to a strengthening of the U.S.
military alliance with Japan and, in that sense, reinforces the logic of
the “rebalance.”
Chinese measures
The
Chinese have backtracked on their “core interest” assertion and have now
nuanced their stand. At one level, they have taken a number of
administrative measures to cement their claims. First, has been the
creation of a new Sansha city, an administrative body with its
headquarters in the Paracel islands. Second, special powers have been
given to the border police in Hainan to board vessels and regulate
shipping in what China says are its territorial waters. Third, has been a
consolidation of the entire maritime domain by the creation of a State
Oceanic Administration.
In 2002, China and ASEAN had
signed a Declaration of Conduct through which they had agreed to
“resolve their territorial and jurisdictional disputes by peaceful
means, without resorting to the threat or use of force, through friendly
consultations and negotiations.”
But China has shown little haste in developing this into a practical code of conduct.
Beijing
has consistently refused to discuss the disputes in any but a bilateral
forum and its adherence to the United Nations Convention on the Law of
the Sea (UNCLOS) Agreement, or the law of the sea, is fitful at best. It
has walked away from a Philippines effort to use the UNCLOS mechanism
to resolve the dispute. But it is invoking UNCLOS in its dispute with
Japan.
New tone
But there is an important
straw in the wind signalling a new tone in Chinese policy. This was
contained in Xi Jinping’s speech at a special study session of the
party’s politburo on China’s maritime issues at the end of July where he
reiterated an old formulation of Deng Xiaoping, termed the 12 character
guideline, which essentially noted that in the island disputes,
“sovereignty remains ours,” but China was ready to “shelve disputes and
pursue joint development.” This was underscored by Foreign Minister Wang
Yi who, during the course of a South-East Asian tour in early August
noted that the eventual resolution of disputes could only be reached
through bilateral talks and would “take time,” and in the meantime,
there was need to pursue the Code of Conduct for handling problems
peacefully.
The Xi-Li tours to South-East Asia,
therefore, appear to be part of a larger strategy where China, having
drawn its lines on the sand in the South China Sea, is now seeking to
moderate its fallout. In the larger geopolitical framework it would
appear that Beijing is working with the assumption that it has a window
of some three or four years in which it will take the U.S. and Europe to
hack their way out of the self-created maze they are in.
This
is the period in which Beijing needs to reach out and consolidate new
relationships and configure partnerships that will help China assume its
rightful place as a world power of consequence.
In
the 19th century, Britain initiated the Great Game to limit Russian
power. The Great Game today is about the rise of China, and the U.S.
effort in remaining number one, come what may. The 21st century game is
not about containment, which is simply not possible when each is the
other’s second largest trading partner. It is about competition to be
the number one economic and military power in the world and, in that
sense, it is about winning and losing and its consequences thereof.
The Hindu October 14, 2013
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