China moves while West is distracted
North Kor e a has threatened “physical action” in response to tougher United Nations sanctions while its foreign minister held a rare meeting in the Philippines capital this weekend to discuss the issue with senior diplomats from China, Russia and South Korea.
At the same time, NBC News revealed that Manila is going to get U. S. Air Force drones to attack Islamist militants in Mindanao that have stubbornly resisted a three- month siege by Filipino forces.
These dramas took place as President Rodrigo Duterte was telling U. S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson that “I am your humble friend.” Whether those words mark an end to Duterte’s ferociously anti- American rhetoric is unclear, but for now it represents a remarkable about- face by the Philippines leader and a morethan-tacit admission that his country needs Washington’s help to end the deadly threemonth uprising under the sinister black flag of Islamic State that has claimed civilian lives.
Paradoxically, these unrelated developments obscured the fact that China had a great weekend as the Association of South East Asian Nations convened in Manila. China scored a huge victory at the ASEAN summit that almost went unnoticed. Understandably perturbed by the menace that North Korea’s nuclear missile program poses and the opening by ISIL of a new front that could threaten the stability of Malaysia and Indonesia, as well as the Philippines, the gathering in Manila spent almost no time discussing Beijing’s brazen grab for almost all of the South China Sea. Nor did the meeting give a moment’s consideration to the many other ways that China continues to push out not only into Asia, but almost every other part of the world.
To put teeth in its South China Sea claim, Beijing recently built airbases capable of launching fighters and bombers, protected by missiles on artificial islands far out into the sea — that it originally claimed where designed to provide shelter for Chinese fishermen.
Despite how i ntensely ASEAN countries feel about their overlapping claims to waters across which $ 5- trillion of trade passes each year, all that they could agree to at the Manila summit was a stale declaration for a framework for talks to begin later this year. In so doing, ASEAN ignored not only China’s militarization of the South China Sea, but a ruling last year by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague that rejected most of Beijing’s claim.
As the China Era is upon us much sooner than most expected, it is essential for Canadians and other sleepy Westerners to consider the consequences t hat arise from Chinese supremacy in so many domains. This extraordinary shift can be seen almost every day in the Philippines where the Chinese embassy runs lavish full-page ads boasting about, for example, China’s railway and port technologies and the grandiose $ 900- billion Silk Road Economic Belt and Maritime Silk Road that it plans to connect Asia to Europe and much of the rest of the world. These stories are accompanied by sidebars that celebrate the immense wealth of companies such as the State Grid Corp. of China and Sinopec Corp., which between them produce revenues of nearly $600 billion.
Canadians and their allies must also pay careful attention to how China uses trade as a cudgel, warning other countries to stay out of its many territorial disputes, but also such fundamental issues as human rights, which it considers to be an internal affair. Or else lose out on huge business and tourism opportunities.
A few decades ago China was closed to the world and seldom ventured out into it. This summer, the People’s Liberation Army Navy shadowed a Canadian warship in the South China Sea and East China Sea while, in a show of force aimed at Taiwan, steamed an aircraft carrier near that island, opened a naval base in the Horn of Africa, sent warships through the Mediterranean Sea and into the Baltic Sea to conduct exercises with the Russian Navy, put coast guard ships inside Japanese territorial waters and sent its Snow Dragon icebreaker to circumnavigate the Arctic Ocean for the first time.
Along with this maritime blitz, and huge infrastructure and natural resources projects in Burma, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Africa, there is immense soft power, too. The Chinese Tourism Academy says China sent 122 million tourists overseas last year, who spent nearly US$ 1.1 billion abroad. According to its mood, China will turn the tourism taps on and off to South Korea, Japan and the Philippines.
China has clearly not felt bound for several years now by former Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping’s admonition to “hide our capacities and bide our time.” With North Korea and Islamic State’s Asian proxies hogging so much of the bandwidth in the Far East today, China has a freer hand to do as it pleases and it is taking advantage of this. One of the many goals of the current Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, is to achieve military parity with the United States within a generation.
The world should be paying a lot more attention to what China is up to, and not be mesmerized by the sideshows in North Korea and Mindanao, as deadly as they are.