Honeymoon with rise of China is well and truly over
Areview of Beijing’s relations with a variety of states in East Asia suggests that the honeymoon surrounding China’s rise is well and truly over.
Even before the physical deployment this week of a US Theatre High Altitude Air Defence (THAAD) unit on South Korean territory, China had already made its displeasure clear by flexing some considerable muscle.
Since Seoul’s July 2016 announcement that it intended to deploy THAAD, Lotte, the South Korean conglomerate which owns the land on which the system will be based, has faced threats of retaliation to its economic interests in China.
South Korean musical artists have been barred from entry into China.
More punishment is in store. Visits of Chinese tour groups to South Korea have been suspended by the Chinese government with effect from 15 March. This hurts South Korea hard. According to the South Korean government’s own figures, Chinese tourists constituted 46% of South Korea’s tourist total for 2016.
The Sino-South Korean relationship is not an aberration.
Beijing’s relations with North Korea, its alliance partner since 1961, are not particularly good either. Since North Korea’s first nuclear test in 2006, China has supported successive United Nations’ Security Council sanctions targeted against Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons-related activities.
Pyongyang’s recent and suspected statesponsored assassination of Kim Jong-nam in Kuala Lumpur has inflicted further damage on its relationship with Beijing.
Since late 2003, Kim had reportedly been a resident in Macau, the Chinese territory. His death is a severe blow to Chinese prestige and complicates its future North Korea strategy. If the day comes when the North Korean regime collapses, Beijing will have one less ace card in its deck.
All this is even before we consider China’s relations with many of the Southeast Asian states, some of which it has disputes over sovereignty of a variety of islands and rock formations in the South China Sea.
When Cambodia and Laos were the hosts for the annual meetings of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, China leaned sufficiently on both states to forestall the release of the standard communique. This occurred in Cambodia in 2012 and again in Laos in 2016.
Further afield, since 2012, Sino-Japanese disputes over the Senkaku or Diaoyutai islands in the East China Sea have been particularly acute.
Bilateral relations between Beijing and Tokyo are presently so poor that Japan has begun supplying the Philippines and Vietnam with coast guard vessels to defend their maritime sovereignty claims against China’s. The Japanese navy now also engages in joint patrols in the South China Sea with their US counterparts.
The new normal in China’s relations with East Asia raises a compelling question. Where are the many academics and diplomats who once celebrated China’s rise as a force for stabilising the region? Some have simply stopped commenting on the subject. At least that is an implicit acknowledgement that their counsel was misplaced.
Rather startlingly, others who had previously talked up China’s rise are now declaring it a deeply conflicted power, presiding over a badly broken political system, with ominous consequences for the Chinese Communist Party’s rule.
The point here is not to deny that contradictions and deep tensions exist in China’s model of political economy. It is to observe that naïve optimism has been replaced with over the top pessimism.
It is high time we understand contemporary China for what it really is. China is a rising power that is seeking to return to a position of regional leadership that has been its historical experience. It may or may not succeed in achieving this, but copious evidence suggests that this is what is really going on.
In this process of transition, it would be highly unusual for a great power like China not to attempt to exercise influence over its immediate region.
Indeed, why wouldn’t an attempt be made to convert economic power into political leverage? Why wouldn’t regional states be the target of a divide and rule policy when they take positions that are at variance with China’s?
This is not the first time a rising power posed such questions to the rest of the world, and it will not be the last. The surprise is that so many are surprised at Chinese behaviour in East Asia.