Between deer and running dogs
From Australia to Britain, from Vietnam to India, China seems to be on the warpath against the world. It has deployed economic and trade tools to coerce Australia and Britain and military might to expand its territory in Asia. The current spread and intensity of the Chinese threat may be unprecedented, but China is using its old playbook. The Deer and The Dragon, a collection of essays on China and Southeast Asia, helps explain the methods it uses to acquire tributaries in Southeast Asia and turn the South China Sea into a virtual Chinese lake.
Trying to suborn Australia into accepting its version of the origins of the coronavirus, China has imposed high tariffs on Australian exports and barred Chinese tourists and students visiting that country, denying Australia significant revenue. This is a familiar tactic. In 2012, when the Philippines tried to block Chinese occupation of its Scarborough Shoal, China halted tourist travel to the Philippines and blocked Philippine fruit imports, ostensibly on health grounds. In 2010, when Japanese and Chinese vessels jostled near the disputed Senkaku Islands, China stopped rare earth mineral exports to Japan.
Twelve chapters in The Deer and the Dragon provide new information and analyses that not only offer fresh insights but also help explain issues that concern China’s relations with other neighbours. In a fascinating chapter “Ambiguity is Fun” editor Donald Emmerson lists eight such tactics: Annexation, augmentation, construction, militarisation, intimidation, ambiguation, cooptation, and prolongation.
In order to achieve control over the entire South China Sea, China has applied all these tactics starting with military annexation of parts of the waters. In recent years the occupied islands and reefs have been augmented, adding 3,200 acres of land reclaimed from the sea, allowing China to build runways, and missile and naval bases. This tactic is familiar to India, as is the tactic of ambiguation.
China submitted before the United Nations its claim to the South China Sea in a so-called “nine dash line” without any explanation. Will this claim cover the airspace above? Stay tuned. As Mr Emmerson says, “Ambiguation allows China to maximise its claims whenever it is expedient to do so, free of the limits that definitive clarity could impose.” He quotes a Chinese navy officer telling him: “Ambiguity is wonderful! Ambiguity is fun!” But at least in the case of the ill-defined Line of Actual Control on the China-india border, it has not been fun.
This rich collection provides answers to many questions. When China says a deal with a foreign partner is “win-win”, who actually wins? A fascinating essay on Cambodia shows which of Cambodia’s government-linked fat cats benefit from multimillion dollar deals with China. Another essay on Myanmar offers interesting insight into long SinoMyanmar relations along with their pitfalls.
China’s imperious, assertive behaviour since 2010 in particular has puzzled the world. Veteran China-watcher Thomas Fingar argues that the reason China has turned aggressively nationalistic lies in its growing concern about domestic instability and legitimacy of its one-party rule. He notes that since 2011 China’s budgets have allocated more money for internal security than for national defence. Resolute and uncompromising positions on questions of sovereignty — whether they concern Taiwan, the
South China Sea, or the Sino-indian border — are critical for the legitimacy of the leadership. Focusing their concern more on “threats to internal stability and regime survival than on external adversaries … and to address those concerns, China’s leaders chose to play the nationalism card”. Mr Fingar’s analysis may also offer a partial explanation of China’s recent aggressive action in the Galwan River Valley.
This collection of essays shows that despite their unhappiness with Beijing’s increasingly aggressive behaviour, most Southeast Asian neighbours are too afraid to speak up. A dramatic moment came in the summer of 2010, when Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Yi sternly reminded his Singapore counterpart attending an Asean meeting that “China is a big country, other countries are small countries, and that’s just a fact”.
As China sheds its Deng Xiaopingmandated policy of hiding its strength to openly pressure its neighbours, Mr Emmerson notes some internal tensions among Asean members, even within one country, over that stern reminder. “Kishore Mahbubani, a Singaporean analyst known for celebrating China,” is quoted as advising Asean countries: “Small states must always behave like small states.” Another Singapore ex-diplomat Bilahari Kausikan strongly disagreed. Singapore citizens are not “stupid” as to ignore meaningful “asymmetries of size and power”, he said but that knowledge did not oblige them to “grovel or accept subordination” as normal. “No one respects a running dog,” Kausikan is quoted as saying.
The reality might be that while not being a running dog one might still choose not to bark. The editor of the collection has chosen a different animal metaphor — of the deer — to describe the Southeast Asian neighbours, facing the Chinese dragon. He hopefully posits that the Southeast Asian mousedeer — small but clever — might outmanoeuvre the mighty dragon. In reality, only Vietnam’s skilful defence of its territory in 1979, when “the mousedeer’s skill and tenacity surprised, embarrassed, and seriously wounded the dragon”, or Singapore’s diplomatic dexterity in retaining its independence might fit the image. But most other deer look paralysed, caught in the dragon’s glare.