China's Territorial Disputes (3 page)

A detailed study of American operations during the Gulf War of 1991, commissioned by the Central Military Commission (CMC), convinced the Chinese leadership that victory in future wars hinges inevitably on rapid force projection and the use of high-technology (hi-tech) weaponry of long-range accuracy.
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This understanding was underscored by the quick success of the American-led campaigns against Serbia in 1999 and Iraq in 2003. Preparation for hi-tech war dictates a qualitative expansion of defense depth on land, air and sea, and the strategy of offshore or forward defense emphasizes long-range air power projection and rapid maneuver of naval forces in capturing and holding distant territories.
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To provide better cover for China’s ground and naval forces or act alone in operations well beyond Chinese territory, the Chinese have been acquiring military aircraft from a cash-strapped Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. China has taken delivery of as many as seventy-two of the SU-2
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fighter aircraft ordered, and was reported to have secured a license to manufacture up to 300 MiG-31 interceptors.
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The Chinese air force was also keen to acquire surface-to-air missiles from the Russians, and aerial-refuelling technology from Britain, Iran and Israel.
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In PLA journal articles arguing for a blue-water capability, the Spratly dispute has been used to justify faster naval modernization. The great distance between the Chinese mainland and a possible site of conflict in the Spratlys has been pointed out by the Chinese navy to justify the acquisition of larger surface combatants, long-range aircraft with aerial-refuelling capability, more logistical supplies and forward naval and marine bases in the South China Sea.
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As the posture of the PLA shifts from that of geostrategic defense during the period of Sino-Soviet split to the defense of China’s right to explore and exploit marine resources in its adjoining seas, we expect the Chinese military, especially the navy, and even the air force, to have an ever greater say, not only in its role in organizing and conducting maritime operations, but also in the discussions or negotiations on resolving maritime territorial sovereignty disputes with China’s neighbors.

Territorial sovereignty disputes and two-level games

According to a scholar who studied territorial disputes by looking at the domestic determinants of the realist approach,

the critical theoretical task confronting scholars in the field of international politics is to develop generalizing propositions about state behaviour based on the premise that foreign policy leaders are attentive to the incentives and constraints generated by both their domestic and international environment ... (for) powerful explanations of international conflict behaviour cannot be derived from theoretical models that fail to consider the simultaneous impact of both domestic and international-level variables.
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I cannot agree more. Examining the intertwining roles which domestic forces, international law, national leadership and systemic changes in the world political-economy play in the Sino-Soviet (Sino-Russian), Sino-Japanese, Sino-Indian, and Sino-Southeast Asian territorial disputes over the Zhenbao/ Damansky island, Diaoyu/Senkaku islands, Himalayan borderlands, and South China Sea outcrops respectively, I am convinced that the politics of international conflicts, negotiations and settlements should best be conceived of as a “two-level game.” In this negotiation “game,” the negotiator sits between two tables: across him sits his negotiating counterpart from another state, and behind him sit domestic constituents who favor or disfavor the agreement being negotiated. The negotiating “game” is two-leveled because, as Robert Putnam puts it:

At the national level, domestic groups pursue their interests by pressuring the government to adopt favourable policies, and politicians seek power by constructing coalitions among these groups. At the international level, national governments seek to maximize their own ability to satisfy domestic pressures, while minimizing the adverse consequences of foreign developments.
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Neither state-centric nor regime integration theories are certain foundations for theorizing about how domestic and international politics interact. As for the state as a unitary actor, in their work on conflict bargaining, Glenn Snyder and Paul Diesing found that, in fully half of the crises they studied, the top decisionmakers were not unified.
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Government negotiators thus have a special role in mediating conflicts, not because they are united on all issues, nor because they are insulated from domestic politics, but precisely because they are directly exposed to both domestic and international pressures. Since the state is not a unitary actor, any change in policies because of international agreements also has domestic distributive and electoral consequences. As such, domestic politics matter, and the structure of preferences of domestic actors and institutions must be taken into account as a key variable influencing policy-making in the diplomatic sphere. The high risk and cost of war may be sufficient to explain why governments do not want to engage in an open territorial dispute with their neighbors, especially if the gains are minor; however, it does not explain why states cannot conclude a peace agreement to forgo or divide a claim. For that, an understanding of domestic politics is necessary.

As for regime integration, China’s participation in the construction of a normative multilateral framework of regional confidence building and cooperative security undertakings is still tentative and uncertain.
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In the last twenty years, China has become more integrated into the world market, and sees cooperation with the international community as conducive to providing a secure environment for economic growth to take place. The Chinese authorities have given the highest priority to economic development as the key to social stability and regime maintenance. As such, institutionalist premises on interdependence, mutual trust, and common norms among members of a regime may become increasingly relevant to the analysis of Chinese foreign policy. However, whereas for Western nations, interdependence entails the sacrifice of some measure of national independence, interdependence for the Chinese is a purely economic concept. The loss of autonomy as the result of joining an international organization or signing an international convention is acceptable only to the extent that it is reciprocal and voluntary for China. In accordance with the independent or “omni-directional” foreign policy announced in 1982, China intends to preserve all of its diplomatic autonomy in its nationalist and security postures, as it seeks to achieve peaceful solutions to disputes and strives to integrate China into a single world market. This is particularly the case with matters pertaining to sovereignty claims and boundary disputes.

Many writers have described Chinese negotiating style and the tactics adopted by Chinese negotiators, and contrasted these with the style and tactics employed by foreign negotiators by attributing the difference to cultural propin-quity.
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“Lessons” were derived on how foreigners can cope with Chinese patience, their flexible “principles,” the impenetrability of the Chinese bureaucracy, Chinese efforts to cultivate a bond of “friendship,” and their willingness to manipulate feelings of goodwill, guilt and obligation to achieve their negotiating goals. The efforts of these writers are most commendable, and have added much to our stock of knowledge on the negotiating behavior of Chinese officials and businessmen. However, a deeper and more circumstantial approach to negotiation than a “how to” guide on “meaningful communication” is needed, especially with regard to negotiations over territorial disputes and boundaries with the Chinese. It must encompass more than parties formally exchanging offers at the bargaining table to fashion a quid pro quo. It must allow for the interplay of different interests in shared purposes, and should be as intensely concerned with historical contingencies as with more immediate and tangible considerations. It must incorporate a shifting mix of cooperative and competitive elements. It must admit moves to change the “game” itself. It must be systematic and amenable to theoretical formulations. The bargaining framework of “two-level games,” developed by political scientist Robert Putnam, is one approach that rises to the challenge.

The theoretical basis of this study will rest on the careful testing and refinement of the propositions put forward by Robert Putnam in his article, “Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-Level Games,” first published in
International Organization
in 1988.
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By means of “two-level games” analysis, I shall explore the recurrent failure to start negotiations over the sovereignty of the disputed Tiaoyutai/Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea by China, Taiwan and Japan. Their abortive efforts will be contrasted with the success of China and Russia in settling their dispute over the sovereignty of Chenpao/Zhenbao/Damansky Island and 600 more islands lying on their boundary rivers, within four years, after coming to blows over the same islands twenty years before. Compared to the other two cases, a study oi the talks on the territorial dispute between China and India over the Himalayan borderlands and the so-called McMahon Line boundary will reveal neither as a complete failure or a resounding success. It is somewhere in between; for although repeated negotiations to fix the boundary between both countries have so far failed, they have led to confidence-building measures that have resulted in the overall reduction of border tensions during the last decade. The roles that transnational and subnational actors can possibly play in raising tensions in the dispute over the South China Sea islands, or in preventing or minimizing them, will also be examined, although in more brevity than the other three cases, as sovereignty negotiations over the final disposition of these islands have yet to begin among the claimant states.

These territorial sovereignty disputes are particularly pertinent now because they raise important issues of nationalist claims, access to (fisheries and petroleum) resources, and strategic sensitivities of these countries. By focusing on the interaction between a government and its domestic pressure groups, and relations between that government and other governments, within the context of the disputes, I will use Putnam’s two-level game framework to relate negotiation outcomes essentially to interactions between governments and their domestic nationalist groups, to reconcile various interest perceptions, the role of institutions, and the strategies of negotiators. My study anticipates the ease of bargaining to correspond directly to the diminution of memories of historical grievances, insularity of a particular regime type to popular and interest-group pressures, low quotient requirements for legislative votes on ratifying agreements, high economic dependency and expected gains from trade between two disputant countries, and leaders’ willingness to find a compromise solution for the dispute at hand. On the contrary, the heightening of memories of historical grievances, exposure of a particular regime type to popular and interest-group pressures, high quotient requirements for legislative votes on ratifying agreements, low economic dependency and expected gains from trade between two disputant countries, and leaders’ unwillingness to compromise, will render the bargaining of territorial sovereignty disputes particularly difficult. The relevance of the failure or success in settling the first three disputes lies in their implications for the countries’ approaches to other outstanding boundary disputes, the way in which the issues have been, or will be, exploited by politicized domestic groups to further their own objectives, and how attempts were made, or should be made, by governments to play down the incidents in the interest of overall foreign relations, economic ties and regional stability. I will then proceed by using the strengths and limitations of two-level games analysis, as derived through the study of the three boundary disputes, to explain the state and societal behavior of the claimants to the Spratly Islands, and why attempts at resolving this dispute never got past the stage of preliminary talks.

“Pressure groups,” as the term is used here, refers not only to institutional or organized interest group actors such as bureaucratic agencies, trade or other lobby groups, legislative committees, and members or factions of a political party. Indeed, even though he held no government position at that time, Mao acted as a “one-man pressure group” in ordering the PLA to provoke military clashes with the Soviet Union over parts of the Amur-Ussuri boundary rivers in March 1969, to unite a Party and country fractured by the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, in a diversionary struggle against imperialism.
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The decision was taken by India’s prime minister Indira Gandhi to normalize relations with China, after official relations were broken off for fifteen years following the Sino-Indian War of 1962, only after she had managed to circumvent the obduracy displayed by the Indian Ministry of External Affairs, by relying on her small coterie of trusted advisers to engineer the breakthrough.
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Pressure groups would also include mass opinion expressed by academics, journalists and other articulate members of the public upon whom political leaders rely to gauge the mood of the country on particular issues, and in a democratic polity, their chances at the polls. A protest involving eighty members of various organizations was staged at the Japanese consulate in Hong Kong on 3 August 1999 over a proposal before the Japanese parliament to send a delegation to the Diaoyu/Tiao-yu-tai/Senkaku islands. The next day, the National Security Committee of Japan’s House of Representatives decided to shelve the plan, citing the need to avoid conflict with China and Taiwan, the other two claimants of the islands.
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Several Vietnamese writers, voicing opinions critical of their governments’ concessions to China in obtaining the land border and Gulf of Tonkin agreements with Beijing in 1999 and 2000 respectively, have been imprisoned or placed under house arrest.
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More recently, intelligence sources have reported that Chinese authorities were giving out cash to encourage fishermen based in harbors close to Vietnam to extend their operations in the Spratlys, to turn them into a force to strengthen China’s sovereignty claims over what it considers to be its territorial waters.
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Although governments could conceivably make use of pressure groups to advance their claim of sovereignty over disputed territories, more often than not, by wrapping themselves in a popular cause, these groups are not easy to control once incited, and the authorities are usually very wary of their actions.