The Contest of the Century (14 page)

To outsiders, the Chinese position appeared rigid and dogmatic. On the inside, however, China’s links with North Korea had been the subject of intense discussion, with many senior officials calling for the government to distance itself from Pyongyang. The alliance had been forged during the Korean War, when China fought alongside Kim Il-sung’s army to push back the Americans. Several hundred thousand Chinese died in brutal fighting, including one of Mao Zedong’s sons, who was buried there. From that day, Chinese propagandists described the relationship with Pyongyang as being as close as “lips and teeth.”

By the early 2000s, however, the sense of comradeship had been replaced by a gnawing embarrassment. Millions were starving in North Korea while cronies of the vulgar, despotic regime of Kim Jong-il nipped across the Chinese border to buy Louis Vuitton goods at the new luxury malls in Shenyang, in the northeast of China. For many Chinese, it was an uncomfortable reminder of the worst days of China under Mao—the mixture of power worship and public misery from which modern China had escaped under Deng. The few scholars I knew who had been
allowed contact with North Korea would quietly hint at a sort of shame that China was propping up such a regime. Popular views ran in a similar direction. The Internet in China almost never misses a chance to denounce American policy in the region, but in the case of North Korea, comments would often sympathize with the U.S. and openly mock China’s ally.

The booming economic relationship with South Korea also pushed China to question its ties with Pyongyang. Tens of thousands of South Korean companies have invested in China, many of them around the east-coast city of Qingdao, and the flows of goods and people between the two countries have become one of the brightest constellations in the Asian manufacturing network. Two decades ago, there was one flight a week between South Korea and mainland China: by 2010, there were 642. In economic terms, South Korea will be a big part of China’s future, not the sclerotic North. Courtesy of WikiLeaks, we know that this frustration occasionally spilled over into the conversations Chinese officials had with other governments. In 2009, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei told an American diplomat that North Korea behaves like a “spoiled child.” In another cable, a South Korean minister described two conversations with senior Chinese officials who said that they supported the idea of a unified Korea, rather than continuing to prop up Pyongyang. Of course, the Chinese diplomats were doing what good diplomats are supposed to do, presenting a version of events that the South Koreans wanted to hear. But the comments also seem to have reflected the view of significant parts of the foreign-policy establishment. According to Peking University Professor Zhu Feng, no question in Chinese foreign policy has been more hotly debated than the ties with North Korea.

Yet, by the time the
Cheonan
was sunk in early 2010, the party leadership had already ended the debate. China’s leaders were given a mortal scare by two developments in North Korea. Kim Jong-il’s stroke in 2008 reminded them of the political frailties of the regime. At the same time, a failed currency revaluation in late 2009 underlined the ever-present potential for economic implosion. Faced with the actual prospect of the regime’s collapsing, China decided this was something it could not tolerate. Ever since Mao ordered his troops to fight in the Korean War,
China has seen North Korea as a sort of buffer, a placeholder that keeps the U.S. military presence at a distance from its borders. The passage of time and the decrepitude of the Pyongyang regime have not changed that fundamental reality. During a period when China was looking to try and push back against U.S. influence in the region, the last thing Beijing wanted was the end of the North Korean regime and its replacement by an America-friendly, united Korea. Beijing decided to double down on its support for the Kim family regime. Xi Jinping, then China’s vice president, gave an extraordinary speech in October 2010, six months after the
Cheonan
sinking, describing the Korean War as “great and just”—a retreat to the 1950s orthodoxy that the U.S. had started the war, and a signal that the fraternal Communist links with the North would trump the economic pull of the modern South. When Kim Jong-il eventually died in 2011, Beijing had already given its support for the dynastic succession plan to hand over North Korea’s nuclear keys to his twenty-something son, Kim Jong-un. China, in effect, has pledged to underwrite the North Korean regime for another generation.

The sinking of the
Cheonan
was the moment when South Korea’s worst suspicions about China were confirmed. By then, South Korea had a different government, which was much more skeptical about the North and more supportive of Washington. Not only was Seoul outraged at the length of time it took for Beijing to send condolences, but China’s continued tolerance for Pyongyang’s truculence seemed to suggest to many in the South that it could not be trusted to uphold basic rules of international behavior if they conflicted with its interests. Beijing managed to make things worse with some ham-fisted diplomacy. In November 2010, North Korea shelled the small island of Yeonpyeong, near the sea frontier between the two countries, killing four South Koreans and causing an even more anguished reaction in Seoul. Under pressure to rein in its ally, Beijing decided to call for a meeting of the so-called six-party talks—the diplomatic forum that had been operating for the previous decade to resolve the North Korean nuclear issue. The Chinese government knew that Seoul would not accept talks until it received a public apology from North Korea, but it calculated that the gesture might help deflect some of the blame for the standoff onto South Korea. With no formal warning, Dai Bingguo, the senior Chinese
foreign-policy official, turned up in Seoul to discuss the proposal. He did not have a visa, so South Korean Foreign Ministry officials had to rush out to the airport to get him into the country. Dai insisted on meeting with President Lee Myung-bak that evening, even though he did not have an appointment. And even though he asked that the meeting be off the record, he brought a group of Chinese journalists along with him. Lee told him that Seoul would not agree to a meeting involving the North Koreans, but Dai went out and announced the proposed summit anyway. The ill-feeling that Dai generated in Seoul summed up the broader setback to China’s long-term interests. By giving so much support to Pyongyang, Beijing was actually doing some of Washington’s own diplomatic work. South Korea’s unease about the American military presence has not ended, but the alliance between the two countries has been reinforced.

A LINE WITH NINE DASHES

If it was the sinking of the
Cheonan
that prompted a lot of soul-searching in Northeast Asia about China, then the moment of clarity in Southeast Asia came from a more mundane source: the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf.

In 2009, this largely obscure UN body set a deadline for countries in the region to deliver submissions of their claims in the South China Sea and its myriad of disputed rocks, islets, and coral reefs. The South China Sea has a large and complicated list of claimants. China, Taiwan, and Vietnam claim most of the area and its islands, but the Philippines, Brunei, and Malaysia also claim part. The UN Law of the Sea Treaty provides a framework of international legislation to adjudicate such disputes, a process of case law and precise legal language which is designed to take the heat out of emotionally charged arguments. In the case of the South China Sea, however, the result was the exact opposite. After Vietnam and Malaysia submitted a joint written claim to the panel, China was incensed. Beijing released its own note, which stated: “China has indisputable sovereignty over the islands of the South China Sea and the adjacent waters.” Alongside this diplomatic
note verbale
, Beijing attached a map of the area, in which China’s claims are demarcated by a line made up of nine dashes.

The “nine-dash line” map was not new: it was first drawn by Chinese cartographers in the 1920s and was adopted as a semi-official map in 1947 under the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, before the Communists had even taken power. But this was the first time it had been used as part of an official Chinese claim in an international forum. And for many in Southeast Asia, it was a symbol of a certain kind of new Chinese arrogance. Shaped like a large U, the “nine-dash line” starts from China’s southwest coast, snakes down adjacent to Vietnam’s coastline, curves round along the littorals of Malaysia and Brunei, and then returns to the Chinese mainland after skirting close to the Philippines’ coastline. In effect, it marks out almost the entire area of the South China Sea, except a narrow strip beside the coast of the other countries in the region. China says the map is a reflection of its “historical rights” that come from having controlled the different islands for centuries. The Chinese sometimes say the map’s U-shape resembles a “cow’s tongue”; one acquaintance describes it, slightly less flatteringly, as “a distended testicle.”

“We will never seek hegemony,” declares China’s latest defense White Paper—a stock phrase that is one of the mottoes of official Chinese policy. But in many other Asian capitals, where claims to such “historical rights” inevitably remind them of the subservient position that they were placed in during previous eras of Chinese power, the sheer, jaw-dropping breadth of the Chinese map felt a lot like a push for hegemony. “We maybe should not have been so surprised,” a Thai diplomat confided about the introduction of the Chinese map with the “nine-dash line.” “But to see with your own eyes that they were actually trying to claim pretty much everything—well, it was quite a jolt.”

One legacy of five hundred years of Western naval ascendancy in Asia is the names that are commonly used for many of the island features in the South China Sea—there is Mischief Reef, Macclesfield Bank, Woody Island, and Scarborough Shoal. The sixty or so rocks in the South China Sea are mostly divided into two groups: the Paracel Islands in the northern section of the sea and the Spratlys farther to the south. For decades, the disputes over who owns the land features were a somewhat obscure sideshow, even if China and South Vietnam did briefly fight over some of the islands in 1974, when China took control of the Paracels, and again in 1988. But over the last five years, they
have rapidly become a perfect storm of modern geopolitics. The South China Sea has been the place where American and Southeast Asian concerns about China’s military buildup have started to overlap. For the U.S., China’s claims set off alarm bells about the long-term threat to the U.S. maritime order. But for the Asian claimants, the dispute also
brings together oil, fish, and potent nationalism.

For what might appear a few insignificant specks of land, the economic stakes over the disputed South China Sea islands are enormous. In China, the South China Sea is sometimes referred to as a “maritime Daqing”—the oilfield in the northeast of China which was discovered in the 1950s, a lifeline to the Maoist economy in an era of economic isolation, as well as a staple of Communist propaganda about hardworking self-reliance. Chinese estimates suggest there could be as much as 213 billion barrels of oil in the South China Sea, not far short of Saudi Arabia’s reserves. Another Chinese estimate suggests there is enough natural gas to meet demand for four hundred years, at current levels of consumption. (Some private estimates are much less optimistic, partly because much of the oil is incredibly hard to recover, indicating reserves closer to 2.5 billion barrels.) If a potential oil boom were not enough, the seas are also rich in fish, making them increasingly attractive to fleets in China and Vietnam, which have seen the stocks in their more traditional catchment areas near the coasts decline through overfishing, pushing them ever farther afield, into contested waters. China is the biggest consumer (and exporter) of seafood in the world, and seafood provides half of the protein intake in the average Vietnamese diet. For both countries, fishing is an industry whose importance is hugely underappreciated.

As tensions have escalated in recent years, China has insisted that the other countries are principally to blame, and it has plenty of evidence to support this claim. Beijing was outraged that Malaysia and Vietnam put forward a joint submission to the UN panel, which the Chinese saw as evidence of other countries’ ganging up against them. Chinese officials complain loudly that China is the only country not to have exploited oil resources in the South China Sea. “There are seven hundred wells already in areas that we believe are ours,” a Chinese official told me. “And yet people accuse us of being assertive.” They point to the buildup
of infrastructure on island features controlled by other countries, notably Vietnam in the Spratlys, where it controls twenty-nine of the land features. Beijing is also adamant that Washington’s attempt to involve itself in the dispute has emboldened Vietnam and the Philippines to take a more confrontational stance toward China. Many in China are convinced that the U.S. is conspiring against it in the South China Sea.
“China is not the maker of these problems and still less the perpetrator of harm,” says Cui Tiankai, a former vice foreign minister who became ambassador to the U.S. in 2013. “Rather, China is a victim on which harm has been imposed.”

The other claimants tell a very different story. They describe a gradual but decisive increase in China’s naval presence in the region over the last decade, as well as a deliberate buildup of military installations on some of the islands that it controls, part of a creeping process in asserting sovereignty. Satellite images from Woody Island (Yongxing in Chinese) in the Paracels bear this out. The small island is around two hundred miles south of the submarine base on Hainan. It has no indigenous population or natural water supply, but over the last few years it has become a fortified military stronghold. A major port has been built from an area that was dredged. At the same time, the landmass has been extended to build a runway for military planes: the satellite images show a thin strip of land almost twice the length of the island. Another thin strip denotes a mile-long road between the island and a small islet, which is now used as a monitoring center for naval activity in the region. In 2012, Beijing declared the island’s main town, Sansha, to be a formal municipality. There is a local government building, which, with its painted white walls, long neoclassical columns, and a large dome, looks like a small version of the U.S. Capitol. On the day it was declared a municipality, a local agriculture official from Hainan called Xiao Jie was dispatched on a twenty-hour boat trip to become the mayor.
“There is no arable land here,” he said of his new job. “The main objective is to protect our nation’s maritime sovereignty.”