The Contest of the Century (5 page)

But in today’s China, it is the geopolitical aspects of Mahan’s writing that are greatly admired, the relationship between expanding commercial interests and naval power. Just as China worries about the Strait of Malacca and the first island chain, Mahan obsessed about building a canal across the Isthmus of Panama and about having naval capabilities in both the Caribbean and the Pacific to defend America’s new commercial arteries. He pushed for the U.S. to acquire bases in the Caribbean, to allow U.S. ships to control access to the Panama Canal. For Mahan, sea power was a crucial aspect of economic development. The ability to secure sea-lanes and the critical geographical locations that facilitate commercial traffic “affects the very root of a nation’s vigor.” Mahan’s ideas from the 1890s echo many of the challenges the Chinese see today, the mixture of a quest for national greatness and insecurity about economic lifelines at sea. The “Near Seas” is a formulation that has a strong Sinocentric ring to it, with its implication of a form of Chinese historical ownership, but it also embodies Mahan’s vision for a country to secure its vital maritime frontiers.

Neglected at home, Mahan has become deeply fashionable over the last decade in Chinese intellectual circles, including translations of his books, academic articles on their importance, and conferences on his ideas. He has inspired a generation of Chinese navalists.
“A big country
that builds its prosperity on foreign trade cannot put the safety of its ocean fleet in the hands of other countries,” writes Ye Hailin, of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. “Doing so would be the equivalent of putting its throat under another’s dagger and marking its blood vessels in red ink.”

One publisher released an edition of Mahan’s
The Influence of Sea Power
with a fold-out map of the Asia-Pacific that included all the U.S. naval facilities in the region. James Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara, two American historians who have tracked Mahan’s influence in China, write:
“His sea power philosophy remains hypnotic.… The Mahanian conceit that national greatness derives from sea power beguiles many Chinese strategists.” As a result, they conclude: “We should therefore expect China to attach extraordinary value to fighting and winning in the waters that fall within the near-seas.”

The U.S. and China have already indulged in some potentially dangerous sparring in the Near Seas—the sort of thing that in the Cold War was known as “nautical chicken.” In March 2009, the USNS
Impeccable
, a surveillance ship, was on an operation around seventy nautical miles from the new submarine base in Hainan when it was confronted by a flotilla of ten different Chinese ships. The Chinese crew dropped planks into the water to obstruct the American ship’s movements. When it braked, the Chinese sailors then used long poles to smash the surveillance instruments it was towing behind the ship. As the American ship retreated from the area, it was shadowed and harassed for some time. When the Chinese ships decided to take their leave, the crew of one boat dropped their pants and waved their bare bottoms in the direction of the Americans.

The confrontation was significant not just because of the risk that it might have escalated, but because it amplified one of the big underlying political issues in the western Pacific. China’s new naval capabilities are interlaced with a broader political strategy designed to exert more control over its maritime reaches. Beijing’s most extravagant claim is in the South China Sea, where a series of islets, reefs, and rocks are disputed by a number of countries, including Vietnam, the Philippines, and China. Beijing argues it has a historical right to be the dominant power in the area, a claim expressed in China’s now famous “nine-dash-line” map,
which assumes ownership of 80 to 90 percent of the South China Sea. (
Chapter 3
will have a more detailed discussion of some of these disputes.) At the same time, China is pushing a version of international law which would potentially give it the right to exclude foreign militaries from large sections of the seas that surround it. A United Nations convention called the Law of the Sea tries to codify rules for national ownership of the world’s oceans. The law gives countries an “exclusive economic zone”—or EEZ—that runs two hundred nautical miles from their coastline, where they have the rights to resources in the water or under the seabed. According to the U.S.—and a majority of other governments—there is a right to freedom of navigation in this zone that includes military vessels. However, China is the leading member of a smaller but significant group of countries which think that foreign militaries should be excluded from their EEZ unless they have permission. In particular, China objects to surveillance vessels operating too near to its coast, just as the U.S.’s
Impeccable
was doing.

Taken together, the two claims have huge implications. China argues that many of the islands in the South China Sea qualify to have their own exclusive economic zones, even though some are no more than largely submerged rocks and many are administered by other countries. As a result, China argues that most of the South China Sea is part of its exclusive economic zone. If it takes control of all the islands, and if its legal interpretation of the Law of the Sea stands, China would be giving itself the political case to turn away the vessels of foreign navies from most of the South China Sea. Given the centrality of the sea to the global economy, this is a far-reaching claim that has enormous implications for everyone in the region—and especially for the United States. Although China’s ultimate aims are still not entirely clear, the evidence of growing ambitions is unnerving the U.S. military.
“China is knowingly, operationally and incrementally seizing maritime rights of its neighbors under the rubric of a maritime history that is not only contested in the international community but has largely been fabricated,” Captain James Fanell, deputy chief of staff for intelligence for the U.S. Pacific Fleet told a conference in 2013. He described an intelligence briefing he attends every morning at 6 a.m. which brings together the U.S. military’s leading Asia-Pacific analysts. “Every day it is about China,”
he said, adding: “They are taking control of maritime areas that have never before been administered or controlled in the last 5,000 years by any regime called ‘China.’… China’s conduct is destabilizing the Asian maritime environment.”

Even with these claims, it might seem improbable that China would seek to tamper with the right to freedom of navigation. China has been an enormous beneficiary of open seas; its economy is based on the free flow of imported raw materials into the country and the export of manufactured products. The assumption among many governments in the region had always been that, even if China would defend its territorial claims fiercely, it would not let those political disputes contaminate its booming commercial links with the rest of the region. Few worried that China would use its growing power to act as a toll keeper of naval traffic in the western Pacific.

Yet confidence in such an assumption is gradually beginning to weaken. Over the last few years, China has shown a willingness to use a form of economic blackmail and bullying during political disputes that raises real questions about how it would behave if it were ever to control the sea-lanes through the South China Sea. During a standoff with Tokyo in 2010, after the Japanese coast guard arrested a Chinese fisherman who had rammed one of its vessels in disputed waters, China limited exports to Japan of rare earths—a group of commodities which China controls and which are central to the manufacture of many products, such as cell phones. When ships from China and the Philippines clashed in 2012 over control of a small island in the South China Sea, Beijing refused to accept imports of bananas from the Philippines, leaving large shipments to rot in a harbor. The local government on Hainan Island has declared it has the power to board vessels which “illegally enter” Chinese waters—one in a string of announcements that have added to the sense of uncertainty about how China will use its growing power. The expansive and ambiguous claims China has made in the South China Sea, combined with its willingness to hold trade hostage to political arguments, have, at the very least, raised questions about freedom of navigation in the region. As Peter Dutton, a U.S. expert on maritime law, argues, China’s approach to the Near Seas has already created “hairline fractures in the global order.”

——

Shortly before he retired as head of the U.S. Pacific Command in 2009, Admiral Timothy Keating revealed a conversation he had had with a senior Chinese naval officer, who effectively offered to split the Pacific with the U.S.
“You, the US, take Hawaii East and we, China, will take Hawaii West and the Indian Ocean,” Keating recalled the officer, whom he refused to name, as saying. “Then you will not need to come to the western Pacific and the Indian Ocean and we will not need to go to the eastern Pacific. If anything happens there, you can let us know and if something happens here, we will let you know.” Keating admitted that the offer was perhaps made “tongue-in-cheek,” but it was revealing. One reason that tensions in the region are rising is the substantial gap between U.S. and Chinese views of America’s natural role in Asia. For many in China, a U.S. retreat from the region is an inevitable response to the revival of Asia. Yet the view is very different from Washington. Since the early years of the republic, the western Pacific has played a large role in America’s sense of its own security.

America’s first Pacific alliance was signed as far back as 1833, a full two decades before Commodore Matthew Perry more famously first set anchor in Japan. President Andrew Jackson sent a sloop-of-war called the USS
Peacock
on a mission around parts of the South China Sea, including a stop at the kingdom of Siam, modern-day Thailand. During the visit, his envoy, Edmund Roberts, signed the Siamese-American Treaty of Amity and Commerce with a representative of King Rama III. Jackson sent as a present a sword whose gold handle had an elephant and an eagle emblazoned on it. The pool of people at the time in either country who spoke both Siamese and English was almost nonexistent, so, in order to make sure the treaty would not be questioned, it was also translated into Chinese and Portuguese.

The prominence of the Pacific in the American mind accelerated sharply in the 1890s, in the era of Mahan and another of his disciples, Theodore Roosevelt, who a century before Barack Obama was really America’s first Pacific president. Roosevelt was the first to predict that Asia would become a center of global power, initially as a result of the rise of Japan, but later as China and India caught up. And he placed
the maintenance of a favorable balance of power in Asia at the center of America’s priorities.
“The commerce and command of the Pacific will be factors of incalculable moment in the world’s history,” Roosevelt predicted.

America’s Pacific role did not fall temporarily into its lap at the end of the Second World War and the decline of the British Empire, nor is it a product of the Cold War. Instead, it is much more deeply rooted in the U.S.’s own history and vision of the world. Over the last century, America has defined its vital interest as preventing any one power from dominating the other main regions of the world and turning them into a private sphere of influence, whether in Europe or in Asia. The U.S. eventually fought the First and Second World Wars because it did not want Germany to dominate Europe—and, in the second war, also to stop Japan from controlling Asia. Washington’s ultimate goal in the Cold War was to prevent the Soviet Union from exercising control across the whole of Eurasia.

It should come as no surprise that the rise of China is beginning to stir something deep in the American psyche. Relative decline or not, Washington will be determined to prevent any other country from dominating such a central part of the world. China’s naval push strikes to the core of how America understands both its security and its prosperity. The Obama administration’s desire to “pivot” toward Asia, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan end, might seem like a new departure to address the rise of China, but it is also a very traditional American response to a shifting balance of power in Asia. Unless America suffers a much deeper economic collapse, it is difficult to imagine the U.S.’s not wanting to play a significant role in Asia in the coming decades. Washington was never going to acquiesce in a proposal to split the Pacific.
“If the U.S. does not hold its ground in the Pacific, it cannot be a world leader,” as Lee Kuan Yew, the former Singaporean leader, puts it in a cold assessment of the political stakes. “The 21st century will be a contest for supremacy in the Pacific because that is where the growth will be.”

WEAK PARTY, STRONG MILITARY

Robert Gates was about to go into a meeting with President Hu Jintao when one of his aides showed him some images that had just appeared on a Chinese Web site that specializes in military gossip. It was January 2011, and the U.S. defense secretary had traveled to Beijing to try and mend fences after China had suspended military contacts between the two countries’ militaries in protest of U.S. arms sales to Taiwan. The photos purported to show a test flight for the J-20, China’s attempt to develop a “fifth generation” stealth bomber that can evade conventional radar. “It’s flying!” wrote an Internet user with the name Little Bird King in one of the chat rooms for military issues run by the
People’s Daily
group, publisher of the party’s mouthpiece newspaper. A large crowd of onlookers watched the test run from outside the fence at a military airfield in Chengdu, some standing on the back of a white pickup truck to get a better view. For Gates, the timing seemed a deliberate insult: the Chinese military were rubbing his nose in one of their new high-tech capabilities.

The photos were a particular embarrassment to Gates, who had publicly dismissed the idea of a Chinese stealth bomber only two years earlier. China would have “no fifth-generation aircraft by 2020,” he had told an audience in Chicago. Most American observers thought that China’s jets were mediocre copies of old Russian models. A month earlier some grainy photos had appeared on another Chinese military-fan Web site showing the J-20 being pulled out on the Chengdu airfield. Soon after, the photos reappeared on the Aviation Week Web site in the U.S., after blogger Bill Sweetman posted them at 7:30 a.m. on Christmas Day and talked about rumors of a test flight. Yet the Pentagon did not believe the new Chinese jet fighter was ready to fly.