China's Coming War with Asia

Jonathan Holslag

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780745688251, 9780745688244
• eBook ISBN: 9780745688282
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Relazioni internazionali

China?s ambition is to rise peacefully. Avoiding fierce conflicts with its Asian neighbors is essential to this goal. Jonathan Holslag makes a brilliant case for the geopolitical dilemma facing the rising China, and his argument that China will likely enter into major conflict with Asia is compelling and thoughtful. Both Chinese experts and decision-makers will find this book illuminating reading.

Asia is set for another great power war. As China?s influence spreads beyond its territorial borders and its global aspirations gain momentum, so tensions with its neighbors are reaching breaking point. In this clear-sighted book, Jonathan Holslag debunks the myth of China?s peaceful rise, arguing instead that China?s policy of shrewd intransigence towards other Asian countries will inevitably result in serious conflict.

China?s ambitions are not malicious. But what China wants ? namely to maximize its security and prosperity ? will lead to a huge power imbalance, where China towers above her neighbors, impels them into unequal partnerships, and is increasingly able to seize disputed territory. At present, China?s focused and uncompromising pursuit of its own interests is bearing fruit. Many of China?s neighbors are still too weak to counter Beijing?s influence, and China has ably exploited divisions between them to divide and rule. But several regional powers are now joining forces to stop China. With the PRC unlikely to back down and nationalism riding high, China?s coming war with Asia is already in the making.

1
Asia's China Dilemma

“I just cannot understand why half the world is blaming us. Our growth benefits all our neighboring countries. We have come to work with regional organizations and have offered to develop disputed waters together,” the Chinese academic gesticulated passionately. “I think we can find solutions for most of our problems, but then our neighbors should not call the United States in to make us do this at gun point. Our claims are reasonable, you see, no one should exploit tensions to complicate China's rise.”¹ It was an amicable discussion, the academic, an Indonesian official, and myself, sipping soda water during an oppressive afternoon on the green banks of Symphony Lake. We were taking a break from the Shangri-La Dialogue, the annual security gathering in Singapore, where senior Chinese delegates also found themselves in a crossfire of allegations and responded with a very similar indignation. I find this one of the intriguing aspects of China's rise, the fact that Chinese insiders – from the young think-tanker to the senior politician – all seem to believe sincerely that their country is not to blame for tensions in Asia and that China has shown a great deal of flexibility to adjust itself to the wishes of its neighbors, to establish dialogues, and to avoid armed conflict. Knowing many of them for several years, I have no reason to question their sincerity, but the dilemma remains: as much as neighboring countries believe that China has to make more concessions, China believes that it has already done enough and that other major powers are playing up the anxiety in its neighborhood.

Great Aspirations

This book aims to clarify this dilemma. Its main argument is that China's important interests, its great aspirations as I call them, are incompatible with the idea of a peaceful rise in a complex Asian environment. In other words, China's strategic objectives are irreconcilable with those of its neighbors and that other Pacific juggernaut, the United States. This is a bold statement and it has to stand against several fine studies that arrived at completely different conclusions – or at similar observations with arguments that failed to withstand closer scrutiny. Let me first explain how I make my case in this book, so that the next section can explain how it differs from other works. To start with, it is important to make sense of the apparent changes in China's behavior in the past six decades. One can, after all, not just forecast conflict without explaining the ostensible tendency of China to be more cooperative and to integrate in the global order. Throughout the first four chapters, I reconstruct how China indeed came to show more military restraint toward its neighbors and how its leaders came to emphasize economic interests and the idea of a mutually beneficial division of labor to advance peace along its borders. They reveal how these leaders piloted the country gradually into more and more regional organizations, took more initiative in developing these organizations, and became deft practitioners of dialogue. Moreover, foreign policy became increasingly diffuse with Beijing allowing provinces, companies, and other actors to play a more autonomous role in the broadening of relations with other countries. These chapters also elucidate the important changes in discourses and thinking about international affairs, the remarkable shift from Mao Zedong's struggle to the current paradigm of peaceful development. All that seems thus to confirm that the optimistic students of China's rise have it right: the country has moved from belligerence to moderation and can hence be expected to integrate peacefully in the global order.

But change does not mean adjustment. As the next step in building my case, I posit that the apparent modifications of China's foreign policy are misleading. This is for two reasons. On the one hand, as the first chapters reveal, it was usually not China adjusting its behavior that paved the way for cooperation. In fact, the other Asian protagonists adjusted first. When China stumbled into the Cultural Revolution, for instance, it was Japan that kept the communication lines open. Later on, it was the United States that spearheaded rapprochement by means of Henry Kissinger's secret diplomacy. The consequent diplomatic revolution led to overtures by Southeast Asian countries and a rapprochement with South Korea. The Soviet problem solved itself. In the 1980s, ASEAN invited China to participate in trade fairs and later on in more political dialogue. It was thus not China's changing foreign policy that sparked the improvement of its security environment. Instead, it was the changing security environment that allowed China to improve its image. On the other hand, as will become clear, China could improve its image without making compromises on its great aspirations, its pursuit of wealth, power, and security. China has proved remarkably adept in minimizing resistance against four aspirations. These two points come as important correctives to the predominant idea of a proactive grand strategy of opening up and compromise.

This is followed by a third argument. China's great aspirations, the book asserts, are inevitably revisionist. In other words, China does aim at a very fundamental tran­sition of the distribution of power and, hence, a transition of the global order. How can we know? Not by looking at China's current behavior. Contrary to what optimists argue, China's stance toward international rules and organizations is no reliable indicator of whether it is a revisionist or status quo power. Even its stance on territorial expansion is not a good guide. Instead, revisionism is about power. One does not need to challenge the rules or the territorial status quo to work toward the revision of the international order. But it is true, of course, that if China gains so much power that it finds itself at the top of a new international order, it can be expected to shape rules and borders to its advantage. China is a revisionist power because its first great aspiration, control over frontier lands like Tibet and Xinjiang, entails its command over the world's largest combined natural and demographic resources. Its second great aspiration, to defend the position of the Communist Party by making China a high-income economy, implies that it will become the largest economy in the world, be in the best position to shape relations with other countries to its advantage, and have the greatest resources to spend on military capabilities. Its third great aspiration, the recovery of lost territory, like Taiwan and the islands in the South China Sea, can only result in a huge strategic advantage over the other regional powers. The fulfillment of China's core objectives are thus destined to upset the international order and, especially with India failing to reform, to establish something that will have all the characteristics of a new empire: a new sinocentric empire.

From a Chinese viewpoint these aspirations are reasonable, defensive, and just. But these interests and the search for security portend nothing less than a power-maximizing strategy that is incompatible with both the security interests of neighboring countries and the privileges of the leaders of today's global order. We should not expect this security dilemma to diminish. The last three chapters show that China is by no means satisfied with its progress so far and that it will try to push ahead with its economic and military expansion. But we do not know whether it can succeed. Domestic and external challenges will become increasingly pressing. This, the book contends, can lead to three kinds of conflicts. First there is the prospect of a traditional hegemonic war, the kind of war famously described in Robert Gilpin's War and Change in World Politics. In that case the United States, unwilling to give up its privileges and to be dominated, will be locked in an armed conflict with its main challenger. This is the most straightforward scenario. But China is still lagging far behind the United States in terms of military power and the quality of its economy, so that hegemonic war should not be expected any time soon. Second, there is the possibility of a regional war. Even if China has a long way to go to catch up with the United States, it does increasingly overshadow the lesser powers in its neighborhood, threatening their sovereignty, and challenging their prosperity. China still has the advantage, the last chapter posits, that its neighbors are divided by geography, history, and economic interests, but with some of them all the ingredients for conflict are present: a contested border, a history of discord, economic competition, fear about China's military capabilities, and nationalism. This applies especially to Japan, Vietnam, and India. The multitude of territorial disputes in a climate of growing nationalism could trigger regional armed conflicts. These can also pull in the United States so that a regional conflict escalates into a “premature” hegemonic war. Even if the United States is not directly threatened, it has signed several security treaties with the parties involved and the prospect of a Chinese victory over its neighbors will only aggravate the fear of its rise in the longer run. A third scenario is that of a faltering power. In that case, China's economic growth would stall and prevent it from fulfilling its great aspirations. In this case, the threat does not emanate from China's rise, but from the insecurity experienced by the Chinese leadership and its tendency to rally domestic support by diverting attention to external threats. The book does not consider the option of collapse and retreat. Yes, the Ming Emperors burned their ships in the past, but given the vast overseas interests and the victory of new modes of transportation over physical barriers, this cannot be repeated in today's world.

These three options instantly overcome the traditional divide in the debate between scholars who believe that China will be more assertive as it becomes more powerful and others who assume that China will not fight because it remains so impotent. But there is more. The shift in thinking and discourse, which I spoke of earlier, the shift towards a paradigm of peace, could even aggravate the security dilemma. Both China and the other powers assume that justice is on their side. Chinese officials genuinely believe that their country has shown a remarkable degree of restraint and has made great efforts to avoid conflicts. They believe also that China has made important economic gestures and, of course, that Chinese entitlements to disputed bits of territory, including Taiwan, are perfectly justifiable. In fact, China is convinced that it works towards a restoration of justice and the ending of the unfair privileges that other powers acquired in their imperial past. But China's great aspirations are of course all about replacing one empire with another and other countries in the region certainly do not consider China's interpretation of mutually beneficial cooperation, freedom of navigation, and political harmony to be very fair. So, even if their decision makers have been socialized with the imperatives of defense, restraint, and fairness, this is by no means enough to avoid violence. That again stands as an important corrective of the more positive constructivist ideas that have been en vogue in the debate about China's ascent.

The main aim of this book is thus to present a sophisticated explanation for the growing tensions in Asia and to address some of the starry misconceptions. Besides that, it also comes as an update of the economic, political, and military power plays in the region. While the first chapters provide an indispensable historical account of China's rise in Asia, the last chapters offer new insights into the contemporary dilemmas. They draw from a large number of recent interviews, field visits, and data to demonstrate that China is by no means a satisfied power. The book is written for a broad readership of students with an interest in international politics and decision makers. To the latter, it offers one important piece of advice: stop pretending that conflicts can be overcome if they cannot be solved. It makes no sense to insist that peace can be maintained if no party is prepared to compromise on core interests. For that reason, the cautious statesman better anticipates yet another episode of major international turbulence, turbulence that could well spill over into other parts of the world and, indeed, into other spheres, like cyber and space. If those statesmen really want to go into the history books as true peacemakers, this treatise advises them to move beyond an obsession with confidence building, dialogue, and economic interdependence. These apparent mitigating factors can even be counterproductive, because they distract attention from the fundamental conflicts and convince different parties that previous efforts to promote exchanges put justice on their side.

Power Shift or Paradigm Shift

So, how then does this work relate to the many existing excellent studies on China's rise? To begin with it comes as a critique of those scholars and decision makers who have presented China's rise in Asia more as a paradigm shift than a power shift. What matters, their argument goes, is not that China is becoming stronger, but that it is committed to using its newly gained strength to the benefit of the region and to steering clear of the sort of aggressive behavior that other powers displayed in the past. By pursuing peaceful development, China should stand as an exception against a long turbulent history of great power wars and will inevitably change the very nature of international power politics. There are different ways to look at the promise of a peaceful rise. Chinese leaders like to argue that the world has changed in a fundamental way, so th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface
• Maps
• 1: Asia's China Dilemma
• 2: The Revolutionary Overture
• 3: The Normalization
• 4: Briefcase Revisionism
• 5: Peaceful Development
• 6: Elusive Harmony
• 7: Economic Power
• 8: The Contest for the Pacific
• 9: Another Great Power Tragedy
• Index
• End User License Agreement