The Geopolitics of East Asia

Robyn Lim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134432707
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

East Asia is a potential area of international conflict, with a number of possible 'flashpoints' and with the absence of strong regional organisations able to deal with conflict resolution. At the same time, global powers frequently get involved in the international politics of the region in order to protect their interests. This book presents a comprehensive overview of the geopolitics of the region. It focuses in particular on the way geographical and historical forces continue to play a key role in shaping international relations here. It considers the role of both regional and international powers, and assesses the risks of war in the region.

1 East Asia to 1905

The European ascendancy

In geostrategic terms, Europe is a small peninsula on the western edge of Eurasia. Yet it dominated the global order after Columbus discovered America in 1492. China and Japan, East Asia's two core areas, were not drawn into the world order until the mid-nineteenth century. That was mostly because they were an ocean further away from India and Southeast Asia, to which the Europeans were initially drawn in their efforts to wrest the lucrative spice trade from the Arabs.

China and Japan responded in different ways to Europe's encroachment. In trying to resist, China lost much of its sovereignty. Japan, alarmed at China's fate, abandoned its efforts to seek security in isolation. From 1868, Japan entered the international system, while seeking as much as possible to set the terms of its engagement. Thus, by 1905, when Japan defeated Russia, all the elements had been assembled in East Asia that were to play themselves out until 1991.

Europeans by sea…

‘Globalization’ began in 1492. Europe's unprecedented domination of the global order after the age of Columbus was a strategic consequence of the Renaissance, especially the development of technology apposite to maritime power. Until then, Europe had been subject to constant invasions from Asia and Arabia. Indeed, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Mongol empire was the largest the world had ever seen, larger even than that of Rome. At its apogee, the empire of the Mongols stretched from Korea to Hungary, incorporating most of Asia and much of eastern Europe. Yet, unlike the Roman empire, the Mongol empire vanished almost without trace. Despite their military proficiency and superior tactics, the horsemen of the steppes lacked higher technology, science or culture.

The Mongols had an especially devastating impact on Russia, wrenching it away from Europe for centuries, with long-term consequences. Kievan Rus, where the first Russian state had been established in 862 at the confluence of river systems, had been converted to Christianity by Byzantine missionaries in 988. Then, in 1240, the Mongols of the ‘Golden Horde’ sacked Kiev, the ‘mother of cities’. For four hundred years thereafter Russia languished under the ‘Tatar yoke’. And it was a Muslim yoke, the Khan of the Golden Horde having being converted to Islam in 1252.

When the Venetian adventurer Marco Polo reached China (‘Cathay’) overland in the era of Kublai Khan, he whetted Europe's appetite for the riches of Asia. Soon the development of maritime transport in Europe, initially based on the ocean-going sailing ship, shrank distance far more quickly and effectively than could be done on land. On land, mechanical means of transport were a precondition of mobility that took several centuries to develop, their first manifestation being the railways. So, for centuries, sea transport had the edge because of its ability to harness natural phenomena such as wind and ocean currents to the movement of ships.¹

Sailing around Africa, the Portuguese Vasco da Gama reached India in 1498. Soon the Spaniards entered the Pacific from the west. Gradually the sea routes eclipsed the ancient caravan routes, including the famed Silk Road, which had carried Asia's luxury goods to the Levant. Thus Europe's economic centre of gravity slowly moved from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic ports. Then the rivalries of a fractured Europe, compounded by the religious hatreds of the Reformation, fuelled the competition of nascent European states in distant waters. Early imperial contest saw Portugal, Spain, Holland and England struggling in Southeast Asia, mainly to wrest control of the spice trade from Muslim traders. The ambitions of the Iberian powers had a particular religious edge, since in 1492 the long struggle for the reconquest of Spain from the Muslims had succeeded after almost eight centuries of occupation by the ‘Moors’. Thus, wresting the spice routes from the Arabs represented revenge as well as profit.

Portugal, intent on establishing control of the eastward bound sea routes from Europe, took Goa in India, and then Malacca in 1511. Consequently the Dutch, in their struggle for liberation against Spain (united with Portugal in 1580), carried the fight to the Spanish and Portuguese in the east, capturing Malacca in 1641. As we have seen, two centuries previously the Chinese admiral Zheng He had also appreciated the significance of the control of the Malacca Strait. Meanwhile, Britain's attention was focused on India. In 1699, the British East India Company established itself in Calcutta, at one of the mouths of the Ganges.

During the eighteenth century, on a scale and in places that would have been impossible on land, Britain and France fought a series of global wars. France, partly because of its continental distractions, proved unable to translate its dominant position in Europe into global maritime supremacy. As a consequence of the Seven Years War (1756–1763) – which ranged from India to North America, the Philippines and Cuba – France lost its grip on North America and India. For its part, Britain lost its American colonies when they rebelled. Still, Britain emerged from these global wars as the preeminent maritime and commercial power.

The British, then as later, were conscious of the risks of overextension. When France overran Holland during the Napoleonic wars, Britain took the Dutch empire into ‘protective custody’. The British could have kept all the Dutch possessions. They chose not to, partly because British security required that the Low Countries be strengthened lest they again fall under French domination. Britain also sought to avoid the risk of imperial overstretch. So it retained only those Dutch colonies that were of strategic value to the sea route to the east – the Cape of Good Hope, Ceylon and Malacca.

Although British possession of Malacca helped screen the maritime approaches to India from the east, it was the tip of the Malay peninsula that dominated the crossroads of the Indian Ocean and the China Seas. Thus, in 1819, Sir Stamford Raffles, then lieutenant-governor of Java, founded a settlement at Singapore. Singapore was founded mostly with an eye to promotion of British trade with China, centred on the tea trade. But until the mid-nineteenth century, China largely escaped encroachment by the Western maritime powers, mainly because it was an ocean further away. Moreover, Spain's Asian empire, based in the Philippines, faced eastwards, oriented towards the lucrative galleon trade with Mexico. As long as the Spaniards could exchange Mexican silver for Chinese luxury goods in Manila, they had neither the urge nor the means to encroach upon China's sovereignty.

It was not only for reasons of distance that China was better able to resist European encroachment than were India's princely states, or the kingdoms and sultanates of maritime Southeast Asia. That was because China was more organized and centralized. Indeed, at about the same time as the Dutch took Malacca, a vigorous new dynasty, the Manchus, captured Beijing. For two centuries, the Qing dynasty remained strong enough to fend off European encroachment. Self-sufficient and confident of their cultural superiority, the Manchus had little interest in the outside world.

Thus the Qing dynasty tightly controlled the conditions under which foreign traders were allowed to operate in China's ports. In 1699, the British East India Company was permitted to establish a trading post in Quangzhou (Canton), forty miles up the Pearl river from the Portuguese enclave of Macao. On their way up-river, British ships had to pay dues at the fortified Bocca Tigris (Tiger's Mouth). While at anchor in Whampoa, they lay under the guns of the forts. China thus held the upper hand, but the imbalance of trade portended trouble. From China, British East India Company ships transported tea and other luxury products to Europe. But there was little that the Chinese empire wished to import, so the trade imbalance had to be made up in Mexican silver. The drain on British coffers was not likely to prove sustainable for long.

…and by land

While the maritime powers were encroaching on China from the sea, Russia – having thrown off the Tartar yoke – was expanding rapidly overland. Under Ivan the Great (1462–1505), Duke of Moscow, who took the title of tsar (Caesar), Moscow assumed the mantle of the ‘Third Rome’, after the Turks sacked Byzantium (Constantinople) in 1453.² Now Moscow became the guardian of Orthodox Christianity. The Russian state, still bearing the imprint of the Mongols, was centralized and authoritarian. But there were some free spirits. In pursuit of furs, the ‘soft gold’ of the north, Cossack adventurers began to move across the vast steppes and taiga, filling the vacuum created by the disintegration of the Mongol empire. In 1607, the same year the English founded Jamestown, Cossacks reached the Yenisey river.³

The Cossacks’ highway to the Far East was the Amur, the ‘Black Dragon’ river, so named by the Chinese because of the silt that it carries down from the mountains. The Amur, which flows 2,700 miles to the Sea of Okhotsk, is the only major Siberian river to flow eastwards to the Pacific Ocean. Navigable for a thousand miles, the Amur is longer than the Danube. It beckoned the Russians towards Manchuria, that vast, sparsely populated but potentially rich expanse of China's northeast which is larger than Germany and France combined. But until Britain's victories in the Opium Wars in the mid-nineteenth century revealed the extent of the rot within their empire, the Manchus remained strong enough to keep the Russians north of the Amur.

For centuries, the landlocked Russian empire had been seeking to break through to the open oceans. After Peter the Great (1689–1725) defeated Sweden, thus giving him a window on the Baltic, he organized a victory parade through Moscow with warships mounted on sleds. Peter forsook Moscow when he sited his new capital of St Petersburg on the Baltic, thus orienting Russia towards the West. Still, Russia's vast spaces, and the lack of natural barriers, made for geostrategic thinking on a grand scale. The tsar believed that there were three points of primary strategic importance to Russia – the mouths of the Neva, the Don and the Amur. In the Far East, Russia broke out to the sea via the Amur even before it reached the Baltic and the Black Seas. Cossack adventurers founded Okhotsk on the Sea of Okhotsk in 1647. Distant and bleak though it was, Okhotsk was to be the base for Russian exploration of the northern Pacific.

In 1651, the Russians founded Irkutsk, where the Angara flows into Lake Baikal. Then they made a settlement at Nerchinsk, on a tributary of the Amur about 400 miles east of Lake Baikal. Nerchinsk became the jumping-off point for the Russian penetration of Manchuria. In 1651 the Russians built a fort at Albazin further downstream from Nerchinsk. Soon Russia's chain of forts became a continental counterpoint to Britain's network of naval bases. Although distances in both empires were immense, until the development of the railways Britain's maritime imperium had the edge. That was because land transport could not compete with ocean-going ships.

The Manchus, alive to the threat to their ancestral homelands, razed Albazin in 1685. With a delegation complete with 10,000 bannermen, artillery and Jesuit interpreters, they parleyed with the Russians at Nerchinsk in 1689. The Treaty of Nerchinsk was the first and last treaty China made with a European power on the basis of equality. By means of this treaty, the Manchus kept the Russians north of the Amur from a point just east of Albazin.

Denied access to the Amur, the Russians then made a flanking movement from Okhotsk down the Pacific coast. In 1707 they seized the Kamchatka peninsula, which juts out into the Pacific from northeastern Siberia. There they established the settlement at Petropavlovsk na Kamchatke in 1740. Petropavlovsk was not the ice-free port that the Russians craved. But it provided a base for probes towards Hokkaido, the northernmost of the four main Japanese islands, where the Russians discovered the splendid bay of Hakodate.⁴

Petropavlovsk also provided a base for expansion across the Aleutian island chain to the North American continent in Alaska, and then down the Californian coast. In 1811 – ignoring Spanish protests – the Russians established Fort Ross north of San Francisco. But Russia, lacking a secure base on the Amur, was overextended, so it opted for retreat. Like the British, the Russians were aware of the risks of imperial overstretch. So they sold Alaska, including the Aleutian chain, to the United States in 1867, in order to provide a buffer between themselves and British maritime power based in Canada. Besides, by that time, Britain's assault on China's sovereignty had created new opportunities for Russia on the Amur.

The nineteenth century: the assault on China's sovereignty

As so often in its later history, China was partly the architect of its own misfortune. The Manchus, incapable of dealing with others on the basis of reciprocity, ignored the growing military capabilities of the European maritime powers. By the late eighteenth century, the Manchu empire was the largest in Chinese history. But its successes had been achieved against enemies far less formidable than the Europeans.

Britain, in search of trade rather than territory, was not seeking to carve up China. Having learned from its mistakes when it lost its first empire after the American colonies rebelled, Britain now preferred a free-trading global system which strengthened the sinews of its industrial, commercial and maritime power. Thus Britain saw China mainly as a market for its industrial products, and a destination for British investment. The British East India Company sought to remind its employees (not always with success) that their business was trade, not war.

But Britain, at the height of imperial power after the great series of wars of the eighteenth century, chafed at the lowly status of its merchants at Canton. Whereas Britain was proud of its reputation as a nation of shopkeepers, merchants were at the bottom of the Confucian hierarchy, with traders from ‘barbarian’ nations the lowest of the low. Unlike the Japanese, the Chinese had a similar disdain for soldiers. Such contempt was now dangerous. After the abolition of the East India Company's monopoly in 1834, which signaled Britain's switch from mercantilism to free trade, China found itself dealing not with ‘John Company’, but with the victors of Trafalgar and Waterloo. While the British government preferred peaceful trade, it was not squeamish about using force.

In their inland redoubts, the Manchus remained oblivious to the growing peril from the sea. Meanwhile, the military and technological consequences of Europe's industrial revolution, especially the ironclad steamship, were making China increasingly vulnerable. And by now, British merchants had discovered one product that was in demand in China, and was thus able to stem the outflow of silver into China's coffers – opium, grown in India and Persia. In 1841, the Chinese government's efforts to confiscate opium stockpiles triggered the so-called Opium War, the first assault on China's sovereignty.

British naval superiority routed the Chinese, and the vast manpower of India, once harnessed, proved a valuable adjunct to British military capabilities in the Far East. After 1841, British punitive expeditions in China had large sepoy contingents. Under the terms of the 1842 Treaty of Nanking, Britain acquired Hong Kong, opposite Macao at the entrance to the Pearl river. Five other ports were opened to foreign trade. The monopoly in Canton was abolished, and foreigners gained extraterritorial rights. That meant that they were subject to their own legal arrangements, and not left to the tender mercies of Chinese law. China also lost control of its tariffs, and was made to pay a large indemnity. Moreover, the breach in China's sovereignty now provided the opportunity that Russia had long been seeking on the Amur.

Accelerated Russian penetration of China

The appointment in 1847 of General Nikolai Muraviev (‘Amurski’) at the age of thirty-nine as governor general of Siberia marked a new stage in Russian expansion. Muraviev enjoyed the strong support of tsar Nicholas 1 (1825–1855). As soon as the Opium War had revealed the extent of the decay within the Chinese empire, Russia began a new forward policy on the lower Amur. In July 1850, Fort Nikolaevsk was founded a short distance from the mouth of the river, and the Russian flag was raised on Sakhalin. Russian expeditions sailed down the Amur, in violation of the Treaty of Nerchinsk. Muraviev himself travelled down the river with a force of eight hundred men.

The Crimean War (1854–1855) then made acquisition of a secure base on the Amur seem even more imperative for Russia. In Europe, Russia had been seeking to exploit the decline of the Turkish empire in order to gain control of Constantinople (Istanbul). That would give Russia the keys to the Turkish straits, which blocked its egress to the Mediterranean from the Black Sea. Determined to contain Russian power, Britain and France declared war. In the Far East, an Anglo–French force bombarded Petropavlovsk. Although an attempted landing failed, the remoteness of Petropavlovsk showed its deficiencies as Russia's main Far Eastern base, because it could not be supported by land forces.

So the Russians transferred their main base to Nikolaevsk at the mouth of the Amur. In developing the new base, the Russians demonstrated that they understood that they would need maritime as well as land power in order to secure their interests in the East. The Crimean War had also closed the sea route by which supplies could be sent to Siberia from southern Russia. But Nikolaevsk had its limits because the mouth of the Amur and most of the Tartar Strait freezes in winter, due to the enormous flow of fresh water. Russia had still not found a warm-water port on the Pacific coast.

Having consolidated their grip on the mouth of the Amur, the Russians renewed their encroachment on its lower reaches. In 1858, under duress, China signed the Treaty of Aigun. The treaty ceded Russia the left bank of the Amur, as well as rights to vast territories between the Ussuri river and the sea. Both the great Manchurian branches of the Amur, the Sungari and the Ussuri, were to be used only by Chinese and Russian vessels. Since the Sungari is the hydrographical axis of the Manchurian plain, Russian access to it portended ambition south towards the Liao valley, and hence control of the whole of Manchuria.⁵

By that time, new opportunities were emerging for Russia as the Anglo-French powers renewed their assault on China's sovereignty. In 1856, continued Chinese resistance to foreigners saw Britain and France again resorting to force in the Arrow War. In retaliation for the murder of members of the captured party of the British consul in Canton, Anglo–French forces looted and burned the Summer Palace. The Treaty of Peking forced China to pay another large indemnity, and to concede Kowloon to Britain. Ten more treaty ports wer...