Strategic Stability in Asia

Amit Gupta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781351897556
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What do the major states of Asia view as the emerging challenges in their immediate security environment as well as in the broader Asian region? What future security outcomes would make them believe that strategic stability had been achieved in the Asian continent? Central to the latter question is China and the path it will take to rise to superpower status. While all the major Asian states increasingly are both economically and politically engaged with China, doubts remain about China's long-term intentions. This volume discusses the military, diplomatic and economic measures being taken by the major Asian countries and Australia to establish a new framework for strategic stability. In the process, the contributors examine the global pressures that are impacting on these countries' security dilemmas and, from the perspective of these countries, the patterns of expected behaviour that China would have to fulfil for a regional security order to emerge in Asia.

Chapter 1

Great Power Peace and Stability in Asia: China’s Emerging Role

David Lai

The rise of China is making its impact on the political, economic, and security landscape in Asia and beyond. Traditionally, shifts in the geo-strategic balance of power gave rise to a new order in international relations. Unfortunately, many of those changes took place in bloodshed. Can the rising Asian powers avoid the tragedy of great power destruction? Will the change of the Asia-Pacific geo-strategic landscape become a force for peace and stability? There are no ready answers to these questions. After all, the world has not seen a peaceful rise of a great power nor a smooth transition of international order; yet Asia today is witnessing the rise of several great powers side by side – China has taken off with its rapid industrialization; India is following aggressively behind; Japan, after years as an economic superpower, is ready to add political and military significance to its great power status; South Korea is also becoming a great power to be reckoned with rather than a protégé of the United States; and finally, Russia, a degraded great power, is determined to restore its greatness. While these great powers pursue their national goals, they nevertheless have to pay attention to the unsettling relations with one another. In addition, the changing relations between these Asian powers and the United States are matters of great importance. By many measures, China is at the center of these changing relations. It is becoming more and more clear to all that if China can peacefully come to terms with the other great powers in their new forms, there will be peace and stability in Asia.

China and the United States: Can Both Get Along as Responsible Stakeholders?

The US-China relationship is undoubtedly the most difficult and complicated one among the great power relations in Asia. These two nations have had a precarious, and at times confrontational, relationship since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 (China’s official name is People’s Republic of China, PRC, used interchangeably with China thereafter). For the first 30 years, the United States did not even recognize the PRC, but chose to support the PRC’s defeated opponent, the Republic of China (ROC) government on exile in Taiwan (further discussion of the Taiwan issue follows). In 1972, President Richard Nixon made a historic overture to China and turned a new page on US-China relations. Nixon believed that it made no sense to keep the 600 million Chinese in isolation to nurture their hatred against the United States.¹ China under Mao Zedong was waging a two-front cold war against the United States and the Soviet Union. Out of dire strategic need, Mao responded in a timely fashion to the US initiatives. The two nations graduallycame round to cooperating with each other. In 1979, the United States switched its recognition of China from Taipei to Beijing. In the meantime, China launched its economic reform and opened its door for foreign, especially US, business investment. These reciprocal acts led to an accelerated cooperation between the United States and China in the 1980s, covering economic, cultural, social, political and even military areas.²

US-China relations took a sharp turn in 1989–1990 following the Tiananmen Square tragedy and the end of the Cold War. In the aftermath of these great changes, while the United States led the world to cherish the coming of the democratic age, chinese leaders struggled to survive the fall of communism and re-emerged from China’s internal turmoil to maintain a defiant regime against US-led pressure for political change in China. These opposing acts unfortunately reincarnated the ideological divide between the United States and China. It has become unfinished business from the Cold War and a point of contention between the two nations that neither could deal with the other in good faith.

Chinese leaders, however, insisted that their authoritarian rule was an absolute necessity for economic development in China, given China’s huge population and uneven development across a vast country. While the jury is still out on the theory of economic development through authoritarian rule, China’s phenomenal growth since the early 1990s has clearly presented a practical case.³ Before long, a rapidly rising China had become the defining factor of the post-Cold War world.

As China continues to make strides in its economic development, it has also brought many challenges to the United States, challenges that touch upon political, military, and socio-economic issues. In short, practically every aspect of US-China relations has been affected.

China’s Political Challenges

China’s success in its economic development follows a model the world is familiar with but it is different from the one the United States promotes. Its authoritarian rule, after all, does not appear to be as distasteful to many developing nations as the United States sees it. Its economic success is clearly appealing not just to developing nations, but also to major powers such as Russia, India, and remnants of the communist nations such as Vietnam, cuba, and even North Korea. From a political standpoint, China’s model rejects the US approach of promoting-democracy-first-and-economic-development-second and poses a challenge to the political objective of the US National Security Strategy (the United States traditionally defines its national goals in terms of national security, economic prosperity, and the pursuance of happiness, which in recent decades has become the promotion of democracy, and more pointedly regime change, in the world).⁴

In addition, while the United States undertakes diplomatic as well as military actions against those ‘rogue states’ and generates resentment around the world, China gains political capital by advocating mutual respect, non-interference in each other’s internal affairs, tolerance for different political systems, and allowing the United Nations to play a larger role in international politics. At the United Nations 60th anniversary in June 2005, Chinese President Hu Jintao took the Chinese position to the international forum and made it sound like a call to ‘make democracy safe for the world’, a call that ironically reverses the order of the one made by President Woodrow Wilson a hundred years ago: ‘make the world safe for democracy’. China’s challenge is subtle and unassuming, but it has been loudly echoed by the UN assembly. It has also undermined US ‘soft power’ – its political influence in the world.⁵

China’s Military Challenges

If the United States and China were to keep their conflict in the political and diplomatic arena, the world would be at ease. Unfortunately, the two great powers have the danger of coming to an armed conflict over a thorny issue called Taiwan.

China has always maintained that Taiwan is an unalienable part of China. chinese leaders also hold that the division of mainland China and the off-shore island is an unfinished business of the Chinese Civil War of the late 1940s. Moreover, Chinese leaders see that the reunification of mainland China and Taiwan will put a glorious closure to China’s contemporary history of humiliation from foreign powers (China was gradually semi-colonized by Western powers from the 1840s to the early 1910s; it lost Taiwan to Japan as a result of its defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1895; preserving China’s territorial integrity has always been an important part of China’s mission to restore its greatness). For China, unification with Taiwan is the only resolution of the Taiwan issue; and the only unanswered question is how to achieve unification: through negotiation or by force. China has steadfastly promised to use force to keep Taiwan in the fold if peaceful means fail.

The United States, however, has a different take on the Taiwan issue. Initially, the United States stood for the return of Taiwan to China. This position was well specified in the Cairo and Potsdam Declarations of 1943 and 1945, in which the great powers of the time, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain, demanded that ‘all the territories Japan has stolen from the chinese, such as Manchuria, Formosa [Taiwan], and the Pescadores, shall be restored to the Republic of China’.⁶ Japan complied with the declarations and surrendered Taiwan upon its defeat in 1945. However, the Republic of China’s government was overthrown by Mao’s communist forces during the Chinese Civil War of 1946–49. As the Cold War emerged, the United States refused to recognize the new People’s Republic of China government in Beijing, and chose to support the Republic of China government restored in Taiwan. When the Korean War broke out in 1950, President Truman sent the Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait. In 1954, the United States signed a mutual defense treaty with the Republic of China government in Taiwan. In the thirty years from 1949 to 1979, US support for Taiwan effectively denied China’s attempts to reunite with the island. In 1979, President Jimmy carter switched US recognition of China from Taipei to Beijing. In an attempt to counterbalance Carter’s move to normalize relations with China, Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) to define US commitments to Taiwan that future US presidents must adhere to:

• Declare that peace and stability in the Western Pacific area are in the political, security, and economic interests of the United States, and are matters of international concern;

• Make clear that the future of Taiwan should be determined by peaceful means;

• Consider any effort other than peaceful means to determine the future of Taiwan, including boycotts or embargoes, a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and a grave concern to the United States;

• Provide Taiwan with arms of defensive character; and

• Maintain the capacity of the United States to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the security, or the social or economic system, of the people in Taiwan.⁷

The TRA suggests that the status of Taiwan is undetermined, and the settlement of the Taiwan issue can be either unification of China and Taiwan or a formal separation of the two as long as it is done through peaceful means.⁸ The TRA makes it clear that the United States will not let China force its will on Taiwan. As such, the TRA puts the United States in an unending state of conflict with China, challenging China’s past and future. Moreover, it has also introduced a dangerous component in the US-China relationship: without the Taiwan issue, the United States and China will still have conflict; yet without the Taiwan issue, the United States and China have no compelling reason to use force to settle their differences. With the US committing to the defense of Taiwan, the United States and China can see each other in arms over a conflict of interest in Taiwan.

The danger of such an armed conflict has become more pronounced as Taiwan’s pro-independence movement gains ground in Taiwan. The call for Taiwan’s independence has a long history (as early as the days before the Japanese colonial takeover in 1895).⁹ When the ROC government came to Taiwan in 1949 and subsequently imposed its authoritarian rule on the island, the pro-Taiwan independence movement struggled underground against the repressive ROC regime. In 1987, when the ROC government lifted its four-decade long marshal law, and subsequently opened up Taiwan for democratic change, the pro-Taiwan independence movement gained a new lease of life. It became a rallying call for the newly-formed Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) whose senior members had fought for years for political liberty as well as Taiwan’s independence. Before long, the DPP had become a formidable opposition party seeking control of the Taiwan government.

In the meantime, the ROC President Lee Teng-hui, a concealed pro-Taiwan independence figure, skillfully engineered a series of changes in the ROC government and its China policy that began a process leading Taiwan toward formal independence from China. By the mid-1990s, those incremental changes had been noticed by Chinese leaders. They responded by stepping up China’s military modernization and tightening their measures against attempts toward Taiwan’s independence. In 1996, Taiwan held its first-ever direct presidential election and Lee Teng-hui led in the polls. China fired missiles landing in waters close to the northern and southern tips of Taiwan to intimidate Taiwan’s voters. The United States swiftly sent two aircraft carrier battle groups to the vicinity of Taiwan.

Although the crisis did not end in war, the Taiwan Strait has remained a dangerous flashpoint. In 2000, this situation became even more intense as the DPP unseated Taiwan’s long-time ruling party, the Kuomintang (KMT), and put its openly pro-Taiwan independence figure, President Chen Shui-bian, in the driver’s seat. As Taiwan’s political parties struggle over the fate of Taiwan, its society has also become fragmented. The DPP holds a sizeable portion of the Taiwan population to promote independence. The KMT and its constituents stand for eventual unification with China, not on China’s terms but on democratic principles. While the DPP’s independence agenda could provoke war with China, most people in Taiwan do not want to see unification with China under its current authoritarian rule. As a compromise, repeated public opinion polls over the last two decades show that the majority of Taiwan people prefer the status quo – no outright push for either Taiwan independence or hasty unification with China (see Figure 1.1).

However, the status quo does not guarantee peace across the Taiwan Strait. It is a delicate situation that can be upset fr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Introduction
• 1 Great Power Peace and Stability in Asia: China’s Emerging Role
• 2 Japan’s Emerging Strategic Posture in Asia: Headed Toward Leadership or Rivalry?
• 3 History Still Matters: Contemporary South Korean Strategy and Diplomacy
• 4 The Reformist State: The Indian Security Dilemma
• 5 Pakistan’s Security Dilemma and Quest for Strategic Stability
• 6 Australia and Strategic Stability in Asia
• 7 Vietnam’s Security Perceptions and Policy Directions
• Conclusion
• Index