China plays maritime chess

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

Japan Times, January 22, 2009

The start of Chinese patrols in the pirate-infested Gulf of Aden is intended to extend China’s naval role and presence far from its shores while demonstrating, under United Nations rules of engagement, a capability to conduct complex operations in distant waters.

Today, taking on pirates under the placard of internationalism offers China a welcome opportunity to add force to its global power ambitions. The antipiracy plank earlier made it handy for Beijing to agree to joint patrols with Pakistan in the Arabian Sea and extend cooperation to ASEAN. Another Chinese objective is to chip away at India’s maritime dominance in the Indian Ocean — a theater critical to fashioning a Sino-centric Asia. If China can assert naval power in the Indian Ocean to expand its influence over the regional waterways and states, it will emerge as the preeminent Asian power.

The geopolitical importance of the Indian Ocean today is beginning to rival that of the Pacific. Much of the global oil-export supply passes through the Indian Ocean rim region, particularly through two constricted passageways — the Strait of Hormuz between Iran and Oman, and the piracy-plagued Strait of Malacca.

In addition, the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the nuclear standoff with Iran undergird the critical importance of the Indian Ocean region. Asserting naval presence in the Indian Ocean and expanding maritime power in the Pacific are part of the high-stakes game of maritime chess China is now ready to play. Its buildup of naval forces directly challenges Japan and India and impinges on U.S. interests.

China, undergirding its larger geostrategic motives, says it is "seriously considering" adding to its navy fleet a first aircraft carrier — a symbol of "a nation’s comprehensive power," as a military spokesperson put it.

Now, with Chinese President Hu Jintao publicly calling for rapid naval modernization and the last defense White Paper disclosing that "the Navy aims to gradually extend its strategic depth," naval expansion and greater missile prowess are clearly at the core of China’s force modernization. Since 2000 alone, China has built at least 60 warships. Its navy now has a fleet of 860 vessels, including at least 60 submarines.

There is a clear strategic shift under way in China on force planning. Historically a major land power, China is now putting the accent on building long-range maritime power to help underpin geopolitical interests, including winning new allies and safeguarding its energy and economic investments in distant lands. China has been in the lead in avariciously acquiring energy and mineral assets in Sudan, Nigeria, Iran, Venezuela, Burma, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia and other states that have a record of showing scant respect for international contracts. Through naval power-projection force capability, Beijing intends to dissuade such states from reasserting control over Chinese-held assets.

More significantly, rising naval power arms China with the heft to pursue mercantilist efforts to lock up long-term energy supplies, assert control over transport routes, and assemble a "string of pearls" in the form of listening posts and special naval-access arrangements along the great trade arteries.

Just as China’s land-combat strategy has evolved from "deep defense" (luring enemy forces into Chinese territory to help garrote them) to "active defense" (a proactive posture designed to fight the enemy on enemy territory, including through the use of forces stationed in neighboring lands or seas), a shift in its sea-warfare posture has emerged, with the emphasis on greater reach and depth and expeditionary capability.

And just as Beijing has used its energy investments in Central Asia as justification to set up at least two offensively configured, armor-heavy mechanized corps — with Xinjiang as their springboard — to fight deep inside adversarial territory and secure strategic assets, China’s growing oil imports from the Persian Gulf and Africa have come handy to rationalize its growing emphasis on the seas.

Chinese naval power is set to grow exponentially. This will become evident as Beijing accelerates its construction of warships and begins to deploy naval assets far from its exclusive economic zone. In fact, Chinese warships inducted in recent years have already been geared for blue-sea fleet operations. China is on track to deploy a fleet of nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarines (known as SSBNs). It has already developed its new Jin-class (Type 094) SSBN prototype, with satellite pictures showing one such submarine berthed at the huge new Chinese naval base at Sanya, on the southern coast of Hainan Island. Within the next 25 years, China could have more nuclear assets at sea than Russia.

Against that background, it is no surprise that the Chinese Navy is extending its operations to a crucial international passageway — the Indian Ocean. China indeed has aggressively moved in recent years to build ports in the Indian Ocean rim, including in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Burma. Besides eyeing Pakistan’s Chinese-built port of Gwadar as a naval anchor, Beijing has sought naval links with the Maldives, Seychelles, Mauritius and Madagascar.

India, with its enormous strategic depth in the Indian Ocean, is in a position to pursue a sea-denial strategy, if it were to adopt a more forward-thinking naval policy designed to forestall the emergence of a Beijing-oriented Asia. It has to start exerting naval power at critical chokepoints, in concert with the Japanese, U.S. and other friendly navies. In essence, that entails guarding the various "gates" to the Indian Ocean. More broadly, Japanese-Indian naval cooperation and collaboration have become inescapable.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author, most recently, of "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan."

The Japan Times: Thursday, Jan. 22, 2009

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Increasing challenges to stability in Asia

Barack Obama takes office as U.S. President at a time when a qualitative reordering of power is under way in the Asia-Pacific, with tectonic shifts challenging strategic stability. The impact of such shifts on U.S. foreign policy will be accentuated by America’s growing challenges, including a deep economic recession, two separate wars and eroding global influence. Such challenges dictate greater cooperation with China to ensure both continued large Chinese capital inflows and political support on issues ranging from North Korea and Burma to Pakistan and Iran.

Such calculations, in turn, are certain to have a bearing on America’s role in Asia — “as a resident power, and as the ‘straddle power’ across the Asia-Pacific,” to quote Robert Gates, who is staying on as Defence Secretary under Mr. Obama. Still, the U.S. will remain a key player in Asia through its security arrangements and other strategic ties with an array of regional states.

However, not since Japan rose to world-power status during the reign of the Meiji emperor in the second half of the 19th century has another non-Western power emerged with such potential to alter the world order as China today. As the latest assessment of the U.S. National Intelligence Council affirms, China is “poised to have more impact on the world over the next 20 years than any other country.”

China’s ascent, though, is dividing Asia, not bringing Asian states closer. Economic-powerhouse Japan — whose economy still is larger than that of China, India and Russia put together — is intent on shoring up its security and ensuring that Beijing does not call the shots in East Asia. Japan is set to reassert itself in world affairs by shedding decades of pacifism anchored in a U.S.-imposed Constitution. Another key actor in Asian geopolitics, India, is unwilling to cede its leadership role in the Indian Ocean rim region, despite China’s creeping influence in southern Asia through growing transportation, trade, port-building and defence links.

Under Mr. Obama, America’s main strategic objectives in the Asia-Pacific are unlikely to change. Indeed, the central U.S. interest in the Asia-Pacific remains what it has been since 1898 when America took the Philippines as part of the spoils of the naval war with Spain — the maintenance of a balance of power.

During the first half of the Cold War, the U.S. chose to maintain a balance by forging security alliances with Japan and South Korea and also by keeping forward bases in Asia. By the time the Cold War entered the second phase, America’s “ping-pong diplomacy” led to the 1972 “opening” with Beijing. It was designed to reinforce the balance by employing a newly assertive, nuclear-armed China to countervail Soviet power in the Asia-Pacific region.

Today, according to the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defence Review Report, America’s interests centre on “maintaining a stable balance” in “the East Asian littoral,” given the likelihood that “a military competitor with a formidable base will emerge in the region” — an allusion to China. At the same time, China’s rising heft is spurring greater American reliance on Beijing for financial and political support.

In fact, China is becoming America’s banker. Mr. Obama’s mammoth stimulus package that is meant to help revive the broken U.S. economy is set to reinforce Washington’s dependence on capital from a foreign power already holding 10 per cent of the U.S. public debt. A creditor-debtor relationship between Washington and Beijing, along with China’s growing sway over states on its periphery, holds major relevance for America’s traditional allies, principally Japan and Taiwan, and new strategic partners, like India. After all, a banker has greater leverage over a customer than vice versa.

In the years ahead, China may not hesitate to assert the leverage over an increasingly indebted America. But the extent of such leverage is likely to remain limited. Although it is now America’s largest external creditor — with two-thirds of its $2 trillion foreign-exchange reserves invested in U.S. dollar-denominated financial instruments — China is locked in a mutually dependent economic relationship with the U.S. For instance, it is as much in China’s interest as in America’s to prop up the value of the dollar because if the dollar sinks, the worth of China’s dollar-denominated assets will plummet.

Also, despite its coffers having swelled 10-fold since 2000, China does not have much room to diversify the foreign investment of its surpluses and savings. For one, the European capital markets remain shallow for a cash-heavy China, with any big induction of Chinese capital likely to prove destabilising. For another, the global oil-price crash crimps China’s diversification ambitions. Had oil prices stayed above $100 a barrel, many oil-exporting nations would have helped bolster the value of the dollar by channelling their high oil earnings into dollar-denominated assets, thus creating space for China to diversify some of its holdings of U.S. debt.

From being allies of convenience in the second half of the Cold War, the U.S. and China have emerged as partners with such close interdependence that economic historian Niall Ferguson has coined the term, “Chimerica” — a fusion like the less-convincing “Chindia.” But as the U.S.-China relationship acquires a wider and deeper base in the coming years, the strains in some of America’s existing military or strategic partnerships will become pronounced.

While South Korea’s importance in the U.S.-led hub-and-spoke alliance system will continue to decline, doubts are bound to grow in Japan and Taiwan over the reliability of Washington’s commitment to their security. In the near term, rising Chinese assertiveness has had the unintended effect of persuading Japan to jettison its doubts about U.S. security commitments and to reinvigorate its military relationship with Washington. In the long run, however, Tokyo will seek to ease its security dependence on the U.S.

Some recent U.S. actions — including the failure to consult Tokyo before removing North Korea from the U.S. list of terrorism-sponsoring states and the refusal to sell Japan the next-generation F-22 Raptor fighter-jets — are likely to sow further doubts among the Japanese. Similarly, Washington turned down new Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou’s request to include diesel-powered submarines and UH-60 Black Hawk attack helicopters in a recent $6.46 billion arms deal the U.S. struck with Taiwan. For the first time, building a stronger cooperative relationship with China is taking precedence in U.S. policy over the sale of advanced weaponry to allies, lest the transfer of offensive arms raise Beijing’s hackles.

In fact, with Washington seeking to revive Sino-U.S. military contacts, suspended by Beijing in reprisal to the latest package of largely defensive arms for Taipei, the Obama administration will not find it easy to sell Taiwan top-of-the-line weapon systems. The U.S. has not only welcomed China’s deployment of battle-ready warships in the pirate-infested Gulf of Aden in its first naval task-force operation beyond the Pacific, but expressed the hope that the move — which brings the Chinese navy into India’s backyard — would be “the springboard for resumption” of military ties.

The U.S. has worked hard in recent years to co-opt India in a “soft alliance” shorn of treaty obligations. Yet, conflicting Indo-U.S. expectations and interests often surface. Take the controversial nuclear deal, which was driven by American non-proliferation considerations but peddled by Indian “neocons” and government managers as a far-reaching strategic initiative to help countervail China’s growing might. As a result, New Delhi strenuously tried to whitewash the progressive attachment of tougher U.S. conditions during the three-and-a-half-year deal-making process.

But just as India has found itself alone in the fight against Pakistani-fomented transnational terror, New Delhi is unlikely to get much comfort on China from American policy. In that light, the Indian ardour in recent years for closer defence ties with the U.S. could gradually give way to more sobering reality.

By contrast, Australia’s growing cozy relationship with distant China, especially under the Sinophile Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, meshes well with the likely trajectory of U.S.-China ties. What Canberra pursues today — to balance its relations with Tokyo and Beijing — Washington is likely to begin doing before long.

The U.S.-China relationship — despite a deepening symbiosis, reflected in the U.S. recession seriously hurting the Chinese economy — is likely to remain uneasy, but overt competition or confrontation suits neither side. For the U.S., however, China’s rising power helps validate American forward military deployments in the Asian theatre. It also helps America keep existing allies and search for new ones. The China factor is thus coming handy to Washington to enlarge its strategic footprint in Asia in the near term.

Caught between an increasingly powerful China and an America narrowly focussed on advancing its strategic interests in Asia, other Asian powers are likely to face tough security choices in the coming years. The recent landmark Japan-India security agreement signals that major changes in the Asian strategic scene are in the offing.

(The writer is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.)

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