By Brahma Chellaney, JoongAng Ilbo, January 21, 2013, page 6

Park Geun-hye broke through South Korea’s glass ceiling to win the presidency. But having overcome the gender barrier, she now faces important domestic and foreign-policy challenges. How she handles those challenges, including slowing economic growth and sharpening geopolitical competition in Northeast Asia, will determine if South Korea’s international clout will continue to rise.

Coincidentally, she is taking over as president at a time when Japan has elected a new government led by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Xi Jinping is assuming the presidency in China. The overlapping power transitions in East Asia’s three main economies promise to mark a defining moment in the region’s harsh geopolitics.

Xi is regarded by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) as its own man, while Abe is a vocal nationalist. The political transitions, coupled with the brewing territorial spats between China and Japan and South Korea and Japan as well as the underlying tensions between the two Koreas, create new risks to regional peace, stability, and prosperity. In this setting, Ms. Park will need to tread cautiously, seeking to expand mutually beneficial ties with Beijing, Tokyo, and Washington while addressing domestic challenges, including the growing income disparity and a generational divide, as reflected in the presidential election’s voting patterns.

Asia’s other major economy, India, is expecting Ms. Park’s election to accelerate cooperation and trade between Seoul and New Delhi. Her election has received wide coverage in India, a country that has a long tradition of powerful women figures in politics.

Washington, for its part, is delighted that voters in South Korea and Japan have elected conservative, pro-American leaders, raising hope that America will be able to work with its two closest allies in East Asia to ease the security issues that are troubling this economically dynamic region. The Obama administration, however, recognizes that the emotionally charged relations between Tokyo and Seoul can prove a serious impediment. A reminder of that was the decision of departing President Lee Myung-bak last summer to cancel the scheduled signing of a military intelligence-sharing agreement with Japan and scrap a bilateral plan to finalize a military-related Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement.

If Ms. Park is to build a historically positive legacy in her five-year term as president, she will need to be different than Lee Myung-bak in both style and substance, even though he is her colleague from the Saenuri Party. She will need to have a more consensual style than Lee, nicknamed “the Bulldozer” from his career as a construction industry executive. And in terms of substance, she must seek to build more cooperative ties with North Korea and Japan.

Lee pointlessly roiled the relationship with Japan in his last year in year, while his policy approach toward North Korea right from 2008 onward only encouraged greater belligerence and defiance on the part of Pyongyang. Not only did inter-Korean contact and cooperation suffer, but the North carried out provocative actions, including missile tests, and ratcheted up bellicose rhetoric. Relations between the two Koreas sunk to a low. Pyongyang’s recent space launch served as a fresh reminder of its determination to defy even United Nations Security Council resolutions.

Fortunately, Ms. Park has already signaled that she will pursue a more pragmatic and balanced foreign policy than her predecessor. For example, she has vowed to tread the middle path on North Korea between unconditional engagement and uncompromising chastisement. She has even indicated that she would try to hold talks with the North’s young leader Kim Jong-un.

Ms. Park’s more moderate approach could undercut the Obama administration’s sanctions-only North Korean policy just when Pyongyang has signaled open defiance of U.S. and UN pressure. But it is in South Korea’s own long-term interest to build economic cooperation and other contact with the North so that when the regime in Pyongyang eventually collapses, the costs of Korean reunification will not be terribly high.

More broadly, the central challenge in Northeast Asia is to get rid of the baggage of history that weighs down the relationships between all the actors. The rise of nationalism in the region with growing prosperity has only compounded the historical issues.

Booming trade in the region has failed to mute or moderate territorial and other disputes; on the contrary, it has only sharpened regional geopolitics and unleashed high-stakes brinkmanship. Economic interdependence cannot deliver regional stability unless rival states undertake genuine efforts to mend their political relations.

China, for example, has launched a new campaign of attrition against Japan over the Senkaku/ Diaoyu Islands. By sending patrol ships frequently to the waters around the islands since September — and by violating the airspace over them recently — Beijing has sought to challenge Japan’s decades-old control over them, despite the risk that an incident at sea or in the air between the two sides could spiral out of control.  Meanwhile, a continuing informal Chinese boycott of Japanese goods has led to a fall in Japan’s exports to China.

China’s new assertiveness has fueled a nationalist backlash in Japan. But that is only fanning nationalism in China, where the Communist Party has already turned nationalism as the legitimating credo of its monopoly on power to compensate for the decline of the state ideology. Consequently, the two countries find themselves in a vicious circle from which they are finding it difficult to escape.

The risks posed by increasing nationalism and militarism to peace in East Asia have already been highlighted by the rise of a new Chinese dynasty of “princelings,” or sons of revolutionary heroes who have widespread contacts in the military. In fact, what distinguishes Xi, a former military reservist, from China’s other civilian leaders is his strong relationship with the PLA, whose rising clout has underpinned China’s increasingly muscular foreign policy.

Against this background, Ms. Park’s test is to prove a visionary, dynamic leader who has the foresight and courage to chart a more stable and prosperous future for her country and region. Her lasting legacy could be to boost South Korea’s economic and foreign-policy influence and turn it into a bridge-builder between Japan and China, between China and the United States, and between Russia and Japan.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author of “Asian Juggernaut” (Harper, 2010) and “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press, 2011), which won the 2012 Bernard Schwartz Award.

(Translated and published in Korean. © JoongAng Ilbo, 2013.)

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is the author of Asian Juggernaut and Water: Asia’s New Battleground. Full profile

(c) Project Syndicate, 2012. Reprinting this article without written consent from Project Syndicate is a violation of international copyright law. To secure permission, please contact us.

Hindustan Times, December 13, 2012

Brahma Chellaney

The recent October 20–December 1 fiftieth anniversary of China’s invasion of India attracted a lot of Indian discussion, yet the debate shied away from drawing the broader, long-term lessons. The lessons are also relevant for China’s other neighbours because 1962 helped uncover the key elements of Beijing’s war-fighting doctrine — a doctrine it brought into play in 1969 (provoking border clashes with Soviet forces), 1974 (occupying the Paracel Islands), 1979 (invading Vietnam), 1988 (seizing Johnson Reef), and 1995 (grabbing Mischief Reef). In each of those aggressions, the major 1962 elements were replicated.

As a 2010 Pentagon report citing 1962 put it, “The history of modern Chinese warfare provides numerous case studies in which China’s leaders have claimed military pre-emption as a strategically defensive act.” In fact, a 2010 essay in the influential Qiu Shi Journal — the ideological and theoretical organ of the Chinese Communist Party’s central committee — underscored the centrality of “offense as defence” in Chinese policy by declaring that, “Throughout the history of new China, peace in China has never been gained by giving in, only through war. Safeguarding national interests is never achieved by mere negotiations, but by war.”

Unlike India — which still naïvely believes that it gained independence through non-violence, not because a world-war-debilitated Britain could no longer hold on to its colonies — “new China” was born in blood after a long civil war. And it was built on blood, with Mao Zedong and fellow revolutionaries ever ready to employ force internally and externally.

No sooner had the new China been established than it swiftly doubled its territorial size by forcibly absorbing Xinjiang and Tibet. Domestically, countless millions perished in witch-hunts, fratricidal killings and human-made disasters. In fact, Mao attacked India after his “Great Leap Forward” created the worst famine in recorded world history, with the resulting damage to his credibility, according to Chinese scholar Wang Jisi, serving as a strong incentive for him to reassert his leadership through a war.

Yet, like a rape victim being scolded for inviting the attack, India was repeatedly rapped during the anniversary debate for having brought on the Chinese aggression through “provocative” gestures and moves. When the Chinese military marched hundreds of miles south and occupied Tibet, resulting in a major Han military presence along the Himalayas for the first time in history and setting the stage for China’s furtive encroachments on Indian territory, this supposedly did not constitute sufficient grounds for India to try to guard its undefended Himalayan borders. So when India belatedly deployed some units of its then scrappy army, the action became, in Beijing’s words, a “forward policy” — a term lapped up by biddable analysts and still being bandied about.

India does not commemorate war anniversaries the way the U.S. does — with an annual ceremony honouring its fallen heroes. For example, at the exact time the Japanese began bombing Pearl Harbour 71 years earlier, commemorations were held last weekend at Pearl Harbour and memorials elsewhere, drawing thousands of Americans. India, in fact, has not built a single special memorial to honour those who were martyred in 1962 or any of the other wars it has fought. China, by contrast, has a 1962 war memorial in Tibet and its Beijing military museum exhibits depict India as the “aggressor.”

In this light, the fiftieth anniversary of what American scholar Roderick MacFarquhar has dubbed “Mao’s India War” ought to have served as a time for Indian reflection on its larger and enduring lessons. Instead, it regrettably became an occasion for some commentators to recycle myths about 1962, including that it was a “brief war.”

Actually, this was one of the longest and bloodiest of all wars India has faced since 1947. The length of a war, however, is usually irrelevant to its outcome: Israel fundamentally changed the land and water map of its region in a six-day war in 1967, while India carved out Bangladesh in a 13-day war in 1971.

The 1962 war lasted 42 days, longer than the 1965 war (38 days). Even after China unilaterally declared a ceasefire on November 21, 1962, its troops kept firing on the outgunned and outnumbered Indian troops in the east. The war really ended on December 1 when China, while holding on to its territorial gains on the Aksai Chin plateau, began withdrawing its forces from the east, simply because it did not have the logistics capability to maintain forces across the McMahon Line once snow cut off mountain passes.

The war — which ranks as the world’s highest-altitude full-blown war in post-World War II history — left 3,270 Indian troops dead, compared with over 1,100 military men killed in the 1947-48 war; 3,264 in 1965; 3,843 in 1971; 1,157 in Operation Pawan in Sri Lanka; and 522 in Kargil. Yet a couple of analysts at a Mumbai seminar last week had the temerity to call 1962 a “skirmish.”

By baring key elements of Beijing’s strategic doctrine, 1962 indeed holds lasting lessons for India and other countries locked in territorial disputes with China. Here are just some of the 1962 principles China replicated in its subsequent aggressions:

• take the adversary by surprise to maximize political and psychological shock.
• strike only when the international and regional timing is opportune.
• hit as fast and as hard as possible by unleashing “human wave” assaults.
• be willing to take military gambles.
• mask offense as defence.
• wage war with the political objective to “teach a lesson” — an aim publicly acknowledged in the 1962 and 1979 invasions.

New China hews to ancient theorist Sun Tzu’s advice: “All warfare is based on deception … Attack where the enemy is unprepared; sally out when it does not expect you. These are the strategist’s keys to victory.”

Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research.

(c) Hindustan Times, 2012.

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

Japan Times, November 30, 2012

At a time when China’s economy and society are under considerable strain and the country is embroiled in increasingly tense border disputes with its neighbors, the relatively peaceful once-in-a-decade political transition in Beijing has helped deflect attention from the underlying turbulence in the Chinese system. The fact is that China is at a turning point, and the next decade under the new leadership of Xi Jinping is likely to decisively shape the country’s trajectory.

Power transition rarely has occurred without bloodshed and chaos in Chinese history. From the first Shang dynasty, political change is usually violent, with force also being employed to retain power. Chinese analyst Xiao Han has called this the “ax gang” tradition — the ax has been the symbol of power since ancient times. In modern times, as Mao Zedong once famously said, “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

The People’s Republic of China — born in blood in 1949 — has pursued endless domestic witch hunts and political purges. Mao and Deng Xiaoping between them got rid of at least five anointed successors who were discarded abruptly, or died mysteriously or under detention.

The first leadership transition without turmoil or bloodshed was in 2002, when Jiang Zemin stepped down in favor of Hu Jintao. This year, Mr. Xi’s ascension was preceded by a vicious power struggle that led to the ouster and disappearance of a rising star, Bo Xilai, and the swift conviction of his wife for the murder of a British national in what probably ranks as the mother of all orchestrated trials.

Power in China today may not flow from the barrel of a gun to the extent it did under Mao — who was responsible for the deaths of countless millions — but it is significant that Mr. Xi has risen to the top with close military ties and support. In fact, what sets Mr. Xi apart from China’s other civilian leaders is his strong relationship with the military, which regards him as its own man.

As Mr. Xi rose through the Communist Party ranks, he forged close ties with the military as a reservist, assuming leadership of a provincial garrison and serving as a senior aide to the defense minister. His wife, Peng Liyuan, is also linked to the military, having served as a civilian member of the army’s musicale troupe.

The real winner from the appointment of the conservative-dominated, seven-member Politburo Standing Committee is the military, whose rising clout in policy already has created an increasingly assertive China. The party has ceased to be a rigid monolith obedient to a single leader. Instead, it has become dependent on the military for its political legitimacy and to ensure domestic order. With rural protests increasing officially by more than 10 percent a year, and separatist unrest growing in the sprawling Tibetan plateau, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, China is now the only important country whose annual internal security budget surpasses its national defense spending.

The rise of a new dynasty of “princelings,” or sons of revolutionary heroes who have widespread contacts in the military, is another indicator that nationalism and militarism likely will strengthen in China. The princelings such as Mr. Xi, numbering in the hundreds, dominate the new Standing Committee and play a key role in the government and economy, in spite of their internecine power squabbles.

An examination of the new members of the 205-member Central Committee, the 25-member Politburo and the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee shows that political patronage and family connections were critical factors in their selection.

Indeed, the new leadership lineup is pretty much what the foreign media reported beforehand, suggesting that despite a secretive selection process, some party bosses had an interest in leaking out the information in advance of the official announcement.

Another striking feature is the dominance of ethnic Han men in the party’s upper levels in a country that claims to represent 56 nationalities and trumpets gender equality. Although the restive ethnic-minority homelands make up more than 60 percent of China’s landmass, there is not even one token minority representative in the Politburo.

These developments have important internal and external implications. Internally, with several reformers losing out to old conservatives in the power struggle for top positions, prospects for major reforms look bleak.

The factional infighting, recently witnessed for the slots in the party’s upper echelons, is even more intense at the provincial level, making bold policymaking difficult despite greater social instability and slower economic growth. The messy politics is an important driver of the flight of capital and professionals from China.

Since the Deng era, China has dumped the Marxist half of Marxism-Leninism but retained the Leninist part. Dictatorship is one thing that is not open to reform. China’s corrupt, faction-ridden political culture and bloody history, in any event, are conducive not to political reform but to political revolution.

China’s internal politics has an important bearing on its external policy. Stepped-up internal repression and aggressive external moves to change the territorial status quo in China’s favor are two sides of the same coin.

The stronger the military has become at the expense of the civilian leadership (every Chinese leader since Mao has been weaker than his predecessor), the more muscular Beijing’s approach has been toward its neighbors. Recent revelations about how some senior civilian leaders have amassed vast wealth even as their privileged children remain unbound by law or consequences only help to accentuate the party’s legitimacy problem.

China’s future is likely to be determined not by its hugely successful economy, which has turned the country into a global player in just one generation, but by its murky politics and the growing sway of the People’s Liberation Army. The leadership transition, far from cleaning up or stabilizing China’s politics, may actually allow the military to increasingly call the shots. We may see more military generals speak out of turn on strategic issues. The plain fact is that the foreign ministry is the weakest branch of the Chinese government because it is often overruled or simply ignored by the military and security establishments.

In this light, China’s neighbors and the U.S. military would be wise to brace themselves to face a less restrained China championing ever-expanding “core interests.”

Brahma Chellaney is the author of Asian Juggernaut (Harper, 2010) and Water: Asia’s New Battlefield (Georgetown University Press, 2011), which won the 2012 Bernard Schwartz Award.

(c) Japan Times, 2012.

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

The Japan Times, November 14, 2012

At a time when Asia’s power dynamics remain fluid, with new military capabilities and resurgent border disputes challenging regional stability, U.S. President Barack Obama and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh are embarking on separate Asian tours that culminate with their participation in the East Asia Summit meeting in Phnom Penh. Singh’s Tokyo visit seeks to cement a rapidly growing relationship between Japan and India — two natural allies — while Obama’s historic visit to Myanmar promises to aid India’s “Look East” policy by marking a formal end to a 24-year U.S. policy of punitively isolating a country that is the Indian gateway to Southeast Asia.

By undertaking an Asian tour shortly after his re-election, Obama has signaled that Asia will move up in importance in his second-term agenda. His previously announced “pivot” toward Asia actually chimes with India’s “Look East” policy, which has graduated to an “Act East” policy, with the original economic logic of “Look East” giving way to a geopolitical logic.

The thrust of the new “Act East” policy — unveiled with the United States’ blessings — is to contribute to building a stable balance of power in Asia by re-establishing India’s historically close ties with countries to its east. India, in fact, has little choice but to look east because when it looks west, it sees only trouble. The entire belt to India’s west from Pakistan to Syria is a contiguous arc of instability, volatility and extremism. A “Look East” policy allows India to join the economic dynamism that characterizes Southeast and East Asia.

It is in the east again that Indian and U.S. interests now converge significantly. The fundamental shift in the U.S. policy on Myanmar eliminates an important constraint on India’s closer engagement with continental Southeast Asia.

India’s new strategic ties with countries as varied as Japan, Australia, Indonesia, South Korea and Vietnam are important moves on the grand Asian chessboard to increase its geopolitical leeway. The U.S., for its part, has strengthened and expanded its security arrangements in Asia in recent years by making the most of the growing regional concerns over China’s increasingly muscular approach on territorial and maritime disputes.

Both the U.S. and India have deepened their ties with Japan, which has a $5.5 trillion economy, impressive high-technology skills and Asia’s largest naval fleet. The first serious Japan-India naval exercise was held five months ago involving a search-and-rescue operation.

India and Japan, despite their messy domestic politics and endemic scandals, actually boast the fastest-growing bilateral relationship in Asia today. Since they unveiled a “strategic and global partnership” in 2006, their engagement has grown dramatically. A free-trade agreement between the two countries entered into force last year. Their 2008 security declaration was modeled on Japan’s 2007 defense-cooperation accord with Australia — the only other country with which Japan, a U.S. military ally, has a security-cooperation arrangement. The India-Japan security declaration, in turn, spawned a similar India-Australia accord in 2009.

Singh’s Tokyo visit will likely set the stage for building closer bilateral security cooperation in the wider Indo-Pacific region, marked by the confluence of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. At a time when India is reflecting on the lessons of its rout by the invading Chinese forces 50 years ago — the only foreign war communist China has won — Japan has been concerned by a new war of attrition China has launched by sending patrol ships daily to the waters around the Japanese-controlled Senkaku Islands group that Beijing claims.

This physical assertiveness, which coincidentally began around the 50th anniversary of the launch of the Chinese military attack on India, followed often violent anti-Japanese protests in China in September and a continuing informal boycott of Japanese goods that has led to a sharp fall in Japan’s exports.

India and Japan are set to sign a formal agreement for the joint development of rare-earth minerals in India. This will be the latest of several such international agreements since China used its monopoly on rare-earths production to cut off such exports to Japan and restrict sales to Western countries in 2010, prompting the U.S., the European Union and Japan to file a World Trade Organization complaint alleging that Beijing was using that monopoly as a weapon. Thanks to the various new agreements, production of these critical minerals is expanding at plants outside China, undercutting the Chinese monopoly.

At a time when Asia is troubled by growing security challenges, trilateral U.S.-India-Japan security consultations and cooperation are also taking place. These three democratic powers recently held their third round of security consultations in New Delhi, after similar meetings earlier in Washington and Tokyo.

These consultations are just one sign of their shift from emphasizing shared values to seeking to trilaterally protect shared interests. Their trilateral cooperation could lead to trilateral coordination, with a potentially positive impact on Asian security and stability.

The U.S. has conducted more joint defense exercises with India than with any other country. Japan has twice joined the annual U.S.-India Malabar naval exercises, and may do so again next year. U.S. defense sales to India, meanwhile, are booming, with America emerging as the largest arms seller to India. But now Japan could bag its first defense contract with India: In response to the Indian Navy’s global request for information for nine amphibious search-and-rescue aircraft, Japan has offered to sell its ShinMaywa US-2, which can land on and take off from water.

More broadly, the nascent trilateral security cooperation may signal moves to form an entente among the three leading democracies of the Asia-Pacific, along the lines of the pre-World War I Franco-British-Russian “Triple Entente,” which was designed to meet the challenge posed by the rise of an increasingly assertive Germany. The present steps, however, are still tentative, and meaningful trilateral security collaboration can emerge only in response to important shifts in the U.S., Japanese and Indian strategic policies, including a readiness to build trilateral military interoperability.

Such an entente’s geopolitical utility, however, is likely to transcend its military value. A geopolitical entente, for example, can help strengthen maritime security in the Indo-Pacific region — the world’s leading trade and energy seaway — and contribute to building a stable Asian power equilibrium.

A fast-rising Asia has become the defining fulcrum of global geopolitical change. Asian policies and challenges now help to shape the international security and economic environment. Yet Asia, paradoxically, is bearing the greatest impact of such shifts, as underscored by the resurgence of Cold War-era territorial and maritime disputes.

A constellation of powers linked by interlocking bilateral, trilateral, and possibly even quadrilateral strategic cooperation has thus become critical to help institute power stability in Asia and to ensure a peaceful maritime domain, including unimpeded freedom of navigation.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of Water: Asia’s New Battlefield (Georgetown University Press, 2011), which won the 2012 Bernard Schwartz Award.

The Japan Times: Wednesday, Nov. 14, 2012. (C) All rights reserved