The Obama Administration’s Strategy in Asia

Posted on November 3, 2011 by Chellaney

Brahma Chellaney
in Anuario Asia-Pacific 2010, Edición 2011, published by CIDOB, Casa Asia, and Real Instituto Elcano (October 2011), pp. 69-75.
(Original in Spanish)

With the eastward movement of global power and influence, all the major actors on the international stage are defining new roles for themselves in Asia, a vast continent whose significance in international relations, in some respects, is beginning to rival that of Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. As these powers seek to build new relationships and equations, the stage has been set for greater cooperation and competition. Asia, home to more than half of the global population, is likely to help mold the future course of globalization.

Yet, Asia faces major challenges. One important point is that while the bloody wars in the first half of the 20th century have made wars unthinkable today in Europe, the wars in Asia in the second half of the 20th century did not resolve matters and have only accentuated bitter rivalries. A number of interstate wars were fought in Asia since 1950, the year both the Korean War and the annexation of Tibet started. Those wars, far from settling or ending disputes, have only kept disputes lingering in Asia.

The Arrival of Obama

U.S. President Barack Obama came to office at a time when the qualitative reordering of power was already under way in the Asia-Pacific, with tectonic shifts challenging strategic stability. The impact of the still-ongoing shifts on U.S. foreign policy is being accentuated by America’s own growing challenges, including economic troubles and a faltering war in Afghanistan. That may explain why the Obama administration has been slow to develop a distinct Asia policy. Under Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, America’s Asia policy was guided by an overarching geopolitical framework.

In comparison, Obama’s Asia policy thus far has appeared fragmented in the absence of a distinct strategic blueprint. The Obama team quickly developed a policy approach toward each major Asian subregion and issue, but without devising an overall strategy on how to promote enduring power equilibrium in Asia, now the pivot of global geopolitical change.

China, India, and Japan, Asia’s three main economic powers, constitute a unique strategic triangle. Obama declared soon after taking office that America’s “most important bilateral relationship in the world” is with China, going to the extent of demoting human rights and putting the accent on security, financial, trade, and environmental issues with Beijing. In fact, his administration tried to assiduously court China. The catchphrase coined by Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg in relation to China, “strategic reassurance,” signaled an American intent to be more accommodative of China’s ambitions — a message reinforced earlier by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when she went out of her way to downgrade human rights in America’s China policy during a visit to Beijing.

But Obama has been slow to fashion a well-defined Japan policy or India policy. While a narrow East Asia policy framework still guides U.S. ties with Japan under Obama, Washington is again looking at India primarily through the Pakistan-Afghanistan (“Af-Pak”) prism. That translates into a renewed U.S. focus on India-Pakistan engagement and preoccupation with counterinsurgency in the Afpak region, including its larger ramifications for American interests. That is in sharp contrast to Bush, who declared in his valedictory speech that, “We opened a new historic and strategic partnership with India.”

After coming to office, Obama’s choice of ambassadors said it all. While Obama named John Huntsman — the Utah state governor and a rising Republican star — as his ambassador to China, he picked an obscure former congressman Timothy Roemer as envoy to India and a low-profile internet and biotechnology lawyer, John Roos, as ambassador to Japan. Obama underlined China’s centrality in his foreign policy by personally announcing his choice of Huntsman. In contrast, Roemer and Roos were among a slew of ambassadors named in an official news release.

The U.S., of course, has every reason to engage China more deeply at a time when its dependence on Beijing to bankroll American debt has only grown. Just as America and the Soviet Union achieved mutually assured destruction (MAD), America and China are now locked in MAD — but in economic terms. The two today are so tied in a mutually dependent relationship for their economic well-being that attempts to snap those ties would amount to mutually assured financial destruction. Just as the beleaguered U.S. economy cannot do without continuing capital inflows from China, the American market is the lifeline of the Chinese export juggernaut.

From being allies of convenience in the second half of the Cold War, the U.S. and China now have emerged as partners tied by such interdependence that economic historians Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick have coined the term “Chimerica” — a fusion like the less-convincing “Chindia.” An article in China’s Liaowang magazine has described the relationship as one of “complex interdependence” in which America and China “compete and consult” with each other. But China’s expanding naval role and maritime claims threaten to collide with U.S. interests, including Washington’s traditional emphasis on the freedom of the seas. U.S.-China economic ties also remain uneasy: America saves too little and borrows too much from China, while Beijing sells too much to the U.S. and buys too little.

Obama’s Asia policy, however, began changing somewhat in the second half of 2010 in response to China’s increasingly assertive actions. With China’s defense spending having grown almost twice as fast as its Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Beijing has started to take the gloves off, confident that it has acquired the necessary muscle. Rising power is emboldening Beijing to pursue a more muscular foreign policy. That was exemplified by several developments in 2010 alone — from China’s inclusion of the South China Sea in its “core” national interests on a par with Taiwan and Tibet, an action that makes its claims to the disputed Spratly Islands non-negotiable, to its bellicose reaction to the South Korean-U.S. joint anti-submarine exercises off the Korean Peninsula. China has also publicly raked up the issue of Arunachal Pradesh, the northeastern Indian state that Beijing calls “Southern Tibet” and claims largely as its own. Indian defense officials have reported a rising number of Chinese military incursions across the entire 4,057-kilometer Himalayan border in recent years. That the Tibet issue remains at the core of the India-China divide is being underlined by Beijing itself by laying claim to additional Indian territories on the basis of alleged Tibetan ecclesial or tutelary links to them, not any professed Han connection.

But nothing fanned international unease and alarm more than Beijing’s disproportionate response to the brief Japanese detention of a fishing-trawler captain last September. While Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s standing at home took a beating for his meek capitulation to Chinese coercive pressure, the real loser was China. Japan’s passivity in the face of belligerence helped magnify Beijing’s hysterical and menacing reaction. In the process, China not only undercut its international interests by presenting itself as a bully, but it also precipitately exposed the cards it is likely to bring into play when faced with a diplomatic or military crisis next — from employing its trade muscle to inflict commercial pain to exploiting its monopoly on the global production of a vital resource, rare-earth minerals.

Its resort to economic warfare, even in the face of an insignificant provocation, has given other major states advance notice to find ways to offset its leverage, including by avoiding any commercial dependency and reducing their reliance on imports of Chinese rare earths. In fact, from the United States to Japan, countries are now seeking to diversify their rare-earth imports. A more tangible fallout from that episode and other developments has been that China is already coming under greater international pressure to play by the rules on a host of issues where it has secured unfair advantage — from keeping its currency substantially undervalued to maintaining state subsidies to help its firms win major overseas contracts.

With his China strategy threatening to fall apart, Obama has now started to do exactly what his predecessor attempted — to line up partners. This was best symbolized by his trip to Asia in late 2010. The very fact that Obama chose to visit Asia’s four leading democracies — India, Japan, Indonesia and South Korea — on that tour was significant. After all, the symbolism of a tour restricted to Asia’s major democracies could not have been lost on Beijing at a time when Chinese assertiveness on exchange rates, trade and security issues had upset U.S. calculations.

The Larger Challenges

The fundamental U.S. strategic objective in Asia is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. Indeed, the key U.S. interest in Asia remains what it has been since 1898 when America took the Philippines as spoils of the naval war with Spain — the maintenance of a balance of power. The security thrust of America’s Asia policy also is unlikely to change. The United States has been, and will continue to be, the leading security player in Asia, building and maintaining strategic ties and arrangements with more Asian states than any other player.

This reality makes America’s China policy pivotal to shaping the larger geopolitical landscape in Asia. Given that Asian security to a large extent will remain anchored in the defense alliances and arrangements that the United States has fashioned, the natural corollary is that the manner Washington deals with the rise of an assertive China will have a bearing both on the Asian security landscape and on the long-term viability of those alliances and arrangements. For the past century, or at least since the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack (which was at least partly prompted by the U.S.-British-Dutch oil embargo against Japan), the United States has clearly signaled that American security begins not off the coast of California but at the western rim of the Pacific Ocean and beyond.

The American belief that U.S. security begins in the Pacific’s western rim may explain, even if partly, why the U.S. military fought in Korea and Vietnam, why it entered into the Australia, New Zealand, United States Security (ANZUS) Treaty, why U.S. security treaties with Japan and South Korea remain critical to American forward military deployment in the Asian theater, why it made a security commitment to Taiwan, and why it has forged new strategic relationships with several Southeast Asian countries and India.

In addition to its determination to stay Asia’s security anchor, America’s balance-of-power objective remains dominant in its Asia policy. During the first part of the Cold War, the United States chose to maintain the 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 Richard Nixon’s historic handshake with Mao Zedong in 1972 in an ‘opening’ designed to reinforce the balance by employing a newly assertive, nuclear-armed China to countervail Soviet power in the Asia-Pacific region.

Today, the United States would not want any single state to dominate the Asian continent or any region there. As part of its hedging strategy against China, the U.S. is reinforcing its existing military relationships and building new allies or partners, including roping in states that can serve as potential balancers in Asia. China too plays balance-of-power politics in Asia, but its balancing is primarily designed to keep its Asian rivals bottled up regionally.

Yet another important aspect of America’s role in Asia is the long tradition of China-friendly approach in U.S. policy. That actually dates back to the 19th century. In 1905, for example, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, who hosted the Japan-Russia peace conference in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, argued for the return of Manchuria to China and for a balance of power to continue in East Asia. The Russo-Japanese War actually ended up making the United States an active participant in China’s affairs. In more-recent times, U.S. policy has aided the integration and then ascension of Communist China, which actually began as an international pariah state. Indeed, there has been a succession of China-friendly U.S. presidents in the past four decades — a significant period that has coincided with China first coming out of international isolation and then being on the path of ascension.

China’s rise, in fact, owes a lot to an American decision post-1989. The fall of the Berlin Wall was not the only defining event of 1989. Another defining event in 1989 was the Tiananmen Square massacre of pro-democracy protestors in Beijing. But for the end of the Cold War, the U.S. and its allies would not have let China off the hook over those killings. The Cold War’s end, however, facilitated America’s pragmatic approach to shun trade sanctions and help integrate China with global institutions through the liberalizing influence of foreign investment and trade. That the choice made was wise can be seen from the baneful impact of the opposite U.S. decision that was taken on Burma in the same period from the late 1980s — to pursue a penal approach centered on sanctions. Had the Burma-type approach been applied against China internationally, the result would have been a less-prosperous, less-open and a potentially destabilizing China today.

Therefore, China’s spectacular economic success — illustrated by its emergence with the world’s biggest trade surplus and largest foreign-currency reserves — owes a lot to the U.S. decision not to sustain trade sanctions. The limited U.S. sanctions imposed after Tiananmen were allowed to peter out by 1992. Without the expansion in U.S.-Chinese trade and financial relations since then, China’s growth would have been much harder.

The U.S.-China relationship, already underpinned by closely intertwined economic ties and four decades of political cooperation on a range of regional and global issues, is expected to acquire a wider and deeper base. In fact, the mutually interdependent relationship with China suggests that the U.S. is unlikely to pursue overt competition or confrontation with Beijing. It speaks for itself that even on the democracy issue, the U.S. prefers to lecture some other dictatorships than the world’s largest and oldest-surviving autocracy, China.

Yet, it is also true that the United States views with unease China’s not-too-hidden aim to dominate Asia — an objective that runs counter to U.S. security and commercial interests and to the larger goal for a balance in power in Asia. To help avert such dominance, the U.S. has already started building potential countervailing influences, without making any attempt to contain China. At the same time, the U.S. shares important interests with China, including maintaining peace on the Korean Peninsula, keeping oil supplies flowing from the Persian Gulf, propping up Pakistan, and seeking strategic stability in the Pacific. On issues of congruent interest, the world can expect the U.S. to continue to work closely with China.

For the United States, China’s rising power actually helps validate American forward military deployments in the Asian theater, keep existing allies in Asia, and win new strategic partners. An increasingly assertive China indeed has proven a diplomatic boon for Washington in strengthening and expanding U.S. security arrangements in Asia. South Korea has tightened its military alliance with the U.S., Japan has backed away from a move to get the U.S. to move its Marine airbase out of Okinawa, and India, Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines, among others, have drawn closer to the United States. But the China factor can remain handy only as long as the United States is seen by its partners as a credible guarantor of stability and security, which is a function not of military strength but political will in Washington.

Against this background, Obama has sought to strengthen U.S. ties with old and new strategic partners in Asia, while simultaneously trying to deepen engagement with China. This was exemplified by the political investment the Obama administration made to ensure the success of Chinese President Hu Jintao’s U.S. tour in early 2011. That visit was noteworthy not for Hu’s grudging admission that his country has a subpar human-rights record, with China’s state-run media promptly expurgating his comment that “a lot still needs to be done in China in terms of human rights.” Rather the visit was notable for the manner Obama bent over backward at the joint news conference with Hu to virtually rationalize China’s human-rights abuses.

Asked by a questioner to explain “how the U.S. can be so allied with a country that is known for treating its people so poorly [and] for using censorship and force to repress its people,” Obama replied that “China has a different political system than we do”; that “China is at a different stage of development than we are”; and that “there has been an evolution in China over the last 30 years” and “my expectation is that 30 years from now we will have seen further evolution and further change.” He made clear that differences over “the universality of certain rights” will not come in the way of better relations with China because “part of human rights is people being able to make a living and having enough to eat and having shelter and having electricity.”

One question that has a bearing on the future Asian security scenarios is whether U.S. policy toward Japan will change with the changed geopolitical circumstances in East Asia. Without carrying out a single amendment, Japan has lived under a U.S.-imposed Constitution for more than six decades — a period during which the Indian Constitution has been amended 114 times. Japan is the only democracy in East Asia that can balance the power of rising China in the region. While China will clearly prefer a Japan that remains dependent on America for its security than a Japan that can play a more independent role, the post-1945 system erected by the U.S. is more suited to keep Japan as an American protectorate than to allow Japan to effectively aid the central U.S.-policy objective in the Asia-Pacific: A stable balance of power. A U.S. policy approach that subtly encourages Tokyo to cut its overdependence on America and do more for its own defense can assist Japan in shaping a new strategic future for itself that directly contributes to Asian power equilibrium.

The prospect that the United States might be forced to retrench on its assets in Asia reinforces the need for such a policy shift. America faces a pressing need for comprehensive domestic renewal to arrest the erosion in its relative power and to cut its huge deficit. That imperative could prompt it to cut back on its ground capabilities it maintains in the Asia-Pacific.

The U.S. actually doesn’t need the enormous and extensive assets on the ground that it presently maintains in Asia, with Bush having used the U.S.-led war against terror to rapidly expand U.S. military presence in the Asian continent. The fact is that the U.S. can effectively advance its objectives by relying more on being an offshore balancer. But to make significant savings in defense expenditure while keeping its Asia-Pacific strategy robust, it will need to make fundamental changes in its Cold War-era hub-and-spoke system, which results in wasteful spending.

Yet another important issue is U.S. policy on Tibet. Even though the U.S. stopped doing anything for Tibet long ago, with the issue of Tibet now coming up only in relation to a presidential meeting with the Dalai Lama, the future of Tibet has become an issue that extends beyond China’s internal security to the ecological interests of much of Asia. The Tibetan plateau is a barometer of climatic conditions in southern, southeastern and central Asia, as well as in mainland China. And the degradation of its natural ecosystems, as well as accelerated thawing of its glaciers, watershed deterioration and soil erosion, hold important implications for Asian nations that depend on rivers flowing in from the Tibetan plateau. The plateau is the source of most of Asia’s great rivers. As water woes have aggravated in its northern plains owing to environmentally unsustainable intensive farming, China has increasingly turned its attention to the bounteous water reserves in Tibet, which it has cartographically dismembered. It is pursuing massive inter-basin and inter-river water transfer projects. These projects on international rivers carry seeds of interstate conflict.

In fact, the U.S. State Department in 2010 wisely upgraded water as “a central U.S. foreign-policy concern.” And it seems interested in playing a constructive role in the water issues between China and its neighbors. But on human rights in Tibet, the U.S. now pursues a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach with Beijing. When Obama grudgingly meets with the Dalai Lama, it is a low-key meeting, with no joint public appearance or photo opportunity before reporters. The White House indeed bends backward to explain that it was a private meeting, not an official meeting, and that it took place in the Map Room, where presidents stage private meetings, and not in the Oval Office.

Two questions arise in this context. If the U.S. is to remain cagey about Tibet and the Dalai Lama, what example will it set for India, the country left carrying the can on Tibet? India is the host of the Dalai Lama and the seat of his government-in-exile. Also, if downplaying human rights becomes an enduring feature of U.S. policy on China — which executes more people every year than the rest of the world combined — how acceptable will it be to beat up the small kids on the Asian bloc, the Burmas and the Kyrgyzstans, over their human-rights record? Nepal, after years of adhering to an United Nations-brokered agreement to allow Tibetan refugees safe passage to India, has now — under Beijing’s pressure — started arresting escapees from Tibet and handing them over to Chinese authorities. A more consistent U.S. human-rights policy will be able to stand up in defense of such hapless Tibetans.

While America’s continued central role in Asia is safe, the long-term viability of its security arrangements boils down to one word: Credibility. The credibility of America’s security assurances to allies and partners, and its readiness to stand by them when it comes to the crunch, will determine the long-term strength and size of its security-alliance system in Asia. For their part, Asian states, in keeping with Asia’s growing role in world affairs, need to pursue policies that break free from history and are pragmatic, growth-oriented and forward-looking. China’s lengthening shadow has only reinforced the necessity to find ways to stabilize major-power relationships in Asia and promote cooperative approaches to help tackle festering security, energy, territorial and history issues. Rather than be the scene of a new cold war, Asia can chart a stable future for itself through shared security and prosperity.

References cited:

Gunnar Myrdal, Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations (New York: Pantheon, 1968).

U.S. Department of Defense, Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2010, A Report to Congress Pursuant to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010 (Washington, DC: Office of the Secretary of Defense, August 2010).

Li Ling, Xizang Zhi Shui Jiu Zhongguo: Da Xi Xian Zai Zao Zhongguo Zhan Lue Nei Mu Xiang Lu (Tibet’s Waters Will Save China), in Mandarin (Beijing: Zhongguo Chang’an chu ban she, November 2005), Book sponsored by the Ministry of Water Resources.

U.S. National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World (Washington, DC: National Intelligence Council, November 20, 2008).

“PLA’s First Major Parachute Exercise on the Tibetan Plateau” (Mandarin), PLA Daily, August 13, 2010. Available at: http://www.tianshui.com.cn/news/junshi/2010081310330711550.htm

Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (New York: Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 43-71.

—
Brahma Chellaney, a professor at the independent Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author of the just-published book, Water: Asia’s New Battlefield (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2011). His previous book, Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India, and Japan (New York: Harper Paperback, 2010), was an international bestseller.

Dragon’s Familiar Dance

Posted on October 29, 2011 by Chellaney

With the 50th anniversary of the 1962 invasion approaching, history is in danger of repeating itself.

Brahma Chellaney
The writer is professor of strategic studies
at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi
GUEST COLUMN
India Today, November 7, 2011

From a military invasion and a cartographic aggression, China is
moving to a hydrological aggression and a strategic squeeze of India.

As the 50th anniversary of China’s invasion approaches, history is in danger of repeating itself, with Chinese military pressures and aggressive designs against India not only mirroring the pre-1962 war situation but also extending to Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) and the oceans around India. China’s expanding axis of evil with Pakistan, including a new troop presence in PoK, heightens India’s vulnerability in Jammu and Kashmir, even as India has beefed up its defences in Arunachal Pradesh.

By muscling up to India, what is China seeking to achieve? The present situation, ominously, is no different in several key aspects from the one that prevailed in the run-up to the 1962 war.

● The aim of “Mao’s India war” in 1962, as Harvard scholar Roderick MacFarquhar has called it, was largely political: to cut India to size by demolishing what it represented—a democratic alternative to China’s autocracy. The swiftness and force with which Mao Zedong defeated India helped discredit the Indian model, boost China’s international image, and consolidate Mao’s internal power. The return of the China-India pairing decades later riles Beijing.

● Just as the Dalai Lama’s flight to India in 1959 set the stage for the Chinese military attack, the exiled Tibetan leader today has become a bigger challenge for China than ever. The continuing security clampdown across the Tibetan plateau since the March 2008 Tibetan uprising parallels the harsh Chinese crackdown in Tibet during 1959-62.

● The prevailing pattern of cross-frontier incursions and other border incidents is no different than the situation that led up to the 1962 war. Yet, India is repeating the same mistake by playing down the Chinese intrusions. Gratuitously stretching the truth, Indian officials say the incursions are the result of differing perceptions about the line of control. But which side has refused to define the line of control? It speaks for itself that China hasn’t offered this excuse. The fact is that Chinese forces are intruding even into Utttarakhand—the only sector where the line of control has been clarified by an exchange of maps—and into Sikkim, whose 206-km border with Tibet is recognised by Beijing.

● The 1962 war occurred against the backdrop of China instigating and arming insurgents in India’s northeast. Although such Chinese activities ceased after Mao’s death, China has come full circle today, with Chinese-made arms increasingly flowing into guerrilla ranks in northeast India via Burmese front organisations. In fact, Pakistan-based terrorists targeting India also rely on Chinese arms.

● China’s pre-1962 psychological war is returning. In recent years, Beijing has employed its state-run media and nationalistic websites to warn of another armed conflict. It is a throwback to the coarse rhetoric China had used in its build-up to the 1962 war. Its People’s Daily, for example, has warned India to weigh “the consequences of a potential confrontation with China.” China merrily builds strategic projects in an internationally disputed area like PoK but responds with crude threats when others explore just for oil in the South China Sea.

● Just as India in the early 1960s retreated to a defensive position in the border negotiations after having undermined its leverage through a formal acceptance of the “Tibet region of China,” the spotlight now is on China’s revived Tibet-linked claim to Arunachal rather than on the core issue, Tibet itself. India, with its focus on process than results, has remained locked in continuous border negotiations with China since 1981—the longest and the most-fruitless process between any two nations post-Second World War. This process has only aided China’s containment-with-engagement strategy.

● In the same way that India under Nehru unwittingly created the context to embolden Beijing to wage aggression, New Delhi is again staring at the consequences of a mismanagement of relations. The more China’s trade surplus with India has swelled—jumping from $2 billion in 2002 to more than $30 billion now—the greater has been its condescension toward India. To make matters worse, the insidious, V.K. Krishna Menon-style shadow has returned to haunt Indian defence management and policy. India has never had more clueless defence and foreign ministers or a weaker Prime Minister with a credibility problem than it does today.

In fact, as it aims to mould a Sino-centric Asia, China is hinting that its real geopolitical contest is more with India than with the distant United States. The countries around India have become battlegrounds for China’s moves to encircle India. From a military invasion in 1962 and a subsequent cartographic aggression, China is moving towards a hydrological aggression and a multipronged strategic squeeze of India. China’s damming of rivers flowing from Tibet to India are highlighting Indian vulnerability on the water front even before India has plugged its disadvantage on the nuclear front by building a credible but minimal deterrent.

Whether Beijing actually sets out to teach India “the final lesson” by launching a 1962-style attack will depend on several factors. They include India’s domestic political situation, its defence preparedness, and the availability for China of a propitious international timing of the type the Cuban missile crisis provided in 1962. If India does not want to be caught napping again, it has to come out of the present political paralysis and inject greater realism into its China policy, which today bears a close resemblance to a studied imitation of an ostrich burying its head in the sand.

(c) India Today, 2011.

The Water Hegemon

Posted on October 14, 2011 by Chellaney

Brahma Chellaney

Column internationally syndicated by Project Syndicate

International discussion about China’s rise has focused on its increasing trade muscle, growing maritime ambitions, and expanding capacity to project military power. One critical issue, however, usually escapes attention: China’s rise as a hydro-hegemon with no modern historical parallel.

No other country has ever managed to assume such unchallenged riparian preeminence on a continent by controlling the headwaters of multiple international rivers and manipulating their cross-border flows. China, the world’s biggest dam builder – with slightly more than half of the approximately 50,000 large dams on the planet — is rapidly accumulating leverage against its neighbors by undertaking massive hydro-engineering projects on transnational rivers.

Asia’s water map fundamentally changed after the 1949 Communist victory in China. Most of Asia’s important international rivers originate in territories that were forcibly annexed to the People’s Republic of China. The Tibetan Plateau, for example, is the world’s largest freshwater repository and the source of Asia’s greatest rivers, including those that are the lifeblood for mainland China and South and Southeast Asia. Other such Chinese territories contain the headwaters of rivers like the Irtysh, Illy, and Amur, which flow to Russia and Central Asia.

This makes China the source of cross-border water flows to the largest number of countries in the world. Yet China rejects the very notion of water sharing or institutionalized cooperation with downriver countries.

Whereas riparian neighbors in Southeast and South Asia are bound by water pacts that they have negotiated between themselves, China does not have a single water treaty with any co-riparian country. Indeed, having its cake and eating it, China is a dialogue partner but not a member of the Mekong River Commission, underscoring its intent not to abide by the Mekong basin community’s rules or take on any legal obligations.

Worse, while promoting multilateralism on the world stage, China has given the cold shoulder to multilateral cooperation among river-basin states. The lower-Mekong countries, for example, view China’s strategy as an attempt to “divide and conquer.”

Although China publicly favors bilateral initiatives over multilateral institutions in addressing water issues, it has not shown any real enthusiasm for meaningful bilateral action. As a result, water has increasingly become a new political divide in the country’s relations with neighbors like India, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Nepal.

China deflects attention from its refusal to share water, or to enter into institutionalized cooperation to manage common rivers sustainably, by flaunting the accords that it has signed on sharing flow statistics with riparian neighbors. These are not agreements to cooperate on shared resources, but rather commercial accords to sell hydrological data that other upstream countries provide free to downriver states.

In fact, by shifting its frenzied dam building from internal rivers to international rivers, China is now locked in water disputes with almost all co-riparian states. Those disputes are bound to worsen, given China’s new focus on erecting mega-dams, best symbolized by its latest addition on the Mekong — the 4,200-megawatt Xiaowan Dam, which dwarfs Paris’s Eiffel Tower in height — and a 38,000-megawatt dam planned on the Brahmaputra at Metog, close to the disputed border with India. The Metog Dam will be twice as large as the 18,300-megawatt Three Gorges Dam, currently the world’s largest, construction of which uprooted at least 1.7 million Chinese.

In addition, China has identified another mega-dam site on the Brahmaputra at Daduqia, which, like Metog, is to harness the force of a nearly 3,000-meter drop in the river’s height as it takes a sharp southerly turn from the Himalayan range into India, forming the world’s longest and steepest canyon. The Brahmaputra Canyon — twice as deep as the Grand Canyon in the United States – holds Asia’s greatest untapped water reserves.

The countries likely to bear the brunt of such massive diversion of waters are those located farthest downstream on rivers like the Brahmaputra and Mekong — Bangladesh, whose very future is threatened by climate and environmental change, and Vietnam, a rice bowl of Asia. China’s water appropriations from the Illy River threaten to turn Kazakhstan’s Lake Balkhash into another Aral Sea, which has shrunk to less than half its original size.

In addition, China has planned the “Great Western Route,” the proposed third leg of the Great South-North Water Diversion Project — the most ambitious inter-river and inter-basin transfer program ever conceived — whose first two legs, involving internal rivers in China’s ethnic Han heartland, are scheduled to be completed within three years. The Great Western Route, centered on the Tibetan Plateau, is designed to divert waters, including from international rivers, to the Yellow River, the main river of water-stressed northern China, which also originates in Tibet.

With its industry now dominating the global hydropower-equipment market, China has also emerged as the largest dam builder overseas. From Pakistani-held Kashmir to Burma’s troubled Kachin and Shan states, China has widened its dam building to disputed or insurgency-torn areas, despite local backlashes.

For example, units of the People’s Liberation Army are engaged in dam and other strategic projects in the restive, Shia-majority region of Gilgit-Baltistan in Pakistan-held Kashmir. And China’s dam building inside Burma to generate power for export to Chinese provinces has contributed to renewed bloody fighting recently, ending a 17-year ceasefire between the Kachin Independence Army and the government.

As with its territorial and maritime disputes with India, Vietnam, Japan, and others, China is seeking to disrupt the status quo on international-river flows. Persuading it to halt further unilateral appropriation of shared waters has thus become pivotal to Asian peace and stability. Otherwise, China is likely to emerge as the master of Asia’s water taps, thereby acquiring tremendous leverage over its neighbors’ behavior.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the Center for Policy Research, is the author of Water: Asia’s New Battleground.

Asia’s Growth: The China-India-Japan Strategic Triangle

Posted on October 10, 2011 by Chellaney

With its demography and economy, Asia will be able to help shape the future process of globalization. But it must first deal with its festering territorial disputes and acute competition over natural resources.

By Brahma Chellaney
Vanguardia Dossier, Number 41, October-December 2011, pages 78-82
(Original in Spanish)

Asia, home to more than half of the global population, is likely to help mold the future course of globalization. In fact, with the world’s fastest-growing economies, the fastest-rising military expenditures, the fiercest resource competition and the most-serious hot spots, Asia holds the key to the future global order.

Asia has come a long way since the time two Koreas, two Chinas, two Vietnams and India’s partition occurred. It has risen dramatically as the world’s main creditor and economic locomotive. The ongoing global power shifts indeed are primarily linked to Asia’s phenomenal economic rise, the speed and scale of which has no parallel in world history.

How fast Asia has come up can be gauged from the 1968 book, Asian Drama: An Inquiry Into the Poverty of Nations, by Swedish economist and Nobel laureate Gunnar Myrdal, who bemoaned the manner impoverishment, population pressures and resource constraints were weighing down Asia. The story of endemic poverty has become a tale of spreading prosperity.

Yet, Asia faces major challenges. It has to cope with entrenched territorial and maritime disputes, harmful historical legacies that weigh down all important interstate Asian relationships, sharpening competition over scarce resources, especially energy and water, growing military capabilities of important Asian actors, increasingly fervent nationalism, and the rise of religious extremism. Diverse transborder trends — from terrorism and insurgencies, to illicit refugee flows, and human trafficking — add to its challenges.

Asia, however, is becoming more interdependent through trade, investment, technology and tourism. The economic renaissance has been accompanied by the growing international recognition of Asia’s soft power, as symbolized by its arts, fashion and cuisine.

But while Asia is coming together economically, it is not coming together politically. If anything, with the gulf between the politics and economics widening, Asia is becoming more divided politically. In some respects, China’s rise has contributed to making Asia more divided.

To compound matters, there is neither any security architecture in Asia nor a structural framework for regional security. The regional consultation mechanisms remain weak. Differences persist over whether any security architecture or community should extend across Asia or just be confined to an ill-defined regional construct, East Asia. The United States, India, Japan, Vietnam and several other countries wish to treat the Asian continent as a single entity. China, on the other hand, has sought a separate “East Asian” order.

One important point is that while the bloody wars in the first half of the 20th century have made wars unthinkable today in Europe, the wars in Asia in the second half of the 20th century did not resolve matters and have only accentuated bitter rivalries. A number of interstate wars were fought in Asia since 1950, the year both the Korean War and the annexation of Tibet started. Those wars, far from settling or ending disputes, have only kept disputes lingering. China, significantly, was involved in a series of military interventions, even when it was poor and internally troubled.

A Pentagon report released last year has cited examples of how China carried out military preemption in 1950, 1962, 1969 and 1979 in the name of strategic defense. The report states: “The history of modern Chinese warfare provides numerous case studies in which China’s leaders have claimed military preemption as a strategically defensive act. For example, China refers to its intervention in the Korean War (1950-1953) as the ‘War to Resist the United States and Aid Korea.’ Similarly, authoritative texts refer to border conflicts against India (1962), the Soviet Union (1969), and Vietnam (1979) as ‘Self-Defense Counter Attacks’.” The seizure of Paracel Islands from Vietnam in 1974 by Chinese forces was another case of preemption in the name of defense. Against that background, China’s rapidly accumulating power raises important concerns today.

In fact, it is the emergence of China as a major power that is transforming the geopolitical landscape in Asia like no other development. Not since Japan rose to world-power status during the reign of the Meiji Emperor (1867-1912) has another non-Western power emerged with such potential to impact the global order as China today.

But there is an important difference: When Japan rose as a world power, the other Asian civilizations, including the Chinese, Indian and Korean, were in decline. After all, by 19th century, much of Asia, other than Japan and Taiwan, had been colonized by Europeans. So, there was no Asian power that could rein in Japan.

Today, China is rising when other important Asian countries are also rising, including South Korea, Vietnam, India and Indonesia. Although China now has displaced Japan as the world’s second biggest economy, Japan will remain a strong power for the foreseeable future, given its more than $5 trillion economy, Asia’s largest naval fleet, high-tech industries, and a per-capita income still nine times greater than China’s.

When Japan emerged as a world power, its rise opened the path to imperial conquests. However, the expansionist impulses of a rising China are, to some extent, checkmated by the rise of other Asian powers. Militarily, China is in no position to grab the territories it covets, although its defense spending has grown almost twice as fast as its GDP.

Today, as China, India and Japan maneuver for strategic advantage, they are transforming relations between and among themselves in a way that portends closer strategic engagement between New Delhi and Tokyo, and sharper competition between China on one side and Japan and India on the other.

Yet, given the fact that India and China point across the mighty Himalayas in very different geopolitical directions and that Japan and China are separated by sea, they need not pose a threat to each other, especially if they were to abstain from hostile actions against one another and strive to avoid confrontation. The interests of the three powers are getting intertwined to the extent that the pursuit of unilateral solutions by any one of them will disturb the peaceful diplomatic environment on which their continued economic growth and security depend.

Ensuring that the Japan-China and China-India competition does not slide into strategic conflict will nonetheless remain a key challenge in Asia. That, in turn, demands that a strong China, a strong Japan and a strong India find ways to reconcile their interests in Asia so that they can peacefully coexist and prosper.

Never before in history have all three of these powers been strong at the same time. In fact, there is no previous history of the three powers having been involved in a bilateral or trilateral contest for preeminence across Asia.

China’s ascent, however, is dividing Asia, not bringing Asian states closer. By picking territorial fights with its neighbors and pursuing a muscular foreign policy, China is compelling several other Asian states to work closer together with the United States and with each other.

If the Chinese leadership were forward-looking, it would utilize 2011 — the year of the rabbit — to make up for the diplomatic imprudence of 2010 that left an isolated China counting only the problems states of North Korea, Pakistan and Burma as its allies. The onus now is clearly on a rising China to show that it wants to be a responsible power that seeks rules-based cooperation and acts with restraint and caution.

But the People’s Liberation Army’s growing political clout and the sharpening power struggle in the run-up to the major leadership changes scheduled to take place from next year raise concerns that the world will likely see more of what made 2010 a particularly tiger-like year when China frontally discarded Deng Xiaoping’s dictum, tao guang yang hui (conceal ambitions and hide claws).

A tiger’s claws are retractable, but China has taken pride more in baring them than in drawing them in. While manipulating patriotic sentiment, it has pursued hardline policies even at home, tightening its controls on the Internet and media and stepping up repression in Tibet and Xinjiang. China’s domestic policy has a bearing on its external policy, because how it treats its own citizens is an internal dynamic likely to be reflected in the way it deals with its neighbors and other states.

On a host of issues — from diplomacy and territorial claims to trade and currency — China spent 2010 staking out a more-muscular role that only helped heighten international concerns about its rapidly accumulating power and unbridled ambition. But nothing fanned international unease and alarm more than Beijing’s disproportionate response to the Japanese detention of a fishing-trawler captain in September 2010. While Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s standing at home took a beating for his meek capitulation to Chinese coercive pressure, the real loser was China, in spite of having speedily secured the captain’s release.

Japan’s passivity in the face of belligerence helped magnify Beijing’s hysterical and menacing reaction. In the process, China not only undercut its international interests by presenting itself as a bully, but it also precipitately exposed the cards it is likely to bring into play when faced with a diplomatic or military crisis next — from employing its trade muscle to inflict commercial pain to exploiting its monopoly on the global production of a vital resource, rare-earth minerals.

Its resort to economic warfare, even in the face of an insignificant provocation, has given other major states advance notice to find ways to offset its leverage, including by avoiding any commercial dependency and reducing their reliance on imports of Chinese rare earths. A more tangible fallout has been that China is already coming under greater international pressure to play by the rules on a host of issues where it has secured unfair advantage — from keeping its currency substantially undervalued to maintaining state subsidies to help its firms win major overseas contracts.

No less revealing has been the gap between China’s words and the reality. For example, China persisted with its unannounced rare-earth embargo against Japan for weeks while continuing to blithely claim the opposite in public — that no export restriction had been imposed. Like its denials last year on two other subjects — the deployment of Chinese troops in Pakistani-held Kashmir to build strategic projects and its use of Chinese convicts as laborers on projects in some countries too poor and weak to protest — China has demonstrated a troubling propensity to obscure the truth.

In fact, the more overtly China has embraced capitalism, the more indigenized it has become ideologically. By progressively turning their back on Marxist dogma —imported from the West — the country’s ruling elites have put Chinese nationalism at the center of their political legitimacy. The new crop of leaders, including President Hu Jintao’s putative successor, Xi Jinping, will bear a distinct nationalistic imprint. Xi is known to be a more assertive personality than Hu.

That suggests that China’s increasingly fractious relations with its neighbors, the U.S. and Europe will likely face new challenges.

More broadly, a fast-rising Asia has become the fulcrum of global geopolitical change. Asian policies and challenges now help shape the international economy and security environment.

Yet major power shifts within Asia are challenging the continent’s own peace and stability. With the specter of strategic disequilibrium looming large in Asia, investments to help build geopolitical stability have become imperative.

China’s lengthening shadow has prompted a number of Asian countries to start building security cooperation on a bilateral basis, thereby laying the groundwork for a potential web of interlocking strategic partnerships. Such cooperation reflects a quiet desire to influence China’s behavior positively, so that it does not cross well-defined red lines or go against the self-touted gospel of its “peaceful rise.”

While the U.S. is thus likely to remain a key factor in influencing Asia’s strategic landscape, the role of the major Asian powers will be no less important. If China, India, and Japan constitute a scalene strategic triangle in Asia, with China representing the longest side, side A, the sum of side B (India) and side C (Japan) will always be greater than A. Not surprisingly, the fastest-growing relationship in Asia today is probably between Japan and India.

If this triangle turned into a quadrangle with the addition of Russia, China would be boxed in from virtually all sides. Japan plus Russia plus India, with the U.S. lending a helpful hand, would not only extinguish any prospect of a Sino-centric Asia, but would create the ultimate strategic nightmare for China. However, a Russian-Japanese rapprochement remains far off.

Against this geopolitical background, Asia’s power dynamics are likely to remain fluid, with new or shifting alliances and strengthened military capabilities continuing to challenge the prevailing regional order.

Brahma Chellaney is the author, most recently, of “Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan” (HarperCollins, 2010) and “Water: Asia’s New Battlefield” (Georgetown University Press, 2011).

Copyright: Vanguard Dossier

Building resistance to China’s dams

Posted on October 7, 2011 by Chellaney

Export of hydropower projects triggering local backlash

Illustration: China’s dams by
John Camejo for The Washington Times

By Brahma Chellaney — The Washington Times, Thursday, October 7, 2011

China’s frenzied dam-building at home and abroad is emerging as a flash point in interstate and intrastate relations in Asia. The latest case is Burma’s decision to suspend work on a controversial Chinese-funded dam that has become a symbol of China’s resource greed and a trigger for renewed ethnic insurgency in northern Myanmar areas.

The Myitsone Dam, where work is being halted, is one of seven dam projects in northern Burma sponsored by China to generate electricity for export to its own market, even as much of Burma suffers from long power outages every day. China also has been erecting dams on its side of the border on the rivers flowing to Burma and other countries, ranging from Russia to India.

The projects have drawn attention to their mounting environmental and human costs. In Burma, the submergence of vast tracts of land and the forced displacement of thousands of residents have instigated new intrastate disputes, leading to renewed fighting and ending a 17-year cease-fire between the Kachin Independence Army and government forces.

The giant, 3,200-megawatt Myitsone Dam – at the headwaters of the Irrawaddy River, the cradle of the Myanmar civilization – was conceived as a Chinese project for China. Burma’s suspension of work on the largest of the dam projects as a means of stemming a groundswell of public anger represents a blow to China and a victory for local communities, which had battled to protect their livelihoods and environment.

Burma is just one of several countries where hydropower projects financed and built by China have triggered local backlashes. China – the world’s biggest dam builder at home and abroad – is erecting giant dams in a number of countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America besides damming transnational rivers on its territory and thereby spurring growing concerns in downstream countries.

China contends that its role as the global leader in exporting dams has created a “win-win” situation for the host countries and its companies. Yet evidence from a number of project sites shows that with Chinese dam builders yet to embrace environmental sustainability standards, those dams are imposing serious social and environmental costs.

Indeed, China is demonstrating that it has no qualms about building dams in disputed territories, such as Pakistani-held Kashmir, in areas torn by ethnic separatism such as northern Burma, or in other human rights-abusing countries. In Pakistani-held Kashmir, it even has deployed thousands of People’s Liberation Army troops at dams and other strategic projects. Yet it loudly protests when foreign firms seek to explore for oil in areas offered by Vietnam and other nations in the disputed South China Sea.

China’s declaratory policy of “noninterference in domestic affairs” actually serves as a virtual license to pursue dam projects that flood ethnic-minority lands and forcibly uproot people in other countries, just as it is doing at home by shifting its dam-building focus from internal rivers to international rivers that originate in the Tibetan Plateau, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Manchuria.

Today, as many as 37 Chinese financial and corporate entities are involved in more than 100 dam projects in the developing world. Some of these entities are very large and have multiple subsidiaries. For instance, Sinohydro Corp., which is under the supervision of the State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of China’s State Council and is made up of 10 holding companies and 18 wholly owned subsidiaries, boasts 59 overseas branches.

The hyperactive dam-building at home and abroad has spawned two developments: First, Chinese companies dominate the global hydropower-equipment export market. Sinohydro alone claims to control half the market.

Second, the growing clout of the state-run hydropower industry in policymaking has led China to seek dam projects aggressively overseas by offering attractive low-interest loans and to increasingly tap the resources of rivers flowing to other countries from Chinese-ruled territories. It was HydroChina, the country’s largest dam builder, that last year revealed government-approved sites for new megadams, including one larger than the Three Gorges Dam, to be built virtually on the disputed border with India.

In a number of nations, ranging from Burma and Congo to Laos and Zambia, Chinese dam construction also is aimed at creating the energy infrastructure for extracting mineral ores and other resources to feed voracious demand in China.

Burma is not the only place where Chinese dam-building has triggered violence. From Sudan to the restive, Shiite-dominated areas of Pakistani-held Kashmir, such projects have sparked violent clashes and even police shootings. In Burma, however, the violence spread from the Myitsone Dam – where several small bombs went off in April 2010 – to other Chinese projects, including the Dapein and Shweli dams.

For China, dam projects in the developing countries showcase its growing economic ties with them. In reality, however, these projects often serve to inflame growing anti-Chinese sentiment in those countries.

China has contributed to such sentiment by refusing to abide by international standards or its own regulations, including the State Council’s 2006 directives that Chinese overseas businesses, among other things, “pay attention to environmental protection” and “support local community and people’s livelihood cause.”

The perception that China is engaged in exploitative practices abroad has been reinforced by the fact that it brings much of the work force from home to build dams and other projects. This practice runs counter to the Chinese Commerce Ministry’s 2006 regulations – promulgated after anti-Chinese riots in Zambia – that called for “localization,” including hiring local workers and respecting local customs.

China can stop its dam builders from further undermining its image by enforcing its regulations and embracing internationally accepted standards.

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the independent Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and the author of the newly released “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press, 2011).

Dams muddy China’s image

Posted on October 6, 2011 by Chellaney

The global leader in dam building faces a backlash.

Brahma Chellaney
The Japan Times, October 6, 2011

China’s frenzied dam building at home and abroad is emerging as a flashpoint in interstate and intrastate relations in Asia. Burma’s decision to suspend work on a controversial Chinese-funded dam marks a tactical retreat on a project that has symbolized China’s resource greed and is a trigger for renewed ethnic insurgency in areas of northern Burma (aka Myanmar).

The projects have drawn attention to their mounting environmental and human costs. In Burma, the submergence of vast tracts of land and the forced displacement of thousands of residents have instigated new intrastate disputes, leading to renewed fighting and ending a 17-year ceasefire between the Kachin Independence Army and government forces.

The giant, 3,200-megawatt Myitsone Dam — at the headwaters of the Irrawaddy River, the cradle of the Burmese civilization — was conceived as China’s project for China. The suspension of work on the largest dam project, so as to help stem a groundswell of public anger, represents a blow for China and a victory for local communities who had battled to protect their livelihoods and environment.

Burma is just one of several countries where hydropower projects financed and built by China have triggered local backlashes. China — the world’s biggest dam builder at home and abroad — is currently erecting giant dams in a number of countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, besides damming transnational rivers on its territory and thereby spurring growing concerns in downstream countries.

China contends that its role as the global leader in exporting dams has created a “win-win” situation for the host countries and its companies.

Yet, evidence from a number of project sites shows that, with Chinese dam builders still to embrace environmental-sustainability standards, those dams are imposing serious social and environmental costs. Indeed, China is demonstrating that it has no qualms about building dams in disputed territories, such as Pakistan-held Kashmir, or in areas torn by ethnic separatism, like northern Burma, or in other human rights-abusing countries.

In Pakistan-held Kashmir, it has even deployed thousands of People’s Liberation Army troops at dam and other strategic projects. Yet it loudly protests when foreign firms seek to explore for oil in blocks offered by Vietnam and others in the disputed South China Sea.

Today, as many as 37 Chinese financial and corporate entities are involved in more than 100 dam projects in the developing world. Some of these entities are very large and have multiple subsidiaries. For instance, Sinohydro Corporation — which is under the supervision of the State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of China’s State Council, and is made up of 10 holdings companies and 18 wholly owned subsidiaries — boasts 59 overseas branches.

The frenzied dam-building at home and abroad has spawned two developments:

(1) Chinese companies now dominate the global hydropower-equipment export market. Sinohydro alone claims to control half the market.

(2) The growing clout of the state-run hydropower industry in policymaking has led China to aggressively seek dam projects overseas by offering attractive, low-interest loans and to increasingly tap the resources of rivers flowing to other countries from Chinese-ruled territories.

It was HydroChina, the country’s largest dam builder, that last year revealed government-approved sites for new mega-dams in China, including one larger than the Three Gorges Dam to be built virtually on the disputed border with India.

In a number of nations, ranging from Burma and Congo to Laos and Zambia, Chinese dam construction also is aimed at creating the energy infrastructure to extract mineral ores and other resources to feed the voracious demand in China.

Burma is not the only case where Chinese dam building has triggered violence. From Sudan to the restive, Shiite-dominated areas of Pakistan-held Kashmir, such projects have sparked violent clashes and even police shootings. In Burma, however, the violence spread from the Myitsone Dam — where several small bombs went off in April 2010 — to other Chinese projects, including the Dapein and Shweli dams.

For China, its dam projects in the developing countries showcase its growing economic ties with them. In reality, however, these projects often serve to inflame growing anti-Chinese sentiment in those countries.

The perception that China is engaged in exploitative practices abroad has been reinforced by the fact that it brings much of the workforce from home to build dams and other projects. This practice runs counter to the Chinese Commerce Ministry’s 2006 regulations — promulgated after anti-Chinese riots in Zambia — that called for “localization,” including hiring local workers and respecting local customs.

China can stop its dam builders from further undermining its image by enforcing its regulations and embracing internationally accepted standards.

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the independent Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and the author of the newly released Water: Asia’s New Battleground.

A rising hydro-hegemon raises worries downstream

Posted on October 5, 2011 by Chellaney

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY
The Japan Times, September 21, 2011

Just as China has aroused international alarm by wielding its virtual rare-earths monopoly as a trade instrument and by thwarting efforts to resolve territorial disputes with its neighbors, it is raising deep concern over the manner it is seeking to fashion water into a political weapon against its co-riparian states.

China, the geographical hub of Asia, is the source of transboundary river flows to the largest number of countries in the world — from Russia to India, and from Kazakhstan to the Indochina Peninsula. This unique status is rooted in its forcible absorption of sprawling ethnic-minority homelands, which make up 60 percent of its landmass and are the origin of all the important international rivers flowing out of Chinese-held territory.

Getting this riparian power to accept water-sharing arrangements or other cooperative institutional mechanisms has proven unsuccessful so far in any basin. As epitomized by its construction of upstream dams on several major international rivers, including the Irtysh-Illy, Amur, Mekong, Salween, Brahmaputra, Arun, Indus, and Sutlej, China is increasingly headed in the opposite direction — toward unilateralist actions impervious to the concerns of downstream nations.

No country in history has been a greater dam builder than China, which boasts not only the world’s biggest dam (Three Gorges) but also a greater number of dams than the rest of the world combined. China thus is the most “dammed” country in the world, boasting slightly more than half of the nearly 50,000 large dams in the world.

Yet far from slowing its dam-building spree, China has stepped up its re-engineering of river flows by portentously shifting its focus from internal rivers to international rivers. It also has graduated from building large dams to building mega-dams.

Its newest dams on the Mekong are the 4,200-megawatt Xiaowan — taller than Paris’s Eiffel Tower and producing more electricity than the installed hydropower-generating capacity of all the lower Mekong countries combined — and the under-construction 5,850-megawatt Nuozhadu, which will be even bigger in storage volume but not in height.

Last summer, China’s state-run hydropower industry published a map of major new dams approved for construction, including one on the Brahmaputra at Metog (or “Motuo” in Chinese) that is to be twice the size of the 18,300-megawatt Three Gorges. The Metog site is almost on the disputed border with India.

In the next decade, according to international projections, the number of dams in the developed countries is likely to remain about the same, while much of the dam building in the developing world, in terms of aggregate storage-capacity buildup, will be concentrated in just one country — China. The consequences of such frenetic construction are already visible.

First, China is now involved in water disputes with almost all its riparian neighbors, ranging from big countries such as Russia and India to weak client-states like North Korea and Myanmar.

Second, its new focus on water megaprojects in the traditional homelands of ethnic minorities has triggered fresh tensions over displacement and submergence at a time when the Tibetan plateau, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia have all been wracked by revolts or protests against Chinese rule.

Third, the projects threaten to replicate in international rivers the serious degradation haunting China’s internal rivers.

Yet, as if to declare itself the world’s unrivaled hydro-hegemon, China is also the largest dam builder overseas. From Pakistan-occupied Kashmir to Burma’s troubled Kachin and Shan states, China has widened its dam building to disputed or insurgency-torn areas, despite local backlash.

While units of the People’s Liberation Army are now engaged in dam and other strategic projects in the restive, Shiite region of Gilgit-Baltistan in Pakistan-held Kashmir, China’s dam building inside Burma has contributed to renewed bloody fighting recently, ending a 17-year ceasefire between the Kachin Independence Army and the government.

For downriver countries, a key concern is China’s opacity on its hydroengineering projects. It usually begins work quietly, almost furtively, and then presents a project as a fait accompli and as holding transboundary flood-control benefits.

Worse still, China rejects the very notion of a water-sharing arrangement or treaty with any riparian neighbor. The terms “water sharing,” “shared water resources,” “treaty” and “common norms and rules” are anathema to it. It is one of only three countries that voted against the 1997 United Nations Convention that lays down rules on the shared resources of international watercourses.

It is thus no accident that there are water treaties among co-riparian states in South and Southeast Asia, but not between China and any of its neighbors. That the country with a throttlehold over the headwaters of major Asian rivers is also a rising superpower, with a muscular confidence increasingly on open display, only compounds the regional security challenges.

In this light, China poses the single biggest obstacle to the building of institutionalized cooperation in Asia to harness internationally shared rivers for mutual and sustainable benefit.

Water indeed has emerged as a source of increasing intercountry competition and discord in Asia, the most-populous and fastest-developing continent whose per capita freshwater availability is less than half the global average.

The growing water stress threatens Asia’s continued rapid economic growth. And for investors, it carries risks that potentially are as damaging as nonperforming loans, real estate bubbles, infrastructure overbuilding, and political corruption.

Because of China’s centrality in the Asian water map, international pressure must be exerted on Beijing to respect the rights of subjacent states and halt further unilateralist appropriation of shared waters.

It should accept institutionalized basin cooperation, which demands a coextensive restraint among all parties so that no country utilizes shared waters in a way to injuriously affect a co-riparian.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of the just-released “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press).

DC Events with Brahma Chellaney

Posted on October 4, 2011 by Chellaney

From Georgetown University Press

This past week Brahma Chellaney, author of Water: Asia’s New Battleground, visited Washington, DC, on a book tour. He stopped by the Woodrow Wilson Center, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the East-West Center, John Hopkins University’s SAIS, American University’s SIS, and the Transatlantic Academy. In sum, Dr. Chellaney spoke to 300 audience members, and numerous copies of his book were carried away by their delighted new owners. Those who did not get the chance to hear him speak may watch the video from the Wilson Center here and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace here.

Book-related address at the Hong Kong University here.

Talk at the East-West Center here.

The New Delhi release of the book by the Vice President of India here.

Interview conducted by the Georgetown University Press here.

Writeup on the presentation at the Transatlantic Academy here.

Water is the new weapon in Beijing’s armoury

Posted on August 31, 2011 by Chellaney

By Brahma Chellaney
Financial Times, August 31, 2011

China has aroused international alarm by using its virtual monopoly of rare earths as a trade instrument and by stalling multilateral efforts to resolve disputes in the South China Sea. Among its neighbours, there is deep concern at the way it is seeking to make water a political weapon.

At the hub of Asia, China is the source of cross-border river flows to the largest number of countries in the world — from Russia to India, Kazakhstan to the Indochina peninsula. This results from its absorption of the ethnic minority homelands that make up 60 per cent of its land mass and are the origin of all the important international rivers flowing out of Chinese territory.

Getting this pre-eminent riparian power to accept water-sharing arrangements or other co-operative institutional mechanisms has proved unsuccessful so far in any basin. Instead, the construction of upstream dams on international rivers such as the Mekong, Brahmaputra or Amur shows China is increasingly bent on unilateral actions, impervious to the concerns of downstream nations.

China already boasts both the world’s biggest dam (Three Gorges) and a greater total number of dams than the rest of the world combined. It has shifted its focus from internal to international rivers, and graduated from building large dams to building mega-dams. Among its newest dams on the Mekong is the 4,200 megawatt Xiaowan — taller than Paris’s Eiffel Tower. New dams approved for construction include one on the Brahmaputra at Metog (or Motuo in Chinese) that is to be twice the size of the 18,300MW Three Gorges — and sited almost on the disputed border with India.

The consequences of such frenetic construction are already clear. First, China is in water disputes with almost all its neighbours, from Russia and India to weak client-states such as North Korea and Burma. Second, its new focus on water mega-projects in the homelands of ethnic minorities has triggered tensions over displacement and submergence at a time when the Tibetan plateau, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia have all been wracked by protests against Chinese rule. Third, the projects threaten to replicate in international rivers the degradation haunting China’s internal rivers.

Yet, as if to declare itself the world’s unrivalled hydro-hegemon, China is also the largest dam builder overseas. From Pakistan-held Kashmir to Burma’s troubled Kachin and Shan states, China is building dams in disputed or insurgency-torn areas, despite local backlash. Dam building in Burma has contributed to renewed fighting, ending a 17-year ceasefire between the Kachin Independence Army and government.

For downriver countries, a key concern is China’s opacity on its dam projects. It usually begins work quietly, almost furtively, then presents a project as unalterable and as holding flood-control benefits.

Worse, although there are water treaties among states in south and south-east Asia, Beijing rejects the concept of a water-sharing arrangement. It is one of only three countries that voted against the 1997 UN convention laying down rules on the shared resources of international watercourses.

Yet water is fast becoming a cause of competition and discord between countries in Asia, where per capita freshwater availability is less than half the global average. The growing water stress threatens Asia’s rapid economic growth and carries risks for investors potentially as damaging as non-performing loans, real estate bubbles and political corruption.

By having its hand on Asia’s water tap, China is therefore acquiring tremendous leverage over its neighbours’ behaviour.

That the country controlling the headwaters of major Asian rivers is also a rising superpower, with a muscular confidence increasingly on open display, only compounds the need for international pressure on Beijing to halt its appropriation of shared waters and accept some form of institutionalised co-operation.

The writer is a professor at the independent Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and author of Water: Asia’s New Battleground.

The Ominous Rise of a Thirsty Dragon

Posted on August 7, 2011 by Chellaney

A Chinese dam under construction.

Brahma Chellaney
Times of India, August 7, 2011

China, the geographical hub of Asia, is the source of transboundary-river flows to the largest number of countries in the world — from Russia to India, and from Kazakhstan to the Indochina Peninsula. This unique status is because of its forcible absorption of sprawling ethnic-minority homelands, which make up 60% of its landmass and are the origin of all the important international rivers flowing out of Chinese-held territory.

Getting this pre-eminent riparian power to accept water-sharing arrangements or other cooperative institutional mechanisms has proven unsuccessful in any basin. In fact, as epitomized by its planned or actual construction of a separate cascade of upstream dams on several major international rivers, including the Mekong, Salween, Brahmaputra, Arun, Irtysh-Illy, and Amur, China is increasingly headed in the opposite direction — toward unilateralist actions impervious to the concerns of downstream nations.

No country in history has been a greater dam builder than China, which boasts not only the world’s biggest dam (Three Gorges) but also more total number of dams than the rest of the world combined. Yet far from slowing its dam-building spree, China has stepped up its re-engineering of river flows in two ways: by portentously shifting its focus from internal rivers to international rivers, and by concentrating on mega-dams.

For example, its newest dams on the Mekong are the 4,200-megawatt Xiaowan — taller than Paris’s Eiffel Tower and producing more electricity than the installed hydropower-generating capacity of all of the lower Mekong countries together — and the 5,850-megawatt Nuozhadu, which when complete will be even bigger in storage volume but not in height.

Last summer, China’s state-run hydropower industry published a map of major new dams approved for construction, including one on the Brahmaputra at Metog (or “Motuo” in Chinese) that will be larger than even the 18,300-megawatt Three Gorges. India’s largest dam — the 2,000-megawatt Tehri — pales in comparison with China’s dams.

In the next one decade, according to international projections, the number of dams in the developed countries is likely to remain about the same, while much of the dam building in the developing world, in terms of aggregate storage-capacity buildup, will be concentrated in just one country — China.

The consequences of such frenetic construction are already visible. First, China is now involved in water disputes with almost all its riparian neighbours, ranging from big Russia and India to weak clients like North Korea and Myanmar.

Second, its new focus on water mega-projects in the traditional homelands of ethnic minorities has triggered fresh tensions along ethnic fault lines over displacement and submergence issues at a time when the Tibetan plateau, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia have all been racked by revolts or protests against Chinese rule. And third, Chinese projects threaten to extend the serious degradation of internal rivers to international rivers.

Yet, as if to underpin its rise as the world’s unrivalled hydro-hegemon, China is also the largest dam builder overseas. From Pakistan-occupied Kashmir to Myanmar’s troubled Kachin and Shan states, China has widened its dam building to disputed or insurgency-torn areas, even in the face of local backlash. While PLA units are engaged in dam and other strategic projects in restive Gilgit-Baltistan, China’s dam building inside Myanmar has contributed to renewed bloody fighting recently, ending a 17-year ceasefire between the Kachin Independence Army and the government.

For downriver countries, a key concern is China’s opacity on its hydro-engineering projects. It usually begins work quietly, almost furtively, and then presents a project as holding transboundary flood-control benefits and as an unalterable fait accompli.

Worse still, China rejects the very notion of a water-sharing arrangement or treaty with any riparian neighbour. The terms “water sharing,” “shared water resources,” “treaty” and “common norms and rules” are an anathema to it. It is one of only three countries that voted against the 1997 UN Convention, which lays down rules on shared basin resources.

It is thus no accident that there are treaties among co-riparian states in South and Southeast Asia, but not between China and any of its neighbours. That the country with a throttlehold over the headwaters of major Asian rivers is also a rising superpower, whose muscular confidence is increasingly on open display, only compounds the regional security challenges.

In this light, China poses the single biggest obstacle to the building of institutionalized cooperation in Asia to harness internationally shared rivers for mutual and sustainable benefit.

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.