Reviving the China threat

Asia Times Online
01 February 2006


Greater China

COMMENTARY
Reviving the China threat
By Gregory Clark

(Republished with permission from Japan Focus)

"I recognize that it [China] is becoming a considerable threat."
- Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso

For some of us in the China-watching business (I have been there for
more than 40 years), there has always been a China "threat". It began
with the 1950-53 Korean civil war, which initially had nothing to do
with China.

Indeed, if any outside power was involved in North Korea's attack on
its rival government in the South, it was the Soviet Union, not
China. The communist regime in Beijing had just come to power after a
protracted civil war with the rival Kuomintang (KMT) regime. Its
troops were being moved to the south of the country, far from Korea,
in preparation for the final attack on the KMT enemy, which had fled
to Taiwan.

Even so, Beijing was blamed. As punishment, Washington withdrew its
earlier pledge not to get involved in China's civil war and called
for a KMT counterattack against the mainland.

It would also threaten Beijing more directly, by sending troops close
to China's border with Korea in late 1950. When China then moved its
own troops into Korea, the China-threat people moved into high gear.
Images of hordes of Chinese troops relentlessly pushing US forces
southward down the Korean Peninsula followed by two years of military
stalemate were to lay the groundwork for two decades of US and other
Western policies calling for the containment and non-recognition of
Beijing.

The next China threat was supposed to operate via the overseas
Chinese in Southeast Asia. Coping with that "threat" meant the West
had to prop up a range of incompetent, corrupt rulers in the area,
and intervene cruelly to suppress revolts by local Chinese against
discrimination in Malaya and then in Sarawak.

It also meant that the United States, Britain and Australia would
work very hard to prevent the 1959 election of an intelligent
Chinese, Lee Kwan Yew, to the Singapore premiership. Lee was seen,
amazingly, as a front for Beijing and Chinese communism. The three
Western powers threw their support and secret funds behind Lee's pro-
Western rival, Lim Yew Hock, whom Lee easily defeated. (Lee
subsequently sent Lim as ambassador to Canberra, where he served for
some months before abandoning his embassy and disappearing into a
Sydney red-light area, leading to his recall.)

The China-threat lobby moved into overdrive over Vietnam in the early
1960s. There a civil war in the South supported by North Vietnam was
denounced by Washington and Canberra as the first step in Beijing's
planned "aggression" into Southeast Asia - despite the fact that as
in Korea, Moscow's support for the pro-communist side in that civil
war was much greater than China's. However, Beijing's rhetoric
supporting the war was seen as proof of China's guilt.

One result was that, in 1964, I had the task of accompanying an
Australian foreign minister, Paul Hasluck, in a foolish, US-
instigated bid to persuade the Soviet Union to side with the West
against those aggressive Chinese. The US, and Australia, had decided
that the Sino-Soviet polemics of the time proved that Moscow was on
the side of moderation and detente with the West while Beijing was
committed to aggressive support for pro-communist revolts worldwide.

Hasluck labored on about how China was threatening not just Asia but
also Soviet territories in Central Asia and the Far East. He gave up
only after being told bluntly by the Soviet prime minister, Alexei
Kosygin, that Moscow was doing all it could to help North Vietnam in
its just struggle against US imperialism, would continue to do so,
and would like to see Beijing doing a lot more.

In 1962, as China desk officer in Canberra, I had to witness an
extraordinary attempt to label as unprovoked aggression a very
limited and justified Chinese counterattack against an Indian
military thrust across the Indian-claimed borderline in the North
East Frontier Area.

Threat scenarios then had China seeking ocean access via the Bay of
Bengal. The London Economist even had Beijing seeking to move south
via Afghanistan.

Then came the allegations that China was seeking footholds in Laos,
northern Thailand and Myanmar - all false. US, British and Australian
encouragement for the 1965 massacre of up to half a million left-wing
supporters in Indonesia was also justified as needed to prevent China
from gaining a foothold there.

So too was the United States' and Australia's 1975 approval for
Indonesia's brutal invasion and takeover of East Timor. Both saw
Fretilin, then the main political party opposed to the Portuguese
colonial regime and seeking independence, as a dangerous left-wing
grouping that might turn to China for support.

Beijing's moves to prevent Taiwan independence have also been
condemned as aggressive, despite the fact that every Western nation,
including the US, has formally recognized or accepted that Taiwan is
part of a nation called China in which Beijing's is the sole
legitimate government.

China's efforts to assert control over Tibet were also branded as
aggression, even though Tibet has never been recognized as an
independent entity. True, many have the right to be upset over the
crude way in which Beijing asserted control over Tibet. But many also
forget that some of that crudity was the result of an abortive
attempt by the US Central Intelligence Agency and New Delhi to stir
up a revolt in the area.

The cruelty and damage caused by China's Great Leap Forward in the
late 1960s, the Cultural Revolution in the late '70s, and the
Tiananmen massacre of 1989 also provoked alarm among some China
watchers. But these were internal, not external, events.

And so it continues to the present day. With the alleged Soviet
threat to Japan having evaporated, we now have an army of Japanese
and US hawks - Foreign Minister Taro Aso included - ramping up China
as an alleged threat to Japan and the Far East.

Much is made of Beijing's recent increases in military spending. But
those increases began from a very low base; until recently its
military was largely concerned with running companies and growing its
own vegetables. Today Beijing faces a US-Japan military buildup in
East Asia for which the spending far exceeds China's. Tokyo and
Washington have a strategic military alliance that specifically
targets China over Taiwan, and possibly other parts of East Asia. For
Beijing to ignore these facts would be surprising, to say the least.

The US and Japan justify this military buildup partly as needed to
contain the potential threat from China. And if the Chinese military
were placing bases and sending spy planes and ships close to the US
coast, were encouraging Hawaiian independence, and were bombing US
embassies, the US role in that buildup might be justified. But so far
that has not happened.

All at sea about maritime boundaries

The China "threat" to Japan is supposed to involve maritime borders
in the East China Sea. Tokyo has unilaterally decreed that its
exclusive economic zone (EEZ) in that area extends to the median line
between the Chinese coastline and the Ryukyu Islands. It claims sole
right to develop potential oil and gas reserves in this claimed EEZ
and its strategists urge punitive action against any Chinese
challenge to that right. Even Chinese developments on the Chinese
side of that median line are threatened on the basis that they might
take gas from underground reserves on the Japanese side of the
claimed line.

Beijing disputes Tokyo's EEZ claim. It says the continental shelf
extending all the way to the Okinawa Trough, or well within the EEZ
claimed by Japan, should be the basis for deciding the EEZ boundary.
But it makes no move to assert control over the disputed area.
Instead it calls for agreement on joint undersea development in the
area between the two rival claim lines, at least until the rival
claims have been settled.

Who is right? The 1982 United Nations Law of the Sea Convention
(UNCLOS) that created the EEZ concept simply says international law
should be the basis for deciding conflicting claims. But
international law is vague. In the past it endorsed the continental-
shelf approach as the main basis for delimiting maritime boundaries.
But recently it has begun to favor the median- or equidistance-line
approach. However, it also goes on to say that any equidistance
approach should be equitable to both sides. One example of equity in
the equidistance approach was the recent Libya/Malta judgment in
which Libya was favored because of its greater land mass. In this as
in several other similar cases, the International Court of Justice
has ruled that "the equidistance line is not mandatory or binding".
It says that the "proportionality of coastlines" is also a factor.

In theory at least, this proportionality ruling would seem to favor
China. The pending Australia-East Timor agreement also raises doubts
about Japan's blunt rejection of Beijing's proposals. The continental
shelf was the basis for the original Australian-Indonesian maritime
boundary agreement reached back in 1972. It favored Australia
greatly, since the Timor Trough that defines the shelf runs close to
the Indonesian and Timorese coastlines.

Then as extensive oil and gas reserves were found on the shelf
between Australia and East Timor (which was incorporated forcefully
into Indonesia in 1975), there were demands for the equidistance line
to be used. When East Timor gained independence from Indonesia in
2002, the demands grew even louder.

But Canberra still insists on the continental-shelf line agreed
earlier with Indonesia. However, and as a concession, it has agreed
to revenue sharing from developing some oil and gas reserves between
the equidistance line and the original continental-shelf line, a
position somewhat similar to what China proposes today in the East
China Sea.

An even stronger precedent was created by Tokyo itself. Japan and
South Korea used to have rival equidistance and continental-shelf
claims against each other. Then in 1974 they agreed to disagree, and
to decide the matter some time in the future (the year 2028 was
mentioned). In the meantime they agreed to joint development in the
area between the two claimed lines. That 1974 agreement was confirmed
as late as August 2002, by an accord for a specific oil co-
exploration project on the continental shelf between the two nations.
Like Beijing's, Seoul's continental-shelf claim extends to the
Okinawa Trough.

Jon Van Dyke of the William S Richardson School of Law, University of
Hawaii at Manoa, and the foremost expert on Japan-China and Japan-
Korea sea boundaries, agrees that the equidistance principle is now
dominant. But he adds that in cases of disagreement "it may be
appropriate to resolve some of them with shared or joint-use zones of
some sort".

The 1982 UNCLOS says specifically that in cases of disagreement, "the
states concerned shall make every effort to enter into provisional
arrangements of a practical nature". Beijing's joint-development
proposal in the disputed area would seem to match that principle.
Tokyo's hardline approach that says everything is already decided
would seem to contradict it.

Ironically, as late as 1994 Tokyo agreed to joint fisheries
exploitation with China and South Korea in the East China Sea pending
what it then agreed was the need for final EEZ delimitations. But
today it insists that the Japan-China EEZ has indeed been finally
delimited - not by negotiation but by unilateral fiat.

Tokyo takes an equally hard line in its Senkaku Islands dispute with
Beijing (which calls the islands Diaoyu) - a dispute in which the
Chinese/Taiwanese claims are not without historical validity, and
would have even more validity under Beijing's continental-shelf
approach.

Tokyo moves from the hard line to the absurd in its claim to 200-
nautical-mile EEZ rights in every direction from a minuscule and
remote Pacific Ocean rock far to the east of Japan that it calls
Okinotori Island. Its claim flies in the face of Article 121 (3) of
UNCLOS, which states clearly that small rocks and even uninhabited
islands cannot have an EEZ.

What we see in all this is the ease with which Japan's positions on
territorial questions harden once subjected to the glare of
publicity. In backroom deals Tokyo can show reasonable flexibility.

For example, in both 1955 and 1956 Tokyo was on the point of reaching
a closed-door compromise settlement of its nagging territorial
dispute with Moscow. Tokyo would receive two of the four disputed
island territories (Shikotan and the Habomais), ie, it would accept
continued Soviet control of the larger islands of Etorufu and
Kunashiri, over which Japan had specifically renounced all right and
title under the 1951 San Francisco peace agreement (but to which in
1953 it revived a claim).

Both times Japan's hardliners were able to drag the compromise
agreements into the light of media and right-wing scrutiny. Overnight
the compromises were condemned as sellouts of the Japanese national
interest. A similar backroom compromise proposal organized by the
Liberal Democratic Party politician Suzuki Muneo in 1999 during prime
minister Mori Yoshiro's administration met the same fate. The Foreign
Ministry officials involved have all been forced into exile.

For a while there were signs that Foreign Ministry moderates were
also willing to go along with Beijing's 1970s suggestion that the
Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands ownership dispute be shelved for the next
generation to solve. But Japan's right wing quickly put an end to
that common-sense suggestion. Led by Tokyo Governor Ishihara
Shintaro, they have also done much to force Tokyo into its absurdly
defiant position over the Okinotori rock. Public opinion in Japan
seems unable to comprehend that there can be two sides to a dispute,
especially when territory is involved. Even at the height of
Canberra's dispute with East Timor, responsible Australian media were
always careful to refer to the "claimed" Australian EEZ line. The
Timorese case was presented objectively. Meanwhile in Japan the media
and the commentators take it for granted that Japan's median-line EEZ
claim in the East China Sea is totally correct. Even the supposedly
impartial NHK forgets to use the word "claimed".

It is not impossible that an economically powerful China still filled
with a sense of grievance over past wrongs might in the future want
to begin to threaten its neighbors. But apart from a brief border war
with Vietnam in 1989, that has not been the case in the past. Nor is
it now. For Japan, which inflicted many of those past wrongs on China
and whose Yasukuni shrine obsession shows that it remains unrepentant
about those wrongs, to condemn China as a threat is chutzpah -
Oriental chutzpah.

Gregory Clark, vice president of Akita International University, is a
former Australian diplomat.

(Republished with permission from Japan Focus )