When India and Vietnam’s prime ministers held a virtual summit on December 21, the two allied leaders nominally agreed to a joint vision for peace and prosperity against the backdrop of perceived rising Chinese aggression in the wider Indo-Pacific region.
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The People’s Republic of China operates the largest state-subsidized fishing fleet in the world. The questionable practices of the hundreds of Chinese vessels operating off the west coast of South America illustrate the extent to which competition with an ascendant China is already underway in the maritime domain — and far beyond the South China Sea.
Beijing’s aggressive reclamation and militarisation of the Spratly Islands and Paracel Islands in 2014 should have immediately made clear that Chinese objectives were not just about fish, gas, and oil.
China has taken advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has been dominating headlines around the world, to reinforce its grasp on the South China Sea. While Western media is now preoccupied by the U.S. protests, Beijing will likely continue to take advantage of the fact that the eyes of the world remain focused elsewhere.
The United States has accused China of using the global coronavirus pandemic to further expand its “unlawful claims” in the South China Sea. In a strongly worded statement, the US State Department gave Washington’s view of last week’s collision of a Chinese coastguard ship and a Vietnamese fishing vessel near the disputed Paracel Islands.
More to the point, when it comes to China, we are dealing with a unique and very formidable cultural organism. The American foreign policy elite does not like to talk about culture since culture cannot be quantified, and in this age of extreme personal sensitivity, what cannot be quantified or substantiated by a footnote is potentially radioactive. But without a discussion of culture and geography, there is simply no hope of understanding foreign affairs.
Empirical evidence of China’s aggression is increasingly common, from its attempt to dominate the South China Sea, the neo-imperialist effort to gain control of states through the Belt and Road Initiative, to its technological imperialism to control 5G and artificial intelligence technologies. What is rather less frequent are statements from high-level Chinese officials proclaiming the country’s intent to be aggressive and offering an attempted legitimising principle justifying that aggression.
What better way than this rousing display of naval might to boost the dream of a resurgent China, determined to play the role of a rising great power on the world stage, as well as rally popular nationalist support for the regime?
As we all see, the situation in the South China Sea is cooling down, and the biggest variable is the emerging Sino-U.S. maritime strategic competition. There have been three major views, all of which stem from anxiety, in the western strategic sphere recently on this issue, namely, the so-called Chinese expansionism , U.S. fecklessness and China’s control of the South China Sea with at the cost of others’ interests.
For years, most experts believed that China’s military challenge to the U.S. was regional in nature — that it was confined to the Western Pacific. After decades of tacitly free-riding on America’s global power-projection capabilities, however, Beijing now is seeking the capabilities that will allow it to project its own military power well outside its regional neighbourhood.
