An Indian Perspective on China's Agression

China’s South China Sea Grab

Dec 14, 2018 BRAHMA CHELLANEY

Over the last five years, China has turned its contrived historical claims to the South China Sea into reality and gained strategic depth far from its shores. China's leaders did not leave that outcome to chance.

MANILA – It has been just five years since China initiated its major land reclamation in the South China Sea, and the country has already shifted the territorial status quo in its favor – without facing any international pushback. The anniversary of the start of its island building underscores the transformed geopolitics in a corridor central to the international maritime order.

In December 2013, the Chinese government pressed the massive Tianjing dredger into service at Johnson South Reef in the Spratly archipelago, far from the Chinese mainland. The Spratlys are to the south of the Paracel Islands, which China seized in 1974, capitalizing on American forces’ departure from South Vietnam. In 1988, the reef was the scene of a Chinese attack that killed 72 Vietnamese sailors and sunk two of their ships.

The dredger’s job is to fragment sediment on the seabed and deposit it on a reef until a low-lying manmade island emerges. The Tianjing – boasting its own propulsion system and a capacity to extract sediment at a rate of 4,530 cubic meters (5,924 cubic yards) per hour – did its job very quickly, creating 11 hectares of new land, including a harbor, in less than four months. All the while, a Chinese warship stood guard.

Since then, China has built six more artificial islands in the South China Sea and steadily expanded its military assets in this highly strategic area, through which one-third of global maritime trade passes. It has constructed port facilities, military buildings, radar and sensor installations, hardened shelters for missiles, vast logistical warehouses for fuel, water, and ammunition, and even airstrips and aircraft hangars on the manmade islands. Reinforcing its position further, China has strong-armed its neighbors into suspending the exploitation of natural resources within their own exclusive economic zones.

Consequently, China has turned its contrived historical claims to the South China Sea into reality and gained strategic depth, despite a 2016 ruling by an international arbitral tribunal invalidating those claims. China’s leaders seem intent on proving the old adage that “possession is nine-tenths of the law.” And the world, it seems, is letting them get away with it.

The Chinese did not leave that outcome to chance. Before they began building their islands in the South China Sea, they spent several months testing possible US reactions through symbolic moves. First, in June 2012, China seized the disputed Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines, without eliciting a tangible international response.

Almost immediately, the China State Shipbuilding Industry Corporation – which is currently building the country’s third aircraft carrier – published on its website draft blueprints for manmade islands atop reefs, including drawings of structures that have come to define China’s Spratly construction program. But the sketches received little international notice, and were soon removed from the website, though they later circulated on some Chinese news websites.

In September 2013, China launched its next test: it sent the Tianjing dredger to Cuarteron Reef, where it stayed for three weeks without initiating any land reclamation. Commercially available satellite images later showed the dredger at another reef, Fiery Cross, again doing little. Again, the United States, under President Barack Obama, did not push back, emboldening China to start its first island-building project, at Johnson South Reef.

In short, as China has continued to build and militarize islands, it has taken a calibrated approach, gradually ramping up its activities, while keeping an eye on the US reaction. The final two years of the Obama presidency were marked by frenzied construction.

All of this has taken a serious toll on the region’s marine life. The coral reefs China has destroyed to use as the foundation for its islands provided food and shelter for many marine species, as well as supplying larvae for Asia’s all-important fisheries. Add to that chemically laced runoff from the new artificial islands, and China’s activities are devastating the South China Sea ecosystems.

Obama’s last defense secretary, Ash Carter, has criticized his former boss’s soft approach toward China. In a recent essay, Carter wrote that Obama, “misled” by his own analysis, viewed as suspect “recommendations from me and others to more aggressively challenge China’s excessive maritime claims and other counterproductive behaviors.” For a while, Carter says, Obama even bought into China’s vision of a G2-style arrangement with the US.

Now, President Donald Trump’s administration is grappling with the consequences of Obama’s approach. Trump wants to implement a vision of a “free and open Indo-Pacific.” The “free and open Indo-Pacific” strategy is the successor to Obama’s unhinged “pivot” to Asia.

But, from its newly built perches in the South China Sea, China is better positioned not only to sustain air and sea patrols in the region, but also to advance its strategy of projecting power across the Indian Ocean and the Western Pacific. How can there be any hope of a free and open Indo-Pacific, when the critical corridor linking the Indian and Pacific oceans is increasingly dominated by the world’s largest autocracy?

China’s territorial grab, a triumph of brute power over rules, exposes the vulnerability of the current liberal world order. The geopolitical and environmental toll is likely to rise, imposing major costs on the region’s states and reshaping international maritime relations.


Brahma Chellaney
BRAHMA CHELLANEY
Writing for PS since 2009
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Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Asian Juggernaut, Water: Asia’s New Battleground, and Water, Peace, and War: Confronting the Global Water Crisis.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/uncontested-south-china-sea-grab-by-brahma-chellaney-2018-12

The Risk of Escalation in South China / East Sea

POLITICO & SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST

How U.S.-China tensions could get a lot worse
South China Sea is a flashpoint in military buildup as China asserts control.

By WESLEY MORGAN and MINNIE CHAN | SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST 12/13/2018 05:05 AM EST

This story is part of an ongoing series on U.S.-China relations, jointly produced by the South China Morning Post and POLITICO, with reporting from Asia and the United States.

Rising tensions over Beijing’s accelerating military buildup in the South China Sea are stoking fears of a major-power clash between China and the United States — fueling urgent calls for new security talks before the two nations stumble into a shooting war.


But the worries come amid a dearth of official dialogue between two of the world's largest militaries, and as U.S. leaders espouse an increasingly harder line against China’s actions. The U.S. and its allies have stepped up naval and air patrols over the sea and canceled joint exercises with Beijing, while China is considering requiring all aircraft flying over the area to first identify themselves — a step that many nations would consider threatening.

Military experts say the showdown could easily spin out of control.

“Chinese colleagues have said to me explicitly that if the U.S. continues to sail through and over-fly what they see as their waters, China will eventually shoot down the offending aircraft," said Matthew Kroenig, a former CIA analyst and Pentagon strategist. “Maybe that’s just a bluff, but if China shot down a U.S. plane, that would be a scenario ripe for escalation. It’s hard to see President [Donald] Trump or any other U.S. leader backing down from that.”

U.S. military leaders insist they’re determined to avoid that. Navy Adm. Phil Davidson, the U.S. commander of the Indo-Pacific Command, told POLITICO he’s eager to open a new dialogue with his Chinese counterparts, contending that “a military-to-military relationship is quite important."

"I have yet to meet the [chief of defense] or the minister of defense in China," he said. "I hope to visit early next year.”

Marine Gen. Joe Dunford, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, says establishing more channels for the militaries to avoid conflict is one his top priorities as Washington and Beijing also tussle over issues such as trade and North Korea's nuclear program. “Competition does not necessarily lead to conflict,” he said at a recent security forum in Canada.

On the other hand, the U.S. is trying to send Chinese leaders a pointed message by sending an increased number of military patrols through the disputed waters, Dunford said in an interview with POLITICO.

"What we are doing is preserving the principle of open access to the global commons,” Dunford said. And he said nations “violating international norms, standards and the law” should know they are “going to pay a cost that is higher than whatever they hope to gain.”

Similarly, Beijing’s leaders are not backing down from their military expansion in the vast South China Sea, which stretches more than 1.3 million square miles with trillions of dollars worth of trade transiting annually. Those waters include the Spratly Islands chain where China seized reefs and began building artificial islands during the second term of the Obama administration.

Despite public assurances from President Xi Jinping that the features would not be militarized, China recently deployed surface-to-air missiles and other weapons and equipment. Earlier this year, satellite images showed that Beijing has built at least four airstrips suitable for military aircraft on Woody Island, as well as the reefs in the archipelago known as Fiery Cross, Mischief and Subi.

China has telegraphed steps to further solidify its claims in the waters. In June, Chinese Lt. Gen. He Lei acknowledged during the Shangri-La defense summit in Singapore that China is deploying troops and weapons on both natural and man-made islands in the Paracel and Spratly archipelagos.

Chinese military sources who were not authorized to speak publicly said the People’s Liberation Army’s Air Force and Strategic Support Force have also placed sophisticated radar systems in the South China Sea.

"Since the U.S. has kept sending spy aircraft to do the close-in reconnaissance activities near China's territory waters in the South China Sea, it's necessary to deploy sophisticated radar system to the artificial islands to detect the U.S. aircraft," one of the sources from the firm said.

He Lei, who led Chinese military delegation to the Shangri-La Dialogue, said that "deploying troops and weapons on islands in the South China Sea is within China’s sovereign right to do and allowed by international law.”

The U.S. and other countries have condemned the expansion as a violation of international law. And in recent months, top American military officials have dropped some of their usual diplomatic language.

U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis revoked China’s invitation to participate in an annual military exercise this fall, then canceled a trip to Beijing planned for October.

“If you'd asked me two months ago, I'd have said we are still attempting to maintain a cooperative stance,” the retired four-star general said at the Shangri-La summit. “But then you look at what President Xi said in the Rose Garden of the White House in 2015, that they would not militarize the Spratlys, and then we watched what happened four weeks ago, it was time to say there's a consequence to this.”

During his trip to Vietnam in October, Mattis said Washington was highly concerned about China's "predatory" behavior and militarization of the South China Sea.

“We remain highly concerned with the continued militarization of features in the South China Sea,” he said, saying that this continued to happen despite a pledge by Xi not to do so.

Davidson, the top American commander in the Asia-Pacific, expressed alarm recently at China’s “secretly deployed anti-ship missiles, electronic jammers and surface-to-air missiles.”

“So what was a great wall of sand just three years ago,” Davidson added, “is now a great wall of SAMs in the South China Sea, giving the [People’s Republic of China] the potential to exert national control over international waters in the South China Sea.”

The U.S. and its allies have also launched "freedom of navigation" operations in the region. In September, two pairs of U.S. Air Force B-52 bombers flew over the disputed area — one pair over the South China Sea and one over the East China Sea. A week later, the destroyer USS Decatur came within 12 nautical miles of two of the disputed reefs, prompting maneuvers by a Chinese destroyer that the Pentagon called “unsafe” and “unprofessional.”

Australia, Japan, France, Canada and New Zealand are among the allies taking part in the patrols.

“What we are doing is preserving the principle of open access to the global commons,” said Dunford, the U.S. Joint Chiefs chairman, in an interview with POLITICO. He said the United States’ message is that nations “violating international norms, standards and the law” are “going to pay a cost that is higher than whatever they hope to gain.”

But the growing prominence of those other military forces has caused China to “push back more, and that heightens the risk that you could have an inadvertent crisis,” said Lindsey Ford of the Asia Society, who is also a former senior adviser to the U.S. assistant secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific security affairs.

China’s interest is not simply to exert political or economic influence in the region, said Kroenig, the former CIA analyst. Its activities are also defensive in nature, he believes.

China, like the Soviet Union during the Cold War, is not confident that its nuclear ballistic missile submarines could survive in the open ocean during a conflict with the United States, he said — because waters closer to Chinese territory are too shallow. So it hopes to use the South China Sea as an operating area for its subs.

“That’s a strategic military purpose on top of the political purpose,” said Kroenig. “I’ve had a Chinese colleague say to me: ‘You guys don’t really care about these territorial claims in the South China Sea. You’re trying to deny our nuclear deterrent.'"

Now, Chinese military experts say, Beijing is considering establishing an "air defense identification zone," which would require all aircraft over the area to declare their identity and destination.

The rationale is ostensibly peaceful in nature: Chinese officials maintain it would help prevent disasters such as the 2014 disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

But a zone Beijing established in the East China Sea in 2013 drew a joint rebuke from Japan and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which considered it threatening.

The pushback from other nations "implied that such a move constituted a security challenge,” said Collin Koh Swee Lean, an analyst at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.

Koh warned that the air traffic proposal could derail regional talks about establishing a code of conduct to avoid confrontations in the area. He also predicted that the U.S. might feel compelled to ramp up its military presence in response — a view echoed by Zhou Chenming, a military expert based in Beijing.

Further fueling tensions in the South China Sea is the growing role of China's so-called Maritime Militia, a naval paramilitary force that operates disguised as fishing or other civilian vessels. Vice President Mike Pence recently criticized the forces as extralegal, and the rules for approaching them are ill-defined.

"Should we treat them as military vessels and expect them to behave that way?" asked the Asia Society’s Ford. "China is exploiting a loophole. Pence’s recent remarks calling out the Maritime Militia explicitly suggest the U.S. is refining its thinking about how to approach that loophole.”

For now, senior American military leaders are expressing confidence that U.S. forces can continue to aggressively promote their freedom-of-navigation mission without sparking a violent confrontation.

“I think one of the unfortunate things is the focus on two destroyers passing in the daylight,” Davidson told POLITICO. “That is not what the issue is about in the South China Sea. It is about trade, commerce, financial markets moving their information around the globe — every airline that flies over the top."

Bryan Bender contributed to this report.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/12/13/us-china-south-china-sea-disputes-1061811