From NATOAIR

[Annie]

Somewhere where it's now winter, :shocked:

From 7th Fleet News Monitor; an interesting opinion piece about China’s increasingly successful attempt to curry favor in the SW Pacific, an often overlooked region of the world, from an Australian POV.



K. The China Syndrome (Opinion)

On line Opinion (Australia), 06/27/2005

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=3605

Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote recently that in 20

years time when we look back at controversies such as the war in Iraq

they will pale in comparison to other tectonic upheavals as the centre

of gravity in world affairs moves to the Asia Pacific. We may not have

to wait that long. Foreign policy pundits are already calling a new

geopolitical game of power politics and interstate rivalry as a rising

China seeks to draft as many countries as possible into its sphere of

influence.

While the US has been preoccupied with combating terrorism and

spreading democracy in the Middle East, China has been busy cultivating

new friends and allies across the Asia Pacific region. The booming

Chinese economy has led to a new confidence as China finds its

international feet and looks for its place in the diplomatic sun. In

stark contrast to Washington’s perceived penchant for unilateralism,

Beijing has discovered an enthusiasm for multilateralism that is

intended to reassure the region of China’s “peaceful rise” and to

portray America’s regional alliances as Cold War relics.

The US has underestimated China. Washington hawks remain focused on

China’s potential “hard” power, with many fearing that Chinese military

modernisation has progressed further and faster than previously

thought. But it is America’s “soft” power - that is, its cultural,

economic and diplomatic clout - that China is now challenging. Through

a combination of trade, aid and skillful diplomacy, Beijing is laying

the foundations for a new regional order with China as the natural

leader and the US as the outsider.

In a recent issue of Prospect magazine, Joshua Kurlantzick scores the

results of this charm offensive on a zero-sum scale ranging from

countries that have clearly chosen Beijing over Washington to those

“still married to Washington” but “dating China on the side”. Burma,

Laos, Cambodia and even East Timor are included in the former category,

while Australia falls into the latter as a “once-staunch US ally” that

has begun to “bend to Beijing”. In between lie formerly pro-American

countries with one foot in the Chinese camp such as South Korea, where

“polls show people fear America more than North Korea”, and to a lesser

extent Indonesia, which has been “alienated by the war on terror” and

“US ignorance of its economic problems”.

Interestingly, Kurlantzick overlooks the increasing role that China is

playing in the more remote sub-region of the southwest Pacific. While

he notes that Beijing has been using aid to woo countries such as Samoa

and Fiji, this is mentioned only in passing. Apart from Australia and

New Zealand, the other states and associated territories that make up

the region fall outside the boundaries of his analysis. Yet if, as he

maintains, China is biding its time until it can convert its influence

in the Asia Pacific into dominance - even military dominance - then the

region’s remoter parts may well acquire a new significance.

What confers strategic significance?

Two insights from strategic theory and practice help explain how

peripheral and seemingly insignificant regions like the southwest

Pacific can sometimes assume an unexpected importance in the affairs of

great powers. As Owen Harries argued in a perceptive 1989 paper,

Strategy and the Southwest Pacific, we should not overlook the value of

non-linear thinking. The most direct route is not always the best one.

The longer, less obvious way around is often more effective, for it is

less likely to have been anticipated. Paradoxically, the very fact that

the southwest Pacific is considered a strategic backwater may make it

more attractive as a testing ground for China’s growing power and

ability to shore up allegiance in a region hitherto considered an

“American lake”.

Related to the indirect approach is the concept of displacement. Rival

states may choose to conduct their competition in less sensitive parts

of the world where the stakes are lower and there is less risk of

tension escalating into major conflict.

Harries was writing in the latter stages of the Cold War when America’s

global rival, the Soviet Union, toyed briefly with some island states

in an attempt to establish a regional presence. China is not the

unlamented Soviet Union. It does not possess the enormous military

power the USSR once had and it does not yet have a blue water navy. Nor

would a Chinese sphere of influence resemble an exclusive zone of total

domination like the Soviet Union had in Eastern Europe. It is more

likely to be an area in which smaller and weaker states defer to the

interests, views and anticipated reactions of Beijing.

But this would mean the island states in a region would owe their

primary allegiance to a country outside the US system of regional

alliances - which is precisely why China’s growing presence is a thorny

issue. While Malaysia, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have also become

more active in the southwest Pacific, only China has the potential to

transform power relationships.

How to win friends and influence people

Over the past decade, China has been quietly planting the seeds of

greater influence in the southwest Pacific, establishing a strong

diplomatic presence and bestowing no-strings aid and other assistance

on cash-strapped island governments. China is now reportedly one of the

region’s top three aid donors. The amounts are modest (although the PRC

does not publish official figures). Unlike Australia, China does not

ask for “good governance” as a precondition.

Most Pacific governments have welcomed China’s overtures, adopting

official “look north” (or east) policies and, at times, playing the

“China card” in an attempt to remind longstanding - but demanding - aid

donors like Australia that they have other options. China has

encouraged this by softening up the region’s political elite through

so-called visit diplomacy. Over the past few years, the red carpet has

been rolled out in Beijing for the leaders of Papua New Guinea, Fiji,

Vanuatu, Samoa, the Federated States of Micronesia, Tonga, Kiribati and

East Timor. “It is now accepted routine”, claimed an article in The

National Interest last year, “that the first official overseas visit by

a new head of government from the region is made to Beijing, not to

Canberra, Washington or Wellington”.

China has also been expanding its diplomatic posts in the region, with

embassies in Samoa, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, Tonga, Micronesia

and Kiribati (a “care-taking” mission since 2004, see below). Even the

Cook Islands, with a population of just over 21,000, have established

diplomatic ties with Beijing. China is now thought to have more

diplomats in the region than any other country.

One goal of this diplomatic activity is to build an island's voting

bloc that will support China in international forums. The Pacific

islands may be small but they are also numerous and in some forums

numbers count, particularly the United Nations with its one-country,

one-vote system.

A related objective is to isolate Taiwan. Last year Vanuatu became the

latest Pacific island country to switch allegiance from Taipei to

Beijing after two weeks of flip-flopping during which the government

broke with Beijing, recognised Taiwan and finally returned to Beijing.

There have been similar reversals in recent times by Nauru, Tonga and

Papua New Guinea. But Taiwan can still count on five Pacific island

states for support, with Kiribati last year joining Tuvalu, Marshall

Islands, Palau and the Solomon Islands in the Taiwanese camp.

Kiribati is a good example of the displacement effect discussed

earlier. For a few weeks in 2004 this collection of coral atolls that

some 100,000 people call home became the only state in the world to

simultaneously recognise both China and Taiwan after the newly-elected

Kiribati president suddenly switched allegiance from Beijing to Taipei.

A familiar diplomatic tug-of-war ensued between the two Chinas, but

there was more than usual at stake.

Kiribati lies close to the equator, the ideal location for launching

rockets and parking satellites in geo-stationary orbits. Since 1997,

China has maintained a missile and satellite tracking station on Tarawa

atoll. Beijing has long denied that the station played any role in the

development of a space warfare capability, or that it was used to spy

on a US testing facility for its missile defence program in the nearby

Marshall Islands. For Taiwan the station must have been of particular

concern given that China has hundreds of missiles pointed at the

country. The secrecy surrounding its function became a major issue in

the 2004 Kiribati elections when both China and Taiwan were accused of

trying to bribe their preferred presidential candidates. When the

Kiribati president chose Taiwan over China he was no doubt hoping that

the station would be too important for the Chinese to give up. But

Beijing closed it down and packed up within two days.

It is unlikely that China will stop seeking such military outposts. We

should consider that Chinese interest in East Timor - also close to the

equator - might have this in mind.

For regional powers like Australia, the most immediate problem arising

from the Pacific Cold War between Taiwan and China is that it further

destabilises already weak and unstable governments and feeds the

endemic corruption throughout the region.

Another problem is the largesse that flows from Sino-Taiwanese rivalry

mostly funds prestige projects designed for maximum public relations

impact rather than economic development. Thus China has paid for a

parliament house for Vanuatu, government buildings for Samoa, and

houses for the president and vice-president in Micronesia. Beijing has

also provided new equipment, trips and training for security forces in

Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Tonga and has bankrolled new sports stadiums

for Fiji, Samoa, Micronesia, and Kiribati.

Apart from aid, China’s main economic attraction for Pacific island

countries lies in tourism and investment. Roughly 3,000 state and

private Chinese companies now do business in the Pacific, with nearly

$1 billion in hotels, plantations, garment factories, fishing and

logging operations. Thousands of Chinese have settled in the region,

running grocery stores, restaurants and other small businesses. This

continues a long history of Chinese traders in the Pacific, although

the latest wave of emigration is starting to tip the ethnic balance in

some countries.

For China the economic attraction of the southwest Pacific is as a

source of natural resources such as minerals, timber and fisheries. The

most significant development on this front is the $800-plus million,

majority Chinese-owned nickel mine in Papua New Guinea’s Madang

province. If it goes ahead it will be one of the biggest offshore

mining developments undertaken by a Chinese company. China has no

experience in open-cut mining in the tropics. It also has a very poor

mine safety record. But the bigger issue is whether China will

interfere in the internal affairs of Papua New Guinea to safeguard its

investment and how the Australian Government would react if it did.

China has already deployed some 4,000 troops to war-torn Sudan to

protect its investment in an oil pipeline with the Malaysian firm

Petronas. This is likely to be a precedent.

History never repeats, but …

American economist David Hale has argued that China’s need to protect

its raw material lifelines will lead to major changes in its foreign

policy, just as it did the US and Great Britain. While the sheer volume

of trade alone should help promote good political ties, China can be

expected to hedge its bets by developing the capability to project

military power - most significantly, a blue water navy - to protect its

access to resources. Indeed, China has already adopted a “string of

pearls” strategy of naval bases and diplomatic ties stretching from the

Middle East to Southern China to protect oil shipments, with Pakistan,

Bangladesh and Burma being some of the “pearls” in this sea-lane

strategy.

When a continental land power that occupies a central geographical

position starts to show signs of blue water ambition, alarm bells begin

ringing in the capitals of maritime powers. This is what happened in

Tokyo recently after a Chinese submarine ventured as far out from the

PRC mainland as Guam, the forward bastion of American power in the

northwest Pacific.

Guam forms part of the “second island chain” that the Japanese occupied

and controlled during World War II in their attempt to build a Pacific

empire. While we are not going to see a repeat of the great air and sea

battles that defined the American-Japanese contest for control of the

Pacific Ocean, an American intelligence consultancy has warned that to

compensate for its naval weakness China could turn its political

influence into military capability by placing shore-based, anti-ship

missiles on these islands. But although the Chinese have been active,

they have not been aggressive.

Interestingly, the US is now beefing up its military presence in the

northwest Pacific as part of a broader strategy to increase American

capability and flexibility in the Asia Pacific. Upgrading of the

Andersen Air Force Base and naval facilities in Guam suggests a busy

future for the island as a vital strategic hub. Combined with a string

of smaller bases, supply depots and “lily pads” - from Korea and Japan

to Thailand, the Philippines, Australia and Singapore - the United

States will be able to project smaller and nimbler forces more rapidly

to counter terrorism and deal with regional crises. There can no doubt

that this is also a soft containment strategy aimed at China.

The relative importance of the southwest Pacific should not be

exaggerated, but nor should it be dismissed out of hand - particularly

since the Australian Government now insists the region is its special

“patch”. Given the possibility that internal weakness and tension could

encourage and facilitate external intervention and manipulation, it

seems prudent rather than paranoid to relate short-term issues and

developments to underlying long-term trends and to make a comprehensive

strategic assessment in regional terms.

The expansion of Chinese influence reflects more than a benign attempt

to gain access to the region’s abundant minerals, timber and fisheries.

Strategic issues often have economic faces. Rising Chinese activity in

the region has a broader twofold purpose: to sideline Taiwan and to

undermine ties between Pacific island nations and regional powers such

as the United States, Australia and Japan. It should be seen as part of

a longer-term political and strategic investment aimed at challenging

the leadership of the US in the greater Asia Pacific region.

What this underscores is that the strategic significance of a region

depends ultimately on the extent to which it gets caught up in the

interactions of great powers. This explains why the southwest Pacific

was catapulted from geopolitical obscurity in the 1930s into the

strategic limelight between 1941 and 1945 - and why it lapsed back into

relative obscurity afterwards. While the region may seem unimportant

now, we cannot be sure it will always remain so.

-C7F