Restless Empire

by Odd Westad

  Lee Kuan Yew, the Singaporean leader, taught the new Chinese leadership much about the region he operated in. By the 1990s he stressed the importance of the regional organization, ASEAN. Originally set up in 1967 as a framework for cooperation among anti-Communist governments, ASEAN soon took on a much broader significance in terms of regional integration. After the Cold War it began a set of ambitious programs for deepening cooperation among member states. And it added new members: Vietnam in 1995, Burma and Laos in 1997, and Cambodia in 1999. Today’s ASEAN states, which together have almost 600 million people in them, are aiming for an economic community not unlike the European Union.

  For China the emergence of ASEAN was both a threat and an opportunity. Lee and other Southeast Asian leaders were at first told that China preferred to deal with individual states, not regional organizations. Then, as it became clear that ASEAN would not accept a divide-and-rule approach and that the organization was an increasingly integrated force for regional stability, the Chinese government changed tack. Since the late 1990s, cooperation between China and ASEAN has gone from strength to strength, with real practical progress underlying the often fuzzy language about Asian values and common heritage. On economic issues, the big northern neighbor has come to be seen more as a partner than a threat through a number of new formal and informal mechanisms. China’s support for regional currencies during the economic crisis in 1997–1998 convinced even those who had been critical of Chinese policies in the past that Beijing now had no interest in economic dislocation to its south. An ASEAN-China Free Trade Area came into force in 2010, but there are still difficulties in the trade relationship that need to be sorted out.

  As we have seen in the case of Vietnam, now a key member of ASEAN, institutional cooperation does not always translate into security perceptions. If one speaks with leaders from the Southeast Asia region, the overarching problem of living next to a giant is always present, in all its facets. In broad outline, the relationship is not unlike the one between the United States and Latin America. But China’s southern neighbors are, relatively speaking, far more powerful than those of the United States, not least because they are better organized. Uncertainties over who will be in a position to develop the resources that border the Southeast Asian region create mutual suspicions and potential conflict. ASEAN countries are for instance worried about Chinese links with Burma, a resource-rich member state that is run by a particularly incompetent military dictatorship. The regional organization has been pushing for reform in Burma, while China has seemed happy with status quo.

  But first and foremost the main ASEAN members are concerned over Beijing’s claims to most of the small islands within the South China Sea. This vast maritime area holds immense riches—oil, gas, and mineral ores—and both the ASEAN countries and China want to develop it. These waters also contain the world’s busiest commercial sea lanes. China and Vietnam have already clashed over ownership of some of the islets, with China occupying nine of the Spratly Islands, over which Vietnam also claims sovereignty. Now other ASEAN states are getting increasingly concerned about China’s motives and its actions. Chinese maps show Scarborough Shoal, about 120 miles from Subic Bay in the Philippines, as Chinese territory, and claim reefs as far south as thirty miles off the coast of Borneo, all in the name of “historical rights.” From 2010 some ASEAN members have leaned heavily toward internationalizing the issue, seeking support from the United States and other powers, such as India. All similar attempts in the past have met with a stern reaction from Beijing, which has now begun speaking of the South China Sea as a Chinese “core interest.” There is obviously much that still can go wrong in the Sino-ASEAN relationship, in spite of a hopeful beginning.

  Within ASEAN, the biggest economy and the most powerful military are both Indonesian. With a rapidly growing population of close to 250 million people, Indonesia has now become the key power in the region, and, as we have seen, its relationship with China has not always been easy. The CCP had supported the Indonesian Communist Party, which was crushed in a military crackdown in 1965. In the massacres that followed the military takeover, Chinese-Indonesian communities were targeted and thousands of innocent people killed. The Indonesian constitution contained anti-Chinese restrictions all the way up to the reintroduction of democracy in 1998. People of Chinese ancestry are still underrepresented in politics and military affairs but massively over-represented in business; it is often said that Chinese-Indonesians control up to two-thirds of the Indonesian private economy.10 There is much uncertainty in the relationship between Beijing and Jakarta, although the two are working together within an ASEAN framework.

  The contradictory form of the Sino-Indonesian relationship came to the fore in 1998, a year many Indonesians celebrate as the beginning of their country’s democracy. As the strongly anti-Communist Suharto dictatorship ended, Indonesians of Chinese descent were attacked in many parts of the country by mobs that accused them of amassing illicit wealth during the dictator’s rule. For older Chinese, who had had relatives killed thirty years before by the dictator’s forces on suspicion of being Communists, the wanton murders and rapes in 1998 were signs that if you were of Chinese descent in Indonesia you were in constant danger whatever you did. One report described the ordeal of a Sino-Indonesian family who ran a little corner store in a suburb of Jakarta: “Among the looters were people known to the family, including the local meatball seller, who made off with a television set. Others stole the photo-copier from the store and then later tried to sell it back to the family for a high price. A year after the attack the family were operating their store again, supplying basic goods to the neighborhood.” Unlike after 1965, the PRC government’s reaction was measured. It stressed that Sino-Indonesians were, above all, Indonesian citizens who should be protected by their own government. Student protests in Beijing were quelled by the authorities, who wanted a good relationship with the post-Suharto regime in Indonesia.11

  China’s fear today is that Indonesia will increase its cooperation with the United States as a result of Beijing’s economic rise and more powerful international position. Military and diplomatic planners whom I have spoken with see such a development as quite likely. The United States had a close strategic relationship with Indonesia during the Suharto dictatorship from 1965 to 1998, and most of the Indonesian leaders are oriented toward the United States culturally and educationally. They are also aware of the positive impact in the country of President Barack Obama having spent four years there as a child. Beijing is trying to use its new economic muscle to be seen by Jakarta as an equal to the United States. Right before Obama’s first visit to Jakarta as president in 2010, China offered investments of $6.6 billion in desperately needed infrastructure improvements. But such forms of economic cooperation are just turning the existing situation around very slowly, especially as the United States will likely pay more attention to the region after the end of its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  The South China Sea issue is less of an immediate concern to Indonesia than to some of the other ASEAN members, but Jakarta has made a point of full ASEAN solidarity on the matter. Unfortunately for both countries, especially in the longer run, the Chinese ocean claims overlap with Indonesia’s economic zone in one area, which happens to be part of the world’s largest gas field off the Natuna Islands. The Indonesian government has reacted very negatively to what it sees as Chinese attempts at intimidating its neighbors. When some ASEAN states tried to raise Law of the Sea concerns at the ASEAN regional forum meeting in 2010, the Chinese foreign minister reminded his counterparts very sharply about the difference in size between China and its southern neighbors. The Indonesians will not have it; a former top foreign policy maker told me afterward that “Indonesia is a serious country that will not be bullied.”

  It is not surprising, then, that the Indonesian armed forces in 2009 carried out a joint exercise with the United States, code-named Garuda Shield. They, and other ASEAN militaries, stress that they believe a US pres
ence in the region is needed in order to balance the growing power of China. The Indonesians have also sought closer relations with India, China’s rival further west. China’s response has been halting. Most Chinese leaders believe that a gradual and measured approach to Southeast Asia, combined with China’s rising economic power, will prevent great power rivalries in the region. They tend to stress China’s historical ties to the area, and their peaceful development over a long period of time. But Beijing is in no mood to barter away what it sees as Chinese rights in return for a stable relationship. In 2010 China held its biggest naval exercises ever in the South China Sea, with ships from all three main Chinese fleets participating. For the first time since the fifteenth century, China has a predominant naval presence in the southern seas.

  NOTHING SYMBOLIZES THE CHANGE in China’s international fortunes better than its relationship with Russia. When our story began, back in the eighteenth century, Qing China was predominant along its northern borders. Then, for almost two hundred years, Russia expanded and China retreated. Now, in the early twenty-first century, China is back in the driver’s seat and sets the terms for how interaction with its northern neighbors will take place. All of this change has happened in little more than thirty years. While China strengthened its economy and its state, the Soviet experiment collapsed, leaving Russia in political chaos and economic free fall. But while China’s newfound strength sets the tune, the links with the Soviet successor states are far from unproblematic as seen from Beijing. Their political disorder means uncertainties in many aspects of relations with China, from access to raw materials to antiterrorism. It is difficult to see easy ways forward for China’s northern policies.

  During the last years of the Soviet era, China spent almost two decades in a stale relationship with Moscow. It was mostly driven by an exaggerated and ideologically based fear of Red Army power. Deng Xiaoping tried to limit the conflict in the mid-1980s, mainly because of a growing concern that the United States could be getting too preponderant in international affairs. But very little came out of the détente with the Soviets, even after Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985. The Chinese leaders feared that Gorbachev was out to cut a deal with the United States and Western Europe, leaving the Soviet Union free to step up its military presence in eastern Asia. In 1988, as it became clear that the USSR was not only planning to withdraw from Afghanistan but also wanted the Vietnamese to withdraw from Cambodia, Deng increased diplomatic contacts with Moscow. These contacts culminated in Gorbachev’s visit to China in the spring of 1989. The visit had a great symbolical importance. Mao Zedong had gone to Moscow right after becoming leader of the PRC. Gorbachev came to visit Deng in Beijing.

  Gorbachev’s visit should have been a triumph for Deng Xiaoping. It completed Sino-Soviet normalization on criteria put forward by China. But the summit in Beijing could not have come at a more awkward moment. In May 1989, as Chinese and Soviet leaders met in The Great Hall of the People, tens of thousands of students occupied Tian’anmen Square right outside. Many held banners in support of Gorbachev’s democratic reforms. Deng would not be distracted. At eighty-five, he lectured the Soviet leader on the need to put the past behind them. “Looking at the past,” Deng said, “many of the expressions that were used by both sides were empty. . . . The question was not [about] ideological differences. We too were wrong.” The problem had not been different views on Communism, Deng maintained, but Moscow accepting China’s position. “Read my speech [at the Moscow meeting in 1963] . . . its leitmotif is [that] the Soviet Union wrongly imagined the place of China in the world.” Deng listed a series of Russian land grabs from China in the past, ending with “the Chinese province of Outer Mongolia, which today is called the Mongolian People’s Republic.”12 Deng was willing to let the past be past, but only on conditions of historical memory set by Beijing.

  The rapid collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 came as a complete shock to the Chinese leaders. They simply could not imagine that a Communist Party general secretary could accept, first, the banning of the party and, then, the dissolution of the Soviet state, almost without a shot being fired in anger. Whereas the Chinese had used massive force to crush unarmed protest in 1989, Gorbachev had accepted change from below, and allowed the Soviet republics to secede peacefully after first dismantling Moscow’s control over Eastern Europe. Three main explanations developed in the CCP, all of which would have significance for the future: Gorbachev was a fool, seduced by US charms and his own ego into leaving the Soviet peoples defenseless against foreign exploitation. Or the Soviet version of socialism had been so unproductive and behind the times that it had dug its own grave. Or the Soviets had been overextended; they had tried to do too much abroad and when they finally got to domestic reform, it was too late. None of these explanations were mutually exclusive, but where leaders put the emphasis signaled how they wanted to approach China’s own development in the future. Even today the Soviet collapse is a hotly discussed topic among Chinese leaders. They want to learn from the Soviet disaster so as not to follow its example.

  After the Soviet Union was replaced by fifteen separate republics in 1992, the Chinese leaders struggled to keep up with the rapid changes along their northern borders. Eager to portray itself as the epitome of stability in a chaotic world, the CCP in the late 1990s pointed to two examples of what not to do. The wars in the former Yugoslavia demonstrated that post–Cold War Europe was unstable. The chaos in the former Soviet Union showed what could go wrong if large states collapsed. Very soon, though, China began trying to set up mutually beneficial links with Russia. Jiang Zemin and his successor Hu Jintao despaired of working with the first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, who disliked the CCP for being autocrats, and whom they excoriated as a drunk. But the Chinese leaders found it much easier to work with Yeltsin’s successor, the former KGB officer Vladimir Putin. Putin made no secret of his admiration for China’s authoritarian government, social order, and economic success. In July 2001 Russia and China signed a new agreement of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation, to replace the treaty that had lapsed under much acrimony in 1979. The new pact underlined mutual consultations and economic cooperation, in fields such as energy and military technology. The text had a vague anti-US tint, promising to cooperate against countries “interfering in the internal affairs of a sovereign state under all sorts of pretexts.” It also prohibited any support to “terrorists, splittists and extremists” in each country. Finally, Russia recognized Taiwan as part of China and China affirmed that it had no territorial claim against Russia. It was a creaseless treaty, symbolizing a new era in the relationship, but forcing either side to do very little that it did not want to do or preventing it from doing what it had the power to do already.13

  China’s main interest in Russia after 1991 has been economic. With a large population, high growth rate, and limited access to resources, China’s leaders see Russia—with its smaller (and shrinking) population, low internal growth, and an abundance of raw materials—as a supplier of resources China will need for its modernization. Chinese leaders tend to think of such a relationship as mutually beneficial and to be irritated by Russian concerns about growing Chinese influence and physical presence in the eastern parts of Russia. Chinese businessmen are also horrified by the complexities of doing business in and with Russia: The bureaucracy, the corruption, and the amount of time needed even for the simplest of transactions hold back business links, the Chinese think. From a Western perspective watching some of these exchanges is truly instructive: The Chinese—often themselves accused of unconventional business methods—lecture Russians and Central Asians on proper financial conduct, responsibility, and international standards. China is increasingly aware of Russia’s centrality for any future Chinese development plans, but the development of economic interaction has been slow. China’s acute energy needs may put an end to the lethargy, however. The two countries have been negotiating massive new oil and gas pipeline de
als, although both construction and exports are so far hampered by disagreements on prices and volume.

  UNTIL 1991, CHINA’S CONCERN with Central Asia was exclusively about the Soviet Union, an inimical power that was the main threat to Chinese security. At that time the Muslim regions in the west were part of the Soviet state, and in the east the People’s Republic of Mongolia was firmly under Soviet control. China itself controlled Tibet and the southern parts of Mongolia. The vast territory from the Korean borders to the Caspian Sea—a distance almost half the circumference of the globe—seemed frozen in time. Then the Soviet Union collapsed, and everything thawed. The change took the CCP leaders entirely by surprise. Even more than in their relationship with the new Russian state, Beijing hesitated and procrastinated in forming clear policies for the Central Asian region. It is only since the early 2000s that China has begun to expand its power and influence among its Asian neighbors to the north.

  The PRC’s first concern as the USSR collapsed was with military and security issues. Beijing had two main aims. First, it wanted to make sure that the sudden dissipation of authority over sophisticated weapons systems—including nuclear weapons, in the case of Kazakhstan—would not endanger China or its regional interests. Second, it aimed to avoid any support being given by the new states to their secessionist-minded ethnic brethren inside China’s own borders or to those who supported cross-border political projects built on Muslim or Buddhist identities. By the late 1990s both of these threats seemed to have been averted. China cooperated with a US-led program to peacefully rid Central Asia of the weapons of mass destruction its states had inherited from the Soviet Union. It also cooperated with Russia to curb secessionism. In 1996 the two signed an agreement with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan on Deepening Military Trust in Border Regions. Out of that treaty came the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) five years later. SCO’s charter binds the members to seek “multipolarity” (read: avoid a US-dominated world), to combat “terrorism, separatism and extremism,” and to support the “territorial integrity of States and inviolability of State borders.” China, Russia, and the authoritarian leaders who had taken power in the new states were exquisitely lucky with the timing of their new initiative. After the 9/11 attacks on the United States, the Bush administration was willing to ignore the anti-American foundation of the organization and concentrate on working with it to fight real or perceived Islamist threats. In all matters, China was the main beneficiary of the organization named after its economic capital. The SCO helped secure China’s borders and defeat internal opposition. Under it, China became open to settlements of disputes over territory and water with the smaller member states. And the SCO under scored China’s central role in Central Asia. After a century, Beijing was back in the driver’s seat in the region.14