China claims “indisputable sovereignty” over the South China Sea. “How would you feel if I cut off your arms and legs?” asked Chinese navy commander Wu Shengli at a forum in Singapore. “That’s how China feels about the South China Sea,” which Chinese officials refer to as “blue national soil.”26
China’s claim to the South China Sea is, in its own words, historical. Chinese analysts argue that their forebears discovered the islands in the South China Sea during China’s Han dynasty in the second century bc. They argue that in the third century ad, a Chinese mission to Cambodia made accounts of the Paracels and Spratlys; that in the tenth through fourteenth centuries during the Song and Yuan dynasties many official and unofficial Chinese accounts indicated that the South China Sea came within China’s national boundaries; that during the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries the various maps of the Ming and Qing dynasties included the Spratlys in Chinese territory; and that in the early twentieth century during the late Qing dynasty the Chinese government took action to exercise jurisdiction over the Paracels. This is to say nothing of the de facto rights Chinese fishermen have enjoyed in the South China Sea for centuries, and the detailed records they have kept of islands, islets, and shoals.27
Then there were the various official maps made by the Nationalist Guomindang government before and after World War II, incorporating South China Sea dry-land formations into Chinese territory. These maps also featured the U-shaped cow’s tongue, a historical nine-dashed line that, as Chinese analysts argue, preceded the interpretations of contemporary international law as stipulated in the United Nations’ Convention on the Law of the Sea. Nevertheless, as the analyst Mingjiang Li points out, many Chinese experts accept that the historical nine-dashed line does “not translate to full sovereignty over the whole South China Sea.” An example of China’s willingness to compromise is its 2004 maritime boundary agreement with Vietnam over the Gulf of Tonkin, where China is entitled to 46.77 percent of the Gulf and Vietnam 53.23 percent.28 However, the Gulf of Tonkin is a special geographical case: a semi-enclosed appendage of the South China Sea where Vietnam and China are in such claustrophobic proximity that it makes sense for China to compromise on the issue, without giving up its claims on the larger sea. Though China seeks dominance, do not assume it will be unreasonable. On the other hand, the cow’s tongue cannot be conceded too easily for fear of a nationalist backlash in China.
China is following up its historical claims with military movements. It has relocated its new SSN nuclear attack submarines and SSBN nuclear ballistic missile submarines from Qingdao in the north, across the Yellow Sea from South Korea, to Yulin, on Hainan Island in the heart of the South China Sea, where Chinese subs have been able to roam at will since the 1990s.29 China has stationed troops of the People’s Liberation Army on many of the disputed islands and atolls in the region, where China has built elaborate signal stations.30 Hainan, in particular, has an extensive electronic military infrastructure in place. By home-porting its newest submarines in Hainan, alongside its extensive communications and intelligence-gathering infrastructure, China, write Bussert and Elleman, is “exerting regional maritime control incrementally.”31 In effect, China is using its land to control the sea.32 Though far out at sea, too, China is ambitious—as it develops its aerial refueling program to project military power from the sea throughout the South China Sea.33 Indeed, while the South China Sea fleet is historically the last of China’s fleets to modernize, that is rapidly changing as China for the last decade has been sending its newest naval combatants and aircraft to the region. Hainan Island, jutting out in the direction of Vietnam, allows China its most proximate perch on the South China Sea. The new naval base at Yalong Bay “sprawls across a spacious tract of land” with one-thousand-meter-long piers for surface warships and 230-meter piers for submarines, which will also be serviced by a special submarine tunnel to ward off aerial surveillance. Even as Southeast Asian countries modernize their own air and sea forces, most notably Malaysia—with its new F-15SG fighter jets, Archer-class submarines, and Formidable-class frigates—they continue to fall behind China.34
Actually, there is nothing unusually aggressive about anything China is doing. China is a great demographic and economic power, enjoying the geography of a vast continent with a long seaboard in the tropics and temperate zone. The fact that it seeks to dominate an adjacent sea crowded with smaller and much weaker powers, where there is possibly a plentitude of oil and natural gas, is altogether natural. If it weren’t, great power politics over the course of the past few millennia would not have been as they have. University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer offers this challenging assertion: “An increasingly powerful China is likely to try to push the U.S. out of Asia, much the way the U.S. pushed the European powers out of the Western Hemisphere. Why should we expect China to act any differently than the United States did? Are they more principled than we are? More ethical? Less nationalistic?”35 In sum, unless China is stopped or slowed in its track by a domestic socioeconomic upheaval, the U.S. military will have to make some serious accommodation with a rising Chinese military power, with great political ramifications for the states in the region.
What would be the larger strategic effect of China becoming the dominant military power in the South China Sea? In other words, does the South China Sea represent something existential for the Middle Kingdom? It is at this point where one should bring the American experience in the Caribbean more fully into the discussion, so as to provide historical context for the deployment of all these submarines, fighter jets, and so on. The history of the Caribbean adds another dimension to the current tensions in the South China Sea.
We might call the Caribbean stretching from Florida to Venezuela, together with the Gulf of Mexico, the Greater Caribbean. This Greater Caribbean, which unites North and South America into a single coherent geopolitical system, is roughly the size of the South China Sea—fifteen hundred miles in one direction and one thousand miles in the other. But the two seas have the opposite visual effect on the map: whereas the South China Sea is defined by continental and island masses around it, the Caribbean is defined by the cluster of islands, big and small, in its very center. But as we know, the map is deceptive unless we peer very closely at it: for the South China Sea is indeed filled with many geographical features, however microscopic, even as they hold the key to significant energy resources.
The sugar revolution holds the key to Caribbean history, bringing an increase in trade in goods and slaves. By 1770, every piece of the Caribbean was the colonial possession of some European state. But with the waning of the slave trade and the shift toward an interest in the temperate lands of North and South America, European enthusiasm for the Caribbean dissipated, too. It was this period that saw the emergence of the United States as an imperial force. The spread of the United States across temperate zone North America was as “rapacious” as anything, for example, the Chinese engaged in while fulfilling their own continental destiny.36 Indeed, when the United States was in an earlier phase of its modern development than China is presently—especially in terms of the political consolidation of its home continent—the United States was already seeking to dominate the Greater Caribbean, which it naturally saw as falling within its geopolitical sphere of interest. That is what the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 was primarily about. By the early nineteenth century, Latin America had largely become free of European rule, and President James Monroe and Secretary of State John Quincy Adams were dead set against European power returning in the form of client states. They wanted, in the words of Naval War College professor James R. Holmes, “to freeze the status quo.” Domination of the Greater Caribbean by America meant neither isolationism, nor the subjugation of local peoples, nor the abjuration of international cooperation. Indeed, while the Monroe Doctrine was being promulgated, the U.S. Navy was working with Great Britain’s Royal Navy to police the Caribbean, in a joint effort to end the slave trade.37 Rather than seek to keep Europea
n navies out of the Caribbean altogether, President Monroe sought only to keep them from reestablishing footholds on land in the region. The Monroe Doctrine was far more subtle than commonly supposed.
The key geographical fact about the Caribbean is that it is close to America and was far from the great European powers of the age, just as the South China Sea is close to China but far from America and other Western powers. Of all the European powers, the British, with the world’s greatest navy and bases in Jamaica, Trinidad, British Guiana, British Honduras, and the Lesser Antilles, were, like the U.S. Navy today in the South China Sea, best positioned to challenge the United States in the Caribbean at the turn of the twentieth century. But the British did not challenge the Americans, because they knew the latter would fight hard to defend the maritime extension of their own North American continent. (For the same reason, the United States must now be careful of openly challenging China in the South China Sea.) Moreover, while the British were a key economic and military factor in the Caribbean, by 1917, U.S. economic influence over the Caribbean, born of geographical proximity and a burgeoning American economy, surpassed that of Britain—just as China has come to surpass the influence of the United States in Asia. “The American Mediterranean,” is what the Caribbean came to be called.38
At the turn of the twentieth century, writes historian Richard H. Collin, “the complex confluence of what we generally call modernism—transportation, communication, and industrial technology—transformed the world.”39 And modernism led to all forms of gunboat diplomacy to protect new economic interests, just as postmodernism leads today to an air, naval, and electronic and cyber-warfare buildup in Asia. Modernism also led to the American desire to build an isthmian canal athwart Central America, to link the Greater Caribbean with the Pacific Ocean.
The modern age began in full force in the Western Hemisphere with the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898 in Spanish-held Cuba, which led, in succession, to the American defeat of the Spanish in the Philippines in the South China Sea. The historian Collin writes: “The United States demonstrated to itself and to Europe that it could fight and win a foreign war. With former Confederates fighting side by side with Union soldiers, military unification cemented the political and economic reunion that had already given the post-Civil War United States its awesome” power.40 The Spanish-American War, which arose partly out of the need to control the Caribbean sea lanes, also meant the death of America’s nonhegemonic exceptionalism, as it, too, acquired an empire of sorts. Theodore Roosevelt, who in 1898 led his Rough Riders in a charge up San Juan Hill in Cuba, would a decade later, as a retiring president, be the ruler of Spain’s former colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific, the builder of the Panama Canal, the winner of a Nobel Peace Prize for settling a war between Russia and Japan, and the commander of a twenty-two-battleship navy. Likewise, if China’s benign and nonhegemonic view of itself becomes increasingly untenable, it would only be following in America’s footsteps. Collin writes, “Eliminating Europe from the New World was the cornerstone of Roosevelt’s foreign policy.”41 So will China, according to Mearsheimer, have as a goal of grand, long-term strategy the elimination of America from Asia?
The Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, issued in 1904, stated that the United States “would interfere with them [the peoples of the Greater Caribbean] only in the last resort, and then only if it became evident that their inability or unwillingness to do justice at home and abroad had violated the rights of the United States or had invited foreign aggression to the detriment of the entire body of American nations.” Roosevelt’s secretary of war, Elihu Root, specifically rejected the policy of the Grover Cleveland administration that the United States was “practically sovereign” in the Greater Caribbean. Root said, “we arrogate to ourselves not sovereignty … but only the right to protect.” Root had in mind crises in the Dominican Republic and Venezuela, where bankrupt and outlaw regimes were threatened with intervention by European creditors, who might then convert customs houses into naval bases. Roosevelt, much as he bristled at the irresponsibility of those regimes, was not about to let Europeans take advantage of the situation. Coups and breakdowns also led to American small-scale and large-scale interventions in Panama and Cuba, even as political crises dominated Colombia and the Central American states: many, to varying extents, threatening to invite European interference. Moreover, Roosevelt wanted to prevent “a strong Germany from replacing a weak Spain” in the Caribbean, as Kaiser Wilhelm II built up his naval force in the decade prior to World War I.42 Just as the Caribbean was the natural maritime extension of the continental United States, it was also the part of America’s security environment most vulnerable to European attack. Finally, it was necessary to shape the political environment for the digging of the Panama Canal.
American military deployments were accompanied by economic hegemony: the guaranteeing of loans known as “dollar diplomacy,” and the regulation of the region’s currencies by pushing as many countries as possible to adopt the gold standard and make their money readily convertible with the dollar.43 Later on, the full-scale production of oil in Trinidad and Cuba would add another motivation to American involvement.44 In the end, the years of the Roosevelt administration marked the culmination of American domination of the Greater Caribbean, which would continue for decades with more American military and economic interventions, notably the nineteen-year American occupation of Haiti that began with a Marine landing in 1915. Theodore Roosevelt accomplished three goals relevant to what China may yearn for today in the South China Sea: he ejected Europe from the Caribbean, even as he moved closer to Europe politically, all the while tempering American power with a deeper understanding of the sensitivities of the peoples of Latin America.45 Borrowing from Roosevelt, Chinese grand strategists should want to weaken American involvement in the South China Sea sufficiently so as to exercise de facto hegemony over their own Asian Mediterranean, while they maintain cordial political and economic relations with Washington and temper their own power through a greater appreciation of the problems and peoples of Southeast Asia.
Obviously, there are great differences between the American and Asian Mediterraneans. The Caribbean states and statelets of the turn of the twentieth century were rickety, unstable, and volatile affairs; not so the formidable entities around the South China Sea, which, with the exception of the Philippines and Indonesia, are strong states, and in the case of Vietnam, a potential middle-level power if it can get its economy in order. And even the Philippines and Indonesia (the latter on the outskirts of the South China Sea) are demographically massive polities whose political and economic structures, as weak as they are compared to neighboring states, are still far more developed than those of the early-twentieth-century Caribbean. The constant mayhem with its consequent interventions that was a feature of Greater Caribbean political life is barely a factor in the South China Sea.
And yet there is a glaringly obvious similarity. They are both marginal seas that are extensions of continent-sized nations: the United States and China. The United States, according to the mid-twentieth-century Dutch-American geostrategist Nicholas J. Spykman, became a world power when it took unquestioned control over the Greater Caribbean. For the basic geographical truth of the Western Hemisphere, he says, is that the division within it is not between North America and South America, but between the area north of the equatorial jungle dominated by the Amazon and the area south of it. Colombia and Venezuela, as well as the Guianas, although they are on the northern coast of South America, are functionally part of North America and the American Mediterranean. Once it came to dominate the American Mediterranean, that is, the Greater Caribbean, and separated as it is from the Southern Cone of South America by yawning distance and a wide belt of tropical forest, the United States has had few challengers in its own hemisphere. Thus the domination of the Greater Caribbean, observed Spykman, gave America domination of the Western Hemisphere, with power to spare for influencing the balance of po
wer in the Eastern Hemisphere. First the Greater Caribbean, next the world.
Likewise with China in the Asian Mediterranean. Domination of the South China Sea would certainly clear the way for pivotal Chinese air and naval influence throughout the navigable rimland of Eurasia—the Indian and Pacific oceans both. And thus China would become the virtual hegemon of the Indo-Pacific. That would still not make China as dominant in the Eastern Hemisphere as the United States has been in the Western Hemisphere, but, in and of itself, it would go a long way toward making China more than merely the first among equals of Eastern Hemispheric powers, with political and economic energy to spare for influencing states in the Western Hemisphere to a greater extent than it already has, especially in the Southern Cone, but also in the Caribbean. The South China Sea, in other words, is now a principal node of global power politics, critical to the preservation of the worldwide balance of power. While control of it may not quite unlock the world for China as control of the Greater Caribbean unlocked the world for America, the Caribbean, remember—even with the Panama Canal—has never lain astride the great maritime routes of commerce and energy to the degree that the South China Sea presently does.
So here we have a more prosperous and militarizing Asia, the very essence of capitalistic dynamism, with the Asian Mediterranean as its focal point. In the race for armaments in the South China Sea, China is increasing the distance between it and its neighbors, and so over time may come close to replicating America’s achievement in the Greater Caribbean. But such realizations represent only the sharp outlines of the South China Sea region’s political, economic, and cultural cartography. To fill in the map with richly painted brushstrokes requires dropping down from thirty thousand feet to ground level in the individual countries themselves.
Asia's Cauldron Page 6