South Korea’s attitude towards North Korea and China on the one hand and the United States on the other, however, remains the subject of major domestic argument: after the two liberal administrations of Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun, which emphasized reconciliation with North Korea and sought closer relations with China, the election of conservative president Lee Myung-bak in 2008 marked a shift towards a tougher stance on North Korea and a closer relationship with the United States. There is also tension between China and South Korea over the precise ancestry of the ancient kingdom of Koguryo, which occupied territory in North Korea, South Korea and also over the Chinese border, and is claimed by both Korea and China as part of their history. In the longer run, however, it seems likely that South Korea will continue to move closer to China and further away from the United States, perhaps to the point where eventually the US-Korean alliance will be dissolved — but that is unlikely to happen within less than a decade, probably rather longer. [932] In the meantime, it is possible that the United States will eventually withdraw its troops from the Korean Peninsula if and when a solution is found to the present crisis. [933] The rapprochement between China and South Korea is a powerful echo of earlier times when Korea was a close and important tributary state of China, a situation that lasted many centuries until China ’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War. [934]
Australia cannot be counted as part of East Asia, but belongs more properly to Asia-Pacific, which embraces that region together with the Pacific countries. One of the great geo-cultural anomalies is that a country that lies just to the south of Indonesia has an overwhelmingly white majority and has long been considered a Western country. Though historically part of the British Empire, ever since 1942 it has enjoyed an extremely close relationship with the United States, for most of that period being its closest and most loyal ally in the Asia-Pacific region. Over the last decade, however, China ’s growing economic power has exercised a mesmerizing effect on the island continent. By far the most important reason for this is China ’s voracious appetite for Australia ’s huge deposits of raw materials, especially iron ore. Largely as a result of Chinese demand, the Australian economy enjoyed uninterrupted growth for almost two decades until the financial meltdown and would appear to be in the process of decoupling its fortunes from the Western economy, especially the United States. [935] Australia is one of the relatively few countries in the world that has experienced a double benefit from China ’s rise: namely the falling price of manufactured goods and, until the global downturn, the rising price of commodities. If twentieth-century Australia was dominated by New South Wales and Victoria, and the rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne, this century will be characterized by the rise of the mining states, Western Australia and Queensland, with China the reason. China ’s interest in Australia ’s vast natural deposits is not confined to that of a customer; its role as an investor is becoming increasingly important, with the purchase of stakes in Australian mining firms, including, most dramatically so far, the proposal for the Chinese state-owned aluminium producer Chinalco to buy a large chunk of the debt-laden Anglo-Australian mining group Rio Tinto.
Not surprisingly, China ’s growing role in Australia ’s prosperity is having important political ramifications. The clearest expression of this hitherto has been the election of Labour prime minister Kevin Rudd in 2007. A fluent Mandarin-speaker, well versed in Chinese culture and tradition, and possessed of excellent contacts in Beijing (having worked there for many years), he can be described as the first Chinese-orientated political leader to be elected in the West. Although Australia remains very closely aligned with the United States, its growing rapprochement with China seems likely to influence the nature of its relationship with Washington. [936] It is premature to suggest that Australia will at some point distance itself from the United States and in effect bandwagon with China in the manner, for example, of South Korea or Thailand, but it would not be surprising to find Australia becoming more sensitive about its relations with China and making these sensitivities known to the Americans. In that way Australia might become the Western voice of China. A key factor in this will be the course of Australian politics: Rudd’s predecessor as a Labour prime minister was Paul Keating, the first Australian premier to advocate the turn towards Asia, while his successor, the long-serving Liberal prime minister John Howard, could hardly have been more pro-American. In the much longer run, however, it is conceivable that Australia will move into China ’s orbit and become increasingly distant from the United States as the latter’s power and utility decline.
ECHOES OF THE PAST
In the light of the region’s realignment towards China, we can now return to the question of how East Asia’s relationship with China is likely to evolve and, in particular, to what extent it might bear some of the hallmarks of the tributary system. The tributary system and Westphalian system are often regarded as polar opposites and mutually exclusive, the former involving a hierarchical relationship, the latter based on relations of equality between sovereign nation-states. In fact, as mentioned in Chapter 7, the Westphalian system in practice has never been quite that simple. For most of its history it was largely confined to a group of European states, since until the second half of the twentieth century the great majority of countries in the world did not enjoy independence, let alone equality. [937] Even after these countries became sovereign nation-states, in the great majority of cases they were to enjoy nothing like equality with the United States or the West European nations, a situation which was exacerbated during the Cold War, when nation-states experienced what was, in practice, limited sovereignty in their relationship with the superpower to which they owed their allegiance. Life has not been that dissimilar in the era of the single superpower, with most countries enjoying varying degrees of limited sovereignty in their relationship with the United States. Given the profound inequalities in interstate relations, the concept of equality in the Westphalian system is thus legalistic rather than real. In practice, as with the tributary system, it has strong hierarchical features. [938] Like the tributary system, the Westphalian system also has an influential cultural component, namely the idea of hegemony or soft power. In other words, the distinction between the tributary and Westphalian systems is not quite as clear-cut as one might think. Seen in these terms, the restoration of elements of the tributary system in a modernized form does not seem so far-fetched. Some of the old building blocks, moreover, remain firmly in place. Chinese culture not only continues to enjoy great prestige throughout East Asia, but its influence is once again on the rise, helped by the presence of a much larger Chinese minority than existed in earlier times, especially in South-East Asia. Furthermore, in North-East Asia, and also Vietnam, Confucianism is a shared heritage in a not dissimilar way to the role of the Graeco-Roman tradition in Europe.
Historically, the tributary system was the international concomitant of China ’s identity and existence as a civilization-state. And just as the influence of the civilization-state remains palpable in the domestic sphere, so the persistence of the tributary state is apparent in the realm of international relations. In important respects, indeed, Chinese attitudes towards concepts of sovereignty and interstate relations continue to owe at least as much to the tributary legacy as to the contemporary Westphalian system. [939]
The Chinese concept of sovereignty differs markedly from that in Western-inspired international law. Take the dispute over the sovereignty of the Spratly and Paracel islands, which, though shelved for now — following the agreement with ASEAN — remains, in the long term, unresolved. [940] The Spratly and Paracel islands are barely islands at all, but a collection of uninhabited rocks, many of which are usually under water, situated in the South China Sea, the Spratlys to the north of East Malaysia and to the west of the Philippines, and the Paracels to the east of Vietnam. The idea of maritime sovereignty is a relatively recent innovation, dating from 1945 when the United States declared that it intended to exercise sovereignty over its territorial
waters, [941] and it is this body of law that essentially forms the basis of the claim by the various South-East Asian states to the Spratlys and Paracels. China, in contrast, rests its argument on ‘historic claims’, namely that the islands have for thousands of years formed an integral part of the south-east frontier of the Middle Kingdom in the same manner, for example, as the land border to the north of Beijing. Expeditions to the islands have discovered various Chinese artefacts, such as chinaware and copper cash from the Tang and Song dynasties, that have been used to buttress these ‘historic claims’ and demonstrate that the islands have long been a part of China. The islands are part of the folklore of Chinese culture, kept alive, in various invocations of the Chinese frontier spirit, by articles written by Chinese journalists who regularly visit the islands. They are shown on many Chinese maps as clearly within the ‘historic claim line’ (see map on p. 293) and therefore as part of China. [942] Hainan Island, off the southern coast of China, may be China’s smallest land province, but it is also regarded — because of the extent of its maritime territory which, as claimed, reaches far into the South China Sea — as its largest ‘ocean province’. [943] In 2007 Beijing established the new Sansha municipality in Hainan Province, which has jurisdiction over three islets that Vietnam claims in the Spratly and Paracel archipelagos. This led to large-scale protest demonstrations outside the Chinese embassy in Hanoi. [944] The idea of ‘historic claims’ finds expression in the Chinese use of intertemporal law, which concerns rights or wrongs in the historical past. Chinese legal scholars argue that: ‘a judicial fact must be appreciated in the light of the laws contemporary with it, rather than the laws in force at the time when a dispute arises.’ [945] This gives force and legitimacy to history rather than the present, to the laws that prevailed during the era of the tributary system rather than the present international legal system.
Map 11. Chinese Claims in the South China Sea
In 1984 Deng Xiaoping suggested ‘the possibility of resolving certain territorial disputes by having the countries concerned jointly develop the disputed areas before discussing the question of sovereignty’. [946] In other words, the question of sovereignty should not necessarily delay moving forward on other issues. Deng’s remark has frequently been cited by Chinese sources in the context of the islands in the South China Sea, where his approach has in practice been followed, and in relation to the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands in the East China Sea that are disputed with Japan; it has also been suggested in connection with Taiwan. [947] While insisting on their ultimate sovereignty over the latter, the Chinese have offered to shelve the matter more or less indefinitely, providing Taiwan does not seek to declare independence, illustrating the flexibility with which the Chinese are prepared to approach the issue. Alternatively, they have suggested that, providing their sovereignty over the island is accepted by the Taiwanese, Taiwan can continue to have its own government, political system and even armed forces. [948]
This highlights another fundamental difference between the Chinese conception of sovereignty and that held in the West — most clearly demonstrated in the attitude displayed by China towards the handover of sovereignty in Hong Kong. The transfer of sovereignty was regarded by the Chinese as non-negotiable, as in the case of all the so-called lost territories — namely, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao and probably the various disputed islands too — which China regards, on the basis of history, culture and ethnicity, as rightly its own. But by Western standards its sovereignty has been exercised in an unusually pliant manner. The British — and Western — narrative concerning Hong Kong was that, following the handover in 1997, the Chinese would transform the territory into something that closely resembled the mainland. This expectation has not been borne out. For the most part, Hong Kong has changed very little. As such, it is utterly atypical of the normal experience of post-colonial transition. The key to understanding the Chinese approach lies in the notion of ‘one country, two systems’, as enshrined in the territory’s constitution, otherwise known as the Basic Law. As far as China was concerned, the issue was the recognition of its sovereignty over Hong Kong rather than whether or not the territory shared the same system of government. [949] The Western approach is different: sovereignty and one-system are seen as synonymous. ‘One country, two systems’ lies in a millennia-old Chinese tradition that acknowledges and accepts the existence of differences between its many provinces, or, to put it another way, that such differences are an inherent and necessary part of a civilization-state. In other words, the civilization-state, like the tributary system which derives from it, is based on the principle of ‘one civilization, many systems’. In contrast, the Western notion of sovereignty rests on the principle of ‘one nation-state, one system’, and the Westphalian system on ‘one system, many nation-states’ [950].
The Chinese attitude towards sovereignty is closely related to the old Confucian concept of ‘harmony with difference’, which has been revived under the present Chinese leader, Hu Jintao. Some Chinese scholars, in fact, have interpreted ‘one country, two systems’ as an example of ‘harmony with difference’. Whereas in Western discourse, harmony implies identity and a close affinity, this is not the case in Chinese tradition, which regards difference as an essential characteristic of harmony. According to Confucius, ‘the exemplary person harmonizes with others, but does not necessarily agree with them; the small person agrees with others but is not harmonious with them.’ [951] Agreeing with people means that you are uncritically the same as them: the opposite of harmony is not chaos but rather uniformity and homogeneity. Interestingly, in China the latter are often associated with the term ‘hegemony’, which is used pejoratively to describe big power behaviour — once the Soviet Union, now the United States — in contrast to ‘harmony’ which is seen as enabling and embracing difference.
In considering the future relationship between China and its East Asian neighbours, it is pertinent to take into account not only the historical legacy of the tributary system but also what might be described as the realpolitik of size. This was clearly a significant aspect of the tributary system, but it is an even more powerful factor in the era of globalization and the modern nation-state. China is anxious to emphasize its desire to exercise self-restraint and respect for the interests of other states, but in the longer run, on the assumption that China continues its economic rise, the disparity between China and the other nations in the region is likely to become ever more pronounced over time. It is not difficult to imagine a scenario in which the inequality between the power of China and that of neighbouring states will be rather greater than that to be found in any other region of the world. Such overweening power will be expressed in a gamut of ways, from economic and cultural to political and military. This is the major factor that lies behind the suspicions latent in the region towards China: the fear not so much of what China is now — especially as it has gone out of its way to reassure its neighbours — but what it might be like in the future. [952] The chief of the Malaysian navy put it like this in 1996: ‘as the years progress, there exist[s]… uncertainty in the form of China ’s behaviour once she attained her great power status. Will she conform to international or regional rules or will she be a new military power which acts in whatever way she sees fit?’ [953] Imagine the relationship, fifty years hence, between a hugely powerful and advanced China, with a population well in excess of 1.5 billion, and Laos and Cambodia, with populations by then of perhaps around 10 million and 20 million respectively; or, for that matter, Malaysia, with perhaps rather more than 30 million people. On grounds of size — let alone the tributary legacy — the relationship between China and its region is bound to be fundamentally different from that between the dominant country and its neighbours in any other region.
What will China be like? How will it act? It is clear that China ’s behaviour towards, and conception of, the region is bound to be heavily influenced by the legacy of the tributary system and its character as a civilization-state. The influence of this wa
y of thinking is already apparent in China ’s attitude towards the Spratly and Paracel islands, Hong Kong and Taiwan. In its own region at least, one can categorically say that China will not simply be a Westphalian nation-state. But even if that is the case, how assertive is China likely to be? Is one to judge China’s future behaviour by the restraint and relative magnanimity that is characteristic of the present regime, or will that be superseded by something altogether more Sinocentric? Could China slowly abandon its present extreme caution and become more forceful in its relations with other countries, for example those, such as India, Japan and the South- East Asian countries, with whom it has territorial disputes which for the time being it has agreed to shelve? [954] As China grows more powerful, it would hardly be surprising if it did become more Sinocentric: in fact, at least in the longer run, that is what one might expect. After all, with the present overwhelming emphasis on economic development and the desire to ensure that there are no distractions, restraint is at least partly a function of priorities: in the reform era, China ’s self-discipline has been huge and impressive. But casting our minds into the future to a time when living standards are much higher and China has established itself as the dominant power in East Asia, how might a more Sinocentric outlook express itself?
Perhaps the best way of answering this question is to look for pointers in the present, however isolated and scattered they might be. There are three examples. The first concerns the Chinese invasion of Vietnam in February 1979, which China described as a ‘punitive war to teach Vietnam a lesson’ about the proximity of Chinese power and its belief that the Vietnamese had not been sufficiently grateful for the assistance they had received from China during the Vietnam War. [955] The language of this war, the tone of imperial condescension, the desire to assert a hierarchical relationship, the need for big brother to teach younger brother a lesson, were a throwback to the days of the pre-modern Chinese world order and the tributary system. [956] In not dissimilar vein, China has used military force in the disputes over the islands in the South China Sea, against the Philippines in 1995 and most notably against Vietnam in 1956, 1974, and again in 1988, when China took six islands in the Spratly area, three Vietnamese ships were sunk and seventy-two Vietnamese seamen killed. [957] These actions all bear the imprint of the tributary system, the need to assert the natural hierarchical order of things, and, if necessary, punish those who dared step out of line. It should be noted, however, that relations between China and Vietnam have improved considerably over recent years, although the enmity between them, which stretches back many centuries, is deeply rooted. [958]
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