Chinese Aggressions

Paul Rahe warns at Ricochet:

There is trouble on the horizon, and before long it may turn into very big trouble.

In late August, I wrote at length about China's resolute turn back to despotism; about its vehement public repudiation of constitutionalism, the rule of law, and freedom of the press; and about the manner in which Chinese communist cadres are now expected to read Alexis de Tocqueville's classic The Ancien Regime and the Revolution as a warning against a relaxation of party discipline.

There is another dimension to what is going on in China, and it dovetails neatly with the first. In and for a long time after the time of Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese talked softly while carrying a big stick. Deng and his immediate successors understood that the rise of China would elicit anxiety on the part of the Japanese, the Koreans, the Vietnamese, the Taiwanese, and the Filipinos, and they did what they could to allay that anxiety by refraining from doing anything that would suggest on their part aggressive intent.

In the last couple of years, however, all of that has changed; and everywhere where one goes in Asia, an old friend who travels in high circles told me earlier this week, one senses hostility -- not towards the United States but towards one's neighbors. The anger underlying all of this has been stirred by the Chinese, who have been throwing their weight around with ever greater force.

This weekend the Chinese upped the ante. In the South China Sea, between Korea and Taiwan, there are some uninhabited islands, which are called the Senkaku isles by the Japanese and the Diayu isles by the Chinese. Although there are other claimants, these have been controlled for many decades by the Japanese. This weekend, however, China extended its air-defence zone to include the islands ....

... This is a deliberate provocation, and it is clearly meant as a challenge to Japan. In that neck of the woods, the Chinese evidently intend to have their way, and those who do not acquiesce will be made to pay dearly. What we are witnessing is an attempt by the Chinese to assert and establish their hegemony over the entire region. What they aim at is something like what, in the years prior to World War II, the Japanese called the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.

The author goes on to discuss that this aggression by China is based on the belief by Chinese leaders that the United States is well and truly in decline--unable or unwilling to do anything to hinder China's pursuit of regional hegemony--and that it is China's time to assert (or reassert, taking the long historical view) power over the region.

I don't believe that the Chinese leadership necessarily has to believe that the United States is too weak. Rather, the Chinese leadership may be pursuing a strategy that it can assert its dominance and expand its power via a series of pinpricks calculated to, individually, never be enough to threaten the United States enough to cause the United States to directly engage in hostilities. This is a risky strategy unless China is confident that it can quickly neutralize any direct threat from the United States (i.e., disable the Navy and/or American satellites).

It may be true that China is misinterpreting American resolve and capabilities. It is this type of misunderstanding of what America might or might not do which led to the first Persian Gulf War (when Saddam Hussein) underestimated American resolve to resist Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. A similar misunderstanding underlay Japan's attacks on the United States and its interests in 1941, and the invasion of Poland by Germany and Russia which kicked off World War II. But I would be concerned of the possibility that China believes that it can quickly neutralize any American threat.