In this article I tackle China’s objectives, calculations,
and way of operations as it asserts itself as a mega power and corrects what it
sees as a historical aberration of the past 150 years.
اضافة اعلان
A look at a map of the Pacific Ocean and East Asia may help
understand China’s rise to the status of mega power. The maritime sphere
surrounding China’s eastern and southern borders is under China’s direct
control. No power, not even the US, can now challenge China’s supremacy in this
area.
Another sphere of influence extends to China’s key
neighbors: Japan and Korea to the north, and Vietnam to the south. This is now
the crux of the strategic, yet distant and still cool, face-off between the US
and China.
China’s most important current strategic objective is to
deny the US, and certainly Japan, the ability to challenge its supremacy in
this maritime region, which includes Taiwan as well as the islands contested by
both Japan and China. But the core of the matter here is not any territory, it
is influence.
The US has been building major capabilities exactly at the
edge of this area. Actually, two thirds of all American forces stationed in
Japan are at its maritime border with China. For China, this area has always
been its civilizational realm. Two words merit attention here: “always” and
“civilizational”. China has been absent from that region since Western powers —
initially Britain, then the US — established a presence in the area in the
mid-19th century. And for a period, in the first half of the 20th century, it
was Japan that held sway in the region, including by invading China itself. But
these 150 years are a historical aberration for, before that, for at least
2,000 years, the whole of East Asia was completely under China’s influence.
Influence here transcended political homage from the
region’s rulers to China’s emperor. It meant that social norms, religious or
philosophical foundations, commercial underpinnings, such as customs and
precedents, and key cultural features, including language, all had their
ultimate references in China.
Returning to the state of affairs that existed before the
West’s appearance in East Asia 150 years ago is the central idea behind China’s
rise as a mega power. It is the desire — or aspiration — that the Chinese
Communist Party, supported by large swathes of the population, instils in the
society.
This is why the question of China projecting its power over
its neighbors is not a matter of if but of when. This “when” is a function of
two variables. The first is how resistant East Asian nations will be to this
Chinese expansionism. The offer is clear. In return for their acceptance, China
presents them with major investments, a largely subsidized pan-regional
infrastructure, often developmental support, and of course access to its
colossal market.
This is a historical evolution. In the centuries prior to
the nineteenth, China expected acquiescence to its supremacy on the back of its
unrivalled size, and in its view, cultural superiority. Now, China’s offer is
quite transactional. It is also a restraint offer. China is orchestrating and
executing its expansion in East Asia, in the current phase, so that it stops
short of antagonizing India to the level of mobilization, and short of
resuscitating in Japan its old militant spirit.
But it is the second variable that is crucial to this first
phase of the emerging new global order. That is, America’s response to China’s
expansion in East Asia and the Pacific.
It is highly likely that America seeks to delay — rather
than deny — China’s securing that region for itself. America realizes that for
it, East Asia is the most important theatre in the strategic confrontation with
China. For China, however, East Asia (excluding Japan) is its backyard, that
old domain China’s idea of itself is inextricably linked to.
America will deploy major resources to make China’s
expansion into its region slow, gradual, and crucially costly and fraught.
Ultimately, however, America will yield it to China — for, denying it will mean
war.
Simultaneously, however, America will erect strong barriers
against any further Chinese expansion beyond East Asia. The nuclear submarines
that are at the heart of the new AUKUS arrangement between US, UK, and
Australia are but a clear example of such barriers. America is already putting
its foot down, along a third Chinese sphere of influence, from Japan to
Indonesia’s maritime borders. This way, America is tactically acquiescing to
China’s rise to the status of mega power with a clear, historically backed
sphere of influence in East Asia (excluding Japan), but strategically denying
China the potential of asserting itself as an equal, as a superpower of growing
multiple global presences.
This is an arrangement that China will likely accept — in
the first phase of the emerging new global order.
This means that the next few years will witness pushes and
pulls between America and China in East Asia, a game intended not to mark
territories, but to expend the other’s energies and resources, a new Cold War
largely focused on one specific, though vast, region. And it is the region with
the most promising economic growth and social mobility in the world.
Two more variables arise. The first would be how China will
operate in East Asia. China understands that almost all East Asian countries
are apprehensive about its return. Some are clearly deepening their links with
the US, and so joining its efforts to exact major costs on China as it
re-enters the region.
China’s ability to balance what it considers its historical
right and the grand idea of its rise, with the transactional approach it has
been using in the past decade, will be the most important dynamic to observe
here.
However, the second variable is perhaps more important for,
its implications affect the nature of the emerging order. That is, what will
Japan and India do? These two powerful countries stand at the north and south
of East Asia. And in the same way that China remembers the centuries before its
humiliation in the mid-19th century, Japan and India remember their
centuries-long acute competition with China before the mid-19th century, not to
mention their wars with it in the twentieth. This is why the calculations of
Japan and India are different from those of the US.
The writer is an Egyptian author, commentator, TV presenter
and documentary producer who specializes in regional politics and political
economy affairs.
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