A New Set of Great Power
Relationships
Remarks
to the 8th International Conference on East Asian Studies
Ambassador
Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
傅立民大使(美国退休外交官)
Liaoning
University, Shenyang, Liaoning, China
We live in a time of great
strategic fluidity. Borders are
shifting. Lines of control are
blurring. Long-established spheres of
influence are fading away. Some states
are decaying and dissolving as others germinate and take root. The global
economic order is precarious. New
economic and geopolitical fault lines are emerging.
The great powers of North and
South America are barely on speaking terms.
Europe is again riven by geopolitical antagonisms. Ukraine should be a prosperous, independent
borderland between the European Union and Russia. It has instead become a cockpit of strategic
contention. The United States and Russia
have relapsed into hostility. The
post-Ottoman borders of West Asia and North Africa are being erased. Neither Europeans, nor Russians, nor Americans
can now protect or direct their longstanding clients in the Middle East. Brazil, China, and India are peacefully
competing for the favor of Africa. But,
in the Indo-Pacific, China and Japan are at daggers drawn and striving to
ostracize each other. Sino-American
relations seem to be following US-Russian relations into mutual exasperation
and intransigence.
No one surveying this scene
could disagree that the world would benefit from recrafting the relationships
between its great powers. As President
Xi Jinping has proposed, new types of relations might enable the great powers
to manage their interactions to the common advantage while lowering the risk of
armed conflict. This is, after all, the
nuclear age. A war could end in the
annihilation of all who take part in it.
Short of that, unbridled animosity and contention between great powers
and their allies and friends have high opportunity costs and foster the
tensions inherent in military posturing, arms races, instability, and
impoverishment.
But there is no shared vision
and little discussion of what a new pattern of great power relations to promote
peace and development would look like.
In the absence of serious engagement on the issue, the evolution of
great power relations has been left essentially to chance. An altered pattern of such relations is duly,
if haphazardly, coming into being.
Unfortunately, it promises protracted discord and confrontation rather than
reduced strategic friction.
Where is the world headed? If it is headed to nowhere we want to end up,
how do we change course? Where do we
want be? How do we get there? These are the questions this conference and
the world’s statesmen must address.
Exchanges of recriminations about past injustices and humiliations have
exacerbated current tensions. There is
an urgent need to talk less about the past and more about the present and what
might follow it.
What can be done to create a
more peaceful and prosperous future than current trends now promise to
produce? How can we transcend competing
narratives to craft a more secure peace in the Indo-Pacific? How can we promote a sense of trans-Pacific
community rather than rivalry? How can
we reverse current trends toward rising antagonism among the Indo-Pacific’s
great powers?
Understanding how tangles first
became knots can help find ways to untangle them. Any trend has an initial phase and
origin. Solving problems often requires
one to begin at their beginning.
The proximate cause of the
recently increased tensions in the Western Pacific is a series of disputes over
long uninhabited (and mostly uninhabitable) islands, rocks, and reefs in the
East and South China Seas. It is
significant that these places were uninhabited.
Traditional Asian statecraft exercised jurisdiction over people, not
places. Places without people were, in
this conception, no-man’s lands, belonging to none, but accessible to all.
The notion of sovereignty as it
evolved in Europe was quite different.
There the governing authorities exercised jurisdiction over territories
and assigned them to national ownership whether or not there were people in
them. By contrast with this
geography-based approach, the traditional Asian order was human-centered. It saw the allegiance of people to a
particular governing authority, regardless of their location, as the basis of
state jurisdiction.
As in so much else, Japan led
the way to change in Asia by adopting the European concept of sovereignty. It did so both to counter Western imperialism
and to emulate it. The first place to
which Tokyo applied the un-Asian idea of geography-based state authority was
the five islands and three adjacent rocks that make up the Diaoyu Islands [钓鱼岛]. Not having yet embraced the Western idea that
a state is defined by its territory rather than by its people, the Qing
government of China had not seen a need to establish effective control of the
uninhabited Diaoyu Islands. So,
following Western legal norms, Japan declared them “terra nullius” [无人区]. It annexed them in January 1895, at the outset
of the first Sino-Japanese War and used a translation of their English name --
the "Pinnacles" -- to rename them the Senkakus [尖阁群岛].
Within a decade, sovereignty –
signifying independence from subjugation by imperialism and the end of
extraterritoriality – had seized the imagination of nationalists everywhere in
Asia.
Emancipation from foreign rule
through the achievement of sovereign independence is the defining moment of
every state in Asia’s modern history.
Colonialism was deeply humiliating.
The nominal equality of states is the heart of the Westphalian notion of
sovereignty. The peoples of the
Indo-Pacific see this principle as central to their hard-won status as respected,
equal participants in international governance.
Recently, some in the West have
proposed to limit sovereignty and allow its breach for “humanitarian”
purposes. Without exception, Asians
reject such innovations. They remain
passionately devoted to the original, uncompromising concept of sovereignty to
which they were converted a century or more ago. This concept takes respect for territorial
integrity and immunity from foreign interference in domestic affairs as inalienable
national rights.
So it is hardly surprising that
Asians have reinterpreted their history to make it conform to the once foreign
notion of sovereignty. Historians have
produced reams of paper documenting close encounters with remote rocks by the
sailors of vanished Chinese and Vietnamese dynasties. But whatever these
sailors were doing, it had nothing to do with either asserting or violating
sovereignty, which was not yet an operative concept in Asia. After World War II, when sovereignty had
indeed achieved such status, a combination of factors – Japan’s retreat to the
home islands, Cold War containment, war in Indochina, Asian military
underdevelopment, and decisions by Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping not to press
China’s claims in either the Diaoyu Islands or the South China Sea – ensured
that these geographic features remained uninhabited no-man’s lands.
In the early 1970s, as the
Sino-American Cold War ended and the United States prepared to return the
Ryukyu Islands to Japanese sovereignty, few noticed that the status of the
region’s uninhabited islands had begun to change. A new law of the sea endorsing exclusive
rights to seabed resources near habitable islands was emerging from
international negotiations. At the same
time, geologists suggested that there might be recoverable reserves of oil and
gas near the Senkaku Islands and in the South China Sea. There was suddenly an economic reason to
demonstrate the habitability of previously deserted islands.
In early 1971, Chinese
nationalists in Taipei sought to one-up Beijing with demonstrations against
American transfer of administrative control of the Diaoyu Islands to
Japan. That made their status a
cross-Strait and domestic issue for China as well as a dispute between Chinese
and Japanese.
In 1973 the former Republic of
Vietnam began to colonize islands in the South China Sea claimed by China. In 1974, China repelled an attempt by Saigon
to drive its fishermen from the southern Paracel Islands and settled in
there. In the late 1970s, the Philippines
began to colonize the Spratly group.
Malaysia followed suit in 1983.
In 1988, China responded by beginning to build its own military
installations in the Spratly Islands.
Today, Hanoi controls twenty-one geographic features there, Manila nine,
Kuala Lumpur five, Taipei one, and Beijing twelve.
Every country claiming territory
and resources in East Asia feels ferociously that it is on the defensive and
that the other claimants are trying to humble it to take what is not rightly
theirs. The disputes evoke patriotic
pride, a felt need to resist foreign bullying, narratives of past imperialism,
and a lust for oil, gas, and fish. All
of them have become inextricably connected to concerns about the implications
of China’s great size and growing military prowess for the regional order. And all now involve a risk of military
confrontation between the United States and China. But the issues in the East and South China
Seas differ in important ways.
The quarrel over the Diaoyu
Islands triggers memories in both China and Japan of the first and second
Sino-Japanese wars and their outcomes.
The first war humiliated China.
The second humbled Japan. The
dispute is also bound up with the unsettled issue of Taiwan’s relationship to
the rest of China. On the Diaoyu Island
issue, even if they say more or less the same thing, China speaks with two
voices – those of Beijing and Taipei.
Until the schizophrenia of the Chinese civil war is cured by some form
of cross-Strait reconciliation, neither Beijing nor Taipei is free to settle
this issue with Japan. In practice, this
means the Diaoyu Island controversy cannot be settled now and probably not for
a long time to come. So some way must be
found to manage it.
Beijing thought it had a deal
with Tokyo to avoid making an issue of the Senkaku Islands. But it in 2010, a belligerently drunk Chinese
fishing boat captain rammed a Japanese Coast Guard vessel near the
islands. Rather than following precedent
by dealing with the charges against the captain as an administrative matter, an
inexperienced new Japanese government referred the affair to Japan’s domestic
courts. This amounted to a slap in the
face for China, which had counted on Japan continuing to avoid the provocation
of an overt assertion of legal jurisdiction in the Senkakus. Later, Japan “nationalized” the islands to
preclude their political exploitation by bellicose right-wingers. The nationalization set off the current
confrontations.
Tokyo’s continuing refusal to
admit that there is any dispute over sovereignty in the Senkakus has made China
determined to demonstrate that there is indeed a dispute and that Japan cannot
claim unchallenged control of the islands and their adjacent seas. The result is a dangerous near-war between
Chinese and Japanese paramilitary forces.
Even if China and Japan cannot solve the attitudinal problems that have
so badly soured relations between them, both would gain by finding a
face-saving way of shelving their dispute over the Diaoyu Islands, as they did
in practice for the 115 years between 1895 and 2010.
There is nothing to prevent
Tokyo from now restoring the situation to what it was before it became
acute. It could “denationalize” the
islands by transferring their ownership to a private foundation dedicated to preserving
them in pristine condition, free of human intrusions and legal wrangling over
control. If China really wants to set
the issue aside, as it says it does, this would allow it to do so. If the Chinese and Japanese governments
cannot discuss and arrange this, civil society in the two countries can surely
do it for them.
By contrast with the Diaoyu
Islands issue, where no solution is quite clearly the best solution, there is
nothing for any party to gain from delay in resolving the disputes in the South
China Sea. Every island, rock, and reef
that can be occupied there has now been seized by one or another claimant. With one exception – the Second Thomas Shoal
[仁爱礁] – there is not even a
dispute about which nation is in effective possession of what. Unless the claimants are prepared to go to
war, none can hope to expand its current holdings. None of the geographic features in the South
China has much importance in and of itself.
There is therefore little, if any incentive to dispossess others of what
they now have. War in the South China
Sea makes no sense.
The continuing uncertainty about
whether force will be used to alter the current status quo is nevertheless
having significant strategic consequences.
In practice, given China’s size, wealth, and military power, concern
centers on China. As then Foreign
Minister Yang Jiechi correctly noted in 2010, "China is a big country and
other countries are small countries, and that's just a fact." That fact is not going to go away. Indeed, the gap between Chinese and Southeast
Asian power is rapidly widening. In the
absence of U.S. opposition, China has the ability to take what it wants from
its smaller neighbors by force with relative ease. The fear that it might seek to do so drives
China’s neighbors to seek American military backing to counter what they
perceive to be a “China threat.” This
understandable but unhealthy dynamic is pushing the United States and China into
military posturing and confrontation. As
long as the status quo in the South China Sea remains insecure, it will
continue to do so.
It would be in everyone’s
interest to bring this pointless drama to an end. All that would be required to do that would
be to accept a fact: the current state of affairs cannot be changed except at
unacceptable cost to all concerned. In
practice, whatever the historical justice or injustice of its claim to a place
in the South China Sea or how that place was occupied, every claimant is going
to keep what it now has. Vietnam is not
going to drive China from the Paracels [西沙]. The Philippines will never dislodge Taipei’s
forces from Taiping Dao or Beijing’s from Johnson Reef [赤瓜噍]. For very
sound reasons of national strategy, China will not seek to conquer the islands
and reefs held by Vietnam, the Philippines, or Malaysia.
In the end, therefore, resort to
the well-established international legal principle of uti possidetis is the obvious solution. This Latin phrase means that, in the absence
of agreement to the contrary, everyone is entitled to keep what they have
regardless of how they got it. Agreement
between the claimants to apply this principle and the law of the sea to the
South China Sea would end their disputes over territory, quell concerns about
armed conflict, and facilitate the legal apportionment of seabed resources.
Neither of the proposals I have
outlined – for the reshelving of the Senkaku issue and the resolution of South
China Sea disputes – requires outside mediation. Both would be Asian solutions, crafted by
Asians themselves. But both would, I am
confident, be welcomed internationally, including in my own country. After all, the result would be a significant
reduction in tensions in Asia and between the United States and China. That could, in turn, facilitate progress
toward defining a new and more productive pattern of relations between the
great powers of the region and the world.
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