China Rises Again – Part II

LOS ANGELES: American engagement with China is frequently described as promoting China’s emergence as a “responsible stakeholder” in the international system. Often unexamined in this dignified but ambiguous formulation is that China may decide, as rising powers sometimes do, that fundamental changes to the international system might suit it better. Against this background, China’s spirited intercept of the surveillance ship USNS Impeccable near Hainan Island on March 8, 2009, acquires deeper significance.

The Impeccable incident fits into a pattern of increasingly assertive attempts by China to leverage its growing resources and capabilities to shift the regional and global balance of power in its favor across a range of fronts. China has shrewdly framed these attempts in the rhetoric of international law and anti-hegemonism, with economic, military, geographic and political ramifications not just for the United States, but for China’s neighbors and others farther afield.

The Impeccable was intercepted approximately 75 miles south of China’s most modern submarine base. This base services a modest but growing fleet of stealthy attack and nuclear ballistic missile subs aimed at projecting Chinese power, countering US naval dominance of the Western Pacific and clouding US security guarantees for Taiwan. As the most advanced submarine detection platform in the US Navy, the presence of the Impeccable in the area no doubt irritated China.

China insists that international law bars virtually all foreign military activities, including reconnaissance, within its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), a band of ocean that extends 200 nautical miles out from its coast. Territorial waters extend out to 12 nautical miles from the coast. Underlying this opinion is a hermetic conception of sovereignty that rejects outside efforts to penetrate national boundaries on humanitarian intervention, human rights and non-proliferation grounds, too. However, the preponderance of opinion, rooted in more than four centuries of treaty and customary law, state practice and theorization, soundly rejects China’s position; the mainstream view by far is that the Impeccable operated legally in China’s EEZ.

The flaws in China’s legal brief are much less interesting than the implications of its argument: 36 percent of the world’s oceans and the airspace above them would be off-limits to most foreign military activities – a paradigm shift in international law. With respect to China, this would attenuate the technological advantages of the US, Russian, Taiwanese and Japanese militaries by limiting their opportunities to intercept communications and acquire up-to-date intelligence on China’s rapidly improving capabilities, especially the detailed technical data required to assess vulnerabilities, prepare the battlefield, deliver precision-guided munitions and track military assets, including submarines.

Currently, the US conducts several hundred reconnaissance missions each year along China’s coast to support its national security interests and defense commitments to partners such as Taiwan, Japan and Korea, some of which operate in and above these waters themselves. Prohibiting these activities would clearly advantage China and catapult its emerging position as the dominant regional power forward.

This is especially true because other nations, irrespective of their relationship with the US, depend on American power to check China’s ambitions and preserve the status quo in the area. Official Chinese maps depict nearly 80 percent of the South China Sea as lying within China’s maritime boundaries. Domestic Chinese legislation also asserts general territorial sovereignty over disputed and largely uninhabited islands in those waters that are claimed by at least six other countries and over similar islands claimed by Korea and Japan in the East China Sea. China’s views on whether its territorial waters extend to these disputed islands and whether the islands themselves generate additional EEZs remain ambiguous.

But evidence indicates that it understands these claims expansively, which would convert up to 3 million square kilometers of ocean – including the sea lanes through which staggering volumes of international trade flow, the fishing grounds, and the rich, untapped reserves of oil, minerals and natural gas contained within them – into a virtual Chinese lake and push foreign military activities farther out into the open ocean, largely at the expense of weaker neighbors. To be clear, China reserves the right to operate freely in these disputed waters because technically it regards them as its own. Accordingly, it has conducted military exercises in the EEZ claimed by Vietnam and sent submarines, research vessels and trawlers outfitted for espionage into the EEZ and, on occasion, even territorial waters claimed by Japan.

Guan Jianqiang, a Chinese legal scholar, notes that China has recorded more than 200 instances of US naval vessels collecting intelligence in its EEZ, and analysts assume that it has mounted many more challenges to them than the comparatively small number of publicized cases would suggest. The US can be expected to continue its policy of defying such challenges and maintaining a high level of activity in and above these waters, effectively daring China to stop it. Indeed, between 2000 and 2007, the US, under its Freedom of Navigation program, dispatched military vessels to China and 25 other countries with the express purpose of heading off creeping restrictions on the Law of the Sea, demonstrating through countervailing state practice that its own views remain the de facto and de jure standards. Not surprisingly, these operational assertions are often received as acts of gunboat diplomacy and in some cases led to bloodshed.

During the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union concluded bilateral protocols to prevent accidents and clashes as they robustly tested each other around the world. Despite several years of negotiations, the US and China have failed to reach similar accords and, given China’s basic position on its EEZ, the prospects are discouraging. The current battle of wills, as evidenced by the Impeccable incident, the fatal 2001 mid-air collision in the same area between a Chinese fighter and a US Navy EP-3 surveillance plane, and China’s 2002 dispatch of warships to surround the oceanographic survey ship USNS Bowditch in the Yellow Sea, invites miscalculation, confrontation and casualties on both sides.

By regularly using civilian proxies in these encounters, China courts tragedy. Only one of the five Chinese vessels sent to intercept the Impeccable was military. Chinese trawlers approached within 25 feet of the Impeccable and risked collision by stopping abruptly in its path. They provocatively attempted to snag and recover its state-of-the-art sonar array, while the sole Chinese naval vessel on the scene observed at a safe distance. The theatrics of flag-waving trawlers and the distasteful possibilities of Chinese civilian casualties at the hands of the US military raise uncomfortable questions about China’s methods and motives.

It’s natural for China to flex its growing muscles and vigorously pursue its national interests, and the international system should accommodate these developments. But the questions are – how and to what ends? China claims its rise is a peaceful one while the US calls upon to China to become a “responsible stakeholder.” The Impeccable incident highlights the gaps between their positions.

Under the cover of tendentious, even plainly wrong, readings of international law, China is signaling across a range of issues, at times truculently, an intention to press its new power to reshape the international system. Rising China wants to change the rules of the game.