When a US warship steamed through the South China Sea the other day China protested and her neighbours applauded. Washington said it was upholding freedom of navigation in the face of Chinese land reclamation projects that are turning disputed rocks into artificial islands. Beijing warned against provocation from an outsider with no claims of its own in the region. The rest of us were reminded of the dismal determinism of Thucydides’s account of the Peloponnesian war.
The demonstration of US naval power — the ship sailed in waters deemed territorial by China — pointed up the multiple collisions of competing historical claims, geography and shifting power balances fuelling an East Asian arms race. Some say there are now as many submarines prowling the waters of the western Pacific as there once were in the north Atlantic. Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan and Malaysia also contest the “nine-dash line” that asserts Chinese suzerainty over the South China Sea. Tokyo and Beijing are locked in a separate dispute in the East China Sea.
Just before the guided missile destroyer USS Lassen set its course, I joined the serried senior ranks of the People’s Liberation Army at China’s annual international security conference in Beijing. I have never seen so many starred epaulettes.
The Xiangshan Forum, hosted by the Chinese Association for Military Science, is another sign of the changing times. Not so long ago the PLA was, in the minds of westerners, an ineffably secret, some would have said sinister, organisation. The Xiangshan meeting, a competitor of sorts to Singapore’s long-running Shangri La Dialogue, speaks to a military establishment that now wants to be heard on the international stage.
China’s rise has come faster than its own leadership imagined, in part because of the immense damage inflicted on the west by the 2008 financial crash. Beijing now has to learn what it means to be a great power. This is not meant to sound patronising. Rather it is a description of reality. After two centuries, first as a victim of, and then largely a bystander at, global events, China has emerged in the space of a couple of decades as second only to the US.
This is not as easy as it sounds, especially since pretty much everyone else in the neighbourhood would have preferred things to have remained as they were. China is discovering that, like its neighbours, it too must adjust to China’s rise. I caught a small glimpse of this in the Xiangshan discussions. The PLA was founded as a land force to defend Chinese territory against external aggression. Now the generals are slashing troop numbers as they look to build expeditionary reach with naval and air power. This is what rising powers do. Yet I have the impression they are puzzling about how to make the transition.
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Likewise, the nation’s civilian policymakers often struggle to find the balance between assertion of what they see as China’s rightful claims and recognition that rising powers need to reassure. To western ears, there is a dissonance between loud proclamations of inalienable sovereignty over disputed territory and quiet assurances, heard many times at the forum, that Beijing will never use military force in order to prevail.
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What marks out President Xi Jinping from his predecessors is his determination at once to concentrate his personal authority at home — the old collective leadership has been dismantled — and project power abroad. The land reclamation works in the South China Sea are one manifestation of the latter aim; to my mind, the One Belt, One Road strategy to build Chinese influence across Eurasia is a still more ambitious one.
Mr Xi’s decision to hold talks with Taiwan’s outgoing president Ma Ying-jeou — the first such meeting since Taiwan broke from the mainland in 1949 — also suggests a leader willing to take risks. The meeting may be seen to have badly backfired if Mr Ma’s KTM loses to the more overtly nationalistic Democrat Progressives in January’s elections.