Banyan: The perils of candour

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

PUBLIC rows can be a welcome relief from the stifling obfuscation and pussyfooting courtesy in which much diplomacy is cloaked. So optimists saw an unseemly spat in Singapore on June 1st—between China on the one hand, and America and Japan on the other—as a positive development. Mealy-mouthed antagonists were at least speaking frankly about their concerns, clearing the air. Frayed tempers exposed the concealed limits of national patience. Through the murk of mutual misunderstanding, the edges of “strategic clarity” could at last be discerned. That clarity, however, is not an unmixed boon: it revealed the depth of the gulf separating China’s view of its future role from the West’s hopes about what sort of great power China might become.

The forum for the tiff was this year’s Shangri-La Dialogue, an annual shindig for Asia’s defence establishments, held in a hotel of that name in Singapore. As an opportunity to air the region’s security concerns, this year’s dialogue, the 13th, was well timed. Such worries have been mounting sharply over the past six months, as China’s neighbours have taken fright at what they see as its aggressive pursuit of disputed territorial claims.

In November 2013 China unilaterally declared an Air-Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ) in the East China Sea. It covered the Senkaku or Diaoyu islands, which are administered by Japan. In January it announced the equivalent of an ADIZ for fish, in the waters of the South China Sea, requiring foreign fishing vessels to seek its permission. Then, in May, China moved a massive oil rig, accompanied by a large flotilla, to drill in waters seen by Vietnam as part of its Exclusive Economic Zone; it started construction work at a shoal elsewhere in the South China Sea claimed by the Philippines; and it flew fighter jets dangerously close to Japanese surveillance planes near the Senkakus.

China probably feared all along that this year’s dialogue would be an opportunity for concerted China-bashing, orchestrated by America, with Japan as the lead soloist. That fear will have solidified into a near-certainty when it learned that the keynote speech would be delivered by Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, whom China shuns as a troublemaker intent on reviving Japan’s militarist past.

So the Chinese delegation was not headed, as others have been, by its defence minister. Some of the top brass from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), however, were in attendance, hackles poised to be raised. They were duly offended when Mr Abe’s speech turned out to be largely, if implicitly, directed at China and its recent behaviour. Mr Abe promised that Japan will play an enhanced role in regional security. He volunteered an offer of patrol boats to the Philippines and Vietnam—seeming, from China’s point of view, to be emboldening those countries to stand up to it. It all seemed to hint at a kind of regional collective self-defence mechanism, aimed at China.

Then Chuck Hagel, America’s secretary of defence, used his speech to endorse Mr Abe’s ideas, and to accuse China of “destabilising, unilateral actions” in the South China Sea. He also stressed the importance of America’s strategic “pivot” or “rebalance” towards Asia. He may have felt the need to counter the disappointment felt among some of America’s Asian allies about a foreign-policy speech that Barack Obama had made on May 28th. The president made no reference to the rebalance, and, in suggesting that terrorism remained the biggest security threat to America, raised questions about whether American strategy had “pivoted” at all. Asians have noticed that the pivot is a policy American leaders tend to talk about only when they are in Asia.

China, however, will have noticed that Mr Obama also said that America “must always lead on the world stage”. The emerging strategic clarity is that China is no longer happy with America “leading” indefinitely in the seas that are China’s backyard. Moreover, Mr Obama said America would “use military force, unilaterally if necessary…when the security of our allies is in danger”. America keeps reminding China that its security treaty with Japan covers the Senkakus, so this could be taken as a threat.

It was left to Lieutenant-General Wang Guanzhong, deputy chief of the PLA’s General Staff Department, to return fire on China’s behalf. He did this with gusto, departing from his prepared speech. He called Mr Hagel’s speech “full of hegemony, full of words of threat and intimidation”. It was “not constructive”. And, in an obvious reference to Mr Abe, General Wang said that China would never allow “ruthless, fascist and militaristic aggression to stage a comeback”.

The consensus among non-Chinese delegates at the dialogue was that General Wang made a pretty poor fist of defending China’s position. His argument was crude, even childish; he dodged specific questions, and at times came close to talking gibberish. But if foreigners thought China had lost the argument, it probably did not care. A big Chinese press corps was on hand to cover their man heroically fighting China’s corner against terrible odds.

If those are the house rules, let’s build a new house

Western diplomats used to talk about how forums such as this were a way of “socialising” China. But China may be losing interest in being welcomed—“accommodated”, as some put it—by a Western-led club. It may well see the whole Shangri-La Dialogue, which is organised by a London-based think-tank, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, as a microcosm of an old world order it no longer feels bound to accept. Viewed from China, that order is one in which the West, and especially America, sets the agenda. They let China in, but only so long as it abides by the West’s house rules; other countries can team up to criticise it, hoping to thwart its rise to great-power status. Meanwhile, far from the discussions in the air-conditioned banqueting rooms of a luxury hotel, China is asserting its claims in the seas around it. There it encounters no resistance it cannot brush aside, for now.

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