Despite appearances, China may be getting the message
Fresh from receiving assurances from President Obama that “close US-Japan cooperation is essential in managing and responding to long-standing and emerging threats and challenges in Asia”, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been seeking to shore up support in Europe, with some success. China’s headline actions this week would suggest that none of this is having any modifying effect on its behaviour, but the relatively positive reception given in Beijing to a high-level Japanese political delegation earlier this week provides a hint (no more than that) that China may just be preparing to dilute its policy of maximum assertiveness, at least as far as Japan is concerned.
There has been a tendency within Europe to see difficulties between the US/Japan and China as an opportunity for Europe to exploit. In March 2012, the EU-funded Europe-China Research and Advice Network (Ecran) produced a strategy document in which it argued: “We should bear in mind…that China poses no military threat to Europe. Nor is it an exporter of international terrorism. Its sphere of influence is primarily East and Southeast Asia…where it seeks to protect its borders and to safeguard oil exploration projects in the South China Sea. It also aspires to develop a second line of defence through a naval presence in the Indian Ocean and potentially the Pacific. But in neither case are European interests directly involved – something that promises to benefit the EU in its engagement with China.”
Shortly after this, in December 2012, the EU-funded European Institute for Security Studies (EUISS) put forward a similar argument when it pointed out that the development of EU-China relations had been “facilitated by the absence of conflict issues that could bring the two sides to a military confrontation – unlike the case of US-China relations where the Taiwan factor and US commitment to Asia’s security may lead to military stand-off.”
Startlingly, the report concluded that “China…presents a strategic opportunity to enhance Europe’s role in world affairs and gain autonomy from the US.”
Against this background, it might be thought that Abe would have struggled to gain traction during his visit this week to Europe which took him to Germany, the UK, Portugal, Spain, France, and Belgium. Yet in France, he reached an agreement to start negotiating a deal for the joint development of defence equipment, and the two sides confirmed plans to strengthen cooperation on nuclear energy technology. A summit meeting between the two countries’ leaders is to be held every year, and France’s President Francois Hollande committed France to holding a regular security dialogue with Japan.
While in the UK, Abe and Prime Minister David Cameron also agreed to the launching of regular foreign and defence minister talks and to the joint development of defence equipment and technology. Abe also extracted statements from Hollande, Cameron, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel on the importance of countries staying within international law in connection with territorial claims. And Abe signed a new Individual Partnership and Cooperation Programme (IPCP) with Nato.
None of this is to suggest that Europe is preparing to take sides with Japan in its disputes with China to the extent that the US has, but the relative success of Abe’s European tour, particularly given the propensity (noted above) of EU strategic thinkers in recent years to argue for a European alignment with China, should give Beijing some pause for thought.
Abe’s hope is that China will eventually reach the conclusion that its recent assertiveness in the East and South China Seas may be counterproductive. For the moment there is little indication that this is about to happen, and indeed Chinese actions in the past week would suggest the opposite, with China moving an oil rig into what Vietnam says are its territorial waters and the flare up of a dispute with Philippines over the detention of a Chinese fishing boat on 6 May off Half Moon Shoal in the Spratly Islands.
Vietnamese officials believe that the Chinese decision to send the oil rig into Vietnamese waters was political not commercial. A Vietnamese official said: “This reflected the will of the central government and is also related to the US strategy on Asia.” In other words, it was a pushback against the renewed commitments made by President Obama to the US’s Asia allies during his just-concluded visit to the region.
Nevertheless, despite this apparent riposte to Obama’s Asian tour, it is worth noting that at the beginning of this week a delegation of senior Japanese lawmakers to China received a better reception than might have been expected.
The delegation of ruling and opposition lawmakers was led by Masahako Komura, vice president of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Komura told Zhang Dejiang, number three in the Communist Party of China (CCP), that Abe was keen to hold a formal meeting with China’s President Xi Jinping this year, possibly on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in November in Beijing.
There have been few high-level political contacts since the Japanese government purchased some of the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands from a private owner in September 2012, and Komura’s meeting with Dejiang was the first between a senior member of Japan’s ruling party and a member of the Politburo Standing Committee since Abe came to power in December 2012.
Interestingly, the Japanese delegation also met with Li Xiaolin, the daughter of former Chinese president Li Xiannian and a close friend of Xi’s. Li has previously acted as an emissary for Xi and is reported to have held secret talks with Japan’s Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso about a year ago. She also met with Abe a day before he assumed office on 26 December 2012.
The strong Chinese restatement in the last few days of its territorial claims against Vietnam and the Philippines would indicate that Beijing is not even close to a retreat from its maximalist claims for sovereignty over the South China Sea, but, for those with an optimistic frame of mind, there might just be a hint in China’s reception of Komura’s delegation of an understanding that its growing assertiveness could be counterproductive, particularly with regards to Japan. JdeC.
NOTE: Much has been written about the validity of the recent claim that China is now the world’s biggest economy when measured on the basis of purchasing power parity (PPP). It is a highly technical debate, but two statistics grab attention: China’s steel industry is 10 times as large as America’s and as big as the rest of the world’s put together; and China poured more concrete in the three years 2009-2011 than America poured during the whole of the 20th century. China has now also become the world’s biggest net importer of oil, although the US still consumes considerably more than China (18.6m barrels per day versus China’s 10.9m).