DOES China want an “empire”? That is to say, does China seek hegemony, suzerainty or outright dominion over much of Asia? Let’s look at other long-time empires and how they came about.
The British, it is often said, acquired an empire “in a fit of absentmindedness”. Fresh from California, I recall a tutorial where a young Englishman at my Oxford college wrote in an essay that the fulcrum of world order was the British Empire. This was 50 years ago, and he was already 50 years out of date, but illusions die slowly. The sun never sets on that empire, globe spinners in Whitehall had always bragged. At the end of World War 1, the empire was deeply in debt and its death was a slow one.
To some extent it was true that acquiring over several centuries such jewels as India, London saw the need for coaling stations to get there, and coaling stations came to mean colonies. India was a self-supporting “jewel in the Crown”, and foreign policy, more than anything, meant keeping the way clear to those lucrative markets. It wasn’t until the end of World War 2 that London realised that its remaining global power depended on a “special relationship” with Washington. Washington in turn required that London retreat from these unequal relationships. We had just “liberated” the Philippines in 1946, and we were damned if we had to buttress imperial power. So, independence followed all too quickly for India, so fast that about a million Indians died in Hindu attempts to get out of the new Muslim Pakistan, and vice versa.
Some of the empire was acquired very consciously, as when London and Paris drew lines in Africa that assigned vast stretches of uncharted territory to England and France.
The American case involved some hypocrisy, to put it mildly. We scoffed at territorial ambitions, but step by step we acquired hundreds of bases worldwide. We were bankers to the world and no one dared stop us. Small wonder that Marxists and many others said that a comparison between old Britain and new America was a distinction without a difference. We didn’t want control on the ground, but getting access required some dominion. The American ambassador to Ethiopia over 40 years ago told me that 100 per cent of his job was to keep access to the communications tower we had built, this one at a critical longitude and latitude for our worldwide network. That required overlooking the emperor’s ignorance of development that was ineluctably leading to a Marxist takeover, the worst outcome. It happened, all too quickly.
Leaving aside Tibet and the historically Muslim far west (which has vastly more outbreaks of violence than reported), does Beijing want absolute power in East Asia? I have an ethnic Chinese witness in a multi-ethnic Southeast Asian country who alleges that the Chinese ambassador stated baldly that Beijing would intervene if any of the rights of its ethnic brothers there were threatened. That’s the kind of threat that Britain and America made during their respective ascension to empire. It’s also what Russia’s Vladimir Putin uses as an excuse to expand militarily in Ukraine.
So the Philippines feels under direct threat and is finally getting serious with its foreign policy, slowly seeking Washington’s return to the great bases we happily forfeited a generation ago.
So how far is Beijing willing to go? It partly depends on the success of an American pivot to East Asia. There is no way on earth that Chinese-American tension won’t get more and more dangerous. We have enormous economic and political stake in the region. The rapid growth of Chinese naval influence guarantees rising competition in the South China Sea and elsewhere. This is not a zero-sum game as was played out by Washington and Moscow over 40 years; there are too many overlapping interests.
So far, the two superpowers have managed the competition, but what happens in a decade when further Chinese military power becomes roughly equal to America’s in the region? The good news, so to speak, is that China has growing problems at home, enough to constrain it from serious interventions abroad. Muslim unrest in the west, centrifugal forces testing the seriousness of Chinese leaders in Beijing, and the many problems that inevitably emerge with rapid economic growth, make the future look a little less bleak in the Asean region. Nonetheless, prepare in our lifetimes for scary encounters and hope for the best.
The writer is professor emeritus of
International Politics, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, the United States