Japanese
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has warned Beijing that Tokyo is losing patience with
China's assertive maritime behavior in the East and South China seas,
suggesting China consider the economic and military consequences of its
actions. His warning followed similar statements from Washington that its
patience with China is wearing thin, in this case over continued Chinese
cyberespionage and the likelihood that Beijing is developing and testing
cybersabotage and cyberwarfare capabilities. Together, the warnings are meant
to signal to China that the thus-far relatively passive response to China's
military actions may be nearing an end.
In an
interview The Washington Post published just prior to Abe's meeting with U.S.
President Barack Obama in Washington, Abe said China's actions around the
disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu islands and its overall increasing military
assertiveness have already resulted in a major increase in funding for the
Japan Self-Defense Forces and coast guard. He also reiterated the centrality of
the Japan-U.S. alliance for Asian security and warned that China could lose
Japanese and other foreign investment if it continued to use "coercion or
intimidation" toward its neighbors along the East and South China seas.
Abe's
interview came amid warnings on Chinese cyberactivity from Washington. Though
not mentioning China by name in his 2013 State of the Union address, Obama
said, "We know foreign countries and companies swipe our corporate
secrets. Now our enemies are also seeking the ability to sabotage our power
grid, our financial institutions, our air traffic control systems."
Obama's comments, and the subsequent release of a new strategy on mitigating
cybertheft of trade secrets, coincided with a series of reports highlighting
China's People's Liberation Army backing for hacking activities in the United
States, including a report by Mandiant that traced the activities to a specific
People's Liberation Army unit and facility. The timing of the private sector
reports and Obama's announcement were not coincidental.
Although
Washington has taken a slightly more restrained stance on the Senkaku/Diaoyu
dispute, reportedly urging Tokyo not to release proof that a Chinese ship
locked its fire-control radar on a Japanese naval vessel, clearly Washington
and Tokyo hold the common view that China's actions are nearing the limits of
tolerance. Given its proximity to China, Japan is focusing on Chinese maritime
activity, which has accelerated in the past two to three years around the
disputed islands, in the South China Sea and in the Western Pacific east of
Japan. The United States in turn is highlighting cyberespionage and the
potential for cyberwarfare. Both are drawing attention to well-known Chinese
behavior and warning that it is nearing a point where it can no longer be
tolerated. The message is clear: China can alter its behavior or begin to face
the consequences from the United States and Japan.
Abe drew a
sharp response from Beijing, though less from his interview than from another
Washington Post article based on the interview that interpreted Abe as saying,
"China has a 'deeply ingrained' need to spar with Japan and other Asian
neighbors over territory, because the ruling Communist Party uses the disputes
to maintain strong domestic support." Tokyo responded to China's
complaints by saying the second Post article was misleading but that the
transcript of Abe's interview was accurate.
Although
the Japanese government did not elaborate on this point, by
"ingrained" Abe did not mean Chinese behavior per se, but rather the
anti-Japanese undercurrents of China's education system and the use of
anti-Japanese sentiment as the basis of Chinese patriotism.
In addition to being Beijing's standard knee-jerk reaction to any
less-than-flattering comments by a foreign leader, the Chinese government and
media response represented an attempt to shift attention from Chinese actions
toward the "hawkish" Abe as the source of rising tensions in East
Asia. A follow-up Xinhua article published after the Abe-Obama meeting
cautioned the United States to be "vigilant against the rightist tendency
in Tokyo" and said the first- and second-largest economies, the United
States and China, should work together "to safeguard the peace and
prosperity of the Asia-Pacific region and contribute to global
development." Other Chinese media reports suggested that Abe failed to
gain support from Obama during the visit for his Senkaku/Diaoyu policies or for
a unified stance against China. The undertones of China's response, however,
reflect less confidence.
The
Economic Threat
What Abe
said in his interview apart from the Chinese media spin is instructive.
According to Abe, relations between China and Japan have been suffering due to
unintended consequences of moves by the Communist Party of China to retain its
legitimacy. China's economic opening led to unequal prosperity, eliminating the
Party's main pillar of support, equality. To counter that, the Chinese
government pursued a two-prong strategy of economic growth and patriotism. Economic
growth required Beijing to expand its sourcing of commodities, moving China
naturally onto the sea. Meanwhile, patriotism, tinged with anti-Japanese
teaching, has come to pervade the educational system and society.
Abe argued
that China is pursuing a path of coercion or intimidation, particularly in the
East and South China seas, as part of its resource-acquisition strategy.
Anti-Japanese undercurrents in Chinese society due to the inculcation of
patriotism have won domestic support for the assertive Chinese actions. But
this has strained Japanese-Chinese economic relations, thus undercutting
China's own rapid economic growth. And without continued economic growth, Abe
cautioned, China's single-party leadership would be unable to control its
population of 1.3 billion.
Within this
context, Abe cautioned that it is important to make Beijing realize it cannot
take another country's territory or territorial water or change the rules of
international engagement. He raised the defense budget and emphasized that the
Japanese-U.S. alliance is critical for regional security, as is a continued
U.S. presence in the region. He also warned that China's assertive behavior
would have economic consequences and that although Japanese companies profit in
China, they are responsible for 10 million Chinese jobs. If the risk of doing
business in China rises, then "Japanese investments will start to drop
sharply," he added.
Abe's
warnings were designed to strike at the core Chinese government fears of
economic and social instability and military encroachment by the United States
and a reinvigorated Japan. On the economic front, Japan is one of the top
sources of actual foreign direct investment in China and a major trading
partner. Although it is difficult to verify Abe's claims of 10 million Chinese
employed due to Japanese investments, the implications of Chinese actions on
bilateral economic cooperation are more easily observable. In 2012, a year when
tensions ran high due to Japan's decision regarding what it called the
"purchase" of some of the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu islands from a
private Japanese citizen, anti-Japanese protests flared in China, as did
unofficial boycotts of Japanese goods. Total trade between China and Japan fell
3.9 percent year on year, the first drop since the major financial crisis of
2009, with exports falling more than 10 percent. Japanese foreign direct
investment, although rising slightly for the year, saw a major falloff in the
summer when tensions between the two countries ran high.
Other
factors played a role in the decline of trade and investment, including reduced
overall Japanese demand and shifts in suppliers for certain key resources (and
adjustments in Japan's export markets). And Japan itself would suffer from a
major break in trade relations, though Tokyo may be taking steps to cushion
against fallout from economic disputes with China. Japanese firms in fact
already are beginning to show an interest is shifting some of their
manufacturing bases out of China even without the added incentive of
anti-Japanese sentiment-driven protests and boycotts. In 2012, the gap between
China and the United States as the top destination for Japanese exports
narrowed further to just 0.6 percent. Abe also hinted strongly that Japan has
finally decided to pursue talks with the United States over the Trans-Pacific
Partnership, a trading bloc (unofficially) designed to exclude China.
Although
Japanese companies are unlikely to flee China en masse, the threat of a slow reorientation
toward stronger trade ties with the United States and softening investment in
China strikes at one of the Communist Party's major concerns, namely
maintaining social stability through employment. Like that of Japan, exports
and growth have driven China's economy. This does not necessarily mean profits
or efficiency; on the contrary, Beijing has harnessed the constant growth to
maintain employment and provide loans to keep businesses operating, even when
they operate with razor-thin profit margins or at a loss.
Employment
represents China's preferred tool to maintain social stability, and the Party
sees stability as paramount to retaining its legitimacy as the unchallengeable
and unopposable leader of China. Both the Chinese government and Abe know this,
and now Abe is threatening to target Chinese growth, upending the whole system
of stability. The Japanese may not really be able to effect or afford any
drastic change in economic relations with China, but with the activation of the
Trans-Pacific Partnership and with a possible Japanese government emphasis on
investment to Southeast Asia and Africa (with private investment likely to
follow), the economic pressure on China could slowly build.
The
Military Warning
The
military warning is therefore more immediately troubling to Beijing. Both Tokyo
and Washington are reaching their limits for tolerating aggressive Chinese
behavior. The United States is pivoting toward Asia, seen by China as a
constraining action. Japan is strengthening ties with Russia, Australia, India
and Southeast Asia, something China regards as containment. China's emergence
as a big power has not been entirely smooth. Any time a nation seeks to alter
the status quo between other powers, disruption and resistance are inevitable.
China's maritime expansion and its cyberespionage and emerging cyberwar
capabilities are closely linked to its economic and social policies. The former
is a more obvious concrete action, but one that raises the risk of creating the
appearance of being ready for peer competition long before China actually is.
The latter at least offers some opportunities for plausible deniability (though
Washington is now removing that already-translucent veil), and reflects an
attempt to exploit an area where China's overall vulnerabilities are less of a
liability; it is the weak taking its best available action against the strong.
For Japan,
maritime activity around the disputed islands is manageable so long as it
remains in the civilian realm, but the use of fire control radar on Japanese
ships and overflights by Chinese aircraft are unacceptable. (Japanese aircraft
are shadowing Chinese overflights. In a recently reported case, a Chinese Y-8
surveillance aircraft and the Japanese F-15 interceptor came within 5 meters, or
16 feet, of one another, creating the potential for a collision like the one
between a U.S. and Chinese aircraft in 2001.) And while the United States may
have tolerated the occasional case of cybertheft and cyberespionage, as Obama
noted, such activities become unacceptable in scale and when it shifts to
targeting U.S. infrastructure, where it has the potential to disrupt
electricity grids, communications systems and other industrial processes.
Japan and
the United States have both called their defense alliance the cornerstone of
their regional policies and relations. Japan continues to evolve its
interpretation of its constitutional limit on military activity, and Tokyo has
pledged to Washington to take a greater role in ensuring regional security. The
escalation of Chinese naval activity has given the impression of a confident
and capable Beijing on its way to changing the balance of naval power in the
region. China has built the impression of a strong modern navy backed by
land-based missiles, with modern ships and technology and an emerging
international reach. China's anti-access area denial strategy is an increasing
point of contention in Japan and the United States, where there are warnings
that the Chinese navy will soon outpace the U.S. Navy in the Pacific, limiting
U.S. naval capabilities with its "carrier-killer" missiles and
quantitatively superior fleet.
The Chinese
navy has undergone a significant modernization program over the past decade.
Still, it is far from ready to compete head to head with the Japanese navy,
much less with Japan's treaty ally, the United States. Modernization efforts
and the fleet-building program have yet to make for a superb Chinese navy, nor
would having superb sailors. A superb navy requires organization, doctrine,
principles and most of all experience. The main problem constraining China's
navy is not its shipbuilding or recruitment, but its limited ability to truly
integrate its forces for war fighting and fleet operations. This requires
substantial knowledge and training in logistics, cooperative air defense and
myriad other complex factors.
There
really is only one real measurement for a navy: Its ability to win against its
likely rival. Part of determining the quality of a navy depends upon its
technology and part on doctrine, but a substantial part is actual experience.
China's navy has little war-fighting experience, even in the past. This has
substantially limited the number of individuals within the officer corps
knowledgeable or capable of effective operations in the highly complex world of
modern military engagements. The Chinese navy may have new technology and be
building toward numerical superiority, but it faces off against a U.S. Navy
with centuries of experience and generations of admirals schooled in combat.
Even the Japanese navy has more than a century of experience and a tradition of
maritime warfare. The lack of combat experience significantly limits China's
naval capability.
The Chinese
government officially downplays these capabilities and any talk of a
potentially aggressive nature of the Chinese military. But Beijing does little
to dissuade such speculation, allowing a steady stream of images and
commentaries in the Chinese popular media and the strategic leaking of imagery
in China's social media. Beijing likes to appear fierce while saying it is not.
But the problem with this strategy is exactly what Abe has pointed out: In
appearing threatening, concrete steps are taken to counter China's maritime
expansion. Abe is calling China's bluff, exhorting Beijing to reassess the
correlation of forces in the region before continuing its aggressive pattern.
Font: By Rodger Baker
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