'Arrogant' China oversteps, shoots itself in the foot

What a difference a year makes! Exactly a year ago, the official Chinese media was hectoring India on its “unwise military moves” along the two countries’ disputed border and publishing spurious opinion polls to claim that 90% of Chinese people believed that India posed a security threat to China.

In every other way too, such official media reportage reflected a belligerence in official Chinese strategic thinking that was calculated to rattle India.

We haven’t seen too much of that lately. It’s not that Chinese strategic thinkers and the official media have suddenly acquired a pacific frame of mind or have taken to ‘contemplating their navel’. It’s more that Chinese strategists have acquired a Pacific frame of mind and are contemplating the naval power of foreign forces in China’s own backyard! Let me explain…

China is at the moment preoccupied with weighty problems on its western and southern coasts. China’s muscle-flexing against its maritime neighbours in the South China Sea and on the Pacific Ocean has whipped up a spirited, concerted pushback against China — and driven those small states to invite the US to police their neighbourhood.

Just this week, the US aircraft carrier George Washington steamed into the South China Sea — in a powerful symbol of American power projection in East Asia directed at China. It was also US President Barack Obama’s way of signalling that the US, which was ‘missing in action’ in Asia, given its preoccupation with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, was back.

The sight of US aircraft carriers in the Yellow Sea has Chinese commentators hopping mad, and their hostile rhetoric — which they directed at India last year — is now being focussed on the US and, to a lesser extent, against Vietnam.

Not a day passes without the Chinese media publishing thunderous commentaries that warn the US it will “pay for provoking China” or accuse the Obama administration of “seeking to contain China.”

A recent editorial in the jingoistic Global Times called the US ‘provocation’ on the western Pacific “a typical act born out of the Cold War mentality.”

The US administration, it warned, “should note that its military activities near Chinese territorial waters will do nothing but stoke up the growing nationalism of the Chinese people, which will pressure the government to… get tougher in defending its national interests.”

But what China does not acknowledge is that there’s a reason the US Navy warships have been ‘invited’ into the region by China’s neighbours. And that reason is that China has fallen victim to its own nationalistic rhetoric, and effectively intimidated its neighbours.

China has long sought to convince the world, and in particular its neighbours, that its economic rise represents a force for good — and that its rise would be “peaceful”. These claims always lacked conviction, given its muscular assertion of its territorial claims on the South China Sea, overriding similar claims from other littoral states, including Vietnam and the Philippines.

However, events of the past few months in the South China Sea have wholly demolished the myth of China’s peaceful rise. Ever since a North Korean mini-submarine sank a South Korean naval vessel earlier this year, China has thwarted international efforts to bring  Pyongyang to account for its maritime lawlessness. And when the US and South Korean navies organised a joint patrolling to keep open the sea lanes in the South China Sea, China staged its own maritime drill.

And when US secretary of state Hillary Clinton announced in Vietnam last month that the US considered it in its “national interest” to ensure peace in the South China Sea, China erupted in rage: Foreign minister Yang Jiechi said that Clinton’s words amounted to a US “attack” on China.

What accounts for Chinese muscle-flexing against its neighbours?

Strategists believe that China is beginning to believe its own nationalist rhetoric about its unparalleled rise, and perceptions about a decline of American influence worldwide. Even Chinese scholars are beginning to acknowledge that China’s economic success of the past three decades has given rise to “national arrogance” and “unprecedented conceit”.

But as the events of recent weeks show, China doesn’t quite have the ‘soft power’ to win over its neighbours or adequate ‘hard power’ to beat back lingering American influence in East Asia.

That even Vietnam, which fought a war with the US not long ago, turned to the US for defence against Chinese belligerence accentuates the limits of China’s influence in its own backyard. China’s ‘peaceful rise’ theory just became a little harder to sell.