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Is China’s primacy over the Western Pacific already a reality?

【Zhou Bo】

In 1999, Gerald Segal, then Director of Research at the International Institute of Strategic Studies, made a considerable splash with his essay “Does China matter?” in Foreign Affairs. Touching upon the economic, political and strategic issue of China, his overall conclusion was that China’s importance had been greatly exaggerated. For Mr Segal, China is but a small market ‘that matters little to the world, especially outside Asia’.

Two decades later, Mr Segal must be turning in his grave to see how his argument has made him a laughing stock. Rather than “a small market", China is now the largest retail market, consumer market, e-commerce market, luxury goods market and even new car market in the world. It is also the largest trading nation, industrial nation and the largest exporter in the world and the largest trading partner to around 130 countries. In the last four decades, no challenges have seemed able to stop China’s advance by leaps and bounds, be it the Asian financial crisis or Trump’s trade war with China, for instance.

Amid the ravaging pandemic, China looks like the eye of global storm, the safest haven on earth. It was the first to suffer from the pandemic, but also the first to recover from it, being the only country to have registered economic growth in 2020.

It is helping others, too. By the end of June, China has provided 450 million doses of its vaccines to nearly 100 countries.

However impressive these facts might be, it is wrong to conclude that the 21st century will be Pax Sinica. In fact, even in East Asia, China’s home ground, China’s primacy is not fully evident.

By contrast with Europe that is bound together by a common culture and religion, Asia has been diversified and pluralistic from day one with distinctive geographies, diversified cultures and religions. No matter how in centuries past, the Chinese thought China was the cultural, political or economic centre of the world and their sovereign had a right to rule “all under Heaven,” China never attempted to control the whole of East Asia. Deference to the Middle Kingdom and exotic gifts from tributary states were all that the Ming and Qing emperors wanted.

There is no doubt about China’s economic primacy in East Asia. In August 2010, China overtook Japan as the world’s second largest economy. According to the UK-based Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR), China will overtake the US to become the world’s largest economy by 2028.

With the US absent from RCEP- Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, the biggest trade bloc in history that accounts for about 30% of the world’s population and 30% of global GDP-and with China’s expressed interest in joining the Comprehensive Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) just days after RCEP’s conclusion, Beijing looks a firm leader in multilateralism.

East Asia won’t be Sino-centric. Even if there is talk of a “Greater China” that encompasses mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan and sometimes Singapore, there are no signs that the Chinese wish to export their ideological or development model.

If a sphere of influence means that a state has a level of cultural, economic, military, or political exclusivity in a region in which other states show deference to the power, then East Asia won’t look like China’s sphere of influence under scrutiny. DPRK has anyway developed nuclear weapons anyway despite China’s disapproval. Japan, Republic of Korea and Thailand are American allies.

Some ASEAN countries such as Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia and Brunei have territorial disputes with China in the South China Sea.  

Would an ever-rising China make the world a better place? This is the ultimate question for the 21st century. Even those most critical of China cannot deny that China’s rise in the last four decades is peaceful -a rare phenomenon for any rising power. China has no war since its reform and opening up in 1979.

Therefore, the brawl resulting in the deaths of 20 Indian soldiers and four Chinese servicemen in the Galwan Valley in the border areas between China and India in June 2020 was most unusual and unfortunate, to the extent that Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said that bilateral trust was “profoundly disturbed”.

But the fact that the two troops chose to use fists and wooden clubs to fight in a stone-age manner showed they knew they should not shoot at each other under any circumstances to violate a tacit agreement.

In this regard, a kind of maturity and rationality still prevailed. Since the Chinese and Indian troops have withdrawn from the border areas that each claimed to be its own and a de facto buffer zone established, the situation has de-escalated. Hopefully, the deadly brawl will provide useful lessons for the two governments in finding out new ways to enhance confidence-building, such as setting up a hotline between the border troops.

The real challenge in East Asia is not how China will deal with its neighbours and vice versa - they know how to deal with each other through thousands of years of historical engagement. It is how China might coexist with the US, a non-Western Pacific nation but a self- claimed guardian of the “free and open Indo-Pacific”. China suspects the US wants to confine Chinese influence within the Western Pacific while the United States suspects a stronger China is trying to drive it out of the region. Looking down the road, the great power competition initiated by the Trump administration will only become more fierce in days to come.

The question is whether competition will slide into a confrontation that neither wants.

Risk reduction for Beijing and Washington is difficult for two reasons if one looks into the history of the Cold War. First, during the Cold War, there were clearly separate spheres of influence dominated by Washington and Moscow that allowed them to avoid direct confrontations. But between China and the United States, there isn’t even a buffer zone. Nowadays American naval vessels regularly sail through the waters off Chinese islands and rocks in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait.

Second, the United States and the Soviet Union were balanced by mutually assured destruction. This is not found between Beijing and Washington. But in the Western Pacific, the gap in military strength is shrinking in China’s favour thanks to the advances of the PLA in the past decades. As a result, Washington is investing more militarily in the region and calling on its global allies and partners to gang up on China. This in turn would irk Beijing and make the situation more volatile.

There is no guarantee the US would win in a military conflict with China in the first island chain that stretches from Japan to the Philippines and the South China Sea. But should it lose, the consequence would be a domino effect: The US would lose prestige and credibility among its allies and partners in the region; The alliance would fall apart and it would have to pack and go home.

Short of global military presence though, China’s influence is already felt worldwide, especially through such mega-projects as the Belt & Road Initiative which is the largest project on infrastructure in human history. A global China doesn’t need to seek dominance anywhere. Instead, it needs to think globally and act responsibly in line with the great responsibility that is intrinsically associated with great powers.