Dust-up at the Shangri-La

Asian security

Jun 1st 2014

by Banyan | SINGAPORE

TEMPERS frayed rather alarmingly at this year’s Shangri-La Dialogue, an annual forum for Asia's defence establishments, held in one of the eponymous hotels, in Singapore. First Japan and then America criticised China. Then China reciprocated in furious terms.

The 13th dialogue, from May 30th to June 1st, could hardly have been better timed to deal with the region’s security anxieties. Over the past six months the level of concern about China's aggressive pursuit of disputed territorial claims has been increasing steadily, at least outside China.

In November 2013 China unilaterally declared an Air-Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ) in the East China Sea, which covered the Senkaku or Diaoyu islands, which are administered by Japan. Then in May, in rapid succession, China moved a massive oil-rig to drill in waters in the South China Sea seen by Vietnam as part of its Exclusive Economic Zone; startedconstruction work at a shoal in the South China Sea claimed by the Philippines; and then, the Japanese complain, flew fighter jets dangerously close to surveillance planes Japan had near the Senkakus.

China probably feared the worst when it learned that this year the speech at the dialogue’s opening dinner would be delivered Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe (pictured). It tends to shun him as a troublemaker intent on reviving Japan’s militarist past.

Perhaps for that reason, the Chinese delegation was not headed by the defence minister. Instead China sent some of the top brass from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), and Fu Ying, a senior diplomat now attached to China’s parliament, the National People’s Congress.

They were all duly incensed by Mr Abe’s speech. It was indeed a (largely implicit) onslaught against China and its recent behaviour. In response, Mr Abe promised, there will be an enhanced role for Japanese security in the region. He offered to provide patrol boats to the Philippines and Vietnam.

Then the next morning, Chuck Hagel, America’s secretary of defence, used his speech to accuse China of “destabilising, unilateral actions” to assert its claims in the South China Sea. He also endorsed Mr Abe’s speech and stressed the importance of America’s strategic “pivot” or “rebalance” towards Asia.

Part of Mr Hagel’s intention may have been to counter the disappointment felt among some of America’s Asian allies about an important foreign-policy speech that Barack Obama had made three days earlier. Mr Obama had made no reference to the rebalance, and mentioned China only in passing. In suggesting that terrorism remained the biggest security threat to America, he raised questions about whether American strategy had “pivoted” at all.

But China may have noticed that it also said that America “must always lead on the world stage” and would “use military force, unilaterally if necessary...when the security of our allies is in danger.” Those allies in Asia did not feel reassured, but China may have felt threatened. Mr Hagel’s more explicit commitment at Shangri-La, to a leading role in Asia, clearly irritated China.

Apparently not as much, though, as Mr Abe’s less direct approach. It was left to Lieutenant-General Wang Guanzhong, deputy chief of the PLA’s General Staff Department, to return fire. He did this with both oratorical barrels, departing from the speech he had prepared for the dialogue. He accused Mr Abe and Mr Hagel, in effect, of ganging up to antagonise China. He called their criticisms “simply unimaginable”. Mr Hagel’s speech was “full of hegemony, full of words of threat and intimidation”. It was “not constructive". In an obvious reference to Mr Abe—and this was in his prepared remarks—General Wang said that China would never allow “ruthless, fascist and militaristic aggression to stage a comeback”.

The consensus among non-Chinese delegates at the dialogue was that General Wang made a pretty poor fist of defending China’s position. His argument was crude, and sounded rather childish: namely that it was not China that had been provocative, but those countries who accused it of provocation.

Later, when asked specific questions, he failed to answer them or else spoke gibberish, as when he purported to explain the mysterious “nine-dashed line” on Chinese maps which is supposed to give it sovereignty over most of the South China Sea. He referred to historic claims dating back to the Han dynasty (contemporary with the Roman empire, from 206BC to 220AD) and suggested that the law of the sea could not have a retroactive effect on them. But he did not explain what this had to do with the line itself.

China might not care that Western and Japanese delegates thought it had lost the argument. Rather, it may well see the whole Shangri-La Dialogue, which is organised by a London-based think-tank, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, as part of an old world order it no longer feels bound to accept.

Viewed from China, that order is one in which the West, and especially America, sets the rules. It lets China in, but only so long as it abides by the house rules, and other countries can team up to criticise it, hoping to thwart its rise to great-power status. Meanwhile, far from the discussions in the air-conditioned banqueting rooms of a luxury hotel, China is asserting its claims in the seas around it. There it encounters no resistance it cannot brush aside, for now.

(Picture credit: AFP)