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US, Japan must
understand China
By John Lee 李約翰
In a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington
on Friday last week, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe informed the audience of
officials, experts and journalists that Japan is “back” and will not stand down
in its ongoing sovereignty dispute with China over the Diaoyutai Islands (釣魚台),
which are also claimed by Taiwan, and are known as the Senkaku Islands in Japan.
With Chinese provocations on the rise, US President Barack Obama, Abe’s host,
appealed for calm and restraint on both sides.
Japan is likely to accede to the US request, as it remains dependent on its
alliance with the US for its security. However, it will be difficult to persuade
China that it should stand down.
China’s assertiveness over its sovereignty claim reflects more than a desire to
exploit seabed resources, or to gain a widened strategic gateway into the
western Pacific. It is also about national renewal and rejuvenation — the core
of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) raison d’etre. Turning away from a fight
with its former occupier and historical rival would be a step back in this
six-decade-long quest.
The idea of Chinese renewal or rejuvenation was popularized by then-premier Zhao
Ziyang (趙紫陽) in the late 1980s and frequently promoted by former Chinese
president Jiang Zemin (江澤民) and outgoing President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤).
Most recently, Chinese Vice President and leader-in-waiting Xi Jinping (習近平),
visiting the National Museum of China’s Road Toward Renewal exhibition, pledged
to continue the “great renewal of the Chinese nation.”
What does this “renewal” or “rejuvenation” mean to the Chinese?
All nations — great and small — embody a combination of historical fact and
myth. In this case, the CCP’s view of rejuvenation is built on the belief that
the zenith of Chinese power under the Ming and Qing dynasties represents the
natural, just and permanent state of affairs for a 5,000-year-old civilization.
When former Chinese leader Mao Zedong (毛澤東) took power in 1949, his immediate
goal was to re-establish the “greater China” of the Qing Dynasty, insisting that
the Manchu-led empire was the permanent and enduring China. However, while the
assault on the Qing Dynasty by foreign powers is historical fact, the notion
that there has been one enduring China struggling against avaricious outsiders
across several millennia is false and self-serving.
Mao achieved his goal following the so-called peaceful liberation of the East
Turkestan Republic (now China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region) in 1949 and
the invasion of Tibet in 1950, which increased China’s size by more than
one-third.
Every CCP leader since has carried forward Mao’s vision of a greater China,
adjusting and expanding it as the country’s power grows. For example, China
showed little interest in the Diaoyutai Islands prior to 1968 — the year a
geographical study pointed to vast oil reserves beneath the seabed.
The same can be said for China’s growing stridency with respect to its claims in
the South China Sea. In 2009, relying heavily on a dubious historical claim,
China formally tabled its “nine-dotted line” map to the UN Commission on the
Limits of the Continental Shelf and has since referred to almost all of the
South China Sea as being under its “indisputable sovereignty.”
Having dominated East and Southeast Asia for all but the last two centuries of
the past two millennia, China is chafing at the current US-led regional order of
sovereign states, in which even the smallest enjoys the same rights, privileges
and protection as the largest. Modern China has benefited enormously from this
arrangement; nonetheless there is resentment that the Chinese
civilization-state’s vast achievements over several thousand years offer China
no special status.
To a people imbued with a deep sense of superior moral worth, historical
achievement and victimization by foreign powers, this state of affairs is unjust
and unnatural. Pulling back from any territorial dispute with smaller and
inferior states would be seen as a humiliating defeat, not a step toward
ensuring long-term regional stability.
An expanding view of greater China implies that a resolution of the Diaoyutais
despute in its favor would be likely to embolden rather than satisfy its
ambitions.
Making good on its claim to the South China Sea could be next.
As Obama and Abe forge a common strategy aimed at helping to manage China’s rise
peacefully, they must understand that China’s conception of renewal seeks to
resurrect a glorious past and that this implies revision, not affirmation, of
the existing regional order. This means that they will have to limit China’s
strategic and military options, even if they cannot constrain its ambitions.
John Lee is a fellow and professor at the Center for International Security
Studies, Sydney University.
Copyright: Project Sydicate
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