Asian Waters: The Struggle Over the South China Sea and the Strategy of Chinese Expansion

after a quick intro and the necessary security script that we are all required to read here at CSIS for the benefit of all so let's see here I am your designated security officer in the unlikely event of a lightning strike natural disaster or whatever in the event of emergency we appreciate your full cooperation we'll ask everybody to exit through the front glass door if here or through the back if necessary everybody's going to meet either across the street at st. Matthew's Cathedral or back at National Geographic will bring ice cream will continue the event there in the rain it'll be lovely but more to the point we are here to get a preview of Humphrey Hawkes Lee's new book Asian waters the struggle over the South China Sea and the strategy of Chinese expansion and by way of biography I'm just going to read the biography in the jacket because that connects the one most approved so Humphrey Hawksley is a BBC correspondent whose face and voice are known to millions he is the author of numerous titles including democracy kills what's so good about having the vote which is a tie-in to a documentary about the pitfalls of the modern-day path to democracy from dictatorship he's written for The Guardian The Times Financial Times the irrational Herald Tribune and other publications and what's not captured there is that most maybe all that writing was in Asia yes spend time in China and think horribly China Singapore Philippines India Sri Lanka Beijing yep pretty wide for this Asia and so with that we're going to go to a brief presentation by Humphrey and then I'll lead a short moderate discussion and then what we really want to do is hear questions from the audience so with that okay do I go here you can use the thing yes I can see that clearly yeah we're on the right and well thanks thank you all for coming and thank you Greg I just want to say before before we begin here that you opened up your images your books and your knowledge to me everybody at CSIS and without that this book would not be half as good and it's also quite humbling coming here cuz I just come from Great Britain which two years ago voted to leave the European Union so I've come from now little England which seems to be a thousand-year-old country chasing some lost dream to the heart of an empire that's defining a new ideology and I'm not quite sure where it's going to end up whether it's somewhere between Trump ology and the Thucydides trap will be somewhere there's an arrow of echo chambers that's happened with our social media and everything where everybody gets on this platform to hear about what they want to hear about and not hear about what other people want to hear about and this happened just recently with the publication of the book because what you're seeing up there is the South China Sea issue as seen by my New York publishers it's pastel it's nuanced it's not too harsh and as Greg said it's the struggle over the South China Sea and the strategy the Chinese expansion this is how its seen from London red harsh dark lines fighter planes aircraft and then a couple of weeks ago I got a call from the publisher saying we've got a problem in the Asian sales teams I said what on earth can that be they said they won't be selling a book in some areas that has South China Sea in the title and I thought and that took me by surprise because I've travelled around I said well everybody uses it but ASEAN uses it everybody uses so that's not the point these guys have got to be enthusiastic about the book so we've got to change the title I said well why don't we call it Indo Pacific then because that's fashionable now and they said well I guess that's okay but nobody knows what the hell that is so we stuck I said okay let's do a Sherpa cific and that is what it is and in fact it's a slightly better in a way because when the book was conceived a couple of years ago the South China Sea was was just there but now it's spread out and we've seen where China's influences and how people are either accepting it or pushing back on it so just to make sure we're all in the same echo chamber for this one is a map of the of the South China Sea the the nine - Lionel cows tongue is it's called locally particularly in Vietnam where it sort of loops around like that and you've got a laser here you've got seven new Chinese military bases they're in the Spratly Islands you've got dispute up in the Scarborough Shoal they're between the Philippines and China nothing built yet but not going on and then you've got the renovation there of the in the Paracel Islands of woody an island base mainly to renovate a new base there the Paracel Islands of it was taken from Vietnam on two occasions in 1956 peacefully by China took part of it and then in 1974 they went in with loss of Vietnamese life and took the other part of it both those dates are interesting in the way that China deals with things in that in 1956 of course Vietnam was just recovering from DM BM Phu and the expulsion of the French and in 1974 South Vietnam was about to fall to the North Vietnamese so that both those times the country was particularly vulnerable this is woody island which has been Greg is much more knowledgeable about what is there and what isn't there but basically this is a military air naval possibly a missile base and there was a many Chinese officials that I've sort of talked to about this book one of them said to me why are you so angry about the South China Sea why are we getting criticized so much about the South China Sea and I started talking about the rule of law and this that near there and then I stopped I said no the reason that I sort of want to talk to you guys about it is because you'd beat up the poor people you go after the fishermen and we don't like in the media big powers beating up small people and this guy is a Vietnamese fisherman pho van Gogh who in 2014 when the when the Chinese and the Vietnamese were rods for each other he was dragged from his boat beaten senseless with mallets and fishing equipment then throw him back onto his boat again and then that boat was rammed by a Chinese Coast Guard so it had to be towed back to shore and then on the other side that's a Scarborough Shoal there which is well inside the Philippines exclusive economic zone and yeah Philippine fishermen have been fishing there for you know centuries they talk about their grandfather's and all the rest of it you see incidentally there that Lagoon where are we there we go this Lagoon scrubber shot it's only got one entrance there which makes it a very particularly sort of there that's where the Chinese put their Coast Guard boats so that nobody can get in so this guy's name is Urich Olson and in 2012 when the Scarborough Shoal thing product he was water cannon twice by the Chinese and thrown off his boat into the sea and that was when the Philippine fishermen were told they couldn't fish there anymore and then he became something of a very intrinsic part of what is now this sort of global shift of regional power that's been going on in Southeast Asia now his village is called Matson Locke and the Scarborough Shoal is called bio Demasi Locke which means lower-mass and Locke and his villages mess woke up in northern Luzon and it's a community that's harboring a way of life that we all know can't exist can't go on any longer it's bit like the old Steel towns the old mill towns of Britain if you look at his boat there you know it's made of bamboo and wood and tied together with god-knows-what lots of colors completely bereft of technology no refrigeration for the for the fish but when he was told that he couldn't fish anymore it took the lifeblood out of the village the gut the men couldn't work and as they got more and more or they sent their wives to Saudi Arabia as domestic helpers so you just imagine what that does to a community and then as they were sort of suffering their lives turned upside down Rodrigo Duterte came to power and he asked the American ambassador Manila so I'm told by Philippine official about Scarborough Shoal and was told bluntly we're not going to go to war over a fishing reef then deterred he got on a plane with a bunch of businessmen and went to Beijing to cut deals one of the deals was that the Chinese investing infrastructure of what it's doing all over the world and he came out of that saying that China that the Philippines future lay not in the United States which is its oldest ally but in China and it was Duterte and he can change his mind and flip-flop at any time but that was a public statement that you know was not good to hear from our point of view when I talk about our site of wealth the sort of Western democracies and a senior Philippine diplomat told me that the president also made it clear to the Chinese that if they wanted that to continue they had to see the fisherman right in Scarborough Shoal so what they did was that they flew to his village a guy from the the the Ministry of Fisheries that took a bunch of fishermen not not him to Beijing and Guangzhou to show them how a modern fishing industry worked they came back starry-eyed they then said look whatever you catch we're gonna buy so you don't have to hawk it around the market anymore oh by the way you can go and fish there again so I met him he'd just come back from a week of fishing way and ten times what he was doing as a shopkeeper or a secret driver and that sort of thing and he had a spring in his step again because these people were put on the earth to fish they won't put on their earth to ride sea clothes or work in supermarkets and more importantly they could bring the wives back from Saudi Arabia and be a community again so underneath all the talk of war and blood in the sand and everything like that you've got a microcosm there of what China is doing all over Southeast Asia and probably beyond this stick and carrot approach reward and Punishment and that's what that's why the South China Sea is sort of so important because it's a it's a sample of that well the first story I did there for television was back in 1995 when these appeared on mischief reef and it was difficult to get it on air I think we got it on the main news network once and then everybody forgets about it and then this is 2012 mischief reef again one of amt eyes photos followed in 2017 by this and here you've got the the hangars the the runways all of the stuff so it's gone from being largely forgotten nobody doing much about it being a fully fledged military base now 2016 before this photo was taken an international court at the hague described all this basically as being illegal it's against international law what about what it trying to do it kept building them kept putting in better weaponry better planes better hangars what it hasn't done is it hasn't said oh I'm sorry I've broken the law we'll take it all down and start again that hasn't happened so here in the South China Sea you have this big test of international or in our conundrum is what to do about it if China gets away with this here and it has got away with it what is it going to do in the Indian Ocean in the Arctic which is melting in the Mediterranean where it now owns ports in in in Greece and in Italy what is it going to do in the Atlantic where it tried to buy a military base in Greenland and we stopped at the last moment by the Danish government and what could any anti Western government or any pro-western government for that matter do when it wants to do something using the South China Sea issue as a precedent that's the conundrum that we haven't yet faced and we're not yet facing it properly I was at a conference a couple of days ago here in Washington where the deputy ambassador Lika shun gave a keynote speech and like a tongue on a sawtooth he started off with what I think many of you will be familiar this term the century of humiliation that's the hundred and ten years from 1839 to 1949 that China considered being colonized and humiliated by the west and the opium wars and when I talk about it and I suspect there's one or two in the audience now singularly I start rolling like when you talk about poverty in India oh this is just the way that they're shoring up support for the Communist Party and the one-party state and that that's just so we've got to ignore it I advise against that that might be true but this idea of the century of humiliation is in the minds of every Chinese from childbirth it's high on the school curriculum big in the Universities big across the family dinner tables and this is a bunch of schoolchildren at the Opium War Museum where the British troops actually came ashore near Guangzhou in 1839 this is a very well-funded museum at the entrance is the picture of a young woman vivacious and healthy who's taken a bit of opium and gets dour and listless and then finally collapses this is what in order to balance its books the East India Company was trying to do to China in the 1830s with its gunboats and opium trade seen through the eyes of the Chinese and the Chinese echo chamber inside the museum which I found interesting there's no cover-up of unfairness or anything it's just the way the world works and there are displays of the advanced Western technology which China had escaped China scopes microscopes their compasses and that sort of thing that enabled the West to defeat John and there's an interesting phrase whether stubbornness translation or not they called it the democratic governments of West doing they use that word democracy and there are these huge murals of the gunboats coming ashore the artillery and that sort of science that does it and finally the Redcoats smashing their way to victory the point being when I was talking in Beijing into Chinese people about this is that when we talk to them or they are lectured by us about the International rule of law and the rules-based system this was their first taste of it so they might say yes it's great if you can work it for yourself makes you rich and it makes you strong but don't try and tell them that it's fair and equal because they don't believe that they will take what they can and there was one guy just to put it in a perspective than interested me he said imagine this he said imagine that America is going through a period of vulnerability it has an unreliable leader there social unrest it's not quite sure what sort of country it is and where it is going and imagine at that time that a Mexican drug cartel blasts its way up from the south demanding that Arizona California New Mexico and Texas open themselves up to cocaine sales and they force a weakened America to sign a treaty and they say look this is the International rule of law this is how things are done now you've got to learn to live with it that's how it's taught in the Chinese universities and schools just as there are similar topics that are taught in my school in that and we go with that so given that I think we need to get inside the minds of China an address or understand this concern in the way that we probably didn't get inside the minds of Saddam and the Iraq is and if we had done that we might not be in that similar position at the moment I just want to go up now too it's about there oh that's oh that's where it is it's off the coast of Da Nang an island called lisan which is a community of about 20,000 people and it's from here that the fishermen go out to the Paracel Islands so this community here is pretty much so sort of fishing it's an agricultural community too but it's got this historical element and quite interesting they have conscription in Vietnam but if you're a fisherman in lisan you escape conscription because you're in fact representing the country in the fishing boats when this character here is Tran excuse me Tran nacht neuen who's the governor of lisan and he told me that at least half of the boats that go out to the Paracel Islands in some way come into confrontation with Chinese coast guards or hostile Chinese fishing boats which is known as the maritime militia of China I asked him to draw me am the nine-dash line so I put a map in front of him without anything honor I said draw me the line so he drew it along those contours of that cow's tongue then when he got to Lee song he pushed the marker down and pressed it right through the center of his island and I stepped back and I said I said look I haven't seen a map like this you're exaggerating you know the China doesn't make it claim to that he says yes but China doesn't say where the nine-dash line is and we have to be prepared that they could at any stage come into this island try and take it from us and that's what our thinking is there's a thinking of a sort of mid ranking government official goes right throughout Vietnam probably right throughout much of Southeast Asia but then after a lot of sort of military the Vietnam small can 'edit but a lot of hostilities Vietnam too has to cut its deals with China China's got the economic leverage it's there on the doorstep so most recently they announced some setting up a beacon on zones of course anti-chinese demonstrations because it means that more Chinese businesses would go in there and that went the wrong way there we are one example that came to me you could go into facts and figures but this was a striking one is that they have the National Military Museum in Hanoi and I've been going back with some Forces Museum since the late 80s and the first time I went there they had right outside the thing they had a French an American and a Chinese armored personnel carrier tag all stacked up and crushed on top of each other to show that this is the one country that's taken on three of the permanent members of the UN Security Council and given them a very bloody nose now if you go there that's not there anymore there's no captured Chinese vehicles and the National Military Museum this is an American plane that was brought down that some some time they've got the maps for the invasion of Saigon and the taking Saigon in 1975 nothing about going into Cambodia in 79 and that the 78 and 79 and that war there and then this one is 948 an ancient battle where they had a fight between the Vietnamese and the Chinese so it's a bit like in Britain if you go into a museum and we've got 1066 and the Norman invasion and Harold with the I the arrow in his eye but nothing about the first or the Second World War they've decided to placate China in that way given the essentially what has happened probably over the past five or six years since these bases have been built when the economic leverage is increased you have this sort of Chinese it's not controlled but big influence in Southeast Asia and they've been very successful at it why first there was a failure of both the US and a United Asian front to stop the building of the basis so that prompts any pragmatic forward-looking Asian leader to ask where their country's long-term future lies so three or four years ago when I was talking to Southeast Asian governments they kept saying we don't want to be US we don't want to be asked to choose sides and this is what we did in the Cold War today more and more of them are putting together already a plan B because they know that things are shifting in that direction just about every government there has at some stage being given a marker of what would happen to them if they cross Beijing and this panoply of rewards that float down if they go along with what Beijing wants what might unfold if China fails to deliver in a number of years we don't really know but that's pretty much where we are now so then we go through the Malacca Straits to India and this is how the book moved in the two years because India now is a sort of new frontline but it's this new ally not even a lie but it's new partner to stop or balance Chinese expansion China's already got what's called a string of pearls that runs around and series of ports and the Indian Ocean the Bay of Bengal there and now it does this talk about the quad which is the US India Japan and Australia and I've got a feeling that we Britain and France will soon be joining that and I don't know what you call it after that my problem with this is is that we've been there before and as much as it's talked up about democratic values going against authoritarian values and all that it's it's not going to work and this is why 1962 China fought a brief war with India in which Kennedy sent immediately us equipment and advisers to help China that helped India against China again China went in as with the Paracels exactly when it thought the US would be distracted distracted it timed it to coincide exactly almost in the day with the Cuban Missile Crisis but Kennedy wasn't distracted and the Cuban Missile Crisis went on when Kennedy ended the blockade the Chinese withdrew from India having defeated the Indians or shown that much better than Jesus militarily they were also terrified that the US would join in and possibly with nuclear weapons so one would have thought there was a clear shoulder-to-shoulder alliance of the two worlds biggest democracies there that would endure not so nine years later when the Bangladesh war of independence happened the u.s. sided with Pakistan and India signed an agreement with China with with Russia that is now endures very well and Russia became India's main supplier of arms so that's a pretty much a lot agreement so if we spool forward 50 years or so that border problem hasn't gone away this was last year on the doctrine plateau with the siq in Bhutan and India the two armies face to face and China will keep up this pressure on India on this unresolved border she was at the same time leveraging its economic and trade leverage inside of India why has it unfolded like this why we living in a false premise if we think that India is going to join like this I three reasons unlike other rising global powers in which I can Britain China France Japan Russia the u.s. India hasn't undergone a massive revolution in whereby you strip out the old system and you install a new one usually with a great deal of bloodshed but that's how it tends to happen what India did was it took what the British bequeathed them and basically ran with it whether it was the rail system or Parliament and the system has held the country together but it hasn't produced great policies or great leaders it hasn't led the world in poverty alleviation for example which it could have done and there aren't really mechanisms or impetus to change it secondly unlike other rising powers India hasn't introduced its monroe doctrine whereby like china is doing now it looks after its own backyard to make sure that other nations don't interfere in it so over the years China's will Pakistan we know about but Sri Lanka the Maldives Bangladesh Nepal and Bhutan all of which were technically in India's arc but it's just let them go and China is now in there very much and third this continuing general lack of trust between the u.s. and India can only ever make them fair with the friends in a scenario say say when it might happen tomorrow whereby the us-russia relationship worsens and India is asked to choose as we in Europe are now being asked to choose on the Iran deal that whose gun the India were likely head back to its non-aligned status and keep doing its own thing and not least because it sees Russia as a reliable supplier of arms whereas the US has not been I'm just going to finish I'm not going to touch on Japan or Korea unless we do that in QA but but these are two other sort of flash points but I do want to talk about Taiwan a little bit which in this very bad map is down there just off the coast if China and I presume we all know pretty much is history and there we have a Taiwanese controlled island against that magnificent backdrop of the mega city of char men it's just a couple of hundred yards throw away and this shows so Taiwan itself is a hundred or so miles away but Jin min which is there is very very close and there's a commuter ferry that I took across to Jimin takes half an hour and it's just sort of runs backwards and forwards now Jimin has been for a long time in the crosshairs of China's reunification plans for Taiwan which seemed in recent months or years two months two gathered pace the deputy ambassador leader Shin highlighted Taiwan and his keynote Express he didn't address he went straight off the opium wars on to Taiwan like let's talk about the things that are really troubling us on this and he spoke in that uncompromising language about red lines and the thing about Taiwan is that you know Korea India South China Sea these are all sort of strategic ways that that you know you work out your foreign policy and defense policy Taiwan is right here there we go right there it's an emotional narrative like the opium wars and the more we understand that emotional narrative the more we can deal with it we have to separate the thinking on that away from the other ones because it does go right to the heart of what what every Chinese person is taught at school and that see Jinping as he gathers his Paris gonna stake more and more of his reputation on winning Taiwan back in 1958 the yeah these these are the spikes that are still there some of the islands of Jin min so that Chinese paratroopers would be impaled if they tried to invade and they would land on those spikes and then get machine gun by Taiwanese troops and guerrillas and this in 1958 Mao was so determined to take back Jim in that he unleashed such a ferocious artillery barrage the US moved nuclear weapons in to carry out a strike around Shar men Khrushchev who was then the newly appointed leader of the Soviet Union got wind of and told Eisenhower that a strike on China would be a strike on the Soviet Union Eisenhower's in any case a little reluctant and he had to tell his commanders that the nuclear weapon was a different type of weapon it wasn't like oh we're going to battle let's use the best gun we've got there was something different here and I think there's an argument we're outside this that perhaps the same thing should be done now with cyber warfare but Taiwan was in a way a forerunner of the Cuban Missile Crisis and of course what by the time that happened the sino-soviet pact had shredded a bit which was why Beijing probably backpedaled from India so quickly in 1962 the most strategic island in the South China Sea is this one here dong Shah because you can see exactly where it lies at the mouth of the South China Sea and that is owned by by the Taiwanese it's a demilitarized it's got the coast guards there and I flew in there a few years back that's what that's what it looks like from a transport plane and there we are doing a piece to camera trying to explain Asia to our audience in two minutes and that's basically all it is it's a runway and a couple of there's a coral place that they grow coral and the housing for the coast guards and I think there's some pretty heavy weaponry on there that we weren't allowed to see there's been some talk on the Twittersphere nonsense another echo chamber recently about US troops being posted to the Taiwanese islands in the Spratlys which obviously is not going to happen but in Taipei there is talk about remilitarization typing which is the other island there which is the big one in the Spratlys and that would be one hell of a red line if Taiwan chose to cross it but it's obviously putting on a table a bit because it's talking about it and then of course if China did walk into dong-ha one day its control of the South China Sea would be complete strategically I don't know how many of you are familiar with the Russian bastion of defense on the other side but it would be similar to to the Russians walking into Spitsbergen and svalbard there and then they would own all that territory they're heading into the North Atlantic the Taiwanese gave me some figures on maintaining these islands which I thought were quite useful they modernized typing recently and reckoned it cost some 1.1 billion to modernize it this new runway new port and all the rest of it meaning that if you take into account the cost of reclaiming the land and building the eight the Paracels in the doesn't come cheap the problem is is that we're not doing much to stop it because one two sorry about that and after the failure of Iraq and the misconceptions about the Arab Spring the reputation of liberal democracy for want of a better word being damaged in the view of some beyond repair particularly if you're in Beijing at times Taiwan along with South Korea stands as examples of the you know democracy can work outside of a Western culture if you mentor it properly if you give it time and if you give patience you can do it you know what we're doing we're faced with a situation now where China's become rich and confident using that international rules based order that it doesn't really trust and it's taking the wealth of that system to destroy one of the great examples of democracy in another culture that we have managed to create I'm not sure what we do about that but but when you look at the flashpoint so you've got the India China bori what career you've got Japan and it's got the South China Sea Taiwan I've got a feeling now that the Korean issue has been shelved for a few months at least we'll come under the spotlight a little bit more and I just finished with this memo from the Australian Joint Intelligence Committee in 1959 and I going to read it because if we ignore problems like this they come and bite us very quickly and we don't know what to do about it no one's trained and this is when we know what China is gonna do we know where it's going in the Arctic we know where it wants to go in Europe we know what it's doing in Africa but we don't seem to have a cohesive policy to address it I'm not saying to stop it but to address and understand it so in 1959 the Australians Joint Intelligence Committee flagged up mm mm oh this is 59 if in the longer term the Communist Chinese were to develop the islands militarily they could make a noose out of themselves on the International shipping and air routes on the pretext of infringement of territorial waters and airspace that might even shoot down an aircraft occasionally at that stage Australia wanted either Britain or the u.s. to take control of the Spratlys and the Paracels but of course that fell on deaf ears because they were Suez there was career there was cube around the corner and all the rest of it I'll leave you with that if we want to talk about Japan and Korea later on that's fine but back to you Greg thank you well Harvey thanks very much for the quick abstract of the book there's still plenty more in there that he didn't talk about I promise I encourage you I at the risk of throwing out any spoilers I would suggest that there was something to the decision by the British publishers to remove the South China Sea from the title because when reading the book I'm struck by the fact that this is less a book about the South China Sea and more a book about China it is a book it seems about the rise of trying to use in the South China Sea of a jumping-off point is that a fair assessment I think one too I was actually asking myself how can I write an interesting book about rocks and reefs and tidal flows and international law that's going to sustain 300 pages and my colleague bill hatin has done one that I couldn't beat anyway I took one look at Bill's book and I thought well there's no way I'm going to do better than that but then as time went on I thought well this is not about this is about these things but it's how cleverly China is doing it in that it it the way that it operates and we're seeing it operate in Europe I'm doing a similar thing in this about China in Europe next week in in Europe is that it will never do enough for anybody to say hey we've really got to stop this so and you've been tracking this Greg and and and you you think well ok so they put missiles in there so what are we gonna do okay so they've reclaimed they built a runway well it's not worth going to war over a fishing reef this is what good and then I was looking more closely and things for developing is what what is happening up in Japan with the Senkaku Islands what is happening over in India on the border there what is the economic leverage that China is putting into Eastern Europe at the moment in order to split the European Union which which isn't in the book but it's sort of emerged you know since then so I was looking at how what is China's long-term plan why didn't we know or address some of this on the South China Sea issue which is you know which is hotly debated where do we stop it do we want to stop it and how do we address it and when you talk to the governments in the West there you know there's always something happening somewhere else that is more important that something that China has deliberately kept below the parapet well that leads into an interesting point which is that there's probably more ink spilled in this book on India and on Japan and certainly on the US and on Taiwan than there is on the Philippines or on Vietnam there are not chapters about the other South Station Clinton so they're mentioned which raises the question in your mind what is the role of the Southeast Asian claim it's they almost seem like bit actors in their own maritime disputes I think that the yeah they're the primary actors in a way but they've shown I think as I mentioned that they've had say since 1975 an opportunity under the Australian security umbrella to become cohesive enough uncorrupt enough decisive enough to recognize in a way that at some stage there will be a rise of China and that they need to be you know a unit to do well that hasn't happened and we saw that when Cambodia split away on the ASEAN thing and on other things and now as we thought with the Philippines and duterte they're picking off these countries one by one even Singapore was targeted when the when it was having its joint military exercises why Taiwan a couple of years back in its armored carriers were confiscated in Hong Kong so you had three hits at once about Chinese control there and what I what I think just to answer your question directly is I thought okay we have the story if the Philippines and Vietnam which are the two main ones the other ones would be if you're looking at the broader camps kind of repetitive and I didn't want to go into the huge corruption although I mentioned it a bit in the Malaysian politics or the the inward workings of Indonesia which is hugely important fair enough now I want to ask an unfair question please what's the South China Sea all about because I let me open this with you one of the final chapters chapter 16 or so is called the heart of the matter where one would expect to see what the heart of the matter is I'm not sure there's a definitive answer though you you open the chapter by mentioning at the center of the dispute our conflict over trade freedom of navigation taxation which I'd be interested that won't call my surprise and international wall and those some you know mix of that same soup is usually what comes out in in statements but we've still failed to explain to publics even in Asia what exactly this is about we keep throwing out those buzzwords but one of them has to be forfeit the forefront well I I guess it's about the rules-based system in international law and for me I think it's where you should draw the line and put the spotlight so if you know if we say Iraq in 2003 was against you know was about democracy and ending threats and and that's this is a different different way of saying yeah there's something very important going on here and if we aren't to uphold the value system that we've fought for over the years and we call it liberal democracy over in Britain and that's getting trashed I don't know what the fashionable term for it is here but the d-day beaches you know the mission of the d-day beaches are we gonna let it be salami sliced away by an authoritarian powerful government that is going to win the Allies of Asia win the weaker countries of Europe win the countries of Africa and the place that it's made it stand and it's a it's blatantly violated international is in the South China Sea the problem we've got there Greg I think is that nobody lives there so that you don't have the sort of pictures that you got down on the Mexican border you don't have the sort of pictures you get out of Syria you don't get that sort of prairie fire of emotion of saying oh my god we've got to do something here and there are issues that are now very complex given what what is happening in the States in in here in the US now politically and what we've got happening in Europe and Britain politically people up bringing up their plan B's as to what is the best system of government particularly if you're sitting in the Philippines or Malaysia or something when you have this huge foot right on top of you that you know you're going to have to deal with this to deal with it so I don't have a I'm not going to be prescriptive here but I think I'm just saying that we've got to be aware that this is happening and find a way to sell it so that the people that make the decisions at the top can allocate the time and money to deal with it well by not being prescriptive you short-circuit my follow-up question which was what are we doing and I'm making allowance for that okay I I understand that that you know there was an entire cottage industry and I'm part of it here in Washington you know making up answer this question but in your opinion what exactly should the party he mentioned not just the US but India Japan and Korea and the cetaceans do about this I think my overall prescription goes a little little wider and actually it was here at a CIS thing when I first started doing this on China power that there were a number of Chinese people and there and I we got into a conversation is has there ever been a conference to read remould the world order without there being a war and we sort of talked about the Congress at the end of the League of Nations and all the rest of it and none of us could actually say that there you know yes so there's been this one and that lasted for X number of years I think what we're facing here is the creaking architecture of a seventy-year-old system that that isn't doing the business it's not doing the business in the European Union it's not doing business that United Nations and various other multilateral things are not doing but and even if it was doing the business it's not trusted that was the point I was trying to get there it's not trusted by China because it sees the Western based international rules system is being delivered through the barrel of the gun in 1839 this will never happen because nations do not concede ground that is not lost on the battlefield but it would be quite interesting if you set a conference with the whole with Iran and saying if we had had a war how would we rewrite this world order who would get the seat at the table and what would it look like I'm not even being prescriptive on that because I know that is never going to happen but I think that is what needs to happen at some stage otherwise you're going to get a black swan come up and everybody's gonna look around and they say oh my god this has happened and now we're going to have to have a war you know I think we have a pretty good idea of what Beijing's vision for post you know World War two international order what what the system would look like in the next couple of decades and whether you want to look at it as as you know Asian values reviving that debate from the 90s or you know Xi Jinping's China dream there's a sense reading the the preference from Beijing but that China think that speaks for Asia and I think one of the reasons and curricula for all that you focus so much on Taiwan is to make the point that China doesn't necessarily speak for the rest of Asia and the part of the problem the cells trying to see is that Beijing is has failed to come to grips with the idea that the rest of Asia isn't necessarily on board with China's vision from 21st century you're right but I think that the rest of Asia is wondering what it can do about not being on board and it's beginning to realize there's not much it can do about not being on board I often compare the situation in Asia particular Taiwan with that that we've got in the Middle East within the Palestinian issue or something I think the Asian there's a pragmatism in Asia of of okay we've got a big power here let's find a pragmatic way of dealing with this power so that we can we can still keep going on they're not going to send out suicide bombers and get themselves killed and that sort of thing it's going to be different there but what will happen I think is this easing of Western values out particularly if we let Taiwan go because and that I think and that's why I mentioned those two things there because one you've got the rule of law or the value system or whatever that's that is militarily symbolized by the South China Sea and then you've got right on its doorstep Taiwan which is a success story of how our values can work in Asia and that is what and I think chide the Chinese too are pragmatic enough to think okay so we've now got a proper argument and a proper thing against what way it's not going to be picked on steel or on you know a freedom of navigation operation we've got an overarching policy here and we can deal with that policy as long as it doesn't interfere with the trajectory of where we want to go in the next 30 or 40 years I mean China's got big problems of its own and it knows right now that it needs us more than we need it to put it very bluntly so but at the same time it has got you know that these this emotional thing about tone where it could lash out to its own detriment if it feels that sovereignty is being impinged a bit like we're doing in Britain at the moment so you know this is what makes it quite delicate well with that I'm going to wrap up and throw it to the audience we're gonna have a microphone coming around I would just lay it on a couple of ground rules please identify yourself someone for knows who's responding to please make sure that your question involves a question speeches and grandstanding are what we're up here for all right and with that I have one in the back ear two three up front I'm Stanley Cober I keep hearing that the Chinese will be able to control South China Sea but these are fixed targets no civilians that's tailor-made for the American armed forces if we get into a conflict we can destroy anything so I'm wondering what value is there in terms of a us-china confrontation and what they're getting out of this you met you started off with the fish okay they get fish this is a big investment just to get some fish I'm still puzzled I think it's it's it's a it's a tricky one because they've got no motivation to interfere with the shipping in the South China Sea at all surance rates would go up they wouldn't be able to get their fuel there's no motivation to do that and the US has essentially said you know apart from the freedom of navigation operations which are very choreographed has said okay that's you know that's how we are at the moment I mean I've spoken to an you know military and defense people who say what concerns me is that China gets a bit of hubris about this and keeps going and oversteps the mark or that a prairie fire begins here like say it did with them was at Dubai ports world when they wanted to buy in New York port here and and you know that a wave of public opinion comes in that forces the politicians to make decisions that aren't necessarily pragmatic and well-thought-out so unless the situation is resolved which is not at the moment and the same goes with Taiwan and all these other other issues you have got a danger of something breaking out that we don't expect to break out it's it's a no unknown as it were which is why it would be far better to resolve it but then how do you do that do you accept that they've broke an international law and therefore what happens after that that's what I talked about the conundrum okay so here shinza Framus aha engine turns over International Studies on evading fellow in CSI is and I don't agree with juror said China's policy is a kind of expecting maybe China policy is gentle about the consultation on husband in santiana see because a week we hasn't occupied more islands in South China Sea especially since 2002 after UNC was concluded to college in Safari is about you mentioned about the historical or Vasant Tennessee you see gaff over Thailand is also one part of some Tennessee and also some maritime disputes of some Southeast Asian countries in the graph of talent and to using a whole say a little more about such a graph on the colonists struggles is there and a second is about the urinal us is a Great Britain and we are count out freedom of navigation insurgency and do you think operating is trying to humiliate the China again thank you I didn't get the can you repeat the question again I didn't quite get it it kept dropping out can you say something about as a maritime disappears jeans a gaffe of a tyrant of Thailand in the Gulf of Thailand oh yes yep yeah there are I think the gentleman is talking about the other disputes between the other countries which there are many you know Brunei Vietnam in that everybody's got a disputed Spratly Islands is disputed between all of these people and that's not settled but I think the key point the narrative that I've got here is that is that there's there's not a threat of war on these there's certainly not a threat of war between superpowers on these and there's a you know there is a structures within a cien that keep keeps stuffed I don't think anybody's got a motivation to to blow these up and I mean there are disputes between the US and Canada and Japan and Korea which occasionally but there's we've got Gibraltar and Spain you know there are territorial disputes all around the world the South China Sea dispute as I said it's because the rule of law international law has been broken according to an international court and that issue of it being broken but not addressed or the or the law being implemented remains unresolved and that I think is the is the problem main problem we've got with this thanks Pete levy from the from the Australian Embassy good to see the Australian intelligence community was was on the ball fifty years ago that's good I just wonder if you could expand on some thoughts on Hong Kong and the future of the one one country two systems which seems to be sort of unravelling quicker than people expected yes again it's sort of it is unraveling in that salami slicing way although the arrest of the booksellers and the stopping of the the Singaporean armored vehicles sort of stepped over the line and I think coming from Britain we've got it we've got a problem there because we and this is an example of Chinese leverage that I was talking about we had a couple of years back before Teresa Mae came in and brexit we had a golden era with China that we were having whereby it was investing in our nuclear power and our high-speed railway and our god-knows-what and this was going to be the future of Britain's economy that's sort of slowed down but it has not have been officially done now we've got brexit and we're looking towards India and China for the big trade deals at the same time we've got international treaty obligations on Hong Kong of which we Britain are being accused on a constant basis of not upholding the arrest of the booksellers a few years back is one example the armored cars is another and there's little example the the the jailing of the demonstrators and school curriculum and that whole sort of slowly gradually absorbing Hongkong not into one country two systems one country one reluctant system that's going on there now I don't know what's going to happen post brexit on this because we are now going to apparently be taking part it regularly in the freedom of navigation operations quite why we're going to be doing this in the South China Sea when we're needed in the North Atlantic that that issue hasn't been answered together with the French and how much we're prepared to forfeit whatever trade deals we're doing with China in order to be part of those freedom of navigation operations none of that is being debated in Britain because we're completely obsessed with ourselves and brexit at the moment thank you I'm Tom reckford with a foreign policy discussion group you briefly mentioned Malaysia a few times but something rather interesting z-- happened in Malaysia in the last few months the Najib government fell in the elections 92 year old maha tier has come back and is in charge he's a fairly prickly character as we all know and he's already trying to get Malaysia out from under some of the Chinese investment deals is it not possible that he can be a more commanding speaker in terms of the South China Sea issues as well I think you're right as you know he's 92 years old as long as he stays the course but I think both of us been tracking him I think I first met him in the mid 80s or something and we were talking about this just before we came in is there's another issue here which which i think is that as the leadership I mean my heart ear and Lee Kuan Yew took those two countries up to be the Asian miracles and the Tigers and there was that sense of Asian unity of independence and an intellectual debate as to what Southeast Asia was and that Singapore's kept it but in Malaysia it disappeared and it fell into this dreadful sort of corrupt mess Arabia and China bailing them out and all the rest of it and I think I think ma hot air can if he stays the course and what he will do in a pity comment is bring forward an argument that will sum it up for us all and I think just yesterday he made a very good point about that the the trade wars and protectionism and everything and he said it should be done on a golf handicap thing so that a small country would be able to have more protectionism against it than a big country because that's the state if it is that is a typical Marathi a comment that Road Malaysia through that thing and I'm I'm you know he is prickly and he was he was very feisty with us in the nineties but he's also a good leader hi Ida Knox with the American Bar Association rule of law initiatives so I have a question for you you set up the context with 1839 being where the average Chinese person gets their first idea of Western based ideals and democracy and I'm curious for you with younger generations the 80s the 90s going in with the internet not to discredit the role that elementary education had in their lives in human university but I feel like they're getting sort of a more live media narrative of what's coming out of Western democracies right now as the influence on what's forming their ideals and I'm curious if you think that like where you think they should look for that because my experience with the undefinable average Chinese person is that they see a very negative view of what's coming out of the Western media narrative so they're lost in that they've what about the West immediately so I feel like they don't necessarily see a model when they look at Western democracy right now and I'm curious since they're getting that narrative from so many places where you think they should be looking either countries or more broadly yeah I think I'm too encapsulate that quote could this is in the developing world I'm going through in a possibly now world at all is that in 2003 the rock invasion post that with the Arab Spring the narrative of Western democracy has has been battered if you'd put that up against the various statistics of poverty alleviation and the delivery of infrastructure particularly in Africa where if you go into any country now probably the airport and the road is going to have been built by the by the Chinese and then you have the debate that's going on I know the debates going on here in the US and the debate we've got going on about a fractured Europe as to what it is and the rise of nationalism and the immigration issues and all that sort of thing I think that if you're sitting say in Ghana or in Mumbai you're going to be actually looking and saying well okay we had thought that you know the Queen and Buckingham Palace represented everything that we wanted to be but that's not the case anymore but holy Moses what's over here and then see Jingping and is taking advantage of that with some very clever people educated over here and educated in London in writing the narrative like he did for the belt and Road initiative speech in May last year and the the Davos speech there where he's actually articulating a vision and because there is no democracy in that country his vision is not immediately torn apart on a talk show so it can get you get traction on weibo and wechat and that then that sort of thing and it gets a bit of traction so I hope that answers your question a little bit back in the same hi my name is axel cotillion with the US Asia Institute so recently Japan just lowered the age to vote on constitutional reform if Japan were to build a full military how do you think that would affect this issue the constitutional reform here or in Japan Oh in Japan yeah we didn't touch on on the I think that it is going to affect because whatever happens there there is a prospect say 10 15 20 years from now that Japan will have a you know a properly deployable military I think another interesting thing that's happened is that whether it's part of it or not the since the withdrawal of the u.s. from the trans-pacific trade partnership there's been a day taunt between China and Japan which you had some very interesting fishing boat photographs I think if one year you know a couple of years ago the fishing boats were all up there at the things and there and talking to people there what I what I see unfolding there in a bigger way is that there's a realization that particularly in Beijing that if they want to get the u.s. out of the Asia Pacific Japan has got to feel safe and if it doesn't feel safe then it's not going to work because the the key thing that they would want to do in the long term they certainly don't want to do it now because you get chaos which they don't like would be to sever that military relationship and then and that means that the Asia would have to work out its own route and that's a it's a big topic but I think that was a since 2012 when the nationalism rise began in Japan the demonstrations happen the inward investment from Japan to Beijing dropped by something like 40 percent the Senkaku Islands raised up I think there are people sensible enough on both sides and says we can't let this escalate any longer but how are we going to bring it down so that both of us can there was a interestingly bidden book I haven't got it here of them the somebody does bribing the rise of Japan in the 1930s and I played around with it exchanging Japan for China and it read pretty much exactly the same you've got a rising power in Asia against the Western democracy of the US and how do you deal with that let's go right next door hi Alex Sanchez my defense analyst here in DC and one question on the issue of Asian unity what do you think is the future of Asian like ASEA n do you think that that block has any kind of future can they unite to sort like balance out Chinese influence or that block is too fragmented I think Asian is Asian people might have been a meet with China next week right because the whole day for the Declaration of conduct conference what do you think about that meeting as well thank you the ASEAN talks yeah I think it's going slowly and incrementally but I mean the it's good to have it but it's not you know that the real issue here is is is China in the US and how much the u.s. is going to support as you know how much China can sort of split split the anything I think it's very good to have ten countries sort of talking amongst themselves to bring in the code of conduct I don't have a lot of faith in it actually resolving any issue I think there are a number of organizations like ASEAN the Commonwealth is another one that deliberately keep their heads below the parapet because they know what they can achieve what they can't achieve and I think this is what's happening with this is good to have it would be good to have it you know written down and everything but it's not gonna solve the problem the nub of the problem of the breaking of international law is isn't going to be solved Jacob Jacob Mendel College of William Mary what's the role of the US and this their kind of there's been the choreographed navigation maneuvers but there's also been now the freezing and military exercises with South Korea kind of what's the path going forward for the US and is there an ideal path forward for the US thank you an ideal path for the u.s. yeah the one that works I mean the problem is you talk about the freedom of navigation operations or anything and they go wrong at any moment so you know in 2001 you had the you know the spy plane accident there which was a you know a rogue Chinese pilot went too far I think and then when those things go wrong that's when you have to really know how to put in all the safety nets before they escalate and I think we're getting to a situation now whether the the the the the freedom of navigation operations are on the increase France and Britain takes power Australia New Zealand are already doing it as somebody said to me in the book you said you've got to be really careful when you're walking your dog down those tracks you've got to be on bridge to bridge communications and if anything of that if there's any miscalculation that goes wrong it can catapult out within seconds and then when you've got the type of democracies that we have where you've got the 24 hour chat shows going on and somebody goes I mean I remember this is an example but it's an it's slightly off here right at the beginning of the Syrian war I was in the studio we get him as a present as friends so something had happened the Syrian war was just starting in a very senior politician came on with me and the presenter and said we we need to send arms to the Syrian rebels I said well we don't know who they are we don't know whose side they're on let's just row back a bit but that argument got completely swept away and I think within a week up you know the Britain was sending arms and aid to various rebel groups and look where we are now and if you have that sort of thing happening with China on a miscalculation in the South China Sea I would hate to war game what would happen going up to the president White House down in the blue shirt hey my name is I'm reading from The Voice of America I have two questions for you first of all for the last four let's look at the overall pictures channel history are from almost nothing in the South China Sea to the point is it today when it has fully militarized is outpost insurgency so in your opinion what has and what underpinned China's success in his spending strategy the US has anything to plan for that and the second question is the really US and its allies has any leverage in getting China to respect the rule base orders in the South China Sea so the first one was was what will they do next essentially the first question was I think Greg might agree or disagree with me on this the Scarborough Shoal is the sort of one that is everybody's talking about and you know I've heard the red lines on the Philippines than that but I mean scratch holes obviously strategically placed they have control over it and I suspect that at some stage they've they will do something they're not at the moment they're prepared to wait it out and they talk about you know dredging in order for radar to happen there so I think that that's that's one to watch and then if you're in Taipei you're talking about dong chair island where the maritime militia these are these Chinese fishing boats that are essentially under the control of the PLA constantly going in there and testing it when I was there they said they had to add a often coming in and testing the defenses of dongja island and that's the one right at the at the mouth of the South China Sea and the second question was well I mean that's the problem I think the u.s. is having if it wasn't having such a problem with its allies it wouldn't be welcoming Britain and France from far away Europe to take part in that so the India thing I spoke about just now that when I was talking this in the Philippines they have they had their I'm not sure if it's changed they had turned down carrying out joint patrols with the Americans because they didn't want you know as one but he said we don't want the American issues with China to be part of what we're doing they've been some winding down of small parts of the US Philippine agreements there I think everybody is very wary of of of how far they will go in taking it I mean Vietnam is probably the strongest because there's been a port visit there that's buying radar Coast Guard vessels and that sort of thing but you're not getting that front that would be necessary you're not getting an allied Democratic front to say right this is what the wall of our values that you have to face hi thank you so much for being here today my name is Caitlin Chung um from the State Department's Bureau of international security and non-proliferation I just like to return to the question of Taiwan and ask something about the trilateral relationship between Taiwan the US and China so in 1979 I believe the u.s. took a very deliberate decision to move away from Taiwan established by a lot of relationships with China but then in 2018 with mine Jill was proud to taunt you see that relationship between the US and Taiwan improving and with the current president tying one in place I was wondering if you still saw Taiwan as a very critical strategic place to counter Chinese influence and rising China or according to your research do you see that not as useful anymore and like your response to the earlier earlier question there aren't we there isn't a rally democratic force in the South China Sea to counter China so is Taiwan still very critical in that mission I think it is yeah I mean it's it's it's a tricky one but the pressure that China has been putting on on Taiwan since giganto power essentially particularly since the phone call it's immense and the Taiwanese I speak to actually think that it's just going to keep going keep going so the semiconductor trade is being squeezed the tourists you know the travel of people from from China are only going to KMT areas they're not going to DPP Aires the trade deal so if for example and we wanted to buy all said we and Britain wanted to buy or sell something to Taiwan somebody is going to have a word in somebody's ear and say well if you do that you're going to lose that big aircraft contract or something that you had so what do we do there and this is this is the stuff that is going on here at the moment I think it's very critical because particularly the military exercises that have started you know had been ramped up there the message that was put over on the military exercises that Singapore and Taiwan have been doing for many many years and they suddenly said well if you can do that we're going to confiscate the your armored cars coming back the diplomatic stuff that was going on and then it was interesting you know it's interesting you talk to you know a Chinese now and Taiwan keeps coming up so it's in their minds its its in its on that that the policy there the key thing is the is his president Choi hasn't agreed to us called the the page of the consensus where by which was the one China policy she's sort of gone along with all things but hasn't reaffirmed it and that and that has set Beijing's hackles up as it were thank you we have five minutes left and I see three questions why don't we four questions while we collect them all okay we can do a lightning round and you can answer them yes we have started in the back here hi some Connor scalloping University of st. Andrews this is more of a question from a military perspective given the resources that China has to expend to kind of you know keep these operations up to what extent do you can they really you know keep doing it while trying to also balance wouldn't say modernizing a military but keeping up with you know the other like military powers and or is this not even something China is really concerned about the outside of the rockers German whoo yeah Tonya thank you very much for for the talking a book on trovato's in in South China Sea yeah sorry my name is Dean Lai from a Southeast Asian sea Foundation which is a non-governmental Research Center based in friends created by Vietnamese intellectuals around world we we speak a lot about the conflict on the sea and their own important role of China in this but the recent situation in Vietnam following days the recent days show that it could affect also the situation on land means the stability of the countries neighboring the area as you are you can know of there is the decision to go through the special economic zone lower in Vietnam by the government that creates a lot of protests and anger inside of the company and so either the country by his pupil to some extent the the bellicose approach of China not only on sea but also in economic cooperation led to lose of truth trust by the people in the neighboring countries to the Chinese to the China is concrete and also to the government of these countries because they tend not to trust their government which they seem to be true in Dungeon to China so it's rather comment but this is something that you discuss on Sonia book about the risk of instability closing by then could you pass the microphone forward oh yeah I would like to pick your brain on two issues the one is recently in a confirmation hearing Admiral don't Anson have state of the Pacific Command have study that that china now has a capability to control silent child ii see in own scenario short of war with the united state my question is can this process be reverse number two is that numbers if not all South Asian country small country there would like you would seek to utilize that as a counterweight to China my question to you is under the present circumstances what is the wisdom for those country to continue the so for that kind of counterweight thank you though can you repeat the last question again the last question is what is the wisdom or small country is how is Asia too sick United States as a counter way to China expansionism reason to assist the United States the wisdom of in the u.s. is so we have four questions why don't we cut it off there and you have a minute and two seconds it's nowhere lanser there yeah the wisdom I think we did we'll talk about can't answer the questions altogether because and I think the I think I'll just say that the the wisdom is is is the focus that we need to put on this this is the biggest geopolitical challenge that we have faced probably since the Second World War the Cold War was a challenge for the Second World War and it comes at a time when our own value system is being questioned so apprec is questions that I got to wrap up in about 45 seconds essentially I think we have to understand what is happening here and that it's happening in a different era to the Cold War to the Second World War to the League of Nations to the first war it's not 1930s it's not 1910s it's not 1960s it's a different era with different technology and a different power that is coming up that is not necessarily an evil power and I think in my greatest fear is that we're gonna wake up one morning and we're gonna find out that see Jing ping is like Saddam and a sad and we've just got to go out and remove him and everything's gonna be fine in China and that's going to be a narrative that will stick because those of us that have follow this is is it's sticks in many places and that would be the biggest mistake that we could possibly make si Jinping is not any of those people and China is not one of those countries China is very sophisticated it's got a vision and I think we need to understand it in order to address it and hopefully without conflict well if everybody could please join me in thanking Humphrey for his time and thank you all for coming out

Channel: Center for Strategic & International Studies

Views: 10,777

Keywords: Tags, go, here!, csis

Id: 7Rp4Vu60Rss

Length: 83min 6sec (4986 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 22 2018