About Those Missiles on Woody Island

I have an article up exclusively at Asia Times Online, South China Sea Face-off: The Mystery of Woody Island.  Go ahead, click the link!

It addresses the media freakout over a Fox News report that commercial satellite imagery revealed something that looked like HQ-9 surface-to-air missile launchers were on the beach at Woody Island in the Paracels.

Official reactions in the PRC were noticeably...strange.  The PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs was clearly blindsided by the whole thing, indicating that whatever was happening was not part of a carefully planned provocation/escalation.

On the US side, Admiral Harris said rather belatedly that the report, "if verified", was an unwelcome sign that Xi Jinping was breaking his "pledge" not to militarize the South China Sea.

(I don't go into in the AT piece, but as I noted at the time of Xi's visit, he never "pledged" not to militarize, he simply said he didn't intend to.  The idea that Xi would unilaterally and individually make "pledges" to the United States concerning areas the PRC considers sovereign territory is apparently not too ludicrous to be entertained by the Western media at large.)

Anyway, it turns out that the Woody Island deployment, if it actually occurred (I'm always a tad skeptical when these things are documented by expert photo analysis of fuzzy commercial imagery), was not the first time the PRC has put missile launchers on Woody Island; in fact it would have been the third time.

And since Woody Island is a key PRC military facility of decades standing, characterizing rotations of military equipment on and off the island are hard to spin as "militarization".

The HQ-9s might have been put on Woody Island to support the deployment of J-11 fighters, something which is supposedly happening now.  It would be the second deployment of J-11s since the airport was enlarged to accommodate them, apparently something the PRC does in rotations instead of stationing them permanently and risking corrosion of the airframes from prolonged exposure to salt air.

And, of course, the Paracels are genuine, not man-made islands a couple hundred kilometers from Hainan, not the infuriating fake-island Spratlys down by the Philippines.

The Paracels do have issues.  In fact they are a permanent obstacle to any formal settlement in the South China Sea since their seizure from Vietnam in 1974 is the hottest of hot button issues and Vietnam will never acknowledge PRC sovereignty over them.  The US doesn't like the archipelagic baseline the PRC claims around the whole group of island (instead of calculating individual territorial waters/EEZs like UNCLOS wants) and the most recent USN FONOP challenged this particular piece of cartography.

But the Paracels and Woody Island are not part of the Spratly island building/militarization fears/nine-dash-line/salami-slicing/arbitration fracas that obsesses the United States right now.

As such they are not a particularly effective venue for the PRC to "defy" President Obama and the ASEAN confrerees at Sunnylands, the allegation that Fox (and its DoD partner in leakage) were trying to push.

All of this, of course, just factual noise in the media  "Missiles in the South China Sea!"  frenzy. As I write in the piece:

Just like in Hollywood, the motto for reporting on the military in Asia is “Nobody knows anything.” Exactly the way the DoD likes it, I expect.


As far as I can tell, the big outlets ran with the Fox story without demanding a look at unambiguous high-res imagery from US spy satellites or, for that matter, trying to get a comment from the PRC apparatus before running the story.

No fun or profit in that, I guess.

The prevailing media zeitgeist appears to be that PRC propaganda must be balanced, in an info-war sort of way, with equally crappy adversarial reporting in part, I suspect, to punish the PRC for its serial mistreatment of foreign journos and their employers.

Might as well get used to it.

Bell Tolls for the Pivot in the South China Sea

In discussing the issue of why the PRC plunked down the drilling rig HYSY981 off the Vietnamese coast, there seems to be a certain amount of cognitive dissonance plaguing the Western commentariat.

Apropos l’affaire HYSY 981,The Asia Society hosted a roundtable on its website composed of the luminaries Daniel Kliman, Ely Ratner, Orville Schell, Susan Shirk, and Carl Thayer.  Almost all of them ignored the elephant in the room—the US pivot to Asia.

Only Carl Thayer, in my opinion, gets it right in discussing the third of his three possibilities for the PRC’s provocation:

The third interpretation stresses the geo-political motivations behind China’s actions. The deployment of the CNOOC mega rig was a pre-planned response to President Barack Obama’s recent visit to East Asia. China was angered by Obama’s support for both Japan and the Philippines in their territorial disputes with Beijing. Therefore China manufactured the oil rig crisis to demonstrate to regional states that the United States was a “paper tiger” and there was a gap between Obama’s rhetoric and ability to act.

The third interpretation has plausibility. China can make its point and then withdraw the oil rig once it has completed its mission in mid-August. But this interpretation begs the question why Vietnam was the focus for this crisis and why China acted on the eve of the summit meeting of the heads of government/state of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

I would go a step further than Mr. Thayer, and opine that China’s South China Sea escapade is more than a one-off tantrum.  It represents a “sea change” in the PRC’s strategy for dealing with the pivot to Asia.

For US-China relations, that means:

No G2.  That’s been clear since Hillary Clinton 86’ed the concept as Secretary of State, anyway.

Little more than symbolic lip service to the “new great power” relationship founded on the comforting myth of the World War II victors’ dispensation with the heirs to Roosevelt & Chiang Kai-shek calling the Asian shots, a fantasy which Prime Minister Abe is working assiduously to undermine and supersede.

And, most importantly, from the Chinese point of view, no pivot, at least in the South China Sea. 

In other words, the PRC intends to ignore the idea that its actions in its near beyond are to be deterred by the alarm and opposition of the US and the Asian democracies, thereby challenging the basic assumption of the pivot: that PRC’s defiance of the pivot triggers a virtuous cycle of escalation and anxiety, causing smaller Asian countries to cleave to the United States more closely, thereby enhancing US influence and inhibiting the PRC’s freedom of motion.

I would suggest that, to answer Mr. Thayer’s rhetorical question, the reason that the PRC decided to beat up on Vietnam just before the ASEAN summit—when, by pivot logic the PRC should be loath to antagonize its nervous regional interlocutors and increase the risk of united, anti-PRC action on behalf of Vietnam and the Philippines by the various spooked ASEAN nations—the Chinese leadership did it because they could, and because they wanted to.

Quite simply, I think, the PRC wanted to make a statement that it would not be deterred.  

Surprisingly, ASEAN went along and declined to administer a serious flaming to the PRC, despite the vociferous complaints of Vietnam and the Philippines concerning the rather blatant provocations by the PRC.  A communique on the issue merely asked for “all sides” to show restraint.  Wonder how much bilateral stroking and armtwisting that took.

The fact that the PRC has taken a major action to repudiate the basic premise of the pivot—that a US-led security alliance can deter unilateral and provocative PRC behavior and put an end to the endless exercise of salami-slicing and cabbage-wrapping in its maritime adventures—is, in my opinion, a pretty big deal.

The pivot, after all, is welcomed because it assumes that the PRC, whose military is no match for the US or even, probably, Japan, can be deterred with relatively low risk and at low cost.

If the PRC is going to ignore the consequences of challenging the US pivot and assume, rather logically, that the US is not going to light off a war with China over the SCS, those costs and risks increase.  Worst case, President Obama has to fall back on Nixon’s “madman” doctrine, which is to say the United States is prepared to inflict and endure (at least through its unlucky allies) losses disproportionate to the interests at stake in order to maintain credibility of the deterrent.

The PRC’s willingness to challenge, provoke, and escalate is a major issue for the pivot. 

However, the clang of cognitive dissonance still seems to be faint and ignorable for the public US Asian affairs commentariat, at least as long as the designated victim is Vietnam, if the Asia Society round table is an indicator.

Ely Ratner and Susan Shirk, in particular, take the tack that the HYSY981 is simply a big, stupid blunder by the big, stupid PRC.

First, Ely Ratner:

[T]he Chinese Communist Party appears increasingly unable to reconcile predominant political and economic goals of securing its sovereignty aims while sustaining a peaceful regional security environment… we’ve seen China engage in bearish and clumsy actions that have raised concerns not just in Tokyo and Manila, but also Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta and now Hanoi. At the end of the day, this means that domestic bureaucratic and political imperatives are overcoming the logic of strategy in Beijing, a dangerous development for outsiders hoping that relative costs and benefits (not politics and nationalism) will shape China’s decision-making on its territorial disputes… These…troubling elements paint the picture of a country whose foreign policy is untethered from strategic logic and increasingly engaging in preemptive revisionism.

And Susan Shirk:

The diplomats in the Chinese Foreign Ministry, especially Foreign Minister Wang Yi, who crafted China’s very successful strategy to reassure Asian countries about China’s friendly intentions during 1996-2009 and is trying to revive the strategy now under Xi Jinping, must be well aware that such high-profile assertions of sovereignty will provoke a backlash among China’s worried neighbors. When ASEAN meets next week, the Southeast Asian countries will certainly be pointing fingers at China, as Taylor Fravel predicts in his very informative Q & A with The New York Times. But the Foreign Ministry’s voice no longer dominates the foreign policy process.

What China’s actions reflect, as Ely Ratner says, is the very dangerous possibility that Chinese security policy has become “untethered from strategic logic.” In other words, domestic bureaucratic interest groups and nationalist public opinion are driving toward over-expansion of sovereignty claims in a manner that could actually harm China’s overall national security interests.

I am no fan of the “crazy stupid psycho panda” school when it comes to analyzing PRC moves that the US finds disturbing.  Nevertheless, the CSPP school is a remarkably durable construct in US Asia-wonk circles, perhaps in direct proportion in faith in the genius of the pivot and the idea that it is the best and essential tool for dealing with the PRC.

My general take is that the United States is the only power with the wealth, military capability, and political and geographic impunity to act really stupidly and irrationally, a characteristic, I might say, is on full display as the Obama administration feeds Ukraine into the maw of anarchy in order to punish Russia for the annexation of Crimea (and perhaps distract attention from the spectacular, compounded clusterf*ck that is the US program for building a pro-Western regime in Kyiv).

Smaller powers, regional powers, and candidate superpowers in complicated neighborhoods, like the PRC, have to plan their moves a little more carefully.

And Beijing has been thinking.

China’s Defense Minister, Chang Wanquan, drew a line during his joint press conference with Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel in early April:

China-U.S. relations is by no means the relations between China -- between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union during the Cold War, nor is it relation of coercion and anti-coercion. With the latest development in China, it can never be contained.

Fast forward to the ruckus surrounding the HYSY 981:

MOFA spokersperson’s statement on May 12:

Q: First, Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) calls for speeded-up negotiations with China on the Code of Conduct in the South China Sea (COC). What is China's response to that? Second, some western media believed that China's drilling activities in the waters off Xisha Islands are in response to the US's pivot to Asia and President Obama's recent visit to Asia. What is China's comment?
A: On your first question, the issue of South China Sea is not one between China and ASEAN. There is consensus between China and ASEAN countries on jointly safeguarding peace and stability in South China Sea. China stands with ASEAN countries to continue to work for a full and effective implementation of the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DOC) and steadily move forward the negotiation process of COC.
[As to the second question, the spokesperson asserted that the drilling rig operation was routine and had nothing to do with the pivot, which I choose to interpret as a backhanded statement that the pivot has nothing to do with the South China Sea.]

And May 13: 

Q: The US Secretary of State John Kerry held a phone conversation with Foreign Minister Wang Yi today. The US side asked China to stop taking provocative actions. What is China's response to that?
A: You mentioned the word "provocative". It is true that provocative actions have been seen in the South China Sea recently. But they are not taken by China. It is nothing but the wrong words and actions made by the US side on maritime issues that have emboldened some countries to take provocative actions. We would like the US side to think hard on this: if they really want the Pacific region to be pacific, what kind of role should they play? What actions should they take to truly contribute to the peace and stability of the Asia-Pacific region?
…Wang Yi … urged the US to treat these issues with objectivity and fairness, live up to its commitment, watch its words and actions, and avoid emboldening relevant parties' provocative actions.

Emphasis added.

I am not torturing prose here to interpret these remarks as “China cannot be contained” (Chang actually said that), and that the declaration that the PRC will work together with ASEAN to “jointly safeguard peace and stability” is meant to convey that the United States has no legitimate front-line interests in the South China Sea and the main job of the United States is to “watch its words and actions” to avoid exacerbating the problems.

In other words, the PRC is working to maneuver the South China Sea issues away from the rather canard-esque “freedom of navigation” issue that Hillary Clinton used to claim a compelling US interest in the South China Sea disputes in 2010.  

Instead, the drilling rig episode highlights the fact that the real issues in the South China Sea are the local matters of territory, sovereignty, fisheries, hydrocarbon reserves and delineation of Exclusive Economic Zones or EEZ (Vietnam cannot claim an uncontested EEZ at the site of the HYSY 981; beyond the notorious Chinese cow-tongue claim, the rig is too close to the Paracels, which have their own, as yet undefined EEZ potential).  

This framing is more factual and practical, and more problematic for the United States and the pivot in the South China Sea.  

The US doesn’t take positions of sovereignty issues concerning the miserable rocks of the South China Sea and has had to hang its hat on “no forcible change of the status quo” as American policy.  That might work for the Senkakus in the East China Sea, but offers limited consolation for Vietnam in its hopes of recovering the Paracels, or for the Philippines in its travails over the Scarborough Shoal.

As for the headaches of EEZ delineation occasioned by the ridiculous fruit salad of sovereignty claims and disputes in the South China Sea, the US—which has been unable to ratify the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea even as it announces its adherence to its provisions—has even less ability to complain.

So the PRC is now claiming a pretty big chunk of salami—declaring that it doesn’t recognize a US role in the South China Sea.

As to why the PRC is making this provocative move, I’ve argued before that it is moving preemptively, in response to President Obama’s pivot and also expecting an extremely unfriendly constellation of forces in Asia once Hillary Clinton becomes president.   

So I am inclined to believe that Xi Jinping has decided it’s time to challenge the pivot, carefully and via Vietnam, but openly.

In terms of proximate causes, I wonder if it was a smart move to send President Obama to Asia for a trip explicitly & exclusively designed to promote the pivot, lobby for Japanese collective self defense, conclude a new military agreement with the Philippines, leave the PRC off his itinerary, and expect the PRC to be mollified by visits from Michelle Obama and Chuck Hagel?

The PRC apparently didn’t think so, judging from Chang’s pugnacious remarks at the joint news conference with Hagel.  In addition to announcing his rejection of any China-containment strategy, Chang devoted much of his time to complaining about the perceived transgressions of US allies the Philippines and Japan.

Also, I think Ukraine is a factor.  While demonstrating US fecklessness as a security partner for its allies, it also served as an object lesson in the US willingness to escalate recklessly when it sees a chance to stick it to a designated adversary.  

The fact that the United States has seen fit to drive Vladimir Putin into Xi Jinping’s arms just as the PRC was looking at an extremely tough decade of isolation and confrontation with the US and its Asian neighbors will, I am sure, provide ample grist for future students of international relations.

For now, I find it rather mystifying that the PRC challenge to the pivot is ignored in the popular, pundit-driven press.

Maybe it’s me.

But maybe there’s some kind of code of omerta, an agreement that this issue won’t be bruited about until the US government has settled on a suitable public riposte.

I don’t think the US government is oblivious.

Consider this report in Stars & Stripes:

A USS Blue Ridge-embarked helicopter photographed two Chinese navy ships May 5 near the site of a heavily contested shoal that has sparked a months-long standoff between China and the Philippines in 2012.

The Navy’s photo release of two Chinese Navy ships near Scarborough Shoal sparked some online news outlets to label the encounter a confrontation, which 7th Fleet officials disputed Friday.

The USS Blue Ridge is the command and control flagship that runs things for the US Seventh Fleet.  The two Chinese ships—PLAN ships, not the usual maritime patrol vessels that harass the Philippines—were presumably in the area to monitor a joint Philippine-US military exercise.

And I presume that the USS Blue Ridge sailed past the Scarborough Shoal in order to yank the PRC’s chain, and not just because that was the quickest way to Thailand, which the US Navy claimed as the reason for the approach.


This represents something of an escalation of the US presence in the area of the Philippines vis a vis the PRC, especially compared to the US government’s discrete behind the scenes assistance to the Philippine government’s resupply mission (and media jamboree) to the derelict freighter on the Second Thomas Shoal.  
 
By sailing the USN Blue Ridge around down there and flying helicopters to take a gander at the Chinese warships, I think that the US wanted to put the PRC on notice that dispatching the HYSY 981 to Philippine waters will be a more complicated and fraught undertaking than the Vietnam exercise.

Whether the PRC finds it expedient to heed that warning is something we may find out about in the next few months.


Below the fold for reference are excerpts from Chang Wanquan’s remarks at his press conference with Secretary Hagel, and from the MOFA press conferences addressing the oil rig issue:

World War III Public Service Announcements

 A lot of matches are flying around the Chinese tinderbox.  

Fortunately, most parties involved seem more interested in scoring political points than making a genuine and risky effort to push back China.


However, as the example of Sarajevo tells us, sometimes wars happen when nations become prisoners of their own posturing.  

So it's worthwhile to take a careful and critical look at what's happening in China's backyard with U.S. allies Japan and South Korea and wannabe regional partner Vietnam, and the political circus surrounding valuation of the RMB.

1.  Let Japan Teach Us How to Start a Pacific War

I have two articles up at Asia Times in recent days.

One covers the waterfront, as it were, concerning tensions in the China and South China Seas.

Simply put, the tension in the seas surrounding China is not caused by Chinese aggressiveness; it is the logical outcome of the Obama administration's return-to-Asia strategy.  South Korea, Japan, and Vietnam are emboldened to stand up to China because the United States stands behind them.  Kind of.

Most recent case in point:  the flare-up over Captain Zhan, the Chinese fishing trawler captain arrested by the Japanese for colliding with two Japanese coast guard vessels.

As my article at Asia Times points out, the hard line on the issue of Captain Zhan was pushed by Seiji Maehara, current Japanese Foreign Minister and one of the most energetic advocates of the U.S.-Japan special relationship within the DPJ.

Nevertheless, China was blamed for escalating the crisis.

An amusing sideline to the whole issue was Maehara's unsuccessful efforts to inveigle the U.S. into supporting his stand on Captain Zhan, even after Prime Minister Kan was apparently eager, nay anxious, to put the matter behind him.

Japanese and U.S. willingness to tug the dragon's whiskers is even more overt in the South China Sea, where Secretary of State Clinton and Maehara's predecessor as FM, Katsuya Okada, rather irresponsibly injected themselves in the local disputes in order to curry favor with Vietnam which, I must admit, looks like it got jobbed when the PRC seized the Paracels from a South Vietnamese garrison in 1974. 

The South China Sea is a fruit salad of flags, conflicting claims, and interested countries waving three-hundred year old historical records to advance their arguments.  As long as the principle of free transit continues to be adhered to by all parties, muddling through looks to be the best solution; promoting an adversarial multilateral process simply won't work, IMHO.

The generally godawful Western reporting on the subject demonstrates that foreign affairs correspondents of the access-journalism persuasion did not have their gullibility circuits blown by their performance in the runup to the Iraq war.  Japanese reporting on Maehara's contortions, in particular, seemed to elevate wishful thinking to an editorial policy.

The whole story can be found at Asia Times.  It seems the headline writers at AT made a slight slip, entitling the story Japan poured oil on troubled waters. It looks like Japan is doing quite the opposite.

2.  If We Can't Have a Real War, How About a Trade War

Japan also figures in the second story, which concerns U.S. handwringing over the Chinese trade surplus and the undervalued RMB.

The main justification for compelling a revaluation is the precedent of the 1985 Plaza Accord, by which the United States strongarmed Japan into an enormous revaluation of the yen, from somewhere around 250 to 120 yen to the dollar.

Paul Krugman of Princeton University argues vociferously that a punitive tariff will strengthen the yuan de facto and rebalance the trade books whether China likes it or not.

Ronald MacKinnon of Stanford University (the "Princeton of the West" as they say in Palo Alto) says that's an illusion.

My personal feeling is that in economics, as William Goldman wrote about Hollywood, "Nobody Knows Anything".

I think there is nostalgia for the Plaza Accord simply because we had enough muscle to twist Japan's arm until it cried Uncle! 

More nationalist empowerment than economic logic, that is to say.

But the Plaza Accord didn't solve America's trade deficit problem, and it totally screwed up Japan's economy.

In addition to the dismal example of the Plaza Accord, the PRC has compelling contemporary reasons not to revalue the RMB per U.S. demands. 

Two reasons, actually:  the flow of hot money that a stated revaluation policy would attract, and the dangerous effect of hot money on China's real estate bubble--a bubble that is financing anywhere from a third to half of local government spending inside China.

If the reader desires a comprehensive overview of the politics of currency revaluation--and the dismal role of the dismal science in the debate over the Chinese trade surplus--I document the atrocities at China plays by its own currency rules.


3.  Let's Turn North Korea Into Iraq.  It's the Only Place Where One Might Call That an Improvement

Finally, Korea.

Because of space and topic limitations in my AT pieces, I didn't address South Korea, the third leg of the rather rubbery tripod of U.S. allies seeking to make political and geostrategic hay from the U.S. "return to Asia".

However, a while back the Korea Times yielded a news report so magnificent that I believe it deserves special commemoration.

The backstory is that the Lee Myung-bak government of South Korea and the Obama adminstration decided to move away from the Six Party Talks, which gave considerable prestige to China but yielded negligible progress.

The alternative was apparently a policy of malign neglect, ignoring the DPRK (and China) and betting that the ROK and USA could sweep in to pick up the pieces when the Kim Jung Il regime finally fell on its ass for good.

The orchestrated reaction to the Cheonan sinking, demanding further isolation and destabilizing sanctions against the Pyongyang regime through the UN Security Council, western governments, and Japan, seems part of this policy.

And China assumed the role of the heavy, questioning both the conclusions of the Cheonan investigation (neither China nor Russia, the two nations with the best foreign understanding of North Korea's military capabilities, were invited to join the investigation) and the way the U.S. and ROK pursued the issue through the UN and outside the Six Party Talks framework.

I assume James Steinberg of the National Security Council and Kurt Campbell, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, are the American Richelieus who have conceived and executed this rather subtle policy, which has China writhing rather angrily on a cleft stick nowadays.

But whatever clever policy civilians formulate, the military can screw up with ham-fisted obviousness.

Courtesy of Korea Times: 

South Korea and the United States have executed “realistic” training exercises to respond to various types of internal instability in North Korea, the top U.S. military general said Thursday.

Such drills were held during the latest Ulchi Freedom Guardian computerized simulation exercise from Aug. 16 to 26, said Gen. Walter Sharp, commander of U.S. Forces Korea (USFK).

…

[W]e take lessons learned out of Iraq and Afghanistan that we think apply here in the ROK and exercise those also,” he said. “So one of the things that we have learned out of Iraq and Afghanistan is that you can be fighting and attacking at one area and defending at another area.”

The main mission is to stabilize and protect the population in the area, he said, adding both militaries are designing such exercises to ensure that they “are able to not only to defend, not only able to attack and kill, but also able to provide humanitarian assistance” to help ensure security and stability for everyone in the region.

Sharp said North Korea stabilization operations are to be conducted by both governments.

It is noteworthy that the U.S. military believes there are successful lessons from our adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan that can be applied to invading and occupying North Korea.

Hey, it's not just attacking and killing!

Well, it's still mostly attacking and killing.

If General Sharp had more time, I'm sure he could have mentioned some other features of American COIN policy, such as: encouraging sectarian and ethnic division to assist pacification and security; rampant corruption; death squads; extensive use of brutal and unregulated mercenaries; and the creation of a weak, divided government unable to provide security and dependent on American good offices and continued U.S. military support.

I'll bet it's all in the latest version of the Ulchi Freedom Guardian video game: Tender Claws of Freedom!