Reuters Concern-Trolls China Over Philippine Typhoon Relief

Reuters’ concern-trolling over the low-key Chinese response to the Philippine Haiyan supertyphoon disaster is revealing, in a relatively inadvertent way.

Yesterday it was

China's Meager Aid to the Philippines Could Dent Its Image

Today it is

No Sign of Help for Philippines from China’s Hospital Ship

The Chinese government has not been particularly forthcoming in aid to the Philippines, especially in comparison with the high profile pledges by the United States and Japan, and the dispatch of the US aircraft carrier George Washington and its strike group to provide relief.

There’s a dearth of hard data on exactly why the PRC hasn’t gone all out in opening the aid floodgates to the Philippines, with whom China is locked in an antagonistic maritime dispute.  China’s activist hardliner newspaper, Global Times, did weigh in with one editorial urging the government not to snub the Philippines; for the rest, Reuters has been forced to rely on the usual suspects—pundits, Twitterers, and Weibo posts—in order to weave a narrative out of the fact that China has provided less aid than the United States and Japan.

The story could have been as easily spun as “US, Japan Go All Out to Exploit Supertyphoon to Bolster Strategic Alliance With the Philippines,”  which, indeed, is a certain part of what’s going on.  Japan, in particular, is eager to use the disaster to strengthen the case for expanding the regional footprint of its Self-Defense Force (in anticipation of the day when the pacifist constitution is revised and the SDF is rebranded as a conventional—and rather large—national military).  

One can almost view the Reuters articles as part of that campaign, highlighting the contrast between the US/Japanese and Chinese responses in order to gain an additional PR value for the West.

But Reuters’ framing that the Chinese regime is clumsily botching the only reasonable policy option—backing up its regional power pretensions with a high profile assumption of disaster relief responsibilities—is remarkably blinkered in a way that implies that flooding the Asian zone with more reportorial resources is simply creating an echo chamber of mutually reinforcing punditry and prejudices, and making it easier to superimpose Western preconceptions on the Asian reality: an exercise in Orientalizing that Edward Said would find quite familiar.

There are, I would aver, other forces at work in China, ones that preclude the new PRC administration of Xi Jinping from blithely laying himself down in the Procrustean bed of western liberal and U.S. great power preconceptions of how China should be responding to the Haiyan disaster at this particular moment.

I see Xi Jinping asserting tight central control and management over China’s media and public opinion space in order to consolidate his own power and, quite possibly, in anticipation of domestic rumpus attending some badly needed and long-expected economic, financial, and political reforms. 

One of the relief valves permitted for Chinese public opinion is the vociferous abuse heaped on countries with whom the PRC are at odds, like the Vietnam and the Philippines.  Reasserting government management of that space means not giving China’s easily riled netizens (and the occasional dissident activists who welcome any expression of on-line discontent as an opportunity to delegitimize the PRC regime) something to bitch about, reinforce their feelings of individual agency, and resist the top-down authoritarian guidance that seems to be Xi Jinping’s preferred governance model.

In my most recent article for Asia Times, Controlling the Media is Xi’s Message, I posit that the PRC regime is taking care not to get out in front of Chinese public opinion (which is pretty negative and uncharitable toward the Philippines, despite the awful Haiyan disaster) by supplying aid beyond the minimum demanded by neighborly compassion, unless it is recognized inside China as a matter of overwhelming moral and practical necessity.

Also, undoubtedly Xi would prefer that the relief be reframed in terms of a regional role that China not only can but must fill, ideally at the urgent behest of the Philippines, and not just because Reuters has written a couple bitchy headlines.

Perhaps the real reason is that Xi has his eye squarely on the domestic ball of public opinion, and does not want to be seen getting all soft and squishy, pursuing international popularity will o' the wisps when his main business is to convince the Chinese populace that the CCP has the domestic dissent/control/reform agenda well in hand. 


Those with longer memories (a characteristic of the Chinese Communist Party hierarchy) might remember how foreign aid issues got rolled up in a spate of horrific school bus accidents that claimed dozens of lives in China in the winter of 2012. Netizen scorn was heaped on the government for concurrently providing school buses to Macedonia as an aid gambit even as China's own children perished on antiquated and unsafe buses.

More recently, the Chinese government came in for considerable criticism in the wake of Cyclone Fitow. In a few hours in October (in another one of those unprecedented calamities probably exacerbated by global warming and now recurring with such frequency that the previous instances are quickly forgotten), that storm dropped a half-meter or so of rain on northern Zhejiang province - more than the region had seen in a century - flooding 70% of a sizable city called Yuyao. There was considerable local disgruntlement at the provincial government's inability to provide prompt relief.

…

With the Fitow context (and with the current example of the admittedly lesser losses and suffering that the Haiyin super-typhoon inflicted on the Chinese mainland), it would seem logical that the Xi government would not be interested in squandering its messaging victory by expending moral, political, and economic resources on the Philippines while the local situation is far from bright, thereby inviting netizen criticism of the government in the (for China) still privileged space of protected expression reserved for outpourings of nationalist and xenophobic bile.

The United States, as part of its pivot to Asia, is eager to identify and advertise through the Western media roles for China that the PRC finds awkward and unpleasant to fill.  Disaster relief for Supertyphoon Haiyan is not the first, and will probably not be the last.

China, Syria, Reuters, and the Security Politics of Middle East Energy

Reuters has a good article by Ben Blanchard on China’s frustrations in the Middle East.

Since it is unable to project power in the Middle East, the PRC has been forced to stand by as the U.S. makes a royal cockup of the region.

Unfortunately, I feel the article delivered a clanger in its conclusion—that the PRC relies on U.S. good offices to “guarantee stability” and keep the oil flowing:

China effectively relies on a strong U.S. military presence in the region to guarantee stability and the smooth flow of oil, especially through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has threatened in the past to close in the event of war.

One thing the US has not delivered to the Middle East in the last fifteen years is “stability”.  

And I don’t think the PRC’s strategic thinkers necessarily believe that Middle East instability is a bigger threat to China’s oil supply than the US presence.

After all, if there’s one thing that everybody in the Middle East, including mortal enemies Iran and Saudi Arabia, is they all want to export to China.  

As to whether or not the United States is simply and altruistically interested in making sure that China’s energy purchases make it safely through the Straits of Hormuz…

…as the stabilizer and oil flow assurer-in-chief, the United States, the U.S. is distinctly aware of the strategic leverage it holds over China by maintaining its presence in the Middle East, as I pointed out in a recent rummage through the historical record:

In 2006, in the American Prospect, Robert Dreyfuss described the Cheney outlook on the People’s Republic of China, based on the account of Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff, Lawrence Wilkerson.  Dreyfuss wrote:

Two of the people most often encountered by Wilkerson were Cheney's Asia hands, Stephen Yates and Samantha Ravich. Through them, the fulcrum of Cheney's foreign policy--which linked energy, China, Iraq, Israel, and oil in the Middle East--can be traced. The nexus of those interrelated issues drives the OVP's broad outlook.

Many Cheney staffers were obsessed with what they saw as a looming, long-term threat from China.

...

For the Cheneyites, Middle East policy is tied to China, and in their view China's appetite for oil makes it a strategic competitor in the Persian Gulf region. Thus, they regard the control of the Gulf as a zero-sum game. They believe that the invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S. military buildup in Central Asia, the invasion of Iraq, and the expansion of the U.S. military presence in the Gulf states have combined to check China's role in the region. …

One may speculate that Mr. Cheney’s determination to keep a threatening thumb over China’s Middle East oil artery lives on in the Obama administration’s continuing involvement in the bottomless pit of money, munitions, and misery that is US Middle East policy, despite the President’s avowed interest in pivoting away from the Middle East to the peaceful and profitable precincts of Asia.

As the U.S. dependence on Middle East oil has shrunk, thanks to the twin miracles of fracking and Canadian gunk, Chinese dependence on Middle East oil has become well-nigh absolute, a state of affairs that is, as Blanchard points out, imperfectly reflected in the state of affairs in the Middle East.

This shift in U.S. foreign dependency from Middle East energy to Pacific trade supposedly underlies the “pivot to Asia” a.k.a. “the rebalancing”.  But the U.S. still seems militarily stuck in the Middle East for a variety of reasons, and maybe because continued leverage in the matter of key global energy flows is simply too irresistible to abandon.

The Chinese have tried to pivot into the Middle East—diplomatically.  Since PLA power projection is about a decade away from aspirational, as the Reuters piece points out, the PRC has tried to midwife a Middle Eastern order based on stability through the principle of non-interference i.e. Saudi Arabia and Iran are welcome to deploy their resources in their pursuit of stability (suppression of domestic democratic sentiments) without Obama-style rabble-rousing in support of democracy, human rights, and freedom to connect.  And as Libya, Egypt, and Tunisia, depose their authoritarian regimes and send new governments through the revolving door of populist/factionalist/military governance, China is always there with a welcoming handshake and offer of aid.  And the PRC has been reasonably surefooted in walking the Palestinian/Israeli tightrope, maintaining good relations with both sides.

If anything, events in Syria tend to confirm the wisdom of the Chinese approach.  So I found Blanchard’s observation that “The worsening Syria conflict has exposed an uncomfortable truth behind China's cherished policy of non-interference: Beijing cannot do much to influence events even if it wanted to,” a little off the mark.   

The PRC doesn’t want to influence events inside Syria.  It doesn’t want the U.S. to influence events inside Syria.  It wants Assad to influence events inside Syria.

The PRC has received precious little support from the Obama administration in its effort to quiet down the ruckus in the Middle East.  Perhaps the United States, driven its irresistible imperative to impose human rights, democratic, and non-proliferation norms in the region, is unwilling or unable to address China’s amoral and opportunistic desire for stability.  

Or maybe the U.S. security establishment remembers China’s free-riding on expensive U.S. initiatives in Iraq and Afghanistan, and resents Chinese footdragging and backfilling on Iran sanctions.

 

Do Chinese establishment liberals debate whether the PRC should have thrown a few lives and a few million dollars into the bloody maw of U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and shown a greater eagerness to cripple the Iranian economy on America’s behalf on order to ingratiate itself to Washington?   

Maybe.  However, a look at recent history implies that U.S. hostility to the PRC is systemic and institutionalized, and there is no G2 nirvana in the offing.  So any U.S. gratitude to China—and willingness to consider Chinese energy anxieties when the next opportunity for a bloody Middle Eastern debacle, such as attacking China’s key energy partner Iran over its alleged nuclear transgressions, presents itself-- would be conditional, temporary, and unreliable.

It certainly is not a slamdunk cinch that China considers that its energy security is best served by a U.S. naval force lurking in the Straits of Hormuz, or even that the PRC’s interests would be better served by inserting a substitute PLA presence in the region.

I am sure that China security hawks are arguing that the PRC should attempt to replicate the U.S. precedent, and try to project PRC military power into the Gulf, thereby abandoning the principle of non-interference (and, inadvertently, providing a measure of vindication-by-imitation of a US policy of intervention that has yielded catastrophic costs but precious few benefits, which is why, I believe, any perceived Chinese drift from the principle of non-interference receives excited attention from the Western security press).

I also expect that there are voices within the PRC establishment who regard the U.S. formula for global relevance (whenever the dark cloud of instability appears, look for the silver lining of an opportunity for U.S. intervention) as a luxury that only the United States can afford.  And, even if the PRC decides to embark on the quixotic and expensive quest of Middle East military power (and somehow avoid tripping over India, which might have a few things to say about Chinese carrier groups sailing off its doorstep), as long as the US worries about China, the United States will not surrender its role as Middle East pot-stirrer in chief to the PRC.

Maybe there are better and more cost-effective ways to hedge against an interruption of shipments from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iraq, and Iran.  Things like spending billions to buy friendships with those in power, instead of spending hundreds of billions on force projection (and getting forced into countless bad decisions about how to use that power, as is happening to the US in Syria).

As the center of gravity of the oil markets shift to China and Asia—and the attention and interest of the Middle East oil barons follow—perhaps China’s best hope is that the United States will tire of the Middle Eastern game, Saudi Arabia and Iran will decide that a prolonged shutdown of the Straits of Hormuz in a war of annihilation is an option not worth pursuing, and the region will refocus on its core business of pouring non-renewable energy down the thirsty throat of the Asian economic miracle.