The South China Sea (30 page)

The result is good news for the quarter of Malaysia's population with Chinese ancestry. For decades after independence, the ethnically Malay elite regarded the Chinese community as either economically over-dominant or subversively Communist. Members of the Chinese minority resent the regulations and practices that still confine them to second-class citizenship. Relations between the communities were tested again following the 2013 elections when some figures in the governing party referred to the narrow result as a ‘Chinese tsunami’ after the opposition won every single majority-Chinese constituency. However, a closer look shows the opposition Pakatan Rakyat coalition actually won support from across the ethnic spectrum. Although hostility lingers in some quarters, the ethnic Chinese are now generally championed as both an integral part of Malaysian society and a cultural bridge to the mega-market across the sea.

Singapore is unique in Southeast Asia for having a Chinese majority, making up three-quarters of the population. That was the main reason behind its exit from the Malaysian Federation in 1965. Ever since,
Singapore's ruling party has strived to create its own ‘imagined community’ – one that citizens of a city state, the offspring of a match between British free trading and Chinese entrepreneurship, could take into their hearts. It found one in its tiny size. Indonesia's former president B.J. Habibie once referred to the country as ‘that little red dot’ and others have called it ‘the nut in the nutcracker’ between two much larger majority-Muslim neighbours. It gives the entire country a sense of being a minority and makes survival a national imperative. The parallel with Israel's self-image is clear and, right from independence, the two have shared military expertise and a defence doctrine based upon conscription and reserve duty.

How ‘Chinese’ is Singapore? At one of the many conferences on the South China Sea that have proliferated in the past few years, one former very senior Singaporean diplomat confided to me that ‘this is the only other country run by Chinese’, deploring the involvement of Singapore and other Southeast Asian countries in American-led efforts to force a legalistic solution to the disputes. ‘China is not interested in these games,’ he insisted. Younger diplomats at the conference were adamant that these were the views of an older generation, dismissing his thinking as outdated. But another former Singaporean diplomat, Kishore Mahbubani, now an academic and polemicist for our present ‘Asian Century’, believes that it does capture an essential truth about Singapore. Of Indian descent, Mahbubani is from a minority in a minority state and he understands the dilemmas that that brings. Although firmly rooted in Singapore he recognises the imagined communities that still exist within its hybrid society. ‘If there's ever an outright war between America and China there's no way that Singapore can join a war against China – the population won't support it. But at the same time, in terms of diplomatic posturing, Singapore's certainly very careful and very nuanced. We're neither pro-American nor pro-Chinese. We're pro-Singapore.’ At another conference in another luxury hotel, the chairman of the Singapore Institute of International Affairs, Simon Tay, shared the new word he had just coined to describe the political location where he thinks Singapore should position itself: ‘equiproximate’ to both China and the US.

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Three weeks after Bayan and Akbayan rallied their supporters on the streets of Manila an opposing force mobilised outside the Philippine embassy in Beijing. China's notorious ‘angry youth’ gathered to defend their country's rights over the Scarborough Shoal or, as they proclaimed it, Huangyan. The protest, on Saturday, 12 May 2012, was passionate – and quickly squashed by the authorities. It didn't take long because just five people had turned up (out of Beijing's population of 20 million).
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Despite the pathetic attendance,
Xinhua
thought the event deserved coverage not just in print but on its television service CNC too. But why had the protestors turned up on the leafy street outside the embassy, so many days after the incident had started? Was it purely a spontaneous outburst of assertive nationalism?

On the Tuesday before the protest, the Chinese Foreign Ministry had published the full text of its dressing-down of the Philippine ambassador, in which it blamed his government for ‘making serious mistakes and … stepping up efforts to escalate tensions’.
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The same evening the Foreign Ministry warned Chinese citizens in the Philippines to stay indoors and avoid ‘anti-Chinese protests’, and China Central Television reported a warning from the Chinese embassy in Manila about large-scale anti-China marches expected in the city at the end of the week. The day ended with every Chinese nationalist's favourite tabloid newspaper,
Huanqiu Shibao
or
Global Times
, publishing an editorial stating it would be ‘a miracle if there is no conflict’ between the two countries. On Wednesday, the Manila warning was the top story on four of the five main online news sites and number one on the Twitter-like
weibo
microblogs.
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Given the authorities’ propensity to block
weibo
content they don't like, this could only have happened with official approval. And to cap it all, the Foreign Ministry spokesman warned, during his regular press conference, that the issue ‘has already led to a strong reaction and attention from the Chinese masses at home and abroad’.

What could explain this deliberate campaign to provoke nationalist outrage? Two answers emerge from the evidence. Firstly, the campaign exactly coincided with the period when the blind human rights activist, Chen Guangcheng, was seeking asylum inside the American embassy in Beijing. That embarrassment came a month after the scandal-tainted former mayor of Chongqing, Bo Xilai, had been publicly sacked from
the Politburo Standing Committee for wrongdoing. In contrast to the Scarborough Shoal standoff, coverage of these two episodes had been strongly suppressed, both in the Chinese media and on social networking sites. The media campaign against Manila was, in part, probably a good way to distract attention from an internal problem but doesn't explain everything.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the episode, given concerns about the influence of populist nationalism in China, was the smallness of the public reaction. Despite two more days of high-profile coverage – including a TV reporter being allowed through the Chinese blockade of the shoal to plant a flag there on Thursday and
Xinhua
’s republishing of foreign media reports that the southern military region had moved onto a war footing on Friday – only five people turned out in front of the Philippine embassy on the Saturday. There was plenty of online outrage but nothing that would disturb the social peace. In several previous periods of international stress the Chinese authorities have allowed, and sometimes encouraged, street protests. There were demonstrations against the attacks on the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia in 1998, after the American bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, following the revision of Japanese history textbooks in 2005, after pro-Tibetan protests against the Olympic Torch relay in Europe in 2008, and during the standoff with Japan at the Senkaku or Diaoyu Islands in 2010 and 2012. In each case officials permitted protests. But in April 2012 there were none.

The lack of street protests did not reflect a low level of interest in the issue. In late 2013 Andrew Chubb, an Australian researcher of Chinese foreign policy-making, commissioned a commercial survey of public attitudes to the South China Sea. The results suggest 53 per cent of the Chinese population pay ‘close’ or ‘very close’ attention to developments, only slightly less than the 60 per cent who say the same about the East China Sea disputes, which had provoked severe rioting the year before. This is a population that could, potentially, take to the streets over issues in the South China Sea. Yet it doesn't. Chubb believes that the deliberate stoking of outrage over Scarborough Shoal immediately followed by the firm suppression of street protest shows that nationalist feeling was being deliberately manipulated.

The period was marked by frequent hawkish, and sometimes threatening, commentaries in the Chinese media by a small group of serving or retired military officers. In an article on 26 April 2012 about the Scarborough Shoal standoff, Major General Luo Yuan declared that the Philippines ‘has “fired the first shot” strategically. It must pay a price for this and we cannot let this example be set as though after it has finished provoking us it can go back to square one via negotiations.’
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Hundreds of thousands of
weibo
and news website users commented on this one article alone. Another well-known television pundit is Air Force Colonel Dai Xu. On 28 August 2012, the
Global Times
published an article of Dai's calling Vietnam, the Philippines and Japan ‘the three running dogs of the United States in Asia’. ‘We only need to kill one, and it will immediately bring the others to heel,’ he claimed.
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Dai has produced even more blood-curdling articles under the pseudonym Long Tao. In one, he warned unspecified Southeast Asian countries extracting hydrocarbons from inside the ‘U-shaped line’: ‘when those towering oil platforms become flaming torches who will be hurt most?’
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These officers have spent almost their entire careers in military academies ensuring the armed forces toe the Party line. In an interview with the
Southern Weekend
newspaper in April 2012, Major General Luo explained his job: ‘This army was created by our Communist Party, and ever since we were born each one of us has had to know what we live for, why we exist.’
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Luo is part of the Communist aristocracy: his father, Luo Qingchang, was the former head of the Party's foreign intelligence service. Colonel Dai also has interesting connections. When writing as Long Tao, Dai frequently described himself as a strategic analyst for an obscure think-tank called the China Energy Fund Committee (CEFC). The CEFC is headed by Ye Jianming. Between 2003 and 2005, Ye was deputy head of the Shanghai branch of the China Association for International Friendly Contacts (CAIFC). The CAIFC is considered by China watchers, such as the Washington-based think-tank Project 2049 Institute, to be a front organisation for a key part of military intelligence: the Liaison Department of the General Political Department of the People's Liberation Army.
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Andrew Chubb believes Ye is probably the grandson of the former head of the People's Liberation Army-Navy, Ye Fei, or perhaps even the son of a former director of the Liaison Department, Ye Xuanning.
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In other words, at least two of China's best-known ‘military hawks’ have direct personal connections into the heart of Chinese military intelligence and propaganda. By their own admission,
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these ‘hawks’ are operating within military and Communist Party discipline and, given their easy access to the media, their role appears to be to strengthen the image of China as a threat. Why would the Beijing leadership want to amplify such voices? The most likely answer is that they serve two useful purposes: domestic and international. They promote patriotic feelings among the populace and also encourage the ‘angry youth’ to let off steam online. That allows the leadership to claim it is under domestic pressure to take a hard line – something that strengthens its hand in dealings with other countries. They also create an impression that ‘hawks’ represent a genuine constituency among the military, which may be wresting control of policy-making. If other governments, notably in Manila and Washington, become fearful of provoking irrational action by these ‘hawks’, their political resolve is likely to be undermined. In other words, one of the roles of the ‘media hawks’ is to intimidate rivals in the region and make up with bluster what China lacks in actual military power. They also make China's overall strategy less obvious and therefore harder to counter. The media jingoism, then, is not necessarily a sign that the Beijing leadership is struggling to contain waves of extreme nationalism, but rather shows the careful use of nationalist sentiments as a diplomatic tool. If it were to allow street protests, the Party leadership would face the same problem as its Vietnamese counterpart: the risk of them running out of control. Aggressive online punditry is more easily turned off once its usefulness is exhausted. Beijing would prefer the appearance of public pressure without the threat of public disorder.

Just as in Vietnam, there is clearly a substantial section of the population which feels passionately about the South China Sea, but that isn't what's driving Chinese policy. In both countries it's not the masses pushing governments into confrontation but rather governments using nationalism to further their own agendas. The Communist parties of China and Vietnam seek two kinds of legitimacy: material and psychological. Both leaderships need to deliver rising living standards to their populations and also demonstrate their ‘moral’ fitness to rule. Both parties face similar existential threats – the ebbing of popular support if they fail
to deliver prosperity and the existence of rival claimants to their thrones. A strong position in the South China Sea will, they hope, provide access to the resources to fuel economic growth and also demonstrate their superiority over their critics. To buttress their right to rule, both parties promote official versions of history that frame them as the saviours of the nation.

In 1991, two years after the crushing of the Tiananmen Square democracy protests, the Chinese Party leadership promulgated a ‘patriotic education’ campaign, ‘to boost the nation's spirit, enhance cohesion, foster national self-esteem and pride, consolidate and develop a patriotic united front to the broadest extent possible, and direct and rally the masses’ patriotic passions to the great cause of building socialism with Chinese characteristics.’
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Twenty years later, on 1 March 2011, the National Museum of China in Tiananmen Square unveiled its grand new permanent exhibition, ‘The Road to Revival’. Spread over two floors of the northern end of the museum, high-definition displays and panoramic projections tell the story of that humiliating century from the first ‘Opium War’ of 1840 up to the victory of the people's revolution in 1949 and beyond. The exhibition's curator Cao Xinxin told journalists its purpose was ‘to show visitors the real scenes that happened in history’.
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Eighteen months after that, the freshly appointed leader of the Communist Party, Xi Jinping, chose the exhibition as the venue to launch his big idea – the ‘Chinese Dream’.