The South China Sea (31 page)

From local schoolroom to national museum the leadership has worked to instil the notion that China's modern history was shameful until the Party took over. While much of the message is about taking pride in the country's contemporary achievements, it's underpinned by a sense of personal violation at the dismemberment of the country's national territory and the collective violation of the Chinese people at the hands of foreigners. This narrative, in turn, now underpins mainstream discussion of territorial issues. Any questioning of it provokes a stern response. In 2006, the Communist Youth League's weekly magazine
Freezing Point
was closed for two months after it printed an article by a retired philosophy professor, Yuan Weishi, in which he said that the version of history taught in the country's schools was akin to ‘drinking wolf's milk’. ‘If these innocent children swallow fake pills, then they will live with prejudices for their own lives and go down the wrong path’, he argued. The Party didn't agree
and only allowed the magazine to reopen if it printed a long article putting the professor back in his place.

The result is that discussions of the South China Sea, whether elite or popular, nationalist or liberal, now take place within a discourse that begins by assuming that the islands are naturally ‘ours’ – an inseparable part of the motherland since ancient times – and that foreigners have wrongfully taken them from ‘us’. This provides the foundation for both online angry youth and elite policy-making. More importantly it creates a national narrative that, in effect, stakes the legitimacy of the ruling elite upon their performance over these tiny islands. When the Norwegian researcher Leni Stenseth finished her thesis on the subject in 1998 she could argue that ‘the Spratly conflict was only to a limited extent embedded in an official nationalism discourse’, because of the relative absence of articles on the subject in official newspapers.
³²
Sixteen years on, the situation has changed significantly: multiple articles flow forth daily in newspapers, web pages and the broadcast media. In the rhetorical competition with the rival claimants to its throne in Taipei there is no way that Beijing can make an orderly retreat from its South China Sea position without suffering some kind of crisis in legitimacy.

Zha Daojiong, the urbane but steely professor of International Political Economy at Peking University, reinforces the case that China's stance in the South China Sea is driven not by mass nationalism but by the leadership's need for credibility – abroad and at home. ‘It's about standing firm, rather than stamping your feet and throwing your arms in the air while doing nothing,’ he told me. For him, the crucial transition came in September 2008, a month after the triumph of the Beijing Olympics, when 40,000 Hong Kong investors collectively lost $2.5 billion in the collapse of the American bank, Lehman Brothers. Although almost all their money was repaid three years later, the shock did irreparable damage to the Chinese elite's faith in the American way of running the world. Before then, according to Professor Zha, Chinese policy-makers were happy to use Western vocabulary and thinking. Afterwards, there was a reassessment.

It was during this period that the notion of an alternative ‘China Model’ began to take off. David Bandurski of the Hong Kong University-based China Media Project calculates the phrase was used in around 500 online headlines in 2007, around 800 in 2008 but, after a push by the
official
Xinhua
news agency, the figure quadrupled to 3,000 in 2009.
³³
The phrase has since dropped in popularity – replaced by President Xi's ‘Chinese Dream’ – but the sense of specialness has endured. Bandurski calls it a ‘discourse of greatness’, or
shengshi huayu
. The trouble-making Professor Yuan traces its roots back to the original nineteenth-century burst of nationalism, arguing that ‘a sense of righteousness was passed on like a spiritual birthright from generation to generation’.
³⁴

In one crucial aspect China's rhetorical development is mirroring that of the United States: both now share a semi-official discourse, a national ideology, of ‘exceptionalism’. The American national belief – shared by both elite and popular opinion – in their country's ‘manifest destiny’ to spread liberty around the world is increasingly matched by an official Chinese discourse of ‘righteousness’ in its international affairs. This sense of righteousness – combining victimhood with superiority – increasingly appears like arrogance to smaller countries on the receiving end. And in the end, this uncritical self-view may be the undoing of the entire project. It may provoke the other countries of the region to resist Beijing's advances.

For now, the ‘angry youth’ of the countries around the South China Sea are fighting their battles in the comment sections of English-language news websites. When tensions rise out at sea, passions boil over online. New imagined communities are being forged in the posting and flaming, and new divisions entrenched. The drum-beating and the symbol-waving are manna for editors eager to render the disputes interesting to uncomprehending audiences but they are a poor guide to reality. The governments in China and Vietnam are rarely swayed by public opinion on matters of foreign policy, the chances of a coherent nationalist movement becoming influential in the Philippines are remote, and elsewhere in the region there is little public concern about the disputes. It is in the interests of all these governments to make it look as if they are under attack from hotheaded nationalists, to the extent that they might even be forced to take what appears to be foolhardy action if it improves leverage against their rivals. These displays of power certainly carry the risk of provoking conflict by mistake. However by far the greatest risk to peace and security in the South China Sea is not angry street nationalism but the interplay of these regional disputes with the growing confrontation between the two great powers in the region.

CHAPTER 7

Ants and Elephants

Diplomacy

D
USK IN
P
HNOM
P
ENH
, Friday, 18 December 2009. Twenty members of China's Uyghur minority are resting in an apartment provided by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). They fled the eastern province of Xinjiang following clashes between Muslim Uyghurs and Han Chinese the previous July in which at least 200 people had been killed. After tense journeys through Vietnam and Laos the Uyghurs might have felt safe. The day before, Cambodia's Prime Minister, Hun Sen, had signed a sub-decree committing his country to international standards in dealing with refugees and asylum seekers. This was a surprise: the decree had been delayed for several years and diplomats didn't expect it to be signed for several more months. Why the urgency?

The Uyghurs’ presence in the city had become common knowledge two weeks earlier after the World Uyghur Congress had publicised their plight to the
Washington Post
. Unusually, the Chinese government made little public comment about the issue – despite regarding Uyghur activists as ‘splitists’ and religious extremists. When asked about the group on 8 December, the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman noted China's friendly relationship with Cambodia and called for ‘enhanced cooperation to fight terrorism’ – but her comments were omitted from the official transcript.
¹
On 15 December she said only that members of the group ‘were involved in crimes’ and were being investigated by Chinese authorities. She warned
that ‘the international refugee protection system should not be a haven for criminals to evade legal sanctions’, but said little else.
²

In private, Beijing was more voluble. On 14 December, Cambodia's Foreign Ministry acknowledged receiving a diplomatic note about the Uyghurs from the Chinese embassy. But the same day, according to US cables released via Wikileaks, UNHCR's Cambodia director told the American ambassador that discussions with the Cambodian government about the Uyghurs were positive and the cases would be resolved within a few weeks.
³
Over the following three days everything changed. The sub-decree the Prime Minister signed also ended an agreement with UNHCR under which the two shared responsibility for refugees and asylum seekers. Immediately the ink had dried, Cambodia's Acting Interior Minister, Em Sam An, ordered the Uyghurs to be deported, claiming they had violated the country's Immigration Law.

In the evening of 18 December, police raided the UNHCR ‘safe house’ and took away the occupants, including a mother and two children, at gunpoint. The following evening they were put on board a private jet that had just arrived from China and flown off into the darkness.
⁴
International protests – both to the Cambodian and Chinese governments and to the UNHCR – were swift and loud but useless. Later reports suggested that four of the group had been sentenced to life imprisonment, four to 20 years, four to 17 years and four to 16 years. The woman and her two children were released.
⁵

The day after that plane took off from Cambodia, a different one arrived. This one bore the then Vice-President of China, Xi Jinping, ending a four-country tour of Asia. Two days later, headlines proclaimed a mightily successful visit: 14 agreements signed and, according to the Cambodian side, promises of $1.2 billion in aid. Dams would be built, roads constructed and ancient temples restored. Cambodian diplomats insisted the fate of the Uyghurs didn't feature on the agenda at all
⁶
but the linkage between the two seemed clear to most outside observers. And according to another American cable, Cambodia's Deputy Prime Minister Sar Kheng had told UNHCR's regional representative that his government was in a ‘difficult position due to pressure from outside forces’.

That private admission demolished Hun Sen's public narrative of his country's relations with China. Speaking the previous September at the
construction site of the third of eight ‘Cambodia–China Friendship’ bridges, the Prime Minister had lauded the Beijing leadership for providing aid without strings. ‘They are quiet, but at the same time they build bridges and roads, there are no complicated conditions’
⁷
– such as observing international human rights conventions, for example.
⁸

Human rights groups continued to criticise the Phnom Penh government over the Uyghur deportation and, as a result, four months later, on 1 April 2010, the US government announced it was suspending a shipment of 200 surplus military trucks and trailers to Cambodia.
⁹
Meant as a slap on the wrist from Washington, it became an opportunity for Beijing. Just a month later, the Chinese government announced that it would provide 256 trucks – brand new, not surplus – and 50,000 uniforms on top. When the vehicles arrived at the end of June, the photo-op featured the tall and athletic-looking political commissar of the General Armaments Department of the People's Liberation Army, General Chi Wanchun, placing a giant key into the grasping hands of the short, portly and over-eager Cambodian Deputy Minister of Defence, Moeung Samphan. Coming less than a month after the formal opening of that third ‘Cambodia–China Friendship Bridge’, the moment seemed to symbolise the future of Cambodia's foreign relations.

But the US wasn't going to be outplayed by a giant key and some long bridges. Three weeks after the big Chinese truck handover, Washington's man was in Phnom Penh with his own gift: a crate-full of antiquities. Under secretary of State for Political Affairs William J. Burns made a special trip to mark the 60th anniversary of diplomatic ties between the two countries, taking the opportunity to hand over seven looted Cambodian statues and carvings seized by customs authorities in Los Angeles. The relics had been transported aboard a US Navy medical ship that sailed into town to win hearts and minds with free healthcare. Elsewhere in the country, other hearts and minds were being wooed with the renewing of military ties – only two months after their supposed suspension.

As the statues were being handed over, American and Cambodian troops were taking part in the first ever multilateral peacekeeping training on Cambodian soil, dubbed Angkor Sentinel 10. It was part of the US State Department-funded ‘Global Peace Operations Initiative’ which has facilitated cooperation between American forces and many other armies
since 2006. Human rights groups, though, were continuing to criticise the choice of Cambodia for the 2010 exercise – partly because of the Uyghur deportation but mainly because, they alleged, some of the Cambodian military units taking part were guilty of forced evictions of farmers, torture and summary executions. That was denied by the US embassy which said its staff had ‘rigorously vetted’ the participants in the exercise – all several hundred of them. Unusually the peacekeeping exercise involved a combined parachute jump for Cambodian paratroopers and US special forces.
¹⁰
If the US government had had doubts about supporting the Cambodian military a few weeks before, they had disappeared.

In fact, Cambodian defence cooperation with the United States goes much deeper than a couple of hundred second-hand trucks. In 2013, Carl Thayer, an expert on Southeast Asian militaries, estimated the annual value of US military assistance to Cambodia at over $18 million.
¹¹
Exercise Angkor Sentinel is now an annual event. So are the CARAT – Cooperation Afloat Readiness And Training – exercises at sea. The third pillar of US military aid (after peacekeeping and military education) is counter-terrorism. Cambodia doesn't have a terrorism problem but the country's counter-terrorism force is, at the time of writing, commanded by Lieutenant General Hun Manet, the prime minister's eldest son. He and his unit are directly advised by a small team of American special forces based out of the US embassy. In fact, for all the talk of strengthening Cambodia's ability to take part in international peacekeeping, American military aid seems deliberately targeted at areas likely to deliver political influence. All three of Hun Sen's sons have received American military training. Manet went to West Point in 1999, Manith to the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in 2010 and the youngest, Many, attended the National Defense University in 2011.
¹²
At the time of writing, Manith is Cambodia's Deputy Chief of Intelligence, with the rank of Brigadier General, and 30-year-old Hun Many is his father's Deputy Chief of Cabinet, head of his party's youth wing
¹³
and, since the July 2013 elections, a member of the National Assembly.