Overreach by Susan L. Shirk

Author:Susan L. Shirk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Sovereignty Comes First

Xi Jinping has owned the maritime security portfolio ever since serving as vice president and vice chair of the Central Military Commission, hence before taking full power in 2012. To better prevent the “nine dragons” from “stirring up the sea,” that is, working at cross-purposes, the CCP formed the Maritime Rights Protection Leading Small Group with Xi as chair in 2012; and as they improved coordination, they converged on a more aggressive strategy. As we’ve seen, Xi resuscitated two ideas for expanding China’s sovereignty that the PLA had proposed but Hu Jintao rejected as destabilizing—an air defense identification zone over the space between China and Japan and construction of those artificial islands on top of the rocks in the part of the South China Sea controlled by China.

As I’ve argued, improving bureaucratic interaction from the top down could have helped Xi exercise restraint, precisely to avoid provoking China’s Asian neighbors and the United States. Instead, Xi has used the new efficiency to take risks designed to bolster his domestic standing as a defender of China’s nationalist honor. One PLA Navy officer explained that “the leaders have made a clear choice, an adjustment in their policy” related to maritime issues. He further explained the ultimate goals are, first, sovereignty and, second, stability. By stability, he means maintaining good relations with China’s Asian neighbors and the United States. The officer had written an article in a Singapore newspaper advocating a balance between stability and sovereignty. “I couldn’t advocate putting stability ahead of sovereignty,” he admitted to me, “it would attract a lot of criticism.” His point was that the leadership feels that to survive public pressure it must assert Chinese sovereignty. He recounted a joke: “We should start a war over the Diaoyu Islands; we will either win the islands or win a new China.” More seriously, he added, “sovereignty is now the top priority over stability.”44 Stability was fine, to a point. But given that China is on the path to becoming a maritime power, as one Chinese academic put it, “we must consider both rights protection and stability maintenance.”45

Some of China’s most respected international relations experts disagree with Xi’s high-profile pursuit of sovereignty over stability.46 In their view, China’s priority should be to maintain good relationships with regional neighbors and the United States to secure their support for China’s rise. It would be a “strategic mistake,” they argue, to attain sovereignty in the South China Sea but lose the whole of Southeast Asia. Starting in 2012, the annual report on the Asia-Pacific from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences acknowledged that China’s neighboring countries feel “uneasy” about China.47 China has been losing soft power, particularly with Southeast Asians, because of its unyielding drive to enforce its narrowly self-interested sovereignty claims. The Asian Barometer Survey conducted from 2014 to 2016 shows a drop in positive perceptions of China’s impact in the region compared to the wave it conducted from 2010 to 2012 in Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan, Japan, and Mongolia.

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