A US Strategy for the Asia-Pacific by Douglas T. Stuart William T. Tow

Author:Douglas T. Stuart, William T. Tow [Douglas T. Stuart, William T. Tow]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, General, Strategy, Political Science, Security (National & International)
ISBN: 9781136042966
Google: AfLaAAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-09-13T15:57:45+00:00

Growing Chinese Influence

Debate is intensifying over the role China will play in the South China Sea and the extent to which the United States can influence Chinese behaviour. Over the last decade, China's interest in the South China Sea has increased as a result of a dramatic shift in its demographic and economic centre of gravity towards the Southeastern coastal regions. According to one expert, China's actions in the South China Sea are ‘rooted in a determination to consolidate its national domain and to secure economic advantage’.33 These themes were stressed in the legislation passed by China's National People's Congress Standing Committee in February 1992, which asserted Chinese sovereignty over the Spratlys and other South China Sea islands and authorised the use of force to defend its claim. Other commentators, however, have argued that China's territorial claims are part of a much more ambitious Chinese strategy of using the Spratlys to support future blue-water naval operations against Japanese or US commercial and naval shipping.34 These are long-term concerns, since the PLA is not presently able to provide effective naval air support or reliable anti-aircraft coverage for its combatants in the region. It also lacks an aircraft carrier task force that would help to provide it with the strategic reach needed to contest US and ASEAN offshore forces in all waters over which it claims sovereign control.

China may be attempting to compensate for deficiencies in its power-projection capability by building a number of military staging posts in the Spratlys to supplement or link up with its existing airstrip on Woody Island in the Paracel Islands archipelago, several hundred kilometres to the north. This is a source of concern for the Philippines, since Japan established similar facilities there during the Second World War in order to launch attacks against the Philippines. This helps to explain why Manila reacted strongly when it discovered in February 1995 that China had constructed modest military facilities on several islands in the Spratly chain. The Philippines responded to this escalation of the Spratlys dispute by destroying Chinese territorial markers and detaining Chinese fishermen in the region, raising local speculation about a Sino-Philippine war that could escalate into a military confrontation between the US and China.35

China has apparently taken other steps to improve its military infrastructure in the South China Sea. A March 1995 article in the official PLA Liberation Army Daily reported that after ‘years of active probes, a South Sea fleet naval base has successfully integrated into a systematic whole the procurement, transport and supply of materials to islands and reefs’ in the Spratlys. The article contends that the new logistical arrangements are ‘aimed at meeting the requirements of future sea battles… under conditions of hi-tech war’.36 The military significance of this claim should not be exaggerated since the archipelago is simply not conducive to the deployment of large concentrations of military power due to navigational hazards and inhospitable coral formations that limit their operational utility. It will nonetheless become increasingly difficult for ASEAN member-states to

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