Managing China’s “Strategic Shock” in the South China Sea

China’s trade partners in the Asia Pacific do not understand what it wants on its ocean frontier. Or perhaps more correctly, none of them really agree on China’s motivations. That is partly because it suits each of them to exploit propaganda value out of China’s actions for its own narrow interests, often seated in domestic politics, rather than participating in a constructive and collective strategic approach to international resolution of the problems. This disagreement is also caused in part by the fact that few countries in Asia have strong, independent academic or intelligence expertise on China’s maritime policy.

This is not helpful when China itself has a fragmented decision-making process for maritime frontier policy in an international environment that is reeling from China’s willingness to deliver a strategic shock (island building) and where China is displaying a lack of interest in genuine negotiation on the maritime disputes.

This is a dangerous constellation of risk and ignorance. A circuit breaker is needed, as is more sustained and serious scholarly assessment of China’s policy. The escalating tension will not be reversed until interested parties can defuse the strategic shock caused by China’s massive upgrading of pre-existing artificial islands through 2015.

What was this strategic shock? China has been developing artificial structures on submerged features in the Spratly Islands since 1988, when it moved to give a physical manifestation of its legal claims in place since at least 1933. At that time, China was forced to occupy submerged features by building artificial structures because other claimants had occupied all natural islands in the Spratly group.

The first Chinese structures were comically inadequate. On Mischief Reef in the mid-ocean, China built three connected platforms on stilts driven into the reef, each platform with a corrugated iron habitation built on it. The facility was manned by Chinese military personnel from the outset. Over time, China extended these artificial structures with pouring of concrete and making them gradually less flimsy and more habitable, including eventually the construction of a helicopter landing pad. In 1988, when China started to build its artificial structures, two rival claimants, the Philippines and Vietnam, had air strips that could accommodate small fixed wing aircraft. Later, Malaysia built an airstrip on one of the islands it claimed and had occupied prior to 1988, while the Republic of China (Taiwan) which had occupied Taiping Island first in 1946, and then again in 1956, built an air strip in 2007.

On May 13, 2015, US Assistant Secretary of Defense David Shear told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that China’s rival claimants, especially Vietnam, had been very active in extending their physical control. Shear also pointed out that as of that time, China did not have an airfield as other claimants did. He testified:

“All of these same claimants have also engaged in construction activity of differing scope and degree. The types of outpost upgrades vary across claimants but broadly are comprised of land reclamation, building construction and extension, and defense emplacements. Between 2009 and 2014, Vietnam was the most active claimant in terms of both outpost upgrades and land reclamation, reclaiming approximately 60 acres. All territorial claimants, with the exception of China and Brunei, have also already built airstrips of varying sizes and functionality on disputed features in the Spratlys.”

Shear was reporting that “Since 2014, China has reclaimed 2,000 acres — more land than all other claimants combined over the history of their claims”. This comparison by Shear was at best irrelevant or at worst misleading. China was not “reclaiming” land around otherwise existing islands. It was from the outset extending artificial structures on submerged reefs. At the time of the Shear statement, the land area of natural islands in the Spratly group, all occupied by other claimants, combined was already around 1,200 acres, and that figure does not take into account any man-made extension of those land features through reclamation.

The “acres of concrete” debate is somewhat fetishistic. It bears little relationship to bigger strategic realities in terms of national power confrontations. But the debate about acres still matters. It shows how deeply shocked all non-Chinese observers have been, even those more understanding of China’s political position on the island claims, by the scale of the additions to China’s artificial islands and their undoubted—if minimal—military potential.

So how do we deal with the maritime strategic shock delivered by China in this climate of risk and ignorance? States hostile to China’s island building, while dealing with the shock, need to understand that China is drawing a very big red line. In 1986, China’s most liberal Communist Party leader, Hu Yaobang, made an unprecedented leadership visit to the Paracel Islands. He declared that China would never surrender an inch of its claims. The Chinese military plan to establish a physical presence on submerged features in the Spratly Islands was undoubtedly made around this time.

With its island building in the past 18 months, China has demonstrated that it will never resile from its territorial claim to the Spratly Islands and that it will compete at every level of international relations, including armed conflict if necessary, to defend the claims. If states opposed to China’s claims do not acquiesce in some way, then we are clearly on a pathway to a serious military clash of some kind over the sovereignty issue. Given what we know about these countries opposed to China, that acquiescence will never come absent a major military “lesson” from China.

The only hope for enduring peace in the Spratly Islands is for China to move from a posture of strategic shock to one of strategic experimentation directed at keeping the peace. For more than twenty years, scholars from China and elsewhere have proposed several practicable and peaceable compromises for the South China Sea disputes.

China has surprised the world with its policy innovations, ranging from “one country, two systems” to special economic zones and membership of the Communist Party for business people. It is time for this spirit of flexibility to inform China’s foreign policy on maritime disputes.

This will not happen without a reform of China’s foreign policy apparatus to liberate it from PLA control through the Central Military Commission, which sets all strategic international policy for China where there is a significant military dimension. This may be the main meaning of the strident rhetoric under Xi Jinping for the proposition that the PLA must be absolutely loyal to the political leadership of the Communist Party.

Greg Austin is a Professor in the University of New South Wales Canberra and a Professorial Fellow in the EastWest Institute (New York). He is author of China’s Ocean Frontier: International Law, Military Force and National Development (1998) and has been researching China’s foreign policy since 1983, with some five books on the subject.