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China expanding its horizons

Glenn D.Tiffert
THE US-China relation is frequently described as promoting China's emergence as a "responsible stakeholder" in the international system. Often unexamined in this dignified formulation is that China may decide that the fundamental changes to the international system might suit it better. Therefore, China’s spirited intercept of the surveillance ship USNS Impeccable near Hainan Island on March 8, 2009, acquires deeper significance.
The Impeccable incident fits into a pattern of increasingly assertive attempts by China to leverage its growing resources and capabilities to shift the regional and global balance of power in its favour.
China has framed these attempts in the rhetoric of international law and antihegemonism with ramifications not just for US but for others farther afield too.
The Impeccable was intercepted approximately 75 miles south of China's most modem submarine base. This base services a growing fleet of stealthy attack and nuclear ballistic missile subs aimed at projecting Chinese power, countering US naval dominance of the Western Pacific
and clouding US security guarantees for Taiwan.
As the most advanced submarine detection platform in the US Navy, the presence of the Impeccable in the area no doubt irritated China.
China insists that international law bars virtually all foreign military activities within its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), an ocean that extends 200 nautical miles from its coast Territorial waters extend out to 12 nautical miles from the coast. Underlying this opinion is a hermetic conception of sovereignty that rejects outside efforts to penetrate national boundaries on humanitarian intervention.
However, the preponderance of opinion soundly rejects China's position; the mainstream view by far is that the Impeccable operated legally in China's EEZ.
The flaws in China's legal brief are much less interesting than the implications of its argument 36% of the world's oceans and the airspace above them would be off-limits to most foreign military activities. With due respect, this would attenuate the technological advantages of the US, Russian, Taiwanese and Japanese militaries by limiting their opportunities to intercept com-
munications.
Currently, US conducts several hundred reconnaissance missions each year along China's coast to support its interests and defence commitments to partners such as Taiwan, Japan and Korea, some of which operate around these waters themselves. Prohibiting these activities would clearly advantage China's emerging position as the dominant regional power.
This is especially true because other nations depend on American power to check China's ambitions and preserve the status quo in the area.
Chinese maps depict nearly 80% of the South China Sea as lying within China's maritime boundaries. China's views on whether its territorial waters extend to these disputed islands and whether the islands themselves generate additional EEZs remain ambiguous.
But evidence indicates that it understands these claims expansively, which would convert up to 3 million square kilometres of ocean into a virtual Chinese lake and push foreign military activities farther out into the open ocean.
To be clear, China reserves the right to operate freely in these disputed waters because technically it regards them as its own. Accordingly, it has conducted military exercises in the EEZ claimed by Vietnam and sent submarines, research vessels and trawlers outfitted for espionage into the EEZ and even territorial waters claimed by Japan.
Guan Jianqiang notes that China has recorded more than 200 instances of US naval vessels collecting intelligence in its
EEZ where it has mounted many more challenges to them than the comparatively small number of publicised cases would suggest.
US can be expected to continue its policy of defying such challenges and maintaining a high level of activity in and above these waters, effectively daring China to stop it.
Indeed US, under its Freedom of Navigation program, dispatched military vessels to China and 25 other countries with the express purpose of heading off creeping restrictions on the Law of the Sea.
Not surprisingly, these operational assertions are often received as acts of gunboat diplomacy and in some cases led to bloodshed.
During the Cold War, US and the Soviet Union concluded bilateral protocols to prevent accidents and clashes as they robustly tested each other around the world. Despite trying, US and China have failed to reach similar accords.
The current battle of wills invites miscalculation, confrontation and casualties on both sides.
By regularly using civilian proxies in
these encounters, China courts tragedy. Only one of the five Chinese vessels sent to intercept the Impeccable was military. Chinese trawlers approached within 25 feet of the Impeccable and risked collision by stopping abruptly in its path.
They provocatively attempted to snag and recover its state-of-the-art sonar array, while the sole Chinese naval vessel on the scene observed at a safe distance. The theatrics of flag-waving trawlers and the distasteful possibilities of Chinese civilian casualties at the hands of the US military raise uncomfortable questions about China's methods and motives.
It's natural for China to flex its growing muscles and vigorously pursue its national interests, and the international system should accommodate these developments. But the questions are — how and to what ends? China claims its rise is a peaceful one while the US calls upon to China to become a "responsible stakeholder." The Impeccable incident highlights the gaps between their positions.
Under the cover of tendentious, even plainly wrong, readings of international law, China is signaling across a range of issues, at times truculently, an intention to press its new power to reshape the international system. Rising China wants to change the rules of the game.
Glenn D. Tiffert is a PhD candidate in Chinese history at the University of California at Berkeley, and previously worked at the United Nations International Law Commission
© Yale Center for the Study of Globalization All rights reserved Reprinted by arrangement