Multiple battlefronts as China takes on the world

Xi Jinping stood before a Democratic Life Meeting of his cadres in May 2014. The gathering in Lankao County, a six-hour drive south of Beijing, has historically been an exercise in self-reflection in a country not usually known for debate.

Those gathered were there to privately criticise the party and each other. Xi had become President by 2952 votes to one just a year earlier and had begun re-orienting China's dour and deferential administration into one that within less than a decade would take on the world.

"It must be clearly understood that the greatest national condition of China is the leadership of the Communist Party of China," Xi said, before ticking off China's push through the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Cold War, three decades of reform and economic growth. "From one victory to another victory, from one success to another success, what else can shake our beliefs?''

Six years after the Lankao meeting, Xi is President for life and his belief remains steadfast. China is now engaged in simultaneous diplomatic, military and trade disputes across Europe, Asia, America and Australia.

At the centre of all these disputes is a China with territorial, technological and economic ambitions that are starting to match the size of its population and the weight of its history, what Xi has called the end of its 200-year eclipse and the "great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation". It is no coincidence that excerpts from the Lankao speech and a dozen others were published on Wednesday in Qiushi, the Communist Party's main theoretical journal.

The world is bracing for more escalations that no longer come by the year or the month.

In one 48-hour period this week, Beijing traded tit-for-tat sanctions with Washington, slammed primaries held by Hong Kong pro-democracy parties as illegal, accused Britain of being a US lackey for banning its flagship telecommunications provider Huawei, confronted the economic fallout from a border dispute with India and warned its citizens they could have their property seized in Australia as diplomatic relations between the two countries evaporate.

A rising China now faces a world that is determined to constrain it. Where will it end?

"Maybe a military confrontation in the South China Sea or Taiwan, or a drastic decoupling of the US and China causing great havoc to the world economy," Jia Qingguo, a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conferencee, says from Beijing.

The Professor of International Studies at Peking University accuses Washington of fuelling anti-China sentiment, arguing it is electorally convenient for US President Donald Trump to generate a crisis ahead of the November election amid the fallout from his administration's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. The US lobbied strongly for Britain to follow Australia and ban Huawei over national security concerns and led international condemnation of Hong Kong before pushing two US Navy aircraft carriers into the South China Sea last week.

US Attorney-General William Barr then accused Hollywood, Disney, Google and Apple of "collaborating" with the Chinese government by censoring films and being "all too willing" to work with Beijing.

The flags of the US and China at the site of a bilateral meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping last year. CREDIT:THE NEW YORK TIMES

The dispute ventured into the absurd on Wednesday when US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo posted a photo of Mercer, his dog, playing "with her favourite toys", including Winnie the Pooh, a nickname for Xi that is censored in China.

Jia argues robust support from Washington has emboldened India, which is now pushing back against China's incursions on a disputed border between the two nuclear-armed nations. India's Ministry of Information has banned 59 Chinese apps, including TikTok and WeChat, after a groundswell of public anger over the deaths of 20 soldiers in hand-to-hand combat with Chinese forces in the Himalayas in June.

Indian activists protesting the deaths of Indian soldiers in border clashes with China burn photographs of Chinese President Xi Jinping. CREDIT:AP

"Why does India all of a sudden take such a tough position? I think one of the reasons is they see they have the backing of the Trump administration," Jia says. "They think they can do it, but it's very dangerous."

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said this week the US had made an "ill-informed strategic miscalculation" that was fraught with emotions and "McCarthyist bigotry".

“It seems as if every Chinese investment is politically driven, every Chinese student co-operation initiative is a scheme with a hidden agenda,” he said.

Jia warns this tit-for-tat approach could see China withdraw from the rules-based international order. "If the US wants to make China the enemy, why should China not engage in an arms race?

"People are very upset," he says. "I don't think China can change people's minds. I think a crisis will."

Jia's assessment of a US-led blockade is not shared by the Morrison government, Britain or increasingly, members of the European Union, which have come to their own conclusions on China's more assertive diplomacy, despite up to 53 countries including Cambodia, Pakistan and Syria backing China's position at the United Nations.

Germany has taken a keen interest in Australia's fraying diplomatic relationship with Beijing, according to sources in Canberra, as Europe hardens its position on China in response to its crackdown on Hong Kong, the historically liberal territory that for more than a century functioned as a conduit between East and West.

Berlin, which has long maintained a China principle of "change through trade" is now leading calls for the European Union to "take a strong stand".

It is grappling with its own debate over Huawei after Britain banned the Shenzhen giant from its 5G network this week over concerns its technology could be used to spy on its citizens.

More than any other company, Huawei and its fellow Chinese globetrotter ByteDance, owner of TikTok, face the dilemma of China's engagement with the world.

They oscillate between two spheres, two systems of government and two enormous markets. TikTok has more than 1.6 million users in Australia alone and 2 billion worldwide. It has an equally popular Chinese version called Douyin, which has publicised crackdowns on protesters in Hong Kong and suspended users for speaking Cantonese, the form of Chinese used in the city.

In Washington, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States is investigating if the millions of videos uploaded to TikTok daily could give the Chinese government access to a vast facial recognition database.

The same backdoor security threat posed by Chinese multinationals and their state-linked companies is driving the fear of Huawei and its role in the most important global technology in a generation - the 5G network that will connect most of our lives to the internet.

Simon Lacey, the former vice-president of trade facilitation and market access for Huawei Technologies in China, is now a senior lecturer in international trade at the University of Adelaide. Last week he acknowledged Huawei's inherent contradiction.

"In China, it had to demonstrate unwavering loyalty to the goals of the Communist Party leadership. Outside China, it had to argue that it had little or nothing to do with the Chinese state," he said in a piece first published in The Conversation.

"The limited space it has to operate is becoming increasingly narrow, to the point where in many markets it is no longer able to appear to be both."

Xu Xiaonian, an honorary professor at the China Europe International Business School, says he has seen the Chinese government take an increasingly assertive role in business in the past few years "as the state advances where the private sector retreats".

"We would hope that we can stop that trend and reverse it," Xu told the Lowy Institute this week. "I don’t see any sign of the policies moving in that direction, which is very unfortunate."

Huang Yiping, a member of the Monetary Policy Committee at the People's Bank of China, says China has been a main beneficiary of the globalisation process, but partial decoupling of its economy from the US is probably the best it can hope for.

"My own recommendation, and that of most Chinese economists, is that China should continue with an open-door policy," says the professor of economics at Peking University. "There is still a large rest-of-the-world but the problem is even this rest-of-the-world is becoming much more uncertain."

Xu doesn't agree that confrontation between the two superpowers is inevitable.

"It is possible to avoid that confrontation. In history we have a precedent. Germany under Otto von Bismarck successfully avoided confrontation with France and the UK. Why today we cannot do that?"

This is true but the analogy has a problem. Germany's first chancellor also annexed Alsace-Lorraine. Two decades after his reign the world would be at war.

US shift on South China Sea may help Asean’s quiet ‘lawfare’ resolve dispute A new arbitration case may be the best way to persuade China that dispute resolution through international law is the best way to peace in the waters. By Bhavan Jaipragas

A photo from 1995 shows China’s flag flying over octagonal structures built on stilts at the Manila-claimed Mischief Reef in the disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea.

South China sea observers seem to have quickly forged a consensus that 

Asean

 claimants in the row will refrain from making major moves following Washington’s full-throated rejection this week of China’s vast claims over the waters.

That may well be the case, as these countries – 

Malaysia

, 

Vietnam

, the 

Philippines

, Brunei and 

Indonesia

 – all are preoccupied with the 

coronavirus

 crisis, and more importantly, are extremely averse to getting pulled into the larger 

US-China

 tug of war for regional influence.

Still, that does not mean we should expect total silence from these countries.

In fact judging from how Vietnam and the Philippines have reacted, it is reasonable to expect that these two claimants – by far the boldest in speaking up against China’s assertion in the waters – may capitalise on the new US position to solidify their legal stances on the row.

One view is that the assertions by Secretary of State 

Mike Pompeo on Monday

 on the illegality of Chinese actions in the waters may be of use in any future arbitration proceeding brought by one of Beijing’s counter-claimants.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Photo: AFP

And even if the position carries little or no legal sway, it adds significant weight to the countries’ efforts to show that the findings of a 2016 arbitral ruling against China’s so-called “historic rights” in the waters should underpin how the dispute is resolved.

Prior to Pompeo’s statement this week – on the fourth anniversary of the ruling – Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia each conveyed diplomatic notes to the 

United Nations

 asserting their acceptance of the court’s findings.

Kelly Craft, the US Ambassador to the UN, in June wrote to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres endorsing these positions.

In his statement this week, Pompeo fully endorsed the ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague – a position the US government had not previously taken.

China

 claims almost the entire South China Sea as falling within its U-shaped nine-dash line.

That boundary is challenged by Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei – along with the self governed island of 

Taiwan

.

The Southeast Asian claimants say the Chinese boundary encroaches on their territorial waters as set out by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Seas, while Taiwan – viewed by Beijing as a renegade province – has a similar claim as the Chinese mainland.

Indonesia, a seventh party in the dispute, insists it is not a claimant though the northern reaches of the exclusive economic zone of its Natuna islands are within China’s nine-dash line.

Before the pandemic struck, Asean diplomatic insiders told me they had witnessed an increasing, albeit quiet, alignment in thinking between Vietnam and the Philippines on the use of international arbitration mechanisms to deal with the dispute.

The Philippine President 

Rodrigo Duterte’s

 government has – for diplomatic reasons – sought to put some distance between itself and predecessors who initiated the case that led to the 2016 arbitral ruling. But the insiders say some in Manila’s diplomatic corps are eager for Vietnam to launch a similar challenge.

Asked about the latest developments, one of the diplomats – who is from a third Asean country – told me he believed Hanoi’s hand had strengthened as a result of the new US position.

Vietnam has publicly given little hint on its plans, though it recently nominated four arbitrators and four conciliators – a move seen as a precursor to bringing an arbitration case on behalf of the state.

China did not take part in the 2016 proceedings brought by Manila and does not recognise the ruling.

Observers have previously said if there is a fresh challenge by Hanoi, Beijing may take part.

A new arbitration case – as undramatic as it may sound – may well be the best way to persuade China that dispute resolution through international law, rather than unilateral alterations of the status quo, is the best way to peace in the waters.

Op-Ed: The cold war between U.S. and China just got a lot hotter. Some argue that the danger of a U.S.-Chinese war is growing. What that misses, a prominent Asian business leader told me this week, is that China has already decided the war has begun. Like the Cold War before it, the outcome is unlikely to be decided by military means. Also like the contest before it, the war will be fought not over days but over decades.

So, this is what life feels like “in the foothills of a new Cold War,” as Henry Kissinger has called it.Though perhaps the better metaphor would be “in the trenches,” for this week one could hear the steady din overhead from the escalating U.S.-Chinese conflict that will define our times.

On Monday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blasted China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea as “completely unlawful,” and he pledged U.S. support for those countries that would wish to challenge Beijing.

For its part, China sanctioned Senators Ted Cruz and Mario Rubio, among others, in retaliation for their legislative actions against Chinese officials linked to the detention and repression of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang.

On Tuesday, President Trump signed into law a bill to impose new sanctions on Chinese individuals, banks and businesses that are helping Beijing’s Hong Kong crackdown. On the same day, Prime Minister Boris Johnson made his UK the first European country to ban use of Huawei’s 5G equipment.

Meanwhile, China threatened to sanction Lockheed over its defense sales to Taiwan, a warning shot to defense companies across the world. Beijing military and political officials increasingly share with foreign counterparts their ambition to alter Taiwan’s independent status by the 100^th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party in July of next year.

This Thursday, U.S. Attorney General William Barr branded some U.S. entertainment and tech companies – Disney, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple among them – as “all too willing to collaborate” with the Chinese Communist party. That followed last week’s charge by FBI director Chris Wray that Beijing pursues its ambitions through industrial espionage, theft, extortion, cyberattacks, and malign influence activities.

All this comes in the face of an unprecedented Chinese global propaganda, economic and intelligence blitz to seize the myriad opportunities that present themselves to China as the first major economy to recover from the pandemic it unleashed. China this week announced 3.2% growth in its second quarter, after a 6.8% decline in the first quarter, even as the United States and Europe remain in recession.

Under the cover of the coronavirus fog, China has stepped up its repression of its ethnic Muslim minorities, tightened its grip over Hong Kong, increased its pressure on Taiwan, stepped up tensions in the South China Sea, escalated attacks on Australia for seeking a coronavirus investigation, heightened pressure on Canada for detaining a Huawei executive, unleashed fatal force on the border of India and ratcheted up its propaganda against the United States.

All this comes in the face of an unprecedented Chinese global propaganda, economic and intelligence blitz to seize the myriad opportunities that present themselves to China as the first major economy to recover from the pandemic it unleashed.

“China may simply be taking advantage of the chaos of the pandemic and the global power vacuum left by a no-show U.S. administration,” write Kurt M. Campbell and Mira Rapp-Hooper this week in Foreign Affairs. “But there is reason to believe that a deeper and more lasting shift is underway. The world may be getting a first sense of what a truly assertive Chinese foreign policy looks like.”

Some argue that the danger of a U.S.-Chinese war is growing. What that misses, a prominent Asian business leader told me this week, is that China has already decided the war has begun. Like the Cold War before it, the outcome is unlikely to be decided by military means.  Also like the contest before it, the war will be fought not over days but over decades.

The conventional wisdom is that China is a far more formidable peer competitor than the Soviet Union ever was, given its size, its economic might and its technological prowess. The Chinese economy that accounted for less than 2% of global GDP in 1980, now at some 20% of global GDP.

The conventional wisdom follows that the United States is far less equipped in Cold War II to take on this competitor than it was during Cold War I, with its alliances weakened, its domestic politics polarized, its national debt spiraling and its COVID-19 health and economic misery growing worse.

That said, many of the lessons of the last Cold War can be applied to this one. With military deterrence, strategic patience and a renewed effort to galvanize Asian and European allies, the fundamental strengths of democracies and weaknesses of autocracies still would be decisive.

Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, one of the world’s leading experts on China, has called for a “managed strategic competition.” Each side would understand and accept the other’s red lines and core interests, difficult areas for cooperation could be identified (such as trade), and cooperation in easier areas could be advanced (such as for pandemics and climate change).

And though it may appear that China is ascendant, its system has grown more vulnerable as it has become more authoritarian under President Xi.

China’s weak spot

Chinese-American political scientist Minxin Pei notes  that during the five decades of Cold War “the rigidity of the Soviet regime and its leaders proved to be the United States’ most valuable asset.”

He argues that Chinese rigidities have been increased by President Xi’s decision in 2018 to abolish presidential term limits, by his heavy-handed purges of prominent party officials, through his suppression of Hong Kong, through the tightest media censorship since Mao, through the incarceration of more than a million Muslim minorities, and through over-centralization of economic and political decision-making.

“The centralization of power under Xi has created new fragilities and has exposed the party to greater risks,” writes Pei. “If the upside of strongman rule is the ability to make difficult decisions quickly, the downside is that it greatly raises the odds of making costly blunders.”

Trump administration officials believe their increasing efforts to counter a more assertive China could prove to be their most significant foreign policy legacy. That will only be true if they can combine it with a strategy that can sustain the effort in concert with allies and far beyond the limits of any single U.S. administration.

These US Navy planes help hunt down one of the greatest threats to American aircraft carriers — here's how they do it. by Ryan Pickrell

• As US aircraft carriers operate around the world, the Navy often relies on aerial assets to find and track submarines, one of the greatest existential threats to a carrier and its strike group.
• P-8A Poseidon maritime reconnaissance and anti-submarine warfare aircraft can operate at higher altitudes and longer ranges than some other assets, allowing them to search broad areas for potential undersea threats.
• "Our main mission is patrol and deterrence," a US Navy officer recently told Insider, explaining that when it comes to submarines, "we want to know where you are" and sometimes, "we want you to know that we know where you are."

• US aircraft carriers operate around the world, sometimes in unfriendly waters, and one of the greatest threats to these symbols of American military might is enemy submarines. That's where the sub hunters come in.

  "In some parts of the world, we do armed patrol and escort for our carriers," US Navy Capt. Erin Osborne, the commodore for Wing Ten who oversees training, manning, and equipping of Navy P-8A squadrons, told Insider recently, explaining that if there are submarines out there, "we want to know that."

  Rivals are challenging American military advantages through increases in undersea warfighting capacity and capability, "but we're keeping right up with them," Osborne said, pointing to the relatively new P-8 as a key increase in lethality. "I think we are staying ahead of the threat."

  Crewed by a team of nine, US Navy P-8 Poseidon maritime reconnaissance and anti-submarine warfare aircraft are built to find enemy submarines. The Boeing P-8s are militarized 737-800ERX aircraft equipped with sensor systems and armed with torpedoes for tracking and, if necessary, engaging undersea threats. The aircraft, which was only introduced about seven years ago, also carries anti-ship weaponry.

  

  Sailor assigned to VP-16 prepare a P-8A aircraft for a flight. 

  US Navy photo taken by Lt. Cmdr Alan Johnson

  'The eyes and ears of the fleet'

  Successor to Lockheed's P-3 Orion, the P-8 provides advanced maritime intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities and is among the best sub hunters in the world. The Navy has described the P-8 as "an extension of the eyes and ears of the fleet," as this aircraft, unlike some other anti-submarine warfare assets in the US arsenal, is uniquely suited to conducting sweeping patrols that cover large swaths of open ocean and track down possible threats to a ship beyond its horizon.

  The Navy's land-based P-8s operate at higher altitudes and have a longer range than the anti-submarine warfare helicopters that are sometimes tied to ships at sea. The P-8s capabilities also give it certain advantages over US attack submarines — among the Navy's most important undersea warfighting assets.

  While the P-8 is equipped to defeat independently — or in coordination with other assets — a potential enemy's submarines, Osborne stressed that "we're not flying around prepared to drop torpedoes all the time."

  "Our main mission is patrol and deterrence," she said, explaining that when it comes to submarines, "we want to know where you are" and sometimes, "we want you to know that we know where you are."

• The Navy uses its P-8s flexibly for more than just patrols, submarine hunting and overwatch. They are also used for drug interdiction missions, collecting intelligence, and carrying out search and rescue operations, with each mission having its own unique aims and demands.

  For carrier strike group support missions, the main goal is situational awareness and threat detection. "We always want to be aware," Osborne said.

  While an adversary could use missiles to cripple a carrier, "if they really wanted to sink the carrier, they might to turn to torpedoes," Bryan Clark, a former US Navy officer and defense expert at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), previously told Insider.

  The Navy's carrier strike groups have relatively robust missile defense capabilities, but are much less prepared to counter torpedoes. "Torpedo defense is hard, not really perfected, and so they actually end up being the more worrying threat," he said.

• Last month, the Dwight D. Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group conducted a three-day anti-submarine warfare drill training US Navy forces to protect ships in transit and defend against submarine threats in chokepoints. During the exercise, a P-8 from the "War Eagles" of Patrol Squadron 16 provided airborne maritime patrol and reconnaissance support.

  'Finding a needle in a haystack'

  Finding enemy submarines in a real-world situation is, as one Navy official told Insider, like "finding a needle in a haystack." Sometimes the P-8 crew works off of intelligence; other times, they are conducting an open-ocean search.

  Anti-submarine missions can involve a lot of figuring out where an enemy is not and then closing in on the target, like playing the classic board game of Battleship, except in this case, your opponent can see both sides of the board.

  "I personally think that our ASW [anti-submarine warfare] mission is our most exciting mission," Osborne explained, calling the hunt both "an art and a science."

• "How does an airplane up in the sky find a submarine under the water? We have sonobuoys that we drop in the water, and the sonobuoys talk to the plane," she said, explaining that a sonobuoy is essentially a hydrophone. "So, a microphone goes into the water and we listen for the submarine as it passes information back to the aircraft."

  A sonobuoy dropped from a P-8A deploys a float when it strikes the water, sending its sonar system lower into the water column. Passive systems act as these underwater microphones while active systems send sonic pings into the water that bounce off objects. These returns are then transmitted back to the P-8A for assessment, and with sonar from nearby ships and submarines can paint a picture of where an adversary's sub lurks.

  Without going into the geometry, she explained that "you can figure out where they might be based on the sounds that you hear." Basically, the aircraft drops an array of sonar listening devices down in the water that allow the crew to zero in on a sub's position.

  It takes more than just the technology to get the job done though, Osborne said. "We have got the technology on the aircraft, we understand how the buoys work, and there's a manual with recommended tactics, but at the end of the day, there's a bit of an art to it as well," she said, adding that it is impossible for any one person to do the mission alone.

• Each P-8 aircrew has three pilots, a tactical coordinator, a co-tactical coordinator, two acoustic operators, and two electronic warfare operators.

  "The pilots put the plane in the right place. The tac decides where the buoy drops. The sensor operators are listening and processing the buoys. It's a team effort to say this is where we think the submarine is," Osborne said.

  "Based on our experiences, based on what our processors are telling us, and based on what we know about the tactics of the target, we think the submarine is over here," she said. "Then we take the plane over there, put another buoy in or fly another pattern."

  All that hard work does not always pay off, but when it does, Osborne said "it is always satisfying to find a submarine."

• She noted though that they are not hunting subs for fun. "This isn't a flying club," she said. "We're out there doing missions every day, and we're doing it for the safety and security of the nation."