Will Southeast Asia take sides?

Will Southeast Asia take sides?

Michael Richardson
The Straits Times
Asia News Network
Singapore

China has lately been ratcheting up the pressure on Taiwan
while telling Singapore and other Asia-Pacific countries in
unambiguous terms that it expects them to stick to its
interpretation of the one-China policy.

Beijing's assertiveness is a reminder that China's rise brings
challenges as well as benefits. In the past few years, it has
been mainly the benefits that have been felt throughout the
western Pacific.

China's supercharged economic expansion has stimulated trade,
investment and tourist flows that have boosted growth and created
jobs -- from Japan and South Korea to Southeast Asia, Australia
and New Zealand. China, it seemed, had been tied into a web of
regional cooperation and order. When President Hu Jintao and
Premier Wen Jiabao took over the leadership of the Communist
Party and government in 2002 and last year, they espoused a
foreign policy with China's "peaceful rise" as its centrepiece.

The economic and diplomatic benefits for the region from the
new China were dazzling. They far outshone the darker side of
China's emergence as a power with increasing political and
military clout, as well as economic strength. But the heightened
tensions over Taiwan are starting to bring regional views of
China back into more realistic perspective.

Beijing's muscle-flexing is a reminder that China is an
irredentist power set on recovering territory it says was
unjustly taken when it was weak and subjugated by colonizers,
among them Western nations and Japan. These often repeated
territorial claims by Beijing conflict with the rival claims of
many of China's neighbors, from Japan to Southeast Asia. The
Chinese claims encompass not just Taiwan but islands and vast
areas of surrounding waters and seabed in the East and South
China Seas. They also stretch to Himalayan territory claimed by
India.

Beijing insists that China can be united and whole only with
Taiwan included. Beijing's claims to sovereignty over the Senkaku
Islands in the East China Sea (disputed with Japan) and the
Spratly Islands in the South China Sea (disputed with Taiwan,
Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei) are equally
uncompromising.

While President Hu and Premier Wen have taken over the party
and state leadership, former president Jiang Zemin has remained
the military boss. It appeared that Hu and Wen wanted to give top
priority to resolving China's economic and social problems, not
military modernization. To do so, they needed a friendly regional
environment and a stable relationship with Taiwan.

Beijing insists that Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian and
others on the island who seek independence are to blame for the
current crisis. However, some foreign analysts say that a power
struggle between the Hu and Jiang factions in Beijing is giving
renewed prominence to reunification, soon rather than later and
by force if necessary.

The United States' decision to press ahead with a big arms
sale for Taiwan to counter what the Bush administration says is a
growing Chinese military threat to the island is adding fuel to
the fires of patriotic fervor on the mainland. Of course, this
storm may pass or subside, as others have over Taiwan in recent
years, when the protagonists accept that the costs of trying to
change the uneasy status quo far outweigh any likely gains.

But China's threats to use force to corral Taiwan must be
taken seriously. The Chinese military is growing stronger and may
be able within the next few years to launch a successful
amphibious invasion of Taiwan or force it to capitulate with a
missile attack or naval blockade.

Contrary to the "peaceful rise" mantra, China has repeatedly
used force to defend or advance its interests in the past 60
years. Its troops took over Tibet in 1950. A few years later,
they fought on the side of the North Koreans against the U.S. in
the Korean War. In 1962, they fought with India to take control
of a mountainous border zone in the Himalayas.

China seized the Paracel Islands from Vietnam in 1974 and
invaded and occupied parts of northern Vietnam for several months
in early 1979 as a reprisal after Hanoi sent its forces into
Cambodia to topple the Khmer Rouge regime, which had ties to
Beijing. The Chinese and Vietnamese navies fought briefly in the
Spratlys in the South China Sea in 1988 in a battle in which
China secured control of six cays.

However, with the exception of Korea, these were all localized
conflicts that could be managed. They were never likely to lead
to a wider war. Taiwan is different. The U.S. is obliged by an
act of Congress to defend the island from Chinese attack, unless
the Taiwanese authorities were to provoke Beijing by declaring
independence. Even then, America might intervene on Taiwan's
side.

The crisis Southeast Asia fears most would be one between
China and the U.S. over Taiwan. The last thing that Southeast
Asian countries want is for regional stability to be disrupted
and economic growth undermined by a conflict in which they would
be under intense pressure to choose sides between these two big
powers.

The writer is a visiting senior research fellow at the
Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore. This is a
personal comment.