China's Asia Policy: Implications for Japan and India
by Mohan Malik
The main objective of China's Asia policy has always been to prevent the rise of an Asian rival or peer competitor to challenge its status as the Asia-Pacific's sole 'Middle Kingdom'. As an old Chinese saying goes, 'one mountain cannot accommodate two tigers'. What distinguishes China from its near-rivals, Japan and India, is its permanent membership of the UN Security Council and declared nuclear weapon state (NWS) status, making it a far more important player in international fora and the sole Asian negotiating partner of the United States on global and regioanl security deliberations. The 'multipolar' world sought by Beijing is based on an 'inner core' which includes only China, the United States and Russia. Japan and India figure in more as allies of the US and Russia or as sub-regional players than as independent poles. The means adopted to achieve Beijing's Asia policy goals are a mix of balance of power and coercion based on the classic strategic principle of 'make the barbarians fight while you watch from the mountain top' (zuo shan guan hu dou).
To ensure China's preeminence of the Asia-Pacific, China's Asia strategy has aimed at 'restraining Japan and containing India'. China has taken great care to keep the memories of Japanese aggression in the region alive, and its diplomatic rhetoric escalated at the slightest provocation into concern about the possible remilitarisation of Japan. Over the years China has also built up North Korea as an ally and as a military counterweight to Japanese power in Northeast Asia. Beijing also knows that Tokyo remains constrained by its World War II legacy to acquire full spectrum of military capability befitting of an independent power or a 'normal' nation.
Seeing India as a potential challenger in South and Southeast Asia, China has sought to contain it through strategic alignment with Pakistan and Burma. China's evolving naval doctrine envisages a coordination of efforts with its allies such as Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, and Burma to ensure dominance and control over trade routes and energy resources in the event of a regional or global crisis. This strategy leaves China free to act without the constraint of either a regional balancer or a regional counterweight on mainland and maritime Asia.
At the heart of Sino-Indian antagonism is the familiar Indian suspicion, which has now matured into a certainty, that China is seeking to deny India its proper stakes in the game of international politics. That China does not want India to emerge as an equal is evident from its staunch opposition to India's membership of the P-5 (UN Security Council), N-5 (Nuclear Club), ASEM (Asia-Europe Summit), and APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation). (India was made the ARF (ASEAN Regional Forum) member in December 1995 despite Beijing's opposition to it.) Speaking at the Munich Security Conference in February 1999, India's National Security Advisor, Brajesh Mishra, hinted at the BJP government's much broader political ambition by predicting that 'in the 21st century a new security order is likely to arise in the Asia-Pacific region in which India should be granted as much respect and deference by the United States and others as is China today.' Much like China, India sees itself as a newly rising great Asian power whose time has finally come.
Unlike other NWSs, China has engaged in nuclear and missile proliferation to advance its strategic interests in Asia. It is not a coincidence that both North Korea and Pakistan owe a greater part of their nuclear and missile capabilities to China. To take the heat off its proliferation activities, Beijing has also encouraged Islamabad and Pyongyang to establish closer nuclear and missile cooperation links since the early 1990s. This has afforded Beijing the unique opportunity to successfully play the dual role of a troublemaker and troubleshooter in South Asia and Northeast Asia. Much like an individual, a country is known by the company it keeps. North Korea and Pakistan are both militarist regimes, and have initiated military conflicts against their neighbours (Islamabad in 1948, 1965, 1999 and Pyongyang in 1950, 1999). Much like China, both have a penchant for engaging in a game of brinkmanship, belligerence and nuclear coercion to change the territorial status-quo (at times with overt and covert backing from Beijing).
A crucial means of 'victory without bloodshed' (bing bu xue ren) in Chinese strategic tradition is to intimidate the hostile country into capitulation through provocation, brinkmanship, coercion and shift in the balance of power. This is evident in the manner in which Chinese-supplied nuclear capable long-range missiles have been brandished by Pyongyang and Islamabad for coercion and blackmail vis-à-vis Japan and India. Such a strategy obviates the need for China to pose a direct threat to Japan or India. Yet when Japan and India take countermeasures to North Korean and Pakistani nuclear and missile capabilities, China cries wolf and threatens to start off an offensive missile race, renege on test ban treaty and engage in proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
As China expert, Alastair Johnston, points out: 'Chinese diplomatic strategy is to negotiate from a position of strength to an enemy who is militarily weak and/or tied down with multiple security concerns. The objective is to convince the enemy that the military situation has shifted to his disadvantage and thus to force him to concede.' By building up the military capabilities of allies such as North Korea vis-à-vis Japan and Pakistan's and Burma's vis-à-vis India, Beijing seeks to tie Japan and India down with multiple security concerns.
In short, China has practised hard-headed realpolitik-inspired balance of power diplomacy vis-à-vis its two Asian rivals. However, recent developments, such as India's overt nuclearisation in 1998, the possible deployment of Theatre Missile Defences in Japan and growing Japanese and Indian push for permanent membership of the UN Security Council, have the potential to seriously undermine carefully crafted twin goals of China's Asia policy:'contain India and restrain Japan'. If prevailing trends continue, Asia will be dominated by three strong and powerful Asian states - China, Japan and India - something which the region has never experienced before and this will usher in new strategic alignments. However, much like the United States at the global level, China is unwilling to accept any serious challenge to its top-dog status in Asia and can be expected to devise ways and means to neutralise Japanese and Indian capabilities.Therefore, an awareness of China's ambitions and the logic of its military alliances, and of its rivals' ability (or the lack of it) to frustrate them, is necessary for an understanding of security challenges in the years ahead. How and in what ways Tokyo and New Delhi respond to Beijing's Asia policy will determine the future of regional balance of power and Asian security in the 21st century.
About the Author
Dr Mohan Malik is Senior Lecturer
and Director of the Defence Studies Program at Deakin University,
Victoria, Australia. He has contributed several chapters to books
and published over 60 articles on security issues in the Asia-Pacific
in leading International Relations/Strategic Studies journals. Dr
Malik is the author of The Gulf War: Australia's Role and Asian-Pacific
Responses (Strategic and Defence Studies Centre/ANU Press, 1992),
China and Nuclear Arms Control (Oxford University Press, forthcoming),
and Editor of the three volumes on Asian Defence Policies (Deakin
University Press, 1994), The Future Battlefield (Deakin University
Press, 1997), and Australia's Security in the 21st Century (Allen
& Unwin, 1999). He has done consultancy work for the Australian
Department of Defence, and the UK
-based Jane's Information Group. Dr Malik has been
awarded the Department of Defence Visiting Fellowship twice in 1991
and 1998 at the Strategic & Defence Studies Centre, the Australian
National University, Canberra. He is a member of the London-based
International Institute for Strategic Studies and lectures regularly
at the Australian Army Command and Staff College, Fort Queenscliff,
Victoria.