The South China Sea: The Struggle for Power in Asia by Bill Hayton and Fire on the Water: China, America, and the Future of the Pacific by Robert Haddick
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Bill Hayton’s The South China Sea opens with a dramatic and alarming scenario of a global conflagration that starts with a pair of Philippine fishing boats sailing out to a shoal in the South China Sea and ends with someone in Delhi deciding that “this would be the perfect moment to regain some lost territory in the Himalayas...” Just in case the historical parallels aren’t immediately obvious, he rhetorically asks a paragraph later “What happens if someone shoots an Archduke?”
Our attention secured, the rest of the book is markedly less sensational. Hayton, a longtime BBC reporter, patiently walks us through the South China Sea’s many conundrums. He starts with history, indeed prehistory. The purpose of these chapters is to debunk Chinese claims that the South China Sea is “historically” China’s. It was not until the 10th century under the Song, for example, that
After more than one thousand years of trading with foreigners, the people whom we would now call ‘Chinese’ set sail across the oceans on their own vessels for the first time.
Even then, China hardly dominated.
Archaeology has been made the handmaiden of politics and Hayton dismisses Chinese claims curtly:
The presence of pottery on any shoal is no more proof of Chinese historical possession than the presence of cowry shells in a Bronze Age tomb in the Chinese city of Anyang is proof that Henan Province should rightfully belong to the Philippines.
He notes that 19th-century Chinese writers just translated English or French names for the various rocks, shoals and islands that China now claims centuries-long knowledge of.
Hayton makes a good case that the historical arguments—whether from China or the other claimants—for sovereignty over the South China Sea are less than convincing. Arguments based around international law fare little better:
Unfortunately, in the South China Sea the law is far from clear. There are two sets of law to contend with: an older form governs ‘historical claims’ to a territory and a newer form, defined by United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), governs the maritime claims that can be measured from territorial claims, The South China Sea is where the two forms intersect—and perhaps collide.
In the process, The South China Sea gives a good overview of a couple millennia of maritime and trade history as well as—no mean task—explaining UNCLOS itself clearly and succinctly. The book is worth reading for this alone.
But the validity of the arguments based on history or international law isn’t, nor surely ever was, quite the point. Hayton provides an alternate and better perspective with which to frame the South China Sea dispute: the adoption (or imposition) of the European nation-state system in which “a political unit had become defined by its edges” on the Southeast Asian mandala system where “the ruler’s authority diminished with the distance from the centre of the kingdom.”
In the Asian system there could gradual transitions in authority and even gaps where no ruler was acknowledged. Smaller units might recognise more than one sovereign or possibly none at all... In the European system there were no gaps—everywhere was supposed to belong to a sovereign—and to only one.
A zero-sum game in other words, which has manifested itself in the now infamous “nine-dashed line”, and one in which China’s growing power is an increasingly decisive factor.
Robert Haddick is a military analyst in Washington and while he doesn’t quite have Hayton’s flowing, journalistically-honed prose, his new book Fire on the Water from the Naval Institute Press—targeted, it is safe to assume, at specialists and policy-makers—is remarkably readable. He also eschews the travelogue-ish anecdotes and detours of Hayton’s book which have unfortunately come to seem de rigueur in current affairs books for a general audience.
Notwithstanding Haddick’s in-depth discussion of weapon systems and strategy—all of which is quite impressive; if military affairs are understood in as much detail as this book suggests, why have the last few American military ventures gone so wrong?—it is the description of China’s “salami-slicing” tactics that stands out:
the slow accumulation of small changes, none of which in isolation amounts to a casus belli, but which can add up over time to a significant strategic change. China’s application of steady pressure and increasingly persistent presence on and around disputed claims in the Near Seas is evidence of salami slicing at work.
This tactic itself has probably been apparent to observers, specialist or otherwise, but it helps to be able to give it such an apt and descriptive name.
Nor can the South China Sea be considered as a purely practical matter. What has “China as a whole gained?” asks Hayton.
The best that can be said is the occupations prevented other countries advancing their positions. No-one else has been able to drill for oil or monopolise fishing activity in the region but despite all the effort that has gone into seizing and building bases, neither has China.
Hayton is skeptical that much in the way of recoverable oil and gas lies beneath the South China Sea; Haddick, who takes a wider geographical remit than just the South China Sea, is more convinced of the potential. But both writers argue that China’s position on the various territorial disputes is not based primarily on the potential resource wealth that lies in or beneath the ocean. Indeed, remarks Haddick,
If... China’s main interest in the Near Seas was the exploitation of their vast hydrocarbon potential... it would seem a straightforward matter to set aside sovereignty questions and instead negotiate deals with Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, and others to develop and share the seas’ oil and gas.
He further points out that China has
settled eleven land border disputes with six of its Northern and Western neighbors since 1998—in many cases ceding more than half of its original claims ... China is thus not opposed on principle to settling territorial claims...
... just not, however, maritime claims.
Both writers conclude that what is really at issue is security, and express not inconsiderable understanding for China’s stated and probable concerns.
Hayton finds many if not most Chinese actions and statements to be cynical, but is not dismissive of the underlying issues. The longer second portion of The South China Sea details more recent developments as well as the issues of nationalism and military security that bedevil attempts to move any discussion forward. These last few years of the story will be familiar to those who read the papers; The South China Sea provides a good aide-memoire.
Haddick goes through these incidents and the consequent concerns for the United States’s policy-makers in even more considerable and even-handed detail, never downplaying China’s security concerns: Fire on the Water is a very useful companion volume to the more journalistic The South China Sea.
Hayton ends optimistically
I offer a Mediterranean analogy... It’s a semi-enclosed Sea with a shared history and a connected present whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It will be a Sea with agreed boundaries based upon universal principles and governed by shared responsibilities to use its resources wisely, a Sea where fish stocks are managed collectively for the benefit of all, where the impacts of oil exploration and international shipping are alleviated and where search and rescue operations can take place unimpeded. It could happen ...
somewhat hoping against hope, one feels.
For Haddick, the United States remains key to regional stability; not that American presence is perfect, but that the alternative would be worse. This must however be a two-way street in ways it has not been in the past. America and its partners, he writes must
treat China with respect and ensure that China has a clear path for continued success, a path that does not detract from the potential of its neighbors...
Something other than a zero-sum game, therefore. Obvious, perhaps, but far from easy to pull off. Anyone who starts asking “Why can’t they just ...” should be read either or both of these books to understand that there is no “just” about it.