China’s creeping ‘cabbage’ strategy

The pattern has become familiar: Construct a dispute, initiate a jurisdictional claim through periodic incursions, and then increase the frequency and duration of such intrusions, thereby establishing a military presence or pressuring a rival to cut a deal on China’s terms.

By Brahma Chellaney

China’s growing geopolitical heft is emboldening its territorial creep in Asia. 

After laying claim to 80 percent of the South China Sea, it has just established a so-called air defense identification zone in the East China Sea, raising the odds of armed conflict with Japan and threatening the principle of freedom of navigation of the seas and skies.
Meanwhile, China continues to nibble furtively at territory across the long, disputed Himalayan border with India.
Few seem to fathom the logic behind China’s readiness to take on several neighbors simultaneously. 

China is seeking to alter the “status quo” gradually as part of a high-stakes effort to extend its control to strategic areas and resources. 

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s 習近平 promise of national greatness — embodied in the catchphrase “China dream” — is tied as much to achieving regional hegemony as to internal progress.
China’s approach reflects what the Chinese general Zhang Zhaozhong 張召忠 this year called a “cabbage” strategy: Assert a territorial claim and gradually surround the area with multiple layers of security, thus denying access to a rival. 

The strategy relies on a steady progression of steps to outwit opponents and create new facts on the ground.
This approach severely limits rival states’ options by confounding their deterrence plans and making it difficult for them to devise proportionate or effective counter-measures. 

This is partly because the strategy — while bearing all the hallmarks of modern Chinese brinkmanship, including reliance on stealth, surprise and a disregard for the risks of military escalation — seeks to ensure that the initiative remains with China.
The pattern has become familiar: Construct a dispute, initiate a jurisdictional claim through periodic incursions, and then increase the frequency and duration of such intrusions, thereby establishing a military presence or pressuring a rival to cut a deal on China’s terms.
What is ours is ours, the Chinese invariably claim, and what is yours is negotiable. 

For example, China says “no foundation for dialogue” with Japan exists unless the Japanese accept the existence of a territorial dispute over the uninhabited Senkaku Islands.
Here, as elsewhere, China has painted its rival as the obstructionist party.
As Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi 王毅 put it, “Japan needs to recognize that there is such a dispute. The whole world knows that there is a dispute.” 

However, there is a dispute only because China has succeeded in shaking the “status quo” in recent years by popularizing the islands’ Chinese name and staging incursions into their territorial waters and airspace.
After steadily increasing the frequency of those incursions since September last year, China has recently begun increasing their duration. 

The establishment of a new air defense identification zone extending over the islands is its latest cabbage-style security “layer” — a unilateral power grab that US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel quickly branded “a destabilizing attempt to alter the status quo in the region.”
The zone even covers the sky over the South Korean Ieodo Reef.
As China escalates its campaign of attrition against a resolute Japan, it increases the risk of armed conflict, whether by accident or miscalculation.