How to Answer China's Aggression

A freshly aggressive tone from Beijing greets Joe Biden on his week-long trip to Asia.
By JOHN BOLTON

China's declaration on Nov. 23 of an air-defense identification zone over the Japanese Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea transformed Vice President Joe Biden's Asia trip this week. 

Mr. Biden's main objective in meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Abe on Tuesday was to assure him that America opposes China's belligerent, unilateral action in asserting the defense zone. 

Of course, if Mr. Abe really wants to know how the Obama administration treats close American allies, he can always call Bibi Netanyahu.
Although Mr. Biden publicly criticized the defense-zone announcement, he did not expressly reject it. Moreover, the administration earlier advised U.S. commercial airlines to notify China of flights into the zone, whereas Japan and South Korea told their airlines not to make such notifications. 

At the very best, these are mixed, and therefore dangerous, signals.
Beijing's new zone over the Senkaku islands, along with the government's broader territorial claims, is indicative of a much larger problem for the United States. 

For too long, American business and political leaders have accepted the notion that China is engaged in a "peaceful rise" to become a "responsible stakeholder" in world affairs, which we should placidly allow to happen. 

Instead of fantasizing about what China might become, it is far more sensible to consider what America's strategy should be under a range of possible scenarios. 

The rosy "peaceful rise" theory ignores countless other possibilities, particularly its polar opposite.

Chinese Vice President Li Yuanchao, right, and U.S Vice President Joe Biden in Beijing on Wednesday.Associated Press

The People's Liberation Army remains the dominant force within the Communist Party, and the party remains the dominant political (and major economic) force in China. 

That explains Beijing's sustained increases in military budgets; its expanding nuclear and ballistic-missile arsenals; its unmatched cyberwarfare program; its construction of a blue-water navy; and its anti-satellite, anti-access and area-denial weapons systems. 

These aren't the marks of a "peaceful rise," especially combined with Beijing's aggressive territorial claims.
America urgently needs strategic thinking about China's radically different alternative futures. 

Simply ignoring the bad news won't work. 

Here are three building blocks for a more realistic U.S. strategy on China.

First, since China's principal theater of action for decades will be Asia, that must also be the focus of America's response. 

China's territorial claims, and now the air-defense zone, provide Washington with an enormous opportunity to maintain and expand its influence along China's periphery, from India to Japan. 

Whether we have the wit to exploit this opportunity remains to be seen.
Ideally, the U.S. would benefit from something akin to an alliance system among our friends and allies, currently a far-fetched goal given, for example, tensions between South Korea and Japan. 

Contemporary Japanese-Chinese disputes are mirrored in Seoul-Tokyo arguments over seemingly useless islands and reefs, reflecting even deeper historical grievances and animosities. 

Nonetheless, America alone can provide the support necessary to resist Chinese hegemonism, which essentially all Asian governments recognize. 

They would welcome a stronger, more visible, Washington role, even if they won't necessarily say so expressly in today's uncertain and dangerous environment.
Taiwan has an interesting potential role. 

Although its territorial claims mirror Beijing's, Taipei could gain substantial support for its unique status from its Asian neighbors, thereby reducing its international isolation, by distancing itself from China's current assertive posture. 

For example, Taiwan could say publicly that it does not recognize Beijing's defense-zone declaration, and that it wants to confer with Japan, South Korea and others to align their responses. 

So doing would serve notice that Taiwan won't accept being declared part of China's next power projection.

Second, China's military growth demonstrates persuasively why the U.S. can no longer countenance massive military-budget cuts. 

We need superior Pacific Ocean air and naval power to counter Chinese aggressiveness, but we also need capabilities in the Middle East, the North Atlantic and elsewhere against other potential threats.
Beijing doesn't have to match America's military capabilities world-wide to equal the U.S. off China's shores. Accordingly, allies who pulled their weight in meeting common-defense needs would certainly help. 

Most of Europe may be beyond redemption, but Japan is poised to resume a normal nation's full self-defense role, something Washington should welcome.

Third, the U.S. and its allies should press China to join a vigorous campaign to counter the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction by North Korea, Iran and others. 

Pyongyang's nuclear and ballistic-missile capabilities have fueled enormous concern in East Asia. 

While China has the heft to bring North Korea to heel, Beijing's persistent failure to do so signals that it is not as interested in solving the problem as its rhetoric indicates.
No wonder, therefore, that Tokyo and Seoul look to their own military capabilities, including missile defense, to protect themselves against Pyongyang and Beijing's growing nuclear arsenal as well. 

Nor has China's interest in Iran's oil reserves helped in containing Tehran's nuclear program.
Japan and Israel both live in the real world of threats and dangers, not in the Obama bubble where national-security issues rarely intrude on his efforts to reshape American society. 

But China's air-defense zone move has pierced the bubble, and Joe Biden's Asia trip could tell us if President Obama now gets it.

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A South China Sea ADIZ: China’s Next Move

American betrayal: Washington not only gave de facto approval of the East China Sea ADIZ, but also suggested that future Chinese moves would not be met with strong resistance. 
By Harry Kazianis

I hate making predictions. 

Truthfully, I am the type of person who likes to go to casinos for the latest sporting events or concerts and would never throw my money away in a slot machine or on the blackjack table. 

However, I can guarantee Vegas would lose its shirt on this bet, an easy wager to make: Look for China in the next year to eighteen months to declare an ADIZ over the South China Sea — in fact, Beijing’s ambassador to the Philippines appears to have alluded to such a move. 

Heck, I will even take it a step further and bet the wife and dog on this one: Beijing will create such a zone in the Yellow Sea as well at some point in the near future.

Why am I making such a prediction? 

Two recent factors come into play that in my view give China the rationale along with the ample cover they need to make such a move.
First, Washington appears to have given Beijing the green light to go forward — albeit unintentionally it seems.
Various reports based off a Kyodo news agency article have suggested a senior official traveling with Vice President Joseph Biden to Asia explained that “Washington is also asking China not to set up an air defense zone in the South China Sea, where Beijing is locked in territorial rows with Southeast Asian nations, without first consulting countries concerned.”
So let me see if I have this correct: It would be OK if China crafted an ADIZ in the South China Sea as long as it tells its neighbors in some fashion, in advance? 

Considering Beijing has already made a veiled reference that it could set up additional ADIZ in the future, the timing of such a comment was ill advised at best.
Honestly, I am hoping the official was misunderstood or misspoke because if accurate, Beijing could use such wording to openly declare such a new ADIZ in the South China Sea — an area with sovereignty disputes involving multiple claimants. 

In fact, Beijing has already gone so far to claim 80 percent of the area, effectively taking control of Scarborough Shoal last summer, which is well within the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of the Philippines and is pressing its claims now on Second Thomas Shoal. 

China has also deployed its new aircraft carrier to the region in what could be seen as a show of force (although, let’s be frank, the carrier won’t be operational for sometime, however, the point is still made).
Second, when America’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) gave guidance that U.S. domestic carriers should inform Beijing of their flight plans, Washington not only gave de facto approval of the East China Sea ADIZ, but also suggested that future moves would not be met with strong resistance. 

Yet, any move that gives this ADIZ declaration on China’s part any legitimacy will certainly be used by Beijing as a sign of acceptance. 

If we got away with it once, why not try the same move again and again?
As I explained in a piece for the Washington Times recently, creating an ADIZ, an area that is essentially an early-warning buffer zone for possible intrusions into a nation’s airspace, is not aggressive. 

It is the arc of Chinese actions dating back to 2006 onward that should worry the international community. Looked upon as a whole, the trend is truly concerning. 

No one is saying Beijing does not have the right as a great power and possible someday a superpower to shape the international stage in a way that is friendly to its own national interest. 

It is the optics of how it is going about doing it that frightens its neighbors. 

For all of China’s worries about being contained by the U.S. “pivot” to Asia, China is doing a great job of aligning its neighbors against its actions — effectively containing itself and giving credence to the growing narrative as Asia’s new regional bully. 

Bad move Beijing.

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China’s Aggressive Expansionism Hits Archaeology

China Has Begun Asserting Ownership of Thousands of Shipwrecks in the South China Sea
By JEREMY PAGE

A replica of a treasure ship sailed by Zheng He about 600 years ago at a museum in Nanjing. 
Underwater archaeologist Franck Goddio's team was exploring the wreckage of a 13th-century Chinese junk off the coast of the Philippines when it made an unwelcome discovery about China's maritime muscle in the 21st century.
As a twin-prop plane swooped overhead, a Chinese marine-surveillance vessel approached the team's Philippines-registered ship and began broadcasting instructions in English over a loudspeaker.
"They said this area belonged to the People's Republic of China, and they told us to scram," recalls one of the people on board last year. 

"It was pretty scary." 

Chinese officials confirm the incident took place but say the archaeologists' mission was illegal.

A boatman paddles away from the Sarangani, a ship on which archaeologists became embroiled in a standoff with China, in Manila Bay.

With territorial disputes escalating in the waters off China, the Chinese government has begun asserting ownership of thousands of shipwrecks within a vast U-shaped area that covers almost all of the South China Sea, which it says has been part of its territorial waters for centuries.
China has ordered its coast guard to prevent what it considers illegal archaeology in the waters it claims, and it is pouring money into a state-run marine-archaeology program. 

Chinese archaeologists are preparing their first comprehensive survey of undersea sites, including in disputed areas.
Chinese officials say their efforts will curb the theft and treasure hunting they say has destroyed numerous sites and flooded the global market with looted Chinese antiquities.

There is a political dimension to China's plans. 

Chinese archaeologists openly aspire to bolster their country's historical claims to the contested South China Sea, which overlap with those of Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, and the Philippines.
"We want to find more evidence that can prove Chinese people went there and lived there, historical evidence that can help prove China is the sovereign owner of the South China Sea," says Liu Shuguang, head of the Chinese government's Center of Underwater Cultural Heritage, set up in 2009 to oversee underwater archaeology in the country.
Tensions have been running high in the region over China's intensifying campaign to assert territorial claims, not only in the South China Sea, but in the East China Sea, which is contested by Japan. 

On Nov. 23, China proclaimed a new air-defense identification zone over Japanese Senkaku islands.
The South China Sea, one of the world's busiest trading routes, is littered with wrecks from the last two millennia, including Chinese junks, Indian and Arab dhows, Dutch and British trading schooners and World War II warships. 

Chinese archaeologists say they have gathered coordinates for 70 shipwrecks in those waters but estimate there are at least 2,000, and possibly many more.

A team working with French underwater archaeologist Franck Goddio, shown in 2010, was exploring the wreckage of a 13th-century Chinese junk off the coast of the Philippines when a Chinese marine-surveillance vessel ordered them to leave the area. 

Mr. Goddio, a Frenchman who is one of the world's leading marine archaeologists, had worked in the area since the 1980s, excavating 15th-century Chinese junks, 16th-century Spanish galleons and 18th-century British merchant ships. 

In addition to the trip last year, his team had visited the cluster of reefs and rocks off the Philippines, called the Scarborough Shoal, in 2011. 

Both expeditions were part of a joint research project with the National Museum of the Philippines, which collaborates with foreign archaeologists because of a shortage of state funding.
Different countries refer to the disputed islands by different names.
People involved in the project say it has no political or commercial agenda. 

During last year's trip, they say, they were examining pieces of celadon, a form of green-glazed ceramic, from a wreck that long ago broke apart on the sharp coral.
Chinese officials see ulterior motives.
"The Philippines sent some French archaeologists to do what? To drag away this shipwreck," says Mr. Liu of China's Center of Underwater Cultural Heritage. 

"Because this was material evidence that Chinese people first found the Scarborough Shoal, they wanted to destroy evidence that was beneficial to China." 

The archaeologists deny that.
Chinese archaeologists haven't started excavating sites at the Scarborough Shoal, but they have begun work on Chinese wrecks around the Paracel Islands, which lie about 200 miles from the coasts of China and Vietnam and are claimed by both countries. 

China has controlled the islands since 1974, when it defeated Vietnam in a brief naval battle.

Mike Hatcher prepares to dive from his ship in the South China Sea in 1986. On the expedition he found the 'Nanking cargo,' a haul of Chinese porcelain and gold from the wreck of the Geldermalsen, an 18th-century Dutch East India Co. ship that raised more than $20 million at auction in Amsterdam. 

"Marine archaeology is an exercise that demonstrates national sovereignty," Li Xiaojie, the vice minister of culture, was quoted as saying by state media in September 2012 as he examined porcelain retrieved from a wreck off the Paracels.
Chinese archaeologists say the survey encompassing other disputed areas will begin this year or next.
They also say they hope to support the government's efforts to re-establish China as a world maritime power, by focusing their research on the "Maritime Silk Road," which connected China by sea with India and Africa beginning in about the second century B.C.
China's five-year plan for 2011 to 2015 calls for the government to promote a seafaring heritage embodied by Zheng He, a eunuch admiral who sailed an armada of treasure ships as far as Africa about 600 years ago. 

The admiral is celebrated in China as the face of an era when it projected power far beyond its shores.
Xi Jinping, China's new president, has repeatedly emphasized the importance of maritime power—at times invoking Zheng He—as part of a vision to reclaim China's world prominence.
Zhang Wei, one of China's first underwater archaeologists, says the nation is "extremely focused on being a great and strong maritime power," which he calls the "grand backdrop" to China's marine-archaeology program. 

The program was launched, he says, under the auspices of President Xi's father, who served as vice premier under Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s.

Two enameled globular teapots painted with peony and bamboo below a border of trellis-pattern; the porcelain survived the wreck and lasted more than two centuries under the sea so well because it was packed inside the tea, which in turn was in wooden chests.

Mr. Zhang says interest was kindled by commercial treasure hunters who operated in the South China Sea. Among the most famous was Mike Hatcher, a Briton whose haul of Chinese porcelain from the wreck of the Geldermalsen, an 18th-century Dutch East India Co. ship that sank in the South China Sea, raised more than $20 million at auction in Amsterdam in 1986.
Chinese leaders dispatched two officials to that auction to try to buy some of the items with cash, according to Mr. Zhang. 

"They only took about $30,000, and they couldn't buy a single thing," he says.
China's National Museum established its Underwater Archaeology Center the following year and appointed Mr. Zhang to head it—mainly, he says, because he was one of the few Chinese archaeologists who could swim.
The first big find in Chinese waters—a roughly 800-year-old merchant ship named the Nanhai One—was made in 1987 while a British salvage company was searching for a Dutch East India Co. wreck. 

The British team was forced to withdraw after the Nanhai One was identified as a Chinese ship.
Since then, there has been almost no foreign participation in marine archaeology in China, according to Chinese and foreign archaeologists. 

And only Chinese wrecks have been excavated in Chinese waters.
Chinese authorities, meanwhile, have trained more than 100 marine archaeologists, built at least three underwater-archaeology museums and invested millions of dollars in research. 

On Thursday, they announced a new project to remove up to 80,000 artifacts from the Nanhai One, which was lifted off the seabed in 2007 and placed in a water tank in a museum.
Next year, China plans to launch a 184-foot ship designed for marine archaeology, the first of its kind in the country, according to state-media reports.
China also is funding joint projects in other countries' waters, focusing mostly on locating wrecks linked to Zheng He. 

Last year, Chinese archaeologists using sonar identified five wrecks they believe were part of his fleet in the Gulf of Oman and the Strait of Hormuz, according to Chinese state media.
One reason Chinese authorities are so interested in tracing Zheng He's travels is that he is said to have visited several rocks and islands in the South China Sea.

Chinese archaeologists work with porcelain artifacts from the Nanhai One shipwreck, which dated back to the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279), in a structure in Yangjiang, China, in 2009.

Foreign experts say they welcome China's new willingness to invest in underwater archaeology and relish the prospect of learning more about sites in China's waters.
But they are concerned that a political agenda might be driving China's choice of sites, its exclusion of foreign archaeologists and its relative lack of openness about its research.
"There's this strong sense of nationalism that flows through the Chinese program," says Jeffrey L. Adams, an anthropologist at the University of Minnesota who has written about Chinese archaeology.
Foreign archaeologists mostly agree that Chinese-built ships and cargo account for many of the sites in the South China Sea because of the international trade in Chinese porcelain and silk.
But many of the wrecks lie far from the Chinese mainland, around the reefs and rocks off the coast of Malaysia, Brunei and the Philippines, because ships used to hug those shores to help with navigation and avoid bad weather.
Even if a wreck isn't in a disputed area, tracing its national "ownership" is often complicated. 

A ship, its owner, its cargo and its crew all may have originated in different countries.
Internationally, the trend in recent years has been toward acknowledging "common heritage," pursuing joint excavation and sharing results among academics from different nations. 

A 2001 Unesco convention on underwater cultural heritage encouraged states to cooperate when they had a shared interest in a site, but offered no guidance on jurisdiction and no mechanism for dealing with sites in disputed areas.
"If there's a disputed site, what we recommend is just get together and don't get into a fight over it," says Ulrike Guerin, who oversees protection of underwater cultural heritage at Unesco, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. 

"If you look around the world now, the majority of projects are multinational ones."
None of the countries involved in the South China Sea disputes have ratified the Unesco convention. 

Only China has the resources to enforce its claims to wrecks in the area and to excavate them.
China did little to enforce those claims until March 2012, when the government announced its first-ever crackdown on illegal salvage and archaeological work in China's territorial waters.
The incident at the Scarborough Shoal occurred less than a month later.
China says the standoff stemmed from an incident that April when a Philippines navy ship detained some Chinese fishermen near the Scarborough Shoal. 

But Chinese officials also have made it clear they regarded Mr. Goddio's project as illegal.
The Chinese marine-surveillance ship that approached the archaeologists was one of three Chinese vessels that took turns monitoring them over the next week or so, according to two people on board the archaeologists' ship and accounts in Chinese state media.
A Philippines coast guard ship was sent to the area but kept its distance. 

A tense standoff ensued as Chinese and Filipino officials accused one another of violating territorial boundaries.
Eventually, on April 18, the archaeologists' ship was forced to leave, prompting a formal protest from the Philippines' government. 

China has had effective control of the area since then.
The team abandoned its project. Mr. Goddio declined to comment.

Neither he nor the National Museum of the Philippines has a track record of using finds to justify territorial or ownership claims. 

"We don't really care who owns the ship," says Sheldon Clyde B. Jago-on, the head of underwater archaeology at the National Museum of the Philippines. 

"It's our shared heritage. It should be about collaboration. We care about the trade patterns, the trade routes, the cargo, the boat building."
Some experts say the overlap between politics and archaeology is neither surprising nor unique to China. Vietnam is expanding investment in its state-run archaeological program, and this year its Institute of Archaeology opened an underwater-archaeology department.
One of Vietnam's first projects has obvious political resonance—excavation of the site of a naval battle in which Vietnamese forces defeated a Chinese army in 938 A.D., bringing an end to centuries of Chinese rule over Vietnam. 

That site is on a river inside Vietnam.
The Scarborough Shoal incident, by contrast, marked the first time a country in the region used force to stop another nation's underwater archaeological project, experts say.
"China has the largest navy and the ability to chase people off, and then follow up with archaeological work," says Mark Staniforth, a marine archaeologist at Australia's Monash University who is working with Vietnam's Institute of Archaeology. 

"There's no sense they want to cooperate or collaborate with anyone."

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China bolsters East China Sea claim, warns of 'defensive measures'

Reuters

A Chinese military plane Y-8 airborne early warning plane flies through airspace between Okinawa prefecture's main island and the smaller Miyako island in southern Japan, out over the Pacific, in this handout photo taken on October 27, 2013 by the Japan Air Self-Defence Force and released by the Joint Staff Office of the Defense Ministry of Japan.


Cartographic aggression: "East China Sea Air Defense Identification Zone"
China on Saturday laid claim to a block of airspace over islands at the heart of a dispute with Japan in the East China Sea, threatening "defensive emergency measures" against aircraft that do not comply with new identification rules.
The Xinhua news agency published a map and coordinates of the area it called "the East China Sea Air Defense Identification Zone" as well as Defense Ministry identification rules for aircraft in the area, which covers most of the Sea.
The rules are likely to anger Japan.
Ties between the Asian powers have been strained for months by the dispute over the Japanese Senkaku islands, which are believed to be surrounded by energy-rich waters.
Patrol ships from both countries have been shadowing each other near the islets, raising fears that a confrontation could develop into a clash.
There have also been several incidents involving military aircraft flying close to each other.

In October, Chinese military aircraft flew near Japan three days in a row, and Japan scrambled fighter jets each time in response.
The Japanese Foreign Ministry did not have any immediate comment about China's announcement.
The Chinese rules mean aircraft have to report flight plans to China's Foreign Ministry or civil aviation administration, maintain radio contact and reply promptly to identification inquiries, keep radar transponders turned on, and bear clear markings of their nationality and registration.
The Defence Ministry said it was the "administrative organ" for the zone, Xinhua said.
"China's armed forces will adopt defensive emergency measures to respond to aircraft that do not cooperate in the identification or refuse to follow the instructions," it said, adding the rules came into force on Saturday.

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The Limits of China’s Surveillance State

By Gabe Collins

The recent attacks point to a future in which repression alone will no longer be enough to guarantee stability.
Violence in Xinjiang appears to be worsening significantly, despite Beijing’s large commitment of money and manpower to build a comprehensive surveillance apparatus intended to preempt social disorder. 

China now spends at least $111 billion per year nationwide on internal security – nearly as much as its reported 2013 military budget of approximately $114 billion.
Yet 2013 has been among the most violent years in the past decade in Xinjiang, with some data showing that at least 189 people – mostly Uyghurs – have been killed in violent confrontations with government forces since March, with many others left injured. 

More disturbingly, Xinjiang’s troubles seem to be metastasizing into other parts of China, a dynamic the authorities have worked hard to prevent.
On October 28, an SUV driven by a Uyghur man and containing two members of his family rammed into a crowd at Tiananmen Square, killing two tourists. 

The vehicle’s occupants then lit themselves on fire. 

The Tiananmen suicide attack and the rising tide of violence in Xinjiang itself suggest that in the face of determined adversaries, China’s well-manned and generously funded surveillance systems and repressive apparatus are not nearly as effective at preempting unrest as Beijing would like them to be.
Indeed, the fact that the Party stripped the senior military commander for Xinjiang, Gen. Peng Yong, of his position in the regional party’s Standing Committee less than a week after the Tiananmen attack suggests Beijing believes a senior official had to be sacrificed for significant security failures. 

Gen. Peng’s position was likely already weak due to the turmoil that has afflicted Xinjiang for much of this year.
Before delving into the strategic implications of surveillance limitations, let us take a quick look at what the parameters of the system look like today. 

China now may employ as many as two million Internet watchers to aid official censors. 

On the physical side, China has an ominously national program called “Skynet” (a name that will no doubt disconcert fans of the Terminator movies) that aims to increase the number and capabilities of surveillance cameras.
Beijing itself is leading the way. 

For those walking or driving in Beijing (and a growing number of other Chinese cities), the operative phrase increasingly is “smile, you’re on camera.” 

Beijing now reportedly has at least 800,000 CCTV cameras, according to Wu Hequan, Secretary General of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. 

As such, in each Tiananmen Square-sized block (roughly 270 meters by 380 meters), one can expect to find an average of 60 CCTV cameras.
In practice, strategic portions of the city – main streets, government sites, and landmarks like Tiananmen Square – will have much higher surveillance camera densities. 

So the Uyghurs who drove into the Square and self-immolated most likely passed hundreds of cameras, if not more, in the final kilometers of their journey. 

Yet despite running this gauntlet of cameras, web watchers, phone taps and police on the street, they were not discovered until they had entered one of the CPC’s most important sites, run down sightseers, and lit their SUV – a white Mercedes Benz – on fire.

If the car had been carrying explosives or struck a more crowded part of town, things could have been much worse.
Beijing clearly sees its growing surveillance systems as a tool for cracking down on separatist movements. 

In November 2012, The Telegraph reported that Chinese security forces intended to use a network of surveillance cameras to help end self-immolations by Tibetan protesters and that police could be on scene within two minutes after undesired activities were spotted by CCTV cameras. 

While public accounts of how video surveillance technologies are used with respect to Xinjiang are elusive, we can note that within the past month, Chinese authorities have detained at least 139 people in Xinjiang, accusing them of using the Internet to spread jihadist ideas.
At present, China may have as many as 30 million security cameras installed around the country. 

Its cities seem to be bent on adding more as quickly as possible, while enhancing their capabilities. 

For instance, Chinese cities such as Dongguan are now working to create “Smart Skynets” to improve surveillance capacity.

Strategic Implications
The Tiananmen attack will likely prompt the Chinese security agencies to take a “tactical” approach and push for installing more cameras and upgrading their technology and capabilities. 

These measures would likely include adding facial recognition software to more camera systems as well as integrating systems with one another.
However, there is a real risk that focusing heavily on technical security measures will fail to yield the security enhancements Beijing desires. 

Consider the fact that even in high-security prisons worldwide, where virtually every movement and activity is watched by guards and security cameras, drugs still get smuggled in, weapons still get made, and inmates still regularly get attacked and even killed. 

In short, where there is a will there is a way, and the limits of surveillance as a pre-emptive tool are rapidly exposed.
It increasingly appears Beijing’s longstanding “strike hard” policies in Xinjiang have not broken the will of the Uyghurs to resist, and in fact may have actually increased the ranks of those willing to openly challenge Han dominance in the region. 

The rising crescendo of violence in Xinjiang suggests that among certain segments of the Uyghur population, the wall of fear that Beijing has worked so assiduously to construct over the past 20 years may be cracking. If true, this is a serious problem because it may portend a cycle whereby violence triggers repression and tighter repression begets additional violence.
Uyghur insurgents will not be able to obtain guns domestically, but Xinjiang lies next door to several Central Asian states where borders are porous and weapons plentiful. 

However, another weapon in the insurgents' arsenal is likely plentiful in Xinjiang’s many farming areas: ammonium nitrate fertilizers that can be used to make simple, but deadly improvised explosive devices (IEDs), a technique pioneered by the Taliban in Afghanistan. 

State capacity in the region is also generally low, especially with regard to Afghanistan and Pakistan, who cannot even effectively manage their internal affairs, much less ensure border security in remote regions. 

The likely result: Beijing will be forced to invest further in securing the border from the Chinese side.
Xinjiang’s rich natural resource bounty is also at risk of insurgent attacks. 

Insurgents in other countries such as Colombia, Iraq and Yemen have made a habit of targeting energy infrastructure. 

Xinjiang’s rail network, growing number of oil & gas pipelines, and planned long-distance power lines intended to supply electricity to Central and Eastern China are all potentially at risk. 

Should insurgents decide to leverage the province’s remoteness and the difficulty of constantly watching hundreds of kilometers of vital infrastructure and begin attacking it, Beijing could have a real problem on its hands. 

Such attacks would be increasingly disruptive to the national economy as Xinjiang’s energy suppliers become more deeply entwined with consumers further east.
Beijing will not lose control of Xinjiang in the scenarios described above, but there is a rising risk that it will have to devote far more manpower and funds to maintaining security and control – a long term “surge” that turns into yet another tax on the country’s economy. 

As the country’s economy levels off onto a lower growth trajectory, China is likely to increasingly face not just “guns versus butter” tradeoffs but also “guns versus guns” as internal security concerns compete with the externally focused military services for budgetary resources.
The increased instability in Xinjiang has truly national security implications. 

China has other restive border areas such as Tibet, less violent than Xinjiang but which still command significant attention and resources from the security services. 

This situation is likely to worsen when the Dalai Lama passes from the scene with no heir apparent. 

Most importantly, the trouble Beijing is having containing the actions of what amounts to probably a few thousand true Uyghur separatists who are actually willing to take up arms suggests that serious economic disruptions in coming months and years could trigger social disorder that even the current muscular repression apparatus could not contain. 

A number of foreseeable events – a severe debt or real estate crisis, say – could rapidly trigger a time of economic reckoning in China. 

Moreover, a complex multi-trillion dollar economy such as China’s holds meaningful potential to produce various types of economic “black swan” events that could prove at least as disruptive as the foreseeable ones.
If tens of thousands of security cameras, two million internet monitors, and large internal paramilitary forces cannot resolve and contain the problems in Xinjiang, how would they cope with potentially millions of angry citizens roiled by economic problems? 

A gaping socioeconomic divide helps fuel violence in Xinjiang and such gaps exist elsewhere in China as well, raising the specter of additional attacks throughout the country as unhappy groups without a real political voice turn to violence as an outlet for their grievances. 

Indeed, on November 6, multiple bombs in the coal-mining center of Taiyuan killed one person and injured at least eight. 

China may be in for a new trend of metastasizing violence that originates in the ethnic minority borderlands, but comes to affect Han interests around the country. 

If Beijing is forced to more tightly control people movements, vehicle movements, and access to basic dual-use goods such as nitrate fertilizers, the resultant “terrorism tax” would have profound effects on trade and economic activity.
China’s leadership has proven smart and capable, but the current problems emanating from Xinjiang increasingly point to a future in which repression alone will not be enough. 

Beijing’s likely near-term solution will be to do everything it can to prop up growth, but the financial and policy measures required to do this simply raise the stakes down the road. 

Zhongnanhai faces an unenviable and complicated set of decisions as it grapples with rising domestic unrest.

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Historical Fiction: China’s South China Sea Claims

China uses folklore, myths, and legends, as well as pseudohistory, to bolster greater territorial and maritime claims. Since the end of the Second World War, China has been redrawing its maps, redefining borders, manufacturing historical evidence, using force to create new territorial realities, renaming islands, and seeking to impose its version of history on the waters of the region.

By Mohan Malik

The Spratly Islands—not so long ago known primarily as a rich fishing ground—have turned into an international flashpoint as Chinese leaders insist with increasing truculence that the islands, rocks, and reefs have been, in the words of Wen Jiabao, “China’s historical territory since ancient times.”

Normally, the overlapping territorial claims to sovereignty and maritime boundaries ought to be resolved through a combination of customary international law, adjudication before the International Court of Justice or the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, or arbitration under Annex VII of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). 

While China has ratified UNCLOS, the treaty by and large rejects “historically based” claims, which are precisely the type Beijing periodically asserts. 

On September 4, 2012, China’s foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, told US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that there is “plenty of historical and jurisprudence evidence to show that China has sovereignty over the islands in the South China Sea and the adjacent waters.”
As far as the “jurisprudence evidence” is concerned, the vast majority of international legal experts have concluded that China’s claim to historic title over the South China Sea, implying full sovereign authority and consent for other states to transit, is invalid. 

The historical evidence, if anything, is even less persuasive. 

There are several contradictions in China’s use of history to justify its claims to islands and reefs in the South China Sea, not least of which is its polemical assertion of parallels with imperialist expansion by the United States and European powers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 

Justifying China’s attempts to expand its maritime frontiers by claiming islands and reefs far from its shores, Jia Qingguo, professor at Beijing University’s School of International Studies, argues that China is merely following the example set by the West. 

“The United States has Guam in Asia which is very far away from the US and the French have islands in the South Pacific, so it is nothing new,” Jia told AFP recently.
China’s claim to the Spratlys on the basis of history runs aground on the fact that the region’s past empires did not exercise sovereignty. 

In pre-modern Asia, empires were characterized by undefined, unprotected, and often changing frontiers. The notion of suzerainty prevailed. 

Unlike a nation-state, the frontiers of Chinese empires were neither carefully drawn nor policed but were more like circles or zones, tapering off from the center of civilization to the undefined periphery of alien barbarians. 

More importantly, in its territorial disputes with neighboring India, Burma, and Vietnam, Beijing always took the position that its land boundaries were never defined, demarcated, and delimited. 

But now, when it comes to islands, shoals, and reefs in the South China Sea, Beijing claims otherwise. 

In other words, China’s claim that its land boundaries were historically never defined and delimited stands in sharp contrast with the stance that China’s maritime boundaries were always clearly defined and delimited. Herein lies a basic contradiction in the Chinese stand on land and maritime boundaries which is untenable. 

Actually, it is the mid-twentieth-century attempts to convert the undefined frontiers of ancient civilizations and kingdoms enjoying suzerainty into clearly defined, delimited, and demarcated boundaries of modern nation-states exercising sovereignty that lie at the center of China’s territorial and maritime disputes with neighboring countries. 

Put simply, sovereignty is a post-imperial notion ascribed to nation-states, not ancient empires.
China’s present borders largely reflect the frontiers established during the spectacular episode of eighteenth-century Qing (Manchu) expansionism, which over time hardened into fixed national boundaries following the imposition of the Westphalian nation-state system over Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 

Official Chinese history today often distorts this complex history, however, claiming that Mongols, Tibetans, Manchus, and Hans were all Chinese, when in fact the Great Wall was built by the Chinese dynasties to keep out the northern Mongol and Manchu tribes that repeatedly overran Han China; the wall actually represented the Han Chinese empire’s outer security perimeter. 

While most historians see the onslaught of the Mongol hordes led by Genghis Khan in the early 1200s as an apocalyptic event that threatened the very survival of ancient civilizations in India, Persia, and other nations (China chief among them), the Chinese have consciously promoted the myth that he was actually “Chinese,” and therefore all areas that the Mongols (the Yuan dynasty) had once occupied or conquered (such as Tibet and much of Central and Inner Asia) belong to China.

China’s claims on Taiwan and in the South China Sea are also based on the grounds that both were parts of the Manchu empire. (Actually, in the Manchu or Qing dynasty maps, it is Hainan Island, not the Paracel and Spratly Islands, that is depicted as China’s southern-most border.) 

In this version of history, any territory conquered by “Chinese” in the past remains immutably so, no matter when the conquest may have occurred.
Such writing and rewriting of history from a nationalistic perspective to promote national unity and regime legitimacy has been accorded the highest priority by China’s rulers, both Nationalists and Communists. 

The Chinese Communist Party leadership consciously conducts itself as the heir to China’s imperial legacy, often employing the symbolism and rhetoric of empire. 

From primary-school textbooks to television historical dramas, the state-controlled information system has force-fed generations of Chinese a diet of imperial China’s grandeur. 

As the Australian Sinologist Geremie Barmé points out, “For decades Chinese education and propaganda have emphasized the role of history in the fate of the Chinese nation-state... While Marxism-Leninism and Mao Thought have been abandoned in all but name, the role of history in China’s future remains steadfast.” So much so that history has been refined as an instrument of statecraft (also known as “cartographic aggression”) by state-controlled research institutions, media, and education bodies.
China uses folklore, myths, and legends, as well as pseudohistory, to bolster greater territorial and maritime claims. 

Chinese textbooks preach the notion of the Middle Kingdom as being the oldest and most advanced civilization that was at the very center of the universe, surrounded by lesser, partially Sinicized states in East and Southeast Asia that must constantly bow and pay their respects. 

China’s version of history often deliberately blurs the distinction between what was no more than hegemonic influence, tributary relationships, suzerainty, and actual control. 

Subscribing to the notion that those who have mastered the past control their present and chart their own futures, Beijing has always placed a very high value on “the history card” (often a revisionist interpretation of history) in its diplomatic efforts to achieve foreign policy objectives, especially to extract territorial and diplomatic concessions from other countries. 

Almost every contiguous state has, at one time or another, felt the force of Chinese arms—Mongolia, Tibet, Burma, Korea, Russia, India, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Taiwan—and been a subject of China’s revisionist history. 

As Martin Jacques notes in When China Rules the World, “Imperial Sinocentrism shapes and underpins modern Chinese nationalism.”
If the idea of national sovereignty goes back to seventeenth-century Europe and the system that originated with the Treaty of Westphalia, the idea of maritime sovereignty is largely a mid-twentieth-century American concoction China has seized upon to extend its maritime frontiers. 

As Jacques notes, “The idea of maritime sovereignty is a relatively recent invention, dating from 1945 when the United States declared that it intended to exercise sovereignty over its territorial waters.” 

In fact, the UN’s Law of the Sea agreement represented the most prominent international effort to apply the land-based notion of sovereignty to the maritime domain worldwide—although, importantly, it rejects the idea of justification by historical right. 

Thus although Beijing claims around eighty percent of the South China Sea as its “historic waters” (and is now seeking to elevate this claim to a “core interest” akin with its claims on Taiwan and Tibet), China has, historically speaking, about as much right to claim the South China Sea as Mexico has to claim the Gulf of Mexico for its exclusive use, or Iran the Persian Gulf, or India the Indian Ocean.
Ancient empires either won control over territories through aggression, annexation, or assimilation or lost them to rivals who possessed superior firepower or statecraft. 

Territorial expansion and contraction was the norm, determined by the strength or weakness of a kingdom or empire. 

The very idea of “sacred lands” is ahistorical because control of territory was based on who grabbed or stole what last from whom. 

The frontiers of the Qin, Han, Tang, Song, and Ming dynasties waxed and waned throughout history. 

A strong and powerful imperial China, much like czarist Russia, was expansionist in Inner Asia and Indochina as opportunity arose and strength allowed. 

The gradual expansion over the centuries under the non-Chinese Mongol and Manchu dynasties extended imperial China’s control over Tibet and parts of Central Asia (now Xinjiang), Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. Modern China is, in fact, an “empire-state” masquerading as a nation-state.
If China’s claims are justified on the basis of history, then so are the historical claims of Vietnamese and Filipinos based on their histories. 

Students of Asian history know, for instance, that Malay peoples related to today’s Filipinos have a better claim to Taiwan than Beijing does. 

Taiwan was originally settled by people of Malay-Polynesian descent—ancestors of the present-day aborigine groups—who populated the low-lying coastal plains. 

In the words of noted Asia-watcher Philip Bowring, writing last year in the South China Morning Post, “The fact that China has a long record of written history does not invalidate other nations’ histories as illustrated by artifacts, language, lineage and genetic affinities, the evidence of trade and travel.” 

Unless one subscribes to the notion of Chinese exceptionalism, imperial China’s “historical claims” are as valid as those of other kingdoms and empires in Southeast and South Asia. 

China laying claim to the Mongol and Manchu empires’ colonial possessions would be equivalent to India laying claim to Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Malaysia (Srivijaya), Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka on the grounds that they were all parts of either the Maurya, Chola, or the Moghul and the British Indian empires.
China’s claims in the South China Sea are also a major shift from its longstanding geopolitical orientation to continental power. 

In claiming a strong maritime tradition, China makes much of the early-fifteenth-century expeditions of Zheng He to the Indian Ocean and Africa. 

But, as Bowring points out, “Chinese were actually latecomers to navigation beyond coastal waters. For centuries, the masters of the oceans were the Malayo-Polynesian peoples who colonized much of the world, from Taiwan to New Zealand and Hawaii to the south and east, and to Madagascar in the west. Bronze vessels were being traded with Palawan, just south of Scarborough, at the time of Confucius. When Chinese Buddhist pilgrims like Faxian went to Sri Lanka and India in the fifth century, they went in ships owned and operated by Malay peoples. Ships from what is now the Philippines traded with Funan, a state in what is now southern Vietnam, a thousand years before the Yuan dynasty.”

And finally, China’s so-called “historic claims” to the South China Sea are actually not “centuries old.” 

They only go back to 1947, when Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist government drew the so-called “eleven-dash line” on Chinese maps of the South China Sea, enclosing the Spratly Islands and other chains that the ruling Kuomintang party declared were now under Chinese sovereignty. 

Chiang himself, saying he saw German fascism as a model for China, was fascinated by the Nazi concept of an expanded Lebensraum (“living space”) for the Chinese nation. 

He did not have the opportunity to be expansionist himself because the Japanese put him on the defensive, but cartographers of the nationalist regime drew the U-shape of eleven dashes in an attempt to enlarge China’s “living space” in the South China Sea. 

First map with the so-called “eleven-dash line” fabricated in 1947 by the Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist government. 

Following the victory of the Chinese Communist Party in the civil war in 1949, the People’s Republic of China adopted this cartographic coup, revising Chiang’s notion into a “nine-dash line” after erasing two dashes in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1953.

Since the end of the Second World War, China has been redrawing its maps, redefining borders, manufacturing historical evidence, using force to create new territorial realities, renaming islands, and seeking to impose its version of history on the waters of the region. 

The passage of domestic legislation in 1992, “Law on the Territorial Waters and Their Contiguous Areas,” which claimed four-fifths of the South China Sea, was followed by armed skirmishes with the Philippines and Vietnamese navies throughout the 1990s. 

More recently, the dispatch of large numbers of Chinese fishing boats and maritime surveillance vessels to the disputed waters in what is tantamount to a “people’s war on the high seas” has further heightened tensions. 

To quote commentator Sujit Dutta, “China’s unmitigated irredentism [is] based on the theory that the periphery must be occupied in order to secure the core. [This] is an essentially imperial notion that was internalized by the Chinese nationalists—both Kuomintang and Communist. The current regime’s attempts to reach its imagined geographical frontiers often with little historical basis have had and continue to have highly destabilizing strategic consequences.”
One reason Southeast Asians find it difficult to accept Chinese territorial claims is that they carry with them an assertion of Han racial superiority over other Asian races and empires. 

Says Jay Batongbacal of the University of the Philippines law school: “Intuitively, acceptance of the nine-dash line is a corresponding denial of the very identity and history of the ancestors of the Vietnamese, Filipinos, and Malays; it is practically a modern revival of China’s denigration of non-Chinese as ‘barbarians’ not entitled to equal respect and dignity as peoples.”
Empires and kingdoms never exercised sovereignty. 

If historical claims had any validity then Mongolia could claim all of Asia simply because it once conquered the lands of the continent. 

There is absolutely no historical basis to support either of the dash-line claims, especially considering that the territories of Chinese empires were never as carefully delimited as nation-states, but rather existed as zones of influence tapering away from a civilized center. 

This is the position contemporary China took starting in the 1960s, while negotiating its land boundaries with several of its neighboring countries. 

But this is not the position it takes today in the cartographic, diplomatic, and low-intensity military skirmishes to define its maritime borders. 

The continued reinterpretation of history to advance contemporary political, territorial, and maritime claims, coupled with the Communist leadership’s ability to turn “nationalistic eruptions” on and off like a tap during moments of tension with the United States, Japan, South Korea, India, Vietnam, and the Philippines, makes it difficult for Beijing to reassure neighbors that its “peaceful rise” is wholly peaceful. 

Since there are six claimants to various atolls, islands, rocks, and oil deposits in the South China Sea, the Spratly Islands disputes are, by definition, multilateral disputes requiring international arbitration. 

But Beijing has insisted that these disputes are bilateral in order to place its opponents between the anvil of its revisionist history and the hammer of its growing military power.

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The Drone War Comes to Asia

How China sparked a dangerous unmanned arms race.
BY SHAWN BRIMLEY, BEN FITZGERALD, ELY RATNER | SEPTEMBER 17, 2013

It's now been a year since Japan's previously ruling liberal government purchased three of the Senkaku Islands to prevent a Tokyo mayor from doing so himself. 

The move was designed to dodge a potential crisis with China, which claims "indisputable sovereignty" over the Japanese islands.
Disregarding the Japanese government's intent, Beijing has reacted to the "nationalization" of the islands by flooding the surrounding waters and airspace with Chinese vessels in an effort to undermine Japan's de facto administration, which has persisted since the reversion of Okinawa from American control in 1971. 

Chinese incursions have become so frequent that the Japanese Air Self-Defense Forces (JASDF) are now scrambling jet fighters on a near-daily basis in response.
In the midst of this heightened tension, you could be forgiven for overlooking the news early in September that Japanese F-15s had again taken flight after Beijing graciously commemorated the one-year anniversary of Tokyo's purchase by sending an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) toward the islands. 

But this wasn't just another day at the office in the contested East China Sea: this was the first known case of a Chinese drone approaching the Senkakus.
Without a doubt, China's drone adventure 100-miles north of the Senkakus was significant because it aggravated already abysmal relations between Tokyo and Beijing. 

Japanese officials responded to the incident by suggesting that Japan might have to place government personnel on the islands, a red line for Beijing that would have been unthinkable prior to the past few years of Chinese assertiveness.
But there's a much bigger and more pernicious cycle in motion. 

The introduction of indigenous drones into Asia's strategic environment -- now made official by China's maiden unmanned provocation -- will bring with it additional sources of instability and escalation to the fiercely contested South and East China Seas. 

Even though no government in the region wants to participate in major power war, there is widespread and growing concern that military conflict could result from a minor incident that spirals out of control.
Unmanned systems could be just this trigger. 

They are less costly to produce and operate than their manned counterparts, meaning that we're likely to see more crowded skies and seas in the years ahead. 

UAVs also tend to encourage greater risk-taking, given that a pilot's life is not at risk. 

But being unmanned has its dangers: any number of software or communications failures could lead a mission awry. 

Combine all that with inexperienced operators and you have a perfect recipe for a mistake or miscalculation in an already tense strategic environment.
The underlying problem is not just the drones themselves. 

Asia is in the midst of transitioning to a new warfighting regime with serious escalatory potential. 

China's military modernization is designed to deny adversaries freedom of maneuver over, on, and under the East and South China Seas.

Although China argues that its strategy is primarily defensive, the capabilities it is choosing to acquire to create a "defensive" perimeter -- long-range ballistic and cruise missiles, aircraft carriers, submarines -- are acutely offensive in nature. 

During a serious crisis when tensions are high, China would have powerful incentives to use these capabilities, particularly missiles, before they were targeted by the United States or another adversary. 

The problem is that U.S. military plans and posture have the potential to be equally escalatory, as they would reportedly aim to "blind" an adversary -- disrupting or destroying command and control nodes at the beginning of a conflict.
At the same time, the increasingly unstable balance of military power in the Pacific is exacerbated by the (re)emergence of other regional actors with their own advanced military capabilities. 

Countries that have the ability and resources to embark on rapid modernization campaigns (e.g., Japan, South Korea, Indonesia) are well on the way. 

This means that in addition to two great powers vying for military advantage, the region features an increasingly complex set of overlapping military-technical competitions that are accelerating tensions, adding to uncertainty and undermining stability.
This dangerous military dynamic will only get worse as more disruptive military technologies appear, including the rapid diffusion of unmanned and increasingly autonomous aerial and submersible vehicles coupled with increasingly effective offensive cyberspace capabilities.
Of particular concern is not only the novelty of these new technologies, but the lack of well-established norms for their use in conflict.
Thankfully, the first interaction between a Chinese UAV and manned Japanese fighters passed without major incident. 

But it did raise serious questions that neither nation has likely considered in detail. 

What will constrain China's UAV incursions from becoming increasingly assertive and provocative? 

How will either nation respond in a scenario where an adversary downs a UAV? 

And what happens politically when a drone invariably falls out of the sky or "drifts off course" with both sides pointing fingers at one another? 

Of most concern, how would these matters be addressed during a crisis, with no precedents, in the context of a regional military regime in which actors have powerful incentives to strike first?
These are not just theoretical questions: Japan's Defense Ministry is reportedly looking into options for shooting down any unmanned drones that enter its territorial airspace.
Resolving these issues in a fraught strategic environment between two potential adversaries is difficult enough; the United States and China remain at loggerheads about U.S. Sensitive Reconnaissance Operations along China's periphery. 

But the problem is multiplying rapidly. 

The Chinese are running one of the most significant UAV programs in the world, a program that includes Reaper- style UAVs and Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVs); Japan is seeking to acquire Global Hawks; the Republic of Korea is acquiring Global Hawks while also building their own indigenous UAV capabilities; Taiwan is choosing to develop indigenous UAVs instead of importing from abroad; Indonesia is seeking to build a UAV squadron; and Vietnam is planning to build an entire UAV factory.
One could take solace in Asia's ability to manage these gnarly sources of insecurity if the region had demonstrated similar competencies elsewhere. 

But nothing could be further from the case. 

It has now been more than a decade since the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and China signed a declaration "to promote a peaceful, friendly and harmonious environment in the South China Sea," which was meant to be a precursor to a code of conduct for managing potential incidents, accidents, and crises at sea. 

But the parties are as far apart as ever, and that's on well-trodden issues of maritime security with decades of legal and operational precedent to build upon.
It's hard to be optimistic that the region will do better in an unmanned domain in which governments and militaries have little experience and where there remains a dearth of international norms, rules, and institutions from which to draw.
The rapid diffusion of advanced military technology is not a future trend. 

These capabilities are being fielded -- right now -- in perhaps the most geopolitically dangerous area in the world, over (and soon under) the contested seas of East and Southeast Asia. 

These risks will only increase with time as more disruptive capabilities emerge. 

In the absence of political leadership, these technologies could very well lead the region into war.

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