Canberra’s shift to anti-China rhetoric and expanded military spending is said to be due to China’s shift to expansionist and aggressive policies. And just in case there is some truth in the ‘Beijing expansionism’ claim let’s look at the claimed evidence.
1. Ignoring rival claims by other nations in the area, Beijing has occupied and militarised sand banks in the South China sea, the Spratley islands group especially. Its claims of a traditional Nine Dot line encompassing most of the South China sea are phony, and.yet another proof of expansionism.
But Taiwan also claims islands in the South China seas. Is that expansionist too?
And it does not stop at sandbanks; its claims include the 53 hectare Taiping island in the Spratleys claimed also by the Philippines, with an airport and some 200 mainly military personnel.
It justifies its claim to the islands with none other than a slightly expanded version of the same Nine Dot line that Beijing uses!
Nor is it just dot lines.
Both the Beijing and Taipei claims in the South China sea can also seek formal backing from the US brokered 1952 peace treaty between Japan and ‘China.’
It made a defeated Japan renounce all claim to the formerly Japanese claimed and occupied islands in the South China sea.
The only problem Beijing and Taipei have today is deciding who is the ‘China’ entitled to take possession.
The rest of Southeast Asia was left to lament how it was too weak or under foreign domination to stake its own claim. Today it is making up for lost time, and asking Beijing and Taipei to cooperate.
If Beijing is expansionist in the South China sea then so is Taiwan – and the US was the abettor.
Japan is even more expansionist with its claim to develop the remote Okinotorishima island – two rocks the size of a bed far out in the Pacific – to justify a claim to a multi-million hectare economic exclusion zone.
2. Beijing claims Japan’s Senkaku islands in the East China sea.
Here the anti-Beijing talk verges on he ridiculous.
First, it is Taiwan, not Beijing, which claims the islands. Beijing simply backs up the Taiwan claim.
The islands lie at the end of a chain of volcanic islands extending north from Taiwan, itself a volcanic island. They are far from Japan, and separated by a deep under-ocean trench.
Taiwan’s former president, the scholarly Ma Ying Jeou, has written a detailed thesis providing historical evidence for China-Taiwan’s claim.
The very name of the islands – Diaoyu-tai, or Fishing Platform, is Chinese and with a long history. There is a Diaoyu-tai palace in the middle of Beijing. .
Senkaku, the Japanese name, is not even Japanese. It is the Japanese translation of the name, Pinnacle Islands, given by 18th century British explorers .
When the US occupied Ohinawa in 1945 it assumed the right also to take possession of the Senkakus.
But with the reversion of Okinawa to Japan in 1973, Taiwan and the strong Taiwan lobby in the US said the traditionally Chinese islands should not revert to Japan.
Today the US simply says the islands come witihin the security obligations it has made to Japan. So far it has declined to say it passed sovereignty to Japan.
Japan itself tacitly admits its claim to ownership is less than perfect by agreeing to Taiwan’s claims to fishing rights in the area.
3. Beijing claims the territory of many other surrounding nations.
Again it is, or was, Taiwan that has done most of the claiming.
Beijing has generously settled all the claims it inherited from the former Nationalist Chinese government in Taiwan, with the exception of India
Here too it made a major concession, by accepting the McMahon line, a product of British aggression into Tibet, as the line of actual control with India.
Even so India remains aggressive. Its 1962 frontier war with China was triggered by Indian troops deliberately crossing the line of control in the eastern Himalayans.(I know because I was China desk officer in Canberra at the time with all related documents).
China reacted and pursued defeated Indian troops into India.
It then withdrew to the line of control leaving territory with Tibetan culture peoples to the south under Indian control, despite severe Taiwan criticism.
It has done no more than retain the right to claim some of that territory – Arunachal Pradesh – in the future.
Recent Himalayan clashes are almost certainly due to India returning to its 1962 ‘forward policy’ against Chinese troops in the area. US efforts of encourage India in that direction do not help.
4. Xinjiang.
As in China, two other areas in the world – Russia’s Chechnya and India’s Kashmir – have also seen serious Islamist attacks against local police and civilians.
Both responded with severe military suppression killing thousands, often indiscriminately. China responded by setting up compulsory indoctrinating schools for adults.
Take your pick.
5 Hongkong.
No argument, unless you think governments should tolerate severe damage to urban facilities in the territories they own and have temporarily entrusted to others.
I share some of the concern over Beijing’s recent return to the more authoritarian policies of the past. But some of the anti-Beijing criticisms we see now from the US, and Australia, go too far.
A February 2019 edition of the New York Times front-paged the Chinese characters for guize. Anyone who knew Chinese could tell you they simply mean rules or regulations.
The Times told us they represented China’s goal of world domination.
Even trivial things can cause misunderstanding. Much is made of Beijing’s criticism of Australia for urging an enquiry into China’s responsibility for the covid virus.
In fact China has no objection. It was objecting to way the demand was made – as an immediate repeat of a similar but aggressive Trump demand.
Most of the criticisms of Beijing are from people who do not speak Chinese or know China. To those who do know China I say cool it. We have seen much more fire and bluster from China in the past.
China is probably the only nation in the world with a saying ‘the good person does not become a soldier.’ That is why it was so easy in the past for the more militaristic peoples in the West and Japan to invade and steal territory from China.
If it is determined not to let that happen again.
Australia with its backing for the Quad concept – the four-legged military grouping of Japan, the US, India and Australia – seems more eager than most to want to provoke Beijing.
Few seem to want to mention it today but the original idea of the Quad was launched in the late sixties by ANU hawks. It was to act as a barrier to China’s then alleged expansionism into Asia via the Vietnam War. The anti-Saigon Vietnamese were supposed to be Chinese puppets.
Today the Quad is supposed to block China’s expansionism in general.
But the Indian leg looks wobbly. New Delhi has refused to join RECP, the 15 nation economic grouping designed to bring much of Asia into an ambitious economic bloc.
Without India, the grouping will almost certainly come to be dominated by China. Tokyo’s distress at the prospect is palpable.
But maybe a RECP-style Asian economic bloc is the answer. Even if it is China dominated that will simply be a recognition of the economic inevitable. And as such maybe it will help put an end to anti-China ambitions of the arms sellers and hawk commentators.
Gregory Clark was the first postwar Australian diplomat trained in Chinese, with postings to Hong Kong, Moscow and the UN before retiring in protest against the Vietnam War. After PhD studies at the ANU he became Japan correspondent for The Australian. A spell in Canberra’s Prime Ministers department led to professorships at Tokyo’s Sophia University and emeritus president of Tama University, Tokyo, before becoming co-founder of the very successful English language Akita Kokusai Daigaku. He has now retired to Latin America (Peru) and Kiwi fruit growing in Boso peninsular south of Tokyo.
His works include ‘In Fear of China’ (1969) and several books in Japan on education and foreign policy.
He used to speak Chinese and Russian with fluency. He now speaks Japanese and Spanish.
Comments
17 responses to “Understanding ‘Beijing expansionism’”
Very good analysis. Pity he didn’t say anything about the long-standing provocation of US commitment to maintaining dominance in the west pacific.
Ni háo ! Romu’rus and Remus
In today’s world, it is difficult to determine who is telling the truth about a situation because “rules of evidence” are not applied to any written word about it. Even if it passes the rules of evidence test, no one can say it is the absolute truth. But it does not stop the finding that this article is most credible, most logical and unbias in its contents. It has also managed to destroyed so far the myths surrounding these issues.
A sigh of relief for Chinese Australian community to see many good and wise fellow Australians speaking out for us.
I hope our Federal MPs and other politicians and commentators are intelligent enough to seek facts from half truth before they are being used by Sky News and other media including our ABC to demonize China and Chinese people. Much appreciated Gregory Clark.
PM Morrison London’s olive branch needs to put into action. Action speaks louder than voice. It is obviously for our national interest to do so to have a robust constructive Australia China Relations with mutual benefit and shared prosperity. Civilized society should denounce all gunboat diplomacy.
The author was the first westerner to expose the ‘TAM massacre’ myth.
He was also among the first to debunk the ‘Chinese invasion of India 1962′ baloney, together with Maxwell
Neville.
A man of integrity.
Yet, instead of embarrassed by such expose’, the west
is doubling down their lies on TAM and Xinjiang….
Besides this ‘million UIghurs in gulags’ psyop,
Witness the hand wringing from Washington., LOndon
whenever UIghurs militants were tried for terrorist attacks in China….’Will they get a fair trial’ , they cried..
Well , tell that to those ‘terrorists suspects’ killed by hellfire missiles, operated by ‘drone jockeys’ sitting in front of his computer console, 2000 miles away in the Colorado.
Never mind the 30 millions civilians killed by the west
since WW2, mostly ‘moslems’ in ME.
Great write up! Unfortunately, after an almost daily diet of anti-China hysteria in the Australian media in the last one year plus, the typical Australian would find it almost impossible to believe what Gregory Clark has said here. The Fake News, on behalf of the military-industrial-intelligence complex, has won.
Regarding The Quad…
Rumour has it that it was Canberra’s brilliant idea to unilaterally rename Asia Pacific to “Indo Pacific”. If that be true, perhaps we should spend a few seconds to ponder this:
Imagine you are sitting in Jakarta, Manila, Ho Chi Minh City, Delhi, Beijing… wherewith the combined Asia Pacific population is about 4,000 million (4 billion).
Little Australia, professedly a reluctant member of the Asia Pacific community who would rather sip tea in London and scull Budweiser in Washington than eat nasi goreng in Singapore and with a meagre 26 million population (0.6%) unilaterally baptise the entire region into “Indo Pacific” for the other 4,000 million (99.4%).
Perhaps Canberra, which has a fondness of preaching democracy and the democratic values, can explain which part of the 0.6% dictating to the 99.4% resembles democracy?
Or is it just another example of sheer arrogance taken for granted in old-time colonial attitude?
Geopolitical Taxonomic racism yá say?
In today’s world, it is difficult to determine who is telling the truth about a situation because “rules of evidence” are not applied to any written word about it. Even if it passes the rules of evidence test, no one can say it is the absolute truth. But it does not stop the finding that this article is most credible, most logical and unbias in its contents. It has also managed to destroyed so far the myths surrounding these issues.
One of the finest, informative and strictly objective fact based articles I have read in a long time, thank you Gregory Clark!
fair article !
Expansionism ! The West talking about expansionism! One thing the west is not short of hypocrisy!
Any expansion on China’s part has been both economic and cultural; the two things that really matter to the Chinese one is economic and the other is culture.
That is very very different from the western tradition where military expansion and political influence being of their importance!
As others are pointing out, this is a fair and balanced report. Almost too fair and balanced, by my reckoning. Absent from it is any account of the malicious attempts by some media and some state actors to deliberately target China. The reason why this piece is a necessary contribution to the discussion, is that in all the instances it mentions, there has been in the past two or three years, a seemingly concerted effort by western agencies to paint China’s actions in the blackest colours possible, while ignoring all the mitigating information Gregory Clark refers to.
The distractions of Blaming other nation states while the carpet baggers here are robbing the place, is standard Western political rhetoric isn’t it?
Pushing it to the point of “fight-fight” urgers in the schoolyard, is something outside any considerations of loss of trade reciprocity.
What do they say about the last resort of scoundrels?
India is a basket case to be avoided. China has backed ASEAN all the way and an Asian economic unit is in our best interests – if Asia generally will accept us?
A footnote to this excellent discussion: the PRC occupies the same features in the SCS that it has occupied since 1987.
Well said
Thank you Gregory Clark for a fair report and I too pin some hope on the role and capacity of the RECP to establish some stability within the Asian and Pacific trading regime. India’s petulant (or slavish obedience to usa) refusal to join was unfortunate and may change in years to come. For nations enduring or witnessing the idiocy of the usa and its illegal sanctions mania, the RECP offers some chance for stable trading rebuild following the covid disaster.
I too hope that the war mongers and their hawks get the bums rush asap. The Harris/Biden presidency will probably fuel their mendacity though.