By Dune Lawrence
March 24 (Bloomberg) -- China’s flash of maritime muscle earlier this month against a U.S. Navy ship has put its neighbors and America on watch against a bolder push to exert sovereignty in regional waters.
After a decade of increases in defense spending that averaged 16 percent a year, China has the military means to enforce claims in the energy-rich and trade-heavy South and East China Seas -- and to challenge U.S. activities there, as it did March 8 when five Chinese vessels confronted the USNS Impeccable.
“China is looking to expand” its sphere of influence towards Guam and to the Philippines, says Tai Ming Cheung, a senior fellow at the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation in La Jolla, California. “The maritime arena is one of the most fluid and strategic for China in terms of how it’s going to defend and expand and protect its interests internationally.”
China’s move reflects its increasing international political and economic clout, which may lend it confidence in challenging the U.S. -- and complicate America’s response. President Barack Obama needs China’s support in dealing with North Korea and Iran’s nuclear programs, not to mention its financial help in the form of continued purchases of U.S. government debt to support stimulus plans.
“There are much bigger factors at play, notably the need to keep China on board in cooperating in resolving the financial and economic crisis,” says Tim Huxley, executive director in Asia for the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.
‘Dangerously Close’
Just eight weeks after Obama’s inauguration, the Chinese boats crowded “dangerously” close to the American surveillance ship and demanded it leave waters about 75 miles south of Hainan Island, China’s southern-most province, according to the U.S. Department of Defense, which sent a warship escort.
China said the U.S. broke international law by spying close to its shores. The U.S. said its activities are allowed under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
For Shane Osborn, the row seemed all too familiar. Osborn piloted a U.S. Navy surveillance plane that collided with a Chinese fighter jet over the same area in April 2001 -- just weeks after the start of George W. Bush’s first term as U.S. president. The Chinese pilot died. Osborn had to make an emergency landing on Hainan, a beach resort and military base, where the Chinese detained him and his crew for 11 days, claiming they entered China’s airspace without permission.
‘Déjà Vu’
The Impeccable’s encounter “was a little bit like deja vu,” says Osborn, 34, now treasurer of Nebraska. While tension died down soon after the 2001 incident, Osborn says he’s concerned that won’t happen this time, and he’s quick to point out how China’s military has changed in the past eight years.
“They’ve made large investments in upgrading their equipment, and it’s starting to show now,” he says. “They were just at the beginning of it” then.
According to a Feb. 4, 2009, report by the Council on Foreign Relations, China had a “bare bones” military in the 1990s, “basic capabilities but nothing sophisticated or top-of- the-line.” While the U.S. Navy remains far more powerful, the gap has narrowed. In 2008, China had 57 attack submarines, up from 50 in 2002, and 74 destroyers and frigates, compared with 60 six years earlier, according to U.S. Defense Department annual reports.
Anti-Piracy Patrols
Its fleet now has the capacity for missions far from China’s shore; in December three ships participated in anti- piracy patrols off Somalia, where its cooperation with the U.S. spurred praise from American officials.
Still, the two countries disagree on international law governing a 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone extending into the ocean from coastal nations’ shores. The U.S. says its military surveys don’t require Chinese permission; China says they do. Analysts note the U.S. would never allow similar activity off its coast.
“We haven’t gone to Hawaii and done surveillance,” Zhao Guojun, former commander of China’s East Sea fleet, said March 12. “If the U.S. takes provocative actions, it’s hard to say what will happen.”
U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates downplayed the contretemps on March 18, saying he didn’t think China was moving to push America’s navy from the area.
‘Troubling Indicator’
A day later, Admiral Timothy Keating, head of the U.S. Pacific Command, sounded a strong alarm, calling the incident “a troubling indicator” that China isn’t “willing to abide by acceptable standards of behavior or rules of the road.” The country’s “behavior as a responsible stakeholder has yet to be consistently demonstrated,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Some of China’s neighbors may be similarly concerned. On March 11, Xinhua News Agency reported that China dispatched a 4,450-ton fisheries patrol boat to protect its interests in the South China Sea, which include the disputed -- and potentially oil-rich -- Spratly Islands. More vessels may be added to the mission, the state-run China Daily newspaper reported.
That may harm China’s bilateral relations in the region, according to Taylor Fravel, an associate professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“There’s a baseline of low-level tension that can always escalate, and the increasing Chinese presence may raise that baseline,” he says.
Conflicting Claims
In the past few weeks, the Philippines and Malaysia have restated conflicting claims to the Spratlys, where, in 1995, the Philippines and China came to the brink of open conflict over alleged Chinese military installations on Mischief Reef.
Filipino lawmakers reportedly called the fisheries patrol- boat deployment “gunboat diplomacy” and said the U.S. needs to clarify what position it might take in the dispute.
The U.S. may also face decisions about getting involved in quarrels among China, Taiwan and Japan in the East China Sea if China tries to push its sovereignty there. All three claim the Senkaku Islands, giving them rights to energy deposits. Japan’s Prime Minister Taro Aso said in response to lawmakers’ questions last month that the U.S. would be bound by their mutual security agreement to help it defend the islands.
Bernard Cole, an expert on China’s navy at the National War College in Washington, says he wouldn’t be surprised to see more assertive moves by China. Conflict with Taiwan, the main driver of China’s naval development for decades, now looks less likely as ties warm, and, with China’s economic growth slowing, the military needs to justify its budget, Cole says.
The naval command may be saying “see, here’s the value to the country quite apart from Taiwan: We can fight piracy, we can guard the sea lines of communication, we can defend our sovereignty,” he says.
To contact the reporter on this story: Dune Lawrence in Beijing at
