Lindsay Hughes* says Beijing should be worried about rising anti-China feelings across Asia and beyond — and needs to develop a strategy to mitigate them.
The United Kingdom’s newest aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth and its accompanying strike group vessels, recently entered the South China Sea.
This led to one of Global Times Editor in Chief’ Hu Xijin’s profanity-laden quotes in which he said that while China had acted with the utmost restraints to previous US provocations “this undoubtedly doesn’t suggest US allies can imitate Washington’s harmful acts”.
“If the UK desires to play the function to coerce China within the South China Sea, then it is being a *****. It is asking for a beating,” Hu said.
The British strike group is not the only one from a non-regional country to sail into the disputed waters of the South China Sea, however.
France sailed a frigate and an assault ship near the South China Sea’s disputed Spratly Islands in May and Germany has despatched a frigate, the Bayern, to the region.
The British carrier strike group joined with vessels from the US, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and France for naval exercises. India announced separately that it would send a four-vessel task force to the same region.
The UK-China relationship has grown decidedly frosty.
Whereas in 2015 an agreement was signed by which China would provide the design, technology and take an ownership in the UK’s future nuclear power plants, London today is looking for ways to remove China from its nuclear sector.
That follows London’s decision to remove the Chinese telecommunications firm, Huawei, and its equipment from UK 5G networks.
China’s crackdown on Hong Kong’s democracy activists and the introduction of its new security laws to curb pro-democracy protests there, despite having agreed to continue with the one-country-two-systems framework when Hong Kong was handed back to it, saw Britain harden its stand against China.
Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the UK Parliament, Tom Tugendhat put it in blunt terms: “We cannot allow the technological heart of our power system to be exposed to the risk of disruption by States that do not share our values.”
Even smaller countries like Romania and the Czech Republic that, at least theoretically, could have been more susceptible to China’s coercion, are re-thinking their associations with Chinese nuclear-generation companies. That places at risk China’s ambitions to be a global supplier of nuclear power plants.
Europe, while important to China, remains a distant entity, however. Beijing is more concerned with developments in its region.
Here too, China has cause for worry. US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken recently announced the launch of a “strategic dialogue” with Indonesia on issues that include defending freedom of navigation in the South China Sea.
Indonesia is the key to Washington’s efforts towards influencing the 10-member ASEAN grouping, which is, in turn, a bloc that Washington sees as vital to its efforts to stand up to China’s growing influence in Asia.
The Parliament of another ASEAN member, the Philippines, has overturned President Rodrigo Duterte’s decision to halt joint military exercises with the US. Yet another ASEAN member, Vietnam, has invited the US Navy to visit its ports.
In each of those instances, it was China’s hubris and elevated sense of its own importance that led it to make decisions that have backfired upon it.
In the case of the UK, Beijing believed that it was in a sufficiently strong commercial position to enable it to enact its repressive measures in Hong Kong and not worry about London’s reaction.
The same hubris has affected its relationships in Europe. Beijing has been taken aback by the European Union’s increasing antipathy towards it.
President Xi Jinping’s goal in Europe is to prevent the European Union from joining forces with the US to oppose China.
He despatched Foreign Minister, Wang Yi on a five-stop tour of the EU to prepare for a video conference between Chinese leaders and the heads of the EU.
Things did not go as Mr Wang planned. He castigated a Czech delegation, led by the President of the Czech Senate, Milos Vystrcil, for visiting Taiwan and warned that the latter would “pay a heavy price” because he had made an enemy of 1.4 billion Chinese people.
That comment led to Germany’s Foreign Minister, Heiko Maas, who was standing beside Mr Wang, to retort that “we, as Europeans, act in close co-operation”, demand respect and that “threats don’t fit in here”.
Other EU politicians, including those from Slovakia and France, backed Mr Maas’s comment.
That some ASEAN countries now appear to be gravitating towards the US and its allies would indicate they are concerned with Beijing’s disregard for their own interests and claims.
Beijing certainly disregarded Manila’s sentiments when it despatched 220 ships to moor at Whitsun Reef, which the Philippines calls Julian Felipe Reef, in March this year.
It was likely, similarly, that China’s decision to position a survey vessel belonging to a Government-run corporation, to survey a large swathe of seabed in July 2019 north-east of Vanguard Bank (Bai Tu Chinh) off the coast of Vietnam, that played at least a part in Hanoi’s decision to invite the US Navy to its ports.
China could salvage the situation by amending its ways. That remains, however, a wildly improbable hope.
*Lindsay Hughes is a Senior Research Analyst at the Indo-Pacific Research Program.
This article first appeared on the website of Future Directions International.
