Free-Lance Star

Beijing's anti-American propaganda heating up

Date published: Sun, 05/13/2001

HERE IS A GORILLA in the South China Sea. Larger than the Nimitz-class carrier we may soon have to station there, he grows larger every day. His presence was scrupulously ignored by both sides during the inconclusive talks between China and the United States that followed the release of the crew of our Navy surveillance plane.

We are experiencing a mutual silence made all the more curious by the fact that this furry fellow precipitated the confrontation. His name is "Sovereignty," and we may expect China and the United States to continue to ignore him, though for very different reasons.

China's motives for wishing him invisible are twofold. First, because it was the Communist Party leaders in Beijing who conjured and situated him. And second, because they did so long before they were ready to enforce the territorial claims he was invented to assert.

Just how profligate are those claims? China claims the entire South China Sea, up to a thousand miles from their coastline, to within 150 miles of the Philippines. It also claims the Yellow and East China seas--all the way to Korea's west coast and the west coast of one of Japan's main islands, Kyushu.

Ownership of all associated fisheries, mineral rights and overlying airspace conveys is also included, according to China. Chinese warships trying to alchemize these claims regularly violate the home waters of regional countries.

These claims invariably come as a surprise to Western nations. A recent issue of Newsweek characterized evidence of China's hegemonic ambitions as "circumstantial." In fact, they could scarcely be more concrete, and can be traced back to the days of the Tiananmen uprising, when socialism's failures were starting to be recognized.

Those who directed that massacre clearly foresaw the imminent demise of revolutionary fervor as the traditional guarantor of their power. In need of a fresher impulse to validate their dubious leadership, party leaders settled on a shopworn favorite, and the choice of tyrants time immemorial--nationalism.

Its displacement of revolution served several purposes. First, it mollified the reformers by casting Beijing's sclerotic panjandrums in a new and progressive light. Also, because the engine of Chinese nationalism is historical victimization by Western land-grabbers, it implied as a long overdue birthright the expansive ownership claims necessary for the acquisition of the Spratly Islands. Those islands had recently been discovered to be floating atop the region's largest oil reserve.

In 1992, the Chinese National People's Congress codified these claims by adopting the "Law of the Territorial Sea," the articles of which claimed as exclusively China's all territory between their coast and the disputed Spratlies a thousand miles away.

The document further asserts the right of China to evict other nation's ships from those waters and requires all foreign warships to receive Beijing's permission before transiting through. Our EP-3 surveillance plane could have been flying 950 miles from China's coast and still would have been in violation of Beijing's sovereignty claims.

The stakes are high. The western Pacific is the fastest growing economic region in the world. Around 42,000 ships per year transit those waters coming from as far away as Europe and headed for ports from Malaysia to San Francisco. The commodities they carry--natural resources, food and oil--are critical to the survival of regional economies and, by association, our own.

And what of America's motives for ignoring Beijing's chest-thumping creation? Simply put, China's claims have served American interests very well. Because they cannot be enforced, Beijing loses credibility among regional nations, sounding more shrill than resolute.

Singapore's offer of port facilities to berth one of our carrier battle groups has been one welcome result. By contesting Beijing on this issue, we would gain nothing, and would only risk provoking that insufferable Asian institution known as "face."

Beijing's stoking of the embers of nationalism has met with unforeseen success among the Chinese population, largely for reasons having nothing to do with the wisdom of the initiative.

The scheduled return of Hong Kong and Macau, the world's inexplicable silence on the illegal occupation of the contested Spratlies, and the loss of American bases in the Philippines has bestowed an illusion of success upon Beijing's leaders. And the accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade reinforced Chinese victimhood.

Therein lies Beijing's problem: Its bothersome primate has slipped his chain and now brachiates noisily about the western Pacific. Beijing has made outrageous sovereignty claims that it cannot yet enforce--but must try, lest the leadership lose credibility with a population it has programmed to demand international compliance. Beijing's only chance is to keep pace with its creation, hence China's 17 percent hike in defense spending, emphasizing naval expansion--including the fortification of its own stationary "aircraft carriers" on the Paracel and Spratly islands.

Some columnists have written about the need to discontinue our intelligence-gathering activities near the Chinese coasts. Such an abdication would be folly, for even more important than the intelligence gathered is the assurance those operations give to the region.

They tell the peoples of the western Pacific that there is still at least one nation that is not cowering--no matter how big, hairy, and intimidating the beast.

-- Anonymous, May 13, 2001