Humphrey Hawksley - Asian Waters: The Struggle Over the South China Sea and the Strategy of Chinese Expansion

This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2018 by

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Copyright 2018 by Humphrey Hawksley

Maps by John Plumer, copyright 2018 The Overlook Press

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ISBN 978-1-4683-1479-3

ASIAN WATERS

The Struggle Over the South China Sea & the Strategy of Chinese Expansion

HUMPHREY HAWKSLEY

15 color images and 5 maps

I n the sphere of future global politics, no region will be as hotly contested as the Asia-Pacific, where great power interests collide amid the mistrust of unresolved conflicts and disputed territory. This is where authoritarian China is trying to rewrite international law and challenge the democratic values of the United States and its allies. The lightning rod is remote reefs and islands from which China has created military bases in the 1.5-million-square-mile expanse of the South China Sea, a crucial world trading route that this rising world power now claims as its own. No other Asian country can take on China alone. They look for protection from the United States, although it, too, may be ill-equipped for the job at hand. If China does get away with seizing and militarizing waters here, what will it do elsewhere in the world and who will be able to stop it?

In Asian Waters, award-winning foreign correspondent Humphrey Hawksley breaks down the politicsand tensionsthat he has followed throughout this region for years. Reporting on decades of political developments, he has witnessed Chinas rise to become one of the worlds most wealthy and militarized countries, and delivers in Asian Waters the compelling narrative of this most volatile region. Can the United States and China handle the changing balance of power peacefully? Do Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan share enough common purpose to create a NATO-esque multilateral alliance? Does China think it can even become a superpower while making an enemy of America? If so, how does it plan to achieve it? Asian Waters delves into these topics and more as Hawksley presents the most comprehensive and accessible analysis ever of this region.

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To Jonie

Map 1. Asia-Pacific

Map 2. China

Map 3. Southeast Asia

Map 4. South Asia

Map 5. East Asia

Whosoever commands the sea commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself.

S IR W ALTER R ALEIGH , The History of the World,
Walter Burre, London, 1614

I magine gazing down from the heavens on the continent of Asia as if it were an elegant table laid out for a banquet, an array of dishes displayed for the feast about to take place. In taste, texture and position on the table, each dish contributes to the overall well-being of the diners who are to be satiated with good food and ambience. If one dish is too highly spiced, too lightly cooked, or eaten out of sequence, the banquet will not be the best. It might even fail.

Such is the way in which Europe gazed upon Asia in the nineteenth century, each tine of the fork polished and sharpened to pick at what it wished. Japan followed in the early twentieth century, and after that two rival powers fought over the banquet until the Soviet Union got sick and only America was left at head of the table.

Now China examines the spread that Asia presents, because here is the feast that it needs to own to keep its people secure. To take the top seat, it plans to introduce a new style of table manners with Chinese characteristics that reflect Asian culture. Whereas Americadriven by speed, certainty, and determinationcuts through with sharpened steak knives, China approaches carefully, chopsticks raised, taking time to think about which dishes it prefers and how the tastes and delicacies should be blended together. For the moment, at least, it knows the table must be shared between two hosts. But at some stage the other host will have to leave because such is the cycle of life.

The Asian banquet in this current era will predominantly be a seafood feast, so the waiters will replace American-style deep-fried squid with delicacies of sharks-fin soup and abalone. The new host will decide how many dishes it needs, of what quality and whether the table itself should to be expanded. Where the feast begins and ends can only be loosely defined because Asia is a continent without a cohesive identity.

Its vast shimmering waters stretch from the east coast of Africa to the west coast of America, from the Arctic and the Russian Far East down to the southern tip of New Zealand and to the Antarctic beyond. Its geographical frontiers of mountain ranges, rivers, and oceans are contradictory and clumsy. To the west, Turkeys narrow Bosphorus strait links the Sea of Marmara with the Black Sea and divides the country in two; Turkey is part Europe and part Asia. To the north, Asia rolls upward through the Himalayas, across the Muslim nations of the former Soviet Union, and into Russia, which itself straddles two continents. To the west it unfolds through India, China, and surrounding countries into Japan and the islands of the Pacific Ocean.

The name itself comes from no Asian language, but from the Greek, referring to sunrise or east, thus placing Asia not within its own context but within Europes. Yet, unlike in Europe and America, where Christianity predominates, Asia is not embedded by any one culture or religion. Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims rub up against animists, Confucianists, and those of other sects. Asians communicate in more than two thousand languages, whereas Europeans have barely more than two hundred.

There is no basket of shared values, no single overarching system of government or common aspiration. Democracies jostle on equal ground with dictatorships and there are many shades in between. Asias citizens are among the worlds poorest and most repressed, but more billionaires live here than on any other continent. In one part of Asia, tribespeople hunt with bows and arrows. In another, a city gleams with high-rise office blocks. The world is now turning to this spread of dishes that Asia offers, for its ideas, its money, and its energy, and how Asia evolves in the coming years will impact all our lives.