China’s rise has powered an impulse to military growth
and unilateral intervention which in turn evokes
anxieties and resistance by players in the same strategic
milieu. The paradoxical effect is to undermine its own
strategic standing.
Historical Similitude
The Franco-German War of 1870 forms a watershed in
strategic thought. After the annexation of the North
German Confederacy in 1866, Bismarck sought the
Southern German States. He deceived the French into
believing that a Prussian Prince would rule from the
throne of Spain as a larger strategy of encirclement. By
July 1870, France was conned into a seemingly
‘inevitable’ war. Germany through superior military craft
and technology inflicted a crushing defeat on the host.
In the process the balance of power in Europe was
upset. The War, from deception, to alliances,
provocation of crisis and defeat of the enemy forcing a
one-sided negotiation could well have been scripted by
Kautilya or, more significant to this narrative, Sun Tzu.
German victory ushered a strategic orientation to
compete with the principal imperial power, Britain. Three
strategic objectives swayed the rivalry: military
dominance over land and sea; global economic and
technological ascendancy in tandem with unimpeded
access to primary resources; and thirdly, diplomatic and
political pre-eminence. By 1890, Germany had
established continental military dominance and a
warship-build programme that would challenge British
command of the seas. Economically, Germany had
already overtaken Britain in heavy industries and
innovation, capturing global markets and amassing
capital. This in turn muscled influence and superiority in
one sector after another.
A thirty-year projection in 1890 suggested that
Germany, home to the most advanced industries having
unimpeded access to resources of the earth, best
universities, richest banks and a balanced society,
would achieve her strategic goals and primacy. Yet
precisely thirty years later, Germany lay in ruins, her
economy in shambles, her people impoverished and her
society fragmented. By 1920, her great power
aspirations lay shamed between the pages of the Treaty
of Versailles. The real lesson was that Germany’s quest
for comprehensive power brought about a
transformation amongst the status-quo powers to align
against, despite traditional hostility (Britain and France;
Britain and Russia) to contain and defeat a rising
Germany that sought to upset the existing global order.
China in Perspective
Historical analogies are notorious in their inability to
stage encores, yet they serve as means to understand
the present.
Contemporary fears of nations are driven by four vital
traumas: perpetuation of the State; impact of internal
and external stresses; reconciliation with the
international system; lastly, the conundrum of whether
military power produces political outcomes. The
paradigm of the day is ‘uncertainty’ with the tensions of
multi-polarity, tyranny of economics, anarchy of
expectations and polarisation along religio-cultural lines
all compacted by globalisation.
If globalisation is a leveller to the rest of the world, to
China, globalisation is about State capitalism, central
supremacy, controlled markets, managed currency and
hegemony. The military was to resolve fundamental
contradictions that threatened the Chinese State.
Significantly, globalisation provided the opportunity to
alter the status-quo. Against this backdrop is the
politics of competitive resource access and denial,
which rationalised the use of force. It is in this
perspective that the rise of China must be gauged.
China’s dazzling growth is set to overtake the US. Its
rise has been accompanied by ambitions of global
leadership. This has in turn spurred an unparalleled
military growth. In this circumstance the race to garner
resources by other major economies is fraught. But the
real alarm is that China seeks to dominate international
institutions without bringing about a change of her own
morphology. China’s claims on the South and East
China Sea; handling of internal dissent; proliferatory
carousing with North Korea and Pakistan are cases in
point.
The emergence of China from its defensive maritime
perimeters into the Indian Ocean is seen as the coming
‘Third Security Chain’. Gone is Deng’s ‘power
bashfulness’; in its place is the conviction that the-
world-needs-China-more-than-China-the-world. Its
insistence on a bilateral policy to settle disputes even
denies the natural impulse of threatened States to seek
power balance in collective security.
The Sense in Cooperative Security Strategies
The standpoint that provocation and intimidation can
benefit China by persuading the victim to negotiate
outstanding issues from a conciliatory position is a
strategically mistaken one. India, Japan, Vietnam and
the South China Sea Littorals have demonstrated so.
Far from acquiescing they have chosen to resist,
adopting (in trend) a cooperative security strategy. This
includes deliberate negative response to favour Chinese
economic monopoly even when the benefits are obvious.
While individual action may be insignificant, the
aggregate of combined action may impede China’s
growth which in turn question’s strategic stability of
dispensation.
The parallels with the rise and fall of Germany is
complete when it is noted that China’s Defence White
Paper of April 2013 underscores the will to expand
offensive military capability in pace with economic
growth. Internationally, this can only be viewed as
acutely threatening. The delusion that menaced States
will not align to contend and defy China’s grand design
is a strategically misleading notion.
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