U.S. takes a tougher tone with China
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 30, 2010
The Obama administration has adopted a tougher tone with
China in recent weeks as part
of a diplomatic balancing act in which the United States welcomes
China's rise in some areas but also confronts Beijing when it butts
up against American interests.
Faced with a Chinese government increasingly intent on testing
U.S. strength and capabilities, the United States unveiled
a new policy that rejected
China's claims to sovereignty over the whole South China Sea. It
rebuffed Chinese demands that
the U.S. military end its longtime policy of conducting military
exercises in the Yellow Sea. And it is
putting new pressure on Beijing
not to increase its energy investments in
Iran as Western firms
leave.
The U.S. maneuvers have prompted a backlash among Chinese
officialdom and its state-run press, which has accused the United
States of trying to contain China. Yang Jiechi, the minister of
foreign affairs, issued a highly unusual statement Monday charging that
the United States was ganging up with other countries against
China. One prominent academic,
Shen Dingli of
Fudan University, compared the planned U.S. exercises in
international waters of the Yellow Sea to the 1962 Russian
deployment of nuclear-armed missiles in
Cuba.
U.S. officials explained the moves as part of a broader strategy
to acknowledge China's emergence as a world power but to also lay
down markers when China's behavior infringes on U.S. interests. So
at the same time that the administration has welcomed China into
the Group of 20 major economies, held the biggest meeting ever
between U.S. and Chinese officials, and backed China's push to
increase its influence in the International Monetary Fund and the
World Bank, it is also seeking to limit what it thinks are China's
expansionist impulses. To this end, the Obama administration has
also intensified its diplomacy and outreach to other Asian and
Oceanic nations, ending a 12-year ban on ties with
Indonesia's special forces and
strengthening its alliances from Tokyo and Seoul to Canberra,
Australia.
The strategy has won rare acclaim in Washington among the
generally fractious community of China watchers. James Mulvenon,
director of Defense Group Inc.'s Center for Intelligence Research
and Analysis, called it "a masterful piece of diplomacy" in dealing
with China, which, he said, "continues to be this paradoxical
combination of bluster, swagger and intense insecurity and
caution."
The decision to confront China on the South China Sea dates back
several months, after administration officials noticed that the sea
-- an international waterway through which more than 50 percent of
the world's merchant fleet tonnage passes each year -- had crept
into the standard diplomatic pitter-patter about China's "core
interests." In March, Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs Cui
Tiankai told two senior U.S. officials that China now views its
claims to the 1.3 million-square-mile sea on par with its claims to
Tibet and Taiwan, an island that China says belongs to Beijing.
In addition, Southeast Asian nations had informed the United
States that they, too, were uncomfortable with China's pressure on
countries and companies interested in exploring for gas and other
minerals in the sea. China had warned Exxon Mobil and BP to stop
explorations in offshore areas near Vietnam. It had also begun
routinely arresting or harassing fishing vessels from other
countries, according to sources from the region.
The U.S. response was unveiled July 23 in Hanoi when 12 nations
-- Vietnam as the first and the United States as the last -- raised
the issue of the South China Sea at an annual security forum of the
Association of South East Asian Nations. Calling freedom of
navigation on the sea a U.S. "national interest," Secretary of
State Hillary Rodham Clinton offered to facilitate moves to
create a code of conduct in the region. And then she said:
"Legitimate claims to maritime space in the South China Sea should
be derived solely from legitimate claims to land features."
Translated, it meant that China's claims to the whole sea were
"invalid," said a senior administration official, because it
doesn't have any people living on the scores of rocks and atolls
that it says belong to China.
Foreign Minister Yang reacted by leaving the meeting for
an hour. When he returned, he gave a rambling 30-minute response in
which he accused the United States of plotting against China on
this issue, seemed to poke fun at Vietnam's socialist credentials
and apparently
threatened Singapore, according to U.S.
and Asian officials in the room.
"China is a big country and other countries are small
countries, and that's just a fact," he said, staring directly at
Singapore's foreign minister, George Yeo, according to several
participants at the meeting.
On Monday, Yang issued a statement on the Foreign Ministry's Web
site saying that there was no need to internationalize the issue,
that China was still intent on solving all of the disputes
bilaterally and that China's view represented the interests of
"fellow Asians."
"After the meeting, about a dozen Asian delegates expressed
their congratulations to the Chinese side," the statement said,
despite what many in the meeting thought were clear indications
that most of the participants supported the U.S. view.
The Obama administration has also pushed back on statements,
particularly from China's People's Liberation Army, over planned
military exercises in the Yellow Sea -- thousands of miles to the
north.
The United States and
South Korea have been planning
the exercises after the March 26 sinking of a South Korean warship
that left 46 sailors dead. An international investigation of the
incident pointed to
North Korea as responsible for
the attack.
But then China inserted itself into the debate, claiming that
any military exercise in the Yellow Sea would be seen as
threatening to Beijing -- something that struck U.S. officials as
unnecessarily complicating what was supposed to be a simple message
of U.S.-South Korean solidarity in the face of an attack by
Pyongyang.
On July 3, Gen. Ma Xiaotian, the deputy chief of general staff
of the People's Liberation Army, told the Phoenix TV channel that
"as far as these exercises are conducted . . . in the close
proximity to our territorial waters, we strongly protest." Yet in
November, the USS George Washington, an aircraft carrier, had been
in the Yellow Sea without eliciting criticism from China.
In an attempt to cool China's ire, the administration conducted
its first exercise this week with the USS George Washington in the
Sea of
Japan (also known to Koreans as
the East Sea) farther from China's coast. But partly because China
made an issue of it, a second exercise is also being planned -- in
the Yellow Sea. U.S. officials also predicted that the George
Washington will soon be back in the region -- this time in the
Yellow Sea.
Finally, the Obama administration continues to push China over
Iran. The United States won Beijing's support for enhanced U.N.
sanctions on Iran in June after Tehran's refusal to halt its
program to enrich uranium. As part of the deal, the sanctions were
kept relatively weak, and China, which has substantial investments
in Iran's energy sector and is Iran's third-largest oil customer,
was exempted from many of them.
But now U.S. officials are concerned that as Western countries
enact additional sanctions on Iran -- the United States, Canada and
the European Union have all slapped on more in recent weeks --
Chinese state-owned energy firms will step in as Western and
Japanese investments dry up, negating any possible effect of the
measures.
"We're not done on Iran," said the senior administration
official. "We are looking for maximum Chinese restraint."
