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January 15, 2012

[SSJ: 7101] Re: 7024] IR Theory and the Japan's Alliance Choices

From: Paul Midford
Date: 2012/01/15

My answers to Rick Katz:

“Paul Midford wrote:

“It's one thing to play China and the US off against each other, and quite another to forsake alliances (formal or informal) with the US for an alliance with China based on fear of China.

Allying with a nation that is currently threatening is bandwagoning, and I am generally skeptical about it as a reason for allying.

Japan's alliance with the
US arose, not only due to the US occupation, but necause it was accepted by the Japanese voters after Japan regained its sovereignty. And that was not out of fear of the US, but out of fear of Stalin's USSR (just as it was accepted by the French and Italian voters vis-a-vis their domestic Communist parties for the same reasons).

For the record, it’s worth noting that threat perceptions of the Soviet Union, or even Communist China, were not so high in Japan during the Cold War (certainly in comparison with US threat perceptions of those two). In the 1950s and 1960s neutrality (although crucially not unarmed neutrality) was a strong competitor in public opinion with the US alliance. It is really only after the US pulled out from Vietnam and adopted a less offensive strategy in East Asia that support for the US alliance really consolidated.

“By contrast, you seem to be
suggesting that Japan would ally with China out of fear of an aggressive China in the face of US retreat. Have I understood you correctly?”

No, although I would go as far as to suggest that Japan might consider aligning with China to prevent it from becoming aggressive in the future. It’s also worth noting that this was sometimes a consideration vis-à-vis the US as well. One of the Japan’s greatest post-war realists, Nagai Yonosuke, in a mid 1960s essay on Japan’s foreign policy choices, argued that aligning with the US was useful for preventing it from becoming hostile toward Japan.
. .
“As a complete layman, I have the impression that China is pushing Asian countries that might ordinarily prefer a more non-aligned posture into a tighter dependence on the US. And it is doing so precisely because its behavior is seen as so threatening and bullying.”

Although China did a number of things from 2009 through the first half of 2011 that to some extent gave this impression, their behavior since suggests that China does not believe that a bullying strategy could work, and that their previous behavior was counter-productive. Also, I think most of the evidence pointed to is little more than a tempest in a tea-pot:
a drunk fishing boat captain here, a cut maritime survey line there, all of which plays into a pre-existing discourse/assumption that China becomes more assertive as its share of global GDP and military power continues to grow. If that’s true, it has been true only to a minor extent. Nothing that has happened in the past two years can compare, for example, with China’s live-fire missile tests that bracketed Taiwan in 1996. By contrast, when the Philippine military shows up on some Spratly atolls and destroys Chinese territory markers, not only is this not considered aggressive, it is not even considered worth reporting.
I am certainly not suggesting that Manila is wrong to do this, but this clearly indicates that evidence supporting the hypothesis tends to get highlighted while that that doesn’t fit tends to get ignored (mostly due to the dynamics of human cognition).

I read recently that a Korean coast guardsman was killed when its coast guard tried to intercept one of the growing number of illegal Chinese fishing boats in Korea's Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).

I don’t think we can relate this to Chinese state
behavior: a detained fisherman broke a window and used a shard of glass to attack a Korean coast guardsman.
More generally, I do not think we can simply or automatically attribute the behavior of Chinese fishing boats to the Chinese state. There are certainly some incidents where China uses what appear to be fishing boats for state purposes, such as when the USS Impeccable spy ship was intercepted in the South China sea two years ago, but that does not mean that all or even most fishing boats are somehow centrally controlled (although I do have to say that using fishing boats as they were used in the case of the Impeccable does lend itself to creating this very impression).

“Donald K. Emmerson reports that Beijing tried, and failed, to prevent other nations from even discussing, let alone criticizing, its claims to broad areas of the South China Sea.“

This is pretty standard diplomacy. Japan certainly tries to prevent China from discussing the Diaoyutai island dispute at the ARF as well. The main difference is that China has always been willing to discuss South China Sea disputes bilaterally, but until last fall it refused to discuss them multilaterally (in the recent agreement with Vietnam it partly relented on that position). Japan, by comparison refuses to discuss the Senkaku islands bilaterally or multilaterally.


“He writes: "China knew that it might
face a backlash in July 2010 when the ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] Regional Forum was scheduled to meet in Hanoi.Beijing reportedly contacted all of ASEAN's member governments and strongly urged them not to broach the subject of the South China Sea…….."
“A serious danger is that China fails to see how others perceive its actions.”

Two points: first, it is not as though ASEAN countries are entirely passive and defensive in this. The 2002 Declaration on the South China Sea calls for all parties to refrain from unilateral actions, yet, recent oil explorations by the Philippines and Vietnam in disputed waters were, certainly from Beijing’s perspective, just that. Second, the picture Rick paints is a reasonably accurate reflection of many of the events (at least of the media discourse on them) until the second half of last year when China struck a deal with Vietnam on the South China Sea. The Chinese Foreign Minister has invited his ASEAN counter parts to his hometown for a meeting where they will work on concluding a binding Code of Conduct on the South China Sea. In short, China sometimes blunders and blusters, but so far it has also demonstrated that it can read how others perceive its actions and then respond accordingly.

“In a wonderful new book on the
decline of all sorts of violence over the millenia and centures called "The Better Angels of Our Nature,"
Harvard psycholist Steven Pinker reports that aggressive nations are often subject to incredible misperceptions and overexagerations of their own strength (and I would add, perhaps the external threats to them). I can't find the page number right now, but, if memory serves, he somewhere reports that nations that start wars tend to lose from 25% to 50% of the time, depending on the definition and database.”

Gee Rick, you’re making me think starting a war isn’t such a bad bet (certainly better odds than I thought).

“I've read books that speak of oligarchies being particularly susceptible to misperceptions.”

I can’t say that I have seen consistent evidence that shows that oligarchies are more prone to misperceptions than dictatorships or democracies, maybe somebody here can cite that literature. One can certainly think of a number of cases where democracies overestimated their strength as well. More importantly, there are many sources of misperception that are well documented and have nothing to do with regime type. The most relevant here is probably the impact of a rapidly changing balance of power. This might be causing China to overestimate its power, and perhaps causing Japan to underestimate its power.

The problem isn't just
the psychology of authoritarian rulers (though that does play a role) but also that such regimes lie to themselves. I was told by a junior editor of Caijing magazine in Shanghai that, when the SARS epidemic broke out, Jiang Zemin could not get accurate information from the provincial leaders, so he promoted a freer press to get other sources of information.”

When SARS broke out (Spring of 2003 Jiang Zemin had retired and Hu and Wen were already in control. Also, remember Shanghai is Jiang’s hometown, so you should expect pro-Jiang sentiments there.

“in late 2009, Caijjing's original founder and editor was forced out along with most of the staff.”

Again, one might wonder how much this might have to do with ties to Jiang.

“You know more on this than I do but a quick google search shows that China cut the undersea cables of two Vietnamese oil exploration vessels in May-June 2011 and I believe Vietnam joined other ASEAN nations in demanding a multilateral solution to territorial disptues, rather than China's "divide and conquer"
insistence on bilateralism. I'd like to see China reverse course, but I leave it to experts to decide whether (or to what extent) it has.”

Again, as mentioned above, China changed its position when it struck an agreement with Vietnam in October.
Moreover, all of the ASEAN claimants agree there is a place for bilateral discussion of the dispute (Thailand has been adamant on this principle, and even Vietnam does not want other countries present when it discusses the Paracels with China), and now China largely agrees.

“My understanding is this: prior to the incident where the Chinese fishing boat rammed Japanese coast guard boat, the Chinese had reduced their rare earth metal exports globally, not just to Japan. That was done for economic reasons. The US, EU and Mexico had launched a WTO complaint about similar restrictions on a host of raw materials as early as 2009. Then, after the incident, and the arrest of the Chinese boat captain, there was a total embargo on Japan--one denied by Beijing but felt by Japanese importers--and not applied to other countries.. In July 2011, The World Trade Organization ruled against China even on its economically-motivated restrictions on raw material exports vital to high-tech industries.The WTO said it was illegal to restrict exports to help domestic firms vis-a-vis foreign ones.”

Since I cited Linus Hagstrom’s work on this, I will leave it to him if he wants to answer. However, besides remembering reports from that time about rare earth shipments being disrupted to the US and others as well, I would also note that environmental concerns (an explosive political issue in China) are also behind China’s crackdown on independent producers of rare earths (after all, if the US and other countries were not hyper sensitive to the low level radioactive slag resulting from mining these minerals, China would never have gained near total control of the industry).

“We don't know how far China would go. But China would undoubtedly insist that other nations recognize its claims to own most of the South China Sea, including all the oil underneath, and its efforts to keep US vessels out of its "territorial waters." One-third of the world's shipping goes through these waters and freedom of navigation is vital to these nations'
survival. China would also undoubtedly want recognition of its claims to much of the East China Sea as well.
Remember its complaints about US-ROK exercises in the Yellow Sea after Pyongyang's sinking of the Cheonan.
China claimed that the US and ROK had no right to conduct exercises in what China claimed to be its Exclusive Exconomic Zone (rather expansive claims, btw). My limited understanding of international law (and I could be wrong) is that EEZs are not like sovereign waters and a nation cannot prevent others from sailing vessels through them.

As a retired MSDF officer explained to me the other day, China does not object to US or Japanese vessels transiting through its claimed EEZ in the South China Sea. What they object to is the activity of spy vessels there. China argues innocent passage is acceptable but not what they define as hostile activities like spying. I can tell you that US and Chinese naval lawyers have been holding a number of seminars on this topic and the conclusion is that the Law of the Sea is ambiguous on this point. The US position is not helped by the fact that it may not necessarily enjoy full rights under UNCLOS, since it has never ratified it (although Japan has).

“Given that China has used violence to take some of the tiny islands in the waters it calls its own, one does not know what China would do in the face of an even greater imbalance of power and the absence of the US.”

We cannot say that the US is preventing China from using violence to take islands in the South China Sea.
Communist Vietnam has no alliance or any reason (or desire from what I can tell) to expect help from the US in such a case, and it has never received any. The US explicitly interprets the US-Philippines defense treaty as excluding the Philippines claim to the Spratlys, so Manila is also on its own, as are Malaysia and Brunei.
And it is not as though there are any shortage of targets if China wanted to aggressively assert its claims, as Vietnam controls 54 Spratly atolls, and the Philippines over 20 (Taiwan controls 1). China? It only controls 7.


Best Regards,

Paul Midford

Approved by ssjmod at 01:11 PM