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Defense diplomacy, Chinese
style
By Stephen Blank
The
concept of defense diplomacy originated in post Cold-War
Europe. The idea was that by establishing relationships
of trust and mutual confidence among former rival
militaries, confidence could be built, generalized
standards could be achieved with regard to the
interoperability of militaries and a broader
democratization of civil-military relations could take
part in what was once the Soviet Bloc.
Ultimately, the processes associated with
defense diplomacy would serve as powerful tools to
encourage and reinforce the broader process of European
integration that took place after the Cold War ended.
This integration would also be an essential part of a
pan-European project to establish cooperative security
relationships among the United States, Canada, Western
Europe and all the members of the former Soviet Bloc and
Soviet Union. To date, this process of defense diplomacy
has enjoyed much success in Eastern Europe but rather
less in the former Soviet Union, where it faces more
serious obstacles and started later that it did in
Eastern Europe.
However, it is clear that this
experience has not been lost on China. Beijing, as it
reacts to the world around it, has seen the value of
stepped-up military relationships with its neighbors in
ways that go far beyond China's traditional military and
foreign policies. As David Finkelstein, a longtime
student of Chinese security affairs, wrote in 1999,
China's leaders had established a series of benchmarks
that declared China would not participate in formal
alliances with foreign governments. It would then not
have to concern itself with alliance issues like
interoperability of equipment, training and doctrine.
Therefore, China rejected all efforts to participate in
combined training exercises like those now common in
Europe even when those exercises were
confidence-building measures. Second, the benchmarks
would prevent China from stationing forces abroad,
making sure thereby that China's defense would occur at
or within the country's borders. However, even as
Finkelstein was writing, the ground was changing beneath
China's feet, and recent developments even indicate an
acceleration of the fundamental change in Beijing's
policies.
Already in 1999 and 2000, in response
to the US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
war in Kosovo, China took part with Russia in combined
naval exercises in the Western Pacific. This action
undoubtedly grew out of both sides' shared and
continuing concern about the aggrandizement of US
military power and the lack of institutional checks upon
it. This exercise and the ongoing institutionalization
of regular staff talks represented actions aimed at
countering US policy and power and a new departure in
Chinese policy.
By 2000-01, facing continuing
tensions with Washington and the growing threat of
terrorism and insurgency within Central Asia and
Xinjiang, Beijing was ready to move forward. During this
time, it converted the Shanghai Cooperative Organization
(SCO) from an organization whose main purpose was
confidence-building, border demarcation and the
expansion of trade, into a vehicle for cooperative
security and, more important, a model for subsequent
attempts to deal with other states on China's periphery.
This conversion process, part of China's larger
"periphery policy", represented efforts to make the SCO
into a vehicle for the broader acceptance of China's
blueprint for a new Asian, if not world, order.
A major part of this conversion of the SCO was
China's agreement, along with that of the other SCO
members, to form a genuine collective security
organization. In the event of an attack on any one of
the members - China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,
Tajikistan and Uzbekistan - the others would be pledged
to come to the attacked party's defense if it requested
such assistance. As commentators at the time noted,
China's decision to offer its own forces under the SCO's
charter or treaty of 2001 to assist in the defense of
the members' integrity and sovereignty against what
Beijing calls the threats from terrorism, secessionism
and splittism represented the first time ever that such
a decision to commit forces beyond the border had been
taken.
As those observers pointed out, this was
the first time that China publicly consented to spelling
out conditions under which it would be willing to
project its military forces beyond China's borders.
Hence it could mark a very significant precedent for all
of Asia. Certainly that provision indicates how
seriously Chinese leaders view Central Asia and threats
to China's security from there. Thus China gives
military assistance to Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and
Kazakhstan while also seeking to prevent these countries
from assisting Uighur insurgents in Xinjiang who have
resisted Beijing's rule for at least 20 years. Likewise,
these policy steps were part of a broader process by
which China attempted to project greater influence
throughout Asia and to do so in a framework of
reassurance and confidence-building.
Since then
these trends have deepened and intensified. China has
undertaken joint exercises with Kyrgyzstan's forces and
since August, with the forces of all the SCO's members.
These exercises set up an anti-terrorism scenario in
both Central Asia and China and represented the
seriousness with which both Beijing and Moscow, if not
the Central Asian states, approach this effort.
Paralleling these activities is a comprehensive
strengthening of the organizational components of the
SCO with a permanently functioning secretariat in
Shanghai.
More recently, China's navy has also
joined the process of defense diplomacy. It has
conducted search and rescue operations involving both
air and naval units with the Pakistani navy and is about
to do so with India's navy. These exercises also
constitute first time activities of their sort with
foreign navies and bespeak China's efforts to maintain
and improve its ties with the two South Asian rivals.
These exercises also represent obvious efforts to build
confidence and rehearse procedures for future combined
operations. Typically they begin with relatively simple
and agreed upon operations such as search and rescue
operations. From there it is possible that future
exercises will progress to more complicated and complex
missions.
But beyond building relationships of
confidence and trust and combining experience with other
Asian military partners, this defense diplomacy is
obviously part of the broader periphery strategy aiming
to enhance China's influence throughout Asia.
Notwithstanding the peculiarities of each case, China's
recent major initiatives regarding North Korea and
Southeast Asia all point to the intensified reach,
assuredness and confidence of Chinese diplomacy in Asia
and its search for ways to expand its influence in
non-threatening and apparently cooperative ways,
including cooperative uses of its military power.
This does not mean that Chinese policy is now
sweetness and light. The discovery of new Chinese
markers in the Spratly Islands suggests otherwise. But
the growing resort to this kind of defense diplomacy and
to initiatives combining this diplomacy with the broader
initiatives of China's periphery policy indicates that
Beijing is acquiring mastery over a broad and growing
range of diplomatic and strategic instruments of power.
And it is clearly gaining confidence in its ability to
deploy these instruments successfully across Asia.
To the degree that this trend continues, China,
sooner rather than later, will come more fully into the
inheritance its elites expect to acquire of being the
main actor on the Asian continent. And they will then be
in possession of more and greater means of consolidating
that position than they could have ever dreamed
possible, even just a few years ago.
Stephen Blank is an analyst of
international security affairs residing in Harrisburg,
Pennsylvania.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times
Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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