It’s Time to Stop China’s Seaward Expansion

The time to prevent Beijing’s takeover of the South China Sea has passed. What comes next?

byJ. Michael Cole

There was a time, when President Barack Obama was still in the White House, when the U.S.-led coalition in the Asia-Pacific could have responded to, and perhaps countered, the creeping occupation and militarization of the South China Sea. According to many security experts, the window for such action has now closed, and Beijing has successfully created irreversible facts on the ground. If that is indeed the case, then freedom of navigation operations (FONOPS) and other measures are too little, too late. China has engineered a new status quo in the South China Sea, and efforts to counter its larger ambitions should henceforth focus elsewhere.

What is perhaps most surprising about what has occurred in the South China Sea in the past decade isn’t so much that China has succeeded in building a series of artificial islands and militarizing what it regards as its “lake,” but rather that the international community would be caught unawares by the current state of affairs. From the outset, Beijing telegraphed its intentions in the South China Sea, and if it has become a no-go zone for others in the region, and for the United States, it is largely the result of our inattention and our failure to read the tea leaves.

Democratic states in the region, along with their longstanding security guarantor back in Washington, now face a new dilemma. And this time it should be clear to all that inaction or inattention will only mean more trouble down the line. Aware that China’s activities in the South China Sea are directly related to its larger ambitions in the West Pacific and Indo-Pacific (among them displacing the United States), it is now incumbent upon allied states in the region to give serious thought to whether even more Chinese expansionism is something they can live with.

The first area where this question needs to be asked is in the East China Sea, where China has also increased its military and maritime militia activities—primarily near the disputed Diaoyu/Senkaku islets claimed by Tokyo, Beijing and Taipei. There, as in the South China Sea, Beijing’s strategy has been one of “salami slicing”—small, gradual gains that, over time, fundamentally shift the balance in Beijing’s favor. As I argued in an earlier piece for the National Interest, Beijing has created an environment of “permanent conflict” in the East and South China Sea whereby it alternating escalation between the two areas, shifting out when its actions drew too much attention, only to return months later to build upon previous gains.

For various reasons, the might of the Japanese self-defense forces and Tokyo’s security treaty with the United States chief among them, China’s gains in the East China Sea have been more limited than in the South China Sea. Still, the frequency of intrusions by Coast Guard and fishing vessels into Japanese territorial waters or near the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu islets, and of transits by the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) and PLA Air Force (PLAAF) through the Strait of Miyako, between Taiwan and Japan, into the West Pacific, has reached alarming levels in recent years.

If, as I would argue, there is no going back in the South China Sea and we must resign ourselves to ceding that maritime territory to China, then the next step is to decide what to do next. More inaction would likely embolden Beijing to seek to accomplish in the East China Sea what it has already achieved in the South China Sea. Another option, if the fledgling democratic alliance is ready to take concrete countervailing action against China, would be to turn the entire East China Sea into a “choke point” for China: denied area whereby the PLAN and PLAAF would no longer be able to use the nine existing channels it currently uses to transit from within the first island chain into the West Pacific. Between them, Japan, the United States and Taiwan undoubtedly have the means to close off this area to the Chinese military by fielding various naval, ground-based and airborne defense systems as well as by reinforcing Yonaguni Island, which lies just 108 kilometers (67 miles) from the east coast of Taiwan. (I would also argue that every effort should be made to ensure that Palau, a tiny speck in the Pacific but strategically located, retains its official diplomatic ties with Taiwan.)