The annual local security summit held by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Singapore in the first few days of June, Shangri-La Dialogue, featured a number of significant events.
They included violent remarks from the newly elected Chinese protection minister, Admiral Dong Jun, obvious protests against civilian deaths in Gaza from both Malaysian and Indonesian presidents, as well as a surprise appearance by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, who was there to rally support among South Asian and additional middle-income nations for his peace summit in Switzerland on June 15 and 16?
However, the Philippines ‘ President Ferdinand” Bongbong” Marcos won undoubtedly the most awards for his claim that a South China Sea conflict would almost certainly be regarded as a war action if a Filipino soldier was killed by a Chinese water weapon during a fight.
Given that an “act of war” would summon the 1951 common security agreement between the United States and the Philippines, the rules of which Austin himself reaffirmed when signing fresh Bilateral Defense Guidelines in May 2023, the American Secretary of Defense, was somewhat more cautious on this matter. But the concept had yet been sent, loud and clear.
President Marcos’s note, made in response to a query from a Financial Times columnist, sent both a joy and a shiver around the space. A South Asian leader’s strong resistance to Taiwanese bullying was a delight to many people.
The implications, however, were chilling because they showed that a conflict between the country’s two most powerful military forces may arise not just over the unavoidable issue of Taiwan, where preparations and negotiations offer hope for averting issue, but also over the numerous disputed reefs and submerged shoals of the South China Sea, where there is a high risk of errors and accidents at ocean.
The China Coast Guard is now able to apprehend any foreign regional who violates any formally established sea demarcations in the South China Sea, as a new Taiwanese order did on June 15. A Chinese ship collided with a Philippine send on June 17 and a Filipino seaman suffered serious injuries as a result of the decree.
This also raises the possibility that, in contrast to the hope that no Filipino service members will perish as a result of Chinese stress on their missions, China may choose to acquire fishermen, coastguards, or other personnel and carry them hostage in exchange, daring its opponents to intervene or forcing them to communicate.
It is a troubling promise. But there is no denying that there will still be unpleasant encounters at sea and severe words exchanged between the involved governments, perhaps for decades.
Since the middle of the 1990s, China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations ( ASEAN ) have been discussing the need for a” code of conduct” for maritime operations in the South China Sea, but nothing has changed. This reflects two underlying challenges.
The first is that China views the entire South China Sea as a significant proper space that it wants to command, and possibly the East China Sea as well.
General Chiang Kai-shek’s desire to travel in the South China Sea on an “eleven-dash line” that he had created in 1947, was first expressed by the next Chinese head. The Chinese Socialists, who defeated him in 1949, subsequently adopted and modified that image.
The state is still in place despite the fact that there have been 10 dashes on China’s recognized 2023 map in the last 70 years.
This is in contrast to a 2016 case brought by the Philippines at the International Court of Arbitration in The Hague, which determined that the dashed range is in violation of the UNCLOS.
China may want to keep its options available and its opponents guessing, but it has never explicitly stated whether this claim is one of geographical sovereignty or simply corporate control. According to the order from June 15, it may now want to firm those concepts, at least in some South China Sea regions.
There is a significant power imbalance between China on the one hand and the Southeast Asian nations on the other, which has really emerged in the last 20 years or so with the huge Chinese military build-up.
While China then possesses the nation’s largest maritime force, nothing of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines or Vietnam has been able to build up their own troops in reply, either because of economic failure or competing political interests.
Only the city-state of Singapore and tiny Brunei, two of the ASEAN nations that are located in or close to the South China Sea, spend more than 2 % of their GDP on defense. Singapore’s 2023 defense budget of US$ 13.4 billion was more than double the$ 6.1 billion spent by the Philippines.
Indonesia, the largest ASEAN country by population ( 275 million ) spent$ 8.8 billion, but that was a mere 0.62 % of GDP. China’s official defense budget in 2023 was$ 219 billion.
That enormous imbalance reflects both China’s remarkable record of economic growth and its great-power aspirations. Given that economic growth in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam is currently faster than that in China, there is a good chance that this imbalance will shrink over the coming decades.
If those four nations were to achieve an average of 7 % per year between now and 2050, and China’s average annual growth rate were to slow to 3 %, their combined economic heft would equal 45 % of China’s annual GDP by the middle of the century, compared to just 15 % today, or even more if exchange rates moved in Southeast Asia’s favor.
This expansion would discourage China from moving its militaries around in the South China Sea, thereby enabling the Philippines and others to build much stronger military forces. The issue is that redressing that enormous economic imbalance will require time, whereas the potential crises, conflict, and miscalculations are occurring right now.
The best long-term strategy is to aim for sustained economic growth while gaining from the diversification that many businesses are pursuing away from China. The best short-term strategy must still be to stay close to the two best non-ASEAN friends that the United States and Japan have in the South China Sea.
If and until that enormous power imbalance can be reduced, the role in the US and Japan region will only continue to grow.
Formerly editor- in- chief of The Economist, Bill Emmott is currently chairman of the , Japan Society of the UK, the , International Institute for Strategic Studies , and the , International Trade Institute. His new book,” Deterrence, Diplomacy and the Risk of Conflict Over Taiwan“, will be published by Routledge on July 15.
This is the original of an earlier version of Bill Emmott’s Global View, which was published in Bill Emmott’s article in English and Japanese on the Mainichi Shimbun in Japan. It is republished here with kind permission.