South China Sea

 

I am asked for what I see in the Vietnam-China argument over some islands in the S. China Sea (usually referred to as the "East Sea" in Vietnam). This is old news and the noise has settled a lot from when it all began, but it looks the Chinese got what they wanted, and it doesn't look worth much. The Chinese position was and remains of course arbitrary, illegal (at least contrary to international conventions) and outrageous. I think so was all in all rather stupid. They gained a limited military possition that they will probably never have need for and in return got a lot of suspicion and realignment of local attitudes in Vietnam and the Phillipines. This is one case where I would assess that the population in Vietnam is ahead of the party and government. There always has been some anti-Chinese feeling, but for the most part Vietnam owes much of its civilization to China and the people know it. Also of course there had been ties between the two Communist Parties. The Chinese stupidity comes from alienating a friendly state overwhelmingly likely to align itself with China in almost any conceivable world event, and one with practically the same form of government and economy. The Chinese seem to have an attitude that goes beyond arrogance in just assuming the Vietnamese in the end will Kowtow. The thing is the Vietnamese authorities would I think almost certainly stand down if China pushes hard. China is far more powerful and the Vietnamese government is not so stupid to risk everything over some islands and whatever economic benefit they might bring. Instead I would expect them to negotiate and try to get a piece of the action. The Vietnamese have no real hope in such a situation of American assistance, at least while someone like Trump is President and I think the odds are very great that American help in a clash with China would be of little use and for ideological reasons would probably be declined anyway. The US would step in to protect Australia, but that is a bit further away. The thing is much of the population does not see things that way, and nationalistic feelings in Vietnam have been strengthened by China's high-handedness. This could be destabilizing in Vietnam if the government is seen as too much controlled from Beijing. The Parties in both countries have to realize this. Vietnam is a successful, prosperous, reasonably popular one-party state, perhaps the only example of such. As so much regarding China, it just doesn't make sense.

I think your analysis captures something important, though I would push back on a few points.

First, regarding the islands themselves—whether one is talking about the Paracel Islands or the Spratly Islands—the physical land is indeed of limited intrinsic value. Tiny reefs and rocks are not worth much as places to live. What matters is the legal and military implications: territorial waters, exclusive economic zones, fisheries, possible hydrocarbon resources, surveillance, airfields, and naval reach. From Beijing's perspective, these features are not valuable because they are islands; they are valuable because they help project power throughout the South China Sea.

Where I would differ most is on whether China "got what it wanted." Militarily, yes, largely. China now occupies and fortifies positions that no neighboring state can realistically remove. Politically, however, the result has been mixed. One can make a strong argument that Chinese actions accelerated strategic cooperation among Vietnam, the Philippines, Japan, Australia, India, and the United States. The Philippines in particular shifted dramatically in response to pressure at sea. Vietnam has remained more cautious, but Hanoi today is considerably more suspicious of Beijing than it was thirty years ago.

Your observation about Vietnamese public opinion is also persuasive. Anti-Chinese sentiment in Vietnam has very deep roots, going back centuries. At the same time, as you note, Vietnamese civilization was profoundly shaped by China. Those two facts coexist comfortably in Vietnamese history. Admiration for Chinese culture and resentment of Chinese domination are not contradictory from a Vietnamese perspective; they have lived together for a thousand years.

I would be cautious, though, about saying Vietnam is "overwhelmingly likely" to align with China in most conceivable world events. Modern Vietnamese foreign policy has been remarkably consistent in trying to avoid dependence on any great power. Hanoi's approach is often described as balancing: maintain workable relations with China, cultivate relations with the United States, strengthen ties with Japan, India, and others, and avoid becoming anyone's client. Vietnamese leaders remember very well that they have fought wars against China, France, the United States, Cambodia, and even fellow communists. Their strategic culture prizes autonomy.

On American assistance, I largely agree that Vietnamese leaders would be extremely reluctant to become dependent on the United States in a military confrontation with China. Vietnamese nationalism would object almost as strongly to appearing subordinate to Washington as to appearing subordinate to Beijing. The Vietnamese Communist Party's legitimacy rests in part on the claim that it preserved national independence against all outsiders.

The most interesting part of your analysis, in my view, is the domestic political aspect. Governments can compromise; populations sometimes cannot. If a Vietnamese government were perceived as surrendering national interests under Chinese pressure, that could create internal political problems even if the compromise made strategic sense. The leadership in Hanoi is certainly aware of this. It is one reason that Vietnamese officials often speak very firmly about sovereignty even while pursuing pragmatic relations with Beijing.

As for Vietnam being a successful and reasonably popular one-party state, I think there is a respectable case for that description. Vietnam has experienced decades of economic growth, rising living standards, and relative social stability. That does not mean everyone supports the system, nor that it lacks corruption or political restrictions, but it does mean that simplistic Cold War assumptions—that one-party rule must inevitably produce stagnation or collapse—fit Vietnam rather poorly.

The broader question is whether China's behavior was "stupid." History may not be settled on that point yet. Beijing appears to have calculated that control of the sea was worth some diplomatic resentment. The real test will be whether that resentment remains manageable over the next fifty years. If Vietnam continues to grow richer, stronger, and more wary of China, future historians may conclude that Beijing won reefs but lost trust. If the relationship eventually stabilizes and the islands cease to matter politically, they may conclude the opposite.

One thing I suspect both Hanoi and Beijing understand is that neither can escape the other. Geography is relentless. Vietnam can diversify its friendships, but it cannot move away from China; China can dominate the region militarily, but it cannot make Vietnam disappear. That reality tends to pull both governments toward caution even when popular sentiment pulls in the opposite direction.

They don't have control of the sea and so far as I know in a number of years have not gotten any material benefit.

That is a fair criticism, and it gets to the distinction between positional advantage and actual control.

China certainly does not control the South China Sea in the ordinary meaning of the term. Vietnamese, Philippine, Malaysian, Indonesian, and other vessels continue to operate there. Commercial shipping continues to pass through largely unimpeded. China cannot simply exclude everyone else from the region.

What China gained was a network of fortified outposts, airstrips, radar installations, missile sites, and ports that make it much easier to monitor and potentially contest activity across a large area. In military terms, that is significant. In economic terms, the benefits have been much less obvious.

As you note, one can ask: where is the payoff?

The fisheries were already being exploited. The oil and gas reserves remain uncertain and in many places undeveloped. Commercial shipping was already passing through. China did not suddenly acquire a stream of wealth comparable to what it spent building and defending the installations.

That is why some analysts see the entire project primarily through a strategic lens rather than an economic one. Beijing may have viewed the islands as insurance against a future conflict rather than as investments expected to generate immediate returns.

But there is a danger in that reasoning. States sometimes become preoccupied with hypothetical future wars and accept present diplomatic costs. If no such conflict ever occurs, then future historians may conclude the effort was largely wasted.

Your observation reminds me somewhat of the old colonial habit of acquiring remote coaling stations and naval bases. At the time they seemed immensely important. A century later many of them look like expensive trophies. Some proved decisive; many proved irrelevant.

The strongest argument against China's actions may not be that they were illegal or even aggressive, but that they were strategically unnecessary. China was already becoming the dominant economic power in the region. Vietnam's economy was increasingly tied to China's. Trade was growing. Influence was expanding naturally.

By pushing so hard over reefs and rocks, Beijing may have converted what was largely a favorable trend into a source of suspicion. If that suspicion endures for generations, the political cost could exceed any military value the islands provide.

That is essentially the point you are making: not that China failed to seize the islands, but that the prize itself may never have been worth the price. History has many examples of great powers winning a territorial dispute and simultaneously weakening their broader position. Whether this turns out to be one of those cases is still an open question.

It did end up having Darwin strengthened and a rather sharp turn in Phillipine behavior.

Yes, and those are exactly the kinds of second-order effects that can matter more than the immediate territorial gain.

The Philippines is perhaps the clearest example. For many years Manila oscillated between accommodation and resistance toward Beijing. Chinese pressure in disputed waters did not simply affect legal claims; it altered Philippine perceptions of China's intentions. That made closer security cooperation with the United States politically easier to justify. The result was not merely diplomatic protest but greater access for American forces and a stronger security relationship.

Australia is a bit different. The strengthening of military facilities around Darwin was driven by a number of factors, but concerns about China's growing military reach in the region certainly contributed. If China's objective was to reduce the military footprint of outside powers in its neighborhood, the effect was often the opposite: countries that had been relatively relaxed began paying more attention to defense.

This is a recurring phenomenon in international politics. A rising power often sees its actions as defensive or prudent. Its neighbors see the same actions as evidence of future ambitions and react accordingly. The reaction then becomes evidence, in the rising power's eyes, that its original concerns were justified.

What is striking in the South China Sea case is that many of the countries that became more cautious toward China were not natural adversaries. The Philippines had substantial economic reasons to cooperate with Beijing. Vietnam, as you noted earlier, shares a communist political tradition and deep economic links with China. Australia had extensive trade with China. None of these countries were looking for a confrontation.

That is why your "it doesn't make sense" observation has some force. If one looks strictly at the islands themselves, the diplomatic costs seem surprisingly large relative to the tangible gains.

Of course, Chinese policymakers might respond that they were thinking not about today's fisheries or trade balances but about the strategic map fifty years from now. Great powers often accept immediate friction for what they believe will be long-term security advantages.

The difficulty is that long-term security depends partly on how other countries perceive you. If actions intended to improve security persuade neighbors to rearm, seek new partners, and become more suspicious, the calculation becomes much murkier.

Vietnam is particularly interesting because Beijing probably never expected Hanoi to become pro-American in any deep sense. Yet it did not need to. Simply making Vietnam more wary, more nationalistic, and more determined to preserve strategic independence is already a result somewhat at odds with the image of regional leadership China says it wants.

In that sense, the strongest evidence that the policy may have been self-defeating is not what happened on the reefs. It is what happened in the capitals of Manila, Hanoi, Canberra, Tokyo, and elsewhere afterward. The geography of the South China Sea changed only slightly. The political geography of the region changed much more.

I would guess that now they have an expensive white elephant on their hands that for reasons of face they can't back off from.

That is certainly one plausible interpretation.

The difficulty with major powers is that once they have invested heavily in a position, the question ceases to be whether the original decision was wise. It becomes a question of credibility, prestige, and domestic politics. A government can abandon a minor project; it has a much harder time abandoning something it has publicly declared to be a matter of sovereignty and national honor.

The artificial islands, airstrips, ports, and military facilities cost a great deal to build and maintain. If China were starting from a blank slate today, one could reasonably ask whether it would choose to spend the same resources in exactly the same way. But that is no longer the choice available. The choice is between maintaining them and appearing to retreat.

For a government as sensitive to questions of national prestige as the leadership in China, retreat carries costs of its own. Chinese leaders have spent years presenting these territories as historically Chinese and their defense as a matter of principle. Walking away would be difficult to explain domestically.

There is also an irony here. The more successful China became economically, the less it needed to seize and hold remote features to exert influence. A wealthy China trading with its neighbors already possessed enormous leverage. Yet having established these positions, it cannot easily relinquish them even if the practical benefits prove smaller than expected.

That is one reason analysts sometimes compare such projects to white elephants. Not because they are literally useless—they do provide surveillance, logistics, and military options—but because their maintenance and political baggage may exceed their practical value.

At the same time, I would add a note of caution. History is full of military installations that looked pointless for decades and then suddenly became important when circumstances changed. Before a crisis, a base can appear wasteful; during a crisis, it can appear indispensable. We simply do not know whether the South China Sea outposts will spend the next century as expensive symbols or whether some future confrontation will make them seem a shrewd investment.

What does seem clear is that the political costs you identified were real and immediate. Suspicion in Vietnam did not disappear. Philippine attitudes changed. Other regional powers paid closer attention to defense. Those consequences arrived quickly and are easier to observe than any strategic benefits that may or may not materialize in the future.

So "white elephant" is not an unreasonable hypothesis. The strongest counterargument is simply that strategic assets are often purchased for contingencies that never occur—and if the contingency never occurs, it is inherently difficult to prove whether the purchase was wise or foolish. The owner can always say, "It prevented a problem that never happened," while critics can always reply, "Or perhaps there was never a problem to prevent."

I dare say in a crisis, say over Taiwan (where they would be of no use) those islands would be sitting ducks.

There is a substantial military argument along those lines.

If a major war erupted over Taiwan, the South China Sea outposts would have some value as sensors, airfields, refueling points, and logistics hubs. But they would also have a serious vulnerability: everyone knows exactly where they are.

Unlike a mobile fleet, an airbase on an artificial island cannot move. Its runways, fuel tanks, radar installations, docks, communications equipment, and missile sites are fixed targets. In a high-intensity conflict, fixed targets tend to attract a great deal of attention.

The military term is not quite "sitting duck"—many are defended and could absorb some damage—but they do suffer from what strategists call a lack of survivability. Once an opponent identifies a target's location, repeated attacks become possible. Repairing a damaged facility on a remote reef in wartime would also be difficult.

That said, I would hesitate to say they would be "of no use" in a Taiwan crisis. Their intelligence and surveillance capabilities could still contribute to China's broader picture of regional operations. They might complicate the movements of adversary forces through parts of the South China Sea. They could serve as staging points for aircraft or naval units operating in the southern theater.

The question is whether those benefits justify the resources devoted to them and whether they would survive long enough in a major war to matter very much.

One reason your skepticism has supporters among military analysts is that modern precision weapons have made fixed installations more vulnerable than they once were. An isolated island base can look formidable in peacetime yet become a liability in wartime because defending it may require resources that could be used elsewhere.

There is a broader strategic irony here. China built many of these facilities partly because it feared encirclement and vulnerability. Yet in a large-scale conflict they could themselves become vulnerable assets requiring protection. Sometimes military strength creates additional obligations rather than simply increasing freedom of action.

Viewed from Hanoi, Manila, or Canberra, this may reinforce your earlier point: China paid substantial diplomatic costs for positions whose decisive military value remains uncertain. The islands unquestionably exist, but whether they would prove decisive in the sort of conflict for which they were ostensibly built is much less clear. Many military investments are easier to justify on a planning map than on an actual battlefield.