By All Means Necessary (26 page)

Whatever happens in China's near abroad, though, will not be the end of the story. The political and security consequences of China's resource quest are increasingly being felt further from home as well.

IN FEBRUARY 2011, AS
a wave of revolution swept North Africa and the Middle East, Libya began to descend into civil war. The previous month, oil prices had risen on broad fears about regional turmoil and intense worries that the Suez Canal, controlled by an unstable Egypt, might be closed. Now Libya was becoming engulfed: oil production plummeted, foreigners fled, and the UN Security Council weighed whether to intervene.

In Beijing, policy makers were increasingly under stress. Several oil production sites in Libya controlled by CNPC had come under attack, but China could do little to protect them.
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The Chinese government had to cobble together a hasty rescue mission that included chartered aircraft, ocean liners, and ships owned by Chinese enterprises to evacuate thirty thousand Chinese nationals in Libya.
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Most oil exported from the Middle East was destined for Asia, but China, with no blue-water navy, remained entirely dependent on the United States to keep the Suez Canal and other critical sea lanes open. China's relative impotence only underscored the impression that without the U.S. military exertions to keep the global resource trade going, Beijing could well see the Chinese economy collapse.

Indeed, although resource competition and cooperation between China and its neighbors provide the most immediate opportunity for China's resource quest to alter international relationships, the consequences of efforts to secure resources are being felt much further away. They are being driven primarily by steps taken to ensure safe transport for the resources China needs, and by entanglements
stemming from resource investment and trade relationships abroad. These will only intensify as China becomes a stronger commercial and military power in the coming years.

Popular discussion of how China's natural resource challenges collide with international security typically focuses on the countries in which its companies do business. But the more fundamental challenge facing China's resource security may have less to do with whether those companies control overseas resources and more to do with whether they can get those resources back to China. Today we take it for granted that resources produced in one part of the world can easily be shipped to any other that wants them. But this is far from a given, and it is certainly not something Chinese strategists take for granted over the long haul.

International trade has always been underpinned by power. Absent some source of physical security for overland routes and high seas corridors, anarchy reigns and threats of theft and piracy can make trade prohibitively costly or even impossible. Similarly, without someone to provide security in critical commodities-producing regions, instability can disrupt producers' ability to extract supplies. Moreover, when a single power (or a group of powers) controls a particular trade route, it can choose to prevent others from using the channel if it so desires. This has often been the case: empires have protected privileged trade routes and excluded others from using them; countries have discriminated in choosing whom and at what price to allow use of their territory as a transit point for trade; and, in wartime, combatants have used their ability to block access to trade as a tool for achieving their war goals. Similarly, when great powers have provided stability in critical commodities-producing regions, they have often insisted that the commodities produced there be sold only to them or their allies (or perhaps to others through their exclusive trading companies).

Since World War II, the United States has underwritten a different sort of global order. It has chosen to make trade routes and
commodities sources accessible to all. The decision to do so facilitates the growth of globalized markets. But doing so is a choice, not an inevitability, and it is something many Chinese strategists fear might change in the future.

The emergence of China as a leading consumer of imported commodities has itself brought the durability of this arrangement into question. The U.S. government has declared its continuing commitment to stability in critical regions, but many Americans wonder why the United States should bear the costs of maintaining freedom of the seas when Chinese consumers appear to benefit from easy trade at least as much as Americans do. This inclination can be particularly strong when the trade routes in question carry goods destined for China but not for the United States. The Strait of Malacca, for example, carries little, if any, oil bound for the United States but was the conduit for 77 percent of Chinese oil imports as of 2009.
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Why, many Americans will inevitably begin to ask, should the United States pay to keep these sea lanes open? Similarly, the United States conducts military, diplomatic, and aid operations in critical commodities-exporting regions, particularly the Middle East and Africa, with benefits (when U.S. strategy succeeds) not only to its consumers but also to China. Skepticism of such activity is likely to become particularly acute in cases where little of the commodity production in the relevant regions is actually shipped to the United States. The predicament is increasingly likely for U.S. oil and gas imports from the Middle East and Africa and as U.S. oil and gas production rises.

Many Chinese are just as skeptical of the current arrangements. The United States has, so far, kept critical sea lanes open, regardless of the destination of the commodities that flow through them, but this might not remain the case indefinitely. Over time, if the United States were to withdraw from providing universal sea-lane security, China might be left without reliable trade routes for critical commodities imports, particularly if it has not developed the naval capabilities required to take over the task itself. Similarly, although the United States has so far remained committed to promoting stability in exporting regions (albeit with mixed success in practice), there is no
guarantee it will continue to do so. Were the United States largely to withdraw from the Middle East, for example, China might find its energy supplies considerably more volatile.

Chinese concerns about possible U.S. retrenchment have increased in recent years as Western analysts have begun projecting that North America might become energy self-sufficient, creating at least a possibility of the United States reducing its overseas commitments, even though U.S. officials insist it will not. And at least as worrisome to Chinese leaders is the prospect that during an armed conflict the United States would use its naval dominance to cut China off from commodities imports critical to both its economy (and hence social stability) and its war-making capacity. Some in China may also fear that the United States could interfere with critical resource-producing regions in Central Asia in times of acute U.S.-China conflict.

Chinese vulnerability to interdiction of vital resource supplies depends critically on where those supplies come from. Resources that come from the Middle East and parts of Africa—primarily oil and gas—are the most fraught. Some must pass through the Bab el-Mandeb, a narrow passage with Yemen on one side and Djibouti and Eritrea on the other. Resources from Egypt and Sudan must pass through here; flows from North Africa (Libya and Algeria) also pass through this waterway after having transited the Suez Canal.
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Other Middle East oil and gas must pass through the Strait of Hormuz, a twenty-one-mile-wide waterway pinched between Iran and Oman, and often a focus of global worries about the free flow of oil.
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Everything that passes through either of these two waterways must also transit the Strait of Malacca, bordered by Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, on its way to Chinese ports. Alternative routes are possible (and occasionally but not intensively used); in principle some ships can pass through the Sunda and Lombok straits, both within Indonesian waters, or, in the extreme, travel around the east coast of Australia (between Australia and New Zealand) in order to reach China.

Resources shipped from the Americas travel different routes. Shipments from the west coast of North and South America transit the Pacific Ocean and thus avoid the most notorious chokepoints in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. (They must still, however, pass through the South or East China Sea on their way to Chinese ports.) Many resource shipments from the east coast of the Americas can use the Panama Canal to transit to the Pacific Ocean and onward to China. But oil shipments typically must take another route, because oil tankers are usually too large to pass through the Panama Canal. Instead tankers travel across the Atlantic and around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa. They then must pass through the narrow sea lanes of Southeast Asia—usually the Strait of Malacca—before reaching Chinese shores.
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Resources extracted from Africa follow similar routes, ultimately entering the Indian Ocean before crossing Southeast Asia. Many of the resources shipped from Australia, by contrast, pass to the east of Australia and Papua New Guinea before entering Chinese waters through the East China Sea. But resources that ship from the country's west coast—notably iron ore—pass through Southeast Asian sea lanes instead.

This diverse set of sea lanes through which Chinese resources pass poses a steep challenge to Chinese military planners, who would rather not rely on the United States for secure transit. Yet China's ability to project power—to replace the United States as a provider of sea-lane security or stability in faraway resource-producing regions—remains severely limited. The Chinese military continues to focus first on contingencies involving Taiwan, in particular the ability to prevail in a cross-straits conflict, along with the capacity to influence Taiwanese decisions more generally.
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Ground forces are focused on internal security and perimeter defense.
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Chinese leaders have, however, long desired broader capabilities. A 2011 study from the U.S. National Defense University described
the evolution of China's naval strategy as “from the ‘near-coast defense' strategy prior to the mid-1980s to the ‘near-seas active defense' after the mid-1980s, and then to the advancement of a ‘far-seas operations' strategy by the mid-2000s.”
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These evolving goals are reflected in statements by China's leaders since the early 2000s. President Jiang Zemin said in 2001 that although China should continue to improve its near-seas active defense, the People's Liberation Army Navy should also “in the long run pay attention to enhancing the far-seas defense and operations capabilities.”
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In 2002, when Hu Jintao succeeded Jiang as president, he continued to press in a similar direction.
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In 2004, President Hu addressed the senior leadership of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and put forth a new vision for a defense policy that encompassed the idea of “far-seas” capabilities in an expanded conception of “China's national interests beyond its geographic borders, ” which was later codified in a series of White Papers and in the Communist Party constitution.
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A 2006 editorial from the
PLA Daily
reported that “China's national interests are spreading everywhere in the world, into the open seas.”
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More recently, President Xi Jinping has drawn significant attention with his increasing emphasis on developing a world-class military, declaring that China “must ensure there is unison between a strong military and a prosperous country.”
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But goals have not been consistently matched by capabilities. The U.S. Department of Defense reports annually on Chinese military capabilities; its 2012 report reflects mainstream thinking well. China has just begun to build a substantial capability to operate in open but nearby waters. “Over the past five years, ” the Pentagon reported, “China has begun demonstrating a more routine naval and civilian enforcement presence in the South China Sea.” This comes after decades of interest in the area unmatched by the ability to project power into it. It is being followed slowly by broader capabilities. “By the latter half of the current decade, ” the Pentagon study projected, “China will likely be able to project and sustain a modest-sized force, perhaps several battalions of ground forces or a naval flotilla of up to a dozen ships, in low-intensity
operations far from China.”
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A flotilla that size would be able to conduct counter-piracy operations but not “project and sustain large forces in high-intensity combat operations far from China.”
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In particular, it would not be able to clear the Strait of Hormuz or any other chokepoint in the face of a deliberate state-led effort to close it. Investment in technologies such as aircraft carriers (which would have little or no value in a confrontation over Taiwan) and nuclear-powered submarines (which can stay away from port for an extended period of time) point in the direction of wanting more influence far from Chinese shores.
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Having already launched one aircraft carrier in 2012, in April 2013 China announced its intention to develop a second, more powerful carrier. Yet the U.S. Department of Defense still foresees a far weaker capacity to project power well away from China than the United States and others enjoy.

Indeed, there remains significant debate within China over how much to invest in the ability to undertake naval operations in distant waters, and substantial uncertainty abroad over just how much sea-lane security figures into defense plans.
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Xi Jinping's first visit to a military installation as president was to the naval base on Hainan Island. He called on the soldiers to be prepared for military struggle and to “nurture [a]‌ fighting spirit.” At the same time, the State Oceanic Administration laid out its plans for expanding maritime power through the purchase of new vessels and planes.
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Chinese naval leaders and journals may speak frequently of the need to boost investments in sea-lane security, but part of this is inevitably bureaucratic jockeying for funds. Others want to steer money toward different defense priorities, and some undoubtedly fear that investment by China in a blue-water navy would merely invite countermeasures from others.
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The net result could well be greater expenses but a similar military balance.
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All of this suggests it is unwise to expect a fundamental change, in which the dominant role of the United States would be altered by a much stronger Chinese presence in securing high-seas resource trade anytime soon.