Two recent books offer a helpful guide to Southeast Asia’s most complex maritime dispute.
Asian Waters, the new book by veteran Asia journalist Humphrey Hawksley, recently became my ideal travel companion on a long flight to Australia, en route to the South China Sea. For any other reader hoping to navigate those troubled waters, or seeking a broad overview of the geopolitical fault lines in Asia, Hawksley’s book provides an excellent guide.
The book’s journey can admittedly be a digressive one, at times wading way beyond Asian waters and far onto shore. Hawksley’s book touches on North Korea’s illicit nuclear program and much else besides. One chapter describes India’s stunted development, recounting in gruesome detail the slavery-like conditions in its brick kilns. Another chapter on Vietnam finds Hawksley meandering into an argument as to why, in the late 1970s, Vietnam was unnecessarily constrained by Cold War logic from taming the bloody Khmer Rouge in neighboring Cambodia. Such stories are certainly intriguing, flowing from Hawksley’s decades of first-hand reporting from the region.
Yet they aren’t central to the book’s main story, which concerns China’s rise, the contest for control of the South China Sea, and the larger great power game between the United States and China. That is the geopolitical story of the century. China is gradually enacting its own version of the Monroe Doctrine in the South China Sea. The United States is pushing back, including by conducting naval freedom of navigation operations, but has not come up with an effective overall strategic response. Meanwhile, China gradually expands its military reach—using salami-slicing tactics to create new facts on the ground (or rather at sea), building new islands, and coercing smaller neighbors such as the Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia.
Hawksley notes how the announcement of the U.S. “pivot to Asia” led to a rapid expansion of Chinese activity in the South China Sea, from the deft takeover of Scarborough Shoal close to the Philippines to the rapid move of a Chinese state-controlled oil rig into disputed areas with Vietnam. In these chapters, Hawksley’s on-the-ground reporting blends well with the geopolitics.
Consider, for instance, his meetings with a disgruntled Philippine fisherman, whose fishing grounds near Scarborough were taken over by China. During their initial encounter, the fisherman is visibly angry, exclaiming that “if America supports us, we should go to war with them.” But later, Hawksley visits the same fisherman after his village has been bought up by Chinese economic assistance and finds that his complaints are now subdued. In many ways, the anecdote is a microcosm for the choice made by Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. Like the fisherman, Duterte opted for Chinese money rather than protecting Philippine sovereignty. He has thus tacitly accepted that China now controls the seas in proximity to the Philippines, which his predecessor Aquino had successfully challenged through an international court ruling based on the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.