South Asia has been dominated by two military conflicts in past months: Pakistan pounding of the Taliban in the Swat Valley, and the obliteration of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. Disturbing as these conflicts are, both may be dwarfed by a wider and more significant trend in the region—the rise of a newly assertive China.
At Hambantota in Sri Lanka, Chinese companies are building a new port that could serve as a refuelling and docking facility for the Chinese navy as it extends its presence (presently confined to helping police pirate activities off the Horn of Africa) across the Indian Ocean. China has also provided much of the military hardware that underpinned the Sri Lankan victory.
In Pakistan's ethnically turbulent Balochistan province, the Chinese-built port at Gwadar became fully operational this year, turning an isolated sandy peninsula on the Arabian Sea into what could become the country's principal commercial port. Run by the Singapore Government's Port Authority (a favoured Chinese partner), Gwadar has opened up new sea-borne trade routes to Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, along with China's partners in the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan) and its own, land-locked, north-western provinces.
But with a total investment of around $1.2 billion, China's interests are more than commercial. Gwadar comes complete with a new naval facility that both the Pentagon and India's Ministry of Defence expect to house Chinese warships.?
A Chinese naval presence in the Indian Ocean is nothing new. In the early 15th Century, when China was at the zenith of it economic, political and cultural power, warships under the command of the legendary admiral, Zheng He, reached India, Arabia and East Africa establishing trade routes for Chinese silk and African ivory.
But six centuries later, the main commodity shipped across the Indian Ocean is oil, and at the core of both the Gwadar and Hambantota developments lies China's search for energy security. Fuelling its double-digit economic growth, China's demand for oil doubled between 1995 and 2005. By 2020, some projections suggest this demand will rise to 10 million barrels a day, or the equivalent of about 70 percent of Saudi Arabia's oil output, an increase of two-thirds over 2007.
The current recession is slowing this demand, but China's plan to wean its economy off export dependence by growing domestic consumption, will quickly re-establish its thirst for oil and gas. And while some of this demand will come from pipelines through Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, more than 85 percent will need to cross the Indian Ocean.
Like all powers, and particularly aspiring great powers, China needs to protect its energy supply lines. But the Indian Ocean presents special problems. Oil tankers loaded with Iranian oil in the Persian Gulf have to transit the Strait of Hormuz. Once across the Indian Ocean they, together with those from Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Angola (China's other principal suppliers) must negotiate the Straights of Malacca— sandwiched between Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore and often reckoned to be the most actively pirated waterway in the world.
But piracy isn't China's real concern. Both the Straits of Hormuz and Malacca are geographic bottlenecks, which could be easily blocked by a future military rival. Chinese energy and military planners have to assume scenarios where within the next decade or so America might become a less benevolent observer of China's growing power than it currently is. With the US 5th Fleet patrolling the Indian Ocean, and an airbase on the British island territory of Diego Garcia sitting in the middle, China's fears about blocked oil supply lines could easily become reality should tensions over Taiwan, for instance, escalate into a Sino-US confrontation.?
To pre-empt such a threat, the Indian Ocean is emerging as a focus for Chinese logistical and naval expansion.? In addition to Pakistan and Sri Lanka, China is developing another container port with possible naval access in Chittagong, Bangladesh and a fourth port alongside the Burmese naval base at Kyaukphyu. On the Burmese island of Ramree, they are also developing oil and gas terminals.?
A clear logic seems to lie behind all this activity. Gwadar is only 72 kilometres from Iran, and discussions are underway for a pipeline to link the port to Iran's oil fields. Having processed the oil in Chinese built refineries, it would then be tankered to Burma. From there another two pipelines take over, from Ramree to Kunming in China's Yunnan Province—one for gas from Burma, the other for oil from Gwadar, Saudi Arabia and Africa.?
Other projects are being developed to circumvent what Chinese President, Hu Jintao, has termed the country's "Malacca dilemma". An Iranian funded pipeline could be built across northern Malaysia, while an ambitious aim is for a "panama style" canal across the thin Kra isthmus of southern Thailand. Such projects could dramatically shift the geo-politics of China's energy security.
These developments and their possible implications are beginning to alarm both the US and India. The Pentagon, obsessed by the prospect of China's naval expansion, refers to the new ports as China's "string of pearls". And even a casual monitoring of Pentagon-related websites, and the output of the hawkish think tanks that line Massachusetts Avenue in Washington DC., reveals how quickly China's Indian Ocean expansion has moved up America's security agenda.?
The emerging rivalry with India is just as acute. As long ago as 1993 Zhao Nanqi, then head of the general logistics department of the People's Liberation Army (which controls China's navy), remarked that: "we can no longer accept the Indian Ocean as an ocean only for the Indians". The Indian government eventually took notice and has begun to modernise its navy. It plans to add three nuclear submarines and three aircraft carriers to its fleet by 2015. China, meanwhile, has already built a submarine base on the island of Hainan (in the South China Sea). It has recently announced plans to build four new aircraft carriers—essential to the protection of oil tankers.
The result is an increasingly militarised Indian Ocean, and one that in time may include Japan too, a nation even more dependent on oil shipments than China. Japan has long relied on the US navy to protect its supply lines, but it too could be tempted into a new geo-political assertiveness, and a permanent Indian Ocean presence for its navy.
The possibility—perhaps we must assume the inevitability—of naval expansion in the Indian Ocean brings with it an increased likelihood of conflict. The minor skirmish off Hainan Island in March 2009, when a US maritime surveillence ship was confronted by Chinese naval vessels, gives a taste of what might follow.
The trick is how to avoid escalation when such incidents occur. If a security crisis in the Indian Ocean is just over the horizon, we must recognise it as a crisis in the Chinese sense: a danger and an opportunity. A multinational naval force to secure oil supply lines for all (building on current arrangements to police pirate activity), might be a way forward, as analyst Robert Kaplan has suggested. Kaplan also thinks the US should act as an 'honest broker' (my term, not his) to manage potential Sino-Indian confrontations. Maybe, but as with British pretensions to act in that way in Europe after the Napoleonic Wars, the US has a poor track record of "honesty" in international relations. In any case, the Indian Ocean could well emerge as a principal flashpoint between an emergent great power (China) and a declining one (the US). So the latter will hardly be in a position to broker that relationship, honestly or not.
If it will not, who might be? The UN seems incapable of acting in this way when premanent members of the Security Council are involved. But what about the European Union? There may be an argument that in an increasingly dangerous world – in the Indian Ocean and elsewhere – we desparately need an EU with the capacity to broker great power confrontations. But this would mean an EU with its own foreign policy and military presence, distinct from both Washington and NATO. Though that's a vision that may exist in some EU capitals, unfortunately it doesn't in Westminster – creator of (US) 'special relationship' mythology and home to the EU project's 'great spoiler'.
Jeffrey Henderson is Leverhulme Research Professor of International Development in the Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Bristol. This article is based on research, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, on the implications of the rise of China for global development. He is solely responsible for the opinions expressed here. (Jeffrey.henderson@bristol.ac.uk)
