So while the South China Sea isn’t really very “Chinese” now, China would like to change that in the future.
The nations of the South China Sea have welcomed a United States military presence in the area, because they see it as a safeguard against Chinese aggression. But the U.S. may not be able to maintain its presence there much longer.
As of July 2015, the U.S. Navy had 273 ships. That number will be getting smaller. Old ships will be decommissioned and taken out of service.
New ships, however, take a long time to build. They need to be planned several years in advance. But Congress hasn’t authorized enough new construction to prevent the shrinkage of the total size of the U.S. Navy.
The Chinese, meanwhile, are continuing to build ships at a pace which more than offsets the rate at which they are retiring their old ships. The Chinese navy is growing. Robert Kaplan writes:
The U.S. Navy presently dominates the South China Sea. But that situation will change. The size of the U.S. Navy has come down from almost six hundred warships in the Reagan era, to the mid-three hundreds during the Clinton era, to under three hundred now. It might go lower still by the 2020s, because of the retirement of current classes of submarines and surface warships, cost overruns, and future budget cuts, the result in turn of massive fiscal deficits. Meanwhile, the Chinese navy, the world’s second most powerful naval service, is growing rather dramatically. Rather than purchase warships across the board, China is developing niche capacities in subsurface warfare and ballistic missile technology (the DF-21 missile) designed to hit moving targets at sea, such as a U.S. aircraft carrier. If China expands its submarine fleet to 78 by 2020 as planned, it will be on par with the U.S. Navy’s undersea fleet in quantity. While the U.S. Navy’s submarine fleet is completely nuclear, it requires that feature to sail halfway around the world, in order to get to East Asia in the first place, even as China’s diesel-electric submarines are supremely quiet and can hide better, therefore, in the congested littorals of East Asia. At some point, China is likely to, in effect, be able to deny the U.S. Navy unimpeded access to parts of the South China Sea.
The Chinese have demonstrated that they have little or no interest in protecting the sea-lanes in and around the South China Sea. These shipping routes are among the busiest in the world, and any piracy or other obstacles to trade through that region would economically impact most or all of the world.
Local differences between the nations of southeast Asia are growing, even as engagement from other parts of the world is generally receding - America’s “pivot toward Asia” might constitute an exception to this trend, but that remains to be seen. As Robert Kaplan writes:
Thus, as China’s navy gets stronger — its economy permitting — and China’s claim on the South China Sea — as demonstrated by its maps — contradict the claims of other littoral states, these other states will be forced to further develop their own naval capacities and to balance against China by relying increasingly on the U.S. Navy: a navy whose strength has probably peaked in relative terms, even as it must divert considerable resources to the Middle East. Worldwide multipolarity is already a feature of diplomacy and economics, but the South China Sea is poised to show us what multipolarity in a military sense actually looks like. Just as German soil constituted the military front line of the Cold War, the waters of the South China Sea may constitute the military front line of the coming decades.
Observers from other parts of the world often underestimate the power of racism among nations of east Asia. Racism as a cultural phenomenon takes very different forms in different parts of the world.
Among the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans, racism is unabashed and officially celebrated. Each of these groups considers itself to be simply better than the others. When these attitudes are augmented with battleships, submarines, and missiles, the danger becomes obvious:
There is nothing romantic about this new front line. Whereas World War II was a moral struggle against fascism, the Cold War a moral struggle against communism, the post-Cold War a moral struggle against genocide in the Balkans, Africa, and the Levant, as well as a moral struggle against terrorism and in support of democracy, the South China Sea shows us a twenty-first-century world void of moral struggles, with all of their attendant fascination for humanists and intellectuals. Beyond the communist tyranny of North Korea, a Cold War relic, the whole of East Asia simply offers little for humanists. For there is no philosophical enemy to confront. The fact is that East Asia is all about trade and business. Even China, its suffering dissidents notwithstanding, simply does not measure up as an object of moral fury.
These factors - China’s territorial ambitions, its lack of concern for commerce in the South China Sea, mutual nationalistic racist distain between the nations of east Asia, increasing tensions between southeast Asian nations, and declining engagement from other parts of the world - send a clear signal that stability in that part of the world is endangered.
