Pacific Pivot, Taiwan Fulcrum Maritime Taiwan and Power Transition in Asia

Pacific Pivot, Taiwan Fulcrum

Maritime Taiwan and Power Transition in Asia

 

[From:  Peter C.Y. Chow, ed., The US Strategic Pivot to Asia and Cross-Strait Relations: Economic and Security Dynamics; Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2014] 

By John J. Tkacik, Jr.

The banner headline of the Communist Party’s flagship newspaper was printed in large bold characters:  “Promoting the establishment of a powerful maritime nation” (海洋强国) is “a major component of the mission of socialism with Chinese characteristics.”  Thus spake Party General Secretary Xi Jinping on August 1, 2013, a date celebrated in China as “Army Day.”  General Secretary Xi’s choice of Army Day for his declaration signaled that this was not a mere civilian goal, but  more significantly a military one. While the General Secretary acknowledged that China had thus far been more of a “major continental nation,” Twenty-First Century China now has “broad strategic maritime interests.” China “absolutely will not abandon its legitimate rights, still less will it sacrifice its core national interests.”

[1]

So, the world can take it as a given that “Building China into a Great Maritime Power” is now a core mission of the Chinese Communist Party. It is the opening stage of a “power transition” in Asia and the Pacific between China as the rising superpower and the United States as the status quo hegemon.  China now explicitly seeks a “new type of major-country relationship” with the United States, and China is fully aware that “major country relationships” in the past have been marked by “inevitable confrontation.”

[2]

This is new.  For three millennia, through successive dynasties, kingdoms and confederations, the entity we today call “China” has been an immovably giant force in human civilization.  There have been centuries at a time when it was the most powerful empire on earth.  There were other centuries at a time when it was a conquered domain of barbarian invaders.  But never in all those millennia, with one brief exception, was China a maritime power. This is about to change. 

And in all those millennia, the island of Taiwan had been more or less inconsequential in human affairs.  But in the past century, that too has changed. 

In the twenty-first century, as both China and the United States embark on their separate “pivots to the Pacific,” Beijing certainly sees Taiwan as an essential element of maritime power projection in Asia and Pacific: “the ‘Lock on the Chain’ is Taiwan,” explained Youth Reference, a popular weekly published by the Communist Youth League in Beijing.

[3]

  But, as we shall see, Washington does not. 

This chapter considers Taiwan’s maritime importance to Pacific security in the context of power transition in the Asia-Pacific region, and suggests that the America’s bruited “pivot to the Pacific” ultimately must fail if Washington can find no place in it for Taiwan. 

History

For a mere flicker of time six centuries ago, between 1405 and 1433, China did rule the seas.  Seven great "treasure fleets" under commission of the Ming emperor Yongle (永樂) transited the Taiwan Strait fourteen times.  Each armada included sixty of the most colossal oceanic sailing ships the world had ever seen – or would see for the next four centuries.  Each was escorted by two hundred or so smaller support and trading vessels.  On each of seven voyages, Yongle's most trusted eunuch, the Han-Moslem admiral Zheng He (鄭和), commanded about 27,000 soldiers, seamen, diplomats and merchants on missions to various South Sea tributary kingdoms, scattered overseas Chinese colonies and distant realms as far as Hormuz and the Persian Gulf with exploratory expeditions even to Africa’s eastern shores.

This, then, was the Ming Dynasty’s brief “pivot to the Indies.” The rising power, Tamerlane’s central Asian empire menaced the status quo hegemon Ming from its vast landmass in the west.  To counter it, Zheng He intended to outflank Tamerlane by sea and to find and recruit Islamic allies to his rear in the Gulf.

[4]

For twenty-seven years, a blip in China’s history, Zheng He's fleets made regular embassies to kingdoms in the southern ocean, his marine warriors battled rebels in Indonesia and Ceylon, his consuls lent imperial legitimacy to Chinese communities throughout Southeast Asia's islands.  “All nations under heaven,” it was recorded, sent tribute to the Yongle Emperor. The Ming History (明實錄) asserts “there was no one who did not present precious objects.”

[5]

 

No one, that is, except the headhunting aboriginal nations on Taiwan.  From the Ming Empire’s coastal waters, Treasure Fleet captains certainly spied across the Strait to the east snowy mountain ranges above distant mists on clear, breezy sailing days in those smog-free centuries before industrialization. Yet, the island of Taiwan (known in later Ming times by Chinese transliterations of aboriginal names such as Beigang [北港] or Jilong [雞籠] or even “Great Ryukyu” [大琉球] ) was never mentioned with Zheng He's missions.  Surely the mighty imperial treasure fleets had the wherewithal and the opportunity to pacify Taiwan if they were so inclined.  Instead they bypassed it.

And why not?  Even in the seventeenth century, savage Taiwan was “beyond the pale of civilization” (化外之地)

[6]

, only emptiness lay beyond it.  It was a strategic gateway to nowhere.  Ming China’s naval ambitions rather attended to the “South Sea” routes bound for the “Great Western Ocean” of the Indies and Araby, not to the unending vastness of the unknown Pacific.

And when the threat from the Timurid Empire receded, supplanted by the chronic menace of myriad Altaic and Turkic clans in near north and central Asia, Yongle’s successors lost interest in the costly maritime “pivot to the Indies” and instead expended their empire’s resources in rebuilding the great landward walls of China which theretofore had moldered in disuse for a thousand years.  Even so, in the “South Sea” (according to the Ming Court’s Jesuit cartographer Matteo Ricci), “Great Ming” sovereignty stretched only as far south as the fifteenth parallel (十五度), far enough to encompass the Paracel Islands. The Spratly Islands, however, lay yet another 550 kilometers beyond the Ming claim, well south of the twelfth parallel.

[7]

 And to the east, Taiwan was to lay undisturbed by China for another two centuries.

Taiwan at the Pivot of Asia

From the late seventeenth century (when Altaic-speaking Manchurian hordes conquered China and pursued the last Ming loyalists who had sought refuge in Taiwan across the Strait) until 1895, Taiwan marked the Manchu Empire’s barbarian periphery.  Only in 1895, when Asia’s rising new superpower, Japan, seized the island from the Manchus and colonized it, did Taiwan find itself in the geographical center of metropolitan East Asia, along the most travelled sea routes of the Far East.  

In Japan’s failed power transition attempt of the 1941-1945 Pacific War, Taiwan was Japan’s springboard to South China, Southeast Asia and beyond.  Taiwan proved an obstacle to the American defeat of Japan as U.S. commanders in the Pacific pondered how to occupy the island without first denying Japanese defenses there of support of Japan’s armies on China’s coast.

With Japan’s defeat by the United States in 1945, Taiwan was in the middle of that East Asian “island chain” once famously declared by General Douglas MacArthur “a protective shield for all of the Americas and all free lands of the Pacific Ocean area.”  MacArthur, the most senior of America’s victorious commanders in the Pacific War, explained “from this island chain we can dominate with sea and air power every Asiatic port from Vladivostok to Singapore ... and prevent any hostile movement into the Pacific.”

[8]

In 1949, when the Chinese civil war resulted in a Soviet-allied “Communist China” on the mainland and a “Nationalist China” in exile on Taiwan, MacArthur was foreboding.  He observed at the onset of the 1950-53 Korean War that, within the “island chain”, Taiwan

 

in the hands of [a] hostile power could be compared to an unsinkable aircraft carrier and submarine tender ideally located to accomplish offensive strategy and at the same time checkmate defensive or counter-offensive operations by friendly forces based on Okinawa and the Philippines.

[9]

 

Moreover, MacArthur warned, “this unsinkable carrier-tender” would “threaten completely sea traffic from the south and interdict all sea lanes in the western Pacific.”

It is little remembered now that, in Washington’s most notorious partisan political drama of the early Cold War, General MacArthur was removed from his command largely because of his persistent advocacy of Taiwan’s strategic importance in winning the Korean conflict, a view that both President Truman and the State Department believed could provoke China into a wider war in Asia.

[10]

  It was the central point of the aged General’s farewell address to a joint session of the Republican-dominated Congress on May 21, 1951, in which he reiterated in the strongest terms, “I have strongly recommended in the past, as a matter of military urgency, that under no circumstances must Formosa [Taiwan] fall under Communist control.”  During the succeeding Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations, Taiwan was indeed integrated into America’s maritime defenses in the Western Pacific, primarily because the island sat astride aviation and merchant marine traffic on and above the Taiwan Strait.  (Taiwan remained a key link in the American Island Chain through the Vietnam War, and only in 1974 were U.S. nuclear weapons removed from Taiwan.

[11]

)

By other quirks of fate, the “Republic of China” (ROC) regime-in-exile

[12]

on Taiwan also garrisoned two distal specks of islands, Pratas and Itu Aba, in the equally crucial air and sea lines of communication in the South China Sea denying them to Communist troops.

Following President Richard Nixon’s opening to China in July 1971, for reasons of diplomacy and comity with Peking (later “Beijing”), Washington policy eschewed for forty years all consideration of Taiwan’s geopolitical importance to the United States.  For forty years, such considerations really hadn’t been necessary because Taiwan seemed firmly committed to the camp of Asia’s democracies and because China’s military power seemed far from able to force the issue.  Until recently, there has been in Washington little or no consideration of Taiwan’s strategic centrality to America’s defense posture in the Western Pacific. 

This is changing.  Presaging a momentous new power transition in the Asia-Pacific, China has elbowed its way onto the international maritime stage.  China is now the world’s biggest trading nation, it is the world’s most massive industrial nation, its merchant marine among the world’s largest.  Chinese port-management companies operate some of the world’s biggest container ports, not just in China but across the globe, and are even more influential if China’s “special administrative region” of Hong Kong’s shipping and port conglomerates are factored in.

Unsurprisingly for a rising non-status quo power, Beijing now assembles a panoply of armed forces capable of molding East Asia’s security environment to its own liking.  Just as unsurprisingly, other major nations in Asia, from India to Japan—and just about everyone in between – are under pressure to build up their own defenses, pressure they had not felt since the end of World War II.

Today, the single exception seems to be Taiwan.  During the latter half of the last century, Taiwan devoted at least five percent – and as much as a quarter – of its economy to defense against China.  But unlike the rest of Asia, Taiwan’s twenty-first century defense spending has atrophied, its military manpower languishes under-trained, its equipment obsolescent.  This, in spite China’s relentless insistence that Taiwan must accept that it is, after all, part of China itself, and that Taiwan must acquiesce to unification with China.  Either that, or go to war. 

Now, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, the United States and its primary Pacific ally Japan are awakening to the realization that Taiwan is being absorbed inexorably into China’s security sphere.  Between 2008 and 2013, Taiwan has engaged in hostile coast guard confrontations at sea, not with China, but with Japan over maritime territories that the regimes in Taipei and Beijing jointly claim as “Chinese.” 

Taipei and Beijing no longer challenge each other.  China encourages Taiwan’s new strategic presence in the East and South China Seas.  Perhaps even more gratifying in Beijing is Taiwan president Ma Ying-jeou’s scholarly exposition that

 

 . . . the Taiwan Strait requires no international delimitation since the ROC and the PRC are not foreign states inter se. There is presumably no room for applying international law.

[13]

 

Taiwan’s maritime role in the twenty-first century Western Pacific hinges on China’s geopolitical intentions.  Power Transition Theory hypothesizes that when the rising power reaches 80 percent of the power of the dominant power, the rising power becomes a contender for the power of the dominant state.  “This is when war-initiation becomes more conceivable for the rising power.”

[14]

  China is a rising power, and “powerful states on the rise often fight wars with other major powers.” Several prominent international relations theorists see China as a “rising power” with little interest in maintaining a strategic “status quo” – similar to Germany and Japan in the first half of the last century.

[15]

 China sees itself in strikingly similar terms.  Since 2002, how the regime presents “China’s Rise” (中国的崛起) to the world has been a topic of controversy among Chinese Communist Party commentators and propagandists.

[16]

Taiwan and China’s Rise

After World War II, China’s two rival regimes, communist and nationalist alike, had claimed nominal maritime dominion over both the entire South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait.  But the world paid little attention because customary international law at the time restricted sovereignty to three nautical miles from land and because neither was in a position to enforce “Chinese” claims in any event.  Moreover, the U.S. Seventh Fleet patrolled the Strait with the explicit mission of keeping the two rivals from attacking each other.  Then, at the beginning of the 1970s, first Taipei, followed by Peking, staked an entirely new claim to the East China Sea continental shelf under an emerging international law of the sea doctrine, and to the Senkakus, a cluster of small then-uninhabited islets on the shelf administered by Japan.

Figure

1

  The South China Sea maritime claims and exploration blocks in May 1995:  from the U.S. Department of State, Office of the Geographer (INR)

 

 

Troublingly, within the context of Chinese territorial assertions in the South China Sea

, Taiwan's role was supportive. Chinese media claimed in 2006 that as early as 1974, Taiwan's “Republic of China” government opened up the Taiwan Strait

 to the transit of People's Liberation Army Naval (PLAN

) warships in support a Chinese attack on South Vietnamese forces on the Yongle (永樂) island group in the Paracel

 (西沙) islands.

[17]

 In March 1988, according to Chinese media, PLAN

 warships anchored for a week at Itu Aba

/Taiping

 Island, a ROC base, to take on food supplies during their battle with Vietnamese forces then occupying Johnson South Reef

 (known as Đá Gạc Ma in Vietnamese and Chigua

 Jiao

 赤瓜礁 in Chinese).  Taiwan's Defense Minister Cheng Wei-yuan

 (鄭為元), “openly declared that if there was another war [in the Spratly

 chain] the Nationalist Army would assist the Liberation Army in a battle of resistance.”

[18]

  Supposedly, as late as 1993, ROC military officers would not rule out cooperation with China in the “development and management” of the Spratlys

.

[19]

For this reason, Chinese media in 2006 blasted Taiwan's former President Chen Shui-bian

 and his predecessor Lee Teng-hui

 for “junking the tacit understanding” that preserved Chinese sovereignty over the Spratlys

 (南沙).

[20]

  Chen Shui-bian's sin was to build a modern airstrip on Itu Aba

/Taiping

 without consulting Beijing.  China responded by menacing the island with constant PLAN

 surveillance as the construction commenced.

[21]

Vietnam

, too, complained about Taiwan’s new airstrip on Itu Aba

.  Hanoi

 claims the islands, and the Philippines

 has laid claim to others located to Itu Aba’s north and east. Both Hanoi and Manila now must calculate whether it is better to acquiesce to Taipei’s future cession of jurisdiction over Itu Aba to Beijing or to start encouraging Taiwan to persist as an international actor in the South China Sea

 in the hope that they might more reasonably deal with Taipei separately rather than with Beijing and Taipei combined.

China swiftly is tightening its strategic presence in the South China Sea

.  By 2008, the deputy commander of the Chinese navy’s East Fleet, Admiral Zhang Huachen (张华臣), explained that “with the expansion of the country's economic interests, the navy wants to better protect the country's transportation routes and the safety of our major sea lanes.”  A retired PLA general was a bit more candid: “We kept silent about territory disputes with our neighbors in the past because our navy was incapable of defending our economic zones, but now the navy is able to carry out its task.”

[22]

 

            In all these territorial matters, the United States has professed not to have a view on the validity of China’s (and Taiwan’s) maritime claims in the South and East China Seas. (This despite the fact that the United States had legitimately occupied the Senkaku Islands under the terms of the Japanese surrender in 1945 and administered them in accordance with the San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951, and had returned the islands legitimately to Japan under the terms of the Okinawa Reversion Treaty in 1972.

[23]

)  The sole American requirement had been that China’s maritime claims be “resolved peacefully” and that “freedom of navigation” in the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait, and the East China Sea be respected.

[24]

Nonetheless, by April 1, 2001, China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) had begun to harass U.S. Navy operations in those waterways -- in an incident on April 1, a mid-air collision between a U.S. Navy reconnaissance aircraft and a Chinese fighter resulted in the death of the Chinese pilot and the two-week detention of the American crew by Chinese military forces on Hainan island.  The United States responded to most of this harassment with low-key protests.  The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, and America’s ensuing global war on terror, left Washington disinclined to publicize the deep strategic cleavages between the United States and China.  The administration of President George W. Bush, instead, papered-over problems with China to give an impression of friendliness and cooperation.

China and the “Pivot to Asia”

Even so, there is a growing alarm in Washington that Beijing intends to build China into the preeminent seapower in Asia and the Pacific, and concern that Beijing sees the United States as an interloper in its historical sphere of influence.

[25]

  By 2008, the Pentagon had begun publically to fixate on China’s “anti-access/area denial” doctrines for eliminating U.S. abilities to keep sealanes open in the Western Pacific and to resist Chinese naval pressures, not just on Taiwan, but on Japan and South China Sea littoral states.

[26]

On July 16, 2008, Admiral Timothy Keating, then the U.S. commander in the Pacific, recounted for a Washington think-tank audience a conversation he had had in Honolulu a few months earlier with a visiting Chinese “two-star” admiral.  The Chinese admiral

 

... made the following proposition: ‘We, China, when we build our aircraft carriers ... you take from Hawaii east, we, China with our aircraft carriers will take Hawaii west.  You stay over here; we’ll stay over there.  We’ll share information with you back and forth, and we’ll save you the trouble of coming to the western Pacific.”

[27]

 

 

Nervous laughter tittered through the audience.  It was not so surprising that a Chinese admiral would think that, only that he would say it.

The Chinese admiral’s jocular proffer made an impression on his American host, however.  Admiral Keating repeated the story at least three times for the record that year, including once in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

[28]

            Admiral Keating touted this anecdote perhaps because he had had enough of suffering in silence as Chinese ships interfered with his fleet’s operations.

[29]

  A new American president was inaugurated on January 20, 2009, and six weeks later, on March 8, 2009, Chinese naval harassment became more pronounced.  On that day, a PLA warship directed dozens of Chinese fishing boats to block the movement of a U.S. Navy survey vessel, the USNS Impeccable, in international waters 75 miles south of Hainan.

[30]

 Unlike previous confrontations, the U.S. Navy decided to publicize the Impeccable incident.

[31]

In June 2009, in international waters about 140 miles northwest of Subic Bay, Philippines, a Chinese submarine monitored the movements of the Aegis destroyer USS John S. McCain apparently while the McCain was, in turn, monitoring a North Korean freighter suspected of illicitly transporting weapons to Burma.  The Chinese submarine collided with a submerged sonar array which the USS McCain had been trailing behind it, and cut the array’s towing cables, perhaps deliberately.

[32]

            At the southern end of the South China Sea

 where China’s maritime claims abut Indonesia

’s, Indonesian authorities detained eight Chinese fishing boats and arrested 75 illegal Chinese fishermen

.  A year later, in the summer of 2010, Indonesian patrol vessels again confronted a fleet of ten Chinese fishing boats, but this time, a Chinese “fishery management vessel” (described as a “repurposed heavy gunboat”) threatened to fire on the Indonesian coast guard ships.  Moreover, the Chinese boats were not even in waters claimed by China, but in Indonesia’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ)

 near Natuna

 Island.

[33]

  One analyst believes that massive overfishing in Chinese waters have left coastal fisheries

 in “a state of near collapse,” and this has prompted the Beijing government to encourage its fleet of 300,000 fishing boats to go farther asea – a migration that now brings regular clashes in its neighbors’ fishing grounds that China now claims as its own.

[34]

 

In recent years, China’s military has systematically occupied several clusters of submerged coral reefs in the Spratlys

 west of the southern Philippine island of Palawan

, secretly emplacing huge caissons of concrete in their shallow water and constructing massive platforms and anchorages.

[35]

  The first new Chinese military platforms appeared atop Mischief Reef

 in 1995, and the Philippines

 has been complaining about them ever since.  In May 2011, the Philippines air force spotted several new structures in the Spratly

 island group, all complete with satellite communications, air defense cannons, and 300 meter-long cargo docks.  The discovery coincided with the visit to Manila of China’s defense minister, General Liang Guanglie

 (梁光烈) who, without a hint of irony, proceeded to sign a communiqué with his Philippines counterpart which urged that “unilateral actions which could cause alarm should be avoided.”

[36]

            As if to rationalize its new belligerence, China also set about declaiming that it now has “core interests” in the South China Sea. In March, 2010, according to The Washington Post, Chinese assistant foreign minister Cui Tiankai (崔天凯)  explained to two senior U.S. officials that his country viewed its claims to the South China Sea on a par with its claims to Tibet and Taiwan.

[37]

This was reportedly the first time China had defined the South China Sea to be as central to China’s security as Taiwan.

[38]

Thereafter, Chinese diplomats proclaimed a “core interest” in the South China Sea to progressively more senior Americans—and Southeast Asians as well.

[39]

In tandem, Chinese security scholars declared in the official media that “by adding the South China Sea to its core interests, China has shown its determination to secure its maritime resources and strategic waters.”

[40]

These incidents, and several others, were emblematic of China’s proprietary posture in the South China Sea, a posture that had become unbearable not just for the major South China Sea states, but for the United States as well. Addressing the annual Asian Security Summit in Singapore (also known as the “Shangri-La Dialogue”) on June 5, 2010, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates countered China’s “core interest” rhetoric with his own declaration of “the longstanding belief of the U.S. government that a peaceful and non-coerced resolution to the Taiwan issue is an abiding national interest—and vital for the overall security of Asia.”

[41]

            Other senior American officials also began explicating America’s “national interests” in the South China Sea.  Speaking at the Asian Regional Forum (ARF) in Hanoi on July 23, 2010, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for a binding international code of conduct for the states claiming disputed islands in the South China Sea, including China, as well as a formal international process for resolving those claims.  “The United States has a national interest in freedom of navigation, open access to Asia's maritime commons and respect for international law in the South China Sea,” Clinton asserted.

[42]

  China’s foreign minister immediately characterized the U.S. stance as an “attack” on China, adding ingenuously that “nobody believes there's anything that is threatening the region's peace and stability.”

[43]

            In June 2012, China’s State Council formally incorporated the entire South China Sea as “Sansha Municipality” (三沙) under the Hainan Provincial Government covering the “three sand” island groups of the Paracels (“West Sand”西沙), Spratly Islands (“South Sand” 南沙) and Macclesfield Bank (“Middle Sand” 中沙) with jurisdiction over 2 million square kilometers of the South China Sea.

[44]

  In November 2013, the Hainan provincial government issued formal “measures” requiring all “foreign vessels entering sea areas administered by Hainan and engaged in fishery production or fishery resource surveys should be approved by the relevant State Council department in charge.”

[45]

             

           

Figure

2

The Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea

 

In the East China Sea, Beijing’s territorial claims on Japanese maritime space became ever more pugnacious, as if to show Southeast Asian powers that China was so confident of its strength that it would challenge China’s rival economic giant to the northeast while it simultaneously harassed smaller states in the South.  It stepped up its belligerence in the Senkaku Islands in 2010, and continues the pressure without letup.  And in China’s showdowns with Japan, Taiwan has played a supporting role against Japan, much to the chagrin of the United States.

[46]

 

By September 2013, Japan’s air self defense forces was scrambling record numbers of interceptors to monitor airspace incursions by Chinese aircraft, including at least two PLA Air Force H-6 long-range bombers.  By late October 2013, Chinese bombers had transited the Japan Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) between Okinawa and Miyako islands for several days in a row.

[47]

   “Scrambles” frequency had risen from 15 times in June to over 69 times by mid-September.

[48]

  On August 30, Japan’s defense minister Itsunori Onodera announced that his ministry was seeking the biggest increase in defense spending in 22 years in an effort to counter a more assertive Chinese military posture.

[49]

 

In the lead up to all this, it was incumbent upon the United States to come up with a better strategy to deal with China’s territorial assertiveness.  And that strategy came to be called variously the “rebalancing,” the “pivot to Asia” or the “pivot to the Pacific”.  In 2009, the Pentagon in tandem, began preparing a new “AirSea Battle” doctrine as a framework for defense planning in the Asia-Pacific region.  The AirSea Battle concept, articulated in a scholarly paper by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in May 2010, presumed that a confrontation in the Western Pacific/South China Sea would rely on friendly regional powers for land forces, to be supported by U.S. air and sea superiority. 

Although U.S. commanders absolutely refused to admit it in public, the only putative adversary was China.

[50]

  The CSBA analysis was blunt: “Today, it is incontestable that the only state with the long-term potential to pose a serious and sustained challenge to US influence and power projection in its region for the foreseeable future is China.”

[51]

            On October 11, 2011, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the United States “stands at a pivot point” and would “lock in a substantially increased investment . . . in the Asia-Pacific Region.”

[52]

 The “pivot” metaphor became the nickname for America’s renewed strategic focus in the Pacific.  On November 16, 2011, President Barak Obama and Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced a joint US-Australia rotating U.S. Marine presence in northern Australia. President Obama’s launch of America’s “pivot” back to Asia came after a decade of exhausting -- and bank-breaking -- strategic overstretch in Iraq and Afghanistan.

[53]

  It was not as if the challenge of rising peer-competitor powers in the Pacific was anything new to the United States.  It just seemed like it.

 

But Taiwan was missing from the “pivot” and from “AirSea Battle,” a conspicuous absence.

[54]

 

Taiwan’s maritime footprint

            It is a given that America’s primary security goal in the Asia-Pacific region is the preservation of the maritime commons (and the airspace above), and the numbers confirm that the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait and the East China Sea together constitute a most vital maritime commons for America’s Asia-Pacific partners and allies.  From the northern approach to the Taiwan Strait abutting Japan’s Senkaku islands, through the Taiwan Strait itself and Taiwan’s exclusive economic zone sweeping 200 nautical miles eastward into the Western Pacific, and on into the South China Sea where Taiwan’s Pratas Reef (東沙礁) sits at the north and where Taiwan’s Itu Aba island (太平) dominates the the Sea’s southern Spratly island chain, Taiwan has an outsized geographical influence amid those maritime commons.

As of 2012, Taiwan’s commercial shipping fleet was the world’s sixth largest after Greece, Japan, Germany, China, South Korea and the United States,

[55]

and three of the world’s top 20 merchant shipping operators were Taiwan companies (two were Chinese and one from Hong Kong).

[56]

            More than half the world’s international trade transits the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait each year, totaling over 117,000 ships displacing 4.7 billion deadweight tons as of 2007.

[57]

  Most Japanese and South Korean energy supplies traverse them, as do all China’s sea routes to Asia, Australia, Africa, and Europe.  

            Hard numbers on transits of specific waterways are always difficult to assemble, but Taipei’s defense ministry confidentially compiles them for the Taiwan Strait and sometimes releases them.  For example, in the year ending August 15, 2002, a total of 259,086 civilian aircraft transited the Taiwan Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) while 246,015 international commercial ships transited the Taiwan Strait and routes eastward of Taiwan, for a daily average of about 675 ship transits.

[58]

The Dover Strait in 2002 saw a daily average of 400–500 ships over 300 tons in transit. About 90,000 ships pass through the Strait of Gibraltar annually; about 50,000 ships a year pass through the Straits of Malacca. The Suez Canal processes about 55–60 transits a day while the more constricted Panama Canal manages just 40–44.

[59]

            Three of the world's major container ports (Kaohsiung, Hong Kong, Shenzhen-Yantian) abut the Taiwan Strait alone. Growth in their maritime cargo throughput has been immense.  One study done in 2002

[60]

suggested that ports in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan together would process 86 million TEUs (“twenty-foot equivalent” unit cargo containers) by 2010, much of which “will come from increased cross-strait cargo,” and “will account for over 40% of Asia’s total container cargo and about 20% of the world’s total container cargo.” Chinese ports alone accounted for 80 million TEUs by 2006,

[61]

and by 2011, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan together in fact accounted for 183 million TEUs.

[62]

Normally, China acquiesces in Taiwan’s administration of its EEZ, content so long as Taipei considers Taiwan to be “part of China.”  But in an unprecedentedly cheeky gesture in April 2009, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs formally complained to the U.S. Embassy about U.S. scientific research near Taiwan’s Pratas Island.  The US- flagged National Science Council research vessel R/V Marcus Langseth operated by Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory was conducting tsunami soundings near Pratas Reef, with the full license of the Taipei government.

            Regardless, the Beijing MFA charged that the Langseth was in “PRC waters” without the formal permission of China’s State Oceanic Administration (SOA).  An SOA ship hailed the Langseth and ordered it to depart “Chinese” waters.  While the U.S. Embassy in Beijing (under instructions from the Department of State) asserted that the Langseth was not “in what we understand to be China's EEZ,” the Chinese foreign ministry nonetheless “sincerely hoped that the area the United States ‘believed to be within China's EEZ’ was consistent with the area China regarded as its EEZ.” 

            According to the Department of State, “In response to the PRC actions, the Langseth changed course and headed east toward the Philippines.”  The State Department even informed its embassy in Beijing that “the NSF plans to direct the Langseth to avoid conducting research in the areas claimed by Beijing in its recent demarche (EEZ generated by Pratas Islands).”  Washington seemed to hope the whole affair would just go away.  The Chinese MFA had made several complaints about the Langseth in the run-up to an April 1, 2009, London meeting between President Obama and General Secretary Hu Jintao, apparently in a Chinese attempt to pressure the US government into restricting survey activity in the Western Pacific.  There is no indication that the U.S. State Department forcefully asserted the right of U.S. vessels to be in Taiwan-administered waters without PRC permission.

[63]

            Four years earlier, in 2005, Taiwan had sought U.S. support in dealing with Chinese fishery and environmental despoliation in Pratas, but the U.S. State Department pointedly demurred.  Without moral support from the United States, Taiwan’s coast guard chief ruefully noted “that PRC exploration in the disputed [South] China Sea has effectively marginalized Taiwan’s ability to enforce its EEZ claims there.” Tellingly, the State Department’s office in Taipei (the American Institute in Taiwan) blamed the Taiwan Coast Guard’s confrontations with “PRC survey ships” near Pratas on inadequate inter-agency coordination and personality clashes within the Taipei government rather than on Chinese new aggressive claims of authority over Taiwan’s EEZ.

[64]

            In hindsight, Washington’s non-action seems a case of “avoidance-avoidance anxiety”; rather than address China’s behavior, the State Department instead sought to minimize Taiwan’s concerns.  It is quite likely that Washington’s scant regard for Taiwan’s agitation over the 2005 Pratas encounters and its dismissal of them as Taiwan’s problem alone led Beijing to calculate that the U.S. would get into the habit of avoiding future, more aggressive Chinese behavior in the South China Sea.

East Asia’s Coast Guard and Maritime Enforcement Context

            All the actors in the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait and the East China Sea appreciate the potential for a dispute over maritime rights to blow-up into armed conflict.  As a result, all actors seem to have conscious policies to minimize the involvement of naval surface combatants and instead use nominally-civilian coast guard vessels and aircraft for enforcement and displays of the flag. 

            Of all these countries, China has been the most aggressive in expanding its white-hulled coast guard fleet, which boasts 13 ships in the 1000-4000 ton class.

Since 2004, the PLA Navy has transferred 11 warships to China Marine Surveillance, including two guided missile destroyers, a 4300-ton icebreaker, a survey vessel, a transport ship and several naval tugboats.  The largest of the civilian ships carry Z-9 helicopters. (Z-9C rotary winged aircraft carry a typical load of four TL-10 anti-ship guided missiles or two 57 mm rockets or 20mm cannon pods and can disable or sink ships up to frigate size); China’s two Type 053H coast guard frigates also mount type 61 37mm twin open top machine gun turrets forward.

[65]

  The Chinese coast guard fleet now operates about 400 seagoing vessels and at least 10 aircraft.

[66]

            On March 10, 2013, China formally combined its Coast Guard (中国海警) , China Maritime Surveillance (中国海监), Maritime Border Control Department (中国海事局), Fisheries Law Enforcement Command (中国渔政) and marine customs (中国海关) into a substantial white fleet under the authority of  State Oceanic Administration (国家海洋局).  It also announced that it would add 36 modern cutters and patrol ships to its civilian coast guard fleet over the next five years.

[67]

However, China’s civilian maritime force seems less designed to police environmentally-sensitive marine ecologies, administer fisheries or interdict smuggling, but rather (as one U.S. Navy intelligence officer points out) serves as a “full-time maritime sovereignty harassment organization.”

[68]

Unlike China, Japan’s Coast Guard (海上保安庁) has no guided missile destroyers, but it maintains an equally impressive fleet of roughly 455 vessels and 75 aircraft.  In October 2012, spurred by China’s incursions in the Senkaku Islands, the Japanese Diet authorized nearly $200 million in additional funds for new Coast Guard ships and modernization.  In August, 2013, the Diet authorized an additional $150 million for the construction of ten new helicopter cutters.

[69]

 

In the South China Sea, the Philippine coast guard is inadequate even for its own domestic enforcement role much less to challenge Chinese coast guard intrusions. It has a total of 15 craft.  In July, 2013, Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the Philippines President Benigno Aquino announced Japan would provide 10 new coast guard patrol ships to the Philippines, reportedly briefing journalists that the move was “with an eye on what China is doing in the region.”

[70]

  On August 6, 2013, the second of two decommissioned U.S. coast guard cutters (transferred to the Philippines as excess U.S. defense equipment) were commissioned in the Philippine navy.

[71]

  The Philippine coast guard, however, appears to be less disciplined and professional.  In May 2013, a Philippine cutter shot up an unarmed and apparently inoffensive Taiwan fishing boat, the Kuang Ta Hsing No. 28, near the Batan Islands in the Bashi Channel between Taiwan and Luzon.  The Taiwan vessel was clearly in Philippine waters, but those waters were within 200 nautical miles from Taiwan, waters where Taiwan’s EEZ overlapped the Philippines EEZ, and waters in which the two countries have never formally negotiated fisheries jurisdictions.  A subsequent investigation demonstrated that the Philippine coast guardsmen had fired nearly 200 machine gun rounds broadside into the Taiwanese boat, killing its master, and belying initial Philippine claims that the Taiwanese boat had attempted to “ram” the Philippine cutter.  The incident caused an international furor and outrage in Taiwan against the Philippine government.  The impression was left that the Philippine coast guard, which had far more pressing threats from Chinese fishermen and Chinese maritime enforcement vessels in the South China Sea, was instead picking on what it thought were defenseless Taiwanese fishing boats which posed no real problem and which were in waters far distant from the Philippines main threat.  The Taiwan-Philippine crisis inflamed by the attack was a national embarrassment for Manila which was obliged to apologize, criminally charge the coast guard personnel involved and pay reparations to the fishing boat owners.

[72]

In contrast to the Philippines civilian enforcement fleet, Taiwan's Coast Guard Administration (海岸巡防署) ranks as one of Asia's most professional and sophisticated.  While the powerful legislative caucus of Taiwan's Nationalist party (國民黨－KMT) opposed defense spending during eight years when Taiwan's executive branch was controlled by the pro-independence (and hence, anti-China) Democratic Progressive Party (民進黨 – DPP), under constituent pressure from Taiwan's fisheries and merchant marine industries, the KMT lavishly funded civilian maritime capacity-building.  Taiwan's Coast Guard Administration was organized in 2000 to combine the ministry of defense coast guard, the national marine police, and customs.  The CGA fleet now includes eight large cutters, and about 150 patrol vessels.

[73]

That the white hulls of Taiwan's Coast Guard Administration have the capacity to operate in blue waters far from Taiwan's coastline was amply demonstrated in February 2008, when literally half of Taiwan's naval and CGA assets, including two Kidd-Class destroyers and two submarines were deployed to Itu Aba/Taiping island to provide security for the visit of then-president Chen Shui-bian to the island.  Taiwan's CGA also has a 200-man contingent on Pratas reef where they perform essential environmental protection and fisheries administration missions.

[74]

The CGA's effectiveness, together with the determination of President Ma Ying-jeou's government to reduce the chance of naval confrontations with China, has persuaded Taiwan's legislature to move formerly Navy responsibilities to the Coast Guard Administration.  Ma's government is appropriating an additional US$767 million between 2009 and 2017 to acquire larger vessels for the CGA.  In explaining this move, President Ma said:

 

. . . the traditional wisdom has been 'on the sea we count on the Navy', but in protecting security on the seas, one can't rely only on the Navy, we must also rely on the policing strength of the Coast Guard.

[75]

 

 

The shift of focus of Taiwan's government toward Coast Guard capacity building and away from naval strength suggests that this will become an increasingly important policy initiative in Taiwan's ongoing rapprochement with the People's Republic on the other side of the Strait. 

 

Taiwan's Maritime Context

Considering the sizes of its merchant fleet and coast guard, shipbuilding capacity, seaport cargo tonnage, international transit of sealanes within national jurisdiction, Taiwan clearly ranks among the world’s major maritime nations.  Taiwan's is the 11th largest merchant fleet,

[76]

the fourth largest builder of bulk carriers by tonnage, and one of the larger Coast Guard operations in East Asia.

[77]

  Taiwan's Coast Guard Administration operates in about 50,000 km² territorial and adjacent waters immediately surrounding Taiwan; 6800 km² around Pratas Atoll (some 400 km from Taiwan), and a theoretical 2900 km² EEZ around Itu Aba/Taiping in the Spratly chain (1200 km from Taiwan) although coast guard operations in Itu Aba and Pratas are limited by Chinese maritime activities that virtually surround it.

[78]

Important or promising seabed hydrocarbon and mineral deposits

[79]

are also within Taiwan's maritime jurisdiction – or claimed jurisdiction.  Like China, Taiwan's “Republic of China” government persists in a broad territorial sea claim in the South China Sea which includes several potential undersea gas fields within an EEZ surrounding Itu Aba/Taiping island and surrounding Chinese-occupied islets. 

Itu Aba is the biggest of the southern South China Sea islands, and the only one with a fresh water supply (thus qualifying the island for a 200-nm EEZ as “capable of sustaining human habitation”) and a modern airstrip – a 1,150-meter concrete pad suited for military operations. In September 2013, Taiwan announced plans for a $100 million infrastructure program on the island to include deepwater pier extending 320 meters from shore, and airfield lengthening for the island.

[80]

 

Similarly, there are seabed hydrocarbon deposits within the EEZ surrounding Pratas Reef. 

In 2008, Chinese and Taiwan oil companies signed memoranda of understanding on exploration of potential hydrocarbon deposits in the Wu-ch'iu, Nan-chih sectors along the mid-line of the Taiwan Strait.

[81]

 

U.S. defense commitment to Taiwan

There is a common misapprehension among casual observers of Washington’s policy toward Taiwan that the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act (TRA)

[82]

is a statement of America’s defense commitment to the island.  Indeed, the Act states “It is the policy of the United States ... to maintain the capacity of the United States to resist any resort to force of other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the security, of the social or economic system, of the people of Taiwan”

[83]

and “the United States will make available to Taiwan such defense articles and defense services in such quantity as may be necessary to enable Taiwan to maintain a sufficient self-defense capability.”

[84]

  While the executive branch did take this congressional statement of policy as a mandate during the Reagan years, successive administrations have honored it more in the breach than the observance. 

In 1992, President George H.W. Bush, approved the sale of 150 F-16A fighters to Taiwan only under extreme electoral pressure from his home state of Texas, while Taiwan’s requests for new F-16s since then have been rebuffed despite internal Pentagon assessments that Taiwan sorely needed the new aircraft in order to maintain a military balance in the Strait.  One senior Obama Administration Taiwan expert confided to the author in 2011 that the Pentagon had recommended that Taiwan now needs even more advanced fighter aircraft with a vertical/short take-off capabilities.  Nonetheless, the Obama Administration had denied all Taiwan’s requests for new fighter interceptors on the theory that Cross-Strait rapprochement had reduced Taiwan’s “self-defense capability” needs.  It is generally appreciated in the U.S. Defense Department not only that Taiwan does not have a sufficient “self-defense capability” vis-à-vis China, but that the United States no longer “maintains the capacity” to “resist the use of force” against Taiwan.

[85]

On April 25, 2001, then-president George W. Bush approved a multi-billion dollar arms package for Taiwan which even included notional, non-existent conventional submarines (a package costing more than nuclear submarines and, hence, was not pursued), but no new fighter aircraft.  President Bush’s decision seemed to be impelled by his annoyance at China over the April 1 Hainan incident.  Despite the opportunity to procure new defensive weapons systems from the U.S., however, Taiwan’s majority-Kuomintang legislature blocked Taiwan’s armed services from moving ahead with the package for another seven years.   After the Kuomintang candidate, Ma Ying-jeou, ascended to Taiwan’s presidency in 2008, he and his top aides regularly beseeched their American counterparts for approval of new F-16s, Blackhawk helicopters, assistance in constructing new submarines and vastly more anti-missile defense systems than the U.S. had theretofore provided. 

A consistent theme in these requests was Taiwan’s impotence – without a credible U.S. security commitment – in its détente attempts with China.  At least once, a senior Taiwan security official insisted that “The sale of the F-16C/Ds, which both sides of the Strait see as a key sign of the U.S. defense commitment, would be an important factor in Taiwan’s ability to pursue [confidence-building measures] with China.”  President Ma Ying-jeou stressed “Arms sales -- and F-16 C/Ds in particular -- were important militarily but were also a ‘litmus test’ of the U.S. relationship.” As American reluctance to supply these defense articles persisted, Taiwan’s media became increasingly alarmed that the United States’ defense commitment was in fact weakening in the face of Chinese pressures.  Leaked diplomatic cables dating between 2008 and 2010 record that official American interlocutors deflected these concerns with soothing reassurances that  “senior U.S. officials were looking at the remaining items from the 2001 package of weapons systems . . . to see whether a decision could be made in the near future.”

[86]

 

The “near future” presumably was something less than two years.  But by the beginning of 2012, the White House continued to sit on Taiwan’s request for new fighter aircraft.  In reaction, Texas Senator John Cornyn (in whose state the fighters would be manufactured) put a “hold” on the confirmation of a senior defense department assistant secretary until his misgivings about the Obama administration’s Taiwan policy had been addressed.  On April 27, 2012, a White House letter was successful in getting Senator Cornyn to release his “hold.”  The White House insisted that it recognized the urgency and severity of the burgeoning fighter gap between China and Taiwan and pledged that the new “assistant secretary ... will play a lead role as the administration decides on a near term course of action on how to address Taiwan’s fighter gap, including through the sale to Taiwan of an undetermined number of U.S.-made fighter aircraft.”

[87]

 However, two years after that letter, the Obama Administration remained disinclined to “address Taiwan’s fighter gap.”  Taiwan, it seems, is a country of little consequence in the new U.S. “pivot to Asia.”

Regardless of how one juggles the data, Taiwan is a jurisdiction of significant importance in international maritime operations and a future confederation with China will logarithmically enhance China's comprehensive maritime power.

It seems likely that Taiwan will continue to transfer maritime defense responsibilities away from its navy and to the coast guard over the coming years.  Given the current state of Taiwan's military and naval defenses, Taiwan is already hopelessly outgunned.

[88]

 Evidence suggests that long-term KMT sentiments see little need for Taiwan's defenses if Taiwan did not intend to become independent.

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A Beijing-Taipei Maritime Axis?

Taiwan’s independence, it seems, is the last thing on the KMT mind.  It is now less a question of “if” Taiwan and China will ever reach a “peace accord” that will finally resolve Taiwan's status within the Chinese political state, than of “when.”  And the “when” will probably come sooner – within a few years – rather than later.   Over the next three years, East Asian littoral states will have to come to terms with China’s preeminence in their maritime space.  Nonetheless, Washington may yet have an opportunity to shape – while it still can – a post- China/Taiwan “peace accord” maritime environment by integrating Taiwan into cooperative regional maritime arrangements that will preserve the status quo by addressing Taiwan’s maritime jurisdiction issues before a “peace accord” forecloses all options.

            Beijing and Taipei are on the verge of a geopolitically momentous tectonic shift in the Western Pacific. Taiwan's President Ma Ying-jeou has implemented an "Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement" that promises to integrate inextricably Taiwan's entire economy with China's.  By the end of his tenure in 2016, or even sooner, President Ma hopes to have signed a "peace agreement" with his Chinese Communist Party counterpart.

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Beijing has no doubt that Ma's status as the “Nationalist Party” party chairman will allow him to negotiate "on an equal footing" with his “Communist Party” counterpart to bring a conclusion to the 1949 Chinese civil war.

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  Whether Ma will have the necessary popular backing for such a move is problematic, but his closest political partners evidently see him inclined toward “political negotiations” if the opportunity presents itself.  Unlike all his predecessors, he doesn’t rule it out.

[92]

 

Given the current correlation of forces in Asia:  China's determination to absorb Taiwan; American and Japanese unwillingness to interpose any objections to Taiwan's ultimate integration with China; and the fact that there are no national level elections in Taiwan until 2016 that might potentially alter its trajectory into China’s orbit, it seems unlikely that Taiwan can persist long as a truly independent political actor in the region.

            This presents Washington and virtually all other East Asian and Southeast Asian littoral states with a thorny conundrum:  How to deal with a Beijing-Taipei axis that has expanded territorial and exclusive economic zone claims in the Western Pacific and the South China Sea.  Will the Taiwan Strait become a Chinese "inland waterway"?  Will the EEZ and territorial seas encircling Pratas Reef govern shipping and fisheries in the Bashi Channel and collide with the interests of the Philippines?  Will Taiwan’s substantial infrastructure on Itu Aba Island in the southernmost South China Sea become a Chinese baseline from which to enforce Beijing's peculiar territorial and EEZ demarcations in conflict with Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines and possibly Indonesia?  Finally, how will a new China/Taiwan entity address ongoing fisheries and seabed delimitations with Japan in the East China Sea? 

Japanese concerns about Taiwan’s cooperation with China over the Senkakus controversy heightened in September 2010 when, as China escalated its own war of nerves over the islands

 – the deputy commander of Taiwan’s Coast Guard

, Wang

Chung-yi

 (王祟儀) secretly hosted Chinese vice minister of Public Security Chen Zhimin

 (陈智敏).

[93]

 While Taipei’s Wang and Beijing’s Chen conferred on September 14, Wang ordered a dozen Taiwan coast guard boats to accompany a lone Taiwan “fishing boat” out to the Senkakus

 where together they confronted eight Japanese coast guard ships.

[94]

 

            In September 2012, the Taipei government encouraged a fleet of 40 fishing boats to descend upon the Senkaku Islands, under escort of 10 Taiwan coast guard vessels, to underscore Taipei’s “Republic of China” claim on the islands.  When the flotilla approached within five miles of the islands, it was confronted by 21 Japanese patrol boats which showered the Taiwanese fishing boats with water cannon.   The Taiwan CGA escort ships responded by firing water cannons at their Japanese counterparts and blared over loudspeakers in Chinese, “This is Taiwan’s territorial waters. You should not interfere with the operations of our fishermen.”

[95]

   Tensions were exacerbated by the menacing presence in the distance of several Chinese coast guard ships. 

            The water gun fight between Taiwan and Japan angered Washington.  Just a few weeks earlier, the State Department had once again asserted that the United States “sees [the Senkakus] falling under the scope of Article 5 of the 1960 U.S.-Japan Treaty.”

[96]

  In plain English, Washington is bound by alliance obligations to aid Japan in defending the islands. Washington’s annoyance at Taipei’s irresponsibility reportedly was registered with senior Taiwan defense officials at several meetings in October 2012.

[97]

            Japanese-Chinese frictions over the Senkaku Islands are well understood, but EEZ, fisheries and territorial seas claims between Northeastern Taiwan and Japan's southernmost islands of Yonaguni, Miyako and Yaeyama are also in flux.  The 2003 "temporary enforcement line" agreed upon between Taiwan and Japan in waters east of Taiwan is just that, "temporary".

[98]

 On April 10, 2013, Japan and Taiwan did reach an “agreement on the establishment of a new order in the fishing industry,” a high point in 17 years of desultory fisheries talks between Tokyo and Taipei, in which Japan agreed to permit Taiwanese fishing within the Senkaku Island’s 200-mile EEZ, in return for which Taipei agreed that Taiwanese fishing boats would not enter the 12-mile territorial waters around the islands.  Tokyo clearly was eager to defuse genuine fisheries tensions in the waters and saw the agreement as an opportunity to delink Taipei and Beijing.  Taipei seemed delighted to take-the-money-and-run, despite its acquiescence to Japan’s 12-mile territorial claim around the Senkakus, and insisted at the conclusion of the agreement that it had not given up Taiwan’s claim to the islands.

[99]

 

            In February 2013, before talks on the Japan-Taiwan fisheries pact had restarted, President Ma Ying-jeou confided to a group of China-based Taiwanese businessmen that he did not see any prospect of coordinating with Beijing on China-Taiwan Senkakus claims.  Nonetheless, he reportedly admitted that “China has hoped his administration would refrain from touching upon the issue of sovereignty over the Diaoyutais [Senkakus] with Japan after Taipei and Tokyo resume talks on fishing rights in the area.”

[100]

 How President Ma knew what Beijing “hoped” is debatable; and indeed Beijing’s reaction to the fisheries agreement was perfunctory and pro forma.

[101]

            The unsettling Beijing-Taipei harassment in the Senkakus

 area prompted U.S. military and naval commanders in the region to rethink naval and air arrangements with Taiwan.  Part of that rethink involved pushing back their Korean War era boundaries of Taiwan’s “air defense identification zone” (ADIZ) jurisdiction away from Japan

’s westernmost island of Yonaguni.  The anachronistic East China Sea

 ADIZ

 lines had been drawn by the American military government in Okinawa

 in the 1950s to help coordinate military and civilian aircraft operations and identification with Nationalist Chinese and American forces in U.S.-administered Okinawa. 50 year later, Taiwan’s eastern ADIZ

 (at 123 degrees east longitude) bisected Yonaguni island, leaving the Japanese air base there incongruously within Taiwan’s ADIZ

.  Press reports indicate that Tokyo’s decision to push the ADIZ

 westward toward Taiwan was prompted by the Americans, but it was not discussed at all with Taiwan’s military which reacted negatively.

[102]

 

            A China/Taiwan accommodation will leave all coastal East Asian states from Indonesia to Japan – as well as other global actors including the United States and India – facing an entirely new geopolitical context that will influence core national interests from fisheries, sea and air transportation routes, seabed resource exploitation, security and piracy cooperation, and environmental protection to naval power balances. 

In the course of negotiating any “peace agreement” with China, it is unlikely that Taiwan’s President Ma would have any leverage with Beijing that would permit him to secure Taiwan's independence of action in maritime affairs.  Nonetheless, Taiwan's continued maritime independence is obviously in the interests of Taiwan's neighbors in East and Southeast Asia – if only to keep the maritime real estate presently administered by Taiwan out of China's hands.

            Future History

East Asia is on the cusp of a power transition as China, now reaching the hypothetical 80 percent of the comprehensive power of the United States, views itself as a competitor for geopolitical preeminence in the region.  Washington, wary of Beijing’s territorial aggressiveness against neighbors from India, through the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait, to Japan, unsettled by Beijing’s support and succor for illiberal powers in Asia from North Korea to Iran and Syria, and alarmed at Beijing’s ruthless mercantilism, maneuvers to counterbalance China with a “pivot” to the Pacific.

Alas, current trends suggest future historians of America’s “Pacific Pivot” will adjudge it to have been doomed from the start because, unlike American island-chain strategy of the last century, there is no place in it for Taiwan.  Future historians will deem the substance of American “strategy” to have been incapable of preserving the country’s geopolitical and economic interests in a pivotal Western Pacific maritime power or of sustaining American leadership in the region. 

            Conversely, future historians will judge China’s twenty-first century “Pacific Presence” to have been assured by Beijing’s well-planned, deft and relentless diplomatic isolation of Taiwan and its steady alienation of Taiwan from America’s security network over the preceding half-century.  China’s twenty-first century maritime supremacy is likely to be vastly more enduring than its brief Ming Dynasty predecessor.