Shivshankar Menon is the author of India and Asian Geopolitics: The Past, Present. Menon served as national security adviser to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh from 2010 to 2014. Currently he is the chairman of the advisory board for the Institute of Chinese Studies in New Delhi, Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for Social and Economic Progress and a Visiting Professor at Ashoka University.

To what extent do you see Chinese actions in the South and East
China Seas fundamentally undermining the balance in the region?

The South China Sea alone, for instance, carries about 38 per cent of India’s foreign trade. So for me, freedom of navigation across the entire Indo-Pacific region, and for all regions, stands out as essential.

Of course the globalisation decades have made freedom of navigation critical to China as well. We tend to underestimate this, but close to 40 per cent of China’s own GDP comes through the external sector. She is very powerful economically, but also very dependent. And she doesn’t have much historical experience with this arrangement. She has depended on the outside world for energy since 1994, when she stopped being self-sufficient in oil. She depends on the world’s technology. She depends on external markets, for access to raw materials. She needs to keep exporting, as a central part of her economy. She wants to shift to domestic consumption, but hasn’t made that shift yet. So for China as well, freedom of navigation has only grown in importance.

But now the South China Sea also has become a significant arena for China’s increasingly tense strategic competition with the US. China has the world’s greatest armada—the US Navy—12 nautical miles off her coast, in her face. She sees the first island chain as a form of containment, as a great wall in reverse, preventing her from shaping her maritime environment, so crucial to her prosperity and security. So she feels justified claiming the entire South China Sea, and trying to enforce these claims by changing facts on the ground: building islands, militarising them, pushing forward, declaring this space a core national interest, which makes any competing claims almost non-negotiable, because now we have a foundational sovereignty concern—not just some friction which you can accommodate and settle through some give and take.

The geopolitics around this have gotten much, much more complicated. China, the US, India and other nations can’t help rubbing up against each other. No mutually accepted set of rules applies. The Chinese didn’t accept the tribunal’s decision when the Philippines took them to the Permanent Court of Arbitration in 2016. So China doesn’t seem to accept everybody else’s interpretation of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. The US abides by this convention, but has never ratified it. So we face this peculiar and unprecedented situation today. We don’t have the proper institutions. We no longer have the established norms of living peaceably and maintaining the collective security of these sea lanes. We really need to work together on this. Maybe we can start by isolating parts of the problem that serve everybody’s interests. Maybe we first should focus on navigation of the high seas, for example, and then try to build momentum towards addressing more delicate issues, such as military passage.

In your book’s account, contemporary Chinese maritime ambition stems from China already having consolidated power across Central Asia. The region’s nations are quietly turning toward China following Russia’s unchecked interventions in Georgia, and Putin himself feels less threatened by China than by an encroaching West. How have the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and various Belt and Road Initiative projects, woven a subtle net of trade, finance, infrastructure, connectivity, and security webs across this vast continental terrain?

China’s Central Asian frontiers had always been disputed and fluid. Throughout her history, her primary security concerns have almost always come from the northern or western ‘barbarians’. But for the first time, she now feels comfortable on these flanks. In fact, she’s consolidating the Eurasian landmass through the Belt and Road Initiative: through railways, trade, fibre-optic cables, pipelines and the like. She’s creating a continental system in which all roads lead to Beijing.

So China, traditionally thinking of herself as a continental power, now sees opportunity to significantly expand her maritime presence. And it actually takes a whole different mindset to think like a maritime power. Again, China senses her increased strengths, but also her increased dependence. She finds herself in a very unfamiliar position. From my perspective, some of the primary tensions we face today probably come from China seeking to find her footing in international circumstances unprecedented for all sides, and certainly for the Chinese.

You also describe China itself potentially facing a closing window for expansive policy—before a slowing economy, an aging population and rising neighbours catch up with it. What could we see China attempting before this window of opportunity closes? How might China continue shaping the region even after this window for robust assertion closes?

Of course this is my book’s most speculative part. Nobody can predict China’s trajectory. We have authors writing books on China’s coming collapse, as well as books on China soon ruling the world. The coming-collapse people have to publish articles every year explaining why it hasn’t happened yet [Laughter]. The when-China-rules-the-world people will have to explain the slight delay. But it seems to me that when you look at long-term drivers of policy, not all of them stack up in China’s favour. The Chinese themselves describe this present moment as a ‘strategic opportunity’ for China. And over the last year, they’ve started to say that this present regional situation has gotten much more complex.

One big variable is US pushback, and what China sees as US opposition to China’s return to its rightful place—at the head of the international order. The Chinese have taught themselves this version of history over the past two decades, stressing a century of humiliation, before China resumes its status as the world’s most advanced, prosperous and powerful society. The Chinese do in fact seek primacy, it seems to me, after having taught themselves this history. They see US pushback as making this much more complicated. Their own demography also works against them right now. Thanks to the one-child policy, they have a rapidly aging population. Their economy seems to be reverting to its historical mean in terms of expansion and new job opportunities and so on. China also finds itself, as always, in a crowded neighbourhood, but now with other relatively powerful countries rising. I mean, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, India and Indonesia all have their own regional clout. China faces a very different situation from, say, previous global superpowers like Great Britain or the US—in geopolitical terms both basically islands, secure in their ability to withdraw and remain offshore balancers to much of the world.

By contrast, the Chinese [government] today might see the need to hurry to achieve their goals. To start with, this might mean completing China’s reunification. They’ve persistently emphasised this goal. Taiwan holds several strong attractions for a Chinese leader. We’ve already discussed some of the maritime and geopolitical dimensions. Any Chinese leader who brings Taiwan back into the fold would place himself on the same level as Mao Zedong, under whom China stood up and Deng Xiaoping, under whom China prospered. Taiwan also of course plays a leading role in key tech industries.

China’s remaking of its domestic society today also furthers this traditional Chinese ideal of a homogenous, centralised state. China’s political leadership always has sought to build centralising structures. Today these pressures surface in China’s treatment of minority populations, in what’s happening within Xinjiang, Tibet and Inner Mongolia, where local languages no longer are encouraged or taught. Everybody now learns Mandarin, or really Putonghua, ‘the common speech’, as they call it.

So you can see various efforts today to build a China of the China dream. But when you look at what this China dream involves, it actually recalls a late-19th-century European dream of a nationalist power, prosperous and projecting a very strong military. Lee Kuan Yew, when asked once where China was heading, responded: ‘If I were Chinese, I would aim for primacy, and good luck to them. But if they ever achieve primacy, good luck to us’ [Laughter]. That’s the unsettled stage we’ve reached today. We can only make an educated guess at China’s trajectory. And the future never offers a straight-line extrapolation to connect the dots. It never has, and never will.

This is an edited excerpt of an interview originally published in the Los Angeles Review of Books. You can read the full interview here.

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