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China’s reliance on hard power and Middle Kingdom trap
China’s excessive reliance on hard power, generated by its Middle Kingdom hubris, has removed Beijing’s soft power shine.
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This file photo taken on June 4, 2019 shows the Chinese flag behind razor wire at a housing compound in Yangisar, south of Kashgar, in China's western Xinjiang region. (AFP/Greg Baker )
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bservers monitoring the tense standoff between India and China the world over, do not see the military build-up between the two nuclear powers in Ladakh in isolation.
In a cyber-connected globe, simmering tensions in the Ladakh and Karakoram ranges are echoing strongly in the South China Sea, the Taiwan straits—in fact across vast swathes of the Indian Ocean and the West Pacific. The ripples driven by prospects of a massive conflict in the high Himalayas, can also be felt in other parts of the global system, including neighboring South Asia, Central Asia, Russia, West Asia and Africa—the core of the global South.
Across geographies, a strong undercurrent of opinion is building up that turbulence in several areas of the globe has been triggered by a single primary source—China, which has decided to embark upon a 360 degree muscle flexing exercise, especially after the COVID-19 outbreak. Coupled with the adoption of an in-your-face Wolf Warrior diplomacy, as well as the combative marshalling of Twitter and other social media platforms, China is attempting to steamroll any resistance to its narrative of international events.
But Beijing’s overkill and recourse to hard power on an industrial scale may be igniting a tectonic revolt along several land borders and oceanic fault lines. A long and complex frontline is fast emerging as passive resentment to Beijing’s threats, ultimatums, and crude muscle power is mutating into plans for an active and coordinated riposte.
Around a month before its convoys drove through Tibet into Ladakh threatening the Darbuk Shyok Daulet Beg Oldie (DSDBO) road heading towards the Karakoram pass, the Chinese coast guard had sunk a Vietnamese fishing vessel, in the South China Sea. Within 10 days of the April 3 event in the disputed Paracel islands, Beijing had redeployed Haiyang Dizhi 8—the notorious geological survey ship, which, last year, had hounded international drilling in the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ)claimed by Vietnam. A few days later, China unilaterally announced that that it had stamped its administrative control over the Paracel and Spratly Islands of the South China Sea.
The proud Vietnamese have repeatedly protested, but with their exhortations falling on deaf ears, a plan-B, with an active military component also appears to be sprouting. That is where Vietnam is connecting with India, already facing off with China in Ladakh.
During the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, Vietnam had joined what has been called the Quad+ mechanism, partnering India, Japan, US, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil and Israel. The formidable Quad+ constellation could now become a natural bridge for Vietnam to enter the Quad security core, built to deter Chinese military assertion in the Indo-Pacific.
