Confronting the Dragon - Part 2: The Quad

"In our international relations, we Chinese people should get rid of Great-Power chauvinism resolutely, thoroughly, wholly, and completely."
-"In Commemoration of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen," Mao Zedong, 1956 (Mao, 339)

"We must never adopt an arrogant attitude of Great-Power chauvanism and become conceited."
-Mao Zedong, Opening address of the 8th CCP National Congress, 1956 (Mao, 339)

Well China, Mao and Deng both warned you.

In my former entry, I discussed the amount of less-than-positive attention China's recent years of aggression have drawn from her neighbors in ASEAN (except of course the Philippines, where Duterte seems to have decided to change Lupang Hinirang's lyrics to "let Xi's invaders trample thy sacred shores"). The focus of the article was to show even though China seems to have crowned themselves as the world's ruler, describing themselves as a "rising and responsible big power (Yang, 25)" with a "moral responsibility to contribute more wisdom (Yang, Opinion 26)," nearly every nation having any maritime borders with China has begun reaching out to push back against China. This push back has been in the form of either beefing up their defenses or reaching out to the United States. This has no doubt truly chaffed Beijing, who have been quite open about their attempts to, as they describe it, "urge the International Order to develop in a more reasonable and just direction (Cao et al., 210)," by which they mean "return to the old Sinocentric Tributary system." They have tried to parade themselves before the eyes of the world (including nations who still remember the humiliation they suffered under the Tributary System) as "liberators" from "U.S.-Led Western Imperialism (Sun et al., 61 & others)," even while engaging in Imperialism against every neighbor.
Here is an interesting irony on China's part. She has built her internal propaganda on a narrative of a coalition of nations struggling to "contain the Motherland (Sun et al. 109 & others)," even though the nations she claims were part of this "coalition" were at each other's throats through most of the Cold War. And yet here, the CCP have diligently worked to build exactly the coalition they feared.
And yet, even united, the list of nations mentioned there are not much of a force by air or sea, having neither impressive military power nor the economic means to procure it (except perhaps in the cases of Singapore and South Korea, who have impressive teeth for their size). They would not stand much of a chance without powerful backing. Enter, the Indo-Pacific Quad-Alliance, an assembly of fully modern industrial nations with strong naval and economic power. Described as a "diplomatic group," this alliance has been quite open about stating that the impetus for their existence is the "disruptive, transitional force" presented by China (Indian Defence News), and they are joining hands to send a message to Beijing: "this is not a few countries who don't like you; this is an entire world who has waited patiently for you to get with the program, and we're running out of patience." In this article, I'll introduce their reasons for bucking against China, and their capabilities.

India

I showed this map in a previous entry to demonstrate India's reasons for worrying about China. India's neighbors Pakistan (Chaudhury, Economic times) and Sri Lanka (The Hindu, 9 Dec.) are already de facto Chinese colonies at this point, and China and India have a history of animosity going back millennia. This rivalry had its most recent incarnation in the 20th century when Mao Zedong said it was China's "responsibility" to "liberate" five countries on India's border (Abhijit, The Asian Age), and later launched an invasion of India in 1962 (with less than impressive results). Just as a reminder, "liberate" is the same word China used for their entry into Tibet and their creation of North Korea. Oh, and did I mention that the Dalai Lama of Tibet, viewed by China as a separatist terrorist, is protected by the Indian government and is considered a "Son of India (Sun et al., 221)?" And just to make sure the world did not forget these two countries hated each other, there were recent armed stadoffs over territorial disputes in Doklam and Sikkim to remind us.
At the moment, India is beginning to feel the air is getting thin as China seems to have entrenched herself on every side, allying herself with (or rather, taking over) nearly every one of India's neighbors. China already has a naval base in Djibouti, meaning that the Chinese Navy has to cross India's backyard just to reach it, and India is worried they might be working on one in Sri Lanka and another in Pakistan. All this, coupled with China's Maritime Silk Road ambitions (which include a deal in the Maldives that looks a lot like the one that helped China take over Sri Lanka (The Hindu, 8 Dec.)), means that India sees China as a clear and present threat in the Indian Ocean, which they view as their primary area of operations (for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who owns a globe). India's response to China setting up shop in their backyard has been twofold. For one thing they have reached out to Southeast Asia, who has welcomed the arrival of any potential counterweight to China (Heydarian, Asia times). For another, they have begun to participate again in the Quad, something they were previously rather reticent to do.
To compare India and China militarily is difficult to do and one tends to get conflicting reports from different sources, but Defence News India and Armedforces.eu seem to be relatively close to each other. At a glance, China is stronger in most categories except India's larger nuclear arsenal (which China really should consider, the way she is tossing aside Sun Tzu's warning about not leaving a foe without a path of retreat). However, it is important to remember that India's military consists primarily of combat veterans while China's military has not seen combat against anyone more heavily armed than ragtag Uighur insurgents since their 1979 defeat at the hands of the war-weary Vietnamese Army. Furthermore, India has the less literal "nuclear option" of formalizing ties with the Tibetan Resistance, a thorn China has been unable to remove from their side since their 1951 entry into Tibet, which their laws require all textbooks to refer to as "peaceful liberation (Sun et. al)." India has deep-rooted ties with Tibet (Sun et al. 222), and an ever-increasing array of incentives to reach out to their occupied kin, which enables them to bring trouble to China not on a distant front, but within China's own borders.

"In Tibet, Buddhism originated in India, not China; our language is inherited from Sanskrit, not Chinese language... no Tibetan would consider himself a Chinese."
-The Dalai Lama, 17 Dec. 2009

Australia

When one thinks of military badassery, Australia is usually not the first name that comes to mind. Unless of course you're one of the 1500 Viet Cong (some sources claim the number was as high as 2500) who ambushed 108 Australian infantrymen at the Battle of Long Tan and were forced to retreat after suffering more than 500 casualties and only inflicting 18 (Russell, War History Online). Also, might I remind the reader of the ANZAC Corps? Indeed, despite their manpower, aircraft and naval vessels being few in number (Australian Royal Navy Website), anyone who sells the Australian Defense Force short does so at their own great peril. They've fought alongside the U.S. in nearly every war America has been involved in (which, as we all know, is quite a few). That means their senior officers have experience dating as far back as Vietnam while their front line forces have seen heavy action as recently as Iraq and Afghanistan (Palazzo), and they are actively engaged in operations all over the globe. All of that is more than can be said for the PLA.
In terms of equipment, being backed by the Australian economy (the sixth largest in the world) gives Australia access to some of the most advanced hardware known, including the JSF F-35A (Frawley, Australian Aviation), and they are giving heavy consideration to investing in its STOVL littermate, the F-35B (Claxton, The Strategist). The reason why that is signifigant is it enables Australia's Canberra class amphibious assault ships, based off of Spain's Carrier, the Juan Carlos, to serve as aircraft carriers (Farley, War is Boring). While 2 aircraft carriers may not seem like much from an American perspective, let's not forget China has yet to complete their second one. But is Australia, whose largest buyer of iron ore is none other than China, actually willing to enter into an alliance against China? A few years ago they would have said no, But China has insisted on giving them plenty of reasons to change their mind.

"Along with security of sea lanes, Australia's well being depends on an international trading regime that allows terms it can manage."
George Friedman, The Next Decade (187)

Apparently, the Australian government's definition of "terms Australia can manage" does not include sea-lanes under the iron-fisted rule of a nation that is busy bullying every neighbor it has while openly declaring its goals of world domination. Australia has been eyeing China's increased aggression for some time now (Le, The Strategist), and there has been no question among policymakers that Australia needed to be ready when (not if) China's bullying extended south (Thomson, The Strategist).
China's recent (and rather undisguised) attempts to reduce Australia to a vassal state have included everything from meddling in elections (Smith, ABC News) to buying huge chunks of the country outright (Bagshaw, Morning Herald), and while there had been some talk in Australia before about whether Chinese hegemony was really any different from what had been perceived as US hegemony, China's casual willingness to micromanage every aspect of Australia's inner workings, compared to America's approach of "do what you will as long as we have a few bases there and you send a few troops when we need 'em; and by the way we'll keep the sea lanes open for you, no questions asked," has finally pushed Australia too far (Westebrook, Reuters).
China, predictably enough, was flabbergasted, and berated Australia for daring to criticize them (Manuel, ABC News). After all, how dare a nation of "lowly laowai barbarians" dare to lift their voice against the "Glorious Middle Kingdom?" If Australia considered Beijing's intentions hostile before, then open threats of reprisal when Australia called them out for their aggression only confirmed it. Of course this was not the first time recently that Beijing condescendingly scolded Australia for daring to call their aggression out. China's overt maritime aggression has already drawn Australia's attention as well (Norman, ABC News). As usual, China was quick to express outrage through their state media (Lo, SCMP) that anyone dared to "disturb the peace," which, as you will begin to notice as this article goes on, is China's classic euphemism for not rolling over and giving China its way. Oh, and just to make sure it was obvious they were threatening Australia with war, China made sure it was one of their top brass who issued the "warning (Seidel, AAP [1])." Australia has not taken kindly to the condescending tone Beijing has routinely taken in these responses, never quite bothering to hide their superiority complex and rather openly employing the kinds of phrases one uses when speaking to a subordinate, and this has propelled Australia forward into the Indo-Pacific Quad.
With total military personnel of only 81,000, calling Australia's troops a rare breed may be true in more ways than one. Even so, I don't envy the poor soul who backs Crocodile Dundee into a corner, and that is precisely what China seems determined to do.

Japan

"Formerly, we Japanese were bombarded with the notion that to show your back to the enemy is cowardice, or to retreat is to lack self-respect. Nowadays such views are not so prevalent, but nevertheless they still seem to be deeply rooted in the Japanese psyche and are hard for us to ignore. In fact, the Japanese have never been much good at running away at all.
"On this point, conversely, the Chinese are experts."
-Hiroshi Moriya, The 36 Strategies of the Martial Arts (227)

If there are two nations on the planet who hate each other more than India and Pakistan, or more than Israel and Iran, they would have to be China and Japan. China loves to take any chance they can find to thump their chests before the world about the occupation they suffered at the hands of Hirohito's Imperial Japan in the 1930's & '40's (never mind that they themselves have inflicted far worse horrors upon Tibet and Xinjiang). Roughly half a century before that, China suffered a humiliating defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of the 19th century, where a ten-to-one outnumbered Japan roundly decimated the Nine Banners Army of the Qing Empire. China's grudge against Japan runs so deep that the Chinese do not even refer to World War 2, but call it "the Anti-Japanese War," a war in which they claim (get this) that the Chinese led the world to victory, with only "support from international anti-fascist forces (Cao et al. 190)."
What the Chinese forget to mention is that for Japan, the animosity goes farther back than that and with good reason. Japan was subject to the humiliation of the Tributary System for part of their history, and the only full-scale invasion of Japan that was ever attempted was by the "Chinese (actually Mongolian)" Yuan Dynasty. Much of Japan's modernization in the 19th century was built around the specific aim of throwing off Japan's long-time mainland taskmaster, and China continues giving Japan reasons to hate them to day with a modern-day foreign policy that basically begins and ends with the assertion that "Xiao Riben" must suffer to pay for their "crimes against China (see previous remarks regarding the hypocrisy of that view)."
China's most recent attempt to exact that "payment" has been a tactic the Philippines would recognize. China has claimed that Japan's Senkaku Islands are "ancient and inalienable" parts of China and have, as Eisuke Tanabe of the Japanese Ministry of Defense stated, "routinzed their intrusions into [Japan's] territorial sea space (Dillow, CNBC)." Japan was apparently paying attention to how China bullied their way through their territorial conflicts with the Philippines, and they had no intention of being left helpless, so they have begun to increase their military capabilities heavily (Easley, AIIA). Of course, China seems to think they have a say in Japan's policy just as they think they have a say in Australia's policy, and they took the opportunity once again to say "you can't do that (Seidel AAP [2])," for what Hua Chunying called "historical reasons." I guess she has forgotten that the entire region has centuries of historical reasons to fear China, while Japan's Imperialist ambitions lasted less than half a century, but never mind. Hua went on to say “We urge Japan to do more that may help enhance mutual trust and promote regional peace and stability,”which is a rather thinly veiled euphemism for "we're upset that Japan does not roll over and give us our way the way we expect all 'barbarian waiguo' to do."
Well, Japan has been pushed around by China for long enough, and China would do well to remember that for all the CCP's high-handed doctrine about Japan being an "American colony," they actually have the most powerful navy (Lockie, Business Insider) and pre-eminent air force (Keck, The Diplomat) in Asia. Militarily, it could actually be argued that despite Beijing's rhetoric about "U.S. puppets," it is actually the Japanese who are the lynchpin of the region's resistance against China, and I will have an article soon outlining in detail why a lot of top intelligance analysts predict Japan, rather than China, will be the dominant power in Asia by the 2040's (as well as America's most powerful opponent, but let's deal with the present decade for now). Japan recently humiliated China by tracking one of their most advanced submarines for two days (Liu, SCMP) as it entered the territorial waters of the Senkaku Islands, and their development of the ability to intercept China's missiles (Asahi Shimbun, "Japan Eyes") has raised eyebrows in Beijing. Of course, when one speaks of Japan's military, one cannot forget to mention the Izumo-class "helicopter destroyer." This destroyer, much like Australia's Canberra-class, is an aircraft carrier in all but name (Gamble, CIMSEC), which can drop the pretense if Japan buys F-35B's. According to the Japan Times, the island nation is looking into that. At last, just because Japan never does anything halfway, they have invited some friends to their "let's push back against China" party: Britain (Packham, Reuters), and France (Asahi Shimbun "Japan, France"). This means even if the "Quad Alliance" did somehow disband, Japan would still have allies to stand with her, and one can only imagine that China's maritime neighbors would follow as well.

The United States

It's become such a cliche to speak of a "global power shift" and to say that the U.S. is declining while China is rising, that one almost sounds like a cheerleader when one disputes this, even though nearly every credible analyst has (Kazianis, National Interest). However, the reality is China's only military advantage is in the sheer number of troops available, an advantage that has proven fruitless for less-advanced military forces in the past thirty years. In terms of technology or of naval assets, there is simply no comparison. The United States has avoided provoking Beijing for a while because the prevailing wisdom was that China's aggression was a phase they would outgrow, and they would adopt a more liberalized position as their economy developed (which most in the West have hoped it would, because the addition of such a massive market to the global economy would have meant massive profitability). However, the Xi Administration has proven that China is going backward rather than forward (Cheng / McElveen, Brookings). Between Xi making his dictatorial ambitions plain and open, and the PLA Navy scrambling Russian Su-35 fighters to their "non-military" islands they have illegally built in Philippine waters the U.S. Navy has finally said "enough is enough," and sent the Nimitz-class supercarrier USS Carl Vinson through their neighborhood (Tan, War Times News). That carrier, which is one of ten of its class in U.S. service, dwarfs the PLA's Liaoning in size, speed, range and capability (Mizokami, Popular Mechanics [1]), and it's not even the biggest in the U.S. fleet. That title goes to the Gerald R. Ford-class, of which one is in service and two more are under construction with more on order.
As far as technology, China loves to boast of their military technology while the U.S. prefers to keep their own developments classified, so it's easier to know what China has than what the U.S. has, but the resources the U.S. Navy publicly acknowledges are impressive enough. For one thing, while China boasts of developing AI for use in warfare, the U.S. Navy is already putting it to use in the form of an unmanned submarine-hunter (Mizokami, Popular Mechanics [2]). This ship is not weaponized... yet. But when Predator drones first took to the skies over Iraq, it didn't take long for them to start packing teeth. Speaking of naval drones, the U.S. Navy has also already begun using underwater drone swarms (Threvethick, The Warzone). And finally, to round out the US Navy's repertoire of drone technology, there's the one that is making China's DF-21D "Carrier-killer" obsolete:
the Northrop Grumman X-47B (Mizokami, Popular Mechanics [3]). So far, this is a carrier-launch-capable stealth refueling drone (yeah; a stealth drone tanker that takes off from a carrier), which will enable aircraft (such as the much-talked-about F-35) to operate inside the A2-AD (anti-access area-denial) range of China's "carrier-killer" while the carriers themselves remain safely out of range. Of course, that may not be necessary, as there is some doubt about the effectiveness of the DF-21D in the first place (Majumdar, National Interest), as it has never been tested over water and is apparently incapable of tracking a moving target, but the X-47B gives the Navy a countermeasure in the event the Chinese ever overcome that problem. And finally, it's worth noting that the X-47B is soon going to be fitted with weapons of its own (Eckstein & Lagrone, USNI News), enabling this unmanned, carrier-launch capable stealth craft to engage targets on its own.
On the subject of stealth in naval warfare, it bears mention that while the PLA Navy can't even keep their submarines hidden (Liu), the US Navy has had a stealth surface-warfare craft in service for several years (Larter, Defense News), which is now being refitted with the Raytheon SM-6 missile. This will give the ship the ability to strike targets on land, at sea or in the air, and the SM-6 has also successfully intercepted a ballistic missile (adding to the layers of cabbage China's DF-21D would have to get through). Though, when it comes to shooting down aircraft or missiles, there are not many options that are more effective (or cost-effective) than the US Navy's laser cannon.
Yeah, you read that right: laser cannon. The US Navy's Laser Weapon System, or "LaWS," is not something that's in-testing or under development. One has already been in service on the USS Ponce in the Persian Gulf (Sciutto & Heerden, CNN), and another is being installed on the USS Portland (Mizokami, Popular Mechanics [4]), just in time for the 2018 RIMPAC games, where you know for a fact China (who has been working on laser weapons but has yet to get one to work) is going to be watching. In light of that, I expect the demonstration will be an impressive one.

Perhaps the demonstration, along with the show of force already being made in the West Philippine Sea, will be enough to make China see that she is headed for a showdown she can't hope to win. I for one hope so. As much as I despise the CCP, a personal note must be inserted here to say that I have invested vast amounts of time and effort into the education of a generation of Chinese children, and I would be distressed to see the devastation of a six-front war unleashed upon their homeland. But when faced with a choice between seeing their homeland in ruins as the price of Xi's arrogance, or seeing my family's homeland, the Philippines, constantly under the guns of the PLA, there is simply no choice to be made.

So Xi, it's your move: back down and lose a little face in the eyes of CCP hawks in return for gaining global respect for a cooler head, or persist and lose everything that every Chinese leader from Zhongshan to Hu Jintao built.

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