China’s anger at taking international blame for the coronavirus pandemic has raised the likelihood that Beijing will order a rare assault against a smaller neighbor, U.S. observers worry.
“They’re doing things they haven’t done before,” Sen. Cory Gardner, a Colorado Republican who chairs the Foreign Relations subcommittee for East Asia and the Pacific, told the Washington Examiner.
Any confrontation involving Chinese communist military forces and neighboring states would make a very rare break with precedent, as Beijing has avoided significant conflict for more than three decades. Yet Chinese diplomats have launched an unusual disinformation campaign to deny responsibility for the pandemic, while U.S. officials have accused China already of “exploiting the distraction” of the public health crisis to consolidate control of vital shipping lanes.
“Could China take some kind of aggressive action with Vietnam, as sort of a test or a flex of both their military as well as the global reaction and check the water temperature, so to speak, of global reaction?” Gardner asked rhetorically.
Such an operation could seem attractive in Beijing, according to U.S. analysts, as a way to strike a triumphant nationalist pose at a time when many Western officials and some mainland Chinese dissidents have cited the Chinese Communist Party’s mishandling of the outbreak as a sign of the regime’s systemic flaws. The global backlash is reminiscent of the years following the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square, with the key difference being that China was “very weak” in that time frame, as a former U.S. Pacific Command adviser noted.
“They find themselves now in a similar period where they’re much stronger, where the rest of the world has these economic ties, and where they have a People’s Liberation Army that could contest the first island chain and some of their sovereignty claims,” said Eric Sayers, a senior analyst at the Center for a New American Security. “Contest the first island chain” refers to a potential attack against the major islands closest to mainland China, including Taiwan and islands over which China claims sovereignty.
“That’s where I think the real danger lies, is in a PRC that feels itself a bit more backed into a corner, unsure about what the future holds, looking to be more opportunistic as they always have — whether that’s in the South China Sea, or with some of its other diplomatic relationships,” Sayers continued, using the acronym for the People’s Republic of China.
China has avoided military conflict in recent decades while pursuing a strategy of expanding economic relationships in order to deliver a higher quality of life to the Chinese people. The pandemic has disrupted that plan in the very year in which Xi Jinping, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, hoped to preside over the regime’s triumph over poverty. Instead, the pandemic has driven China’s unemployment rate to an estimated 20%, with little help available for struggling or unemployed workers.
“Unlike in other economies, mainland China has not implemented a broad-based wage protection scheme,” HSBC chief China economist Qu Hongbin observed recently. “This means that most of the furloughed workers in mainland China have no source of income.”
And some Chinese officials believe that President Trump’s team wants to damage China’s economy in order to undermine the Chinese Communist Party’s standing with the broader populace. “The party’s legitimacy is tied to their ability to deliver economically,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Zack Cooper told the Washington Examiner. “I do think that they feel worried.”
That compound of internal and external pressures, along with Beijing’s decision to launch Russian-style disinformation campaigns alleging that the U.S. military started the outbreak, has brought other hostilities into the realm of plausibility.
“I could imagine the Chinese making a move in the South China Sea. I could imagine them making a move, say, against the Vietnamese or the Malaysians,” the Heritage Foundation’s Dean Cheng said in an interview. “That is a very disturbing possibility.”
An operation targeting Vietnamese positions in the Spratly Islands could appeal to Chinese strategists for multiple reasons, Cheng suggested. Vietnam doesn’t have a treaty alliance with the United States, making it less likely that Trump would intervene. And, at a time when U.S. officials hope that companies will move key supply chains out of China, even such a small-scale conflict might cause Indo-Pacific governments to think twice about following the U.S. lead.
