© Provided by The Diplomat l Asyura Salleh
China needs to build more alliances to challenge the U.S. in the Asia-Pacific.
China’s rapid industrialization as an emerging power has prompted much discussion of a power transition, in which a rising China displaces a declining America with potentially dire consequences in the process. Internal capabilities, particularly domestic industrialization, are an essential ingredient in national power. China has been industrializing rapidly, and could within the foreseeable future reach a rough parity in national power with the U.S., signaling the start of a power transition.
However, Woosang Kim goes beyond this internal capability argument to include external factors. He argues that alliance formation is also important in strengthening national power. In this argument, rising powers like China that seek to achieve power parity with the U.S. need to bolster their national power by pursuing both domestic industrialization and external alignment relationships. China has already made impressive strides in expanding its share of global GDP and trade. To further augment its national power, it should focus on aligning with other countries, especially with neighbors that are inside its targeted sphere of influence.
However, China’s recent behavior toward its neighbors has moved it in the opposite direction. Rather than aligning themselves with China, countries in the Asia-Pacific are turning to the U.S. How then, can China continue its pursuit of regional hegemony without inflaming regional fears? Instead of pursuing assertive actions against regional neighbors, China will need to consider an alternative approach, one that attracts potential allies, instead of repelling them. And in fact this would be possible, if China observed the alignment preferences of weaker regional neighbors such as the Philippines.
The Philippines: U.S. Over China
China’s behavior toward the Philippines provides an opportunity to display the alignment preferences of China’s weaker neighbors. Lacking a credible defense capability, the Philippines cannot rely entirely on its own military strength for national security. Military spending accounts for just 1.3 percent of the country’s GDP, and most of its naval equipment is in dire need of modernization. As a result, in the face of a perceived threat, the Philippines finds itself resorting more to external balancing strategies by aligning more closely with the U.S.
This alignment behavior was demonstrated in two recent instances of Chinese assertiveness against the Philippines. The first was when China announced the Law on Territorial Sea and Contiguous Zone in 1992, which claims the disputed Spratly Islands as Chinese territory. The second was the 2011 Reed Bank Incident, in which a Chinese vessel allegedly harassed a Philippine vessel.
The Philippines’ alignment preferences in each of these instances reflect assessments of both relative power capabilities and threat perception. This echoes the alliance theories of Kenneth Waltz and Stephen Walt. Waltz’s balance of power theory is based on relative calculations of power, in which he argues that secondary states are more likely to balance against the more powerful state. This is based on the assumption that the country with the most national power is by definition the most threatening.
Meanwhile, Walt believes that alignment preferences are determined by factors beyond simple relative military capabilities. He shows that states generally balance against the country perceived as most threatening, which is determined by many factors such as relative power and geography.
Therefore, Waltz would expect the Philippines to balance against the more powerful state, which would be the U.S., by forming a coalition with other regional states. On the other hand, Walt would expect the Philippines as the weaker state to tighten its alignment with the U.S. as China is the greater threat to its territorial integrity.
The Philippines’ alignment preferences most closely reflect Walt’s predictions. In both of the cases of Chinese behavior cited above, the Philippines perceived a threat in China and responded by balancing against the source of this threat. In 1992, as chair of the ASEAN Ministerial Meeting, the Philippines viewed China’s Law on Territorial Sea and Contiguous Zone as a threatening concern and pushed for an ASEAN Declaration to call for the peaceful resolution of sovereignty and jurisdictional issues in the South China Sea. President Benigno Aquino III echoed these concerns in 2011 when he described China’s actions in the Reed Bank as a “violation of our territorial integrity and sovereignty.”
Accordingly, the Philippines responded to the perceived threat from China by aligning more closely with the U.S. through external balancing strategies. China’s passing of the controversial law in 1992 spurred then-President Fidel Ramos to immediately secure a temporary U.S. military presence in the Philippines by granting the U.S. access to military installations. In 2011, Aquino took a different strategy: modernizing the Philippines’ military capabilities, but with American military assistance. Not long after the Reed Bank Incident, the Philippines purchased a second-hand Hamilton-class cutter from the U.S.. Interestingly enough, this same cutter, the BRP Gregorio Del Pilar, was deployed against China during a later incident at the Scarborough Shoal in 2012. It appears that the more threatening China’s posture to the Philippines, the tighter the Philippines’ alignment with the U.S.
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