Opinion | The new imperialism: as Asia gets caught up in power struggle between China and the West, what can it do?

Western navies are sending flotillas to the South China Sea to assert their primacy while China is turning inward and reinforcing nationalist narratives

Asia is in the middle and a divide is opening up. It’s a matter of time before the region again endures conflicts it has no stake in but pays a heavy price for

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US Navy vessels are seen during a drill in the South China Sea as it strengthens its military presence in the Indo-Pacific. Photo: EPA-EFE

Published: 8:30am, 10 May 2021Updated: 8:30am, 10 May 2021

There is never any candour when it comes to grand strategy. China’s rise is presented as peaceful when it surely can’t be. America’s protection of the global rules-based order is couched in terms of shared values, when there is nothing equal or shared about who gets to write the rules. After spending the first two decades of the 21st century tiptoeing around the issue, distracted by other concerns such as the global war on terror, the world’s two largest powers are locked in a proper struggle for primacy that threatens to divide the world along ideological lines just as it was for the last half of the 20th century.

With this attempted creation of a new iron curtain, the rest of the world is once again being forced to take sides. Talk of war we have grown accustomed to experience as limited lethal strikes in far-off places is now assuming global dimensions, and is nuclear-tipped. The two big powers demand fealty and alignment, and will hold recalcitrants hostage using the legal tools of extraterritoriality and control over supply chains.

Unlike the first Cold War between the capitalist West and communist Soviet Union with its epicentre in Europe, Asia is the principal field of battle for the great power struggle of the 21st century. The US is beefing up its military presence across what it calls the Indo-Pacific – a shiny new term coined in Washington that deprives Asians of the right to define themselves. There is talk of a new First Fleet based in Southeast Asia. The navies of France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom have all made plans to send ships to support American freedom of navigation exercises in the South China Sea.

But while European states of the 17th century sailed to Asia in search of wealth from trade in spices, today they are sending costly naval flotillas into the South China Sea in a bid to maintain relevance and shore up a crumbling compact of Western powers. The UK, for example, has just launched a comprehensive policy statement arguing that it is a “force for good in the world”. The Netherlands has also declared its own Indo-Pacific strategy, arguing the need for a louder voice to counter moves by China to threaten free access to sea lanes in the region. Three hundred years ago, these same countries colonised the region claiming to be a force for good and only interested in free trade. From an Asian perspective, this starts to look like imperialism 2.0.

China, meanwhile, is also taking a leaf out of the book of its own imperial past. Its successful management of the Covid-19 pandemic has generated inward-looking impulses that echo the era when contact with the outside world was resisted and considered a threat to social stability. China’s economy has recovered faster than anywhere else in the world because of soaring domestic demand in a Covid-free society; the millions of Chinese tourists who once queued outside luxury brand stores in Paris and London are now spending at home. Turning inward also helps reinforce nationalist narratives and stiffen ideological discipline.

Caught in the middle are an array of smaller states which neither share the values Americans and Europeans claim they do, nor savour the prospect of a communist China-led co-prosperity sphere. Precisely because the colonial experience is so fresh in their minds, Asians hold strongly onto Westphalian notions of sovereignty. They are suspicious of one another, so they don’t work well together in alliances. Nor is ideological conformity a thing in societies so diverse and only partially integrated.

The seeds of binary division are therefore falling on stony ground in Asia. A truly effective iron curtain will be hard to put up – just as it was in the 1950s when the US and China also tried and failed to build effective client states in newly-independent Southeast Asia, leaving only a legacy of war and human suffering. Something approaching 7 million people lost their lives with the brutal suppression of the Indonesian Communist Party after 1965 and the Indochina wars that lasted until 1979.