Around Asia

Last week, the Associated Press reported that the National Intelligence Council is working on a new National Intelligence Estimate that will point the finger at the Chinese government for a multi-year campaign of cyberattacks against American networks. The estimate, according to the wire service, will call for more effective action against Beijing.

The news comes on the heels of a series of revelations that Chinese hackers have been reading e-mails of New York Times reporters as well as attacking the computer systems of the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. Reports also suggest the Chinese have hacked Twitter and the Department of Energy.

During the morning of January 21st, three China Marine Surveillance vessels—the Haijian 23, 46, and 137—entered the territorial waters of Japan north of Kubajima, one of the Senkaku Islands, in the East China Sea. This followed an intrusion by the Haijian 23 and two sister vessels during the preceding Saturday, also in the morning.

On Tuesday, Beijing voted in favor of a UN Security Council resolution condemning North Korea for the launch of its three-stage rocket last month, a step it has long been reluctant to take. But does it matter?

China had initially insisted that the Security Council rebuke Pyongyang only with a statement issued by its president. The council’s president issued a statement after the North’s previous test, in April last year, not a resolution as Washington and others wanted. A presidential statement carries far less weight than a formal resolution.

Beijing’s decision to go along with a resolution this time has been hailed as progress. As one Security Council diplomat told Reuters, “The Chinese move is significant.” Yes, it’s positive that China relented and agreed to a formal resolution rather than a presidential statement, but neither form of condemnation promises to change the North’s behavior. And while the proposed resolution extends the existing sanctions to other agencies, most notably North Korea’s space agency, no additional sanctions have been added.

Goopy smog may have smothered Beijing this week, but optimism among foreigners is shining a bright light across China.

A temperature inversion resulted in, literally, off-the-charts pollution in the Chinese capital, and the country’s leaders quickly reacted to universal criticism of their decades-old environment-be-damned policies. “Chinese media is all over the story in a remarkably transparent contrast to today’s haze in Beijing,” said Bill Bishop to the New York Times.

President Obama’s pick to succeed Hillary Clinton as secretary of state is making some in New Delhi’s diplomatic, military, and intelligence communities nervous that Washington will soon tilt to Islamabad, India’s decades-old rival and tormentor. Last week in New Delhi, a former ambassador to the US complained to me about America’s support for Pakistan—on three separate occasions.

Some Indian journalists are also reflecting the uncertainty. “Pakistan has powerful supporters in Washington who have pressed for ladling out US tax dollars in the belief that America needs to remain invested in the country, none more than Senator John Kerry,” wrote the Times of India, the Mumbai-based paper, in the middle of last month.

The new Japanese prime minister reiterated his “values diplomacy” recently, confirming his nation’s “pillar” ties with the US and reaching out to two countries in particular, Australia and India. “Freedom, democracy, and fundamental human rights,” Shinzo Abe told the newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun in a December 28th interview. “We will deepen ties with nations that share and uphold these values.”

Abe’s words are no aberration for Tokyo. In November 2006, Taro Aso, when he was foreign minister, proposed an “arc of freedom and prosperity” for Asia. Then, the concept went nowhere, as Asian diplomats were optimistic about engaging China. Now, however, a grand coalition of democracies is in fact slowly forming in the region, backed up by President Obama’s “pivot” or “rebalancing” to East Asia.

The heads of nine of the ten member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations traveled to New Delhi two weeks ago to celebrate 20 years of ties between their organization and India. At the two-day “Commemorative Summit,” ASEAN leaders toasted Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and signed a free-trade pact covering services and investment with his country.

The events in New Delhi, ostensibly about friendly relations among the participants, were also about one country not a part of the festivities. China, not a member of ASEAN, haunts its members these days with aggressive actions in the region, especially in the South China Sea, which Beijing believes is an internal Chinese lake. Moreover, China claims large portions of territory under Indian control and continually probes the areas with its troops and sometimes aircraft.

So Beijing has been pushing ASEAN and India into each other’s arms. New Delhi, for two decades, has been pursuing a “Look East” policy. Now, Southeast Asia is reciprocating. 

On Wednesday, Park Geun-hye was elected the 11th president of the Republic of Korea. The 60-year-old conservative will, in February, be inaugurated as the first female leader of her nation. 

The atmospherics of the campaign revolved around Park’s deceased father, Park Chung-hee, the dictator who in the 1960s and 1970s created the economic miracle that propelled the South past North Korea, which up until then was the more prosperous state on the Korean peninsula. Many conservatives venerate the elder Park, who is reviled by the progressives—leftists—in South Korean society. 

North Korea was not the main issue in the campaign, and the announced positions of Park and her opponent, Moon Jae-in, on inter-Korean relations were not entirely dissimilar, at least on their face. Both pledged to try to work with Kim Jong Un, the new leader in Pyongyang, and throughout the campaign they each distanced themselves from the strict stance of outgoing President Lee Myung-bak. Yet it is clear Park will not adopt the essentially pro–North Korea “Sunshine Policy” that Moon would have certainly pursued.

On Monday, the National Intelligence Council released its fifth “Global Trends” report. Among its conclusions, the study predicted that the Chinese economy would surpass the American one to become the world’s largest “a few years before 2030.” 

The report, a blend of analysis from the American intel community and experts in almost 20 other countries, is consistent with most assessments of the subject. The World Bank, for instance, made the same prediction (pdf) this year.

On Saturday, North Korea announced it will launch a satellite this month, sometime between December 10th and 22nd. Almost nobody thinks Pyongyang’s technicians have had the time to correct the faults that led to the catastrophic failure of the same rocket this April. Then, the Unha-3 blew up around 90 seconds into the flight.

So why launch now? That’s a mystery, but the one reason that should concern us involves Iran. In short, Tehran needs a launch vehicle for the warhead it has been developing, and the North Koreans need a successful test for their best missile customer.

By 2050, half of Japan's population will be over 52 and, according to the Economist, that country will be “the oldest society the world has ever known.” By the end of this century, the Japanese are expected to number 47 million, down from today’s 127.7 million. If there is any reason to be pessimistic about the future of the Land of the Rising Sun, it is its collapsing demography.

Japan’s total fertility rate—generally speaking, the average number of births per female over her lifetime—is now estimated to be 1.39. That is well below the 2.10 TFR needed for a population to replace itself.

Apart from instances of war, famine, and pestilence, Japan’s demographic decline will be unprecedented. Yet the country will not be unique for long. Other East Asian nations are sure to follow the Japanese trajectory.

Jiang Zemin scored a resounding political triumph on Thursday as the Communist Party’s new Politburo Standing Committee was revealed in Beijing. Not only did the former supremo pick China’s next leader, Xi Jinping, but he also packed the rest of the seven-member body with at least four allies and possibly five. Hu Jintao, the just-departed general secretary, now has only one friend he can count on—Li Keqiang—in the Standing Committee, the apex of Chinese political power. 

Jiang also forced Hu to give up his post as chairman of the party’s Central Military Commission, adding to the humiliation. Hu’s allies had been predicting that, following Jiang’s example in 2002, Hu would hold onto that important position for two years. Some even said he was going to keep it for five.

President Obama will make a whirlwind visit to Bangkok, Rangoon, and Phnom Penh from November 17–20. It will be the first time a sitting American leader has gone to Burma or Cambodia.

The stopover in the former Burmese capital has become the story of the trip, largely because there are misgivings about the astonishing speed of the reconciliation with the generals, who are very much in control of the impoverished nation. Also of concern is the visit to another hard-line regime, the one that runs Cambodia.

Despite these legitimate concerns, the main theme of the trip is that the White House is serious about the “pivot” to—or “rebalancing” with—Asia, code in either case for hedging against recent Chinese belligerence. That’s why members of the Politburo Standing Committee in the Chinese capital know they now have one more problem they cannot solve: a popular American president touring countries that once were under Beijing’s sway.

Last Thursday, two weeks of talks to establish a 640,000-square-mile sanctuary off the coast of Antarctica ended in failure as three nations—China, Russia, and Ukraine—blocked agreement. The 25-member Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) will meet next July in Germany to see if it is possible to resurrect the US-New Zealand proposal to protect the Ross Sea, “the world’s most intact marine ecosystem.”

Chinese officials delighted in stopping the plan to create a preserve. As an unnamed official told AFP, “I think there was a little bit of ‘Don’t tell us what we can or can’t do,’ as well as keeping their options open.”

After a year of turmoil, the Communist Party will convene its 18th Congress on November 8th in Beijing. If all goes according to plan, 2,270 delegates will elect a new Central Committee. 

On the day following the close of the Congress, the new Central Committee will convene the First Plenum to appoint the next leadership, specifically a new Politburo, Central Military Commission, and Secretariat. All eyes will be on who steps out from behind the curtain—literally—as the new Politburo Standing Committee is unveiled. Analysts universally believe the first person to appear will be Vice President Xi Jinping. That will mean he is the party’s new general secretary, the leader of China.

This leadership transition, from the so-called Fourth Generation to the Fifth, was supposed to be uneventful, predictable even. According to the accepted view, the Communist Party had institutionalized its politics with rules, guidelines, practices, and limits. Even critics of the regime accepted this storyline.