Look Toward China

With all of the furor over Russia, it looks to me as though developments in China have been too much ignored. That’s a mistake as this article at the New York Review of Books by Richard Bernstein highlights:

It has long been routine to find in both China’s official news organizations and its social media a barrage of anti-American comment, but rarely has it reached quite the intensity and fury of the last few days. There have been calls from citizens on the country’s social media platforms to boycott KFC, Starbucks, and the iPhone 7, accusations against the US of waging a new “war” against China, and threats that the Philippines, a close US ally, will be turned into a Chinese province. All of this is in response to the July 12 ruling against China by the Law of the Sea Tribunal in the Hague, which found Beijing to be engaging in a host of illegal actions and violations of international law as it has pressed its territorial claims in the South China Sea. The five-member panel, set up as part of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, or UNCLOS, had been asked by the Philippines to arbitrate its dispute with China. The tribunal declared that China’s exclusion of Filipino fisherman from the area, its building of half a dozen artificial islands, and the damage it has done to coral reefs and endangered species are violations of the law.

Immediately after the decision, some one hundred of China’s most famous actors, musicians, television personalities, and other celebrities furiously denounced the tribunal on social media, reproducing a map of the disputed area and declaring, “China’s territorial sovereignty is not a matter for arbitration.” An image of a poster made its way around the Chinese web, showing one of the artificial islands and airstrips that China has built on disputed territory with the legend: “South China Sea: Our Beautiful Motherland; We won’t let go an inch.” Much of the comment about the tribunal’s decision has been explicitly, angrily, even frighteningly anti-American. The United States and the Philippines, the state-run Xinhua news agency said, “have conspired for a long time to blackmail China,” and they are doing that now “through a tribunal that tramples on international justice.”

The Chinese believe with some justification that China was treated unfairly in the 19th and 20th centuries. Letting China get away with whatever it wants to do is no remediation for past wrongs. If China is to retain the benefits of international law and global trade, it must follow the rules.

As should go without saying, that goes for the U. S., too.