China Losing Interest in Playing by the West's "International" Rules?

PUBLIC rows can be a welcome relief from the stifling obfuscation and pussyfooting courtesy in which much diplomacy is cloaked. So optimists saw an unseemly spat in Singapore on June 1st—between China on the one hand, and America and Japan on the other—as a positive development. Mealy-mouthed antagonists were at least speaking frankly about their concerns, clearing the air. Frayed tempers exposed the concealed limits of national patience. Through the murk of mutual misunderstanding, the edges of “strategic clarity” could at last be discerned. That clarity, however, is not an unmixed boon: it revealed the depth of the gulf separating China’s view of its future role from the West’s hopes about what sort of great power China might become.

The forum for the tiff was this year’s Shangri-La Dialogue, an annual shindig for Asia’s defence establishments, held in a hotel of that name in Singapore. As an opportunity to air the region’s security concerns, this year’s dialogue, the 13th, was well timed. Such worries have been mounting sharply over the past six months, as China’s neighbours have taken fright at what they see as its aggressive pursuit of disputed territorial claims.

In November 2013 China unilaterally declared an Air-Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ) in the East China Sea. It covered the Senkaku or Diaoyu islands, which are administered by Japan. In January it announced the equivalent of an ADIZ for fish, in the waters of the South China Sea, requiring foreign fishing vessels to seek its permission. Then, in May, China moved a massive oil rig, accompanied by a large flotilla, to drill in waters seen by Vietnam as part of its Exclusive Economic Zone; it started construction work at a shoal elsewhere in the South China Sea claimed by the Philippines; and it flew fighter jets dangerously close to Japanese surveillance planes near the Senkakus.

China probably feared all along that this year’s dialogue would be an opportunity for concerted China-bashing, orchestrated by America, with Japan as the lead soloist. That fear will have solidified into a near-certainty when it learned that the keynote speech would be delivered by Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, whom China shuns as a troublemaker intent on reviving Japan’s militarist past.

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