John Mearsheimer, of “and Walt” fame, lays out the scenario (pdf) for growing US-Chinese rivalry in the Pacific, culminating in an American-led balancing coalition of nations off the Chinese littoral. It’s nothing personal:
I expect China to act the way the United States has acted over its long history. Specifically, I believe that China will try to dominate the Asia-Pacific region much as the United States dominates the Western Hemisphere. For good strategic reasons, China will seek to maximize the power gap between itself and potentially dangerous neighbors like India, Japan and Russia. China will want to make sure that it is so powerful that no state in Asia has the wherewithal to threaten it. It is unlikely that China will pursue military superiority so that it can go on the warpath and conquer other countries in the region, although that is always a possibility. Instead, it is more likely that Beijing will want to dictate the boundaries of acceptable behavior to neighboring countries, much the way the United States makes it clear to other states in the Americas that it is the boss. Gaining regional hegemony, I might add, is probably the only way that China will get Taiwan back.
A much more powerful China can also be expected to try to push the United States out of the Pacific-Asia region, much the way the United States pushed the European great powers out of the Western Hemisphere in the nineteenth century. We should expect China to come up with its own version of the Monroe Doctrine, as Imperial Japan did in the 1930s. In fact, we are already seeing inklings of that policy. Consider that in March, Chinese officials told two high-ranking American policymakers that the United States was no longer allowed to interfere in the South China Sea, which China views as a “core interest” like Taiwan and Tibet.
via. This latter isn’t quite true: China has offered to resolve disputes over various hydrocarbon-handy lumps of rock in the ocean bilaterally with the relevant counterparties. Tibet and Taiwan aren’t up for negotiation at all. I suspect that the phrase “core interest” is being translated into English from phrases meaning different things in Chinese – maybe an example of strategic communications applied to translation.
The other factor is that China can’t treat a lot of the countries around it in the same way as the US treated those of its neighbours which weren’t under the protection of the British Empire (ie, nearly all of its southern ones). Bhutan, Cambodia and Laos may be the equivalent of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, but Japan isn’t Mexico and South Korea isn’t Nicaragua. Vietnam and India pose unique problems of their own. The seas off China could conceivably become an Asian lake, but they can’t become a Chinese lake because China is too weak to make it happen now, and an aggressive push to develop that capability might move the littoral states into a US backed containing alliance against China. There’s little chance here of China being able to impose a Monroe Doctrine.
I don’t think we’re seeing a containing alliance in formation right now. Mearsheimer notes that US support for Kopassus followed the Indonesian military hinting that it would work with the Chinese if the US refused to co-operate. What you have here is a bidding war. China’s chances of winning it depend on whether it can behave more rationally, reasonably and generously to its neighbours than the United States. Mearsheimer again:
...most Chinese are well aware of how the United States took advantage of a weak China by pushing forward the infamous “Open Door” policy in the early 20th century. Chinese officials also know that the United States and China fought a bloody war in Korea between 1950 and 1953. It is not surprising that the Economist recently reported that, “A retired Chinese admiral likened the American navy to a man with a criminal record ‘wandering just outside the gate of a family home’.”
True enough: So what China needs is a neighborhood watch, and to be able to put aside its local historic grievances – with Japan, Vietnam and India, for instance - in order to get one.