Asian defence ministers to meet in Hanoi amid concern over Chinese build-up

By Siti Rahil

Hanoi, July 18 Kyodo - Foreign ministers from 27 countries will discuss ways to promote confidence-building at an annual Asian regional security forum here from Tuesday amid China's rapid military-building that has raised the concern of neighbouring countries and sparked an arms race in the region.

The ministers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and other major powers, including the United States, Japan, China and Russia are gathering in the capital of Vietnam for the ASEAN Regional Forum.

The buildup, meant to protect its growing economic clout, has been one of the main factors prompting China's economically dynamic Southeast Asian neighbours to sharply raise their defence spending and modernize their ageing military equipment in recent years.

"China's military has been developing quite fast in the past few years, especially its naval power," said Huang Jing, a scholar on the Chinese military at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore.

"It has already affected Southeast Asian countries. China is now an engine for the entire region, which has become more integrated with China's economy.

However, in terms of security and military, the Southeast Asian countries are trying to hedge against China," he said.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's Arms Transfers Database, arms deliveries to Southeast Asia nearly doubled from 2005 to 2009 compared to the five preceding years, with weapons deliveries to Malaysia jumping by 722 per cent, Singapore by 146 per cent and Indonesia by 84 per cent.

Singapore was the fourth-largest buyer of weapons in Asia during the period after China, India and South Korea. The wealthy but small city-state's recent arms purchases included eight F-15E combat aircraft with advanced air-to-air and air-to-ground missiles from the United States, two La Fayette frigates from France and 40 tanks from Germany. Last year, Malaysia acquired combat aircraft with advanced missiles from Russia, its first submarines from France and Spain, frigates from Germany and tanks from Poland.

China already has the most powerful military in the region, Huang said. "If you take out the United States and Russia, nobody can overtake China in terms of military power in the region," he said. "Ten years ago, there was a 40-year gap between the military capability of China and that of the US, now that gap has been shortened to 15 years." The Chinese navy, which used to be very backward in the mid-1990s, lagging behind the United States or Japanese navy by least 40 years, is already on the verge of operating across the deep waters of open oceans. "Right now China already has navy that can go into blue water," Huang said.

China last year made the unprecedented move of sending its naval fleet on its first escort mission against pirates in the waters of the Gulf of Aden off Somalia. And in an apparent sign that the country is intent on securing its maritime interests and projecting force in the region and beyond, the Chinese military is building a naval base on Hainan, an island in the South China Sea, for nuclear submarines capable of firing ballistic missiles.

It started to build up its military vigorously after the Taiwan crisis in the mid-1990s, when China test-fired missiles over the island that it regards as a renegade province. Today, China's military is strong enough to extend its tentacles beyond Taiwan.

In March this year, the Chinese government officially conveyed a new state policy to the United States, saying that it considers the South China Sea as part of its "core interests" that concern China's sovereignty and territorial integrity. By adding the South China Sea to its core interests, China has made clear its determination to secure maritime interests in strategic waters that connect Northeast Asia and the Indian Sea and are a source of territorial disputes between China and other countries in the region.

In recent years, China has asserted that its military will not only defend Chinese territorial boundaries but also China's national interest. This adds a sense of uncertainty to other countries in the region as China's economic interests could reach as far as the Straits of Malacca, Africa and the Middle East.

Several ASEAN countries, notably Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines and Brunei, have a territorial dispute with China in the South China Sea, particularly over the resource-rich Spratly islands.

As part of confidence-building efforts, ASEAN has been working to elevate a 2002 declaration signed with China on the South China Sea into a "Regional Code of Conduct," but it has not been an easy task to get China to agree to it. So far they have agreed on several joint cooperation projects but there are still disagreements on even the guidelines to get the projects going. For example, China is against any mention in the guideline that ASEAN members will get together first before meeting China, because China does not want to multilateralize an issue that it regards as bilateral.

Li Mingjiang, assistant professor on China and East Asian security at the S.

Rajaratnam School of International Studies, said, "A lot of people in China are worried about safety of navigation in the Malacca Straits, a possible scenario is the US using forceful means to block the Malacca Straits and prevent the supply of Chinese oil and gas and other commercial goods from passing through the Malacca Straits." The problem with China is that it does not have a clearly defined national or regional defence strategy due to its breakneck economic growth in recent years that has outstripped its traditional defence strategy.

In the past, China's defence strategy had been pointed towards cracking down on internal stability and preventing Taiwanese independence moves. "But now, Chinese military force has gone beyond all that, China now has military capability," Huang said.

The annual ASEAN foreign ministers meeting will begin in Hanoi on Tuesday, followed by a meeting between ASEAN foreign ministers and their counterparts from Japan, China and South Korea on Wednesday, and the ASEAN Regional Forum, a multilateral forum on security in the Asia-Pacific region on Friday, which will be attended by ministers from major powers outside ASEAN, including US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada.

ASEAN groups Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.