US Return to Asia: How Can We Avoid Conflict?
One day in 2015, the American aircraft carrier “George Washington was conducting routine patrols off the coast of China to send a signal of U.S. resolve. China responded with a signal of its own — sinking the massive ship. The ship broke in two and sank in 20 minutes. The Chinese medium-range ballistic missile had a penetrator warhead that drilled through all 14 decks of the ship and punched a cavernous hole measuring 20-feet wide from the flat-top landing deck through to the bottom of the hull. Ammunition stores ignited secondary explosions. Two million gallons of JP-5 jet fuel poured into the sea.” Thousands of sailors floated desperately in the ocean awaiting rescue.
The description above does not come from the author of a military novel, but is part of a scenario put forward by James Kraska, former Oceans Policy Advisor for the Director of Strategic Plans and Policy, Joint Chiefs of Staff, in an cautionary piece he published in the winter of 2010.
Despite being completely beyond belief and inaccurate in some of its data, nonetheless, one thing is certain: In the view of this author and of many other scholars, there still exists the possibility for a maritime conflict between the United States and China, especially as both sides continue to reinforce their military presence and the magnitude of their activities in the region.
Even if neither side desires a war, given the greater concentration of forces on the sea and in the air, who can guarantee that the rash decisions of a low-level official might not lead to a catastrophic outcome? If a chance dispute on the sea turns into a disaster where one side suffers significant losses, then a conflict would be difficult to avoid and both sides might even be drawn into an inadvertent war.
In fact, there are countless precedents for a dispute that progresses into a military conflict. With regard to China, we have the standoff that occurred between the Chinese nuclear submarine and the U.S. aircraft carrier in a recent decade, the aircraft collision incident over the South China Sea, and other such tense affairs that have previously pushed China into walking an awkward and dangerous tightrope.
Following the 2012 announcement that the U.S. plans to return to an Asia-Pacific based strategy, the U.S. will undoubtedly increase its military presence in the Asia-Pacific region, and its military activities will become more intense. When this happens, China and the U.S. will face even more severe challenges — how to curtail the escalation of military disputes, and to contain the tension between Chinese and American military forces within the bounds of treaty regulations. These items will become high priorities on the bilateral negotiation table.
13 Years of Stagnation
In fact, China and the U.S. did sign the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement in January 1998, but even today, a full 13 years later, the two countries still have not made much progress on building it into a mature and concrete mechanism.
From the mid 1990s, after the end of the “Sino-American Honeymoon,” there has been constant friction between the Chinese and American navies, among which the standoff between the American carrier Kitty Hawk and a Chinese Han class nuclear attack submarine stands out as the most conspicuous and also one of the most influential examples.
In these incidents, owing to the lack of an effective bilateral military communication mechanism, these common military confrontations ultimately escalated to the diplomatic level. Subsequently, the “Taiwan Crisis” pushed the China and American naval forces into more large-scale standoffs.
This caused complications for the Clinton administration of the time. In order to extract themselves from the middle of it, the Clinton administration proposed to China something similar to the Cold War regulation mechanism for maritime activities, in order to curtail military conflict and dispute escalation.
The original good intentions of the Americans stagnated, however, because they were swept up in the constant appearance of such contemporary political questions as the issues of Chinese-American trade, human rights and Taiwan. It was not until 1997, aided by the warming of Sino-American relations brought about by Jiang Zemin's important official visit to the U.S., that the two nations finally agreed in principle to establish a mechanism for interchange.
The next year, the two nations officially signed the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement protocol, and held the first working session under this framework.
The greatest failure of the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement protocol is that it is too simplistic and vague. The agreement only has nine clauses, the most important of which simply establishes the requirement for bilateral annual meetings of two or three days each. The meetings discuss the interaction between the operations of the two sides' naval and air forces on the open sea, using this as an opportunity to promote bilateral military trust and maritime security, covering areas such as search and rescue, procedures for communication between warships when they encounter each other and clarifying shipping regulations, as well as avoiding unintended incidents on the ocean.
In other words, this is just a transitional protocol, and each year's annual meeting is sufficient for the two sides to do basic groundwork by consulting and establishing a set of pragmatic, detailed and workable standards of conduct.
In the last 13 years, China and the U.S. really haven't stringently abided by the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement, having convened only 10 annual meetings. According to a report that carefully examines these meetings, one can see that the Chinese and American media coverage of these meetings is more and more scarce (there being a little more coverage in the U.S.). However the product of each meeting always appears to be stifled diplomatic language.
Looking at the official report from the most recent meeting in Hawaii in October 2011, the most significant outcome of the meeting was that, “the two sides settled on the topics for the next annual meeting.”
Repeated identical meetings like this seem to have long ago deviated from the original American ideal of a complete and accurate standards mechanism, and are merely what China sees as a channel of communication.
In fact, this is also the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement's most successful point.
The year after China and the U.S. signed this agreement, the American guided missile attack on the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia occurred. China, in order to express its strong displeasure, took measures to halt all military contacts with America and bilateral relations fell to freezing point. However, following the warming of Sino-American relations, under the framework of the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement, the two sides again renewed and reinstated all discontinued military contacts. This is the only point on which the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement can claim any kind of greatness.
Despite this, after the passage of 13 long years, China and the U.S. have made no forward progress, and it's hard to say that the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement has advanced at all. If the two sides had really established a set of improved mechanisms for regulating activities, perhaps the 2001 South China Sea aircraft collision incident and other such military disputes ultimately could have had different outcomes.
Letting Go of the Political Strings
China's policy-making echelons may still harbor some misgivings about it, but given the increasing risk that China and America could become involved in a maritime conflict, the continued improvement and enhancement of the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement is something that should be considered again after 13 years.
For China, the most optimal decision might be to sign something like the former U.S.-Soviet “Agreement on the Prevention of Incidents on and over the High Seas.”
It was due to this very agreement that the United States, with more than 10,000 naval ships of various models and more than 40,000 military aircraft throughout the world, competing against a similarly large Soviet force, faced no catastrophic aftermath as a result of disputes at sea, and certain kinds of standoffs and run-ins were even limited.
The reason it achieved such a significant outcome is all due to the fact that the U.S.-Soviet bilateral agreement rose from the considerations of pragmatism, surpassing the constraints of politics, and even more so the bonds of ideology. In the course of implementing subsequent agreements, America and the Soviet Union maintained an objective approach of professionalism and technology.
Compared with the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement signed by the U.S. and China, the U.S.-Soviet Agreement on the Prevention of Incidents on and over the High Seas is not simply a communication channel, it is moreover a set of detailed regulations for military contact.
For example, Agreement on the Prevention of Incidents on and over the High Seas, aside from declaring American and Soviet bilateral respect for the “International Regulations on Preventing Collisions at Sea,” the “International Code of Signals” and other such common international conventions, also standardized the specific conduct for U.S. and Soviet maritime military units (including warships and aircraft, not including submarines and unmanned craft) to follow when they encounter each other in times of peace.
The content of the agreement touched on all aspects of the regular navigation of naval ships and aircraft, formation exercises, sea maneuvers, oceanic research, and emergency activities at sea; all kinds of operations that could have led to errors of judgment and misunderstandings were clearly governed by regulations. For example, regulations prohibited many inimical and threatening activities, and prohibited warships on both sides from making simulated attacks on each other.
What made the agreement even more successful was that it possessed high-level independence, and was fundamentally free of political and diplomatic influence. In their regular consultative meetings, the Americans and Soviets always dispatched naval professionals to attend, and moreover did not allow their respective foreign ministries to become involved, nor did they allow the news media to take advantage of the meetings to create hype.
Although a measure of the American public's right to know was sacrificed, the topics that both sides were able to discuss were treated as high-level technical discussions, were not constrained by diplomatic bonds and did not devolve into finger-pointing and rhetorical nonsense. In this professional atmosphere, both sides avoided the disadvantages of political agreements and peacefully resolved whatever accidents occurred.
In this atmosphere of professionalism, all evidence regarding incidents between the parties (such as photographs, video recordings, maritime maps, nautical logs) were arranged on a table; those at the meeting then proceeded item by item, analyzing the background of the accident and determining where responsibility genuinely lay. It is precisely an impartial and rational mechanism like this that compels lower level officers to be more cautious and restrained in the course of a confrontation, strictly carrying out the clear regulations of the agreement, with the result that both parties avoid one day being burned as a result of an accidental confrontation.
Freedom from the extremes that go along with political elements enabled the treaty mechanism to operate to the greatest degree without obstruction, even during periods of significant disputes or diplomatic tension, so when a real crisis arose, it seemed all the more valuable.
In 1979, after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the U.S. suspended the majority of its official dialogue with the Soviet Union, but communication under the Agreement on the Prevention of Incidents on and over the High Seas framework remained free and clear. In contrast with the situation during the Cuban Missile Crisis of Kennedy's time, when the leaders of the U.S. and USSR had to rely on mass media to transmit messages to each other, this mechanism undoubtedly preserved the peace to a greater degree.
Standing the tests of time, the U.S.-Soviet Agreement on the Prevention of Incidents on and over the High Seas agreement achieved significant success, effectively limiting the amount of bilateral military friction. In the 1960s there were on average more than 100 hostile American and Soviet maritime military confrontations each year. But in the 10 years after the signing of the agreement, the annual number fell to 40.
Precisely because of the effectiveness of the Agreement on the Prevention of Incidents on and over the High Seas agreement, not only did the scope of American and Soviet agreements increase with time, but the Soviet Union and other American allies also signed similar agreements one after another, and after the breakup of the USSR, this system of constraints was carried on by the newly born Russian Federation.
In the new century, China and America stand against a new background and face new questions. Although there is no way to directly copy the U.S.-Soviet Agreement on the Prevention of Incidents on and over the High Seas agreement, nonetheless contemporary China still needs to follow on the successful past experiences of the U.S. and USSR, while finding a road that fits our era and ourselves.
The Problems China Faces
The most important reason that China cannot directly copy the U.S.-Soviet Agreement on the Prevention of Incidents on and over the High Seas agreement lies in the fact that maritime confrontations between the U.S. and USSR during the Cold War occurred on the high seas, and the two parties were more or less equal in strength. In the future, Chinese and American sea conflicts will more often take place within the 200 nautical miles of the Chinese exclusive economic zone. Given the gap between the relative strengths of the two parties, China is clearly in a passive position, and requesting America, which holds the superior advantage, to sign an equal agreement, would be doomed to certain trouble.
The Agreement on the Prevention of Incidents on and over the High Seas agreement that the Americans and Soviets signed was largely based on the 1958 “Geneva Convention on the High Seas,” and the idea of exclusive economic zones did not exist at that time. Following the enactment of the 1994 “United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea,” the category of the high seas was pushed out beyond the exclusive economic zones.
For the U.S., which desires the greatest freedom to navigate and engage in military maneuvers, rather than speaking of high seas, it is preferable to continue to make use of the vague concept of “international waters.” This creates the risk of confrontations within the exclusive economic zone (prior to this many disputes having occurred within the area of China's exclusive economic zone). However for China, in its clearly passive position, this is untenable, and China must ponder the question of how to defend its sovereign interests in the exclusive economic zone.
In addition to this, if China and the U.S. need to advance a step to improve the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement, the parties must clarify the boundaries of China's territorial waters as well as those of the exclusive economic zone. However, many controversies still exist on this issue between China and its neighbors, and the U.S. cannot hastily sacrifice the interests of its allies and partners in order to yield to China.
Are we then to request China to make its most important concrete choices in order to pursue and reinforce nominal political advantages that cannot be implemented? Or should we choose a pragmatic and flexible approach to pursuing real advantages? You can't have your cake and eat it too, so China clearly must approach this question wisely.
Furthermore, the shock wave of the internet age has already made it difficult for the U.S. and China to operate in a vacuum, and to establish an incident resolution mechanism entirely independent from the rest of the public and society. The question of how to respond to the public mood, especially to China's rising nationalist sentiments, must become a new consideration for China and America's further development of the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement mechanism.
In the future, Chinese and American military disputes will increasingly be concentrated in the vicinity of China's territorial waters, and against this backdrop China and America will be hard pressed to resolve disputes quietly and covertly. Even if it is an incident that occurs under the sea, it will still be very difficult to guarantee that news will not leak out. The case of the previous fatal accident involving Chinese submarine #361 illustrates this issue, where even then the news flowed out across the internet.
Even if China can sufficiently control the flow of news to the public, it is still very difficult to guarantee that U.S. military personnel would not use social media (like Facebook and Twitter) to leak related information. Once the public learns of a run-in that has caused casualties and losses, the emotional domestic mood will make the continued proper handling of the incident through the protocol mechanism incredibly difficult.
In fact, under former circumstances when the internet had not yet been developed, the approach to resolving disputes between China and the U.S., which did not take the public mood and reaction into consideration, had already met with intense repercussions in popular society.
In addition to the aforementioned issues, there are also some old problems that nag China.
First of all, if we want to continue to deepen the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement agreement, then we must strengthen the position of China's naval independence, and break away from its current dependent posture. For the independent U.S. Navy, the U.S.-Soviet Agreement on the Prevention of Incidents on and over the High Seas agreement has always been seen as a special advantage, because of maintaining covert contact with the enemy is in itself a kind of embodiment of importance.
At each of the previous Military Maritime Consultative Agreement working meetings between China and the United States, one could always see the figures of high ranking officials who had emerged from China's land forces (under the principle of parity, America also has to field equally ranked officials). China appears to have mistakenly transformed these meetings into political and diplomatic ones, and it will be difficult to restore the essential character of this preventative agreement. It will also be very difficult to really work on handing it over to a genuine and independent Chinese navy. At the most fundamental level this error lies in the fact that among personnel of all ranks from top to bottom, the Chinese navy is just a system of ranks, and not a branch of the military with its own independent spirit, independent nature, and independent mission.
Though the China of the future may face this or that kind of old or new problem, nonetheless China and America must act as quickly as possible to undertake improvements and upgrades of the already greatly effective Military Maritime Consultative Agreement system, in order to bring out its greater usefulness.
Within the narrow regions and spaces of East Asia in which the future military activities of China and America will be increasingly concentrated, the density of military activities and the probability of contact between military units of both sides will increase. Improving the robustness of the mechanism of the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement will not only be a short-term urgent issue of safeguarding security, but looking at the long-term, it has an even more profound significance with regard to deepening and normalizing Sino-American bilateral military contact.
The description above does not come from the author of a military novel, but is part of a scenario put forward by James Kraska, former Oceans Policy Advisor for the Director of Strategic Plans and Policy, Joint Chiefs of Staff, in an cautionary piece he published in the winter of 2010.
Despite being completely beyond belief and inaccurate in some of its data, nonetheless, one thing is certain: In the view of this author and of many other scholars, there still exists the possibility for a maritime conflict between the United States and China, especially as both sides continue to reinforce their military presence and the magnitude of their activities in the region.
Even if neither side desires a war, given the greater concentration of forces on the sea and in the air, who can guarantee that the rash decisions of a low-level official might not lead to a catastrophic outcome? If a chance dispute on the sea turns into a disaster where one side suffers significant losses, then a conflict would be difficult to avoid and both sides might even be drawn into an inadvertent war.
In fact, there are countless precedents for a dispute that progresses into a military conflict. With regard to China, we have the standoff that occurred between the Chinese nuclear submarine and the U.S. aircraft carrier in a recent decade, the aircraft collision incident over the South China Sea, and other such tense affairs that have previously pushed China into walking an awkward and dangerous tightrope.
Following the 2012 announcement that the U.S. plans to return to an Asia-Pacific based strategy, the U.S. will undoubtedly increase its military presence in the Asia-Pacific region, and its military activities will become more intense. When this happens, China and the U.S. will face even more severe challenges — how to curtail the escalation of military disputes, and to contain the tension between Chinese and American military forces within the bounds of treaty regulations. These items will become high priorities on the bilateral negotiation table.
13 Years of Stagnation
In fact, China and the U.S. did sign the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement in January 1998, but even today, a full 13 years later, the two countries still have not made much progress on building it into a mature and concrete mechanism.
From the mid 1990s, after the end of the “Sino-American Honeymoon,” there has been constant friction between the Chinese and American navies, among which the standoff between the American carrier Kitty Hawk and a Chinese Han class nuclear attack submarine stands out as the most conspicuous and also one of the most influential examples.
In these incidents, owing to the lack of an effective bilateral military communication mechanism, these common military confrontations ultimately escalated to the diplomatic level. Subsequently, the “Taiwan Crisis” pushed the China and American naval forces into more large-scale standoffs.
This caused complications for the Clinton administration of the time. In order to extract themselves from the middle of it, the Clinton administration proposed to China something similar to the Cold War regulation mechanism for maritime activities, in order to curtail military conflict and dispute escalation.
The original good intentions of the Americans stagnated, however, because they were swept up in the constant appearance of such contemporary political questions as the issues of Chinese-American trade, human rights and Taiwan. It was not until 1997, aided by the warming of Sino-American relations brought about by Jiang Zemin's important official visit to the U.S., that the two nations finally agreed in principle to establish a mechanism for interchange.
The next year, the two nations officially signed the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement protocol, and held the first working session under this framework.
The greatest failure of the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement protocol is that it is too simplistic and vague. The agreement only has nine clauses, the most important of which simply establishes the requirement for bilateral annual meetings of two or three days each. The meetings discuss the interaction between the operations of the two sides' naval and air forces on the open sea, using this as an opportunity to promote bilateral military trust and maritime security, covering areas such as search and rescue, procedures for communication between warships when they encounter each other and clarifying shipping regulations, as well as avoiding unintended incidents on the ocean.
In other words, this is just a transitional protocol, and each year's annual meeting is sufficient for the two sides to do basic groundwork by consulting and establishing a set of pragmatic, detailed and workable standards of conduct.
In the last 13 years, China and the U.S. really haven't stringently abided by the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement, having convened only 10 annual meetings. According to a report that carefully examines these meetings, one can see that the Chinese and American media coverage of these meetings is more and more scarce (there being a little more coverage in the U.S.). However the product of each meeting always appears to be stifled diplomatic language.
Looking at the official report from the most recent meeting in Hawaii in October 2011, the most significant outcome of the meeting was that, “the two sides settled on the topics for the next annual meeting.”
Repeated identical meetings like this seem to have long ago deviated from the original American ideal of a complete and accurate standards mechanism, and are merely what China sees as a channel of communication.
In fact, this is also the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement's most successful point.
The year after China and the U.S. signed this agreement, the American guided missile attack on the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia occurred. China, in order to express its strong displeasure, took measures to halt all military contacts with America and bilateral relations fell to freezing point. However, following the warming of Sino-American relations, under the framework of the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement, the two sides again renewed and reinstated all discontinued military contacts. This is the only point on which the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement can claim any kind of greatness.
Despite this, after the passage of 13 long years, China and the U.S. have made no forward progress, and it's hard to say that the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement has advanced at all. If the two sides had really established a set of improved mechanisms for regulating activities, perhaps the 2001 South China Sea aircraft collision incident and other such military disputes ultimately could have had different outcomes.
Letting Go of the Political Strings
China's policy-making echelons may still harbor some misgivings about it, but given the increasing risk that China and America could become involved in a maritime conflict, the continued improvement and enhancement of the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement is something that should be considered again after 13 years.
For China, the most optimal decision might be to sign something like the former U.S.-Soviet “Agreement on the Prevention of Incidents on and over the High Seas.”
It was due to this very agreement that the United States, with more than 10,000 naval ships of various models and more than 40,000 military aircraft throughout the world, competing against a similarly large Soviet force, faced no catastrophic aftermath as a result of disputes at sea, and certain kinds of standoffs and run-ins were even limited.
The reason it achieved such a significant outcome is all due to the fact that the U.S.-Soviet bilateral agreement rose from the considerations of pragmatism, surpassing the constraints of politics, and even more so the bonds of ideology. In the course of implementing subsequent agreements, America and the Soviet Union maintained an objective approach of professionalism and technology.
Compared with the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement signed by the U.S. and China, the U.S.-Soviet Agreement on the Prevention of Incidents on and over the High Seas is not simply a communication channel, it is moreover a set of detailed regulations for military contact.
For example, Agreement on the Prevention of Incidents on and over the High Seas, aside from declaring American and Soviet bilateral respect for the “International Regulations on Preventing Collisions at Sea,” the “International Code of Signals” and other such common international conventions, also standardized the specific conduct for U.S. and Soviet maritime military units (including warships and aircraft, not including submarines and unmanned craft) to follow when they encounter each other in times of peace.
The content of the agreement touched on all aspects of the regular navigation of naval ships and aircraft, formation exercises, sea maneuvers, oceanic research, and emergency activities at sea; all kinds of operations that could have led to errors of judgment and misunderstandings were clearly governed by regulations. For example, regulations prohibited many inimical and threatening activities, and prohibited warships on both sides from making simulated attacks on each other.
What made the agreement even more successful was that it possessed high-level independence, and was fundamentally free of political and diplomatic influence. In their regular consultative meetings, the Americans and Soviets always dispatched naval professionals to attend, and moreover did not allow their respective foreign ministries to become involved, nor did they allow the news media to take advantage of the meetings to create hype.
Although a measure of the American public's right to know was sacrificed, the topics that both sides were able to discuss were treated as high-level technical discussions, were not constrained by diplomatic bonds and did not devolve into finger-pointing and rhetorical nonsense. In this professional atmosphere, both sides avoided the disadvantages of political agreements and peacefully resolved whatever accidents occurred.
In this atmosphere of professionalism, all evidence regarding incidents between the parties (such as photographs, video recordings, maritime maps, nautical logs) were arranged on a table; those at the meeting then proceeded item by item, analyzing the background of the accident and determining where responsibility genuinely lay. It is precisely an impartial and rational mechanism like this that compels lower level officers to be more cautious and restrained in the course of a confrontation, strictly carrying out the clear regulations of the agreement, with the result that both parties avoid one day being burned as a result of an accidental confrontation.
Freedom from the extremes that go along with political elements enabled the treaty mechanism to operate to the greatest degree without obstruction, even during periods of significant disputes or diplomatic tension, so when a real crisis arose, it seemed all the more valuable.
In 1979, after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the U.S. suspended the majority of its official dialogue with the Soviet Union, but communication under the Agreement on the Prevention of Incidents on and over the High Seas framework remained free and clear. In contrast with the situation during the Cuban Missile Crisis of Kennedy's time, when the leaders of the U.S. and USSR had to rely on mass media to transmit messages to each other, this mechanism undoubtedly preserved the peace to a greater degree.
Standing the tests of time, the U.S.-Soviet Agreement on the Prevention of Incidents on and over the High Seas agreement achieved significant success, effectively limiting the amount of bilateral military friction. In the 1960s there were on average more than 100 hostile American and Soviet maritime military confrontations each year. But in the 10 years after the signing of the agreement, the annual number fell to 40.
Precisely because of the effectiveness of the Agreement on the Prevention of Incidents on and over the High Seas agreement, not only did the scope of American and Soviet agreements increase with time, but the Soviet Union and other American allies also signed similar agreements one after another, and after the breakup of the USSR, this system of constraints was carried on by the newly born Russian Federation.
In the new century, China and America stand against a new background and face new questions. Although there is no way to directly copy the U.S.-Soviet Agreement on the Prevention of Incidents on and over the High Seas agreement, nonetheless contemporary China still needs to follow on the successful past experiences of the U.S. and USSR, while finding a road that fits our era and ourselves.
The Problems China Faces
The most important reason that China cannot directly copy the U.S.-Soviet Agreement on the Prevention of Incidents on and over the High Seas agreement lies in the fact that maritime confrontations between the U.S. and USSR during the Cold War occurred on the high seas, and the two parties were more or less equal in strength. In the future, Chinese and American sea conflicts will more often take place within the 200 nautical miles of the Chinese exclusive economic zone. Given the gap between the relative strengths of the two parties, China is clearly in a passive position, and requesting America, which holds the superior advantage, to sign an equal agreement, would be doomed to certain trouble.
The Agreement on the Prevention of Incidents on and over the High Seas agreement that the Americans and Soviets signed was largely based on the 1958 “Geneva Convention on the High Seas,” and the idea of exclusive economic zones did not exist at that time. Following the enactment of the 1994 “United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea,” the category of the high seas was pushed out beyond the exclusive economic zones.
For the U.S., which desires the greatest freedom to navigate and engage in military maneuvers, rather than speaking of high seas, it is preferable to continue to make use of the vague concept of “international waters.” This creates the risk of confrontations within the exclusive economic zone (prior to this many disputes having occurred within the area of China's exclusive economic zone). However for China, in its clearly passive position, this is untenable, and China must ponder the question of how to defend its sovereign interests in the exclusive economic zone.
In addition to this, if China and the U.S. need to advance a step to improve the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement, the parties must clarify the boundaries of China's territorial waters as well as those of the exclusive economic zone. However, many controversies still exist on this issue between China and its neighbors, and the U.S. cannot hastily sacrifice the interests of its allies and partners in order to yield to China.
Are we then to request China to make its most important concrete choices in order to pursue and reinforce nominal political advantages that cannot be implemented? Or should we choose a pragmatic and flexible approach to pursuing real advantages? You can't have your cake and eat it too, so China clearly must approach this question wisely.
Furthermore, the shock wave of the internet age has already made it difficult for the U.S. and China to operate in a vacuum, and to establish an incident resolution mechanism entirely independent from the rest of the public and society. The question of how to respond to the public mood, especially to China's rising nationalist sentiments, must become a new consideration for China and America's further development of the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement mechanism.
In the future, Chinese and American military disputes will increasingly be concentrated in the vicinity of China's territorial waters, and against this backdrop China and America will be hard pressed to resolve disputes quietly and covertly. Even if it is an incident that occurs under the sea, it will still be very difficult to guarantee that news will not leak out. The case of the previous fatal accident involving Chinese submarine #361 illustrates this issue, where even then the news flowed out across the internet.
Even if China can sufficiently control the flow of news to the public, it is still very difficult to guarantee that U.S. military personnel would not use social media (like Facebook and Twitter) to leak related information. Once the public learns of a run-in that has caused casualties and losses, the emotional domestic mood will make the continued proper handling of the incident through the protocol mechanism incredibly difficult.
In fact, under former circumstances when the internet had not yet been developed, the approach to resolving disputes between China and the U.S., which did not take the public mood and reaction into consideration, had already met with intense repercussions in popular society.
In addition to the aforementioned issues, there are also some old problems that nag China.
First of all, if we want to continue to deepen the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement agreement, then we must strengthen the position of China's naval independence, and break away from its current dependent posture. For the independent U.S. Navy, the U.S.-Soviet Agreement on the Prevention of Incidents on and over the High Seas agreement has always been seen as a special advantage, because of maintaining covert contact with the enemy is in itself a kind of embodiment of importance.
At each of the previous Military Maritime Consultative Agreement working meetings between China and the United States, one could always see the figures of high ranking officials who had emerged from China's land forces (under the principle of parity, America also has to field equally ranked officials). China appears to have mistakenly transformed these meetings into political and diplomatic ones, and it will be difficult to restore the essential character of this preventative agreement. It will also be very difficult to really work on handing it over to a genuine and independent Chinese navy. At the most fundamental level this error lies in the fact that among personnel of all ranks from top to bottom, the Chinese navy is just a system of ranks, and not a branch of the military with its own independent spirit, independent nature, and independent mission.
Though the China of the future may face this or that kind of old or new problem, nonetheless China and America must act as quickly as possible to undertake improvements and upgrades of the already greatly effective Military Maritime Consultative Agreement system, in order to bring out its greater usefulness.
Within the narrow regions and spaces of East Asia in which the future military activities of China and America will be increasingly concentrated, the density of military activities and the probability of contact between military units of both sides will increase. Improving the robustness of the mechanism of the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement will not only be a short-term urgent issue of safeguarding security, but looking at the long-term, it has an even more profound significance with regard to deepening and normalizing Sino-American bilateral military contact.