 So we'll follow on the light topic of the last panel about nuclear war in South Asia with a panel about yet another insignificant part of the world. We're going to look at whether a long piece is possible in Asia and more specifically how China sees itself in the world and the future of war in the region. So happily, we've already spoken about this in a few of the last panels, even the question of whether there could be World War III begun through a conflict between the US and China. But to help us think through these issues, we have a great panel with people who have a few different areas of expertise. So Dr. Orianna Mastrow at the end, there is a professor of security studies at Georgetown University and she focuses on the Chinese military and security policy. She's also in the Air Force Reserve, so she's promised to use military precision and keeping us all on time. Dr. Sheldon Simon is a professor and director of ASU's Center for Asian Studies and he focuses on China's influence in Southeast Asia. So he'll be giving us a great overview of what's happening in the South China Sea and China's version of the Monroe Doctrine as we discussed last night. And lastly, my old friend, Philippe Lacour, who I met while on a Fulbright in Hong Kong 15 or so years ago, who's a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution focusing on China's foreign policy, especially as it pertains to Europe and has a new book coming out dealing with China's investment in Europe. So with that, Orianna, can you start us off with a bit of an overview? Sure, inviting me today. I do only have four minutes and so I'm gonna cut right to the chase. The question of this panel is, oh, do we have some mic issues? No one can hear me, nobody. Is there someone that can come up here and help me with the mic issues? Or do you just want me to shout? Okay, I'm just gonna continue on with the bottom line up front of how we can answer this question of, is a long piece possible in Asia? The short answer is, if you define a long piece, thank you, better. Does this work now? Yes, better. If you define a long piece as the absence of armed conflict or the use of military force to accomplish political and economic goals, I think the answer is no. More likely, what we're gonna see in Asia is limited conflicts in the coming decades and these conflicts are largely going to be associated with the rise of China. A brief caveat, however, China does not have global intentions. I think Chinese objectives are extremely limited, what they say they want in terms of the territorial claims, I don't think that will change. And though I've recently written a piece at the national interest on the future of a global Chinese military, that piece was largely designed as a thought piece of what would happen that would force the Chinese against current plans to have a more global presence, which is currently not in the cards. But as China rises in power, it's going to expect and want other countries to accommodate its newfound position. It's going to want to translate its new power into achieving political and economic goals. China wants to be the dominant power in the Asia Pacific. The ideal system from the perspective of Beijing is an Asia that is multipolar in which China is one of the poles. And actually, ideally, one of the dominant poles. What this means is a decreased influence and role for the United States. These competing visions of the United States that is determined to stay in Asia and China that would like the United States to militarily disengage in the region is why we have increased competition and tension in the relationship. Now, of course, there are areas of mutual interest and opportunities for cooperation. But the bottom line is that in recent Chinese writings, they've shifted their perspective from the role of the United States as being a positive stabilizing factor to one in which the United States is the primary obstacle to their rise. Because of this, the United States is the chief actor in Chinese war planning when they think of the future of war. The Chinese think of sort of three types of conflict, all US-centric. First, they write about how the primary threat of war rises from US potential disruptive policies. Second, they think about how the threat is going to come from USC power. And third, that the primary source of conflict is basically the United States refusing to decline gracefully, but instead doubling down in the form of the rebalancing to maintain its position. So the trends are not good. Xi Jinping has more recently domestically, the primary leader of China has launched a domestic campaign, a war against Western influence in Chinese education. These are not good signs in which he wants to eliminate the role of the West in the history, politics, law, and other areas. Xi Jinping is a nationalist. He's not just using nationalism as a tool to rally his people. So in this context, again, I think that conflict is likely, but on a very limited scale. I think as many of us in the West, we think about war, we think about World War I, World War II, but really we're thinking more of these 30 day conflicts that we've seen in Asia, which a handful of people are killed that aren't at the grand scale that we're thinking about. So for military planners, the big question is not whether or not there's gonna be a conflict in Asia, but instead, how are the Chinese going to perform? This is the huge uncertainty. The Chinese have focused lately on soft modernization. They have for decades been building platforms and focusing on certain weapon systems to design, but now they have the hard part. They have huge weaknesses associated with their personnel's ability to actually conduct operations. We can talk more in the Q&A about the army dominance and how that hurts joint operations, shared command responsibility, inexperienced commanders and staff, and basically known in the Chinese military, very few have any combat experience since the last war they fight was 1979. So this is Xi Jinping's legacy. He wants soft modernization in terms of institutional organizational reform that allows them to achieve their goals if they need to through force. Corruption is a big part of this in which he'd like to enhance morale within the military and a meritocracy so that the people actually believe those who are commanding them are worthy of that position and hopefully in a conflict will actually listen to the commands issued down to them. So this is a very stark view about is the long piece possible? I don't think so. But I don't think it looks as bad as we think it will either. And the big uncertainty on both sides that imposes caution on the Chinese is how they will perform. And if there is a limited shorter conflict in which the Chinese gain that operational experience that they need to have confidence, that's when we need to be more concerned. Thanks so much, Orianna. Sheldon, if you would take us to one particular touchstone. Sure, does my mic work? I guess it does. It does, so you don't need that. Pass that on to you. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm gonna pick up on some of the themes that Orianna presented and focus them on the South China Sea. I think that China does indeed have a grand strategy. Many China analysts don't, but I think it does. And I wanna look at the South China Sea as an example of that grand strategy. What China is doing in my mind is striving for an exclusive sphere of influence in its neighborhood. A restoration, if you will, of the traditional Middle Kingdom dominance or put another way, a Chinese Monroe doctrine. It's not gonna happen overnight and it's not even gonna happen in a few years. But 10 to 20 years from now, I think Chinese leaders envision a situation in which the East and South China Seas will be dominated by the People's Republic of China. Let's look at the South China Sea. It's a main theater for this effort, in my view. It is a semi-enclosed body of water that straddles key shipping lanes from Southeast Asia to Northeast Asia. The Southeast Asian countries around the South China Sea are small and medium-sized countries. They don't have the material capability to resist China's supremacy. Unlike in Northeast Asia, the U.S. security presence in the South China Sea is smaller and American security commitments in Southeast Asia are seen as less robust than in Northeast Asia. China's legal claim to the South China Sea is its so-called nine-dash line or causton, depending on which similarly you wanna use. It encompasses about 80% of the South China Sea. The initial evidence for implementation of the nine-dash line was the discovery of China's occupation of mischief reef off the Philippines Palawan Island in 1995. Nevertheless, it was more than a decade later that China possessed the maritime capabilities to begin to exclude the boats of Southeast Asian states from this region, particularly the boats of the Philippines and Vietnam. In China's grand strategy, its maritime dominance of the South China Sea is part of its ability to dominate what China refers to as the first island chain that stretches from Japan's Ryukyu Islands all the way down to the Philippines. Control of that stretch of ocean is seen as essential for China to implement its anti-access area denial strategy vis-a-vis the United States. Returning to its South China Sea claims, China's nine-dash line or causton encompasses the bulk of the South China Sea waters is based on the concept that control of those waters determines who owns the land features within the South China Sea. That concept is a true puzzle to those countries that have signed and ratified the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. That convention, according to over 90% of the signatories, states the opposite, that land determines water, water that, yeah, land determines water and not the other way around. So the exclusive economic zones and so on are determined by land. China's claim is that that's irrelevant. China owns the sea, therefore it controls the sea. China is now building structures, some of the speakers yesterday talked about it, on the islands it controls, particularly in the Paracels and Spratlys, which are contested by both Vietnam and the Philippines. China is enforcing its claim and I think this is particularly interesting given that it's claimed that these are its national territories. It's enforcing its claim primarily with its coast guard and maritime authority boats, not with its navy. Its navy kind of lingers behind. So by using the coast guard and the fishery authority boats, in effect China is demonstrating that these are China's national waters. It's not an international conflict. As China builds airstrips on some of the islands, it will be able in due course to run air patrols over disputed areas more often, providing air and naval coverage of the domain that it claims. Going back to China's nine dash line, it overlaps the exclusive economic zones of Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and probably the continental shelf of Indonesia. China's coast guard vessels already outnumber all of the coast guard vessels of all of the Southeast Asian claimants put together. And China is building a whole new array of coast guard vessels of 12,000 tons, which will be the largest coast guard vessels in the world when they're completed. So how does one sum this up? Although Vietnam and the Philippines have tried to use multilateral diplomacy in the region to rein in the PRC, this has so far been unsuccessful. Both Manila and Hanoi regularly raised China's actions in the South China Sea, in meetings chaired and dominated by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Basically, China simply ignores that. China has talked with the Osteon for years about creating a code of conduct, but China is uninterested, in fact, in concluding a code of conduct. It constantly stonewalls. China believes that the United States will not become involved in the Southeast Asian disputes, even when the coast guards of the literal countries conflict with the PRC. And I think China is probably right. So China's maritime impunity, in my view, will continue and increase. Thank you very much, Philippe. Can you give us your view on China's foreign policy? Yes, thank you, Bay. Shall I? Yes, is it working? Well, I'm sorry about my voice. It's recovering, but I'm basically in agreement with my colleagues, except for the fact I do believe that China does have a global strategy. And the global strategy is about more economic power for China. And the focus of my work for the past year has been on investment, Chinese investments abroad. And I find it really striking that a lot of infrastructures in particular have been taken over by Chinese companies, or at least they've been investments. If you look at a number of European countries, for example, Portugal, Greece, Italy, and even bigger countries, you see a move from China, both state-owned enterprises and private companies, to invest in the energy sector. Now, this is taking us quite far away from the future of war, perhaps. But I do believe China, and I'm sure that's of interest to a number of you in this room, has a plan which is to become involved in the global economy. If you look at Africa, if you look at Latin America, Australia, all these regions have seen for the past 15 years huge investments from China. And in sectors that are usually energy, transport, as I said, utilities, and real estate, of course, which is a traditional sector for the Chinese. Now, how does it work? Of course, there's no such thing as a fully private investment in China. The banks are state-owned. We are at a stage in China where the inter-corruption drive is so strong that for an official to travel abroad or for the head of a company to travel abroad and discuss with a potential partner is very complicated if you don't get an approval from the center. So indeed, there is a strategy. That strategy is called China Going Global and it's being accompanied by a number of public diplomacy tools, you can call that, including some kind of soft power engines, the Confucius Institutes and things like that. But at the end of the day, what matters is that the Chinese overseas investments are now larger than FDIs coming into China and China has four trillion dollars of foreign reserves. It is immensely rich and powerful and they've decided to conquer the world in that way. At least in Europe, once again, they've been taking advantage of the debt crisis and we're gonna see more of it. That's what I would like to say. Thank you so much. Orianna, I wanted to draw you out a little bit about you mentioned Xi Jinping's war against Western influence in education and his nationalist tendencies in general. Many have described that as Maoist, but of course right now he's functioning in a landscape in China that is completely different from what it was in Mao's time. People across China have unprecedented access to information even with China's Great Firewall. They are able to get around that with a fair amount of ease and they can share information in a way that was never possible before. So I'm wondering what you think public opinion in China, how that has influenced Beijing's grand strategy or its foreign policy interests. So I think what is useful for people who don't spend all day reading about China is to think about good comparisons. Now maybe our first panel on history would warn against this, but in many cases we look through history and we talk about nationalism and leaders and people compare China, you know, World War I, World War II, but I actually think the most relevant comparison is to the United States and the rise of the United States. Xi Jinping is a nationalist and I don't mean to say that in a negative way. He has put forth this idea of the China dream in which every individual within China should be able to live up to their full potential. Now I've watched a lot of these propaganda films for the China dream and maybe as an American we look at those and we think oh those are kind of kitschy. I mean even with the military propaganda videos of like men lifting weights on the aircraft carrier like that's kind of strange, but then whenever I'm doing my military training I see all these propaganda videos and I, you know, I'm like tearing off and I'm like America's so great, right? Same thing, you know, people look at our videos and then they think what is this US exceptionalism? Why do they think they deserve to be at the center of the world? China and Chinese leaders and their people admire how far they've come. They believe in the reassurgence of China to take back its natural position. That doesn't mean that the people are fully happy with what's going on domestically. There's a lot of critiques of corruption, you know, income inequality and things of that sort. How much is that influencing decision making? I think the good news in all of this if I can offer some optimism, because I don't think nationalism is this sort of adding fuel to the fire that people think it is. Instead, the people want on the international stage for China to stand up for its interests. That doesn't mean China can't back down in the end. So reasonable people disagree on this, but I believe that there was a conflict with Japan, for example. Even if China did not come out the winner, the Chinese people would be happy that China stood up for itself for the first time, even if it didn't win. So I don't think nationalism ties Chinese leaders' hands. They sometimes say it does to their own benefit, but I don't find a lot of evidence to suggest that. Thank you. I'll ask one more question of the panel and then open it up for questions from the audience. I think I would be remiss if I didn't mention the issue of cybersecurity, which we've talked about in several other panels today. Though the focus has recently been on North Korea's capabilities, it was less than a year ago that the Justice Department indicted five PLA officers with cyber espionage. So I'm wondering, I want to ask of the panel, how should the US prepare itself for this, especially from China? Well, the problem is that there doesn't seem to be a dialogue going on. I mean, officially there was one, but I don't believe the conversation has been continued. And one more time, I mean, if the business conversations were to be expended, that may help to have a cyber dialogue as well. But on the security aspect, I'm not sure if we can achieve a regular conversation between the US and the Chinese military on these authorities. I think there is an asymmetrical relationship when it comes to the illicit use of cyber capabilities. That is, China wants a lot from us. We don't want very much from China. And if you look at, for example, what China's doing with a fifth generation combat aircraft, it looks amazingly like at least what I've seen, the F-35. I mean, clearly we've been hacked like crazy for that. What can we do? Well, we can simply increase our own defensive capabilities, cyber defense, but I don't think we want to engage in a cyber war with China. I don't think that's in the cards. I just want to note that I don't think we're doing ourselves any favors in terms of confusing cyber-enabled espionage for military purposes versus those that are impacting private corporations in the commercial sector of the United States. I know that people in government has worked very hard to differentiate this, particularly the United States has not engaged in espionage in which we gain information on the commercial side and then give it to American companies for an advantage. And China has sort of won out on this debate by confusing people about what cyber is being used for. Can we stop the Chinese from hacking? It'd be great if I could go to China and bring my laptop. Probably never gonna happen. We just have to be smart about it, but can we try to convince them that it's bad for their economic interests to be selling commercial information to their companies to gain the advantage? I think that's where the focus needs to be and since there's less hope on the security side, I think we need to focus on protecting our companies first. Thanks so much. Any questions from the audience? Sure. Good afternoon. Ben Hernandez, Naval History and Heritage Command. My question is about perceptions. Do the Chinese view this cyber theft as an offensive action or a defensive action? Are they trying to arm themselves against us? Militarily, is this unrestricted warfare or is this purely economic? Is it somewhere in between? I think the short answer is that they would see it as defensive. The caveat to that is they have this cult of the defensive in Chinese strategic writings in which they would say that China will never take a move first, offensive move first. However, anything in other country does that hurts Chinese interests is considered a first move and therefore by the very definition, everything China does is defensive. So that doesn't really help us at all as strategists. And the second thing is that I think they think it's defensive, largely because they are in the inferior position. In Chinese writings, they find the United States threatening, right? I always say they write about being encircled and we think that's crazy, but you put up a map of China and you show where all the US bases and operations are. They feel vulnerable because we're there. And so they largely believe that most of their military modernization is national given, their rise and designed to defend against what would be considered disruptive policies on behalf of a country like the United States. Yep, go ahead. So far as looking at your assessments and risk assessments for future conflict in Asia, how would you view the activities now of India to basically enhance its capabilities in the Indian Ocean, the building of new bases, and new military capabilities, as well as the potential remilitarization, if you will, of Japan in response to some of the activities in both North Korea and China that we see the Prime Minister Ravi trying to promote? How would that affect your risk assessment of future conflicts there? Well, India for some time now has had a look East policy, which the US endorses. India's had very close relations with Vietnam in terms of oil exploration in areas that China claims and then obviously Vietnam claims as well. India is now providing Vietnam with certain military assistance, including the training of Sukhoi pilots. So India sees itself, I think, as very much involved in Southeast Asian security as an extension of its look East policy. Japan is talking about the, well, the United States is talking about Japan beginning South China Sea patrols. I think it was Admiral Greenert who said, gee, we would welcome that. I think Prime Minister Abe would agree, but he's not said so publicly yet. It's still a sensitive issue internally to the Japanese politics. To me it seems like in that question there is also a statement about Chinese behavior potentially has these negative effects for China's security environment. It's possible that given their more aggressive stance on territorial issues, this could lead to Japanese remilitarization, perhaps a more aggressive stance on their border with India. It seems to me that the Chinese suffer from an opposite bias that the United States suffers from. We think that all countries are responding to us. China thinks that no one is ever responding to their policy. So if you look at Chinese writings about it, they understand that remilitarization is possible. They see what the Indians are doing, but they'll either say that that's not a response to them or that that is a response to China's rise, the nature of trends and structural change, not their behavior. So even though we see a lot of these things happening, I don't think China is gonna change its position. And I think at least on the China-India nexus, it's very important to know that the Chinese view of India is very different than India of China. I did field work in India and I was surprised with how often they would bring up the 1962 war. I went to China, I went to the biggest bookstore in Beijing, so I was doing field work on the topic for a book, asked for their books on the sign of Indian war and their response was we fought a war against India. But so the Chinese I don't think are quite as focused on that border issue as the Indians are. Thanks so much. Unfortunately we're out of time, but if you would all join me in giving a hand to our panel. Thank you.