China: expansion for itself, rhetoric for others’ 

China has denigrated the move by the United Kingdom (UK), the United States (US) and Australia to co-operate on hypersonic weapons under the trilateral alliance AUKUS. 

Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce said it is exigent that the country builds its defences as quickly as possible to counter an increasingly aggressive China, with hypersonic weapons creating an “existential threat” for Australia. 

“They can change path, which makes them very hard to detect and even harder to hit,” Mr Joyce told Sky News on Wednesday, 6 April. 
 
“This gives an existential threat to Australia. 
 
“(In) probably about 14 minutes after they are launched they would be able to reach here … so we have to make sure that we are right at the top of our game.” 

Hypersonic missiles are able to travel 2,000 kilometres and five times the speed of sound. 

Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and US President Joe Biden have now agreed to expanding information sharing and deepening co-operation on defence innovation, including hypersonics and counter-hypersonics capabilities. 
 
The US and Australia already have a hypersonic weapon program called SCIFiRE (Southern Cross Integrated Flight Research Experiment). 

China’s United Nations ambassador Zhang Jun was quick in his acerbic response and warned against measures that could fuel conflict. 
 
“Anyone who does not want to see the Ukrainian crisis should refrain from doing things which may lead the other parts of the world into a crisis like this,” Mr Zhang said. 
 
“As the Chinese saying goes: ‘If you do not like it, do not impose it against the others’.” 

However, China’s increasingly aggressive postures appear to indicate that it believes it has license to seek expansion for itself, while excoriating others for doing the same.  

As it is, China has contradicted its pacifist rhetoric, albeit belligerence in reality, with plans to set up a military base in the Solomon Islands. The Chinese embassy has consistently insisted that noising that the pact with the Solomon Islands would allow a People’s Liberation Army base to be established there was “utterly misinformation deliberately spread with a political motive”. Only this week, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said: “The world has entered into [the] 21st century, but regrettably some people are still indulged in Cold War and colonial mentality,”  

Only last month Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Zhao Lijian said during a media briefing: “The aim of China and Solomon Islands’ security cooperation is to protect people’s life and property safety and has no military undertones…Relevant remarks and speculations in the media are groundless and ill-intentioned.” 

But SkyNews has obtained a document signed by the President of Chinese state-owned company, Avic International Project Engineering Company, Mr Rong Qian, and addressed to the former Premier of the Isobel Province Leslie Kikolo, showing Chinese plans to establish a military presence in the Solomons were being discussed as far back as 2020. 

China is increasingly eyeing new military bases in Asia and Africa, while adding to its pre-existing facility in Djibouti. It is reportedly seeking military footholds in Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, Indonesia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Seychelles, Tanzania, Angola and Tajikstan. These bases would facilitate an enormous variety of military capabilities, including naval, air, ground, cyber and space power projection. Such a situation would establish China’s superiority over the US in the new global power struggle. The fact is, China is not only looking for parity, in its neighbourhood, with Western forces; but is stridently looking for global ascendancy. 

The point becomes pertinent because China has been holding the West culpable for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as the fallout of NATO’s expansion. On 20 March, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng criticised the far-reaching Western sanctions imposed on Russia after it invaded Ukraine and said the root cause of the war in Ukraine lies in the Cold War mentality and power politics. 

The Chinese envoy said if NATO’s “enlargement goes further, it would be approaching the ‘outskirts of Moscow’ where a missile could hit the Kremlin within seven or eight minutes.” 

“Pushing a major country, especially a nuclear power, to the corner would entail repercussions too dreadful to contemplate,” he said.  

Last month (March 2022), US Indo-Pacific commander Admiral John C Aquilino voiced concern that China has fully militarised at least three of several islands it built in the disputed South China Sea, arming them with anti-ship and anti-aircraft missile systems, laser and jamming equipment and fighter jets in an increasingly aggressive move that threatens all nations operating nearby. 

“Over the past 20 years we’ve witnessed the largest military build-up since world war two by the PRC,” Aquilino told the Associated Press in an interview. “They have advanced all their capabilities and that build-up of weaponisation is destabilising to the region.” 

China has maintained that its actions are purely defensive, aimed at protecting its sovereign rights to its own territory. China has been building military bases on artificial islands in a region also claimed by Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam. China, in fact, claims 90% of the South China Sea as territory that historically belongs to it. 

On 12 July 2016, The Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague dismissed Beijing’s claim to much of the South China Sea. It stated that there was no evidence that China had exercised exclusive control, historically, over the key waterway.  

China has repeatedly said it does not accept the Court ruling and has continued to expand its South China Sea presence. 

China is determinedly and efficaciously seeking to usurp the bastions of the West, in order to assert its prime objective of becoming the nonpareil power in the world. In fact, China has been aggressively using military, economic and diplomatic might to spread its tentacles across the globe. 

Its Belt and Road Initiative is one of the largest infrastructure and investment projects in history, covering more than 68 countries, including 65% of the world’s population and 40% of the global gross domestic product as of 2017. 

In fact, it has taken its onslaught to the very neighbourhood of the US, what with it engineering lucrative deals in South America. Reuters reported, on 5 April, that US senators expressed consternation, during a senate foreign relations subcommittee hearing, that China has made serious inroads into the region that was seen as traditionally aligned with the US.  

“China has a plan. We don’t have a plan,” Sen Edward Markey (D-Massachusetts) explained, while officials from several US agencies discussed their strategies.  

Beijing’s trade with the South American region has soared by over USD 300 billion from 2002 to 2020, with USD 160 billion directly invested during that time. Twenty of the 31 Latin American countries have signed on to be part of the Belt and Road Initiative, China has financed infrastructure projects in another five nations, and several countries have been persuaded to drop diplomatic relations with Taiwan, an independent island nation that China views as part of its sovereign territory. 

Indeed, the US has been caught napping. While it has been embroiled in conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and now, with its preoccupation with Ukraine, China has overtly and covertly set its sights on the world. In China’s President’s Xi Jinping’s own words “…time is on China’s hands.” But China has been explicitly and aggressively staking the claim, in recent times, that its time has come.