Category Archives: China

The Quad of India, Japan, Australia and the US: A Work in Progress

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Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 7, No. 3, March 2019

Commodore Anil Jai Singh

IN (Retd)

The photograph depicts Indian naval soldiers be led in a tour by a US counterpart. They are all photographed inside what appears to be the naval cockpit.

Members of the Indian navy conduct a tour of Indian Naval Station Hansa to crew members of Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS O’Kane (DDG 77) during a port visit in Goa. Source: U.S. 7th Fleet via Wikimedia Commons.

The recent statement by the Commander-in Chief of the US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Phil Davidson at a press conference in Singapore that the ‘Quad’ or the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue between the USA, Australia, India and Japan may need to be shelved was met with a mixed reaction in the regional maritime security discourse. However, this was not a fatalistic view but rather a tacit acknowledgement of the divergent views amongst the Quad partners on certain fundamental issues. He made this statement based on his discussions with Admiral Sunil Lanba, the Chief of the Indian Navy at the recent Raisina Dialogue in New Delhi where Admiral Lanba said that there was not an immediate potential for the Quad.

The idea of a Quad was first articulated by the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe during the East Asia Summit in 2007; in the same year he spoke of the confluence of the two oceans – the Indian and the Pacific- and introduced the term Indo-Pacific during an address to the Indian Parliament. The first attempt to shape the Quad was the decision to enhance Exercise Malabar — the annual bilateral Indo-US naval exercise into a quadrilateral construct. However, China understandably expressed strong reservations about this as an anti-China initiative. Australia succumbed but a trilateral exercise was nevertheless held between the US, Japan and India.  For the next decade, while the Quad was spoken of periodically at various fora, very little was actually happening on the ground to give it concrete shape.

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State Sponsorship of Uyghur Separatists: the History and Current Policy Options for East Turkestan (Xinjiang, China)

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Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 7, No. 3, March 2019

The map depicts China highlighting the different provinces of the country. It appears to be an old map.

A 1922 map of China. Source: John Bartholomew, The Times Atlas, London, 1922.

Anders Corr, Ph.D.
Publisher of the Journal of Political Risk

This article is a slight revision of a talk given on March 25, 2019, in Oxford, England. The associated university is not named at the request of the host organization’s president, who was concerned about possible repercussions.

I would like to thank the Terrorism Research Society (TRS) for kindly hosting this event. 

The historical map shown here is from 1922, and shows what China looked like when the Chinese Communist Party was founded in 1921 in Shanghai. It shows East Turkestan and Tibet in the west as autonomous regions — much more autonomous than they are today.

East Turkestan is now occupied militarily by China and officially called the Xinjiang region of northwestern China. In Chinese, “Xinjiang” means “new frontier”. But Xinjiang has an ancient history as a culturally diverse crossroads of trading on what the Chinese call “the silk road”, but which was actually more Iranian than Chinese. It was central to the ancient Persian trading areas called the Sogdian network by historians. It has been home to Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims, to Mongolians, Indians, Greeks, Koreans, Buddhists, and Christians. Since at least the First East Turkestan Republic of 1933 is has been called East Turkestan by Turkic Muslim residents. The Chinese Communist Party in Beijing has indiscriminately labeled Uyghurs who support an independent East Turkestan today, as separatist and terrorist in their goals and means. The acronym of the Chinese Communist Party is the “CCP”. The CCP seeks to colonize and extinguish all linguistic, ethnic and religious diversity in Xinjiang today, in order to assimilate the territory under its own preferred Han Chinese race, and their own atheist communist ideology.

In the face of such extreme repression, some Uyghurs have indeed advocated separatism and utilized terrorism and violence, including street riots, as a means.

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China’s Technological and Strategic Innovations in the South China Sea

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Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 7, No. 3, March 2019 

Publisher of the Journal of Political Risk

Anders Corr, PhD

This article is a slight revision of a talk given on March 13, 2019, in New York City.

Introduction

A navy ship is depicted in the open ocean.

The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (Navy) (PLA(N) Luang II class guided-missile destroyer Xian (153) arrives at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam for Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC), 2016. Source: Picryl.

Thanks very much for the invitation to speak today, and to all the members of the audience. I want to thank my good friend US Navy Captain James Fanell, who was Director of Intelligence for the US Pacific Fleet. He is not here, but he has been a mentor on the issues I’m covering, and assisted with comments to this presentation.

The full presentation is a combination of material from a book I edited that was published last year by the U.S. Naval Institute Press with the title – Great Powers, Grand Strategies: the New Game in the SCS, and my next book, on the strategy of brinkmanship.  This presentation, however, will focus on how China is innovating in the South China Sea on technological and strategic levels.

In a short year since the book was published, the South China Sea conflict has heated up. On March 4 and March 7, 2019, USPACOM, which is the Asian equivalent of CENTCOM and for which I used to work, sent nuclear-capable B-52 bombers over the SCS, including one flight revealed today. USPACOM also recently revealed that China’s military activity in the SCS rose over the past year. China occupied a sand bar near the Philippines island of Pagasa, in the Philippine exclusive economic zone, or EEZ, and Chinese boats purposefully rammed and sunk a Vietnamese fishing boat in the Paracel Islands of the north west SCS, islands that both China and Vietnam claim.

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Tariff Benefits Will Exceed Costs When National Goals Are Met

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Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 7, No. 3, March 2019 

US President Donald Trump is photographed behind a podium, giving a speech outside. The US flag is visible in the background.

US President Donald Trump gives a speech. Source: Picryl

William R. Hawkins

International Economics and National Security Consultant

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China’s Heavy 5G Hand in the Classroom: Combining its Social Credit Score with the latest IT by 2020

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Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 7, No. 2, February 2019

Young students at their desks all with mobilephones.

Young students at their desks all with mobilephones. The mobilephone has become seen as a ‘must have’, an item of necessity among the Chinese people and China as the world’s largest country is now recognised to have the most mobilephone users. Source: Pexels.

Victor Mair, Ph.D.

University of Pennsylvania

I recently had a good, long talk with a young American who is teaching at a major Chinese university on behalf of a top American university.

He kept saying that life in China now is becoming more and more “intense” (he repeated that word many times).  The politicization of life is felt in countless ways.

He said that the Communist Party Secretary of his school marched into his classroom one day without announcing it ahead of time and without even saying anything to him when she barged in.  She started inspecting everything he’d written on the blackboards and that the students had written in their notebooks.  She had her camera out and was taking pictures the whole while.

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