China's territorial disputes threaten global peace, commerce

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- Beijing's increasing sabre-rattling and its territorial disputes with its neighbours threaten global peace and risk choking the world's busiest shipping lanes with global economic repercussions, analysts warn.

China's military drills last month off Taiwan are the most recent reminder of the threat that Beijing's military expansionism poses.

Taiwan has had its own government since 1949 but lives under the constant threat of invasion by China. Beijing views the island as its territory and has vowed to one day seize it -- by force if necessary.

After top US government officials visited Taiwan on August 2, China retaliated by deploying warplanes, ships and missiles for drills.

Over five days, from August 2-6, Chinese military aircraft entered what Taiwan calls its Air Defence Identification Zone or crossed the Taiwan Strait median line at least 131 times, Taiwan's military reported.

China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) fired ballistic missiles into the waters off Taiwan, including four that flew high over the island itself, according to Japan. It also conducted exercises closer to the island than ever before.

The goal of the exercises was more to demonstrate to Taiwan and the international community China's ability to surround and potentially blockade its island neighbour.

"This is political warfare," Drew Thompson, a senior fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore who formerly worked in the Pentagon, told The New York Times on August 25.

"The political aspect of what they do is sometimes more important than the actual training that they're undertaking," he noted.

While China's intentions were a show of force, the threats are real, said Ou Si-fu, a research fellow at the Institute for National Defence and Security Research, which is affiliated with Taiwan's Defence Ministry.

"I think they have shown their intentions, encircling Taiwan and countering foreign intervention," he told the Times. "Their assumption was 'Taiwan can be isolated, and so next I can fight you.'"

Tensions have remained high since the drills.

Taipei and Beijing on Monday (August 29) traded barbs over a recent string of drone sorties that flew from the Chinese mainland to an outlying Taiwanese island, some surveilling military outposts, according to AFP.

Photos and video taken by Chinese drones of the Kinmen islands have been circulating on both Taiwan and Chinese social media, with one video showing Taiwanese soldiers hurling rocks at one to drive it off.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said it was not "anything worth making a fuss about" as the drones were "flying around Chinese territory".

That response triggered an angry riposte from Taipei.

"The authoritarian expansionist government of the Chinese Communist Party has always made harassing other countries a daily routine, and therefore its title of a 'regional troublemaker' is well-deserved," Taiwan's Foreign Ministry said in a statement late Monday.

Clogging shipping lanes

China's military exercises in the waters surrounding Taiwan affected global shipping lanes.

The Taiwan Strait, a 180km-wide waterway separating Taiwan from mainland China and the rest of Asia, is a main ocean route for commercial vessels sailing to or from China, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea.

The shipping routes carry goods from Asian factory hubs to markets in the Middle East, Europe and the United States.

Last year, almost half of the global container fleet and 88% of the world's largest ships by tonnage crossed the waterway, according to Bloomberg.

While Taiwan's ports were open during the drills, container ships and natural gas carriers were forced to steer around the areas of the exercises, shipping executives said.

Those movements increased costs and caused delays, adding up to a half-day to some voyages, with a ripple effect around the world, analysts and shipowners said.

Shipping insurance groups also posted alerts to members, urging caution in navigating around Taiwan, Reuters reported August 5.

"Shanghai, the world's busiest port, is literally next door and any major disruption will affect the Chinese merchant fleet as well," Peter Sand, chief analyst of maritime data provider Xeneta, told the Wall Street Journal in August.

"Though China's action has yet to significantly disrupt ocean freight operations, a prolonged version certainly could," Zvi Schreiber, CEO of the Freightos shipping index, told Reuters, referring to the drills in August.

"Regional conflict could force vessels to take alternative routes, adding transit time, disrupting schedules and causing further delays and costs."

'String of Pearls'

The recent drills bode ill for other key waterways in which China either has active disputes or where it is expanding its military presence.

China claims almost all of the South China Sea, through which trillions of dollars in trade passes annually, with competing claims from Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam.

In Central Asia, Beijing has in recent years been floating the idea of the return of "its" territories in its media to gauge the reaction of the local population in what observers say is a direct threat to the region's sovereignty.

Beijing has also been pushing a massive infrastructure drive to connect mainland China to the Horn of Africa via a network of military and commercial facilities.

As part of its "String of Pearls" strategy, China's sea lines run through several major ports from the Maldives to Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Iran and Somalia.

They run through several major maritime choke points including the Bab al-Mandeb Strait (between Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula, and Djibouti and Eritrea in the Horn of Africa), the Strait of Malacca (the main shipping channel between the Indian and Pacific oceans), the Strait of Hormuz (which separates Iran from Oman and the United Arab Emirates) and the Lombok Strait (between the islands of Bali and Indonesia).

Beijing's global infrastructure drive, known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) or One Belt, One Road (OBOR), continues inland from these important seaports, reaching other parts of the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa.

However, critics warn that China's ostensibly commercial projects serve a dual purpose, allowing for its rapidly growing military to expand its reach.

The String of Pearls also gives Beijing an advantage and a pressure lever should a full-scale conflict erupt over Taiwan.