Opinion
Why Putin is losing his war, and Xi is winning his
Peter Hartcher
Political and international editorWhen it comes to encroaching on neighbours’ territory, Vladimir Putin is simply a boofhead. Xi Jinping, on the other hand, is simply brilliant.
Both dictators are intent on imperialist expansion into the territories of their neighbours. But they are experiencing wildly different fates.
Vladimir Putin with Xi Jinping at The Grand Kremlin Palace in Moscow in March. Credit: AP
Putin is wanted as a war criminal, his troops are dying, his economy suffering, his grip on power under pressure. And, after early gains, Putin is losing his war.
Xi is feted wherever he goes, his military is expanding, his economy has slowed yet still growing, his power unquestioned. And Xi is winning his war.
The key difference? Putin chose to launch a kinetic war to expand his territory: bullets and bombs, the traditional way of warfare.
Xi chose “grey zone” warfare – distinctly aggressive, but without firing a shot. So, on Saturday, when Russia was firing missiles into Ukraine, China was shooting a water cannon at a Philippines ship. Both were hostile acts, yet only one was deadly.
Illustration: Dionne Gain.Credit:
The world knows how to deal with Russia and its missiles. But no one yet has devised an effective counter to China’s forceful muscling into the territories of its neighbours.
It’s seven years since an international tribunal at The Hague ruled that China had “no legal basis” under international law for claiming the reefs and waters within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone.
But Beijing simply ignored the ruling and, in the years since, has kept applying physical pressure to the territories also claimed by the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan in the South China Sea, one of the world’s greatest commercial arteries.
But the pressure is always beneath the threshold of traditional, kinetic war. The result? “Over time,” says the Lowy Institute’s China expert, Richard McGregor, “China is winning.”
In Saturday’s example, the Philippines, a US ally, set out to resupply a territorial marker post, an old Philippines Navy vessel that was deliberately run aground on a coral reef, Second Thomas Shoal in the Spratly Islands group.
To reinforce the country’s claim to ownership, the Philippines makes sure to keep the old hulk occupied continuously. In recent times it’s kept a small crew, around a dozen navy personnel, on the ship.
Every month or so, the Philippines Navy brings them fresh supplies of food, water, fuel, and it sometimes rotates its personnel. Except when China decides to interfere.
On Saturday, a pair of the Philippines coast guard vessels escorted a pair of chartered supply boats towards the reef. A pair of much larger Chinese coast guard ships manoeuvred to block one of the supply boats. One turned its water cannon on the Filipinos.
A chorus of complaints and condemnations went up. It was “dangerous” and “illegal”, according to Manila. Washington said Beijing’s forces had “interfered with the Philippines’ lawful exercise of high seas freedom of navigation and jeopardised the safety of the Philippine vessels and crew”. Canberra said it was “dangerous and destabilising”. And so on.
But who won? One of the two supply boats was unable to unload the fresh crew and other supplies it had intended to deliver, and Beijing suffered nothing but noise from Manila and its indignant allies. That’s a clear win for China. In the Philippines’ own waters.
Sure, the US reminded Beijing that it “reaffirms an armed attack on Philippine public vessels, aircraft, and armed forces – including those of its Coast Guard in the South China Sea – would invoke US mutual defence commitments under Article IV of the 1951 US [and] Philippines Mutual Defence Treaty”.
But that’s the brilliance of Xi’s way of war. It was not an armed attack. Last month Beijing’s ships successfully ran interference on another Philippines effort to resupply another occupied reef, and earlier this year China used military-grade lasers against Philippines ships’ crews.
Such harassment is so frequent that Manila says it has lodged around 90 formal complaints against China. And that’s just the Philippines. China wages a similar non-stop, low-level, grey zone campaign against Vietnam and Malaysia and other South-East Asian states as well, conducted mostly out of public view and unnoticed by the wider world.
“So far,” McGregor notes, “nothing any South-East Asian nation does, nothing the US does, is an effective deterrent.”
Xi called America’s bluff years ago when Barack Obama demanded that China stop using “sharp elbows” to wrest maritime territories from its neighbours. China’s forces simply pushed past everyone to occupy reefs and rocks and built them up into substantial new islands.
Obama’s former Asia policy director, Danny Russel, told me that the administration had concluded that the only way the US could have prevented China’s takeover would have been through the use of force. War, in other words. It was too high a price, Obama decided.
Xi Jinping has been smart where Putin has been stupid. Credit: Getty Images. Artwork Stephen Kiprillis
“Over time, China has been changing the status quo,” McGregor says. “They have military bases in the South China Sea they didn’t have before, which are not small – they’re very large. They built up islands, they built up by far the biggest naval fleet by number of ships, bigger than the US.”
A former Philippines foreign secretary, Teodoro Locsin, said China’s behaviour in the region was like “a dragon in your living room”. That was years ago, and still no one has worked out how to manage, let alone tame, the dragon.
Still, it’s not all going China’s way. Putin’s war of aggression has awoken many governments to the dangers of ignoring expansionist dictators, even ones smart enough to stay in the grey zone.
In recent months, nations far and wide have been taking a firmer diplomatic position in support of The Hague tribunal ruling: “Since November 2022, 16 governments have shifted from positively acknowledging the ruling to fully supporting it by issuing statements endorsing the ruling as legally binding,” reports Washington think tank CSIS.
These include India, France and the Netherlands. In total, 24 countries have taken this stance. Only eight have backed Beijing’s position of rejecting the ruling. Putin’s thuggery, unexpectedly, has drawn unprecedented attention to Xi’s brilliance. And its unsettling success.
Peter Hartcher is international editor.