Chapter Six: Asia

China and member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations agreed a framework for a code of conduct in the area, in May 2017. The reality, however, was that Beijing further strengthened its military bases in the South China Sea, on the features it had physically expanded after 2012. At the same time, it continued to engage in coercive behaviour there. For the Chinese Communist Party and the PLA, securing greater control of South China Sea features and surrounding waters was evidently a strategic priority, despite the unease that Beijing’s actions were creating in Southeast Asia and beyond. In July, following Hanoi’s refusal to yield to Chinese demands to halt drilling by a Spanish oil company on Vanguard Bank, an area that Vietnam claimed was within its exclusive economic zone, Beijing reportedly threatened to use force against a Vietnamese-occupied feature. In August, China deployed a flotilla of fishing vessels, accompanied by PLAN and coastguard ships, close to Pagasa, the largest feature occupied by the Philippines in the Spratly Islands. While Southeast Asian governments emphasised the importance of diplomacy in managing regional maritime tensions, in these circumstances several states have continued their efforts to develop military capabilities that could help to deter potential future Chinese aggression. In February, Vietnam commissioned the last two of six Project 636.1 (improved Kilo-class) submarines supplied by Russia. At the commissioning ceremony, Prime Minister Nguyễn Xuân Phúc praised the Vietnamese Navy’s willingness to defend ‘every inch’ of national territory including territorial waters. Later in the year, Vietnam received a third Russian Gepard 3.9-class frigate, with another due by year’s end. Reflecting Hanoi’s increasing sense of vulnerability to Chinese pressure, Minister of National Defence Ngo Xuan Lich visited Washington DC in August, where he met US Secretary of Defense James Mattis; the two sides reached an agreement on increased bilateral naval engagement and information-sharing, and more importantly that a US aircraft carrier would visit Vietnam during 2018, the first such visit since the Vietnamese communists’ victory in 1975. In the Asia-Pacific region, the influences on defence policy, military spending and equipment procurement, and on the development of armed forces’ capabilities, were as wide-ranging as ever in 2017. However, the most important were pervasive and persistent insecurity; economic circumstances that allowed for a relatively high – and in some cases increasing – allocation of national resources to the armed forces; and domestic political circumstances, which often helped to support ambitious defence programmes. The most important factors driving the region’s sense of insecurity were evident at the 16th IISS Shangri-La Dialogue. In June 2017, this annual event again brought together in Singapore defence ministers and other senior representatives of AsiaPacific defence establishments. Serious concern over the security ramifications of China’s emergence as a major strategic actor in the Asia-Pacific and beyond was as apparent as it had been for the last half-decade – particularly in terms of its maritime assertiveness and the growing presence of the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) in regional waters. Meanwhile, Australia, Japan, the Republic of Korea (ROK) and other regional states had good reason to view North Korea’s accelerating development of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles as an acute threat. In addition, some Southeast Asian defence ministers and military chiefs viewed jihadi terrorism as an increasingly important challenge, particularly as the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, lost territory in the Middle East and the risk increased that its fighters might disperse to Southeast Asia. A new concern for regional states was the uncertainty generated by the Trump administration, which had appeared to question the importance of the United States’ alliances, and also seemed to have no clear strategy towards the region.