The global economy is facing a very cheerless 2009. The OECD economies are sliding or already have slid into recession. Developing Asian countries face weaker demand for exports, lower flows of remittances and less investment. Lower energy prices may help some countries, but generally lower commodity prices hurt. The estimates of growth for 2009 fell as last year ended and the new one began. The countries more involved with international trade are clearly suffering the most with Singapore and Thailand expected to be in recession and Malaysia to eke out only slender growth. For some countries, the impact on growth may not seem horribly large, but these are moving targets and the bad news continues to come.
The impact of lower growth in Southeast Asia should not be underestimated. From an OECD or developed country's perspective, 3% to 4% growth doesn't seem so bad. From a Southeast Asian developing country's perspective, it is close to a growth recession and a policy disaster. Political expectations in Southeast Asia target growth well in excess of what is likely; 6% to 7% growth rates are medium-range targets in Malaysia and the Philippines. Political needs for growth relate partly to the commitment to lower poverty.
Over time, for most countries, the incidence of poverty tracks economic growth. A rough rule of thumb is that 1% growth in per capita national income in Southeast Asia results in a 2 percentage-point decrease in the incidence of poverty. In this region, perhaps 200 million people live on or under $2 per day, from a population of approximately 512 million. If growth slackens, large numbers of people will be affected: A 2% fall-off in growth could translate to 20 million people being left in or reduced to poverty. Most of these people will be living in the more populous countries: Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. It is not just the poor that will suffer in a downturn. The middle class will see the loss of jobs and a fall-off in income and in their family businesses. Just as in the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, the gains of past years are put at risk as businesses fail and trading opportunities vanish. In Southeast Asia, the middle class will make their unhappiness known in the political arena.
The fear of a growth slowdown is quite apparent in the response of monetary policy: there have been determined steps in most countries toward easing credit conditions and shoring up domestic demand. Policy makers rapidly changed from worrying about inflation (when oil prices were widely viewed as likely to stay above $100 per barrel) to fighting a world-wide credit crunch and falling demand. Even before the end of 2008, Singapore had increased liquidity; Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam had all cut key monetary policy rates and taken other steps to ease domestic credit markets. These steps show a clear focus and flexibility-when conditions changed, so did policy. That monetary policy has been quick to react partly reflects real success in establishing independent monetary authorities. A relatively small group of people in each country has been able to respond to clearly changing conditions in a timely fashion.
Fiscal policy measures, in contrast, appear hesitant, small, and unlikely to have impact over the near term; certainly not commensurate with the economic slowdown we are seeing. Government spending, which could help support domestic demand, especially in the larger nations, is not yet being used to stimulate the economy. At the end of 2008, looking forward to 2009, fiscal policy in most countries was little changed in spite of the expected fall-off in growth. Only in the case of Thailand was there a clear, early public commitment to use fiscal policy to support economic activity and even there, political difficulties suggest implementation could be uncertain. By February of this year, across the region, some additional planning to use fiscal policy is starting to appear, but by no means everywhere. Asia is losing time.
Part of the problem reflects the decision-making processes. In the larger countries, such as Indonesia, the Philippines and in Thailand, changing the government's budget, and establishing a political consensus on what to do, is no easier than it is in the United States, which has seen months of delay on a stimulus plan.
One issue hindering Southeast Asian public spending is a fear of falling into "debt traps." Indonesia and the Philippines, especially, have had experiences of public debt weighing on public financial resources for years, restricting fiscal freedom and imposing real costs. The Asian financial crisis drastically elevated external debt levels for some countries. Over time, however, most nations have reduced their external indebtedness. Statistics for total public debt generally show the same trends. For Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, as of 2007, public debt as a fraction of GDP ranged from 35% to 42%. The Philippines is the one large nation that potentially is still dogged by past debt problems. While public debt has fallen in the Philippines in relation to the size of the economy, it was still 62.3% of GDP in 2007, well above its regional neighbors. Other than the Philippines, the larger ASEAN countries have fiscal freedom that was lacking earlier in the decade.
A second fear inhibiting the use of fiscal policy may be a legitimate concern over whether deficit spending will be effective. There has been an extensive debate about the efficacy of fiscal policy, especially with respect to long-term outcomes. But in a situation in which there is general weakness in the world economy, when excess capacity is growing, and when monetary policy in most countries is being directed at fighting contractionary tendencies, there should be few theoretical concerns. If ASEAN as a group moves to expand public spending, the impact is likely to be larger than if only some member nations do. Although, as a group, they are not their own most important markets, coordinated efforts will lessen "leakages" through imports. The general issue of fiscal policy and stimulus packages was on the agenda for the Special ASEAN Plus Three finance ministers' meeting, held in February 2009, in Phuket, Thailand; however, it was overshadowed in the press reports by other topics, such as the mechanisms for swapping foreign exchange to countries in difficulty.
This is not to give license to any and all ideas to spend -- bridges to nowhere are still poor choices. But most large nations in Southeast Asia have some leeway to increase spending and to cushion the current slide of their economies. In these situations, it is often suggested that governments quicken their spending for infrastructure. This is particularly appealing for Indonesia and the Philippines where there are well identified needs. In both countries investment for infrastructure as a fraction of GDP has hovered in the 2% to 3% range, a fraction of what is needed to provide for roads, ports, safe water and electricity. Both countries suffer from uneven infrastructure service provision across the nearly 24,000 islands. Indonesia has recently announced that it will seek to spend for infrastructure as one way to support the economy.
Unfortunately, experience shows that new infrastructure programs are very difficult to start in a short period of time. In particular, "greenfield" infrastructure projects take years to move from idea to implementation. Partly that is good news; today's ASEAN countries are developing more robust, if somewhat cantankerous, democratic institutions. Government-spending programs require considerable political consensus to institute large-scale changes. Implementation demands more local-level consultations, all of which means that governments are more responsive to their citizens, but all of which requires time that is lacking in a crisis. If spending money quickly is important, infrastructure projects are not the best idea.
There are alternatives. A central concern with low growth rates is the impact on the poor. An estimated 200 million people face a $2 per day budget, mostly in Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. While these countries are not rich enough to win any short-term "war on poverty" they are capable, in this period of economic distress, of devoting 1% to 2% of GDP to supporting the poor in direct ways, which could make a tremendous difference. Even in Vietnam, 2% of GDP would allow the government to give an extra $1 a day to the poorest 5% of the population. In Indonesia and the Philippines you could cover 9% to 10% of the population, and in richer Thailand you could reach the poorest 20% of the population.
Of course the situation is not so simple; governments cannot simply throw money at a particular group of poor people. There is little difference between people at the high end of the poorest 20% of the population and the people at the low end of the next group up. To help one without helping the other is neither equitable nor politically sensible. Moreover, simply giving money to large groups of people goes against most of the grain of current policy. But transferring money to the poor and near-poor is likely to be pretty efficient at stimulating economic activity. Arguably it is the poorer in the population who will not save the money, and who will immediately use the funds to buy local goods and services. The businesses of the middle class depend on the spending of the poor.
There are, moreover, targeted processes that can transfer money to poor people in a short period of time and accomplish other goals for the countries. Conditional cash transfers are perhaps the most important of these. These programs provide cash support to families on certain conditions, for instance, that children attend school and are taken regularly to health posts. This means that the program of income support to the families ensures that investments are made in children. Given the dramatic differences that early childhood learning and health care can make in lifetime earnings, this is an investment that will ultimately pay off for the countries. Programs of this type have been instituted in Indonesia and piloted in the Philippines. Conditional cash transfers are only one example of programs that can mitigate the impact of growing poverty, while also providing for greater economic potential in the future. The Philippines provides examples of community development guided by very strong civil-society organizations that have meant real improvements in living standards, especially in urban areas. Funds used in this fashion have a high multiplier impact: When directed to the poor, little money will be saved and most will be used to buy goods and services, thus supporting a broader economy.
In past periods of economic distress, calls to provide support for the poor have struggled to overcome a fear that funds would simply be stolen. Southeast Asian countries have uneven reputations for governance. However, the experience with social-safety nets, especially in Indonesia and the Philippines during the 1997-98 financial crisis, suggest that proper organization provides systems that can be accountable, although problems were surely noted. More importantly, technology is on the side of good governance. The spread of the Internet and the ubiquitous use of cell phones have sharply reduced the costs of tracking government actions. The growing strength of civil-society organizations provides a watch dog that governments increasingly have difficulty ignoring. Transferring funds to millions of people cannot be done without opportunities for theft, but we can do the job better than we have done before as a result of information technology advances.
Last year was abysmal for many in the developed world. The collapse of asset markets and commodity prices has made sure that these troubles will travel to Southeast Asia. But with this warning there is the opportunity to implement programs to protect the vulnerable and cushion the fall in overall growth. To date, however, most countries appear to have found it easier to rely upon monetary policy and a hope that the present crisis will pass quickly, than to truly marshal the fiscal resources needed to turn the economic tide. The year has started with the risk that, by December, we will have done little to help ourselves.
By David Jay Green
24 Mar 2009
Im lặng nhưng không đồng tình ( CHINA - VIETNAM Island )
Tháng Giêng 1974, khi hải quân của Cộng hòa Nhân dân Trung Hoa đánh chiếm Hoàng Sa và buộc quân đội Nam Việt Nam rút khỏi đó, ban lãnh đạo Bắc Việt không hề có phát ngôn công khai, dù là ủng hộ hay phản đối.
Báo chí Bắc Việt không hề đề cập vụ đụng độ giữa Sài Gòn và Bắc Kinh. Phản ứng chính thức duy nhất trước cuộc xâm lăng của Trung Quốc là một tuyên bố ngắn gọn, thận trọng của Chính phủ Cách mạng Lâm thời miền Nam, kêu gọi có giải pháp thương lượng và hòa bình về mọi tranh cãi lãnh thổ.
Kho lưu trữ Hungary
Kể từ đó, sự im lặng của Hà Nội đã thường bị xem là thể hiện sự đồng tình của ban lãnh đạo trước hành động của Trung Quốc. Theo đó, thái độ thụ động của Bắc Việt hẳn là do sự thừa nhận ngầm về chủ quyền lịch sử của Bắc Kinh. Quan điểm này được hỗ trợ nhờ thông báo năm 1956 của Ung Văn Khiêm gửi tham tán Trung Quốc về chủ quyền lịch sử của Trung Quốc đối với Hoàng Sa và Trường Sa - gợi ý rằng "im lặng có nghĩa là đồng thuận". Quan điểm này nói nếu Bắc Việt không tán thành cuộc xâm lăng, thì phải nói ra chứ.
Iim lặng của miền Bắc chủ yếu là do cân nhắc chiến thuật ngắn hạn của Hà Nội.
Balazs Szalontai
Nhưng tài liệu tôi tìm thấy từ Kho Lưu trữ Quốc gia Hungary lại kể một câu chuyện khác. Chúng gợi ý rằng sự im lặng của miền Bắc chủ yếu là do cân nhắc chiến thuật ngắn hạn của Hà Nội, chứ không phải vì sự đồng ý về pháp lý giữa Trung Quốc và Việt Nam.
Sau vụ xâm lấn, Thứ trưởng Ngoại giao Nguyễn Cơ Thạch nói với đại sứ Hungary ở Hà Nội rằng "có nhiều văn bản và dữ liệu về quần đảo của Việt Nam". Các cán bộ khác của miền Bắc nói với các nhà ngoại giao Hungary rằng theo họ, xung đột giữa Trung Quốc và chính thể Sài Gòn chỉ là tạm thời; họ nói sau đó, "vấn đề này sẽ là vấn đề cho cả quốc gia Việt Nam." Khác với Bắc Kinh, Hà Nội không hề xem vụ việc đã khép lại. Một vụ trưởng của Bộ Ngoại giao Bắc Việt nói với Hungary rằng chính phủ miền Bắc dự tính sẽ họp với Trung Quốc để làm rõ vấn đề.
Tháng Chín 1975, Tổng Bí thư Lê Duẩn nêu vấn đề Hoàng Sa trong chuyến thăm Trung Quốc. Phản ứng không khoan nhượng của Bắc Kinh rõ ràng làm lãnh đạo Việt Nam bực mình. Sang tháng 11, một cán bộ Việt Nam nói với nhà ngoại giao Hungary rằng Hoàng Sa "là phần không thể tách rời của Việt Nam và chúng tôi sẽ không bao giờ từ bỏ chủ quyền với các đảo nhiều dầu hỏa này có tầm quan trọng chiến lược."
Dấu hiệu phản đối của Việt Nam, gián tiếp nhưng rõ rệt, đã xuất hiện từ những tháng đầu của 1974. Sau khi Trung Quốc chiếm đảo, Bắc Việt bắt đầu gây khó khăn cho Hoa kiều khi muốn thăm thân nhân ở đại lục, và cũng không cho nhiều công dân đại lục sang miền Bắc thăm người thân. Nếu Hà Nội đồng ý cho Trung Quốc chiếm Hoàng Sa, hẳn những cử chỉ này đã không xảy ra.
Tham vọng lãnh thổ của Hà Nội không phải xuất phát từ việc làm đồng minh của Liên Xô mà đó là mục tiêu của Việt Nam mà thôi. Thực ra, các bản đồ Liên Xô sau năm 1950 đều đánh dấu Hoàng Sa là của Trung Quốc, và vì thế thật khó cho Kremlin công khai phản đối Trung Quốc.
Tính toán
Hà Nội không vui khi Gerald Ford gặp Leonid Brezhnev năm 1974
Nhưng nếu Bắc Việt phản đối Trung Quốc chiếm Hoàng Sa, tại sao họ im lặng trong trận đánh và cũng đã yêu cầu Moscow im lặng? Để trả lời, ta phải phân tích kỹ quan hệ Trung-Việt và Xô-Việt trong giai đoạn 1972-74.
Năm 1972 và nửa đầu năm 1973, lãnh đạo Hà Nội rõ ràng bất mãn trước quan hệ cải thiện của Mỹ và Trung Quốc. Theo họ, Trung Quốc đã hy sinh quyền lợi Việt Nam. Nhưng cuối 1973 đầu 1974, quan hệ Trung - Mỹ bắt đầu xấu đi, vì Mao Trạch Đông kết luận rằng chính sách của Washington về Đài Loan và Liên Xô không đáp ứng mong đợi của ông. Tình hình mới buộc Bắc Kinh và Hà Nội linh động hơn với nhau.
Vào cuối năm 1973 và đầu 1974, giới ngoại giao Liên Xô ở Hà Nội ghi nhận phía Trung Quốc bắt đầu mềm mỏng hơn trong giao dịch với Bắc Việt - có lẽ vì nếu xảy ra đồng thời xung đột với cả Mỹ và Bắc Việt, quyền lợi của Trung Quốc sẽ bị nguy hại.
Lãnh đạo Bắc Việt dĩ nhiên chẳng thích gì phe Mao tuyển đang một lần nữa thắng thế trên chính trường Trung Quốc. Nhưng họ không thích Chu Ân Lai, kiến trúc sư trong hòa giải Mỹ - Trung và nay cũng là đối tượng tấn công của phe Mao tuyển. Có thể họ hy vọng sự hòa giải Mỹ - Trung sẽ phần nào bị đảo ngược và vì thế muốn tránh gây hấn với Bắc Kinh - đặc biệt vì Hiệp định Paris 1973 đã không chấm dứt giao tranh giữa chính quyền Thiệu và quân cách mạng.
Tháng Chín 1973, Lê Duẩn và Phạm Văn Đồng nói với Fidel Castro rằng nếu miền Nam tiếp tục tấn công "vùng giải phóng", quân cộng sản sẽ đánh lại cho đến khi chính phủ Thiệu sụp đổ. Trong hoàn cảnh đó, rõ ràng Bắc Việt cần có hòa hoãn tạm thời với Trung Quốc.
Thời điểm Trung Quốc lấn chiếm cho thấy Bắc Kinh muốn hành động trước khi chính quyền Sài Gòn sụp đổ - tức là trước khi Hà Nội có thể giành lấy các hòn đảo tranh chấp
Balazs Szalontai
Thái độ thận trọng của Bắc Việt với Trung Quốc cũng còn là vì Hà Nội không tin Liên Xô. Nếu họ đã không thích sự gần gũi Mỹ - Trung thì họ cũng chẳng ưa gì việc Mỹ - Xô hòa hoãn. Cuộc hội đàm của Nixon ở Moscow và Brezhnev ở Vladivostok với Gerald Ford rõ ràng bị Hà Nội chau mày.
Về phần mình, Liên Xô cảm thấy sự hung hăng của đồng minh Bắc Việt có thể dẫn tới rắc rối to trên trường quốc tế. Tháng 11.1974, chỉ vài tháng trước khi Hà Nội đánh thắng miền Nam, đại sứ Liên Xô Shcherbakov nói với các đồng nghiệp Đông Âu rằng Moscow quyết tâm ngăn chiến tranh bùng nổ ở Việt Nam, vì nó đi ngược lại mục tiêu căn bản trong chính sách toàn cầu Liên Xô.
Lời nói của Shcherbakov để lộ ra là Liên Xô muốn giảm ảnh hưởng của Trung Quốc ở Bắc Việt hơn là hỗ trợ Hà Nội dùng vũ lực thống nhất đất nước. Cuối năm 1973, phái đoàn của Phạm Văn Đồng, khi đi thăm Đông Đức, đã công khai tuyên bố chính sách hòa hoãn của Moscow chẳng đem lại kết quả tích cực ở châu Âu, và nói cả Liên Xô và Trung Quốc đều có cống hiến lớn cho phong trào cộng sản quốc tế. Tức là trong năm 1973-74, Hà Nội vẫn không chịu theo phe nào giữa Liên Xô và Trung Quốc.
Tóm lại, có lẽ chúng ta không thể dùng nguyên tắc "im lặng là đồng ý" để giải thích hành vi của Hà Nội trong trận hải chiến Trung Quốc - Nam Việt Nam. Sự thụ động tạm thời của Bắc Việt phản ánh tính toán chiến thuật chứ không mang tính chiến lược hay pháp lý.
Trong khi đang còn đánh nhau với miền Nam và nghi ngờ Kremlin, Hà Nội ắt hẳn cảm thấy họ không thể cùng đối đầu với Bắc Kinh. Nhưng ngay sau khi chính quyền Thiệu sụp đổ, Bắc Việt không ngần ngại kêu đòi Hoàng Sa.
Thời điểm Trung Quốc lấn chiếm cho thấy Bắc Kinh muốn hành động trước khi chính quyền Sài Gòn sụp đổ - tức là trước khi Hà Nội có thể giành lấy các hòn đảo tranh chấp.
Về tác giả: Tiến sĩ Balazs Szalontai từng dạy ở Đại học Khoa học Công nghệ Mông Cổ và hiện là một nhà nghiên cứu độc lập ở Hungary. Ông là tác giả cuốn sách Kim Nhật Thành trong thời kỳ Khruschev (Đại học Stanford và Trung tâm Woodrow Wilson xuất bản, 2006).
Báo chí Bắc Việt không hề đề cập vụ đụng độ giữa Sài Gòn và Bắc Kinh. Phản ứng chính thức duy nhất trước cuộc xâm lăng của Trung Quốc là một tuyên bố ngắn gọn, thận trọng của Chính phủ Cách mạng Lâm thời miền Nam, kêu gọi có giải pháp thương lượng và hòa bình về mọi tranh cãi lãnh thổ.
Kho lưu trữ Hungary
Kể từ đó, sự im lặng của Hà Nội đã thường bị xem là thể hiện sự đồng tình của ban lãnh đạo trước hành động của Trung Quốc. Theo đó, thái độ thụ động của Bắc Việt hẳn là do sự thừa nhận ngầm về chủ quyền lịch sử của Bắc Kinh. Quan điểm này được hỗ trợ nhờ thông báo năm 1956 của Ung Văn Khiêm gửi tham tán Trung Quốc về chủ quyền lịch sử của Trung Quốc đối với Hoàng Sa và Trường Sa - gợi ý rằng "im lặng có nghĩa là đồng thuận". Quan điểm này nói nếu Bắc Việt không tán thành cuộc xâm lăng, thì phải nói ra chứ.
Iim lặng của miền Bắc chủ yếu là do cân nhắc chiến thuật ngắn hạn của Hà Nội.
Balazs Szalontai
Nhưng tài liệu tôi tìm thấy từ Kho Lưu trữ Quốc gia Hungary lại kể một câu chuyện khác. Chúng gợi ý rằng sự im lặng của miền Bắc chủ yếu là do cân nhắc chiến thuật ngắn hạn của Hà Nội, chứ không phải vì sự đồng ý về pháp lý giữa Trung Quốc và Việt Nam.
Sau vụ xâm lấn, Thứ trưởng Ngoại giao Nguyễn Cơ Thạch nói với đại sứ Hungary ở Hà Nội rằng "có nhiều văn bản và dữ liệu về quần đảo của Việt Nam". Các cán bộ khác của miền Bắc nói với các nhà ngoại giao Hungary rằng theo họ, xung đột giữa Trung Quốc và chính thể Sài Gòn chỉ là tạm thời; họ nói sau đó, "vấn đề này sẽ là vấn đề cho cả quốc gia Việt Nam." Khác với Bắc Kinh, Hà Nội không hề xem vụ việc đã khép lại. Một vụ trưởng của Bộ Ngoại giao Bắc Việt nói với Hungary rằng chính phủ miền Bắc dự tính sẽ họp với Trung Quốc để làm rõ vấn đề.
Tháng Chín 1975, Tổng Bí thư Lê Duẩn nêu vấn đề Hoàng Sa trong chuyến thăm Trung Quốc. Phản ứng không khoan nhượng của Bắc Kinh rõ ràng làm lãnh đạo Việt Nam bực mình. Sang tháng 11, một cán bộ Việt Nam nói với nhà ngoại giao Hungary rằng Hoàng Sa "là phần không thể tách rời của Việt Nam và chúng tôi sẽ không bao giờ từ bỏ chủ quyền với các đảo nhiều dầu hỏa này có tầm quan trọng chiến lược."
Dấu hiệu phản đối của Việt Nam, gián tiếp nhưng rõ rệt, đã xuất hiện từ những tháng đầu của 1974. Sau khi Trung Quốc chiếm đảo, Bắc Việt bắt đầu gây khó khăn cho Hoa kiều khi muốn thăm thân nhân ở đại lục, và cũng không cho nhiều công dân đại lục sang miền Bắc thăm người thân. Nếu Hà Nội đồng ý cho Trung Quốc chiếm Hoàng Sa, hẳn những cử chỉ này đã không xảy ra.
Tham vọng lãnh thổ của Hà Nội không phải xuất phát từ việc làm đồng minh của Liên Xô mà đó là mục tiêu của Việt Nam mà thôi. Thực ra, các bản đồ Liên Xô sau năm 1950 đều đánh dấu Hoàng Sa là của Trung Quốc, và vì thế thật khó cho Kremlin công khai phản đối Trung Quốc.
Tính toán
Hà Nội không vui khi Gerald Ford gặp Leonid Brezhnev năm 1974
Nhưng nếu Bắc Việt phản đối Trung Quốc chiếm Hoàng Sa, tại sao họ im lặng trong trận đánh và cũng đã yêu cầu Moscow im lặng? Để trả lời, ta phải phân tích kỹ quan hệ Trung-Việt và Xô-Việt trong giai đoạn 1972-74.
Năm 1972 và nửa đầu năm 1973, lãnh đạo Hà Nội rõ ràng bất mãn trước quan hệ cải thiện của Mỹ và Trung Quốc. Theo họ, Trung Quốc đã hy sinh quyền lợi Việt Nam. Nhưng cuối 1973 đầu 1974, quan hệ Trung - Mỹ bắt đầu xấu đi, vì Mao Trạch Đông kết luận rằng chính sách của Washington về Đài Loan và Liên Xô không đáp ứng mong đợi của ông. Tình hình mới buộc Bắc Kinh và Hà Nội linh động hơn với nhau.
Vào cuối năm 1973 và đầu 1974, giới ngoại giao Liên Xô ở Hà Nội ghi nhận phía Trung Quốc bắt đầu mềm mỏng hơn trong giao dịch với Bắc Việt - có lẽ vì nếu xảy ra đồng thời xung đột với cả Mỹ và Bắc Việt, quyền lợi của Trung Quốc sẽ bị nguy hại.
Lãnh đạo Bắc Việt dĩ nhiên chẳng thích gì phe Mao tuyển đang một lần nữa thắng thế trên chính trường Trung Quốc. Nhưng họ không thích Chu Ân Lai, kiến trúc sư trong hòa giải Mỹ - Trung và nay cũng là đối tượng tấn công của phe Mao tuyển. Có thể họ hy vọng sự hòa giải Mỹ - Trung sẽ phần nào bị đảo ngược và vì thế muốn tránh gây hấn với Bắc Kinh - đặc biệt vì Hiệp định Paris 1973 đã không chấm dứt giao tranh giữa chính quyền Thiệu và quân cách mạng.
Tháng Chín 1973, Lê Duẩn và Phạm Văn Đồng nói với Fidel Castro rằng nếu miền Nam tiếp tục tấn công "vùng giải phóng", quân cộng sản sẽ đánh lại cho đến khi chính phủ Thiệu sụp đổ. Trong hoàn cảnh đó, rõ ràng Bắc Việt cần có hòa hoãn tạm thời với Trung Quốc.
Thời điểm Trung Quốc lấn chiếm cho thấy Bắc Kinh muốn hành động trước khi chính quyền Sài Gòn sụp đổ - tức là trước khi Hà Nội có thể giành lấy các hòn đảo tranh chấp
Balazs Szalontai
Thái độ thận trọng của Bắc Việt với Trung Quốc cũng còn là vì Hà Nội không tin Liên Xô. Nếu họ đã không thích sự gần gũi Mỹ - Trung thì họ cũng chẳng ưa gì việc Mỹ - Xô hòa hoãn. Cuộc hội đàm của Nixon ở Moscow và Brezhnev ở Vladivostok với Gerald Ford rõ ràng bị Hà Nội chau mày.
Về phần mình, Liên Xô cảm thấy sự hung hăng của đồng minh Bắc Việt có thể dẫn tới rắc rối to trên trường quốc tế. Tháng 11.1974, chỉ vài tháng trước khi Hà Nội đánh thắng miền Nam, đại sứ Liên Xô Shcherbakov nói với các đồng nghiệp Đông Âu rằng Moscow quyết tâm ngăn chiến tranh bùng nổ ở Việt Nam, vì nó đi ngược lại mục tiêu căn bản trong chính sách toàn cầu Liên Xô.
Lời nói của Shcherbakov để lộ ra là Liên Xô muốn giảm ảnh hưởng của Trung Quốc ở Bắc Việt hơn là hỗ trợ Hà Nội dùng vũ lực thống nhất đất nước. Cuối năm 1973, phái đoàn của Phạm Văn Đồng, khi đi thăm Đông Đức, đã công khai tuyên bố chính sách hòa hoãn của Moscow chẳng đem lại kết quả tích cực ở châu Âu, và nói cả Liên Xô và Trung Quốc đều có cống hiến lớn cho phong trào cộng sản quốc tế. Tức là trong năm 1973-74, Hà Nội vẫn không chịu theo phe nào giữa Liên Xô và Trung Quốc.
Tóm lại, có lẽ chúng ta không thể dùng nguyên tắc "im lặng là đồng ý" để giải thích hành vi của Hà Nội trong trận hải chiến Trung Quốc - Nam Việt Nam. Sự thụ động tạm thời của Bắc Việt phản ánh tính toán chiến thuật chứ không mang tính chiến lược hay pháp lý.
Trong khi đang còn đánh nhau với miền Nam và nghi ngờ Kremlin, Hà Nội ắt hẳn cảm thấy họ không thể cùng đối đầu với Bắc Kinh. Nhưng ngay sau khi chính quyền Thiệu sụp đổ, Bắc Việt không ngần ngại kêu đòi Hoàng Sa.
Thời điểm Trung Quốc lấn chiếm cho thấy Bắc Kinh muốn hành động trước khi chính quyền Sài Gòn sụp đổ - tức là trước khi Hà Nội có thể giành lấy các hòn đảo tranh chấp.
Về tác giả: Tiến sĩ Balazs Szalontai từng dạy ở Đại học Khoa học Công nghệ Mông Cổ và hiện là một nhà nghiên cứu độc lập ở Hungary. Ông là tác giả cuốn sách Kim Nhật Thành trong thời kỳ Khruschev (Đại học Stanford và Trung tâm Woodrow Wilson xuất bản, 2006).
18 Mar 2009
Yes, Globalization Passed Its Peak
Will It Ever Come Back?
Rawi Abdelal and Adam Segal
RAWI ABDELAL is the Joseph C. Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.
ADAM SEGAL is Maurice R. Greenberg Senior Fellow for China Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Two years ago, in an article [1] in the January/February issue of Foreign Affairs, we argued that the process of worldwide economic integration was likely to continue but that political support for globalization was rapidly weakening. Without political and institutional underpinnings, we feared, the single global economic space could disintegrate, just as it had during the 1930s. Politicians and mass publics in the United States, Europe, and Asia were not only skeptical that the benefits of globalization outweighed the costs, they also seemed intent on raising new barriers to the movement of people, capital, goods, and services across borders. The future looked muddled, driven by strong technological forces pushing global commercial and financial integration forward and equally potent political forces pushing in the opposite direction.
At the time, many people considered us overly pessimistic [2]. Now it looks like we might have been too sanguine. The IMF predicts that global economic activity will expand by only 0.5 percent in 2009 -- down from 3.4 percent in 2008 and 5.2 percent in 2007. Global trade is expected to fall by more than 2.1 percent this year, and no major exporting country has escaped: China exported nearly 18 percent less in January 2008 than it did just one year earlier; for Korea, the drop was 33 percent; for Taiwan, 42 percent; and for Japan, 46 percent. According to the Institute of International Finance, private investment in developing economies has collapsed, falling more than 80 percent from its 2007 level. Whereas the worry two years ago was about the renaissance of state capitalism in energy and finance, it now appears that the banking sector in the United States, and almost every other major developed economy, will end up wholly or partially owned by the state.
Our description of the future as "muddled" turns out to have been an understatement. Today many are pessimistic about the future of the international system for the same reasons we were two years ago. In January, the World Trade Organization hopefully reported that most states were resisting the lure of protectionism. Although many were offering subsidies to their banks and auto manufacturers, it noted, "to date, most WTO Members appear to have successfully kept domestic protectionist pressures under control." A month later, the organization was no longer so certain, and optimism about the future was more difficult to locate. In the last several months, Brazil has raised tariffs on manufactured goods, the European Union has barred Chinese bolts and resumed subsidies on dairy products, and India has considered tariffs on steel imports.
The uproar among U.S. trade partners over the "buy American" principle initially embedded in the stimulus package -- companies would have been required to use U.S. steel and other goods in projects -- is a clear reflection of the concern that the economic crisis might kill globalization in its current form. Speaking out against the "buy America" provisions, President Barack Obama warned that the United States could not afford to send a protectionist message or "trigger a trade war." While this particular Smoot-Hawley-like bullet was ultimately dodged, protectionist temptations will not disappear and the political struggle for openness is likely to become ever more contentious.
The current crisis has caused the destruction of value, the contraction of capital, a decline in consumption, and an increase in unemployment. But its ultimate impact may be even more pervasive, because the crisis has further undermined the political legitimacy of the free movement of capital, goods, and services.
The legitimacy problem existed beforehand, of course, but the current downturn is making it much, much worse. When we wrote our article in 2007, for example, the U.S. public was wondering about how much globalization benefited them and whether some Americans -- say, bankers and CEOs of large corporations -- had benefited too much. Try asking the question now. The Chinese, meanwhile, were already working hard to keep all their plates spinning, ensuring continued rapid growth while addressing rising inequality and social protests. Soon the floor might be full of broken crockery.
As one of the most prolific exporters and important investors in U.S. dollar-denominated assets, China must play an important role in saving the global economy from which it has benefited so much. Beijing gamely talks about the need to "rebalance," shifting to a more domestic demand-driven model of growth, but has found it hard to abandon incentives for even more exports. Premier Wen Jiabao told the Financial Times, "Running our own affairs well is our biggest contribution to mankind." Perhaps. But the world will also need reassurances that Beijing's appetite for Treasury securities will outlast a crisis that, in the medium term, will threaten the value of the U.S. dollar.
Our message two years ago was that policy leaders needed to manage expectations at home as they worked together internationally. In particular, we argued that the United States needed to reinforce the global institutions that supported international trade while getting its own domestic house in order. Following through on these prescriptions is now even more necessary. In order to avoid disaster, all of the major economic players are going to have to resist pressure to protect home markets through subsidies or tariffs. Individual governments need to tackle the downturn through macroeconomic and financial policies; unemployment and worker retraining should be addressed through expanding and strengthening the social safety net. The United States in particular needs to absorb one of the most important lessons of European social democracy -- that a generous, well-designed welfare state is not the antithesis of capitalist globalization but rather its savior.
Amid all this gloom and doom, however, there is also a glimmer of optimism. Over the past 15 years, American capitalism lost its way, abetted by a world much too ready to lend it vast amounts of capital. The U.S. economy -- its households and companies -- essentially squandered those borrowed funds, saving and investing less, building and consuming more. The debate about the sustainability of those global imbalances has lost any charm it might once have had. Now, some $11 trillion of losses later, the answer is clear. And if the crisis proves to be a catharsis that persuades the United States to change its profligate ways, the legitimacy and promise of globalization may eventually be restored.
Source URL: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/64856/rawi-abdelal-and-adam-segal/yes-globalization-passed-its-peak
Rawi Abdelal and Adam Segal
RAWI ABDELAL is the Joseph C. Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.
ADAM SEGAL is Maurice R. Greenberg Senior Fellow for China Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Two years ago, in an article [1] in the January/February issue of Foreign Affairs, we argued that the process of worldwide economic integration was likely to continue but that political support for globalization was rapidly weakening. Without political and institutional underpinnings, we feared, the single global economic space could disintegrate, just as it had during the 1930s. Politicians and mass publics in the United States, Europe, and Asia were not only skeptical that the benefits of globalization outweighed the costs, they also seemed intent on raising new barriers to the movement of people, capital, goods, and services across borders. The future looked muddled, driven by strong technological forces pushing global commercial and financial integration forward and equally potent political forces pushing in the opposite direction.
At the time, many people considered us overly pessimistic [2]. Now it looks like we might have been too sanguine. The IMF predicts that global economic activity will expand by only 0.5 percent in 2009 -- down from 3.4 percent in 2008 and 5.2 percent in 2007. Global trade is expected to fall by more than 2.1 percent this year, and no major exporting country has escaped: China exported nearly 18 percent less in January 2008 than it did just one year earlier; for Korea, the drop was 33 percent; for Taiwan, 42 percent; and for Japan, 46 percent. According to the Institute of International Finance, private investment in developing economies has collapsed, falling more than 80 percent from its 2007 level. Whereas the worry two years ago was about the renaissance of state capitalism in energy and finance, it now appears that the banking sector in the United States, and almost every other major developed economy, will end up wholly or partially owned by the state.
Our description of the future as "muddled" turns out to have been an understatement. Today many are pessimistic about the future of the international system for the same reasons we were two years ago. In January, the World Trade Organization hopefully reported that most states were resisting the lure of protectionism. Although many were offering subsidies to their banks and auto manufacturers, it noted, "to date, most WTO Members appear to have successfully kept domestic protectionist pressures under control." A month later, the organization was no longer so certain, and optimism about the future was more difficult to locate. In the last several months, Brazil has raised tariffs on manufactured goods, the European Union has barred Chinese bolts and resumed subsidies on dairy products, and India has considered tariffs on steel imports.
The uproar among U.S. trade partners over the "buy American" principle initially embedded in the stimulus package -- companies would have been required to use U.S. steel and other goods in projects -- is a clear reflection of the concern that the economic crisis might kill globalization in its current form. Speaking out against the "buy America" provisions, President Barack Obama warned that the United States could not afford to send a protectionist message or "trigger a trade war." While this particular Smoot-Hawley-like bullet was ultimately dodged, protectionist temptations will not disappear and the political struggle for openness is likely to become ever more contentious.
The current crisis has caused the destruction of value, the contraction of capital, a decline in consumption, and an increase in unemployment. But its ultimate impact may be even more pervasive, because the crisis has further undermined the political legitimacy of the free movement of capital, goods, and services.
The legitimacy problem existed beforehand, of course, but the current downturn is making it much, much worse. When we wrote our article in 2007, for example, the U.S. public was wondering about how much globalization benefited them and whether some Americans -- say, bankers and CEOs of large corporations -- had benefited too much. Try asking the question now. The Chinese, meanwhile, were already working hard to keep all their plates spinning, ensuring continued rapid growth while addressing rising inequality and social protests. Soon the floor might be full of broken crockery.
As one of the most prolific exporters and important investors in U.S. dollar-denominated assets, China must play an important role in saving the global economy from which it has benefited so much. Beijing gamely talks about the need to "rebalance," shifting to a more domestic demand-driven model of growth, but has found it hard to abandon incentives for even more exports. Premier Wen Jiabao told the Financial Times, "Running our own affairs well is our biggest contribution to mankind." Perhaps. But the world will also need reassurances that Beijing's appetite for Treasury securities will outlast a crisis that, in the medium term, will threaten the value of the U.S. dollar.
Our message two years ago was that policy leaders needed to manage expectations at home as they worked together internationally. In particular, we argued that the United States needed to reinforce the global institutions that supported international trade while getting its own domestic house in order. Following through on these prescriptions is now even more necessary. In order to avoid disaster, all of the major economic players are going to have to resist pressure to protect home markets through subsidies or tariffs. Individual governments need to tackle the downturn through macroeconomic and financial policies; unemployment and worker retraining should be addressed through expanding and strengthening the social safety net. The United States in particular needs to absorb one of the most important lessons of European social democracy -- that a generous, well-designed welfare state is not the antithesis of capitalist globalization but rather its savior.
Amid all this gloom and doom, however, there is also a glimmer of optimism. Over the past 15 years, American capitalism lost its way, abetted by a world much too ready to lend it vast amounts of capital. The U.S. economy -- its households and companies -- essentially squandered those borrowed funds, saving and investing less, building and consuming more. The debate about the sustainability of those global imbalances has lost any charm it might once have had. Now, some $11 trillion of losses later, the answer is clear. And if the crisis proves to be a catharsis that persuades the United States to change its profligate ways, the legitimacy and promise of globalization may eventually be restored.
Source URL: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/64856/rawi-abdelal-and-adam-segal/yes-globalization-passed-its-peak
The Dangers of 'Deglobalization'
March 16, 2009
Author: Jayshree Bajoria
From construction laborers to Harvard-educated bankers, foreign workers are being forced to return home as once-booming economies around the world contract. Globally, 24 million to 52 million people could lose their jobs in 2009, according to the International Labor Organization's latest estimates. And populist sentiment and protectionist moves in countries which relied on foreign laborers during the boom years have put 200 million migrant workers internationally in the crosshairs.
Examples of the new protectionism abound: The United States enacted a law in 2009 imposing strict restrictions on hiring of skilled immigrant workers by companies receiving government bailout money. Malaysia and Saudi Arabia directed companies to lay off foreign workers first if they needed to downsize. In Britain, large-scale protests (Telegraph) were held against the use of foreign workers at an oil refinery. The Philippines reports over 5000 Filipino workers lost their jobs overseas from October 2008 to January 2009. Even Ireland is debating its liberal immigration laws which allowed for massive levels of immigration to sustain the country's economic growth since the late 1990s. In a September 2008 poll, as the country's economy faltered, 66 percent of Irish felt immigration policy should be made more restrictive (IrishTimes).
Experts dub this deglobalization. Some analysts also express fears of a reverse brain drain. Examining skilled immigrant contributions to the United States, Duke University professor Vivek Wadhwa notes immigrants founded a quarter (Issues in Science and Technology) of all U.S. engineering and technology companies between 1995 and 2005, including half of those in Silicon Valley. CFR's Matthew Slaughter says skilled immigrants can help revive the economy by creating more jobs in the United States. "Keeping them out damages us," he writes, as a co-author of a recent op-ed (WSJ). Wadhwa's research points out immigrant-founded tech companies generated $52 billion in revenue and employed 450,000 workers in 2005.
In the short term, experts worry about protectionist measures and job loss sending migrants home and curtailing levels of migration from origin to destination countries. This would result in reduced remittances which, when coupled with increased unemployment in countries of origin, prompt fears of social and political upheaval. The World Bank says global remittances are expected to fall (PDF) by 0.9 percent in 2009, but could fall by as much as 6 percent if the economic situation worsens. The International Organization for Migration also warns against the risk of rising xenophobia (PDF) "based on the false perception" that migrants steal jobs from local workers.
In the long-term, writes Stephen Castles, co-author of the book The Age of Migration, the motivation to migrate (PDF) in times of recession may be even higher than before, and remittances may prove a resilient form of international transfer. He also argues global economic inequality and the demographic imbalances between the ageing populations of the North and massive working-age people in the South remain important factors in generating future migration.
The recent fall in arrests (LAT) of illegal immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border raises question: Will a poor labor market in developed economies deter illegal immigration? Experts appear divided. Some, in fact, think tighter immigration laws in traditional destination markets will merely strengthen black-market activity.
To respond effectively to the financial crisis, economists generally argue against rich countries barring their doors to migrants. In October 2008, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon stressed migration can help lift the world out of its economic crisis. "Now more than ever, politicians and policymakers need to cooperate across borders," he said. There are also demands for reforming immigration laws that do not discourage skilled labor, but at the same time secures borders. In a new interview with CFR.org, former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff says U.S. lawmakers should be preparing changes to immigration policy in anticipation of the country's economic revival. "[T]here is something to be said for getting it right now before the economy starts to grow again, and the demand for workers becomes increased," he says.
Author: Jayshree Bajoria
From construction laborers to Harvard-educated bankers, foreign workers are being forced to return home as once-booming economies around the world contract. Globally, 24 million to 52 million people could lose their jobs in 2009, according to the International Labor Organization's latest estimates. And populist sentiment and protectionist moves in countries which relied on foreign laborers during the boom years have put 200 million migrant workers internationally in the crosshairs.
Examples of the new protectionism abound: The United States enacted a law in 2009 imposing strict restrictions on hiring of skilled immigrant workers by companies receiving government bailout money. Malaysia and Saudi Arabia directed companies to lay off foreign workers first if they needed to downsize. In Britain, large-scale protests (Telegraph) were held against the use of foreign workers at an oil refinery. The Philippines reports over 5000 Filipino workers lost their jobs overseas from October 2008 to January 2009. Even Ireland is debating its liberal immigration laws which allowed for massive levels of immigration to sustain the country's economic growth since the late 1990s. In a September 2008 poll, as the country's economy faltered, 66 percent of Irish felt immigration policy should be made more restrictive (IrishTimes).
Experts dub this deglobalization. Some analysts also express fears of a reverse brain drain. Examining skilled immigrant contributions to the United States, Duke University professor Vivek Wadhwa notes immigrants founded a quarter (Issues in Science and Technology) of all U.S. engineering and technology companies between 1995 and 2005, including half of those in Silicon Valley. CFR's Matthew Slaughter says skilled immigrants can help revive the economy by creating more jobs in the United States. "Keeping them out damages us," he writes, as a co-author of a recent op-ed (WSJ). Wadhwa's research points out immigrant-founded tech companies generated $52 billion in revenue and employed 450,000 workers in 2005.
In the short term, experts worry about protectionist measures and job loss sending migrants home and curtailing levels of migration from origin to destination countries. This would result in reduced remittances which, when coupled with increased unemployment in countries of origin, prompt fears of social and political upheaval. The World Bank says global remittances are expected to fall (PDF) by 0.9 percent in 2009, but could fall by as much as 6 percent if the economic situation worsens. The International Organization for Migration also warns against the risk of rising xenophobia (PDF) "based on the false perception" that migrants steal jobs from local workers.
In the long-term, writes Stephen Castles, co-author of the book The Age of Migration, the motivation to migrate (PDF) in times of recession may be even higher than before, and remittances may prove a resilient form of international transfer. He also argues global economic inequality and the demographic imbalances between the ageing populations of the North and massive working-age people in the South remain important factors in generating future migration.
The recent fall in arrests (LAT) of illegal immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border raises question: Will a poor labor market in developed economies deter illegal immigration? Experts appear divided. Some, in fact, think tighter immigration laws in traditional destination markets will merely strengthen black-market activity.
To respond effectively to the financial crisis, economists generally argue against rich countries barring their doors to migrants. In October 2008, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon stressed migration can help lift the world out of its economic crisis. "Now more than ever, politicians and policymakers need to cooperate across borders," he said. There are also demands for reforming immigration laws that do not discourage skilled labor, but at the same time secures borders. In a new interview with CFR.org, former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff says U.S. lawmakers should be preparing changes to immigration policy in anticipation of the country's economic revival. "[T]here is something to be said for getting it right now before the economy starts to grow again, and the demand for workers becomes increased," he says.
China Gains Key Assets In Spate of Purchases
Oil, Minerals Are Among Acquisitions Worldwide
SHANGHAI -- Chinese companies have been on a shopping spree in the past month, snapping up tens of billions of dollars' worth of key assets in Iran, Brazil, Russia, Venezuela, Australia and France in a global fire sale set off by the financial crisis.
The deals have allowed China to lock up supplies of oil, minerals, metals and other strategic natural resources it needs to continue to fuel its growth. The sheer scope of the agreements marks a shift in global finance, roiling energy markets and feeding worries about the future availability and prices of those commodities in other countries that compete for them, including the United States.
Just a few months ago, many countries were greeting such overtures from China with suspicion. Today, as corporations and banks in other parts of the world find themselves reluctant or unable to give out money to distressed companies, cash-rich China has become a major force driving new lending and investment.
On Feb. 12, China's state-owned metals giant Chinalco signed a $19.5 billion deal with Australia's Rio Tinto that will eventually double its stake in the world's second-largest mining company.
ad_icon
In three other cases, China has used loans as a way of securing energy supplies. On Feb. 17 and 18, China National Petroleum signed separate agreements with Russia and Venezuela under which China would provide $25 billion and $4 billion in loans, respectively, in exchange for long-term commitments to supply oil. And on Feb. 19, the China Development Bank struck a similar deal with Petrobras, the Brazilian oil company, agreeing to a loan of $10 billion in exchange for oil.
On Saturday, Iran announced that it had signed a $3.2 billion agreement with a Chinese consortium to develop an area beneath the Persian Gulf seabed that is believed to hold about 8 percent of the world's reserves of natural gas.
Even as global financial flows have slowed sharply overall, China has dramatically stepped up its outbound investment. In 2008, its overseas mergers and acquisitions were worth $52.1 billion -- a record, according to the research firm Dealogic. In January and February of this year, Chinese companies invested $16.3 billion abroad, meaning that if the pace holds, the total for 2009 could be nearly double last year's.
Worldwide, the value of mergers and acquisitions transactions so far this year has dropped 35 percent to $384 billion. By comparison, the United States had $186.2 billion in outbound mergers and acquisitions in 2008 and Japan had $74.3 billion.
China's state-run media outlets are calling the acquisition spree an opportunity that comes once in a hundred years, and analysts are drawing parallels to 1980s Japan.
"That China started investing or acquiring some overseas mineral resources companies with relatively low prices during the global economic crisis is quite a normal practice. Japan did the same thing in its prime development period, too," said Xu Xiangchun, consulting director for Mysteel.com, a market research and analysis firm.
It's not just Chinese corporations that are taking advantage of the economic crisis to help others while helping themselves.
The Chinese government also has come to the rescue of ailing countries, such as Jamaica and Pakistan, that it wants as allies, extending generous loans. Even Chinese consumers are taking their money abroad. In a shopping trip last month organized by an online real estate brokerage, a group of 50 individual investors from China traveled to New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco to purchase homes at prices that have crashed since the subprime crisis.
As soon as we launched the project, we had 100 people registered and ready to go," said Dai Jianzhong, chief executive of SouFun Holdings, which organized the trip. "Now the number has reached 400. Apparently, the American real estate market has a great appeal to Chinese buyers."
China's Commerce Ministry organized a similar shopping expedition -- but for Chinese companies to visit foreign companies -- the week of Feb. 25. Commerce Minister Chen Deming took with him about 90 executives, who signed contracts worth about $10 billion in Germany, $400,000 in Switzerland, $320 million in Spain and $2 billion in Britain. The deals were mostly for the purchase of goods, including olive oil, 3,000 Jaguars and 10,000 Land Rovers.
The Commerce Ministry said Monday that it intends to send more investment missions abroad this year. Although details are still being worked out, the itineraries will probably include the United States, Japan and Southeast Asia, the ministry said.
Foreign automakers may be next on China's acquisitions list.
On Feb. 23, Weichai Power, a diesel engine company, said it would spend about $3.8 million to acquire the products, technology and brand of France's Moteurs Baudouin, which designs and manufactures marine propulsive equipment such as engines and propellers.
ad_icon
That was a relatively small deal, but Chen Bin, director general of the National Development and Reform Commission's Department of Industry, hinted that larger acquisitions may be in the works. He noted on the sidelines of a news conference on the economy late last month that overseas car companies are facing cash difficulties at the same time their Chinese counterparts "need their technology, brands, talent and sales networks."
"It will be a very big challenge for Chinese companies to stabilize the operations of foreign automakers and to maintain growth," Chen acknowledged, according to the official People's Daily, but he added that if the companies decide to acquire such assets, "the government will support them."
The one country that appears conspicuously absent from China's corporate bargain-hunting spree is the United States.
Many Chinese investors are still stung by the memory of China National Offshore Oil's 2005 attempt to buy a stake in the U.S. energy company Unocal. The deal fell apart after U.S. lawmakers expressed concern about the national security implications of China controlling some of the country's oil resources.
Xiong Weiping, president of Chinalco, whose bid for a larger stake in Rio Tinto is China's biggest outbound investment to date, has taken measures to address concerns as scrutiny of that deal has increased. The deal will be put to a shareholder vote in May or June and must also be approved by Australia's Foreign Investment Review Board.
At a news briefing in Sydney on March 2, Xiong assured the country that Chinalco is not seeking a majority share of the mining giant and that its management and corporate strategy would not change. Xiong emphasized that "the transaction will in no way lead to any control of the natural resources of Australia."
Zha Daojiong, an energy researcher at Peking University, said Chinese companies feel they may be discriminated against in the United States because of the mistaken perception that they are all state-owned or state-directed.
"Foreigners question these companies' intentions and tend to link their moves with government instructions," Zha said, "but I should say it is really hard to tell whether this is true nor not."
Researchers Wang Juan and Liu Liu in Beijing contributed to this report.
SHANGHAI -- Chinese companies have been on a shopping spree in the past month, snapping up tens of billions of dollars' worth of key assets in Iran, Brazil, Russia, Venezuela, Australia and France in a global fire sale set off by the financial crisis.
The deals have allowed China to lock up supplies of oil, minerals, metals and other strategic natural resources it needs to continue to fuel its growth. The sheer scope of the agreements marks a shift in global finance, roiling energy markets and feeding worries about the future availability and prices of those commodities in other countries that compete for them, including the United States.
Just a few months ago, many countries were greeting such overtures from China with suspicion. Today, as corporations and banks in other parts of the world find themselves reluctant or unable to give out money to distressed companies, cash-rich China has become a major force driving new lending and investment.
On Feb. 12, China's state-owned metals giant Chinalco signed a $19.5 billion deal with Australia's Rio Tinto that will eventually double its stake in the world's second-largest mining company.
ad_icon
In three other cases, China has used loans as a way of securing energy supplies. On Feb. 17 and 18, China National Petroleum signed separate agreements with Russia and Venezuela under which China would provide $25 billion and $4 billion in loans, respectively, in exchange for long-term commitments to supply oil. And on Feb. 19, the China Development Bank struck a similar deal with Petrobras, the Brazilian oil company, agreeing to a loan of $10 billion in exchange for oil.
On Saturday, Iran announced that it had signed a $3.2 billion agreement with a Chinese consortium to develop an area beneath the Persian Gulf seabed that is believed to hold about 8 percent of the world's reserves of natural gas.
Even as global financial flows have slowed sharply overall, China has dramatically stepped up its outbound investment. In 2008, its overseas mergers and acquisitions were worth $52.1 billion -- a record, according to the research firm Dealogic. In January and February of this year, Chinese companies invested $16.3 billion abroad, meaning that if the pace holds, the total for 2009 could be nearly double last year's.
Worldwide, the value of mergers and acquisitions transactions so far this year has dropped 35 percent to $384 billion. By comparison, the United States had $186.2 billion in outbound mergers and acquisitions in 2008 and Japan had $74.3 billion.
China's state-run media outlets are calling the acquisition spree an opportunity that comes once in a hundred years, and analysts are drawing parallels to 1980s Japan.
"That China started investing or acquiring some overseas mineral resources companies with relatively low prices during the global economic crisis is quite a normal practice. Japan did the same thing in its prime development period, too," said Xu Xiangchun, consulting director for Mysteel.com, a market research and analysis firm.
It's not just Chinese corporations that are taking advantage of the economic crisis to help others while helping themselves.
The Chinese government also has come to the rescue of ailing countries, such as Jamaica and Pakistan, that it wants as allies, extending generous loans. Even Chinese consumers are taking their money abroad. In a shopping trip last month organized by an online real estate brokerage, a group of 50 individual investors from China traveled to New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco to purchase homes at prices that have crashed since the subprime crisis.
As soon as we launched the project, we had 100 people registered and ready to go," said Dai Jianzhong, chief executive of SouFun Holdings, which organized the trip. "Now the number has reached 400. Apparently, the American real estate market has a great appeal to Chinese buyers."
China's Commerce Ministry organized a similar shopping expedition -- but for Chinese companies to visit foreign companies -- the week of Feb. 25. Commerce Minister Chen Deming took with him about 90 executives, who signed contracts worth about $10 billion in Germany, $400,000 in Switzerland, $320 million in Spain and $2 billion in Britain. The deals were mostly for the purchase of goods, including olive oil, 3,000 Jaguars and 10,000 Land Rovers.
The Commerce Ministry said Monday that it intends to send more investment missions abroad this year. Although details are still being worked out, the itineraries will probably include the United States, Japan and Southeast Asia, the ministry said.
Foreign automakers may be next on China's acquisitions list.
On Feb. 23, Weichai Power, a diesel engine company, said it would spend about $3.8 million to acquire the products, technology and brand of France's Moteurs Baudouin, which designs and manufactures marine propulsive equipment such as engines and propellers.
ad_icon
That was a relatively small deal, but Chen Bin, director general of the National Development and Reform Commission's Department of Industry, hinted that larger acquisitions may be in the works. He noted on the sidelines of a news conference on the economy late last month that overseas car companies are facing cash difficulties at the same time their Chinese counterparts "need their technology, brands, talent and sales networks."
"It will be a very big challenge for Chinese companies to stabilize the operations of foreign automakers and to maintain growth," Chen acknowledged, according to the official People's Daily, but he added that if the companies decide to acquire such assets, "the government will support them."
The one country that appears conspicuously absent from China's corporate bargain-hunting spree is the United States.
Many Chinese investors are still stung by the memory of China National Offshore Oil's 2005 attempt to buy a stake in the U.S. energy company Unocal. The deal fell apart after U.S. lawmakers expressed concern about the national security implications of China controlling some of the country's oil resources.
Xiong Weiping, president of Chinalco, whose bid for a larger stake in Rio Tinto is China's biggest outbound investment to date, has taken measures to address concerns as scrutiny of that deal has increased. The deal will be put to a shareholder vote in May or June and must also be approved by Australia's Foreign Investment Review Board.
At a news briefing in Sydney on March 2, Xiong assured the country that Chinalco is not seeking a majority share of the mining giant and that its management and corporate strategy would not change. Xiong emphasized that "the transaction will in no way lead to any control of the natural resources of Australia."
Zha Daojiong, an energy researcher at Peking University, said Chinese companies feel they may be discriminated against in the United States because of the mistaken perception that they are all state-owned or state-directed.
"Foreigners question these companies' intentions and tend to link their moves with government instructions," Zha said, "but I should say it is really hard to tell whether this is true nor not."
Researchers Wang Juan and Liu Liu in Beijing contributed to this report.
11 Mar 2009
China's Way Forward - How Vietnam moving forward?
Our apartment in Beijing overlooks one of the city’s long-distance bus terminals, where people arrive from the countryside to find work or sell wares, and depart for visits or permanent returns to their home villages. Early last summer, the terminal was jammed, and most of the passengers were leaving town.
At the time, the outbound flow was taken as one more last-minute sign of China’s optimistic, all-fronts effort to spiff up Beijing for its role as Olympic host. Through the spring, construction workers had toiled round the clock on any building or public-works project (notably, new subway stations) that had a chance of being completed by the time of the Games. For projects with no hope of making the deadline, workers toiled instead to put up screening walls, or to neaten the piles of I-beams and rebar that normally littered the sites. In July the government ordered a halt to all building or demolition work anywhere near Beijing, as part of a security lockdown and in hopes that construction dust would settle out of the air. The workers, mostly migrants from poorer neighboring provinces, went home on (mostly unpaid) leave to see their families and watch the Games on village TVs.
In September, as Olympic spectators were leaving Beijing, migrant workers returned, via packed buses and trains. In the capital as in fast-growing cities all across China, country people stand out in the urban crowd. Their hands and faces are more weathered, their clothes simpler and more ragged. Often they move about town lugging unwieldy bundles of bedding and belongings wrapped in the plaid-patterned, woven-plastic fabric that somehow has become standard for such purposes in poor countries around the world.
This post-Olympic flow back into the city was expected—but what happened next was not. In mid-October, at about the time retail sales were collapsing in the United States, we started seeing extra buses muster each morning with full loads of migrants headed out of town again. On an icy afternoon in November, I passed a site where a huge new office complex was being built. Its towering construction cranes, which just a week earlier had been swinging loads of cement and steel so close to the sidewalk that passersby ducked, were motionless. The frontage road was lined with buses whose license plates were from Hebei province—the sticks. A driver told me that the convoy would take workers back to their home village—“For now, no work”—and then come back for another load as soon as it dropped this batch off.
Through the rest of the winter and early this spring, Beijing’s air stayed notably clearer than it had been at the same time a year ago. Part of that was because of unusually windy weather, and part may have been a residual benefit of Olympic cleanup measures. But it was also a sign that fewer factories were running in the heavy-industrial districts upwind of Beijing.
The outbound buses and the better air were our local indicators of the economic contraction being felt in practically every corner of the world. And there were signs of it everywhere in China. Container ships sitting, moored and idle, in the harbor of Hong Kong. Revenues down in Macau’s casinos. Seas of empty seats aboard a small Airbus on the Shanghai-Beijing shuttle flight. (The first time I took that trip, in 2006, it was aboard a 747 with every seat full.) A report that a million or more of this year’s university graduates were still looking for jobs. Protests across the country, as real-estate developers and small-factory owners went bankrupt—and disappeared without paying employees months of back wages. Thousands of factories in Dongguan, in Guangdong province just north of Hong Kong, had been the real-life incarnation of the world’s stereotype of low-wage Chinese workers turning out low-value goods—cheap dolls and toys, Halloween masks, the bulk of the world’s Christmas presents and decorations. Within months the area was transformed into China’s rust belt.
You never know which statistics to believe in China, but in January a local official in Dongguan told me that at least 1 million factory workers had recently lost their jobs within five miles of where I was, and probably another million in nearby manufacturing areas of Guangdong province. The electronics supplier Foxconn, whose gigantic compound in Shenzhen turns out components for Apple, Dell, HP, and countless other companies and which had recently employed more than 250,000 workers, sent all its employees on a one-month unpaid furlough late last year. Reports in the Chinese press said Foxconn might lay off 100,000 worldwide.
Is the “China story” as we’ve known it—the three-decade-long story of modernization and prosperity supervised by an authoritarian regime whose economic success excuses most complaints and failings—over? Has it reached its limits and exposed its contradictions? If China does not keep moving forward and growing, will it tear itself apart?
Observers outside China often compare its difficulties to Japan’s a generation earlier. Few people inside China think the two economies have much in common—one is full of impoverished peasants, while the other has practically eliminated poverty; one is rushing toward industrialization while the other has been an industrial power for more than a century. But in recent months, I’ve heard countless Americans and a few Europeans ask, “Isn’t this just like the ‘Japan scare’ of the 1980s?” The question is shorthand for saying: “Japan seemed unstoppable 20 years ago and has been a sick man ever since. Is ‘rising’ China perhaps due for a similar reassessment?”
From Chinese intellectuals and officials I’ve more often heard a cautionary comparison to the old Soviet Union, implying that political control and territorial dominion could be undone by economic failure. By this logic, the Chinese Communist Party has no choice but to keep the country’s business growing as fast as possible, since a steady increase in material welfare is the real basis of the party’s legitimacy. If the economy were ever to stagnate—which is generally understood to mean a growth rate that falls below about 8 percent per year—then a larger share of the Chinese public might register dis content with Communist rule. And then anything could happen. The territorial contrast between the vast old Soviet empire and today’s shrunken Russian state may help explain the Chinese government’s intransigence about any threat of what it dismisses as “splittism” concerning Tibet, the Muslim region of Xinjiang, or Taiwan.
The Japanese and Soviet comparisons are awkward because of obvious differences from China. At no point in its history did the Soviet Union achieve anything like China’s sustained record of high-speed growth. So the “stagnation” that helped bring the Soviet regime down was in fact real, decades-long economic decline. Japan’s prolonged “sickness” is one most countries would envy: with half as many people as America and one-tenth as many as China, Japan still has the world’s second-largest economy and many of its strongest industrial brands, including the world’s largest carmaker, Toyota. Moreover, both Japan and the Soviet Union at times presented themselves as models of different paths toward modernity. Modern China is a force and a reality, but not a model or an idea that others might replicate. The Chinese system will remain unique. (The one nation that shares its scale, India, does not share its political precepts. No other nation that could build roads, airports, and industrial parks as modern as China’s could impose so repressive a political regime.)
Still, thinking of how previous models might apply to China raises a valid point. The Soviet Union’s political control was finally undone by its economic failures. And the parts of Japan’s system that truly don’t work—mainly the financial markets, which have yet to emerge from a 20-year slump—reflect its difficulty in adjusting to changes in the world economy. So if China’s rise is not undone by the risks that have been evident for years—pollution, water shortage, corruption, the widening rich-poor social gap, safety standards so primitive that on average more than 250 people die each day in coal-mine accidents—might China prove vulnerable to Soviet-style discontent born of a slowing economy? Or to Japanese-style inability to understand how the world is changing all around it?
My guess is No. China faces big problems, and its modern history has been marked by the unforeseen. Perhaps we will look back at the spectacle and choreography of the Beijing Olympics opening ceremonies as the last time the world thought there was no limit to what China could achieve. But I am betting the other way.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200904/chinese-innovation
At the time, the outbound flow was taken as one more last-minute sign of China’s optimistic, all-fronts effort to spiff up Beijing for its role as Olympic host. Through the spring, construction workers had toiled round the clock on any building or public-works project (notably, new subway stations) that had a chance of being completed by the time of the Games. For projects with no hope of making the deadline, workers toiled instead to put up screening walls, or to neaten the piles of I-beams and rebar that normally littered the sites. In July the government ordered a halt to all building or demolition work anywhere near Beijing, as part of a security lockdown and in hopes that construction dust would settle out of the air. The workers, mostly migrants from poorer neighboring provinces, went home on (mostly unpaid) leave to see their families and watch the Games on village TVs.
In September, as Olympic spectators were leaving Beijing, migrant workers returned, via packed buses and trains. In the capital as in fast-growing cities all across China, country people stand out in the urban crowd. Their hands and faces are more weathered, their clothes simpler and more ragged. Often they move about town lugging unwieldy bundles of bedding and belongings wrapped in the plaid-patterned, woven-plastic fabric that somehow has become standard for such purposes in poor countries around the world.
This post-Olympic flow back into the city was expected—but what happened next was not. In mid-October, at about the time retail sales were collapsing in the United States, we started seeing extra buses muster each morning with full loads of migrants headed out of town again. On an icy afternoon in November, I passed a site where a huge new office complex was being built. Its towering construction cranes, which just a week earlier had been swinging loads of cement and steel so close to the sidewalk that passersby ducked, were motionless. The frontage road was lined with buses whose license plates were from Hebei province—the sticks. A driver told me that the convoy would take workers back to their home village—“For now, no work”—and then come back for another load as soon as it dropped this batch off.
Through the rest of the winter and early this spring, Beijing’s air stayed notably clearer than it had been at the same time a year ago. Part of that was because of unusually windy weather, and part may have been a residual benefit of Olympic cleanup measures. But it was also a sign that fewer factories were running in the heavy-industrial districts upwind of Beijing.
The outbound buses and the better air were our local indicators of the economic contraction being felt in practically every corner of the world. And there were signs of it everywhere in China. Container ships sitting, moored and idle, in the harbor of Hong Kong. Revenues down in Macau’s casinos. Seas of empty seats aboard a small Airbus on the Shanghai-Beijing shuttle flight. (The first time I took that trip, in 2006, it was aboard a 747 with every seat full.) A report that a million or more of this year’s university graduates were still looking for jobs. Protests across the country, as real-estate developers and small-factory owners went bankrupt—and disappeared without paying employees months of back wages. Thousands of factories in Dongguan, in Guangdong province just north of Hong Kong, had been the real-life incarnation of the world’s stereotype of low-wage Chinese workers turning out low-value goods—cheap dolls and toys, Halloween masks, the bulk of the world’s Christmas presents and decorations. Within months the area was transformed into China’s rust belt.
You never know which statistics to believe in China, but in January a local official in Dongguan told me that at least 1 million factory workers had recently lost their jobs within five miles of where I was, and probably another million in nearby manufacturing areas of Guangdong province. The electronics supplier Foxconn, whose gigantic compound in Shenzhen turns out components for Apple, Dell, HP, and countless other companies and which had recently employed more than 250,000 workers, sent all its employees on a one-month unpaid furlough late last year. Reports in the Chinese press said Foxconn might lay off 100,000 worldwide.
Is the “China story” as we’ve known it—the three-decade-long story of modernization and prosperity supervised by an authoritarian regime whose economic success excuses most complaints and failings—over? Has it reached its limits and exposed its contradictions? If China does not keep moving forward and growing, will it tear itself apart?
Observers outside China often compare its difficulties to Japan’s a generation earlier. Few people inside China think the two economies have much in common—one is full of impoverished peasants, while the other has practically eliminated poverty; one is rushing toward industrialization while the other has been an industrial power for more than a century. But in recent months, I’ve heard countless Americans and a few Europeans ask, “Isn’t this just like the ‘Japan scare’ of the 1980s?” The question is shorthand for saying: “Japan seemed unstoppable 20 years ago and has been a sick man ever since. Is ‘rising’ China perhaps due for a similar reassessment?”
From Chinese intellectuals and officials I’ve more often heard a cautionary comparison to the old Soviet Union, implying that political control and territorial dominion could be undone by economic failure. By this logic, the Chinese Communist Party has no choice but to keep the country’s business growing as fast as possible, since a steady increase in material welfare is the real basis of the party’s legitimacy. If the economy were ever to stagnate—which is generally understood to mean a growth rate that falls below about 8 percent per year—then a larger share of the Chinese public might register dis content with Communist rule. And then anything could happen. The territorial contrast between the vast old Soviet empire and today’s shrunken Russian state may help explain the Chinese government’s intransigence about any threat of what it dismisses as “splittism” concerning Tibet, the Muslim region of Xinjiang, or Taiwan.
The Japanese and Soviet comparisons are awkward because of obvious differences from China. At no point in its history did the Soviet Union achieve anything like China’s sustained record of high-speed growth. So the “stagnation” that helped bring the Soviet regime down was in fact real, decades-long economic decline. Japan’s prolonged “sickness” is one most countries would envy: with half as many people as America and one-tenth as many as China, Japan still has the world’s second-largest economy and many of its strongest industrial brands, including the world’s largest carmaker, Toyota. Moreover, both Japan and the Soviet Union at times presented themselves as models of different paths toward modernity. Modern China is a force and a reality, but not a model or an idea that others might replicate. The Chinese system will remain unique. (The one nation that shares its scale, India, does not share its political precepts. No other nation that could build roads, airports, and industrial parks as modern as China’s could impose so repressive a political regime.)
Still, thinking of how previous models might apply to China raises a valid point. The Soviet Union’s political control was finally undone by its economic failures. And the parts of Japan’s system that truly don’t work—mainly the financial markets, which have yet to emerge from a 20-year slump—reflect its difficulty in adjusting to changes in the world economy. So if China’s rise is not undone by the risks that have been evident for years—pollution, water shortage, corruption, the widening rich-poor social gap, safety standards so primitive that on average more than 250 people die each day in coal-mine accidents—might China prove vulnerable to Soviet-style discontent born of a slowing economy? Or to Japanese-style inability to understand how the world is changing all around it?
My guess is No. China faces big problems, and its modern history has been marked by the unforeseen. Perhaps we will look back at the spectacle and choreography of the Beijing Olympics opening ceremonies as the last time the world thought there was no limit to what China could achieve. But I am betting the other way.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200904/chinese-innovation
3 Mar 2009
Công nghiệp phụ trợ Việt Nam - Không thể yếu hơn
Ngành công nghiệp phụ trợ của VN chỉ cung cấp được thùng các-tông, thậm chí chưa thể sản xuất vỏ chai rượu đủ chất lượng, tỉ lệ nội địa hóa thực chất rất thấp... khiến Đại sứ Nhật Bản Mitsuo Sakaba phải thốt lên "tôi bị sốc", tại Diễn đàn kinh tế Việt - Nhật lần 3 diễn ra sáng 3/3 ở Hà Nội. Ông cảnh báo: Thời gian để tranh đấu nỗ lực vì sinh mệnh của nền công nghiệp VN không còn nhiều nữa.
Cuối tháng 2 năm ngoái, khi đi thị sát một số doanh nghiệp Nhật Bản tiêu biểu, Đại sứ Mitsuo Sakaba nhận ra rằng VN vẫn phải nhập từ Nhật Bản và các nước Đông Nam Á lân cận nhiều loại phụ tùng, linh kiện.
"Tôi đã rất ngạc nhiên khi được biết VN chỉ cung cấp được thùng các-tông và tôi đã bị sốc khi nghe nói rằng, các doanh nghiệp sản xuất rượu của Nhật Bản còn phải nhập khẩu đến cả chai rượu".
Đại sứ dẫn ví dụ nếu độ dày của chai thủy tinh không đều sẽ ảnh hưởng đến lượng rượu chứa trong nó. Phối màu của chai thủy tinh không đều thì ngoại quan của chai sẽ không đẹp.
"Thật đáng tiếc, ở VN chưa có nhà sản xuất thủy tinh nào có thể sản xuất và cung ứng sản phẩm chai rượu có thể đáp ứng được tiêu chuẩn yêu cầu của phía nhà sản xuất rượu".
Thâm nhập thực tế, ông Đại sứ khẳng định, ngay cả những phụ tùng linh kiện mua trong nước có nguyên vật liệu và phụ tùng nhỏ phải nhập khẩu, nên về thực chất tỉ lệ "nội địa hóa" còn thấp hơn thế.
"Chưa đủ tin cậy"
Cho rằng ngành công nghiệp phụ trợ của VN chưa đủ tin cậy, Đại sứ Nhật Bản khuyến cáo với các bộ, ngành VN có liên quan rằng vận mệnh của công nghiệp VN sẽ ảnh hưởng đến tương lai phát triển kinh tế của đất nước. Đồng thời, vấn đề này không đơn giản chỉ ảnh hưởng đến quan hệ đầu tư thương mại và chính sách ODA trong tương lai giữa Nhật Bản và VN, mà còn ảnh hưởng đến địa vị chính trị của VN ở Đông Nam Á.
Lần đầu tiên sau những "dư chấn" của vụ ODA Nhật, một đoàn doanh nghiệp đông đảo vùng Kansai, Nhật Bản đang có mặt tại VN tìm hiểu môi trường kinh doanh. Tham dự Diễn đàn kinh tế Nhật - Việt sáng 3/3 có đại diện của 350 doanh nghiệp hai nước.
Đã từng có làn sóng đầu tư của Nhật đổ vào VN, nhiều dự án đầu tư lớn do Nhật bỏ vốn đang được triển khai nhưng nhiều nhà đầu tư Nhật Bản vẫn kêu gọi VN tiếp tục cải thiện môi trường đầu tư kinh doanh.
"Có vẻ quý vị đều cho rằng "thật là phóng đại", nhưng tôi nghĩ vấn đề này có tầm quan trọng như vậy đấy", Đại sứ Sakaba phát biểu tại Diễn đàn.
Đại sứ Nhật cũng cho biết, khoảng tháng 6 năm ngoái, một lãnh đạo của Chính phủ VN từng nói với ông: "Chính phủ VN đã có quy hoạch tổng thể phát triển công nghiệp phụ trợ".
Sau đó, Đại sứ đã nhanh chóng tìm hiểu thì đúng là vào tháng 7/2007 đã có văn bản tổng hợp mà Bộ Công thương là cơ quan chủ trì. Theo nhận định của ông, đó là một quy hoạch có nhiều điều hay, thể hiện những phương hướng, chủ trương đúng đắn. Nhưng đến giờ vẫn chưa có kế hoạch hành động cụ thể nói rõ khi nào, ai, làm cái gì và như thế nào.
"Chính vì thế mà quy hoạch tổng thể của rất nhiều nỗ lực cũng không được vận dụng đầy đủ và chưa thực sự được triển khai. Tôi có ấn tượng về tổng thể nhưng về chi tiết thì chưa có".
Lợi thế lao động rẻ sẽ giảm
Cho đến nay, chi phí lao động giá rẻ vẫn là điểm hấp dẫn lớn của việc đầu tư vào VN. Tuy nhiên, Đại sứ Nhật Bản nhận định năng lực cạnh tranh quốc tế nhờ vào giá rẻ sẽ giảm dần đi. Con đường tiếp cận của doanh nghiệp quốc tế vào thị trường VN đang dần dần trở nên dễ dàng hơn do VN đã gia nhập WTO và các hiệp định FTA/EPA đã có hiệu lực.
"Nếu không sản xuất được sản phẩm chất lượng cao, rẻ, phù hợp nhu cầu, thì không thể tránh được việc bị loại bỏ khỏi thương trường".
Ông Đại sứ nêu giả thiết nếu doanh nghiệp đa quốc gia có nhiều cơ sở sản xuất ở Đông Nam Á và phát triển chiến lược kinh doanh mang tính toàn cầu thì có thể từ bỏ sản xuất ở VN và chuyển sang hướng nhập sản phẩm đã sản xuất ở các nước lân cận. Tuy nhiên, nền công nghiệp nội địa của VN sẽ không đơn giản như vậy. Quá trình tự do hóa dựa vào FTA trong khu vực ASEAN và FTA giữa Trung Quốc và ASEAN đã bắt đầu.
"Thời gian không còn nhiều để chúng ta tranh đấu nỗ lực vì sinh mệnh của nền công nghiệp VN".
http://vietnamnet.vn/chinhtri/2009/03/833802/
Cuối tháng 2 năm ngoái, khi đi thị sát một số doanh nghiệp Nhật Bản tiêu biểu, Đại sứ Mitsuo Sakaba nhận ra rằng VN vẫn phải nhập từ Nhật Bản và các nước Đông Nam Á lân cận nhiều loại phụ tùng, linh kiện.
"Tôi đã rất ngạc nhiên khi được biết VN chỉ cung cấp được thùng các-tông và tôi đã bị sốc khi nghe nói rằng, các doanh nghiệp sản xuất rượu của Nhật Bản còn phải nhập khẩu đến cả chai rượu".
Đại sứ dẫn ví dụ nếu độ dày của chai thủy tinh không đều sẽ ảnh hưởng đến lượng rượu chứa trong nó. Phối màu của chai thủy tinh không đều thì ngoại quan của chai sẽ không đẹp.
"Thật đáng tiếc, ở VN chưa có nhà sản xuất thủy tinh nào có thể sản xuất và cung ứng sản phẩm chai rượu có thể đáp ứng được tiêu chuẩn yêu cầu của phía nhà sản xuất rượu".
Thâm nhập thực tế, ông Đại sứ khẳng định, ngay cả những phụ tùng linh kiện mua trong nước có nguyên vật liệu và phụ tùng nhỏ phải nhập khẩu, nên về thực chất tỉ lệ "nội địa hóa" còn thấp hơn thế.
"Chưa đủ tin cậy"
Cho rằng ngành công nghiệp phụ trợ của VN chưa đủ tin cậy, Đại sứ Nhật Bản khuyến cáo với các bộ, ngành VN có liên quan rằng vận mệnh của công nghiệp VN sẽ ảnh hưởng đến tương lai phát triển kinh tế của đất nước. Đồng thời, vấn đề này không đơn giản chỉ ảnh hưởng đến quan hệ đầu tư thương mại và chính sách ODA trong tương lai giữa Nhật Bản và VN, mà còn ảnh hưởng đến địa vị chính trị của VN ở Đông Nam Á.
Lần đầu tiên sau những "dư chấn" của vụ ODA Nhật, một đoàn doanh nghiệp đông đảo vùng Kansai, Nhật Bản đang có mặt tại VN tìm hiểu môi trường kinh doanh. Tham dự Diễn đàn kinh tế Nhật - Việt sáng 3/3 có đại diện của 350 doanh nghiệp hai nước.
Đã từng có làn sóng đầu tư của Nhật đổ vào VN, nhiều dự án đầu tư lớn do Nhật bỏ vốn đang được triển khai nhưng nhiều nhà đầu tư Nhật Bản vẫn kêu gọi VN tiếp tục cải thiện môi trường đầu tư kinh doanh.
"Có vẻ quý vị đều cho rằng "thật là phóng đại", nhưng tôi nghĩ vấn đề này có tầm quan trọng như vậy đấy", Đại sứ Sakaba phát biểu tại Diễn đàn.
Đại sứ Nhật cũng cho biết, khoảng tháng 6 năm ngoái, một lãnh đạo của Chính phủ VN từng nói với ông: "Chính phủ VN đã có quy hoạch tổng thể phát triển công nghiệp phụ trợ".
Sau đó, Đại sứ đã nhanh chóng tìm hiểu thì đúng là vào tháng 7/2007 đã có văn bản tổng hợp mà Bộ Công thương là cơ quan chủ trì. Theo nhận định của ông, đó là một quy hoạch có nhiều điều hay, thể hiện những phương hướng, chủ trương đúng đắn. Nhưng đến giờ vẫn chưa có kế hoạch hành động cụ thể nói rõ khi nào, ai, làm cái gì và như thế nào.
"Chính vì thế mà quy hoạch tổng thể của rất nhiều nỗ lực cũng không được vận dụng đầy đủ và chưa thực sự được triển khai. Tôi có ấn tượng về tổng thể nhưng về chi tiết thì chưa có".
Lợi thế lao động rẻ sẽ giảm
Cho đến nay, chi phí lao động giá rẻ vẫn là điểm hấp dẫn lớn của việc đầu tư vào VN. Tuy nhiên, Đại sứ Nhật Bản nhận định năng lực cạnh tranh quốc tế nhờ vào giá rẻ sẽ giảm dần đi. Con đường tiếp cận của doanh nghiệp quốc tế vào thị trường VN đang dần dần trở nên dễ dàng hơn do VN đã gia nhập WTO và các hiệp định FTA/EPA đã có hiệu lực.
"Nếu không sản xuất được sản phẩm chất lượng cao, rẻ, phù hợp nhu cầu, thì không thể tránh được việc bị loại bỏ khỏi thương trường".
Ông Đại sứ nêu giả thiết nếu doanh nghiệp đa quốc gia có nhiều cơ sở sản xuất ở Đông Nam Á và phát triển chiến lược kinh doanh mang tính toàn cầu thì có thể từ bỏ sản xuất ở VN và chuyển sang hướng nhập sản phẩm đã sản xuất ở các nước lân cận. Tuy nhiên, nền công nghiệp nội địa của VN sẽ không đơn giản như vậy. Quá trình tự do hóa dựa vào FTA trong khu vực ASEAN và FTA giữa Trung Quốc và ASEAN đã bắt đầu.
"Thời gian không còn nhiều để chúng ta tranh đấu nỗ lực vì sinh mệnh của nền công nghiệp VN".
http://vietnamnet.vn/chinhtri/2009/03/833802/
2 Mar 2009
Trung Quốc, Hoa Kỳ, Anh Quốc : tòng phạm của Khmer đỏ
Translated by : Mai Vân - RFI
Bài đăng ngày 01/03/2009 Cập nhật lần cuối ngày 01/03/2009 16:59 TU
Nhân dịp Toà Án Quốc tế xét xử tội ác Khờ Me Đỏ mở ra tại Phnom Penh, và những kẻ phạm tội diệt chủng lần lượt ra trước vành móng ngựa, các tuần báo Pháp đã nhìn lại thời kỳ đen tối của lịch sử Cam Bốt, để tìm hiểu và đưa ra ánh sáng những tòng phạm, đã từng đứng sau lưng hỗ trợ chế độ này
Tạp chí Le Courrier International đặt câu hỏi : Những kẻ đồng lõa với Khmer Đỏ sao không không thấy đâu cả ? Nêu bật thắc mắc của một chuyên gia về Khmer Đỏ, ông John Pilger, đã không thấy nhắc đến những lãnh đạo phương Tây, đã từng hỗ trợ cho chế độ Pol Pot nhân phiên tòa, Le Courrier Inetrnational đã trích đang bài viết của chuyên gia này trên tờ báo anh ngữ độc lập, Phnom Penh Post xuất bản ở thủ đô Cam Bốt.
Nixon và Kissinger đã gián tiếp giúp Pol Pot lên cầm quyền
Tác giả bài báo có vẻ lấy làm tiếc là hiện nay chỉ có các lãnh đạo Khmer Đỏ bị đem ra xét xử, trong lúc thảm kịch Cam Bốt bao gồm 3 giai đoạn, trong vụ diệt chủng chỉ là một giai đoạn, và duy nhất được ghi lại trong ký ức chính thức. Theo John Pilger, Pol Pot không thể nào lên nắm quyền nếu tổng thống Mỹ thờI đó Richard Nixon và cố vấn của ông là Henry Kissinger đã không mở chiến dịch tấn công tại Cam Bốt, vào thời nước này còn là một quốc gia trung lập.
Năm 1973, pháo đài bay B.52 đã dội xuống Cam Bốt một lượng bom còn cao hơn số bom mà Nhật Bản hứng chiụ trong suốt Đệ nhị Thế chiến. Theo Pilger, số người Cam Bốt bị chết ước tính khoảng 600.000 người. Một số hồ sơ đã cho thấy là cơ quan tình báo Mỹ CIA đã đo lường đươc hậu quả chính trị của chiến dịch. Họ đã cảnh báo : thiệt hại do B.52 gây ra là trọng tâm tuyên truyền của Khmer Đỏ, mà theo CIA, ''đã tuyển mộ đươc một số lớn thanh niên, trong số những người chạy lánh nạn chiến sự".
John Pilger kết luận miả mai là Khmer Đỏ đã hoàn tất những gì mà Nixon và Kissinger đã bắt đầu. Thế nhưng Kissinger sẽ không ngồi vào ghế bị cáo ở Phnom Penh vì ông đang bận cố vấn cho tổng thống Barack Obama trên các vấn đề điạ lý chiến lược.
Nước Anh của Thatcher bí mật tiếp tay cho Khmer Đỏ
Nhưng không phải có Hoa Kỳ và Henry Kissinger bị lên án. John Pilger còn nêu tên một người khác : cựu thủ tướng Anh, bà Margaret Thatcher, và những viện chức cao cấp của Anh, nay đã về hưu. Họ đã bí mật hỗ trợ cho Khmer Đỏ, sau khi chế độ này bị Việt Nam đánh đuổi. Đây là giai đoạn 3.
Năm 1979, Hoa Kỳ và Anh Quốc đã áp đặt cấm vận đối với một nhà nước Cam Bốt bị kiệt quệ. Vì là người giải phóng Cam Bốt, Việt Nam đã không đứng về phe tốt trong thời kỳ chiến tranh lạnh.
Pilger còn nhận thấy là chưa bao giờ một chiến dịch do bộ ngoại giao Anh tổ chức lại trắng trợn và dữ dằn như thế. Anh Quốc đòi hỏi là chế độ không còn nữa của nước Kampuchéa Dân chủ, được giữ ''quyền'' đại diện cho nạn nhân của họ ở Liên Hiệp Quốc. Hoa Kỳ, Anh Quốc và Trung Quốc, đã biạ đặt ra một liên minh ''không cộng sản'' lưu vong, mà thật ra chủ yếu gồm phe Khmer Đỏ. Ở Thái Lan, các cơ quan tình báo Mỹ CIA và DIA (tình báo quốc phòng) đã duy trì quan hệ mật thiết với Khmer Đỏ.
Năm 1983, chính quyền Anh của bà Margaret Thatcher, còn cử lực lượng đặc biệt SAS đến huấn luyện cho các thành phần này, đặc biệt là các kỹ thuật gài mìn. Khi trả lời dân biẻu đối lập Neil Kinnock, bà Thatcher khi đó đã hoàn toàn phủ nhận, khẳng định rằng chính quyền Anh không hề dính líu vào việc huấn luyện, trang bị, hay một hình thức hợp tác nào, với lực lượng Khmer Đỏ hay đồng minh của họ. Có điều là năm 91, chính phủ kế nhiệm là John Major đã phải thú nhận trước Quốc Hội Anh là lực lượng đặc biệt SAS đã thực sự tham gia huấn luyện một cách bí mật cho lực lượng Pol Pot.
Tác giả bài báo kết luận, nếu công lý quốc tế không phải là một tấn hài kịch, thì phải gọi những người đồng hành với kẻ phạm tội ác ra trưóc toà án Phnom Penh. Ít ra là phải ghi tên họ vào ‘’danh sách nhục nhã’’. John Pilger là một chuyên gia về thời kỳ Khmer Đỏ, từng là phóng viên chiến trường, đồng thời là nhà văn, nhà đạo diễn phim. Ông là tác giả 2 bộ phim về thời kỳ Khmer Đỏ.
Hoa Kỳ đẩy Sihanouk vào vòng tay Khmer Đỏ
Le Monde 2, tạp chí hàng tuần của nhật báo Le Monde, đã ghi nhận một hệ quả khác của chiến dịch Mỹ tiến hành ở Cam Bốt : đẩy quốc vương Sihanouk đến với Khờ me đỏ.
Dưới tựa đề ‘’Sihanouk trong bóng Khmer Đỏ’’, tạp chí đăng lại một số bức ảnh ông Sihanouk chụp với các chiến sĩ trẻ hoặc bên cạnh các lãnh đạo Khmer Đỏ như Khiêu Samphan, trong bức ảnh đến tham quan thác Phnom Kulen ở vùng giải phóng, hay ảnh hoàng hậu Monique đứng bên cạnh vợ của Pol Pot. Theo lời chú thích, hai tấm ảnh này chụp vào tháng 3 và tháng tư năm 1973.
Một bức ảnh nữa cũng chụp Khiêu Samphan và Sihanouk ở Siem Reap, gần đền Angkor, chụp thời kỳ ông trở lại Phnom Penh, sau tháng 4 năm 1975. Hàng chú thích dưới bức ảnh giải thích : đây là một trong nhũng lần hiếm hoi mà ông Sihanouk rời cung điện ở Phnom Penh. Ông là nguyên thủ quốc gia nhưng không có quyền hạn gì và thật ra là tù nhân của Khmer Đỏ, từ tháng tư năm 1975 cho đến đầu năm 1976 (lúc ông từ chức).
Tạp chí Le Monde 2 cho biết là các bức ảnh trên nằm trong tài liệu lưu trữ cá nhân mà cưụ quốc vương Cambốt đã tặng cho Trưòng Viễn Đông Bác Cổ vào năm 2004. Hàng trăm ngàn tài liệu mà công việc kiểm kê, sắp xếp lại số tài liệu này chỉ vừa mới kết thúc. Tạp chí hoan nghênh thái độ minh bạch hoá lịch sử hiếm thấy của một nguyên thủ quốc gia.
Về bức ảnh đầu tiên, Francis Deron, tác giả bài báo dài lược qua thời kỳ này, và giải thích rằng : vào một ngày tháng 3 năm 1973, ở một góc rừng Cam Bốt, những chiến sĩ Khmer Đỏ đươc chọn lựa kỹ càng, đã được đưa đến chào người Cha đất nước, trước ống kính của một nhiếp ảnh gia do Trung Quốc đào tạo và trang bị.
Do đâu ông Sihanouk đã đến với Khmer Đỏ ? Dĩ nhiên là do chiến dịch của Hoa Kỳ ở Cam Bốt, việc dựng lên chính quyền Lon Nol, năm 1970. Bị quân đội lật đổ, không còn đươc hậu thuẩn của phưong Tây, Quốc vương Sihanouk, lánh nạn ở Bắc Kinh, đã không còn con đường nào khác là nghe lời của Trung Quốc liên minh với du kích quân Khmer Đỏ, mà trước đó ông vẫn cho săn đuổi.
Trong bài lược lại tình hình, Francis Deron nêu bật trở lại sự thay đổi thái độ của Henry Kissinger. Theo bài báo khi Pol Pot lên nắm quyền ở Phnom Penh, các nhà phân tích của CIA đã cố cảnh báo về chế độ độc tài đang đươc thiết lập ở đây. Nhưng CIA không phải là một nguồn tin đáng tin cậy. Chỉ có một người lắng nghe họ : Henry Kissinger, nhưng không phải là để ngăn chặn .
Bài báo trích lại lời của Kissinger, ngày 26 tháng 11 năm 1975, trong buổi ăn trưa ở bộ Ngoại giao với một đoàn đại diện Thái Lan : ‘’Chúng tôi nghĩ là mối đe doạ lớn nhất đối với Đông Nam Á hiện giờ, đến từ Miền Bắc Việt Nam. Chiến lược của chúng tôi là, là lôi kéo Trung Quốc đến Lào và Cam Bốt để ngăn chăn Việt Nam. Hãy nói với những người ở Cam Bốt rằng chúng tôi sẽ là bạn của họ. Họ là những tên côn đồ sát nhân, nhưng nói riêng giữa chúng ta thì điều đó không quan trọng. Chúng tôi sẳn sàng cải thiện quan hệ với họ. Hãy nói lại vớI họ phần cuối những gì tôi vừa nêu, đừng lập lại phần đầu’’.
(Những lời lẽ này nằm trong số tài liệu giải mật ngày 27 tháng 7 năm 2004). Và dĩ nhiên phía Thái Lan đã tường thuật lại cho Trung Quốc, và Bắc Kinh lập lại cho Khmer Đỏ.
Francis Deron nhận định là để trừng phạt Việt Nam, Henry Kissinger không ngần ngại sử dụng mọi phương cách. Việc Khmer Đỏ thù ghét Việt Nam là một công cụ tốt. Vả lại từ năm 1972, Bắc Kinh và Washignton không còn là kẻ thù nữa. Năm 1976, Trung Quốc ở vào một thờI điểm then chốt. Mao Trạch Đông qua đờI, Đặng Tiểu Bình sẽ cầm cương Trung Quốc. Đặng Tiều Bình, theo Deron, thù ghét Việt Nam không kém gì Kissinger.
Bài báo cũng nhắc lại là từ 1975 đến cuối 1978, Khmer Đỏ thực hiện kế hoạch thảm sát. Được sự hổ trợ của Trung Quôc và sự đồng ý ngầm của Phương Tây.
Như trả lờI thắc mắc của đồng nghiệp John Pilger, không thấy nhũng nguời bạn của Khmer Đỏ ở đâu trong vụ xét xử hiện nay, Deron cho là đã có những cuộc mặc cả gay go và thoả hiệp để chỉ xét xử những hành vi Khmer Đỏ trong giai đoạn từ năm 1975 đến ngày mùng 7 tháng giêng 1979. Phần còn lại, lịch sử sẽ phán xét.
Thái Lan chưa thoát khỏi quá khứ phong kiến
Tiếp tục nhìn sang Châu Á, le Courrier International chú trọng đến Thái Lan. DướI tựa đề ‘’Bất bình đẳng như là nền tảng của xã hội’’, tạp chí trích dẫn tờ Bangkok Post, lấy làm tiếc là khái niệm nhân quyền chưa thâm nhập thực sự vào xã hội Thái, và sở dĩ Thái Lan vẫn là đứa học trò kém cỏi về nhân quyền, đó là vì chưa thóat ra khỏi quá khứ phong kiến.
Bài báo nhắc lại là sau khi bị tố cáo ngược đãi ngườì tỵ nạn sắc tộc Rohingya (Miến Điện), chính quyền Bangkok đã mở cửa cho Cao ủy Tỵ nạn Liên Hiệp Quốc, và cho các tổ chức phi chinh phủ để vào điều tra.
Nhưng câu hỏi được nêu ra là chính quyền có thực sự giải quyết tận gốc vấn đề hay không ? Theo bài báo, người Thái Lan không chia sẻ khái niệm nhân quyền như người ta thấy ở phương Tây, ví dụ như đối với người hồi giáo Thái Lan. Việc họ bị đẩy ra bên lề xã hội là một thực tế, và phần lớn xã hội không thấy đoái hoài, tỏ cảm tình đối vơí thành phần này.
Suy nghĩ là mọi người đều có những quyền bình đẳng như nhau không có ở Thái Lan. Xã hội được xây dựng trên một nền tảng tôn ti trật tự. Thời phong kiến, mỗi tầng lớp xã hội có những quyền lợi khác nhau, trong mỗi tầng lớp thì đàn ông vẫn có quyền hơn đàn bà.
Cho đến nay thì người ta cũng không thực sự đòi hỏi quyền bình đẳng, Mọi người có vẻ an phận với chỗ đứng của mình bất kỳ là trong tầng lớp xã hội nào. Người Thái đã không thoát khỏi cơ cấu xã hội cứng nhắc dù quyền lợi của họ bị chà đạp. Không ai muốn thay đổi, kể cả giới chính trị.
Bài báo kết luận nếu thủ tướng Abhisit muốn thật sự cải thiện, tìm giải pháp cho vấn đề nhân quyền hiện nay thì ông phải thay đổi cả hệ thống xã hội, chính trị Thái, cách quan hệ giữa con người và con người. Tóm lại điều khó thể hay chưa thể làm được.
Trung Quốc : từ đại nhảy vọt đến đại hoài nghi
Tạp chí Anh The Economist tuần này chú trọng đến việc Bắc Kinh kềm hãm Tây Tạng với bàn tay sắt, trong lúc tạp chí kinh tế Pháp l'Expansion thì nhìn kinh tế Trung Quốc, và tóm lược tình hình trong hàng tựa hóm hỉnh : "Trung Quốc đi từ đại nhảy vọt đến đại hoài nghi". Tất cả các vùng miền, các vùng phát triển nhất cũng như tầng lớp trung lưu, không ai thoát khỏi tác động khủng hoảng kinh tế.
Năm nay theo l'Expansion, tình hình càng nguy hiểm với những lễ kỷ niệm lịch sử, 60 năm ngày Mao Trạch Đông nắm quyền ở Trung Quốc, 50 năm ngày Đức Đạt Lai Lạt Ma lưu vong, 20 năm ngày đàn áp phong trào sinh viên Thiên An Môn.
L'Expansion ghi nhận yếu tố đáng ngại đối với chính quyền là người dân không còn sợ xuống đường để đấu tranh cho quyền lợi của mình. Năm 2005, theo số liệu chính thức, đã có 87.000 cụôc biểu tình, phần lớn do các do vụ trưng thu đất đai. Nhưng bây giờ tình hình càng nguy hiểm do nạn thất nghiệp, đặc biệt trong số các dân công, ước tính có 20 triệu người mất việc làm. Ngày càng nhiều các công ty bị lỗ lã phải đóng cửa, và thường khi là không trả đươc lương công nhân. Tình cảnh bị sa thải, lại không tiền, họ là một thách thức lớn lao về mặt xã hội đối với chính quyền.
Trở lại vớí tạp chí Anh the Economist, nhận định về đối sách của Bắc Kinh đối với Tây Tạng, Tạp chí này nhìn thấy Trung Quốc chọn biện pháp mạnh vì có nhiều thuận lợi : tình hình êm xuôi, Tây Tạng không còn được thế giới quan tâm như vào năm ngoái. Trong chuyến công du vừa qua, tân ngoại trưởng Mỹ Hillary Clinton không đặt nặng vấn đề nhân quyền và Tây Tạng.
Nhưng the Economist cảnh báo là đàn áp không phải phương thức dẫn đến thành công chính trị. Theo tạp chí Anh, cái gai đối với chính quyền Bắc Kinh vẫn là Đức Đạt lai Lạt Ma. Lãnh đạo Trung Quốc nghĩ là mọi vấn đề sẽ đươc giải quyết khi ngài mất đi. Nhưng theo the Economist hệ quả có thể ngược lại, và Bắc Kinh có thể sẽ tiếc nuối ảnh hưởng ôn hoà của ngài.
http://rfi.fr/actuvi/articles/111/article_2695.asp
Bài đăng ngày 01/03/2009 Cập nhật lần cuối ngày 01/03/2009 16:59 TU
Nhân dịp Toà Án Quốc tế xét xử tội ác Khờ Me Đỏ mở ra tại Phnom Penh, và những kẻ phạm tội diệt chủng lần lượt ra trước vành móng ngựa, các tuần báo Pháp đã nhìn lại thời kỳ đen tối của lịch sử Cam Bốt, để tìm hiểu và đưa ra ánh sáng những tòng phạm, đã từng đứng sau lưng hỗ trợ chế độ này
Tạp chí Le Courrier International đặt câu hỏi : Những kẻ đồng lõa với Khmer Đỏ sao không không thấy đâu cả ? Nêu bật thắc mắc của một chuyên gia về Khmer Đỏ, ông John Pilger, đã không thấy nhắc đến những lãnh đạo phương Tây, đã từng hỗ trợ cho chế độ Pol Pot nhân phiên tòa, Le Courrier Inetrnational đã trích đang bài viết của chuyên gia này trên tờ báo anh ngữ độc lập, Phnom Penh Post xuất bản ở thủ đô Cam Bốt.
Nixon và Kissinger đã gián tiếp giúp Pol Pot lên cầm quyền
Tác giả bài báo có vẻ lấy làm tiếc là hiện nay chỉ có các lãnh đạo Khmer Đỏ bị đem ra xét xử, trong lúc thảm kịch Cam Bốt bao gồm 3 giai đoạn, trong vụ diệt chủng chỉ là một giai đoạn, và duy nhất được ghi lại trong ký ức chính thức. Theo John Pilger, Pol Pot không thể nào lên nắm quyền nếu tổng thống Mỹ thờI đó Richard Nixon và cố vấn của ông là Henry Kissinger đã không mở chiến dịch tấn công tại Cam Bốt, vào thời nước này còn là một quốc gia trung lập.
Năm 1973, pháo đài bay B.52 đã dội xuống Cam Bốt một lượng bom còn cao hơn số bom mà Nhật Bản hứng chiụ trong suốt Đệ nhị Thế chiến. Theo Pilger, số người Cam Bốt bị chết ước tính khoảng 600.000 người. Một số hồ sơ đã cho thấy là cơ quan tình báo Mỹ CIA đã đo lường đươc hậu quả chính trị của chiến dịch. Họ đã cảnh báo : thiệt hại do B.52 gây ra là trọng tâm tuyên truyền của Khmer Đỏ, mà theo CIA, ''đã tuyển mộ đươc một số lớn thanh niên, trong số những người chạy lánh nạn chiến sự".
John Pilger kết luận miả mai là Khmer Đỏ đã hoàn tất những gì mà Nixon và Kissinger đã bắt đầu. Thế nhưng Kissinger sẽ không ngồi vào ghế bị cáo ở Phnom Penh vì ông đang bận cố vấn cho tổng thống Barack Obama trên các vấn đề điạ lý chiến lược.
Nước Anh của Thatcher bí mật tiếp tay cho Khmer Đỏ
Nhưng không phải có Hoa Kỳ và Henry Kissinger bị lên án. John Pilger còn nêu tên một người khác : cựu thủ tướng Anh, bà Margaret Thatcher, và những viện chức cao cấp của Anh, nay đã về hưu. Họ đã bí mật hỗ trợ cho Khmer Đỏ, sau khi chế độ này bị Việt Nam đánh đuổi. Đây là giai đoạn 3.
Năm 1979, Hoa Kỳ và Anh Quốc đã áp đặt cấm vận đối với một nhà nước Cam Bốt bị kiệt quệ. Vì là người giải phóng Cam Bốt, Việt Nam đã không đứng về phe tốt trong thời kỳ chiến tranh lạnh.
Pilger còn nhận thấy là chưa bao giờ một chiến dịch do bộ ngoại giao Anh tổ chức lại trắng trợn và dữ dằn như thế. Anh Quốc đòi hỏi là chế độ không còn nữa của nước Kampuchéa Dân chủ, được giữ ''quyền'' đại diện cho nạn nhân của họ ở Liên Hiệp Quốc. Hoa Kỳ, Anh Quốc và Trung Quốc, đã biạ đặt ra một liên minh ''không cộng sản'' lưu vong, mà thật ra chủ yếu gồm phe Khmer Đỏ. Ở Thái Lan, các cơ quan tình báo Mỹ CIA và DIA (tình báo quốc phòng) đã duy trì quan hệ mật thiết với Khmer Đỏ.
Năm 1983, chính quyền Anh của bà Margaret Thatcher, còn cử lực lượng đặc biệt SAS đến huấn luyện cho các thành phần này, đặc biệt là các kỹ thuật gài mìn. Khi trả lời dân biẻu đối lập Neil Kinnock, bà Thatcher khi đó đã hoàn toàn phủ nhận, khẳng định rằng chính quyền Anh không hề dính líu vào việc huấn luyện, trang bị, hay một hình thức hợp tác nào, với lực lượng Khmer Đỏ hay đồng minh của họ. Có điều là năm 91, chính phủ kế nhiệm là John Major đã phải thú nhận trước Quốc Hội Anh là lực lượng đặc biệt SAS đã thực sự tham gia huấn luyện một cách bí mật cho lực lượng Pol Pot.
Tác giả bài báo kết luận, nếu công lý quốc tế không phải là một tấn hài kịch, thì phải gọi những người đồng hành với kẻ phạm tội ác ra trưóc toà án Phnom Penh. Ít ra là phải ghi tên họ vào ‘’danh sách nhục nhã’’. John Pilger là một chuyên gia về thời kỳ Khmer Đỏ, từng là phóng viên chiến trường, đồng thời là nhà văn, nhà đạo diễn phim. Ông là tác giả 2 bộ phim về thời kỳ Khmer Đỏ.
Hoa Kỳ đẩy Sihanouk vào vòng tay Khmer Đỏ
Le Monde 2, tạp chí hàng tuần của nhật báo Le Monde, đã ghi nhận một hệ quả khác của chiến dịch Mỹ tiến hành ở Cam Bốt : đẩy quốc vương Sihanouk đến với Khờ me đỏ.
Dưới tựa đề ‘’Sihanouk trong bóng Khmer Đỏ’’, tạp chí đăng lại một số bức ảnh ông Sihanouk chụp với các chiến sĩ trẻ hoặc bên cạnh các lãnh đạo Khmer Đỏ như Khiêu Samphan, trong bức ảnh đến tham quan thác Phnom Kulen ở vùng giải phóng, hay ảnh hoàng hậu Monique đứng bên cạnh vợ của Pol Pot. Theo lời chú thích, hai tấm ảnh này chụp vào tháng 3 và tháng tư năm 1973.
Một bức ảnh nữa cũng chụp Khiêu Samphan và Sihanouk ở Siem Reap, gần đền Angkor, chụp thời kỳ ông trở lại Phnom Penh, sau tháng 4 năm 1975. Hàng chú thích dưới bức ảnh giải thích : đây là một trong nhũng lần hiếm hoi mà ông Sihanouk rời cung điện ở Phnom Penh. Ông là nguyên thủ quốc gia nhưng không có quyền hạn gì và thật ra là tù nhân của Khmer Đỏ, từ tháng tư năm 1975 cho đến đầu năm 1976 (lúc ông từ chức).
Tạp chí Le Monde 2 cho biết là các bức ảnh trên nằm trong tài liệu lưu trữ cá nhân mà cưụ quốc vương Cambốt đã tặng cho Trưòng Viễn Đông Bác Cổ vào năm 2004. Hàng trăm ngàn tài liệu mà công việc kiểm kê, sắp xếp lại số tài liệu này chỉ vừa mới kết thúc. Tạp chí hoan nghênh thái độ minh bạch hoá lịch sử hiếm thấy của một nguyên thủ quốc gia.
Về bức ảnh đầu tiên, Francis Deron, tác giả bài báo dài lược qua thời kỳ này, và giải thích rằng : vào một ngày tháng 3 năm 1973, ở một góc rừng Cam Bốt, những chiến sĩ Khmer Đỏ đươc chọn lựa kỹ càng, đã được đưa đến chào người Cha đất nước, trước ống kính của một nhiếp ảnh gia do Trung Quốc đào tạo và trang bị.
Do đâu ông Sihanouk đã đến với Khmer Đỏ ? Dĩ nhiên là do chiến dịch của Hoa Kỳ ở Cam Bốt, việc dựng lên chính quyền Lon Nol, năm 1970. Bị quân đội lật đổ, không còn đươc hậu thuẩn của phưong Tây, Quốc vương Sihanouk, lánh nạn ở Bắc Kinh, đã không còn con đường nào khác là nghe lời của Trung Quốc liên minh với du kích quân Khmer Đỏ, mà trước đó ông vẫn cho săn đuổi.
Trong bài lược lại tình hình, Francis Deron nêu bật trở lại sự thay đổi thái độ của Henry Kissinger. Theo bài báo khi Pol Pot lên nắm quyền ở Phnom Penh, các nhà phân tích của CIA đã cố cảnh báo về chế độ độc tài đang đươc thiết lập ở đây. Nhưng CIA không phải là một nguồn tin đáng tin cậy. Chỉ có một người lắng nghe họ : Henry Kissinger, nhưng không phải là để ngăn chặn .
Bài báo trích lại lời của Kissinger, ngày 26 tháng 11 năm 1975, trong buổi ăn trưa ở bộ Ngoại giao với một đoàn đại diện Thái Lan : ‘’Chúng tôi nghĩ là mối đe doạ lớn nhất đối với Đông Nam Á hiện giờ, đến từ Miền Bắc Việt Nam. Chiến lược của chúng tôi là, là lôi kéo Trung Quốc đến Lào và Cam Bốt để ngăn chăn Việt Nam. Hãy nói với những người ở Cam Bốt rằng chúng tôi sẽ là bạn của họ. Họ là những tên côn đồ sát nhân, nhưng nói riêng giữa chúng ta thì điều đó không quan trọng. Chúng tôi sẳn sàng cải thiện quan hệ với họ. Hãy nói lại vớI họ phần cuối những gì tôi vừa nêu, đừng lập lại phần đầu’’.
(Những lời lẽ này nằm trong số tài liệu giải mật ngày 27 tháng 7 năm 2004). Và dĩ nhiên phía Thái Lan đã tường thuật lại cho Trung Quốc, và Bắc Kinh lập lại cho Khmer Đỏ.
Francis Deron nhận định là để trừng phạt Việt Nam, Henry Kissinger không ngần ngại sử dụng mọi phương cách. Việc Khmer Đỏ thù ghét Việt Nam là một công cụ tốt. Vả lại từ năm 1972, Bắc Kinh và Washignton không còn là kẻ thù nữa. Năm 1976, Trung Quốc ở vào một thờI điểm then chốt. Mao Trạch Đông qua đờI, Đặng Tiểu Bình sẽ cầm cương Trung Quốc. Đặng Tiều Bình, theo Deron, thù ghét Việt Nam không kém gì Kissinger.
Bài báo cũng nhắc lại là từ 1975 đến cuối 1978, Khmer Đỏ thực hiện kế hoạch thảm sát. Được sự hổ trợ của Trung Quôc và sự đồng ý ngầm của Phương Tây.
Như trả lờI thắc mắc của đồng nghiệp John Pilger, không thấy nhũng nguời bạn của Khmer Đỏ ở đâu trong vụ xét xử hiện nay, Deron cho là đã có những cuộc mặc cả gay go và thoả hiệp để chỉ xét xử những hành vi Khmer Đỏ trong giai đoạn từ năm 1975 đến ngày mùng 7 tháng giêng 1979. Phần còn lại, lịch sử sẽ phán xét.
Thái Lan chưa thoát khỏi quá khứ phong kiến
Tiếp tục nhìn sang Châu Á, le Courrier International chú trọng đến Thái Lan. DướI tựa đề ‘’Bất bình đẳng như là nền tảng của xã hội’’, tạp chí trích dẫn tờ Bangkok Post, lấy làm tiếc là khái niệm nhân quyền chưa thâm nhập thực sự vào xã hội Thái, và sở dĩ Thái Lan vẫn là đứa học trò kém cỏi về nhân quyền, đó là vì chưa thóat ra khỏi quá khứ phong kiến.
Bài báo nhắc lại là sau khi bị tố cáo ngược đãi ngườì tỵ nạn sắc tộc Rohingya (Miến Điện), chính quyền Bangkok đã mở cửa cho Cao ủy Tỵ nạn Liên Hiệp Quốc, và cho các tổ chức phi chinh phủ để vào điều tra.
Nhưng câu hỏi được nêu ra là chính quyền có thực sự giải quyết tận gốc vấn đề hay không ? Theo bài báo, người Thái Lan không chia sẻ khái niệm nhân quyền như người ta thấy ở phương Tây, ví dụ như đối với người hồi giáo Thái Lan. Việc họ bị đẩy ra bên lề xã hội là một thực tế, và phần lớn xã hội không thấy đoái hoài, tỏ cảm tình đối vơí thành phần này.
Suy nghĩ là mọi người đều có những quyền bình đẳng như nhau không có ở Thái Lan. Xã hội được xây dựng trên một nền tảng tôn ti trật tự. Thời phong kiến, mỗi tầng lớp xã hội có những quyền lợi khác nhau, trong mỗi tầng lớp thì đàn ông vẫn có quyền hơn đàn bà.
Cho đến nay thì người ta cũng không thực sự đòi hỏi quyền bình đẳng, Mọi người có vẻ an phận với chỗ đứng của mình bất kỳ là trong tầng lớp xã hội nào. Người Thái đã không thoát khỏi cơ cấu xã hội cứng nhắc dù quyền lợi của họ bị chà đạp. Không ai muốn thay đổi, kể cả giới chính trị.
Bài báo kết luận nếu thủ tướng Abhisit muốn thật sự cải thiện, tìm giải pháp cho vấn đề nhân quyền hiện nay thì ông phải thay đổi cả hệ thống xã hội, chính trị Thái, cách quan hệ giữa con người và con người. Tóm lại điều khó thể hay chưa thể làm được.
Trung Quốc : từ đại nhảy vọt đến đại hoài nghi
Tạp chí Anh The Economist tuần này chú trọng đến việc Bắc Kinh kềm hãm Tây Tạng với bàn tay sắt, trong lúc tạp chí kinh tế Pháp l'Expansion thì nhìn kinh tế Trung Quốc, và tóm lược tình hình trong hàng tựa hóm hỉnh : "Trung Quốc đi từ đại nhảy vọt đến đại hoài nghi". Tất cả các vùng miền, các vùng phát triển nhất cũng như tầng lớp trung lưu, không ai thoát khỏi tác động khủng hoảng kinh tế.
Năm nay theo l'Expansion, tình hình càng nguy hiểm với những lễ kỷ niệm lịch sử, 60 năm ngày Mao Trạch Đông nắm quyền ở Trung Quốc, 50 năm ngày Đức Đạt Lai Lạt Ma lưu vong, 20 năm ngày đàn áp phong trào sinh viên Thiên An Môn.
L'Expansion ghi nhận yếu tố đáng ngại đối với chính quyền là người dân không còn sợ xuống đường để đấu tranh cho quyền lợi của mình. Năm 2005, theo số liệu chính thức, đã có 87.000 cụôc biểu tình, phần lớn do các do vụ trưng thu đất đai. Nhưng bây giờ tình hình càng nguy hiểm do nạn thất nghiệp, đặc biệt trong số các dân công, ước tính có 20 triệu người mất việc làm. Ngày càng nhiều các công ty bị lỗ lã phải đóng cửa, và thường khi là không trả đươc lương công nhân. Tình cảnh bị sa thải, lại không tiền, họ là một thách thức lớn lao về mặt xã hội đối với chính quyền.
Trở lại vớí tạp chí Anh the Economist, nhận định về đối sách của Bắc Kinh đối với Tây Tạng, Tạp chí này nhìn thấy Trung Quốc chọn biện pháp mạnh vì có nhiều thuận lợi : tình hình êm xuôi, Tây Tạng không còn được thế giới quan tâm như vào năm ngoái. Trong chuyến công du vừa qua, tân ngoại trưởng Mỹ Hillary Clinton không đặt nặng vấn đề nhân quyền và Tây Tạng.
Nhưng the Economist cảnh báo là đàn áp không phải phương thức dẫn đến thành công chính trị. Theo tạp chí Anh, cái gai đối với chính quyền Bắc Kinh vẫn là Đức Đạt lai Lạt Ma. Lãnh đạo Trung Quốc nghĩ là mọi vấn đề sẽ đươc giải quyết khi ngài mất đi. Nhưng theo the Economist hệ quả có thể ngược lại, và Bắc Kinh có thể sẽ tiếc nuối ảnh hưởng ôn hoà của ngài.
http://rfi.fr/actuvi/articles/111/article_2695.asp
1 Mar 2009
Power Plays in the Indian Ocean ( China - India )
Center Stage for the Twenty-first Century
By Robert D. Kaplan
Summary: Already the world's preeminent energy and trade interstate seaway, the Indian Ocean will matter even more as India and China enter into a dynamic great-power rivalry in these waters.
Robert D. Kaplan, a National Correspondent for The Atlantic and a Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, in Washington, D.C., is writing a book on the Indian Ocean. He recently was the Class of 1960 Distinguished Visiting Professor in National Security at the U.S. Naval Academy.
For better or worse, phrases such "the Cold War" and "the clash of civilizations" matter. In a similar way, so do maps. The right map can stimulate foresight by providing a spatial view of critical trends in world politics. Understanding the map of Europe was essential to understanding the twentieth century. Although recent technological advances and economic integration have encouraged global thinking, some places continue to count more than others. And in some of those, such as Iraq and Pakistan, two countries with inherently artificial contours, politics is still at the mercy of geography.
So in what quarter of the earth today can one best glimpse the future? Because of their own geographic circumstances, Americans, in particular, continue to concentrate on the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. World War II and the Cold War shaped this outlook: Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, and communist China were all oriented toward one of these two oceans. The bias is even embedded in mapping conventions: Mercator projections tend to place the Western Hemisphere in the middle of the map, splitting the Indian Ocean at its far edges. And yet, as the pirate activity off the coast of Somalia and the terrorist carnage in Mumbai last fall suggest, the Indian Ocean -- the world's third-largest body of water -- already forms center stage for the challenges of the twenty-first century.
The greater Indian Ocean region encompasses the entire arc of Islam, from the Sahara Desert to the Indonesian archipelago. Although the Arabs and the Persians are known to Westerners primarily as desert peoples, they have also been great seafarers. In the Middle Ages, they sailed from Arabia to China; proselytizing along the way, they spread their faith through sea-based commerce. Today, the western reaches of the Indian Ocean include the tinderboxes of Somalia, Yemen, Iran, and Pakistan -- constituting a network of dynamic trade as well as a network of global terrorism, piracy, and drug smuggling. Hundreds of millions of Muslims -- the legacy of those medieval conversions -- live along the Indian Ocean's eastern edges, in India and Bangladesh, Malaysia and Indonesia.
The Indian Ocean is dominated by two immense bays, the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, near the top of which are two of the least stable countries in the world: Pakistan and Myanmar (also known as Burma). State collapse or regime change in Pakistan would affect its neighbors by empowering Baluchi and Sindhi separatists seeking closer links to India and Iran. Likewise, the collapse of the junta in Myanmar -- where competition over energy and natural resources between China and India looms -- would threaten economies nearby and require a massive seaborne humanitarian intervention. On the other hand, the advent of a more liberal regime in Myanmar would undermine China's dominant position there, boost Indian influence, and quicken regional economic integration.
In other words, more than just a geographic feature, the Indian Ocean is also an idea. It combines the centrality of Islam with global energy politics and the rise of India and China to reveal a multilayered, multipolar world. The dramatic economic growth of India and China has been duly noted, but the equally dramatic military ramifications of this development have not. India's and China's great-power aspirations, as well as their quests for energy security, have compelled the two countries "to redirect their gazes from land to the seas," according to James Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara, associate professors of strategy at the U.S. Naval War College. And the very fact that they are focusing on their sea power indicates how much more self-confident they feel on land. And so a map of the Indian Ocean exposes the contours of power politics in the twenty-first century.
Yet this is still an environment in which the United States will have to keep the peace and help guard the global commons -- interdicting terrorists, pirates, and smugglers; providing humanitarian assistance; managing the competition between India and China. It will have to do so not, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, as a land-based, in-your-face meddler, leaning on far-flung army divisions at risk of getting caught up in sectarian conflict, but as a sea-based balancer lurking just over the horizon. Sea power has always been less threatening than land power: as the cliché goes, navies make port visits, and armies invade. Ships take a long time to get to a war zone, allowing diplomacy to work its magic. And as the U.S. response to the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean showed, with most sailors and marines returning to their ships each night, navies can exert great influence on shore while leaving a small footprint. The more the United States becomes a maritime hegemon, as opposed to a land-based one, the less threatening it will seem to others.
Moreover, precisely because India and China are emphasizing their sea power, the job of managing their peaceful rise will fall on the U.S. Navy to a significant extent. There will surely be tensions between the three navies, especially as the gaps in their relative strength begin to close. But even if the comparative size of the U.S. Navy decreases in the decades ahead, the United States will remain the one great power from outside the Indian Ocean region with a major presence there -- a unique position that will give it the leverage to act as a broker between India and China in their own backyard. To understand this dynamic, one must look at the region from a maritime perspective.
SEA CHANGES
Thanks to the predictability of the monsoon winds, the countries on the Indian Ocean were connected well before the age of steam power. Trade in frankincense, spices, precious stones, and textiles brought together the peoples flung along its long shoreline during the Middle Ages. Throughout history, sea routes have mattered more than land routes, writes the historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto, because they carry more goods more economically. "Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice," went one saying during the late fifteenth century, alluding to the city's extensive commerce with Asia; if the world were an egg, Hormuz would be its yolk, went another. Even today, in the jet and information age, 90 percent of global commerce and about 65 percent of all oil travel by sea. Globalization has been made possible by the cheap and easy shipping of containers on tankers, and the Indian Ocean accounts for fully half the world's container traffic. Moreover, 70 percent of the total traffic of petroleum products passes through the Indian Ocean, on its way from the Middle East to the Pacific. As these goods travel that route, they pass through the world's principal oil shipping lanes, including the Gulfs of Aden and Oman -- as well as some of world commerce's main chokepoints: Bab el Mandeb and the Straits of Hormuz and Malacca. Forty percent of world trade passes through the Strait of Malacca; 40 percent of all traded crude oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz.
Already the world's preeminent energy and trade interstate seaway, the Indian Ocean will matter even more in the future. Global energy needs are expected to rise by 45 percent between 2006 and 2030, and almost half of the growth in demand will come from India and China. China's demand for crude oil doubled between 1995 and 2005 and will double again in the coming 15 years or so; by 2020, China is expected to import 7.3 million barrels of crude per day -- half of Saudi Arabia's planned output. More than 85 percent of the oil and oil products bound for China cross the Indian Ocean and pass through the Strait of Malacca.
India -- soon to become the world's fourth-largest energy consumer, after the United States, China, and Japan -- is dependent on oil for roughly 33 percent of its energy needs, 65 percent of which it imports. And 90 percent of its oil imports could soon come from the Persian Gulf. India must satisfy a population that will, by 2030, be the largest of any country in the world. Its coal imports from far-off Mozambique are set to increase substantially, adding to the coal that India already imports from other Indian Ocean countries, such as South Africa, Indonesia, and Australia. In the future, India-bound ships will also be carrying increasingly large quantities of liquefied natural gas (LNG) across the seas from southern Africa, even as it continues importing LNG from Qatar, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
As the whole Indian Ocean seaboard, including Africa's eastern shores, becomes a vast web of energy trade, India is seeking to increase its influence from the Plateau of Iran to the Gulf of Thailand -- an expansion west and east meant to span the zone of influence of the Raj's viceroys. India's trade with the Arab countries of the Persian Gulf and Iran, with which India has long enjoyed close economic and cultural ties, is booming. Approximately 3.5 million Indians work in the six Arab states of the Gulf Cooperation Council and send home $4 billion in remittances annually. As India's economy continues to grow, so will its trade with Iran and, once the country recovers, Iraq. Iran, like Afghanistan, has become a strategic rear base for India against Pakistan, and it is poised to become an important energy partner. In 2005, India and Iran signed a multibillion-dollar deal under which Iran will supply India with 7.5 million tons of LNG annually for 25 years, beginning in 2009. There has been talk of building a gas pipeline from Iran to India through Pakistan, a project that would join the Middle East and South Asia at the hip (and in the process could go a long way toward stabilizing Indian-Pakistani relations). In another sign that Indian-Iranian relations are growing more intimate, India has been helping Iran develop the port of Chah Bahar, on the Gulf of Oman, which will also serve as a forward base for the Iranian navy.
India has also been expanding its military and economic ties with Myanmar, to the east. Democratic India does not have the luxury of spurning Myanmar's junta because Myanmar is rich in natural resources -- oil, natural gas, coal, zinc, copper, uranium, timber, and hydropower -- resources in which the Chinese are also heavily invested. India hopes that a network of east-west roads and energy pipelines will eventually allow it to be connected to Iran, Pakistan, and Myanmar.
India is enlarging its navy in the same spirit. With its 155 warships, the Indian navy is already one of the world's largest, and it expects to add three nuclear-powered submarines and three aircraft carriers to its arsenal by 2015. One major impetus for the buildup was the humiliating inability of its navy to evacuate Indian citizens from Iraq and Kuwait during the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War. Another is what Mohan Malik, a scholar at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, in Hawaii, has called India's "Hormuz dilemma," its dependence on imports passing through the strait, close to the shores of Pakistan's Makran coast, where the Chinese are helping the Pakistanis develop deep-water ports.
Indeed, as India extends its influence east and west, on land and at sea, it is bumping into China, which, also concerned about protecting its interests throughout the region, is expanding its reach southward. Chinese President Hu Jintao has bemoaned China's "Malacca dilemma." The Chinese government hopes to eventually be able to partly bypass that strait by transporting oil and other energy products via roads and pipelines from ports on the Indian Ocean into the heart of China. One reason that Beijing wants desperately to integrate Taiwan into its dominion is so that it can redirect its naval energies away from the Taiwan Strait and toward the Indian Ocean.
The Chinese government has already adopted a "string of pearls" strategy for the Indian Ocean, which consists of setting up a series of ports in friendly countries along the ocean's northern seaboard. It is building a large naval base and listening post in Gwadar, Pakistan, (from which it may already be monitoring ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz); a port in Pasni, Pakistan, 75 miles east of Gwadar, which is to be joined to the Gwadar facility by a new highway; a fueling station on the southern coast of Sri Lanka; and a container facility with extensive naval and commercial access in Chittagong, Bangladesh. Beijing operates surveillance facilities on islands deep in the Bay of Bengal. In Myanmar, whose junta gets billions of dollars in military assistance from Beijing, the Chinese are constructing (or upgrading) commercial and naval bases and building roads, waterways, and pipelines in order to link the Bay of Bengal to the southern Chinese province of Yunnan. Some of these facilities are closer to cities in central and western China than those cities are to Beijing and Shanghai, and so building road and rail links from these facilities into China will help spur the economies of China's landlocked provinces. The Chinese government is also envisioning a canal across the Isthmus of Kra, in Thailand, to link the Indian Ocean to China's Pacific coast -- a project on the scale of the Panama Canal and one that could further tip Asia's balance of power in China's favor by giving China's burgeoning navy and commercial maritime fleet easy access to a vast oceanic continuum stretching all the way from East Africa to Japan and the Korean Peninsula.
All of these activities are unnerving the Indian government. With China building deep-water ports to its west and east and a preponderance of Chinese arms sales going to Indian Ocean states, India fears being encircled by China unless it expands its own sphere of influence. The two countries' overlapping commercial and political interests are fostering competition, and even more so in the naval realm than on land. Zhao Nanqi (Triệu Nam Khởi), former director of the General Logistics Department of the People's Liberation Army, proclaimed in 1993, "We can no longer accept the Indian Ocean as an ocean only of the Indians." India has responded to China's building of a naval base in Gwadar by further developing one of its own, that in Karwar, India, south of Goa. Meanwhile, Zhang Ming (Trương Minh), a Chinese naval analyst, has warned that the 244 islands that form India's Andaman and Nicobar archipelago could be used like a "metal chain" to block the western entrance to the Strait of Malacca, on which China so desperately depends. "India is perhaps China's most realistic strategic adversary," Zhang has written. "Once India commands the Indian Ocean, it will not be satisfied with its position and will continuously seek to extend its influence, and its eastward strategy will have a particular impact on China." These may sound like the words of a professional worrier from China's own theory class, but these worries are revealing: Beijing already considers New Delhi to be a major sea power.
As the competition between India and China suggests, the Indian Ocean is where global struggles will play out in the twenty-first century. The old borders of the Cold War map are crumbling fast, and Asia is becoming a more integrated unit, from the Middle East to the Pacific. South Asia has been an indivisible part of the greater Islamic Middle East since the Middle Ages: it was the Muslim Ghaznavids of eastern Afghanistan who launched raids on India's northwestern coast in the early eleventh century; Indian civilization itself is a fusion of the indigenous Hindu culture and the cultural imprint left by these invasions. Although it took the seaborne terrorist attacks in Mumbai last November for most Westerners to locate India inside the greater Middle East, the Indian Ocean's entire coast has always constituted one vast interconnected expanse.
What is different now is the extent of these connections. On a maritime-centric map of southern Eurasia, artificial land divisions disappear; even landlocked Central Asia is related to the Indian Ocean. Natural gas from Turkmenistan may one day flow through Afghanistan, for example, en route to Pakistani and Indian cities and ports, one of several possible energy links between Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Both the Chinese port in Gwadar, Pakistan, and the Indian port in Chah Bahar, Iran, may eventually be connected to oil- and natural-gas-rich Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and other former Soviet republics. S. Frederick Starr, a Central Asia expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, said at a conference in Washington last year that access to the Indian Ocean "will help define Central Asian politics in the future." Others have called ports in India and Pakistan "evacuation points" for Caspian Sea oil. The destinies of countries even 1,200 miles from the Indian Ocean are connected with it.
ELEGANT DECLINE
The United States faces three related geopolitical challenges in Asia: the strategic nightmare of the greater Middle East, the struggle for influence over the southern tier of the former Soviet Union, and the growing presence of India and China in the Indian Ocean. The last seems to be the most benign of the three. China is not an enemy of the United States, like Iran, but a legitimate peer competitor, and India is a budding ally. And the rise of the Indian navy, soon to be the third largest in the world after those of the United States and China, will function as an antidote to Chinese military expansion.
The task of the U.S. Navy will therefore be to quietly leverage the sea power of its closest allies -- India in the Indian Ocean and Japan in the western Pacific -- to set limits on China's expansion. But it will have to do so at the same time as it seizes every opportunity to incorporate China's navy into international alliances; a U.S.-Chinese understanding at sea is crucial for the stabilization of world politics in the twenty-first century. After all, the Indian Ocean is a seaway for both energy and hashish and is in drastic need of policing. To manage it effectively, U.S. military planners will have to invoke challenges such as terrorism, piracy, and smuggling to bring together India, China, and other states in joint sea patrols. The goal of the United States must be to forge a global maritime system that can minimize the risks of interstate conflict while lessening the burden of policing for the U.S. Navy.
Keeping the peace in the Indian Ocean will be even more crucial once the seas and the coasts from the Gulf of Aden to the Sea of Japan are connected. Shipping options between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean will increase substantially in the future. The port operator Dubai Ports World is conducting a feasibility study on constructing a land bridge near the canal that the Chinese hope will be dug across the Isthmus of Kra, with ports on either side of the isthmus connected by rails and highways. The Malaysian government is interested in a pipeline network that would link up ports in the Bay of Bengal with those in the South China Sea. To be sure, as sea power grows in importance, the crowded hub around Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia will form the maritime heart of Asia: in the coming decades, it will be as strategically significant as the Fulda Gap, a possible invasion route for Soviet tanks into West Germany during the Cold War. The protective oversight of the U.S. Navy there will be especially important. As the only truly substantial blue-water force without territorial ambitions on the Asian mainland, the U.S. Navy may in the future be able to work with individual Asian countries, such as India and China, better than they can with one another. Rather than ensure its dominance, the U.S. Navy simply needs to make itself continually useful.
It has already begun to make the necessary shifts. Owing to the debilitating U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, headlines in recent years have been dominated by discussions about land forces and counterinsurgency. But with 75 percent of the earth's population living within 200 miles of the sea, the world's military future may well be dominated by naval (and air) forces operating over vast regions. And to a greater extent than the other armed services, navies exist to protect economic interests and the system in which these interests operate. Aware of how much the international economy depends on sea traffic, U.S. admirals are thinking beyond the fighting and winning of wars to responsibilities such as policing a global trading arrangement. They are also attuned to the effects that a U.S. military strike against Iran would have on maritime commerce and the price of oil. With such concerns in mind, the U.S. Navy has for decades been helping to secure vital chokepoints in the Indian Ocean, often operating from a base on the British atoll of Diego Garcia, a thousand miles south of India and close to major sea-lanes. And in October 2007, it implied that it was seeking a sustained forward presence in the Indian Ocean and the western Pacific but no longer in the Atlantic -- a momentous shift in overall U.S. maritime strategy. The document Marine Corps Vision and Strategy 2025 also concluded that the Indian Ocean and its adjacent waters will be a central theater of global conflict and competition this century.
Yet as the challenges for the United States on the high seas multiply, it is unclear how much longer U.S. naval dominance will last. At the end of the Cold War, the U.S. Navy boasted about 600 warships; it is now down to 279. That number might rise to 313 in the coming years with the addition of the new "littoral combat ships," but it could also drop to the low 200s given cost overruns of 34 percent and the slow pace of shipbuilding. Although the revolution in precision-guided weapons means that existing ships pack better firepower than those of the Cold War fleet did, since a ship cannot be in two places at once, the fewer the vessels, the riskier every decision to deploy them. There comes a point at which insufficient quantity hurts quality.
Meanwhile, by sometime in the next decade, China's navy will have more warships than the United States'. China is producing and acquiring submarines five times as fast as is the United States. In addition to submarines, the Chinese have wisely focused on buying naval mines, ballistic missiles that can hit moving targets at sea, and technology that blocks signals from GPS satellites, on which the U.S. Navy depends. (They also have plans to acquire at least one aircraft carrier; not having one hindered their attempts to help with the tsunami relief effort in 2004-5.) The goal of the Chinese is "sea denial," or dissuading U.S. carrier strike groups from closing in on the Asian mainland wherever and whenever Washington would like. The Chinese are also more aggressive than U.S. military planners. Whereas the prospect of ethnic warfare has scared away U.S. admirals from considering a base in Sri Lanka, which is strategically located at the confluence of the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, the Chinese are constructing a refueling station for their warships there.
There is nothing illegitimate about the rise of China's navy. As the country's economic interests expand dramatically, so must China expand its military, and particularly its navy, to guard these interests. The United Kingdom did just that in the nineteenth century, and so did the United States when it emerged as a great power between the American Civil War and World War I. In 1890, the American military theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan published The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783, which argued that the power to protect merchant fleets had been the determining factor in world history. Both Chinese and Indian naval strategists read him avidly nowadays. China's quest for a major presence in the Indian Ocean was also evinced in 2005 by the beginning of an extensive commemoration of Zheng He (Trịnh Hòa), the Ming dynasty explorer and admiral who plied the seas between China and Indonesia, Sri Lanka, the Persian Gulf, and the Horn of Africa in the early decades of the fifteenth century -- a celebration that signals China's belief that these seas have always been part of its zone of influence.
Just as at the end of the nineteenth century the British Royal Navy began to reduce its presence worldwide by leveraging the growing sea power of its naval allies (Japan and the United States), at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the United States is beginning an elegant decline by leveraging the growing sea power of allies such as India and Japan to balance against China. What better way to scale back than to give more responsibilities to like-minded states, especially allies that, unlike those in Europe, still cherish military power?
India, for one, is more than willing to help. "India has never waited for American permission to balance [against] China," the Indian strategist C. Raja Mohan wrote in 2006, adding that India has been balancing against China since the day the Chinese invaded Tibet. Threatened by China's rise, India has expanded its naval presence from as far west as the Mozambique Channel to as far east as the South China Sea. It has been establishing naval staging posts and listening stations on the island nations of Madagascar, Mauritius, and the Seychelles, as well as military relationships with them, precisely in order to counter China's own very active military cooperation with these states. With a Chinese-Pakistani alliance taking shape, most visibly in the construction of the Gwadar port, near the Strait of Hormuz, and an Indian naval buildup on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, near the Strait of Malacca, the Indian-Chinese rivalry is taking on the dimensions of a maritime Great Game. This is a reason for the United States to quietly encourage India to balance against China, even as the United States seeks greater cooperation with China. During the Cold War, the Pacific and Indian oceans were veritable U.S. lakes. But such hegemony will not last, and the United States must seek to replace it with a subtle balance-of-power arrangement.
COALITION BUILDER SUPREME
So how exactly does the United States play the role of a constructive, distant, and slowly declining hegemon and keep peace on the high seas in what Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International, has called "the post-American world"? Several years ago, Admiral Michael Mullen, then the chief of naval operations (and now chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), said the answer was a "thousand-ship navy . . . comprised of all freedom-loving nations -- standing watch over the seas, standing watch with each other." The term "thousand-ship navy" has since been dropped for sounding too domineering, but the idea behind it remains: rather than going it alone, the U.S. Navy should be a coalition builder supreme, working with any navy that agrees to patrol the seas and share information with it.
Already, Combined Task Force 150 (CTF-150), a naval force based in Djibouti and comprising roughly 15 vessels from the United States, four European countries, Canada, and Pakistan, conducts antipiracy patrols around the troubled Gulf of Aden. In 2008, about a hundred ships were attacked by pirates in the region, and over 35 vessels, with billions of dollars worth of cargo, were seized. (As of the end of 2008, more than a dozen, including oil tankers, cargo vessels, and other ships, along with over 300 crew members, were still being held.) Ransom demands routinely exceed $1 million per ship, and in the recent case of one Saudi oil tanker, pirates demanded $25 million. Last fall, after the capture of a Ukrainian vessel carrying tanks and other military equipment, warships from the United States, Kenya, and Malaysia steamed toward the Gulf of Aden to assist CTF-150, followed by two Chinese warships a few weeks later. The force, which is to be beefed up and rechristened CTF-151, is likely to become a permanent fixture: piracy is the maritime ripple effect of land-based anarchy, and for as long as Somalia is in the throes of chaos, pirates operating at the behest of warlords will infest the waters far down Africa's eastern coast.
The task-force model could also be applied to the Strait of Malacca and other waters surrounding the Indonesian archipelago. With help from the U.S. Navy, the navies and coast guards of Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia have already combined forces to reduce piracy in that area in recent years. And with the U.S. Navy functioning as both a mediator and an enforcer of standard procedures, coalitions of this kind could bring together rival countries, such as India and Pakistan or India and China, under a single umbrella: these states' governments would have no difficulty justifying to their publics participating in task forces aimed at transnational threats over which they have no disagreements. Piracy has the potential to unite rival states along the Indian Ocean coastline.
Packed with states with weak governments and tottering infrastructure, the shores of the Indian Ocean make it necessary for the United States and other countries to transform their militaries. This area represents an unconventional world, a world in which the U.S. military, for one, will have to respond, expeditionary style, to a range of crises: not just piracy but also terrorist attacks, ethnic conflicts, cyclones, and floods. For even as the United States' armed forces, and particularly its navy, are in relative decline, they remain the most powerful conventional military on earth, and they will be expected to lead such emergency responses. With population growth in climatically and seismically fragile zones today placing more human beings in danger's way than at almost any other time in history, one deployment will quickly follow another.
It is the variety and recurrence of these challenges that make the map of the Indian Ocean in the twenty-first century vastly different from the map of the North Atlantic in the twentieth century. The latter illustrated both a singular threat and a singular concept: the Soviet Union. And it gave the United States a simple focus: to defend Western Europe against the Red Army and keep the Soviet navy bottled up near the polar icecap. Because the threat was straightforward, and the United States' power was paramount, the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization arguably became history's most successful alliance.
One might envision a "NATO of the seas" for the Indian Ocean, composed of South Africa, Oman, Pakistan, India, Singapore, and Australia, with Pakistan and India bickering inside the alliance much as Greece and Turkey have inside NATO. But that idea fails to capture what the Indian Ocean is all about. Owing to the peripatetic movements of medieval Arab and Persian sailors and the legacies of Portuguese, Dutch, and British imperialists, the Indian Ocean forms a historical and cultural unit. Yet in strategic terms, it, like the world at large today, has no single focal point. The Gulf of Aden, the Persian Gulf, the Bay of Bengal -- all these areas are burdened by different threats with different players. Just as today NATO is a looser alliance, less singularly focused than it was during the Cold War, any coalition centered on the Indian Ocean should be adapted to the times. Given the ocean's size -- it stretches across seven time zones and almost half of the world's latitudes -- and the comparative slowness at which ships move, it would be a challenge for any one multinational navy to get to a crisis zone in time. The United States was able to lead the relief effort off the coast of Indonesia after the 2004 tsunami only because the carrier strike group the USS Abraham Lincoln happened to be in the vicinity and not in the Korean Peninsula, where it was headed.
A better approach would be to rely on multiple regional and ideological alliances in different parts of the Indian Ocean. Some such efforts have already begun. The navies of Thailand, Singapore, and Indonesia have banded together to deter piracy in the Strait of Malacca; those of the United States, India, Singapore, and Australia have exercised together off India's southwestern coast -- an implicit rebuke to China's designs in the region. According to Vice Admiral John Morgan, former deputy chief of U.S. naval operations, the Indian Ocean strategic system should be like the New York City taxi system: driven by market forces and with no central dispatcher. Coalitions will naturally form in areas where shipping lanes need to be protected, much as taxis gather in the theater district before and after performances. For one Australian commodore, the model should be a network of artificial sea bases supplied by the U.S. Navy, which would allow for different permutations of alliances: frigates and destroyers from various states could "plug and play" into these sea bases as necessary and spread out from East Africa to the Indonesian archipelago.
Like a microcosm of the world at large, the greater Indian Ocean region is developing into an area of both ferociously guarded sovereignty (with fast-growing economies and militaries) and astonishing interdependence (with its pipelines and land and sea routes). And for the first time since the Portuguese onslaught in the region in the early sixteenth century, the West's power there is in decline, however subtly and relatively. The Indians and the Chinese will enter into a dynamic great-power rivalry in these waters, with their shared economic interests as major trading partners locking them in an uncomfortable embrace. The United States, meanwhile, will serve as a stabilizing power in this newly complex area. Indispensability, rather than dominance, must be its goal.
By Robert D. Kaplan
Summary: Already the world's preeminent energy and trade interstate seaway, the Indian Ocean will matter even more as India and China enter into a dynamic great-power rivalry in these waters.
Robert D. Kaplan, a National Correspondent for The Atlantic and a Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, in Washington, D.C., is writing a book on the Indian Ocean. He recently was the Class of 1960 Distinguished Visiting Professor in National Security at the U.S. Naval Academy.
For better or worse, phrases such "the Cold War" and "the clash of civilizations" matter. In a similar way, so do maps. The right map can stimulate foresight by providing a spatial view of critical trends in world politics. Understanding the map of Europe was essential to understanding the twentieth century. Although recent technological advances and economic integration have encouraged global thinking, some places continue to count more than others. And in some of those, such as Iraq and Pakistan, two countries with inherently artificial contours, politics is still at the mercy of geography.
So in what quarter of the earth today can one best glimpse the future? Because of their own geographic circumstances, Americans, in particular, continue to concentrate on the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. World War II and the Cold War shaped this outlook: Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, and communist China were all oriented toward one of these two oceans. The bias is even embedded in mapping conventions: Mercator projections tend to place the Western Hemisphere in the middle of the map, splitting the Indian Ocean at its far edges. And yet, as the pirate activity off the coast of Somalia and the terrorist carnage in Mumbai last fall suggest, the Indian Ocean -- the world's third-largest body of water -- already forms center stage for the challenges of the twenty-first century.
The greater Indian Ocean region encompasses the entire arc of Islam, from the Sahara Desert to the Indonesian archipelago. Although the Arabs and the Persians are known to Westerners primarily as desert peoples, they have also been great seafarers. In the Middle Ages, they sailed from Arabia to China; proselytizing along the way, they spread their faith through sea-based commerce. Today, the western reaches of the Indian Ocean include the tinderboxes of Somalia, Yemen, Iran, and Pakistan -- constituting a network of dynamic trade as well as a network of global terrorism, piracy, and drug smuggling. Hundreds of millions of Muslims -- the legacy of those medieval conversions -- live along the Indian Ocean's eastern edges, in India and Bangladesh, Malaysia and Indonesia.
The Indian Ocean is dominated by two immense bays, the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, near the top of which are two of the least stable countries in the world: Pakistan and Myanmar (also known as Burma). State collapse or regime change in Pakistan would affect its neighbors by empowering Baluchi and Sindhi separatists seeking closer links to India and Iran. Likewise, the collapse of the junta in Myanmar -- where competition over energy and natural resources between China and India looms -- would threaten economies nearby and require a massive seaborne humanitarian intervention. On the other hand, the advent of a more liberal regime in Myanmar would undermine China's dominant position there, boost Indian influence, and quicken regional economic integration.
In other words, more than just a geographic feature, the Indian Ocean is also an idea. It combines the centrality of Islam with global energy politics and the rise of India and China to reveal a multilayered, multipolar world. The dramatic economic growth of India and China has been duly noted, but the equally dramatic military ramifications of this development have not. India's and China's great-power aspirations, as well as their quests for energy security, have compelled the two countries "to redirect their gazes from land to the seas," according to James Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara, associate professors of strategy at the U.S. Naval War College. And the very fact that they are focusing on their sea power indicates how much more self-confident they feel on land. And so a map of the Indian Ocean exposes the contours of power politics in the twenty-first century.
Yet this is still an environment in which the United States will have to keep the peace and help guard the global commons -- interdicting terrorists, pirates, and smugglers; providing humanitarian assistance; managing the competition between India and China. It will have to do so not, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, as a land-based, in-your-face meddler, leaning on far-flung army divisions at risk of getting caught up in sectarian conflict, but as a sea-based balancer lurking just over the horizon. Sea power has always been less threatening than land power: as the cliché goes, navies make port visits, and armies invade. Ships take a long time to get to a war zone, allowing diplomacy to work its magic. And as the U.S. response to the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean showed, with most sailors and marines returning to their ships each night, navies can exert great influence on shore while leaving a small footprint. The more the United States becomes a maritime hegemon, as opposed to a land-based one, the less threatening it will seem to others.
Moreover, precisely because India and China are emphasizing their sea power, the job of managing their peaceful rise will fall on the U.S. Navy to a significant extent. There will surely be tensions between the three navies, especially as the gaps in their relative strength begin to close. But even if the comparative size of the U.S. Navy decreases in the decades ahead, the United States will remain the one great power from outside the Indian Ocean region with a major presence there -- a unique position that will give it the leverage to act as a broker between India and China in their own backyard. To understand this dynamic, one must look at the region from a maritime perspective.
SEA CHANGES
Thanks to the predictability of the monsoon winds, the countries on the Indian Ocean were connected well before the age of steam power. Trade in frankincense, spices, precious stones, and textiles brought together the peoples flung along its long shoreline during the Middle Ages. Throughout history, sea routes have mattered more than land routes, writes the historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto, because they carry more goods more economically. "Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice," went one saying during the late fifteenth century, alluding to the city's extensive commerce with Asia; if the world were an egg, Hormuz would be its yolk, went another. Even today, in the jet and information age, 90 percent of global commerce and about 65 percent of all oil travel by sea. Globalization has been made possible by the cheap and easy shipping of containers on tankers, and the Indian Ocean accounts for fully half the world's container traffic. Moreover, 70 percent of the total traffic of petroleum products passes through the Indian Ocean, on its way from the Middle East to the Pacific. As these goods travel that route, they pass through the world's principal oil shipping lanes, including the Gulfs of Aden and Oman -- as well as some of world commerce's main chokepoints: Bab el Mandeb and the Straits of Hormuz and Malacca. Forty percent of world trade passes through the Strait of Malacca; 40 percent of all traded crude oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz.
Already the world's preeminent energy and trade interstate seaway, the Indian Ocean will matter even more in the future. Global energy needs are expected to rise by 45 percent between 2006 and 2030, and almost half of the growth in demand will come from India and China. China's demand for crude oil doubled between 1995 and 2005 and will double again in the coming 15 years or so; by 2020, China is expected to import 7.3 million barrels of crude per day -- half of Saudi Arabia's planned output. More than 85 percent of the oil and oil products bound for China cross the Indian Ocean and pass through the Strait of Malacca.
India -- soon to become the world's fourth-largest energy consumer, after the United States, China, and Japan -- is dependent on oil for roughly 33 percent of its energy needs, 65 percent of which it imports. And 90 percent of its oil imports could soon come from the Persian Gulf. India must satisfy a population that will, by 2030, be the largest of any country in the world. Its coal imports from far-off Mozambique are set to increase substantially, adding to the coal that India already imports from other Indian Ocean countries, such as South Africa, Indonesia, and Australia. In the future, India-bound ships will also be carrying increasingly large quantities of liquefied natural gas (LNG) across the seas from southern Africa, even as it continues importing LNG from Qatar, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
As the whole Indian Ocean seaboard, including Africa's eastern shores, becomes a vast web of energy trade, India is seeking to increase its influence from the Plateau of Iran to the Gulf of Thailand -- an expansion west and east meant to span the zone of influence of the Raj's viceroys. India's trade with the Arab countries of the Persian Gulf and Iran, with which India has long enjoyed close economic and cultural ties, is booming. Approximately 3.5 million Indians work in the six Arab states of the Gulf Cooperation Council and send home $4 billion in remittances annually. As India's economy continues to grow, so will its trade with Iran and, once the country recovers, Iraq. Iran, like Afghanistan, has become a strategic rear base for India against Pakistan, and it is poised to become an important energy partner. In 2005, India and Iran signed a multibillion-dollar deal under which Iran will supply India with 7.5 million tons of LNG annually for 25 years, beginning in 2009. There has been talk of building a gas pipeline from Iran to India through Pakistan, a project that would join the Middle East and South Asia at the hip (and in the process could go a long way toward stabilizing Indian-Pakistani relations). In another sign that Indian-Iranian relations are growing more intimate, India has been helping Iran develop the port of Chah Bahar, on the Gulf of Oman, which will also serve as a forward base for the Iranian navy.
India has also been expanding its military and economic ties with Myanmar, to the east. Democratic India does not have the luxury of spurning Myanmar's junta because Myanmar is rich in natural resources -- oil, natural gas, coal, zinc, copper, uranium, timber, and hydropower -- resources in which the Chinese are also heavily invested. India hopes that a network of east-west roads and energy pipelines will eventually allow it to be connected to Iran, Pakistan, and Myanmar.
India is enlarging its navy in the same spirit. With its 155 warships, the Indian navy is already one of the world's largest, and it expects to add three nuclear-powered submarines and three aircraft carriers to its arsenal by 2015. One major impetus for the buildup was the humiliating inability of its navy to evacuate Indian citizens from Iraq and Kuwait during the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War. Another is what Mohan Malik, a scholar at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, in Hawaii, has called India's "Hormuz dilemma," its dependence on imports passing through the strait, close to the shores of Pakistan's Makran coast, where the Chinese are helping the Pakistanis develop deep-water ports.
Indeed, as India extends its influence east and west, on land and at sea, it is bumping into China, which, also concerned about protecting its interests throughout the region, is expanding its reach southward. Chinese President Hu Jintao has bemoaned China's "Malacca dilemma." The Chinese government hopes to eventually be able to partly bypass that strait by transporting oil and other energy products via roads and pipelines from ports on the Indian Ocean into the heart of China. One reason that Beijing wants desperately to integrate Taiwan into its dominion is so that it can redirect its naval energies away from the Taiwan Strait and toward the Indian Ocean.
The Chinese government has already adopted a "string of pearls" strategy for the Indian Ocean, which consists of setting up a series of ports in friendly countries along the ocean's northern seaboard. It is building a large naval base and listening post in Gwadar, Pakistan, (from which it may already be monitoring ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz); a port in Pasni, Pakistan, 75 miles east of Gwadar, which is to be joined to the Gwadar facility by a new highway; a fueling station on the southern coast of Sri Lanka; and a container facility with extensive naval and commercial access in Chittagong, Bangladesh. Beijing operates surveillance facilities on islands deep in the Bay of Bengal. In Myanmar, whose junta gets billions of dollars in military assistance from Beijing, the Chinese are constructing (or upgrading) commercial and naval bases and building roads, waterways, and pipelines in order to link the Bay of Bengal to the southern Chinese province of Yunnan. Some of these facilities are closer to cities in central and western China than those cities are to Beijing and Shanghai, and so building road and rail links from these facilities into China will help spur the economies of China's landlocked provinces. The Chinese government is also envisioning a canal across the Isthmus of Kra, in Thailand, to link the Indian Ocean to China's Pacific coast -- a project on the scale of the Panama Canal and one that could further tip Asia's balance of power in China's favor by giving China's burgeoning navy and commercial maritime fleet easy access to a vast oceanic continuum stretching all the way from East Africa to Japan and the Korean Peninsula.
All of these activities are unnerving the Indian government. With China building deep-water ports to its west and east and a preponderance of Chinese arms sales going to Indian Ocean states, India fears being encircled by China unless it expands its own sphere of influence. The two countries' overlapping commercial and political interests are fostering competition, and even more so in the naval realm than on land. Zhao Nanqi (Triệu Nam Khởi), former director of the General Logistics Department of the People's Liberation Army, proclaimed in 1993, "We can no longer accept the Indian Ocean as an ocean only of the Indians." India has responded to China's building of a naval base in Gwadar by further developing one of its own, that in Karwar, India, south of Goa. Meanwhile, Zhang Ming (Trương Minh), a Chinese naval analyst, has warned that the 244 islands that form India's Andaman and Nicobar archipelago could be used like a "metal chain" to block the western entrance to the Strait of Malacca, on which China so desperately depends. "India is perhaps China's most realistic strategic adversary," Zhang has written. "Once India commands the Indian Ocean, it will not be satisfied with its position and will continuously seek to extend its influence, and its eastward strategy will have a particular impact on China." These may sound like the words of a professional worrier from China's own theory class, but these worries are revealing: Beijing already considers New Delhi to be a major sea power.
As the competition between India and China suggests, the Indian Ocean is where global struggles will play out in the twenty-first century. The old borders of the Cold War map are crumbling fast, and Asia is becoming a more integrated unit, from the Middle East to the Pacific. South Asia has been an indivisible part of the greater Islamic Middle East since the Middle Ages: it was the Muslim Ghaznavids of eastern Afghanistan who launched raids on India's northwestern coast in the early eleventh century; Indian civilization itself is a fusion of the indigenous Hindu culture and the cultural imprint left by these invasions. Although it took the seaborne terrorist attacks in Mumbai last November for most Westerners to locate India inside the greater Middle East, the Indian Ocean's entire coast has always constituted one vast interconnected expanse.
What is different now is the extent of these connections. On a maritime-centric map of southern Eurasia, artificial land divisions disappear; even landlocked Central Asia is related to the Indian Ocean. Natural gas from Turkmenistan may one day flow through Afghanistan, for example, en route to Pakistani and Indian cities and ports, one of several possible energy links between Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Both the Chinese port in Gwadar, Pakistan, and the Indian port in Chah Bahar, Iran, may eventually be connected to oil- and natural-gas-rich Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and other former Soviet republics. S. Frederick Starr, a Central Asia expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, said at a conference in Washington last year that access to the Indian Ocean "will help define Central Asian politics in the future." Others have called ports in India and Pakistan "evacuation points" for Caspian Sea oil. The destinies of countries even 1,200 miles from the Indian Ocean are connected with it.
ELEGANT DECLINE
The United States faces three related geopolitical challenges in Asia: the strategic nightmare of the greater Middle East, the struggle for influence over the southern tier of the former Soviet Union, and the growing presence of India and China in the Indian Ocean. The last seems to be the most benign of the three. China is not an enemy of the United States, like Iran, but a legitimate peer competitor, and India is a budding ally. And the rise of the Indian navy, soon to be the third largest in the world after those of the United States and China, will function as an antidote to Chinese military expansion.
The task of the U.S. Navy will therefore be to quietly leverage the sea power of its closest allies -- India in the Indian Ocean and Japan in the western Pacific -- to set limits on China's expansion. But it will have to do so at the same time as it seizes every opportunity to incorporate China's navy into international alliances; a U.S.-Chinese understanding at sea is crucial for the stabilization of world politics in the twenty-first century. After all, the Indian Ocean is a seaway for both energy and hashish and is in drastic need of policing. To manage it effectively, U.S. military planners will have to invoke challenges such as terrorism, piracy, and smuggling to bring together India, China, and other states in joint sea patrols. The goal of the United States must be to forge a global maritime system that can minimize the risks of interstate conflict while lessening the burden of policing for the U.S. Navy.
Keeping the peace in the Indian Ocean will be even more crucial once the seas and the coasts from the Gulf of Aden to the Sea of Japan are connected. Shipping options between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean will increase substantially in the future. The port operator Dubai Ports World is conducting a feasibility study on constructing a land bridge near the canal that the Chinese hope will be dug across the Isthmus of Kra, with ports on either side of the isthmus connected by rails and highways. The Malaysian government is interested in a pipeline network that would link up ports in the Bay of Bengal with those in the South China Sea. To be sure, as sea power grows in importance, the crowded hub around Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia will form the maritime heart of Asia: in the coming decades, it will be as strategically significant as the Fulda Gap, a possible invasion route for Soviet tanks into West Germany during the Cold War. The protective oversight of the U.S. Navy there will be especially important. As the only truly substantial blue-water force without territorial ambitions on the Asian mainland, the U.S. Navy may in the future be able to work with individual Asian countries, such as India and China, better than they can with one another. Rather than ensure its dominance, the U.S. Navy simply needs to make itself continually useful.
It has already begun to make the necessary shifts. Owing to the debilitating U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, headlines in recent years have been dominated by discussions about land forces and counterinsurgency. But with 75 percent of the earth's population living within 200 miles of the sea, the world's military future may well be dominated by naval (and air) forces operating over vast regions. And to a greater extent than the other armed services, navies exist to protect economic interests and the system in which these interests operate. Aware of how much the international economy depends on sea traffic, U.S. admirals are thinking beyond the fighting and winning of wars to responsibilities such as policing a global trading arrangement. They are also attuned to the effects that a U.S. military strike against Iran would have on maritime commerce and the price of oil. With such concerns in mind, the U.S. Navy has for decades been helping to secure vital chokepoints in the Indian Ocean, often operating from a base on the British atoll of Diego Garcia, a thousand miles south of India and close to major sea-lanes. And in October 2007, it implied that it was seeking a sustained forward presence in the Indian Ocean and the western Pacific but no longer in the Atlantic -- a momentous shift in overall U.S. maritime strategy. The document Marine Corps Vision and Strategy 2025 also concluded that the Indian Ocean and its adjacent waters will be a central theater of global conflict and competition this century.
Yet as the challenges for the United States on the high seas multiply, it is unclear how much longer U.S. naval dominance will last. At the end of the Cold War, the U.S. Navy boasted about 600 warships; it is now down to 279. That number might rise to 313 in the coming years with the addition of the new "littoral combat ships," but it could also drop to the low 200s given cost overruns of 34 percent and the slow pace of shipbuilding. Although the revolution in precision-guided weapons means that existing ships pack better firepower than those of the Cold War fleet did, since a ship cannot be in two places at once, the fewer the vessels, the riskier every decision to deploy them. There comes a point at which insufficient quantity hurts quality.
Meanwhile, by sometime in the next decade, China's navy will have more warships than the United States'. China is producing and acquiring submarines five times as fast as is the United States. In addition to submarines, the Chinese have wisely focused on buying naval mines, ballistic missiles that can hit moving targets at sea, and technology that blocks signals from GPS satellites, on which the U.S. Navy depends. (They also have plans to acquire at least one aircraft carrier; not having one hindered their attempts to help with the tsunami relief effort in 2004-5.) The goal of the Chinese is "sea denial," or dissuading U.S. carrier strike groups from closing in on the Asian mainland wherever and whenever Washington would like. The Chinese are also more aggressive than U.S. military planners. Whereas the prospect of ethnic warfare has scared away U.S. admirals from considering a base in Sri Lanka, which is strategically located at the confluence of the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, the Chinese are constructing a refueling station for their warships there.
There is nothing illegitimate about the rise of China's navy. As the country's economic interests expand dramatically, so must China expand its military, and particularly its navy, to guard these interests. The United Kingdom did just that in the nineteenth century, and so did the United States when it emerged as a great power between the American Civil War and World War I. In 1890, the American military theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan published The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783, which argued that the power to protect merchant fleets had been the determining factor in world history. Both Chinese and Indian naval strategists read him avidly nowadays. China's quest for a major presence in the Indian Ocean was also evinced in 2005 by the beginning of an extensive commemoration of Zheng He (Trịnh Hòa), the Ming dynasty explorer and admiral who plied the seas between China and Indonesia, Sri Lanka, the Persian Gulf, and the Horn of Africa in the early decades of the fifteenth century -- a celebration that signals China's belief that these seas have always been part of its zone of influence.
Just as at the end of the nineteenth century the British Royal Navy began to reduce its presence worldwide by leveraging the growing sea power of its naval allies (Japan and the United States), at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the United States is beginning an elegant decline by leveraging the growing sea power of allies such as India and Japan to balance against China. What better way to scale back than to give more responsibilities to like-minded states, especially allies that, unlike those in Europe, still cherish military power?
India, for one, is more than willing to help. "India has never waited for American permission to balance [against] China," the Indian strategist C. Raja Mohan wrote in 2006, adding that India has been balancing against China since the day the Chinese invaded Tibet. Threatened by China's rise, India has expanded its naval presence from as far west as the Mozambique Channel to as far east as the South China Sea. It has been establishing naval staging posts and listening stations on the island nations of Madagascar, Mauritius, and the Seychelles, as well as military relationships with them, precisely in order to counter China's own very active military cooperation with these states. With a Chinese-Pakistani alliance taking shape, most visibly in the construction of the Gwadar port, near the Strait of Hormuz, and an Indian naval buildup on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, near the Strait of Malacca, the Indian-Chinese rivalry is taking on the dimensions of a maritime Great Game. This is a reason for the United States to quietly encourage India to balance against China, even as the United States seeks greater cooperation with China. During the Cold War, the Pacific and Indian oceans were veritable U.S. lakes. But such hegemony will not last, and the United States must seek to replace it with a subtle balance-of-power arrangement.
COALITION BUILDER SUPREME
So how exactly does the United States play the role of a constructive, distant, and slowly declining hegemon and keep peace on the high seas in what Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International, has called "the post-American world"? Several years ago, Admiral Michael Mullen, then the chief of naval operations (and now chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), said the answer was a "thousand-ship navy . . . comprised of all freedom-loving nations -- standing watch over the seas, standing watch with each other." The term "thousand-ship navy" has since been dropped for sounding too domineering, but the idea behind it remains: rather than going it alone, the U.S. Navy should be a coalition builder supreme, working with any navy that agrees to patrol the seas and share information with it.
Already, Combined Task Force 150 (CTF-150), a naval force based in Djibouti and comprising roughly 15 vessels from the United States, four European countries, Canada, and Pakistan, conducts antipiracy patrols around the troubled Gulf of Aden. In 2008, about a hundred ships were attacked by pirates in the region, and over 35 vessels, with billions of dollars worth of cargo, were seized. (As of the end of 2008, more than a dozen, including oil tankers, cargo vessels, and other ships, along with over 300 crew members, were still being held.) Ransom demands routinely exceed $1 million per ship, and in the recent case of one Saudi oil tanker, pirates demanded $25 million. Last fall, after the capture of a Ukrainian vessel carrying tanks and other military equipment, warships from the United States, Kenya, and Malaysia steamed toward the Gulf of Aden to assist CTF-150, followed by two Chinese warships a few weeks later. The force, which is to be beefed up and rechristened CTF-151, is likely to become a permanent fixture: piracy is the maritime ripple effect of land-based anarchy, and for as long as Somalia is in the throes of chaos, pirates operating at the behest of warlords will infest the waters far down Africa's eastern coast.
The task-force model could also be applied to the Strait of Malacca and other waters surrounding the Indonesian archipelago. With help from the U.S. Navy, the navies and coast guards of Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia have already combined forces to reduce piracy in that area in recent years. And with the U.S. Navy functioning as both a mediator and an enforcer of standard procedures, coalitions of this kind could bring together rival countries, such as India and Pakistan or India and China, under a single umbrella: these states' governments would have no difficulty justifying to their publics participating in task forces aimed at transnational threats over which they have no disagreements. Piracy has the potential to unite rival states along the Indian Ocean coastline.
Packed with states with weak governments and tottering infrastructure, the shores of the Indian Ocean make it necessary for the United States and other countries to transform their militaries. This area represents an unconventional world, a world in which the U.S. military, for one, will have to respond, expeditionary style, to a range of crises: not just piracy but also terrorist attacks, ethnic conflicts, cyclones, and floods. For even as the United States' armed forces, and particularly its navy, are in relative decline, they remain the most powerful conventional military on earth, and they will be expected to lead such emergency responses. With population growth in climatically and seismically fragile zones today placing more human beings in danger's way than at almost any other time in history, one deployment will quickly follow another.
It is the variety and recurrence of these challenges that make the map of the Indian Ocean in the twenty-first century vastly different from the map of the North Atlantic in the twentieth century. The latter illustrated both a singular threat and a singular concept: the Soviet Union. And it gave the United States a simple focus: to defend Western Europe against the Red Army and keep the Soviet navy bottled up near the polar icecap. Because the threat was straightforward, and the United States' power was paramount, the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization arguably became history's most successful alliance.
One might envision a "NATO of the seas" for the Indian Ocean, composed of South Africa, Oman, Pakistan, India, Singapore, and Australia, with Pakistan and India bickering inside the alliance much as Greece and Turkey have inside NATO. But that idea fails to capture what the Indian Ocean is all about. Owing to the peripatetic movements of medieval Arab and Persian sailors and the legacies of Portuguese, Dutch, and British imperialists, the Indian Ocean forms a historical and cultural unit. Yet in strategic terms, it, like the world at large today, has no single focal point. The Gulf of Aden, the Persian Gulf, the Bay of Bengal -- all these areas are burdened by different threats with different players. Just as today NATO is a looser alliance, less singularly focused than it was during the Cold War, any coalition centered on the Indian Ocean should be adapted to the times. Given the ocean's size -- it stretches across seven time zones and almost half of the world's latitudes -- and the comparative slowness at which ships move, it would be a challenge for any one multinational navy to get to a crisis zone in time. The United States was able to lead the relief effort off the coast of Indonesia after the 2004 tsunami only because the carrier strike group the USS Abraham Lincoln happened to be in the vicinity and not in the Korean Peninsula, where it was headed.
A better approach would be to rely on multiple regional and ideological alliances in different parts of the Indian Ocean. Some such efforts have already begun. The navies of Thailand, Singapore, and Indonesia have banded together to deter piracy in the Strait of Malacca; those of the United States, India, Singapore, and Australia have exercised together off India's southwestern coast -- an implicit rebuke to China's designs in the region. According to Vice Admiral John Morgan, former deputy chief of U.S. naval operations, the Indian Ocean strategic system should be like the New York City taxi system: driven by market forces and with no central dispatcher. Coalitions will naturally form in areas where shipping lanes need to be protected, much as taxis gather in the theater district before and after performances. For one Australian commodore, the model should be a network of artificial sea bases supplied by the U.S. Navy, which would allow for different permutations of alliances: frigates and destroyers from various states could "plug and play" into these sea bases as necessary and spread out from East Africa to the Indonesian archipelago.
Like a microcosm of the world at large, the greater Indian Ocean region is developing into an area of both ferociously guarded sovereignty (with fast-growing economies and militaries) and astonishing interdependence (with its pipelines and land and sea routes). And for the first time since the Portuguese onslaught in the region in the early sixteenth century, the West's power there is in decline, however subtly and relatively. The Indians and the Chinese will enter into a dynamic great-power rivalry in these waters, with their shared economic interests as major trading partners locking them in an uncomfortable embrace. The United States, meanwhile, will serve as a stabilizing power in this newly complex area. Indispensability, rather than dominance, must be its goal.
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