The most dramatic example of the way in which China ’s rise has been transforming relations in the region, however, is South Korea. [925] After the Second World War it became an intimate ally of the United States, a relationship which was cemented in the Korean War, with no small part of its subsequent economic success due to its position as an American vassal state during the Cold War. Yet over the last decade it has been moving closer to China both at a governmental and a popular level. [926] China is now easily the country’s largest trading partner and South Korean firms have invested heavily in the mainland, with China the largest destination for Korean foreign investment. [927] Over half the students from East Asia studying for advanced degrees in China come from South Korea. [928] More than 1 million South Koreans visited China in 2003, while 490,00 °Chinese made visits to South Korea. Each week, there are over 700 flights between the two countries. [929] The crisis over North Korea and its nuclear weapons has also served to bring China and South Korea closer together, with the latter discovering that it had more in common with the cautious Chinese position of restraint than the more aggressive American approach under Bush. Indeed, China ’s handling of the crisis and its emergence as the key mediator with North Korea has enhanced its standing both with South Korea and in the region more widely. [930] The fact that the United States has meanwhile strengthened its defence ties with Japan has further alienated South Korea, which views Japan with considerable enmity as a result of the latter’s conduct during its colonial occupation of the country. [931]
South Korea’s attitude towards North Korea and China on the one hand and the United States on the other, however, remains the subject of major domestic argument: after the two liberal administrations of Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun, which emphasized reconciliation with North Korea and sought closer relations with China, the election of conservative president Lee Myung-bak in 2008 marked a shift towards a tougher stance on North Korea and a closer relationship with the United States. There is also tension between China and South Korea over the precise ancestry of the ancient kingdom of Koguryo, which occupied territory in North Korea, South Korea and also over the Chinese border, and is claimed by both Korea and China as part of their history. In the longer run, however, it seems likely that South Korea will continue to move closer to China and further away from the United States, perhaps to the point where eventually the US-Korean alliance will be dissolved — but that is unlikely to happen within less than a decade, probably rather longer. [932] In the meantime, it is possible that the United States will eventually withdraw its troops from the Korean Peninsula if and when a solution is found to the present crisis. [933] The rapprochement between China and South Korea is a powerful echo of earlier times when Korea was a close and important tributary state of China, a situation that lasted many centuries until China ’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War. [934]
Australia cannot be counted as part of East Asia, but belongs more properly to Asia-Pacific, which embraces that region together with the Pacific countries. One of the great geo-cultural anomalies is that a country that lies just to the south of Indonesia has an overwhelmingly white majority and has long been considered a Western country. Though historically part of the British Empire, ever since 1942 it has enjoyed an extremely close relationship with the United States, for most of that period being its closest and most loyal ally in the Asia-Pacific region. Over the last decade, however, China ’s growing economic power has exercised a mesmerizing effect on the island continent. By far the most important reason for this is China ’s voracious appetite for Australia ’s huge deposits of raw materials, especially iron ore. Largely as a result of Chinese demand, the Australian economy enjoyed uninterrupted growth for almost two decades until the financial meltdown and would appear to be in the process of decoupling its fortunes from the Western economy, especially the United States. [935] Australia is one of the relatively few countries in the world that has experienced a double benefit from China ’s rise: namely the falling price of manufactured goods and, until the global downturn, the rising price of commodities. If twentieth-century Australia was dominated by New South Wales and Victoria, and the rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne, this century will be characterized by the rise of the mining states, Western Australia and Queensland, with China the reason. China ’s interest in Australia ’s vast natural deposits is not confined to that of a customer; its role as an investor is becoming increasingly important, with the purchase of stakes in Australian mining firms, including, most dramatically so far, the proposal for the Chinese state-owned aluminium producer Chinalco to buy a large chunk of the debt-laden Anglo-Australian mining group Rio Tinto.
Not surprisingly, China ’s growing role in Australia ’s prosperity is having important political ramifications. The clearest expression of this hitherto has been the election of Labour prime minister Kevin Rudd in 2007. A fluent Mandarin-speaker, well versed in Chinese culture and tradition, and possessed of excellent contacts in Beijing (having worked there for many years), he can be described as the first Chinese-orientated political leader to be elected in the West. Although Australia remains very closely aligned with the United States, its growing rapprochement with China seems likely to influence the nature of its relationship with Washington. [936] It is premature to suggest that Australia will at some point distance itself from the United States and in effect bandwagon with China in the manner, for example, of South Korea or Thailand, but it would not be surprising to find Australia becoming more sensitive about its relations with China and making these sensitivities known to the Americans. In that way Australia might become the Western voice of China. A key factor in this will be the course of Australian politics: Rudd’s predecessor as a Labour prime minister was Paul Keating, the first Australian premier to advocate the turn towards Asia, while his successor, the long-serving Liberal prime minister John Howard, could hardly have been more pro-American. In the much longer run, however, it is conceivable that Australia will move into China ’s orbit and become increasingly distant from the United States as the latter’s power and utility decline.
ECHOES OF THE PAST
In the light of the region’s realignment towards China, we can now return to the question of how East Asia’s relationship with China is likely to evolve and, in particular, to what extent it might bear some of the hallmarks of the tributary system. The tributary system and Westphalian system are often regarded as polar opposites and mutually exclusive, the former involving a hierarchical relationship, the latter based on relations of equality between sovereign nation-states. In fact, as mentioned in Chapter 7, the Westphalian system in practice has never been quite that simple. For most of its history it was largely confined to a group of European states, since until the second half of the twentieth century the great majority of countries in the world did not enjoy independence, let alone equality. [937] Even after these countries became sovereign nation-states, in the great majority of cases they were to enjoy nothing like equality with the United States or the West European nations, a situation which was exacerbated during the Cold War, when nation-states experienced what was, in practice, limited sovereignty in their relationship with the superpower to which they owed their allegiance. Life has not been that dissimilar in the era of the single superpower, with most countries enjoying varying degrees of limited sovereignty in their relationship with the United States. Given the profound inequalities in interstate relations, the concept of equality in the Westphalian system is thus legalistic rather than real. In practice, as with the tributary system, it has strong hierarchical features. [938] Like the tributary system, the Westphalian system also has an influential cultural component, namely the idea of hegemony or soft power. In other words, the distinction between the tributary and Westphalian systems is not quite as clear-cut as one might think. Seen in these terms, the restoration of elements of the tributary system in a modernized form does not seem so far-fetched. Some of the old building blocks, moreover, remain firmly in place. Chinese culture not only continues to enjoy great prestige throughout East Asia, but its influence is once again on the rise, helped by the presence of a much larger Chinese minority than existed in earlier times, especially in South-East Asia. Furthermore, in North-East Asia, and also Vietnam, Confucianism is a shared heritage in a not dissimilar way to the role of the Graeco-Roman tradition in Europe.
[925] Jae Ho Chung, ‘ China ’s Ascendancy and the Korean Peninsula: From Interest Revaluation to Strategic Realignment?’, in Shambaugh,
[926] Ibid., p. 151; Victor D. Cha, ‘Engaging China: The View from Korea ’, in Alastair Iain Johnston and Robert S. Ross, eds,
[927] Shambaugh, ‘Return to the Middle Kingdom?’, pp. 33- 4.
[928] South Korea sends more than 13,000 students a year to China, a figure equal to the total number of Koreans who studied in the US at the height of US- South Korean relations between 1953 and 1975; Kurlantzick,
[929] Shambaugh, ‘ China Engages Asia ’, p. 79.
[930] Chung, ‘ China ’s Ascendancy and the Korean Peninsula ’, pp. 156, 160-61.
[931] Ibid., p. 160.
[932] Ibid., pp. 161-2.
[933] Jonathan D. Pollack, ‘The Transformation of the Asian Security Order: Assessing China’s Impact’, in Shambaugh,
[934] South Korea, however, is fiercely protective of its independence and identity, and took considerable offence over an interpretation by Chinese historians in 2003 that the ancient kingdom of Koguryo (37 BC-AD 668) had been part of China. Intense diplomatic activity in 2004 saw the dispute shelved; Shambaugh, ‘China Engages Asia’, p. 80.
[935] Peter Smith and Richard McGregor, ‘Good Days: Australia Prospers from China ’s Resource Needs’,
[936] ‘Australia Shifts Course, Away from US’, posted on www.bbc.co.uk/news. Greg Barnes, ‘Australia Finds a New Role as Sino-US Matchmaker’,