Of course it’s too soon to make any authoritative pronouncements about the effect of the Biden presidency, but the first signs for Asia are none too good. There were anodyne noises about Asia from Biden though he seems allergic to the term ‘Indo-Pacific’, but the memory of Obama’s feckless “pivot to Asia” is emboldening China.
To be succinct, China is rampaging, and having a field day. It cannot hide its disdain for Biden.
The first thing China did, on the very day that Biden took over, was to sanction 28 Trump-era appointees, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Then it gave its Coast Guard orders to open hostile fire on anybody passing through its claimed maritime territory. Considering their expansive claims on others’ waters, this is dangerous.
To make it clear what they meant, the Chinese then did a mock drill on how to attack an American aircraft carrier in the South China Sea.
Chinese aircraft began to violate Taiwanese airspace in larger numbers and more frequently.
Myanmarese generals met Chinese diplomats, and then there was the coup d’etat in Burma. The net result is that China gets to build a deep-water port at Kyaukpyu, another entry into the Bay of Bengal; also the earlier regime had entered into large military procurements from India to the tune of $100 million, and India had gifted them their first submarine.
Sri Lanka, which had agreed to let its Colombo East Container Terminal be developed with Japanese and Indian support, did a U-turn. It appears it will be a Chinese firm in charge now.
There is a ‘glacier bomb’ in India’s Uttarakhand, bordering Tibet, and there is a fair chance China triggered the flash flood that led to dozens of casualties downstream.
A WHO team, which went to China, a full year after the Wuhan virus epidemic began, declared that the Level 4 virology lab isn’t the origin of the virus, but suggested it came from bats, and that too quite vaguely from somewhere in the region, not necessarily China. A year is a long time to scrub all incriminating data, and of course WHO boss Tedros is a China protege.
China unilaterally announced a pull-back by its troops and Indian troops from positions they occupy around the Pangong Tso lake in Ladakh. This would be suicidal for the Indian side, because they occupy the strategic heights there. Therefore this is likely to be a trial balloon.
Chinese Coast Guard vessels have entered the territorial waters around Japan’s Senkaku Islands in a provocative move. Chinese have unilaterally claimed these islands.
The sum and substance of this is that China believes they have nothing to fear from the Biden Administration. According to the Chinese Communist Party, they won. They got rid of the tiresome Trump, and imposed a giant health and financial catastrophe on the world, and are getting away with it.
Hubris before nemesis. And another step in the drastic decline of US power.
Episode 14: Just weeks into the Biden presidency, how has China behaved in Asia?