China: Air Defence Identification Zone

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I am very grateful indeed to the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, for bringing this subject to the Floor of the House, because it has always been my estimation, given that the Iranian situation is perhaps moving towards a position of being resolved—or at least the heat is coming out of it—that this area of relations in the East and South China Seas is the most dangerous part of the globe in terms of its potential effects.

I wanted to engage in this debate also because when our Prime Minister recently visited China, the press coverage—it may not have been the fault of No. 10’s efforts—gave no mention of this dispute, even in the serious newspapers, and instead centred on trade. I would be interested to hear from the Minister what conversations took place during that visit in late December, or whenever it was, about the incident we are discussing. Clearly, this has the potential to be a major world problem. Not only are there disputes in the East and South China Seas but there is a territorial claim involving Arunachal Pradesh in north-east India. That, too, has been dealt with using what to us sophisticated diplomats in the western world seem to be unsophisticated changes in policy, or unexpected and sudden very fierce positions, that make everyone in the region nervous.

I used to be a director of the UK-Japan 21st Century Group, which involves a number of people in this House, as well as academics and industrialists. It is very sympathetic towards Japan which, as other Members have said, must be our strongest ally, and which is involved in our closest relationships in the Far East in all sorts of ways. However, I do not think that Japan has necessarily been completely correct in the way it has sometimes dealt with this. The purchase of the islands, which in some ways may have provoked this dispute, was perhaps not done in the best way that it could have been. There was surely going to be some sort of Chinese reaction. Japan has altered its own air defence identification zone a couple of times since it was established after the war. I do not suspect that it talked to China about that at the time.

More recently, of course, we had the visit by Prime Minister Abe to the war shrine, which everybody knew was going to be—again—provocative. Never mind what official Chinese government views are: clearly, the memory of the invasion of China by Japan in the 1930s and the 1940s is still very strongly in the minds of the Chinese people, with all the atrocities that happened at that time. There is still a great deal of understandable resentment of that period of history.

Added to that—not a tinder-box as yet, but a concern—is the very real United States pivot towards the Pacific, which affects Europe, the western hemisphere and our own defence requirements. It has resulted in changes in defence arrangements with Australia. China itself, through its own actions, is starting to see this as a move towards encirclement. This is clearly something it sees as a problem in relation to its own national security. Of course, we would look at that and say, “That is clearly provoked by a number of China’s own actions, and the ASEAN states are themselves going to be nervous and look for outside help, primarily from the United States and its strengthened relationship with the Pacific Rim because of these changes”.

As the noble Lord has just said, China sees itself as having had 100 years of humiliation and, as a result of that, there are all sorts of difficult diplomatic tasks. I was privileged to chair this House’s European Union Sub-Committee on External Affairs. We visited China three and a half years ago, looking at EU-China relations. There were a couple of things that really came out to me during that visit. One was meeting a retired senior military man at one of the Beijing universities. On the whole, when you go to China, you do not meet any officials who say anything that has not been agreed beforehand, and he was extremely positive in his own regard when he stated that one of China’s aims was to see the US Sixth Fleet banished from the East China Sea. That was clearly something he was putting forward to us; it was obviously not official Chinese government policy, but a view of how he saw the future. There are, therefore, a number of issues about the future that we can be very pessimistic about.

As the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, said, I would like to hear the Minister’s views on the fairly strong statement made by Catherine Ashton—the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton of Upholland—on behalf of the EU, soon after the air defence zone was declared. Europe has in many ways a soft-power ability here; it certainly does not have a hard-power ability in respect to this region, but it does have the ability perhaps, as a non-threatening power in the world, to help China in some way through the diplomacy that is needed in this region.

Some people in Europe still see China—although I would not describe it as such—as an adolescent power in respect of being able to deal with worldwide diplomacy and as a great power; they say it still has a lot to learn. That is clearly a patronising way of putting it, but China is moving from being a defender of the developing world to being a great power again itself. It needs to make those adjustments and perhaps it needs help.

Sometimes, the situation in the Pacific is seen as equivalent to 100 years ago—1914—in Europe. Clearly, that is an exaggeration. But as the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, and others have already said, the formula is there. The circumstances are there for many mistakes to be made and for actions to happen that are not intended. I still see this as one of the challenges for the globe and a way in which Europe can involve itself over the next few years.