China's Territorial Disputes (39 page)

I

The two-level game framework predicts that when the costs of an agreement are “heterogeneous” rather than “homogeneous,” that is, they are relatively concentrated on certain segments of a population while the benefits are diffused throughout the country, then those sectors and regions whose interests are most negatively affected by the agreement will organize and agitate to thwart the negotiating process, or failing that, derail its ratification.

However, preferences within the Russian Federation were clearly divided between Moscow at the center, which favored the agreement, and the inhabitants and authorities of the Russian Far East, who wanted to scuttle it for being detrimental to their own interests. The costs and benefits of the 1991 Sino-Russian boundary agreement have fallen “heterogeneously” or “unevenly” on the Russian Far East as a region, while Russia as a whole has benefited. While the economic and security benefits which flow from the agreement in the form of increased trade and reduction in military expenditure have been readily acknowledged by Moscow, residents of the Russian Far East perceive that they are the ones who are paying its cost in terms of smuggling, illegal immigration, lost employment opportunities and crimes which come with more open borders and greater contact with the Chinese. As such, while the Russian central government has been assuring its Chinese counterpart of its intention to adhere to both the letter and spirit of the agreement and complete demarcation work as fast as possible, local government leaders in the Russian Far East and opposition groups within Russia have been decidedly vocal in opposing the implementation of the agreement to transfer territory to China. However, Yeltsin’s support for negotiations and synergistic linkages between the two states in expectation of joint gains, was strong enough in this case to isolate and override potentially disruptive influences against implementation of the negotiated agreement. It should not be forgotten that monetary transfers from Moscow to the region constituted an attractive form of side-payment to the cash-strapped regional leadership to induce them to compromise on the boundary question and other issues important to the center.

Although the Chinese have been trying occasionally without success to get the Russian border authorities to complete the demarcation of the border since the boundary agreement came into force, there has been no record of disagreement between Beijing and regional authorities in Heilongjiang, Jilin and Inner Mongolia, provincial-level administrations which border the Russian Far East. Regarding the 1991 Sino-Russian boundary agreement, both state and society in China were overwhelmingly in favor of it, for they stood to gain all they had always asked for in exchange for giving up virtually nothing. This is because both Beijing and the border towns and counties are in a “win-win” situation together. Ever since China embarked on an “open-door” policy in the late 1970s to promote economic growth and raise Chinese standards of living by attracting foreign trade and investment, both central and local authorities have been very enthusiastic about cross-border trade, where both common people and government officials alike can generate a lot of wealth. As such, while the benefits for the Chinese as a result of the 1991 boundary agreement are “homogeneously” positive, the costs to them are practically nil. It is thus no wonder that we do not hear complaints or grumbles on the Chinese side about the agreement itself, which is to them an unmixed blessing.

In the case of the Diaoyutai/Senakaku Islands dispute, Taiwan and Okinawa fishermen, both afraid that their livelihood would suffer if their access to waters off the islands are obstructed by the other’s coastguard, repeatedly appealed to their respective national legislators and county councilors for naval escorts. By holding noisy demonstrations and writing petitions through their cooperatives urging their own government to uphold the country’s sovereignty over the islands, the fishermen wanted the authorities to ensure that the interests of their segment of the population were not sacrificed in any proposed territorial compromises.

As for the quieted but as yet unsettled Sino-Indian boundary dispute, both the costs and benefits of a border agreement, or for that matter the absence of one, are small and diffused for the governments and peoples of China and India. The major benefits of an agreement for both countries are largely strategic, through an improvement in the security climate that would enable both sides to withdraw troops and arsenals from the border area and reduce the chances of accidental cross-firings. However, the cost of supporting the military would not be significantly reduced. The Chinese would still need to maintain a sizeable military presence in Tibet to guard against the threat of Tibetan separatism, and India would simply be re-deploying most of her troops along the Himalayan frontier to the border with Pakistan and Kashmir. The principal costs of such an agreement, if they can be considered as such, would accrue to the extremist wing of the BJP and nationalist Indian politicians, who would be deprived of the chance of making political capital out of taking a militant and expansionary stance on the Sino-Indian border. Hence material costs or benefits have not been, and will not likely be, a significant impediment or incentive to a border agreement.

It should be pointed out that the presence of heterogeneous preferences between a state government and its societal pressure groups does not automatically imply that it is possible, or even desirable, for one’s negotiators to take advantage of a split in the opponent’s public opinion or division of interest to pursue negotiations. Putnam’s bargaining framework does not seem to have taken sufficient account of this fact, perhaps because he did not have in mind the intricacies of negotiations over sovereignty of disputed territories when he derived his bargaining theory. If mutual suspicion or lingering discontent between the people of the disputant states is deep, as a result of cultural bias, historical memories of past conflicts or perceived slights to national dignity, much like the circumstances surrounding the Diaoyutai/Senkaku affair or to a lesser extent the South China Sea islands dispute, then even if preliminary talks or pre-negotiations are held, it would still be very difficult for official negotiations to begin, let alone achieve any results. This is all the more so if the attitude of domestic constituents is unyielding and sympathetic to the provocative activities and mobilization efforts of domestic nationalist groups in asserting sovereignty claims over contested territories. This shows that, especially with regard to very sensitive issues like territorial disputes, if preferences and priorities between state governments and articulate sectors of their society are far apart on whether to take steps to increase neighborly relations or sustain and even exacerbate tensions, it will be exceedingly difficult for any government leader or negotiator to compromise. This is so even in the presence of overlapping win-sets on related issues on joint development or security confidence-building, for all politicians have reasons to fear negative political consequences.

II

Bargaining theory predicts that it is easier for the government of a non-democratic country to conclude an international agreement and have it ratified than for a democratic government to do so, because it is easier for the former to distribute benefits derived from the agreement, and also to prevent individuals and groups adversely affected by the agreement from organizing to protect their interests. This observation seems to have been borne out by the confrontational stance taken in the Diaoyutai/Senkaku dispute by the right-wingers in Japan and the student organizations, fishermen’s lobby and major political forces in Taiwan after its political liberalization of the late 1980s and early 1990s. This is obvious when contrasted with the scant activities and small-scale demonstrations permitted by the Taiwanese authorities in the early 1970s, the extent of which is not even allowed in China today. In 1970-1971, Taiwan’s Kuomintang party-state could engage in open discussions with regional countries on joint development of sea-bed minerals off the disputed islands, to the extent of setting up a joint-stock company for mining purposes, until demonstrators in Hong Kong and among Chinese overseas communities, plus objections from the Chinese government, put a stop to those plans. Likewise, China’s Deng Xiaoping could suggest “separating” resource development from sovereignty issues to the Japanese in 1978, and set up several meetings to discuss joint development. In the 1990s, however, as Japan developed the politics of coalition government as the LDP lost its dominance, and as Taiwan democratized and sought its own identity, China’s political scene became more pluralistic and nationalistic, with nationalism filling up the ideological space in the national psyche vacated by socialism. Wary of being accused by their public of not holding firm on their countries’ sovereignty over the islands, leaders of all three governments rarely mentioned the issue of joint development, and even fishery talks have become closely guarded secrets.

A similar comparison can also be made between Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. While the Soviet government had expressed a willingness to yield Zhenbao/Damansky and other disputed islands on the Sino-Soviet boundary rivers to the Chinese several times during border negotiations in 1964 and 1969-1970, democratic Russia still has problems completing border demarcation years after the 1991 boundary agreement was signed, owing to local opposition. The Soviet central authorities could compensate residents of the Far Eastern and Siberian provinces affected by the closure of the border with China between the early 1960s and the late 1980s by shipping raw material and commodities to them via the Trans-Siberian railway, to make up for their discomfort and deprivations incurred as a result of the ending of cross-border trade. This system of inter-regional subsidies has basically collapsed with the fall of the Soviet Union. The border negotiations had proceeded rather smoothly for the last four years of Soviet rule, and achieved results largely because there was still more or less a functioning central government and unified Communist Party apparatus, whose fiat still ran to the far corners of that vast country, and the regions were not yet accustomed to conducting their own foreign policy. Incidentally, none of the countries that reached border agreements with the Chinese in the 1950s and 1960s - Laos, Burma, Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Mongolia - with remarkable speed and minimum fuss, at least compared with China’s other boundary disputes, could be classified as representative democracies where Level I negotiators would likely encounter Level II obstacles.

Although we have so far made no reference to China’s border disputes with the post-Soviet Central Asian republics, which have mercifully not resulted in armed conflict, they should serve as good illustrations of our theoretical argument here that democratic governments will find it more difficult than non-democratic ones to surmount domestic opposition in reaching or ratifying agreements with other countries. The demarcation of most of the Sino-Russian border, from the Altai to the Pamir mountains in Central Asia, was agreed to in the Treaty of Chugachuk signed by Russia and China in 1864, a treaty that a century later was to be denounced as “unequal” by the PRC. The process of demarcating and delimiting the border between China and the present-day Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan started anew in 1992. Although Kyrgyzstan and China signed a border treaty in July 1996 and a supplementary agreement on disputed border territories in August 1999, with Kyrgyzstan ceding to China 870 square kilometers of disputed territory, political forces in opposition to President Askar Akaev used ratification of this already long-delayed agreement by the Kyrgyz parliament in May 2002 to raise mass demonstrations and demand its rejection.
¹
The standoff between the authorities and some 6,500 protesters in the Jalal-Abad region lasted five days, leading to the death of six local residents and eighty wounded. Approximately 3,500 protesters also blocked the only highway between the capital Bishkek and the major southern city of Osh, and demonstrations soon spread to the capital.
²
Akaev succeeded in winning over parliamentarians only with difficulty, and the Kyrgyz senate managed to ratify the border agreements with China only on its second attempt and after Prime Minister Kurmanbek Bakiev was forced to resign.
³
On the other hand, Kazakhstan, under the authoritarian regime of Nursultan Nazarbayev, concluded a border treaty with China in April 1994, with which it quietly and without incident signed a supplementary agreement completing the demarcation of the common border in September 1997, and ceded 407 square kilometers of the 944 square kilometers under dispute to China.
⁴
In the Tajik-China border agreement of 1999, Tajikistan’s president

Emomali Rahmonov ceded 200 square kilometers of 28,000 square kilometers of disputed territory to China, and in a supplementary agreement signed in May 2002, Tajikistan agreed to cede a further 1,000 square kilometers to China, all without incident.
⁵
Perhaps in this case the Tajik authorities were only too happy that the Chinese did not asked for more of the disputed territory than they actually did.

IIA

Aside from whether it is harder to resolve an all-or-nothing territorial sovereignty dispute with a democratic country than with a non-democratic one, perhaps more future work should be devoted to finding out if democratic governments may actually make it much easier than non-democratic governments for latent boundary, territorial or other disputes between states to surface into very real conflicts. This is not an unreasonable suggestion, assuming that political forces in a competitive electoral system have to respond effectively to public opinion, which has the potential to be created, manipulated and galvanized by well organized and well funded groups with their own agenda. It was not difficult for both the Chinese and Soviet governments to orchestrate popular demonstrations by quickly assembling a crowd in front of each other’s embassies in the aftermath of the March 1969 confrontations, and dispersing these crowds just as quickly. The Chinese and Soviet authorities were able to do so because a populist or even elite political discourse over territorial claims had yet to develop at that time. However, it would not be easy for authorities today in the Russian Far East or Taiwan to dampen the enthusiasm of their respective nationalists who choose to sail into disputed stretches of water to plant flags, erect beacons, and place border markings on disputed rocks and islands, all in the name of protecting national sovereignty, let alone incite them to do so. Likewise, while the Vietnamese authorities were able to suppress calls by journalists and writers to revise the land border and Tonkin Gulf boundary agreements between Vietnam and China in 1999 and 2000 respectively, before their clamor could resonate with disgruntled elements of the general populace, the Filipino government has hardly been successful in preventing its politicians from taking occasional sailing trips to some Spratly isle to press their national claim, and has not tried to stop its reporters from covering these events.