PERSPECTIVES
Beijing’s Ménluó Doctrine
If it was good for America, should it be good for China?
PATRICK MENDIS is a distinguished senior fellow and affiliate professor at
George Mason University’s School of Public Policy. A former American
diplomat, Mendis is currently serving as a commissioner to the US National
Commission for UNESCO at the US State Department.
B
eijing has an incremental foreign policy in the
South and East China Seas which appears to
parallel America’s Monroe Doctrine. When
the increasingly assertive young America
declared that the Western Hemisphere was
off-limits to the great colonial powers of Europe, President
James Monroe’s eponymous doctrine altered the nature of
trans-Atlantic relations. In retrospect, China is essentially
following America’s footprints in trans-Pacific affairs with
its own Ménluó (a transliteration of Monroe) Doctrine in
the Asian Seas.
Beijing’s competing claims primarily involve the Diaoyu (or Senkaku in Japan) islands dispute with Tokyo,
the Paracel (or Xisha in China, Hoang Sa in Vietnam) archipelagos conflict with Hanoi and the Scarborough shoal
clash (or Huangyan island in China) along with the Second
Thomas shoal (known as Ren’ai in China) with Manila. The
ever-more powerful China has now engaged in a number
of other territorial disagreements with Brunei, Indonesia,
Malaysia, and Taiwan over the resource-rich regions of the
South China Sea. Beijing exclusively claims that a U-shaped
swathe of this maritime region—just south of Hong Kong
and Hainan Island—historically belongs to China. The disputed waters demarcated by the so-called “nine-dash-line”
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on Chinese maps, which Beijing now puts on its Chinese
passports, has elevated into an international issue.
President Barack Obama seems to understand the
delicacy of historical analog and future prospects for the
Sino-American relationship—the most important bilateral
relationship in the world. The evolving complexity ranges
from the ever-changing regional and bilateral relations with
nations in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC)
to Myanmar and Japan. Now, it is with the Philippines and
Vietnam. In April, a few days after making a strong statement
about the US treaty obligations to defend Japan over the
Diaoyu islands in the East China Sea, Obama reiterated at
a news conference in Manila that the Philippines and Vietnam should bring the disputed claims against China before
an international tribunal under the Law of the Sea Treaty
of the United Nations.
During this four-nation tour of Japan, South Korea,
Malaysia, and the Philippines, Obama emphasized the US
commitment to the “rebalancing” policy in the Pacific, stating that “coercion and intimidation is [not] the way to manage these disputes.” Obama’s rebalancing policy, which was
previously introduced as the “Asia pivot strategy” by former
Secretary of State