On Cuba, South China Sea or Taiwan Strait, Beijing has failed to rally support against US positions

The question isn’t so much why Beijing and Havana might be conspiring to spy on the US. Rather, it’s why China would not have something of this nature on the go already
Moreover, Beijing should reflect on why it hasn’t been able to convince others in the region to join it in challenging US narratives in the South China Sea

Robert Delaney

Published: 1:00am, 20 Jun 2023

Why you can trust SCMP

In the flurry of US-China diplomacy in recent weeks, it’s understandable that tensions between the two countries over the South China Sea and Cuba have been in the background.

Despite all the initial clamouring to confirm reports that Beijing is paying Cuba billions of dollars to set up a surveillance base on the island, the story never developed into the kind of crisis that a Chinese balloon over the American heartland caused a few months ago.

The most China-triggered lawmakers in Congress tried to keep the China-Cuba connection at the top of the agenda, but the American debt ceiling stand-off and the possibility of a violent response to the second indictment of former president Donald Trump exhausted our anxiety receptors. A theoretical listening station around 160km south of Florida doesn’t have the visual urgency of Chinese machinery just above Kansas.

There are other reasons that alleged Chinese and Cuban cooperation on spying cycled out of the headlines more quickly than the balloon incident.

Older Americans have as their reference the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when the possibility of Soviet nuclear missiles on the island left many wondering whether they would be spending years in a nuclear winter eating cockroaches in a bunker.

The cultural impact of that crisis stretched from the baby boomers well into Generation X, and makes reports of a listening station in Cuba seem to many in these age brackets about as threatening as a jaywalking fine in Manhattan. Meanwhile, social-media obsessed younger Americans largely aren’t concerned about something that doesn’t play well in a five-second video loop with special effects.

04:16

‘I think there might be a bias’: Young Americans address China fears amid potential TikTok ban

For many of us who have been tracking the downward spiral in US-China relations in recent years, the question isn’t so much why Beijing and Havana might be conspiring – it is why China would not already have something of this nature in a country that Washington has been trying to bring to its knees economically for six decades.

Another important question: have American efforts to isolate Cuba been worth the complete forfeiture of diplomatic leverage that might have prevented efforts – real or imagined – to turn Cuba into a Chinese spying base?

There’s another aspect of the US-China-Cuba tangle where Washington is not on entirely firm footing, and one that Beijing rightfully presses, even if it’s an exercise in “whataboutism”.

The Pentagon has been spying on China long before Beijing had the technical capabilities to do the same. Such operations did not begin or end with the 2001 mid-air collision of a US reconnaissance aircraft and a People’s Liberation Army fighter jet.

The American freedom of navigation patrols through the South China Sea, a source of US-China tension, undoubtedly include intelligence gathering operations.

Couple this with the fact that Washington has still not ratified the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and you can easily make the argument that American support for the Philippines and Vietnam in their outstanding disputes with Beijing in the region – most of them based on the convention – is entirely hypocritical.

01:30

More footage emerges from 2018 near collision of US and China warships in South China Sea

Moreover, the limits that international laws of the sea place on intelligence gathering in the exclusive economic zones of other countries, which US and Chinese patrols do regularly, is not a settled matter and could leave these operations open to criticism.

James Kraska, of the US Naval War College, noted in a paper last year that the conventional view is that “international law generally does not prohibit intelligence gathering that is not tantamount to an ‘armed attack’ or ‘armed aggression’ proscribed in Article 2(4) of the Charter of the United Nations”.

From Washington’s perspective, freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea are nothing close to armed aggression, but that is how Beijing portrays the presence of US aircraft carrier groups.

Given all the above, countries in the region have firm ground to stand on if they want to join Beijing in calling for restrictions on US naval operations there or even demand an end to them.

However, in many cases in the South China Sea making headlines, such as the Chinese coastguard’s blocking of a Philippine patrol vessel, the anger is aimed at Beijing.

When it comes to Washington’s positions on Cuba, the South China Sea or the Taiwan Strait, there are several outstanding questions. Beijing, with all the economic clout it has built, should be able to muster large coalitions to challenge them. But it hasn’t happened, and whose fault is that?

Robert Delaney is the Post’s North America bureau chief