INTERVIEW: Japan Urged to Be in Coalition to Constrain China

By Nico Pandi Washington, June 3 (Jiji Press)–Japan needs to be part of an Indo-Pacific “balancing coalition” that can constrain China’s influence, says Michael Kovrig, a former diplomat of Canada who spent over 1,000 days in Chinese detainment on espionage charges from 2018. Countries like Japan, South Korea and Australia are not big or united enough to counterbalance China, but together with the United States and India, they could pursue a strategy to resist China’s goal of regional dominance, Kovrig says. The Communist Party of China is “a very dangerous organization that has a fundamentally adversarial agenda toward democracies and free societies and that treats human beings very callously,” Kovrig said in an online interview. China seeks to keep the West divided by leveraging its supply of rare earths and other critical minerals, as well as access to the huge Chinese market that companies depend on, he said. This relationship of dependence on Chinese supply chains often causes other countries to refrain from taking economic protection measures of their own, he added. “Right now, the Europeans and Americans, it’s not that they don’t know what they should do. It’s that they are afraid to do it,” he explained. Kovrig warns that China would continue to try to extend its power and influence even if it succeeds in taking control of Taiwan. “They want as much as they can get, as much security as they can get, as much power as they can get,” he stated. The policy of constrainment that he advocates starts with recognizing that China does not have to be stopped everywhere. He pointed out that the policy differs from the Cold War-era strategy of containing the Soviet Union. “There is too much economic entwinement and integration, and China is too geoeconomically and geopolitically powerful and central in the international system to realistically try to contain it,” he said. Instead, countries need to focus their efforts on a few critical areas, Kovrig continued. “You want to constrain its influence in the first and second island chains (in the Pacific) militarily. You want to balance its economic influence in East Asia. And you want to constrain its influence in all the international organizations and other mechanisms of global governance.” China is also seeking to use high-profile U.S.-China summits, such as the one recently held in Beijing between U.S. President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, to project its influence to the rest of the world, Kovrig said. When China positions itself as a peer equal of the United States, it is sending a message not only to Trump but also to other leaders in the region, he observed. “The audience is Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and so on, to demonstrate that, look, if this is what we can get Donald Trump to do, watch out, (Japanese Prime Minister) Sanae Takaichi.” END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]