As a heavily laden, Danish-owned container ship leaves Singapore’s port and enters international waters, it pings China’s Zheng He vessel identification system, providing an update on its cargo and intended route through the South China Sea to Shanghai. Despite long-standing fears about China’s threat to freedom of navigation, Beijing still allows all commercial ships unrestricted access to these critical global trade routes, so long as they adopt Chinese monitoring technology. Foreign navies, by contrast, are severely curtailed in these waters, with control maintained through China’s unrivalled navy and coast guard, plugged into a sprawling network of unmanned ships, drones, sensors, and satellites.
The year is 2035. And this vignette reflects a hypothetical scenario of Chinese dominance of the South China Sea that we recently presented to policymakers and maritime experts in Southeast Asia and the United Kingdom in a “back-casting” exercise.
We designed our scenario as a worst-case realistic outcome (excluding black swan events). Shockingly, many officials and researchers we spoke to in Southeast Asia viewed this outcome as simply a continuation of business-as-usual. That was one of many surprises that arose in our discussions, underlining the importance of techniques such as back-casting in challenging conventional wisdom. As Beijing has consolidated its leading position in the South China Sea, international analysts have tended to focus on factors such as the
of the
, China’s use of
, and its abuses of international law. But in our back-casting discussions, Southeast Asian participants thought that the combination of Beijing’s economic might and its
in digital and renewable energy technologies would be more decisive considerations if China were to gain full control of the South China Sea.
