Quad’s Focus on Indo-Pacific & Taiwan Shows Growing Unity Against China

But as Prime Minister Modi puts it, the Quad must stand “for something” — a mere anti-China rhetoric won’t help.

Would Quad – Australia, India, Japan & the US – serve as an effective check to China’s aspirations?

(Photo: Erum Gour/The Quint) 

Over the past year, China has adopted a forward-looking defence posture. It has flown its fighter jets over Taiwan, built air bases in the territories bordering India and, most recently, voiced its opposition to Australia buying nuclear-powered submarines from the US and UK.

Not so long ago, China’s Foreign Minister, Wang Yi, denigrated the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (or “Quad”) grouping, saying it would “dissipate like sea foam” in the Indian Ocean, and called it nothing more than a “headline-grabbing” exercise.

It is worth pondering why a “dissipating seafoam” suddenly warrants such a proactive defence posture.

On Quad, Biden Followed in Trump's Footsteps

For starters, Quad nations have begun to turn words into action. Australia cancelled port projects that were part of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), embarked on a mission to find alternative markets for its exports, and cemented ties with India and the US, thus taking the initiative to diversify its supply chains. India went a step further and instituted Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) rules that selectively kept Chinese investment out. This measure aided in fulfilling the Modi administration’s Atmanirbhar goals, while simultaneously reducing the Indian economy’s over-reliance on Chinese imports.

With the erstwhile hesitant partners of Australia and India jumping all in for the Quad grouping, the US and Japan have capitalised on policy convergence and pulled the Quad along.

In the US, President Biden has followed in President Trump’s footsteps and doubled down on the Quad grouping by expanding its scope, to address economic challenges such as supply-chain vulnerabilities, acts of economic coercion in the Indo-Pacific region, and the economic underpinnings of China’s human rights violations. This includes adding new names to the list of those sanctioned over Hong Kong’s eroding freedoms, banning imports tied to forced labour in Xinjiang, and continuing the Trump policy of rejecting student/research visas for those suspected of having ties to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). While Beijing once hoped to see a change in the US approach to China with the new administration, recent signs suggest that it now accepts that the tensions are here to stay.

Commitment to Common Values

Biden’s own approach to the Quad appears to be an extension of his overall view of America’s role in the world. In the Quad virtual leaders’ summit in March, he and the heads of the other three participating states released a statement proclaiming that a “free, open, inclusive, and resilient Indo-Pacific requires that critical and emerging technology is governed and operates according to shared interests and values”. In June at the G7 Summit, he revealed that a figure in the Chinese leadership attempted to pre-empt his participation in the Quad ahead of his inauguration, and while he did not reveal that official—or his response at the time— his actions at the G7 reveal his answer: he used the forum as an opportunity to tout Build Back Better as an alternative to the BRI.

And unlike his predecessor, who had strained relations with traditional US allies, a questionable commitment to core US values such as human rights, and played up the US-China rivalry with inflammatory statements and tweets, Biden’s approach has been strategic, and centred on multilateral commitment to shared values.

"I think we're in a contest — not with China per se, but a contest with autocrats, autocratic governments around the world, as to whether or not democracies can compete with them in the rapidly changing 21st century,” he said at the G7.

Where Does the Quad Go From Here?

The four countries must sustain this momentum in order to secure those values and their economic interests. The US has at times been faulted for lacking an economic strategy for the region to match its security objectives, but this can be addressed — building off the Biden administration’s supply chain review and call for “resilient, diverse and secure” supply chains, the Supply Chain Resilience Initiative launched by India, Australia and Japan needs US buy-in.

The Economic Prosperity Network (EPN), announced in the latter days of the Trump administration and expanding beyond the Quad to the nations of Vietnam, South Korea, and New Zealand, must continue.

But to do so will also require careful, almost paradoxical, framing — as Prime Minister Modi has put it, the Quad must stand “for something” rather than against something.

Framing the Quad or the EPN as anti-China ventures will be off-putting to Seoul, whose administration is still engaging Beijing for both economic reasons and to achieve better ties with North Korea. Framing them as anti-communist will complicate engagement with Hanoi, which is, despite its populace’s love of the free market, still officially a one-party communist state. Vietnam’s reservations about being forced to take sides in the mounting US-China competition are, however, unfortunately, shared throughout Southeast Asia, and pushing an anti-China narrative will make the coordination required to thwart China’s ambitions impossible.

Quad's Big Paradox: Look Beyond China to Thwart China

Over the past five years, China has used different forms of diplomacy to win/coerce friends and allies in the Indo-Pacific. From debt-trap to Wolf Warrior to (most recently) vaccine diplomacy, China and its diplomats have not refrained from using any means necessary to attain foreign policy goals. While a few Indo-Pacific nations have expressed concern and have resisted Chinese coercion, many do not have the economic or military might to resist China’s incursion into their societies, markets or their sovereign territories.

To meet this challenge, the nations of the Quad grouping have to coordinate their resources, but also their rhetoric, in order to pose a formidable challenge to China’s plans for the Indo-Pacific. The diverging foreign policy priorities of the Quad nations has been a perennial threat to a strategy of countering China’s growing influence in Asia, and analysts continue to highlight this challenge. The Quad should, therefore, have a positive agenda in the Indo-Pacific: upholding rules and norms of behaviour in the region, as well as the free flow of goods, services, and ideas.

It just so happens that the greatest challenge to those rules and norms is China, and Beijing is starting to recognise what a coordinated response to its activities might mean.

(Rob York is Director for Regional Affairs at Pacific Forum. He can be reached at [e-mail] and @Rob_York_79 on Twitter. Akhil Ramesh is Non-Resident Vasey Fellow at Pacific Forum. He can be reached at [e-mail] and @akhil_oldsoul on Twitter. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the authors' own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)