Banyan: Future tense

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

TENSION in the South China Sea has now reached the point where references to tension have become an issue. “Someone has been exaggerating or even playing up the so-called tension in the South China Sea,” Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, said on August 9th. By “someone”, of course, he meant America. He was speaking in Naypyidaw, Myanmar’s capital, where the ten foreign ministers of ASEAN, the Association of South-East Asian Nations, were holding their annual meeting. So when they agreed on a communiqué referring to “increased tensions” in the sea, many scored it as a diplomatic victory for the United States.

American officials saw the inclusion of the phrase as a sign that ASEAN’s members were readier to present a united front against Chinese aggression towards rival claimants to territory in the sea. China’s “nine-dashed line”, its vague cartographic claim to most of the sea, encroaches on the claims of four ASEAN members. A State Department official cheered the group’s movement away from “diversionary issues” and “happy talk”. It was reasonable to conclude, he said, that “the Chinese are feeling the heat”. Reasonable, perhaps, but almost certainly inaccurate. If China is alarmed about the mounting regional antagonism stoked by its behaviour in the South China Sea, it is certainly not letting on.

The only significant Chinese gesture that could be seen as conciliatory came last month, when China withdrew, ahead of schedule, a massive oil rig from waters also claimed by Vietnam. The positioning of the rig in May had provoked maritime scuffles with Vietnamese vessels, as well as protests and fatal anti-Chinese riots onshore. But China did not suggest it was removing the rig in response to the hackles it had raised. Rather, it claimed it had completed its mission. The motive may have been the onset of the typhoon season, which would have threatened if not the oil rig, then at least the large Chinese flotilla protecting it.

China has not refrained from other activity in disputed waters. It has dredged channels near the Paracel Islands, claimed by Vietnam, and has announced plans to build five lighthouses in the sea, at least two of which are to be on islands also claimed by Vietnam. It is also expanding tiny islets further south in the sea, which are claimed by the Philippines, into artificial islands. And ahead of the ASEAN meeting, which was followed by the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), a security talking-shop, China rejected calls for a moratorium on such construction activity.

The Philippines had asked for this as part of a three-step plan to ease tensions. So had America, whose omnipresent secretary of state, John Kerry, attended the ARF. The request fuelled the usual Chinese accusations of American meddling, and of encouraging countries such as the Philippines and Vietnam to beard China, with potentially disastrous consequences. “It is a painful fact,” China’s official news agency reminded the world, “that Uncle Sam has left too many places in chaos after it stepped in, as what people are witnessing now in Iraq, Syria and Libya.”

In fact, a moratorium of sorts is meant to have been in place since 2002, when China and ASEAN signed a “declaration” on their intention to agree on a binding “code of conduct” to reduce the risk of conflict in the sea. Nine years on, as if to prove the declaration really did mean something, they agreed on “guidelines” for implementing it. But these agreements are interpreted as allowing the expansion of facilities on places where building has already taken place, and China insists it can build what it wants on what it sees as its own territory. As a result the sea has experienced a building boom, turning uninhabitable rocks and islets into little garrisons. Even now the Philippines is upgrading an airstrip on one of the Spratly Islands, claimed also by China, Taiwan and Vietnam. Taiwan, which occupies the largest of the Spratlys, is building a new pier there.

The “code of conduct” remains under discussion but nothing suggests China is willing to submit itself to legally binding restraints. Indeed, a solution to the many interlocking disputes seems ever more distant as China in particular seeks to change the facts on the ground—and in the sea.

It is hard to see in which forum these disputes could be resolved. The Philippines is challenging the nine-dashed line under the international law of the sea. But even if a ruling finds the line not to be based in law, China will simply ignore it. And the law of the sea cannot resolve disputes over sovereignty. China’s preference would be for a series of bilateral negotiations in which its overwhelming muscle might cow the other side. So South-East Asian claimants cling to ASEAN for the collective weight it gives them. But most ASEAN members are loth to get drawn into an open rift with China. For all their alleged new toughness, ASEAN foreign ministers could not bring themselves to name China as the source of the tension.

Of the region’s security forums, the ARF is the oldest and most inclusive. But, following ASEAN tradition, it has never evolved into more than a gathering where the bland mislead the bland. Two other ASEAN-centred meetings also lack bite: those involving its defence ministers and eight other powers, including America and China; and the East Asia Summit of these 18 countries’ leaders. That leaves the Shangri-La Dialogue, an annual meeting in Singapore for ministries of defence. But this year that descended into a slanging match between China and its critics.

Sticks and stones

As for America, although China criticises it for creating alarm about Chinese intentions in the South China Sea, it sometimes seems to be doing the opposite—playing down the risks and pointing to signs of China “feeling the heat”. The heat seems to have no deterrent effect, however, perhaps because China’s bullying is, for now, cost-free. Diplomatic resistance has no effect. And China is probably right in thinking there is little appetite in America, and even less in ASEAN, for anything more vigorous.

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