While the world’s attention is riveted on civil wars in the Middle East, terrorism everywhere and dramatic, divisive electioneering in the United States, tension is building up over the South China Sea. By aggressively ramping up its territorial claims to the vast waterway with provocative activities, China has spurred a new rearmament race in Asia and raised the possibility of a major conflict with the United States. Can the world moderate the dragon’s ambitions and avoid violence?
The omens are bad. China raised the ante with the news on Monday that it planned to begin reclamation of the Scarborough Shoal, one of hundreds of scattered structures in the disputed water, after a meeting of the Group of 20 economies meeting billed to hold in the Chinese city of Hangzhou next month in a clear show of defiance against the international community. This will be a culmination of its heightened petulance since the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague dismissed its claims to sovereignty over the territory last month.
Already, apart from its massive military build-up and modernisation over the past decade, six other nations with competing territorial claims over the sea – Taiwan, Malaysia, Japan, Philippines, Brunei and Vietnam – have, to varying degrees, been strengthening their military muscles. Crucially, the US, as a historic defender of free trade, has, in furtherance of the freedom of navigation principle, flexed its military might in the territory and has been forging closer diplomatic and military ties with the other six, and other nations in the hemisphere like Australia, South Korea, India and Singapore that are also anxious over China’s rude assertiveness and military arsenal.
The South China Sea is what maritime experts call a marginal sea, part of the Pacific Ocean, measuring about 1.4 million square kilometres and containing over 250 small islands, shoals, reefs, sand bars, atolls and cays and grouped into three archipelagos. Its strategic importance lies in the fact that it is the world’s second busiest sea lane, accounting for over 50 per cent of global annual fleet tonnage. The US Energy Information Agency estimates that it has 7.7 billion barrels of proven crude oil reserves and 266 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Territorial claims by the seven countries in the vast territory are complicated by additional claims by Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore and Cambodia.
Today’s tension has its roots in 1947 when China’s then republican government introduced a new map of the territory in which it drew a line of 11 dashes and claimed all territory within it. This was later replaced with the nine – the infamous Nine Dash Line – that The Hague tribunal, in its ruling, said, “has no legal basis” under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea Treaty to which China is a signatory. The world should unite and put greater pressure on China to respect the ruling in the case filed over a piece of rock by the Philippines. Like every other independent maritime authority, the panel found that China has no basis in history, geography or law to claim sovereignty over the nine dash line. Its defiance of international law and refusal to accept the authority of the tribunal is provocative and potentially destabilising to global trade and peace.
In response to what they see as Beijing’s belligerence and threat to their own national security, its neighbours have been raising military spending too. Taiwan has raised spending to $10.75 billion this year despite a national policy of avoiding war; Vietnam has closed ranks with its one-time enemy, the United States, from which it is buying advanced weaponry after splashing $2 billion on six Russian-made Kilo-class submarines. Japan rolled out its largest post-World War II defence budget of $41.4 billion for fiscal 2016/17 even as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government presses ahead with efforts to amend the country’s pacifist constitution to pave the way for even greater rearmament. Meanwhile, Western intelligence analysts and IHS, the global defence specialist, believe China is spending much more than the official $145 billion it says it is spending on its military this year.
Though weakened by the major world powers’ bickering, the United Nations needs to step up diplomacy before the frequent incidents among the opposing countries lead, by commission or misjudgment, to a flare-up. China’s hectic building of artificial islands and stationing radar, war planes and sonar facilities has so far not abated despite strong protests.
The world should have learnt since the days of the fascist dictators in the early mid-20th century that buckling to aggressors only emboldens them. Economically, a super power, and with a modernised military eager to test its prowess and advanced equipment, China appears to be seeking dominance in the old fashioned way. At stake, apart from the natural resources and lucrative sea lane, is denial of free navigation to other nations should China’s claims succeed, thereby allowing it the 12-mile exclusive zone and 200-mile exclusive economic zone allowed by international law to a sovereign territory. The US has twice sailed naval ships through the sea to assert the freedom of navigation.
China should moderate its ambitions. Many of its generals and admirals as well as the ruling Communist Party media organs have been trumpeting the inevitability of war. Ominously, a report by the US Army published in June considered the real possibility of armed conflict and how America would fare in the eventuality.
The UN should not give up: while sending a clear signal that aggression would not be rewarded, the US and its allies should continue to engage China and insist on peaceful resolution of all international disputes.
