Games powers play in South China Sea

Dinesh Kumar

The ongoing conflict and tensions in the South China Sea (SCS) are showing no signs of ending. Rather, a series of incidents on May 25 led the G7 to express concern over China's assertiveness in the East and South China Sea where Beijing has disputes with Japan, Taiwan and several South-East Asian nations. The announcement was preceded by the interception of an American reconnaissance aircraft by a Chinese fighter aircraft on May 17, which Beijing has denied, and followed thereafter with US President Barack Obama lifting a decades-old arms embargo on Vietnam which has major disputes with China in the Sea. 

Earlier in March, a Chinese coast guard ship forcibly freed a Chinese fishing vessel being towed by an Indonesian coast guard ship after it was allegedly caught fishing in Indonesia's territorial waters near the Natuna Islands. In February, evidence emerged that China has deployed missile launchers and fighter jets on an island in the Sea, a region considered among the world's most heavily militarised and which accounts for the passage of about 35 per cent of the world's sea trade pegged annually at about $5 trillion. The SCS, a semi-enclosed sea, is the world's only region with several active multiple claimants of sovereignty, incidents of occupation and fortification with maritime zones overlapping each other, thus making it both difficult to resolve and more volatile. The disputed islands and archipelagos can be classified into four groups — (i) Paracel islands, comprising 130 small coral islands and reefs located in the northern part of the Sea and distributed over 15,000 sq km,  claimed by Vietnam, China and Taiwan. China forcibly took these islands from Vietnam in 1974 and since then controls all of the Paracel Islands. (ii) Spratly islands, located in the centre of the sea and comprising 750 islands, reefs, islets, atolls, claimed by China, Taiwan and Vietnam in its entirety and by the Philippines, Brunei and Malaysia in part; (iii) Pratas islands, located 200 miles south of Hong Kong, claimed by China and Taiwan and (iv) the Scarborough Reef, located 130 miles from the Philippine island of Luzon, claimed by China, Taiwan and the Philippines.  Malaysia has built structures on Investigator Shoal and on the Erica Reef in the Spratly archipelago, while Vietnam has upgraded its structures on Cornwallis South Reef and Alison Reef in the middle of the Spratly area. The Philippines has filed five claims against China pertaining to Beijing's nine-dash-line, sovereignty rights, freedom of navigation and the legal status of several maritime features adjacent to Scarborough Shoal and Johnson Reef. Manila is also currently fighting Chinese claims over the Spratly Islands in the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague even as Beijing is boycotting the case and said it will ignore the verdict. A more politically and militarily aggressive China, which claims sovereignty over virtually the entire SCS and all islands and other features located in it, has declared the SCS to be a core interest worth fighting for, along with Tibet and Taiwan. Basing its sovereignty on historical maps, China has circulated a map with an arbitrary nine-dash-line that shows its jurisdiction in entirety in disregard to claims by several members of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (Asean) and in violation of UN Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) which, in turn, does not recognise historical claims and permits coastal states an exclusive economic zone of up to 200 nautical miles and a continental shelf up to 350 nautical miles. China is wantonly building new islands and enlarging some existing islands by reclaiming land in the SCS, creating civil and military infrastructure such as runways, jetties, helipads, military posts and surveillance equipment in addition to deploying surface-to-air missile launchers and operating fighter aircraft. It has unilaterally launched prohibition on fishing in the disputed area. More recently, it has been promoting the disputed Paracel islands as a tourism destination. In addition to it being a major passageway for sea trade, the importance of the SCS stems majorly from the presence of massive reserves of oil and natural gas. Such has been the level of hostility in the region that there have been over 75 major recorded incidents of attacks, clashes, collisions at sea, forcible eviction and occupations, aggressive patrolling, interception and shadowing of vessels in which China has almost always been involved. Over half of these have occurred in the last six years alone starting from 2010, notwithstanding a series of multilateral risk-reduction and confidence-building measures that were put into effect in the years preceding 2010.   

The US, which has already rejected Chinese claims, has stationed an aircraft carrier battle group in the Sea. In October last year, the US sent a warship within the 12 nautical mile territorial waters of an island claimed by China to which Beijing had protested. With Washington DC declaring it will continue to send warships and aircraft on patrol missions to the SCS, tensions are only expected to further rise in the region. The US is unlikely to back down considering that it has close relations with Taiwan, South Korea and Japan and any silence on its part could have an impact on its security relations with these three countries. Within Asean, the US has three sets of defence agreements with the Philippines and, ironically, is being wooed by Vietnam for support. India is also viewed by Asean members such as Vietnam as a counter-weight although it is more likely that New Delhi will both politically and militarily tread with caution. Excepting Brunei, all Asean members party to the dispute are expanding their naval and air arms to safeguard their maritime interests. In the years ahead, militarisation and tensions are only expected to escalate as China clearly goes about consolidating and expanding its domination of the South China Sea.    

 dkumar@tribunemail.com