BBC South China Sea Backgrounder.

This is a very brief backgrounder on recent Sino-American tensions in the South China Sea I wrote for BBC World Service.

Here is the link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/vietnamese/world/2009/07/090728_rehman_commentary.shtml

I'm afraid it's not as well written or structured as I would like it to be as it was written under a deadline.

Growing Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea over the past few months:

2009 has been marked by a distinct increase in the level of Chinese assertiveness, both diplomatic and military, in the region.
The Spratly dispute has resurfaced to overshadow Sino-Philippine relations and Vietnamese fishermen are routinely being rounded up by Chinese patrol vessels for "fishing in Chinese waters".
British and American companies have been pressured out of participating in offshore energy ventures with Vietnam, Beijing threatening to bar them from engaging in any future lucrative energy contracts in China. The PRC has been steadily ramping up its naval activities in the region, more than doubling its patrols around the disputed Paracel and Spratly islands. When an American oceanographic survey vessel, the USNS Impeccable was harassed by Chinese ships in international waters in March, the incident made world headlines. In reality, this was no isolated affair, but just one of the latest developments in a string of Sino-American naval spats in the South China Sea. The USNS Victorious, another unarmed surveillance ship, for example, was also harassed by Chinese aircraft and patrol boats in the course of the same month. Only a few weeks ago Chinese state-run media reported a mysterious ‘collision’ in-between a Chinese submarine and an underwater sonar apparatus towed by a U.S. destroyer. Meanwhile Chinese Foreign Ministry officials have been repeatedly claiming that their entire EEZ, which extends over 200 miles beyond their coastline, and covers thus a major portion of the South China Sea, implies their absolute sovereignty over the region rather than just their exclusive right to explore and exploit the zone's natural resources. The UNCLOS EEZ convention is an incredibly complex and subtly worded text, and the Chinese have been seeking to exploit the 'grey ' jurisdictional areas in-between traditional territorial waters (which only extend 12 miles beyond the coastline) and those falling under the purview of their self-declared EEZ, which appears to encompass the entire South China Sea, which it characterises in its official documents as its “natural territorial waters”.



What can explain this increased Chinese assertiveness? In my opinion there are two main reasons for this behaviour. First of all, as the Pentagon's most recent annual report on the PLA predicted, the PLAN's extensive military modernization has put in a much better position to project power in the region and has thus given birth to a more aggressive form of Chinese self-confidence in the defence of its maritime claims. Secondly, it is possible that Beijing is seeking to probe the new Obama administration, by engaging in a series of deliberate provocations in order to assess the 'hardness' of the latest American president. It may be somewhat premature to detect a pattern, but the USNS Impeccable incident does bear a lot of similarities with the EP-3 spy plane imbroglio in July 2001. Both occurred off the Chinese nuclear submarine base of Hainan, and both happened during the very first months of a new American administration.


The Obama Administration’s response:

The Obama Administration has revealed itself to be both firm and measured in its dealings with the PRC. After the USNS Impeccable incident, the US promptly dispatched destroyers to escort its surveillance vessels in the South China Sea while repeatedly stressing the importance of establishing effective military to military dialogue in-between both states in order to prevent such events from occurring on a regular basis. Since then, much to the aggravation of the more hawkish elements of the PLAN, the US has continued to conduct surveillance operations, both maritime and by air, within China's EEZ.
The PRC's claim that it has absolute sovereignty over its EEZ has been repeatedly rebuffed by the State Department officials, who quote article 58 of the UNCLOS convention which stipulates the following, " In the EEZ, all states...enjoy the freedoms referred to in Article 87 of navigation and overflight..and other internationally lawful uses of the sea related to such freedoms".
China's instrumentalization of the principle of national sovereignty thus enters directly in conflict with America’s time old defence of navigational freedom. American officials have even pointed out at Congressional hearings that even during the height of the Cold War, "Soviet intelligence-collection ships, hydrographic research vessels (....) and military reconnaissance flights regularly operated off US coastlines without US legal objection.”
Jurisdictional squabbles put aside, the reality is that the PRC has historically viewed the South China Sea as little more than a 'Chinese lake', and now has the diplomatico-military wherewithal to pursue the geopolitical materialization of its geographical perceptions with an ever growing self-confidence.
The United States, which has been gradually reducing its naval forces in the region, and which, to the eyes of certain Chinese strategists, has seemed to be displaying signs of 'imperial overstretch' in Iraq and Afghanistan, does not inspire the same level of deference that it used to.



This may be about to change however. The US's withdrawal from Iraq and concentration on Afghanistan has provided it with a greater degree of focus to deal with other international flashpoints. A recent US Foreign Relations Committee on the issue of East Asia tensions reveals that the South China Sea maritime disputes have become a major issue for the Obama Administration. In the course of the hearing, high ranking defence and state department officials repeatedly highlighted the threat growing Chinese military assertiveness poses for regional stability, and all seemed to advocate the pursuit of a more efficient "stick and carrot policy".
Stick, because the US has clearly indicated that it will not brook any further harassment of any of its vessels, be they military or non-military, in China's EEZ. Carrot, because the Obama Administration is intent on re-establishing dialogue with the PRC on such matters, and on reviving the military to military dialogue that was frozen in 2008, due to Chinese fury over the Bush Administration's decision to go ahead with a 16 billion dollars arms transfer to Taiwan.
During the hearing, American officials reasserted US neutrality in the maritime border dispute in the South China Sea, but also brushed aside the Chinese legal basis for its claims of sovereignty over Vietnamese and Philippine waters. Both countries were openly referred to as friends and strategic partners in the region, which is, in the case of Vietnam, something of a novelty. Chinese pressures on American energy firms were also mentioned, the participants stating that in the future the US government should take action in order to shield them from such blackmail.

You can watch the Senate Subcommittee Hearing in its entirety by following this link:

http://www.senate.gov/fplayers/CommPlayer/commFlashPlayer.cfm?fn=foreign071509p&st=435

The Future of American Policy in the Region: A Delicate Balancing Act:

. The US now faces the difficult challenge of endeavouring to reassure other Asian countries uneasy over the PLA’s increased assertiveness, while striving to abide by its professed neutrality in the South China Sea sovereignty disputes. China’s strategy until now has been to deal with Southeast Asian countries one on one, in the hope, no doubt, of browbeating them into submission. Washington should up its efforts to level the diplomatic playing field by getting Beijing to sit down with ASEAN as a group unified around a common consensus. Unfortunately, the persistence of territorial disputes in the region in-between Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia; makes the emergence of such a common consensus in the near future seem somewhat improbable. One can imagine that in the coming years, State Department officials will discreetly intensify their mediation of intra-ASEAN territorial disputes, in the hope of nudging the member states towards a common resolution which, ideally, would build upon the 2002 ASEAN DOC or Declaration of Conduct in the South China Sea.

All, in all, American policy towards the South China Sea will continue to be a subtle balancing act, in-between public displays of resolve and private efforts to re-establish dialogue, and in-between professed claims of neutrality and rather more circumspect efforts to strengthen Southeast Asian unity in the face of Chinese expansionism.

While such policies may seem both convoluted and complex to the outsider, one thing has been made clearly apparent: if the PRC was hoping to destabilise the new American administration by engaging in a series of actions designed to test its mettle, it has failed: the US still very much has its eye on the ball. For the time being at least, the South China Sea shows no signs of becoming a Chinese lake.