Troubled Waters: Vietnam, China and the South China Sea.

 A recent series of spats in-between Vietnam and China in the South China Sea (or East Sea as it is called in Vietnam) has attracted a fair degree of international media coverage. Over the past weeks, I was interviewed by various Vietnamese media outlets at different stages of the crisis.

 Here you will find the link to a recent article, published by Thanh Nien Weekly, which discusses the announcement by both parties to attempt to resolve their outstanding territorial disputes in a less confrontational manner. I weigh in, along with veteran Vietnam watcher Carlyle Thayer from the Australian Defense Force Academy, and Ian Storey from ISAS in Singapore.
http://www.thanhniennews.com/2010/Pages/20110702161309.aspx

And an interview for BBC World, which appeared on the Vietnamese website a few weeks ago:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/vietnamese/vietnam/2011/05/110530_viet_china_spat.shtml

I have provided below an English translation of the interview:

Understanding China's Intentions:


Vietnamese media has now been flooded for several days with information related to the threatening actions of Chinese ships towards Vietnam seismic survey vessels operating in the East Sea.In the morning of 26/05, three Chinese ships harassed and sabotaged a PetroVietnam survey vessel.
The location of the incident is said to be deep inside Vietnamese waters, only 120 nautical miles off Lanh Phu Yen province. BBC sat down for a short interview with a specialist on regional maritime security, Iskander Rehman, to discuss the implications behind this latest incident.

BBC: 

How should one view this latest incident?

Iskander Rehman:  
 

The recent incident fits into a broader pattern of Chinese behavior in the South and East China Seas, which has increasingly revolved around the use of coercive diplomacy and aggressive military signaling in order to assert Beijing’s territorial claims. This has led to tense situations not only with Vietnamese ships, but also with US, Japanese, and , more recently, Filipino vessels.

China’s approach to its maritime territorial disputes has not only become more assertive, but also more multi-layered. Indeed, Micro-level naval sparring is just one of the techniques employed by Beijing to enforce its claims over the rocky outcrops that straddle the resource-rich sea lanes of the South China Sea. Other forms of aggressive military signaling, such as mass joint exercises and increased naval patrols off the disputed Paracels and Spratly islands, have been increasingly apparent over the past few years. These provocative actions have been accompanied by what Chinese strategists refer to as “legal warfare”, with Chinese government spokesmen openly contesting in legalistic terms some of the more universally accepted features of the law of the sea. 

BBC:

It has been stated that there is a growing concern in China over the burgeoning US-Vietnam rapprochement. Do you think that last week's incident and the seeming hardening of China's position can also be viewed as a response to this?

Iskander Rehman:

Maybe. The recent Sino-Vietnamese naval spat cannot be entirely divorced from the changing geopolitical landscape in Southeast Asia. Vietnam, with its history of potent nationalism and staunch defiance towards the Middle Kingdom, has always been viewed by China as the unruly upstart of Southeast Asia. Although both states have resolved their land border dispute, tensions remain high on both sides over the disputed Paracel and Spratly islands. These tensions have led to small-scale naval clashes in the past, in 1974 and 1988, and it is unfortunately not outlandish to consider that such small-scale skirmishes might reoccur in the short to medium future.

Chinese officials have been rattled by the burgeoning strategic partnership in-between Washington and Hanoi, and have not taken kindly to the staging of joint US-Vietnamese naval exercises in the South China Sea. Beijing may therefore also be adopting  a more hardline position vis-à-vis Vietnam in response to its growing proximity with the US-either as a form of punishment, or as form of not-so-subtle warning of the potential costs of such a rapprochement.

BBC: 

What kind of long-term trends or strategic calculations do you see emerging from China in light of the growing frequency of such incidents?

Iskander Rehman: 

As China’s economic and military clout grows, so too do its power projection aspirations. For Beijing’s increasingly vocal strategic community, control over the area circumscribed by “the first island chain”, (a natural boundary formed by the Aleutians, the Kuriles, Japan's archipelago, the Ryukyus, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Borneo); and over the offshore gas and oil deposits, strategic waterways, and straits it encompasses is considered an absolute prerequisite for the PLAN’s gradual transition from “off-shore defense” to “far-seas operations”, and , in so doing, from regional influence to global reach.

There has also been speculation in certain quarters that the PLAN wishes to establish a ring of defended maritime watch towers or bastions near Hainan in order to ensure the protection of its “second-strike” nuclear ballistic missile submarine fleet newly based at Sanya. Absolute control over the strategically placed Paracels and Spratly islands would facilitate this defensive configuration.