Chinese marines in the South China Sea, near Nansha Islands, April 10, 2010. Zha Chunming/ Xinhua Press/Corbis
February 10, 2013
Speaking
to diplomats, businessmen and journalists at the British Foreign Office in
November, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of Indonesia emphasized the need
for “norms and principles” in resolving disputes in the South China Sea. Why
did President Yudhoyono, who was spending a week in
London at the invitation of Queen Elizabeth II as the first leader to visit
Britain during the year of her Diamond Jubilee, feel that he had to bring up
the South China Sea disputes at such a time?
After a member of the audience asked what
Indonesia, the leading nation in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations
(ASEAN) could do if China did not share his views, President Yudhoyono recalled
what he had said to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao at a summit conference in Bali
and again to Chinese President Hu Jintao at a meeting in Beijing: without
forward movement on a Code of Conduct (CoC) for the South China Sea, the whole
region could “easily become a flashpoint.” He added that the two Chinese
leaders had concurred with his assessment.
President Yudhoyono added, however, that he
had become quite concerned after ASEAN foreign ministers failed to reach a CoC
agreement at a meeting in Cambodia in July 2012. He did not mention the role
played by China in getting the Cambodian government to sabotage the pact. He
only said that since then, Indonesia has done its utmost to bring about a
consensus among ASEAN nations on the issue. He also did not mention the fact
that at an international conference on “Peace and Stability in the South China
Sea and the Asia Pacific Region” held in Jakarta in September, most of the
participants expressed pessimism as long as China continued to exert military
and economic power in area within the U-shape line demarcating its self-declared
zone of sovereignty.
The U-Shape Line
What is the U-shape
line and why is it seen as such a threat to peace and stability in the South
China Sea area and the Asia Pacific Region?
On May 7, 2009, the
People’s Republic of China (PRC) officially submitted—in two separate
letters—to the secretary general of the United Nations a map with a
nine-dotted, U-shape line with the following identical words: “China has
indisputable sovereignty over the islands in the South China Sea and the
adjacent waters, and enjoys sovereign rights and jurisdiction over the relevant
waters as well as the seabed and subsoil thereof.”
This was the first
time China sent the map, without any coordinates, to an intergovernmental body,
principally in response to the Vietnamese-Malayan joint submission and
Vietnamese individual submission to the Commission on the Limits of the
Continental Shelf (CLCS) of the United Nations. Under the 1982 Convention on
the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the littoral states of Southeast Asia are entitled
to an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) in waters up to 200 nautical miles from
their coastlines. In order for coastal states to expand the outer limit up to
350 nautical miles, they have to obtain approval from the CLCS.
The origin of the
U-shape line can be traced to a map published by the Department of the Interior
of the Republic of China (ROC) in 1946. The map included a U-shape line
consisting of eleven intermittent dashes enclosing most of the South China Sea,
supposedly because Chinese had discovered the area during the Han Dynasty. Even
though the dashes in the Gulf of Tonkin were erased from the map presented to
the UN in 2009, partly because a bilateral agreement between China and Vietnam
on the demarcation of the area had been reached, the U-shape in the latest map
still cut deeply into the EEZs of Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, and
Brunei.
Vietnam, Indonesia,
and the Philippines responded with their own notes to the CLCS to reject
China’s claim and its map. Vietnam’s note maintained that China’s claim as
represented by the U-shape line “has no legal, historical, or factual basis,
therefore is null and void.” Indonesia’s note said that the map “clearly lacks
international legal basis” and is tantamount to upsetting the UNCLOS. The
Philippines’ note said that China’s claim to most of the South China Sea “would
have no basis under international law, specifically UNCLOS.”
Under UNCLOS, the
South China Sea is divided into three areas:
—The 200 nautical
mile EEZs stretching out from the coastal lines of Vietnam, Chinese Hainan
Island/Province, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Brunei.
—The islands, islets,
rocks, and reefs in the Paracels and the Spratlys. According to Article 121 of
UNCLOS: “Rocks which cannot sustain human habitation or economic life of their
own shall have no exclusive economic zone or continental shelf.” And islands
cannot have maritime space beyond twelve nautical miles.
—The international
waters area outside of the EEZs, the Paracels, and the Spratlys. Many of the
islands, islets, rocks, and reefs in the Spratlys are actually situated inside
the EEZs of the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei.
In 1974, China used
force to take over the entire Paracels, which at that time was under the
administration of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam), killing at least
fifty-three Vietnamese sailors. Again, in 1988, China took possession of the
Johnson Reef in the Spratlys from the Vietnamese. Chinese gunboats sank
Vietnamese transport ships supporting a landing party of Vietnamese soldiers,
killing sixty-four Vietnamese soldiers and injuring many others. In 1995, China
also took over the Mischief Reef, which is 150 miles west of the Palawan, the
Philippines’s nearest land mass, and proceeded immediately with the
construction of military structures on the reef.
It is seemingly based
on these and other occupations that China claims “indisputable” sovereignty
over all the island groupings in the South China Sea and uses them to justify
attempts to control maritime space 200 nautical miles beyond them. For example,
in response to an official protest by the Philippines following China’s
assertive activities in the region, especially in the Spratlys (called the
Nansha Islands by China), China sent a note to the United Nations on April 14,
2011, that asserted: “China’s Nansha Islands is fully entitled to Territorial
Sea, Exclusive Economic Zones, and Continental Shelf.”
In June 2012, China’s
State Council announced the establishment of the City of Sansha (Three Sands),
a prefectural-level city to be headquartered on Woody Island in the disputed
Paracels, to directly administer “the Xisha, Nansha, Zhongsha Islands and their
adjacent islets and waters.” Xisha (Western Sands), Nansha (Southern Sands),
and Zhongsha (Middle Sands) are Chinese names of three disputed archipelagos—otherwise
known as the Paracels, the Spratlys, and the Macclesfield Banks—respectively.
On July 24, 2012, Sansha officially announced that it had established a
prefectural government; and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) also
said that it would soon establish a military garrison there to serve as the
command headquarters for military units operating in the South China Sea area.
The headquarters of China’s Southern Fleet—the most powerful of China’s three
naval fleets—and China’s entire marine force with some 20,000 soldiers, are
presently stationed on Hainan Island, China’s southernmost province.
Many countries in
Southeast Asia—among them the Philippines and Vietnam—protested China’s
provocative actions, especially the establishment of the new military garrison.
In August, the U.S. State Department issued a statement saying that the move
risked raising tensions and was “counter to collaborative diplomatic efforts to
resolve differences.” On the same day, the Chinese foreign ministry called in a
senior U.S. diplomat to protest the State Department’s remarks. Chinese Foreign
Ministry Spokesman
Qin Gang also issued a statement, which repeated China’s contention that it has
absolute sovereignty over the sea and islands in the South China Sea, and so
has the right to set up a city to administer the region. In September, the
Chinese foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, declared flatly during a four-hour
appearance with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the Great Hall of
the People on Tiananmen Square that “China has sovereignty over the islands of
the South China Sea and the adjacent waters. There is plentiful historical and
jurisprudential evidence for that.”
Even if China could rightfully claim
sovereignty over the disputed islands in the South China Sea and exclusive
zones as well as continental shelf rights around them, this would still not
justify the U-shape line given that it cuts deeply into the EEZs and undisputed
territories of other countries. Thus, China’s actions raise the question of
whether its real intention is to turn undisputed territories into disputed ones
in order to flex its muscles and force other countries to yield to its demands,
and not only in the South China Sea but also in other domains.
In 2011, for example, Chinese ships twice
cut the cables of oil exploration vessels well within Vietnam’s EEZ and drove
off an oil exploration vessel in Philippine waters. Then in late June 2012
China’s National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) issued nine exploration
leases in blocks that fall entirely within Vietnam’s EEZ. CNOOC executives and
officials at China’s Ministry of Land and Resources have given estimates that
there are approximately 40 billion tons of oil equivalent in the South China
Sea, most of which is believed to be natural gas. According to the U.S. Energy
Information Administration, one Chinese estimate puts the sea’s gas reserves at
2,000 trillion cubic feet. That would be enough to meet China’s gas needs for
more than 400 years based on 2011 consumption levels. According to a May 2012
statement by Zhong Hua, CNOOC chief financial officer, the company aims to
produce 500 million barrels of oil equivalent a day from the deepwater of the
South China Sea by 2020—up from nothing today.
Oil is but one factor
in China’s strategy of roiling the troubled waters. Since 2009, China has also
enforced an annual unilateral fishing ban in the South China Sea, confiscating
fishing boats from other countries—mostly from Vietnam—as well as arresting and
injuring many fishermen. In April 2012, when the Philippine navy prepared to
arrest Chinese fishermen who were operating illegally in the Scarborough Shoal,
China Marine Surveillance (CMS) vessels arrived on the scene and blocked the
entrance to the lagoon thus preventing the arrest of the Chinese illegal
fishing boats. During a two-month stand-off, China dispatched nearly one
hundred fishing craft to occupy the shoal. In June, the Philippines announced
that an agreement had been reached with China for a mutual withdrawal of ships.
Later, however, Chinese ships returned and have maintained effective control of
the shoal and the waters around it ever since. In addition to the occupation of
the shoal, China also applied economic sanctions on the Philippines by banning
the import of bananas and cancelling tourist charter flights.
China and Vietnam
For Vietnam, pressures
from China have been multi-faceted and more heavy-handed than those applied on
the Philippines and other countries in the region. And because of
historical, ideological, geopolitical, economic, and cultural considerations,
reactions from Vietnam have also been much more circumscribed compared to those
from the Philippines. Here it is useful to consider some of the key periods in
the history of Chinese-Vietnamese relations since the establishment of the
Chinese Communist regime in 1949.
The Vietnamese
resistance to the French colonial re-conquest of Vietnam after the Second World
War had consistently been interpreted by the U.S. State Department as a case of
“nationalist groundswell” under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh. But after the Communist
victory in China, it came to be seen by top U.S. leaders as a Communist threat
that had to be destroyed. Secretary of State Dean Acheson commented: “The
question of whether Ho is as much a nationalist as a Communist is irrelevant.”
Consequently, Acheson argued in 1949 that “no effort should be spared” to
assure the success of a pro-French Vietnamese government. On the eve of the
Korean War in March 1950, Acheson observed that French military success
“depends, in the end, on overcoming [the] opposition of indigenous population”
and that the U.S. must help the French protect Indochina from communist
encroachment. Thereafter, the United States supplied the French with some 80
percent of the total cost of its colonial re-conquest.
In late 1950, Chinese economic and military
aid also began to enter Vietnam. Though much more limited in scope than U.S.
support for France, Chinese aid enabled China to increasingly exert influence
and dictate demands on the anti-colonial front—the Vietnamese League for Independence,
or Viet Minh—and provoke factional disputes among its leadership.
French military setbacks by the Viet Minh,
such as the humiliating defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, led to the Geneva
Conference (held from May 8 to July 21 in that year) to provide France with a
face-saving means of disengagement. On her part, France did not want anything
more than a graceful exit from Indochina. But, after the United States
attempted to sabotage the negotiations and create an opportunity for direct
intervention in Vietnam, China and the Soviet Union forced the Hanoi delegation
to make repeated and significant compromises so that a peaceful settlement
could be concluded quickly. These powers were uneasy over the possibility that
the United States might intervene massively, with consequences that would
extend beyond Indochina. The Chinese and Russian leaders were also afraid that
once the United States intervened, nuclear warfare that had begun in one corner
of Asia would not be confined there. China’s leaders also wished to avoid
giving the U.S. any pretext for introducing forces on her southern flank,
especially after as many as one million Chinese “volunteers” had lost their lives in
Korea.
As a result of the significant concessions
made by Hanoi, the Geneva agreements on Vietnam were reached on July 20 and 21:
the bilateral armistice agreement between France and the Viet Minh was signed
on July 20, and the multilateral final declaration was signed by all
participants—except the United States—the following day. Secretary of States
John Foster Dulles had said however, two days before the signing of the
agreement by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and France, that the
United States “will not do anything to upset any reasonable accord sought by
the French.” This promise was no doubt quite instrumental in encouraging the
DRV delegation to make its final concessions in reaching the accords. Both
accords spelled out in detail a temporary partition of the country, at the 17th
Parallel, into “two military regroupment zones” with military forces of the
Viet Minh regrouped to the north of those of the French to the south of the
line. National elections under international supervision were to be held in two
years to reunify the country.
Undersecretary of
State Walter Bedell Smith, head of the American delegation, read an official
unilateral declaration from the United States saying that it would not do
anything to threaten the stipulations of the agreements and that it
specifically endorsed the call for elections to reunify the country. In spite
of the public promise, the United States immediately went about violating the
agreements and promoted the country’s division into so-called “North Vietnam”
and “South Vietnam” until 1975. The Second Indochina War fought over this
decision would cost more than two million Vietnamese and 58,000 American lives.
In a meeting with a group of U.S. scholars in 1971, Premier Zhou Enlai,
the head of the Chinese delegation at Geneva, admitted that his “mistake and
inexperience” at Geneva had contributed to the Vietnam tragedy.
In the meantime, however, China was able to
use the northern half of Vietnam as a buffer zone to protect its territorial
integrity from possible U.S. encroachments. Furthermore, in order to secure its
“lips-and-teeth” relationship with the Hanoi leadership, China pushed its
Maoist model on the northern regime with disastrous consequences for the
economic, social, and political structures of the region. As a result, again,
many innocent Vietnamese lives were lost.
The most grievous
destruction during the mid-1950s was the land reform program carried out
simultaneously with the rectification program applied against so-called
rightists within the Vietnamese Workers Party and the state bureaucracy. Of
course, this was done in the name of building socialism and creating a solid
base for resisting imperialist aggression in the south. A report by the
politburo to the tenth plenary session of the central committee of the party in
October 1956 stated that thousands of lives had been lost as a result of the
land reform program, and that “the land reform machine, in fact, became the
institution that was placed both above the party and the government.”
The politburo report said that 2,876
village party branches or cells (out of 3,777) were subjected to the
rectification program. These branches represented 150,000 out of the total of
178,000 party members. Of the party members who were forced to go through
rectification, 84,000 (or 47.1 percent of the total number of party members)
were purged. Many village party branches were summarily disbanded, and many
good party members were arrested and executed.
The report went on to say that often the
best village party branches and the best local cadres were the ones who were
most severely punished. Many village party branches that made the biggest
contributions during the resistance war against the French were regarded as
reactionary and hence their party members and party secretaries were either
jailed or killed. One of the aims of the rectification program was to replace
party members with those with “property-less peasant background.” As a result,
the percentage of members with this background in the village party branches
rose to 97 percent.
The rectification program was also applied
against sixty-six district party branches and seven provincial branches with
similar damaging results. Yet, the land reform and rectification programs
enabled China to exert increasing control over the economic, social, and
political structures in the northern half of Vietnam. Partly because of their
realization of China’s influence over Vietnam and of the China-Soviet split,
President Richard M. Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger,
began to play the “China card” in the early 1970s to get China to apply
pressures on Vietnam in favor of American objectives.
Nixon in China
In 1972, President Nixon undertook his
historic trip to China, which to the Vietnamese conveyed the implication that
the Vietnam question could be settled not via representatives of the Vietnamese
people, but between these two great powers. In response to this, Nhan Dan
(The People’s Daily), the central organ of the Vietnam Workers’ Party, wrote:
“Nixon is heading in the wrong direction. The way out is open, yet he rushes
headlong into a blind alley. The time when the great powers could decide the
fate of small nations is past and gone.”
Although China was not able to force
Vietnam to end the war on Washington’s terms, after the signing of the Paris
agreement in late January of 1973 China began cutting all military aid and most
economic aid to Hanoi while the United States gave the Saigon regime more than
$1 billion a year from 1973 to 1975. After the fall of Saigon and the
reunification of Vietnam in 1975, the United States immediately imposed the
strictest possible trade embargo under the Trading with the Enemy Act.
Partly because Hanoi refused to heed
China’s advice in sparing Saigon from a military takeover as suggested by
France and some other countries, China lost face and decided to cut off all aid
to Vietnam. Furthermore, while China began to mass several hundred thousand
troops along Vietnam’s northern border, it increased both economic and military
aid significantly to the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, which also started to
build up its forces along Vietnam’s southern border provinces. According to the
scholar Damodar Sardesai, “between 1975 and 1978, China supplied Cambodia with
130-mm mortars, 107-mm bazookas, automatic rifles, transport vehicles,
gasoline, and various small weapons, enough to equip thirty to forty regiments
totaling about 200,000 troops… An estimated 10,000 Chinese military and
technical personnel were sent to Cambodia to improve its military
preparedness.” Beginning in January 1977, Khmer Rouge forces attacked civilian
settlements in six out of seven of Vietnam’s border provinces. Khmer Rouge
troops brutally murdered about 30,000 Vietnamese civilians during attacks in
1977 and 1978, and forced tens of thousands to flee the border provinces.
Several hundred thousand Cambodian refugees also fled to Vietnam during those
years.
It was during these two years that
officials from Vietnam and the United States met to negotiate the normalization
of relations between the two countries. In meetings between Assistant Secretary
of State Richard Holbrooke and Vietnamese Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach at
the United Nations headquarters in New York in 1978, the two agreed on
normalization without any preconditions. According to Zbigniew Brzezinski’s
memoirs, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance sent a report on the details of the
agreement to President Jimmy Carter and recommended that normalization should
proceed immediately after the Congressional elections in early November. But
Brzezinski succeeded in persuading Carter against it.
Fearing that the
negative position of the United States would encourage Cambodia and China to
stage a pincer attack on Vietnam, in November 1978 Vietnam signed a treaty of
friendship and mutual assistance with the Soviet Union. On December 15, the
United States announced the normalization of relations with China. On December
25, Vietnam invaded Cambodia in order to preempt a pincer attack, publicly
saying, however, that it went into Cambodia to save the Cambodian people from
the genocidal Pol Pot regime. In January 1979 China’s top leader, Deng
Xiaoping, visiting the United States, announced that China would “teach Vietnam
a lesson,” and asked President Carter for “moral support” for the forthcoming
Chinese punitive war against Vietnam.
In February 1979, with the blessing of the
United States, China launched its invasion of Vietnam, laying waste to six
northern provinces and killing an estimated 30,000 Vietnamese (Chinese sources
have claimed from 60−70,000 Vietnamese were killed.) Brzezinski
called this a “proxy war” against the Soviet Union and was satisfied that it
imposed “major costs on [the Vietnamese], produced a great deal of devastation,
and above all, showed the limits of their reliance on the Soviets.”
For the next ten years, China and the
United States exerted maximum economic and diplomatic pressures on Vietnam.
China rejected all proposals by Vietnam Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach for a
peaceful settlement to the Cambodian conflict under the auspices of the United
Nations. The Tiananmen Square crisis of 1989 and Vietnam’s withdrawal of all
its troops from Cambodia by September of the same year should have led to
favorable international support for such a settlement.
Then came the collapse of communism in
Europe. Vietnamese General Secretary Nguyen Van Linh had gone to East Germany
to attend the fortieth anniversary of the Democratic Republic of
Germany in early October 1989 just before the Eastern European communist
regimes began to collapse one after another. Vietnamese Communist officials
rushed to reestablish relations with China at all cost in order to defend
socialism under the leadership of China. Linh even went so far as apologizing
to Chinese leaders for all the mistakes that Vietnam had made in its the
relations with China, while proposing a solution to the Cambodian situation
that only involved the remaining communist countries in the region (known as
the “Red Solution”).
In 1991, Nguyen Co Thach, the foreign
minister who had pushed for a multilateral settlement to the Cambodian
conflict, was evicted from the Vietnamese central committee and politburo.
Later that year, Vietnam signed the UN-sponsored settlement for Cambodia, which
represented the positions of China and the United States. In 1992, China and
Vietnam established full diplomatic relations and the policy of cooperating
closely with China for ideological reasons and for regime maintenance has been
reinforced ever since between top Chinese and Vietnamese leaders.
For example, a joint declaration between
Vietnamese General Secretary Nong Duc Manh and Chinese President Hu Jintao in
2008 spelled out the details of “total and effective cooperation” between
central committee organizations of the two parties to “promote the mechanisms
between the agencies of foreign relations, defense, public security, national
security, and to expand practical cooperation in the economic, trade,
scientific, technological, cultural, educational and other fields.”
It is difficult to know the real extent of
Chinese-Vietnamese cooperation. But even official information publicly given by
the two countries has shown that Chinese penetration in many sectors has been
quite deep and detrimental to Vietnam’s interests. For example, although
bilateral trade between the two countries has increased rapidly since 2000,
Vietnam’s trade deficits with China have also accumulated to unprecedented
levels. In fact, Vietnam’s trade deficits in the last decade have been
principally with China. In 2011, Chinese and Vietnamese governments reported in
glowing terms expanding bilateral trade of some $40 billion. This represented a
30 percent increase over the 2010 figure of $27 billion. But Vietnam’s trade
deficits with China also grew significantly to over $11 billion in 2009 and $14
billion in 2011. In the first seven months of 2012, Vietnam’s trade deficit
with China was over $8 billion. According to both governments, this bilateral
trade will increase to $60 billion in 2015 when the ASEAN-China trade agreement
goes into effect. This is when Vietnam will have to discard trade barriers over
almost all items imported from China.
China’s trade surplus
with Vietnam will certainly grow significantly after this date. Already, there
are three principal reasons for China’s rapid increase in trade surplus with
Vietnam in the last decade: 1) most of Chinese exports to Vietnam are
manufactured goods while most of its imports from Vietnam have been
agricultural products and raw materials; 2) China subsidizes its producers,
manufacturers, and traders at all levels and hence the cost of products
exported to Vietnam have been much lower than the production costs of most
items produced in Vietnam; 3) Chinese exporters resort to a wide variety of
questionable means including outright bribery—which are often reported even in
the highly-censored Vietnamese press—to penetrate the Vietnamese market.
Bribery has also enabled Chinese
corporations to win most of the bids for significant projects in Vietnam.
According to many estimates, more than 50 percent of the total value of the all
the contracts during the last ten years have been won by Chinese companies. In
particular Chinese companies have won 90 percent of all the contracts in the
sectors of electricity, oil and gas, telecommunications, metallurgy, machine
tools, and chemicals and 100 percent of all contracts in the mining sector.
Many of the contracts are worth several billion dollars each.
Vietnamese press reports have also
disclosed that Chinese companies, armed with insider information, often
tendered bids lower than those by Vietnam or other foreign countries, in order
the win contracts. But after they have won the contracts, the companies jack up
prices to levels much higher even than those tendered by Western companies
whose technology and equipment are much more modern. The Vietnamese Ministry of
Science and Technology disclosed this year that many “turn-key” projects with
outdated technology and equipment have been imported from 1,800 dismantled
Chinese industrial plants. The ministry added that it has come up with a policy
to limit this kind of practice.
It remains to be seen how the ministry will
be able to minimize these problems that will certainly grow by leaps and
bounds. According to current plans, government outlays for infrastructure alone
will be $117 billion by 2025 and many Vietnamese have wondered aloud how much
of this money will again end up in Chinese hands. In the meantime, however,
implementation of the projects that are already under contract with Chinese
companies have been mostly been prolonged because of all kinds of excuses,
causing huge cost overruns that the Vietnamese side has had to pay. Completed
projects also have to depend on these Chinese contractors for maintenance and
spare parts. In addition, tens of thousands of Chinese workers have been
brought to projects in Vietnam and have, according to frequent reports in the
Vietnamese press, caused many security problems in the surrounding areas.
Partly as a result of the outlays for such
projects, the Vietnamese government budget deficit increased 31 percent in
2007, increased 29 percent in 2008, and 46 percent in 2009. Government
borrowing from China increased tenfold during those years. In 2009 alone,
official borrowing from China was $1.4 billion. Worse, the bad debts to
Vietnamese banks from state sectors are threatening a series of bank collapses.
According to sources in the financial sector and reports by the International
Monetary Fund (IMF), Asian Development Bank (ADB), and Vietnamese press, the
2011 figures for the overall debt of the state sector is $52.2 billion, about
43 percent of GDP. The state sector debts to Vietnamese banks run to $24.5
billion, 47 percent of which is considered bad debt.
Both the IMF and the ADB have issued
warnings to Vietnam about the danger of the collapse of its banking system. The
IMF also stated in September 2012 that it might have to provide bail-out
supports for Vietnam. However, Prime Minister Nguyen Tien Dung announced after
a meeting with Chinese Vice Premier Xi Jinping in September 2012 that “we will
not have to resort to help from the IMF.” Sources close to the prime minister
have gloated that this was a meeting between bosom friends and that Chinese
leaders were prepared to loan the Vietnamese government $10 billion to shore up
its banking system should the crisis worsen.
Cleaning up the Neighborhood
Reporting on the meeting between the
Chinese vice premier and the Vietnamese prime minister on September 20, the
official Chinese news agency Xinhua quoted Xi Jinping as saying that the
South China Sea issue will have a negative impact on bilateral relations if not
handled properly. The Xinhua report also disclosed that the two sides
reaffirmed the agreement reached between President Hu Jintao and General
Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong in mid-October of the previous year on “finding
solutions to maritime disputes based on negotiations and dialogues.”
The Vietnam News Agency’s report of
the same meeting quoted Dung as saying that “the two sides need to properly
implement the general understandings of the top leaders of the two countries
and seriously abide by the agreements on the fundamental principles directing
efforts at solving maritime issues and disputes… through friendly negotiations
based on international laws, especially the United Nations Convention on the
Law of the Sea of 1982, as well as on the spirit of the Declaration of Conduct
in order to move forward to an effective Code of Conduct (CoC).”
The Declaration on the Conduct of Parties
in the South China Sea was signed in 2002 by ASEAN countries and China, and
committed them to respect freedom of navigation and overflight in the South
China Sea in accordance with international laws and UNCLOS, and to resolve
their disputes through peaceful means without resorting to the threat or use of
force. The parties must also exercise self-restraint in the conduct of
activities that would complicate or escalate disputes and affect peace and
stability in the region. But the declaration was non-binding, thus enabling
activities that have heightened tensions and instability for the entire region.
Hence, in 2009 the ASEAN countries decided to come up the idea of the Code of
Conduct to create a rules-based framework for managing and regulating the
conduct of the parties in the South China Sea. The aim of the CoC is to dampen
conflicts and manage disputes, not to solve them. Even so, China has put up
obstacles to such an agreement, including providing aid and loans to some ASEAN
countries in order to get them to sabotage such an agreement.
A gathering of ASEAN and Chinese officials
to discuss the CoC was held in October 2012 in Pattaya, Thailand, to work out
the final details of the document so that it could be presented to the ASEAN
summit meeting in November for ratification. On October 31, Vietnamese Foreign
Minister Pham Binh Minh stated that ASEAN countries had already reached a
consensus of the basic points of a CoC. After the meeting in Pattaya, however,
First Deputy Foreign Minister Nopadol Gunavibool of Thailand, the coordinator
of meetings between ASEAN and China, said that he did not have much hope for
the passage of a CoC at the ASEAN. Then the spokesperson of the Cambodian
foreign ministry announced flatly on November 3 that the CoC would not be
adopted in 2012.
Recently, China made
further moves that alarmed its neighbors. Perhaps the most serious was the
announcement in late November by Hainan Province, which administers China’s
South China Sea claims, that starting January 1, 2013, Chinese police and coast
guard will board ships entering what China considers its territory in the South
China Sea. According to a report by Jane Perlez of the New York Times on
December 1, the announcement was made by Wu Shicun, the director general of the
foreign affairs office of Hainan Province. The article stated: “Mr. Wu said the
new regulations applied to all of the hundreds of islands scattered across the
sea, and their surrounding waters. That includes islands claimed by several
other countries, including Vietnam and the Philippines… The Chinese foreign ministry said last week that China was within its rights to allow the coast
guard to board vessels in the South China Sea.”
On January 22, Philippines Foreign
Secretary Albert del Rosario told reporters that his country had exhausted
almost all political and diplomatic avenues for a peaceful negotiated
settlement of maritime disputes with China and that his government would take
the South China Sea issue to an UNCLOS tribunal. That was a direct challenge to
China, whose deputy foreign minister, Fu Yuing, had asked del Rosario not to
internationalize their dispute by going to the United Nations, raising it with
third parties including allies or holding high-profile press conferences.
China has annexed Scarborough Shoal by
maintaining a continuous deployment of surveillance ships there. If the
Philippines took no action, it would appear to be acquiescing to the
enforcement of Chinese jurisdiction by its civilian surveillance ships. The
Philippines is trying to get a ruling on international law on specific matters
involving maritime jurisdiction under UNCLOS. The Philippines is making four
claims: 1) China’s U-shape line is illegal under international law; 2) China
has occupied and built structures on submerged banks, reefs and low-tide
elevations in the South China Sea and illegally claims that these are Chinese
islands under international law: 3) China has illegally interfered with the
Philippines’ exercise of sovereign jurisdiction within legal maritime zones;
and 4) the Philippines is seeking a judgment in international law on matters
that China has not excluded from consideration in its 2006 declaration
exempting itself from compulsory arbitration by UNCLOS.
Although the Philippines has chosen to
focus on highly specific legal aspects in its case, any favorable ruling would
not only undermine China’s U-shape claim but would also represent a
breakthrough for a peaceful resolution to the maritime disputes in the region.
China’s stonewalling
and resistance with respect to addressing South China Sea issues come from the
confidence that in bilateral negotiations with each of the far less powerful
ASEAN countries she can impose her will on them. Vietnam is the most vulnerable
to China’s pressures in part because Vietnam has the longest coastline in the
region and has had the most maritime territories taken over by force by China.
Hence compromises by the Vietnamese government in the face of further Chinese
assertiveness inside Vietnam’s EEZs and around the areas of disputed islands
would certainly invite further pressures from China as well as strong reactions
from Vietnamese citizens.
In 2007, protests
against China’s arrest and maltreatment of Vietnamese fishermen erupted at the
PRC’s embassy and consulates in Vietnam, but were quashed by the Vietnamese
government. In 2011, after Chinese Maritime Administration ships cut the sonar
cables of Vietnamese oil prospecting boats, protest rallies were staged again,
in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City simultaneously, every Sunday for nearly two
months. But arrests and violence against the protestors by security forces
again put an end to the rallies.
In September, before
going to Nanning to meet with Xi Jinping, Prime Minister Dung ordered a
crackdown on blogs that have attacked his leadership and opposed China.
Subsequently at least five bloggers were put on trial, resulting in jail terms
of up to thirteen years. One of the bloggers had composed a song in which he
urged the citizens to rise up against invaders and “cowards who sell the
country.” On October 14, ten policemen stormed into the dorm room of the female
student, Nguyen Phuong Uyen, at the Ho Chi Minh City Food and Technology
University and put her in a jail in Long An province. An open letter for her
release, signed by her classmates and addressed to President Truong Tan Sang,
stated that she had been arrested because she had been suspected of
participating in anti-China activities and joining anti-corruption campaigns.
The Vietnamese government’s repressive
activities in the face of pressures from China have exacerbated tensions with
its own citizens and eroded its legitimacy. Furthermore, these activities might
have soiled the Vietnamese government’s image regionally and internationally
and hence weakened its effectiveness in dealing with China’s increasing
assertive activities in a region through which 60 percent of the entire global
sea-borne trade moves each year.
In order to promote peace and stability in
the region, all countries that utilize the South China Sea for trade and other
reasons should unambiguously support efforts to settle the disputes.
A Proposal
In the interest of regional peace and
global development, this writer made the following proposal based on UNCLOS’s
definition of three South China Sea areas at an international conference
attended by specialists and officials from most Asian countries, the United
States, and many European nations. The conference, “The South China Sea:
Cooperation for Regional Security and Development,” was held in Ho Chi Minh
City in November. The main idea of the proposal is to open up areas for
cooperation among all parties involved:
1. Reaffirm the EEZ of each individual
country and negotiate all overlapping claims. Form an international consensus
on getting China to abandon its U-shape line.
2. Rally
international support to bring all disputed claims in the island areas
(islands, islets, rocks, and so on) to an international court for judgment if
solutions could not be agreed upon by the claimants. In the meantime, occupants
of undisputed areas should be willing to declare publicly that no island should
have more than twelve nautical miles of territorial waters around it.
3. In the international area beyond the
EEZs and the territorial waters of the islands all resources extracted therein
(such as oil, gas, seafood) should be divided to each country in the region,
after extractive expenses have been deducted, according to a formula to be
negotiated.
Ngo
Vinh Long is a professor of history at the University of Maine,
where he has taught for more than twenty-five years. He is also a research
associate at Duy Tan University, Da Nang City, Vietnam. He has contributed to
the Journal of Contemporary Asia, American Historical Review, and other publications. He is a frequent commentator on
Asian affairs on the Vietnamese-language broadcasts of Radio France
Internationale, the BBC, and Radio Free Asia.