China rips ‘US-led’ SCS effort

From the Manila Standard (Jul 14, 2023): China rips ‘US-led’ SCS effort (By Rey E. Requejo)

China on Wednesday accused the United States of masterminding efforts to rally countries against Beijing and instead support the 2016 decision by the Permanent Court of Arbitration that invalidated its expansive claims to the South China Sea and upheld Manila’s exclusive economic zone in the West Philippine Sea.

In a statement released by the Chinese Embassy in Manila, China accused the US of mobilizing countries to gang-up on Beijing to pressure it into accepting the arbitral ruling.

Meanwhile, the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) on Thursday said it deployed additional assets to the Kalayaan Group of Islands in the West Philippine Sea amid continued Chinese incursions in the disputed waters.

Additional ships were deployed in the islands to hold sovereignty patrols, which AFP spokesperson Col. Medel Aguilar said was part of the military’s mission to “protect Filipinos and the state” together with the Philippine Coast Guard (PCG).

Aguilar did not disclose how many assets were deployed but assured the AFP would devote more time to patrol wider areas in the West Philippine Sea, the part of the South China Sea in which the Philippines says it has sovereign rights, and that sovereignty patrols would be done more often.

On the 7th anniversary of Manila’s win in its arbitration case against China, Beijing on Wednesday night said the US has been pushing more countries each year to commemorate the ruling.

“As the mastermind behind the South China Sea arbitration, the US ropes in allies to play up the issue each year on the anniversary of the illegal award to gang up against China and to exert pressure, and force China into accepting the award,” the embassy statement said.

“We are firmly against this,” it added.

China’s remark came after a growing number of countries openly expressed support for the Philippines in the maritime row—a development welcomed by Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) Secretary Enrique Manalo.

Among those countries include the US, an ally of the Philippines; Japan, which also has disputes against China over the East China Sea; Australia, which shares the same waters with the Philippines and China; India, which shares a border with China; and the UK; France and other European nations.

On July 12, 2016, the Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) ruled that China’s “nine-dash line,” which it cites as basis to claim the West Philippine Sea, a part of the bigger South China Sea, is contrary to the provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

UNCLOS is an international agreement, which both the Philippines and China ratified, that establishes a legal framework for all marine and maritime activities.

In the same statement, China said it will “never accept any claim or action based on the award.”

Arguing that its rights and interests in the South China Sea were “established in the long course of history,” China said its claims “are solidly grounded in history and the law” and will not be affected by any award.

China then urged countries outside the region to respect its territorial sovereignty and maritime rights.

It also called on them to “stop using the South China Sea issue to drive wedges among regional countries, and refrain from being a troublemaker to peace and stability in the South China Sea.”

JAKARTA TALKS

Meanwhile, top US and Chinese diplomats will hold their second meeting in as many months on Thursday in Jakarta, seeking to manage tensions that risk flaring anew over alleged Chinese hacking.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Wang Yi, China’s top foreign policy official, will meet on the sidelines of Association of Southeast Asian Nations talks in the Indonesian capital, the State Department’s public schedule showed.

The meeting is going ahead despite Microsoft saying two days earlier that Chinese hackers had breached US government email accounts, including those of the State Department.

The Jakarta talks come nearly a month after Blinken traveled to Beijing, the first visit by a US secretary of state in nearly five years, and met President Xi Jinping as well as Wang and Foreign Minister Qin Gang.

Wang, who leads the foreign affairs commission of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee, is representing China at the Jakarta talks among foreign ministers as Qin is ill, the foreign ministry in Beijing said.

Blinken’s trip opened a flurry of diplomacy, with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen visiting Beijing last week and a trip by climate envoy John Kerry set for the coming days.

But the United States has still not achieved its key goal of resuming dialogue with the Chinese military, seen as critical to avoiding worst-case scenarios.

Tensions between the world’s two largest economies have soared in recent years over a host of issues including China’s growing assertiveness in the region and sweeping restrictions imposed by the United States on exports of advanced semiconductors.

US officials fear China is readying plans to invade Taiwan, the self-governing democracy it claims, and want to preserve the status quo that has reigned, often uneasily, for nearly five decades.

Neither the United States nor China has predicted breakthroughs from the renewed diplomacy, but both have spoken of making sure that disagreements do not lead to outright conflict.

Blinken spoke in unusually sanguine terms about China after his trip to Beijing, avoiding the Cold War-like talk of a long-term global confrontation with the rising Asian power that was popular under former president Donald Trump’s administration.

“At least in the near term, maybe even in the lifetimes of most people in this room, I don’t think (there is) a clear finish line,” Blinken said of US goals in China during a recent appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

“This is more about getting to a place where we have peaceful and maybe somewhat more productive coexistence between us.”

But incidents have repeatedly crept up to overshadow the relationship.

Microsoft this week said that a Chinese hacking group had gained access to nearly 25 organizations with the goal of espionage.

The State Department said it detected “anomalous activity” but stopped short of publicly blaming China, saying an investigation was underway.

Blinken’s first plan to visit Beijing was scuttled in February after Washington said it detected a Chinese spy balloon over the mainland United States.

SCS TENSION

The South China Sea is set to be a major topic at the ASEAN talks in Jakarta, where Washington and Beijing will both take part in an 18-nation East Asia Summit with foreign ministers’ on Friday. (See full story online at manilastandard.net)

China claims almost the entirety of the strategic waterway and several ASEAN members complain about Beijing infringing on their own overlapping territorial claims.

Wang addressed ASEAN ministers before talks Thursday morning as did Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who will be in the same room Friday as Blinken for the East Asia Summit meeting.

It will be their first encounter since a brief March meeting in India but no bilateral talks are expected between the two diplomats as Moscow’s widely-condemned invasion of Ukraine grinds on.

ASEAN will also meet jointly with the foreign ministers of China, Japan and South Korea, a dialogue in place since the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

MYANMAR

The crisis in coup-racked Myanmar that has divided ASEAN members will also be on the list of topics addressed, said Teuku Rezasyah, international relations expert at Padjadjaran University.

“Japan and South Korea have an interest to prevent Myanmar from joining China’s orbit,” he said.

Thailand’s foreign minister on Wednesday said he met with ousted Myanmar democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi last week and Bangkok has sought engagement with Myanmar’s ruling junta, drawing criticism that it is undercutting ASEAN efforts.

A Southeast Asian diplomat said a joint ASEAN communique after thebloc’s two-day ministerial meeting earlier this week was still being worked out and would come on Thursday, a day later than expected.

In other developments:

* Senate Minority Leader Aquilino Pimentel III and Senator Grace Poe warned against the filing of another case versus China before international courts to assert the country’s sovereignty over the West Philippine Sea. “Let us not re-litigate what we already won. When we file something, we are actually giving the other side a chance to bring up their planned original argument—which they did not bring up because they boycotted the proceedings,” Pimentel said in an ANC

interview on Thursday. Poe added that if the country files another case, the ruling might change. “Usually the ones that reopen the case are the ones that lose,” she said.

* Australian Ambassador to the Philippines HK Yu said Canberra’s strengthened military alliance with the Philippines is only a form of “deterrence” and “diplomacy” and will not necessarily create tension in the South China Sea. Yu said Australia’s enhanced military partnership with the Philippines, which includes more joint maritime exercises, is not a form of escalation.

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