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JUNE 26, 2014:
The screech of metal and crack of breaking wood has become the new sound of China’s relationship with Vietnam. On June 23, 2014, two Chinese tugboats deliberately rammed into a Vietnamese fishing vessel, the latest of many nautical skirmishes in the South China Sea.
The Chinese Navy oil rigs function to fuel Chinese drivers, not just to instigate. Taking advantage of ambiguous international law and unsubstantiated historical claims by Vietnam, China needs oil to appease its ravenous energy demand.
The aggression of the Chinese navy corresponds with a longstanding territorial dispute over the Paracel and Spratly Islands, which are less than 15 feet above sea level and all together cover less than five square miles.
The Islands lie 250 miles from Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam and 580 miles from China’s Hainan Island, but Chinese officials claim the land historically has been China’s.
In a deliberate display of power, the Chinese government deployed an oil rig 17 miles off of Vietnam’s coast on May 1, 2014. Despite riots in Vietnam and international criticism, China sent out a second oil rig on June 18. The designated location is still unknown. Neither rig has started drilling.
China’s oil demand is fast approaching the United States’ oil consumption level. China will import 9.2 million barrels a day by 2020 as the number of vehicles increases–a 360% growth in oil imports.
“You cannot redefine boundaries and violate territorial integrity and sovereignty of nations by force, coercion, and intimidation, whether it’s in small islands in the Pacific or large nations in Europe,” warned U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel on April 6 and again on May 31.
A naval beach party on the disputed Spratly Islands echoed Hagel’s security statement. On June 8, 2014, the Vietnamese and Philippine navies enjoyed a day of beer and volleyball on the Islands to show their shared discontent with China’s claim to the territory. Military officials from the two countries emphasized that the Chinese navy was not invited.
Vietnam and the Philippines have formed an alliance against potential Chinese aggression in the South China Sea. Vietnam also has an alliance with Malaysia for the same purpose. Vietnam-China relations, never friendly, have been particularly tense since 1974 when the dispute over sovereignty of the Paracel Islands turned deadly.
As outlined by James Lap, a Vietnamese scholar at Columbia University, the Chinese military killed 74 Vietnamese sailors in 1974 over the Paracel Islands. The consequences of this skirmish are still being played out today.
China tried to legally claim the islands in 1991 passing the “Law of the Territorial Sea and the Contiguous Zone of the Republic of China.” According to Chinese government officials, the “territorial waters,” a phrase borrowed from UN terminology, would make the Spratly Islands China’s possession.
The plan failed because of the ambiguous language of the law, which lists the names of islands owned by China, adding “as well as all the other islands that belong to the People’s Republic of China.” The law never mentions the Paracel and Spratly islands by name, but they are implied.
Vietnam and China normalized diplomatic ties in November 1991, both countries avoiding the issue of definitive sovereignty of the Islands, and the aggression dissipated.
After the discovery of oil fields was confirmed in 2011, following decades of speculation, tensions escalated quickly. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimated the islands’ oil reserves at 213 billion barrels. As a point of comparison, Iraq has an estimated 112 billion barrels of oil reserves. As a result, the South China Sea Islands are no longer just a symbol of sovereignty, but rather the promise of economic growth.
Vietnam and China signed an agreement in October 2011 to prevent further bloodshed. As seen by China’s oil rig breaching among other metaphorical muscle flexing, Vietnam’s exclusive economic zone and Vietnam’s anti-China protests that left four Chinese dead, the peace promised in the 2011 agreement has not held.
“The conflict matters because it is one of the offshore arenas in which the relevant countries will work out how to adapt to China’s rising demands,” says Ed Winckler, a political scientist at Columbia University, “with nobody daring to do much to counter China.”
Chinese government officials repeatedly argue that the “nine dash line“, which boxes the perimeter of the Paracel and Spratlys on maps of the South China Sea, indicates sovereignty. The line includes 85 percent of the South China Sea. Danny Russel, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, announced on February 5, 2014, that the line violates international law because claims should be based on territory and not water.
Vietnam has lost faith in the rule of international law. “It’s the same old game with a new name,” Lap said, referring to the thousand years of Vietnamese “slavery” by China.
China announced on June 15 that construction would soon begin on a Chinese school to accompany the hospital and other official buildings already on the Paracel Islands. Chinese government workers have been renovating the Spratly Islands by adding sand to the reefs to increase the Islands’ size and make the land habitable.
Duncan McCargo, a political scientist at the University of Leeds, sees the Paracel and Spratly Islands as a gauge of how China will behave towards superpowers over larger issues.
U.S. support could help rewrite China’s history of dominating Vietnam. President Barack Obama has voiced support for ASEAN, the Association of South East Asian Nations, of which Vietnam is a member and China is not. In November 2011, Obama vowed to fully support the security of the Asia-Pacific, but the U.S. does not have an official defense treaty with Vietnam.
The UN agreed on June 10, 2014 to facilitate peace efforts between Vietnam and China. The Philippines has already filed a complaint with the UN Tribunal court against Chinese aggressive naval actions.
Global scholars met in Danang, Vietnam at a conference on June 20, citing aspects of international law and military strategy to help support Vietnamese claims to the Islands. New York University School of Law professor Jerome Cohen emphasized the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) as a document to safeguard Vietnamese territory.
“My guess is that the Chinese feel that they have held off drilling in these waters long enough and it is time to start” as their oil needs become more pressing, says former director of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Andrew Nathan, with regard to the two Chinese oil rigs. Nathan does not foresee a war between China and Vietnam. In fact, according to Nathan, China should downplay the conflict to prevent the U.S. from mediating and supporting Vietnam in order to avoid warring with U.S. forces.
As Alex Magno of TIME Magazine put it, “The Chinese character for the word crisis combines the ideographs for danger and opportunity. That’s an apt approximation of how many Southeast Asians regard China… The Sleeping Dragon keeps the rest of us awake.”
Aliza Goldberg is an editorial assistant at World Policy Journal and a graduate student at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.
Read original article here: http://www.worldpolicy.org/blog/2014/06/26/push-comes-shove-south-china-sea
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