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China's grand plan for the South China Sea
By Billy Tea
Whether China's decision to remove an oil exploration rig from waters
hotly contested with neighboring Vietnam was motivated by bad weather,
a completed mission, or rising diplomatic pressure from the United
States, the move was the latest phase of Beijing's grand plan to
assert its sovereignty over the South China Sea.
While US Secretary of State John Kerry is scheduled to call for a
"voluntary freeze" on all actions that could escalate disputes in the
maritime area at a Southeast Asian security meeting this
weekend, Beijing has already rejected the idea,
saying it will retain its right to build on structures in its claimed
areas. China's nine-dash map claims over 90% of the 3.5 million square
kilometer South China Sea.
There is a geo-strategic rationale rooted in realist
foreign policies for Beijing's rising assertiveness in the maritime
area. In order to understand the present and anticipate the future, it
is essential to look beyond recent events as isolated incidents and
instead look towards Beijing's long-term ambition for the highly
strategic, hydrocarbon-rich sea.
China and a handful of Southeast Asian nations have
long contested and sometimes clashed over different areas of the South
China Sea. However, it was not until then United States Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton declared at a July 2010 meeting of the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Regional Forum in Hanoi
that the US had a "national interest" in the South China Sea that the
situation started to spiral downward.
Clinton's pronouncement was viewed by Beijing as a
provocation and step towards internationalizing the situation.
Beijing, which has declared the area a "core interest" of its
sovereignty, desires to resolve the disputes bilaterally with
individual claimants and has resisted multilateral-led, international
law-based solutions to the disputes. Beijing's out-of-hand rejection
of Kerry's "voluntary freeze" recommendation is indicative of China's
hardening position on the issue.
Ever since Clinton's speech, the South China Sea has
been locked in a series of escalating action-reaction spats over
individual features between China and Southeast Asian nations,
including the Philippines and Vietnam. China's 2012 stand-off with the
Philippines over the contested Scarborough Shoal marked the beginning
of Beijing's more provocative approach to the disputes.
This year's clashes between Chinese and Vietnamese boats near China's HYSY 981
exploration rig, positioned in May near the contested Paracel
islands, threatened to escalate into a full-blown conflict. China's move
was likely partly a reaction to Vietnam's recent tender of
exploration contracts to foreign energy concerns. Last November
India's Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) signed an agreement
with state-run PetroVietnam to cooperate in the hydrocarbon sector.
By May 2014, Vietnam had offered India seven blocks
for offshore exploration in the South China Sea without competitive
bidding. When India stated its plans to abandon oil block 128 in 2012,
Hanoi asked Delhi to remain until 2014, demonstrating Hanoi's desire
to maintain India's counterbalancing presence in the region. Hanoi has
also opened the way to stronger strategic ties with the US to
counteract Beijing's rising assertiveness.
To be sure, the South China Sea conflicts are being
driven in part by the potential bounty of oil and natural gas in the
area. HYSY 981 is part of China's so-called 863 Program, an
initiative launched in March 1986 to narrow the technological gap
between China and the world's most advanced economies. Government
agencies including the Ministry of Science and Technology and the
National Development and Reform Commission provided strong support for
the rig's development.
The rig provides China with the independent ability
to drill for oil and natural gas in disputed parts of the South China
Sea of which foreign companies may be unwilling to operate due to the
political risks. After HYSY 981's move in May 2014, China deployed four more oil rigs (Nanhai
2/4/5/9) in June in the South China Sea with similar exploration
missions to be completed later this year. The moves have sparked
further diplomatic and economic disputes between China and Vietnam.
So what is China's grand plan for the South China Sea?
Former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping's strategic foreign policies of "bu chu tou" and "tao guang yang hui"
- literally translating to "don't stick your head out" and "hide
brightness, nourish obscurity" - are still relevant but at the same
time shifting towards a more assertive posture.
China no longer fully "hides in obscurity" about its
capabilities and is increasingly willing to flex its military strength
and technological prowess. HYSY 981 is a prime example of
China's indigenous technological advancement, including the deployment
of a much improved coast guard to protect the rig from harassment by
Vietnamese vessels.
Now that China has demonstrated its willingness to
confront rival claimants in the South China Sea, it is likely for now
"not to stick its head out" while gauging Vietnam's and the
international community's full reaction to the incident. Behind this
latest iteration of "action-reaction" over contested waters, China
continues apace on its long-term, multi-phased plan to eventually
assert dominance over the maritime area. The plan consists of three
clear components, namely:
1) Boost military, particularly naval and air force, capabilities:
In March, China revealed its national 2014-2015
budget, with US$132 billion allocated to military expenditures, an
increase of about 12% over the previous year. China's military
development has multiple purposes, and will not be solely aimed at
asserting or defending its territorial claims in the South China Sea
and East China Sea but will also be used as a deterrent for the
situation in Taiwan and to displace US influence in the Western
Pacific.
According to Ronald O'Rourke, a US Specialist in Naval
Affairs, China's naval modernization efforts encompass:
- anti-ship ballistic missiles (ASBMs)
- anti-ship cruise missiles (ASCMs)
- submarines
- surface ships
- aircraft,
and supporting C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers,
intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) systems
- maintenance and logistics, naval doctrine, personnel quality, education and training
2) Improve international Image:
China has been widely criticized for its lack of legal evidence to
support its wide-reaching nine-dash map claims over the South China
Sea. In the past, such international criticism would have had limited
influence on Beijing's policy, as demonstrated by its lack of response
to the international outcry against its lethal suppression of the
1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
However, China is now much more preoccupied with its global image.
That was witnessed by Chinese authorities' attempts to censor any
negative representation of the country during the 2008 Olympic Games
held in Beijing. In light of recent international criticism of its
actions in the South China Sea, China has tried to bolster its claims
through counter appeals to the United Nations. This new tactic, while
not calling for a multilateral intervention in the disputes, is seen
as a response to the Philippines filing of a case to the International
Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) to assert its claim to
disputed areas.
3.) Bolster legal claims:
In turn, China's Foreign Ministry recently released a statement to the
UN entitled, "The Operation of the HYSY 981 Drilling Rig: Vietnam's
Provocation and China's Position," which criticized Vietnam's alleged
provocations over the oil rig and provided a comprehensive outline of
China's claims to the Paracel Islands, including a Chinese government
declaration issued on September 4, 1958. Moreover, it included
photocopied pages from a geography textbook for Vietnamese
ninth-graders published 40 years ago and a cover of a World Atlas
Another method China is employing to support its claims is to bring
sand to already established reefs and shoals in the South China Sea.
The process, known as "island building", is meant to support its claims
within the definition of territory as set out in the United Nations
Convention on the Law of the Sea. China apparently plans to move
permanent populations on to the manufactured territories, thus
strengthening its legal assertion to certain features and islands.
In order to foresee China's potential actions post-HYSY 981,
it is essential to understand its grand plan for asserting eventual
dominance over the South China Sea. The question is not why did China
remove the oil rig but rather what adaptive policies will it likely
enact in the next phase. The escalating conflict, with or without US
calls for calm, will not be resolved anytime soon. Yet the biggest
mistake any onlooker could make would be to view the HYSY 981 event as a one-off occurrence rather than as a carefully calculated move that is part of a wider strategy.
Billy Tea
is a Research Fellow at the Pacific Forum CSIS. His research interests
include conflict prevention, conflict management and regional
cooperation; Chinese foreign policy in Asia; and security and defense
relations between Asia, Europe and the United States. He holds a BA in
Political Science from UMASS Amherst and a MA in War Studies from
King's College London.
(Copyright 2014 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved.
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