Wednesday, July 13, 2016

China's Claims are Legally Unjustified in South China / East Sea

Tribunal Rejects Beijing’s Claims in South China Sea


By JANE PERLEZ

JULY 12, 2016

A panel in The Hague rejected Beijing’s claims to the South China Sea on Tuesday, in a landmark case.

BEIJING — An international tribunal in The Hague delivered a sweeping rebuke on Tuesday of China’s behavior in the South China Sea, including its construction of artificial islands, and found that its expansive claim to sovereignty over the waters had no legal basis.

The landmark case, brought by the Philippines, was seen as an important crossroads in China’s rise as a global power and in its rivalry with the United States, and it could force Beijing to reconsider its assertive tactics in the region or risk being labeled an international outlaw. It was the first time the Chinese government had been summoned before the international justice system.

In its most significant finding, the tribunal rejected China’s argument that it enjoys historic rights over most of the South China Sea. That could give the governments of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan and Vietnam more leverage in their own maritime disputes with Beijing.

The tribunal also said that China had violated international law by causing “irreparable harm” to the marine environment, endangering Philippine ships and interfering with Philippine fishing and oil exploration.

“It’s an overwhelming victory. We won on every significant point,” said the Philippines’ chief counsel in the case, Paul S. Reichler.

But while the decision is legally binding, there is no mechanism for enforcing it, and China, which refused to participate in the tribunal’s proceedings, reiterated on Tuesday that it would not abide by it.

Speaking at a meeting with European leaders, President Xi Jinping was defiant, reasserting China’s claim to sovereignty over the South China Sea “since ancient times,” the state-run People’s Daily reported. His remarks echoed a statement from the Foreign Ministry. The tribunal’s decision “is invalid and has no binding force,” the ministry said. “China does not accept or recognize it.”
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The foreign secretary of the Philippines, Perfecto Yasay Jr., welcomed the ruling as “significant” and called on “all those concerned to exercise restraint and sobriety.”

The five judges and legal experts on the tribunal ruled unanimously, and the decision was so heavily in favor of the Philippines that there were fears about how the Chinese leadership would react. Many in the region worry that Beijing will accelerate its efforts to assert control over the South China Sea, which includes vital trade routes and fishing waters as well as possible oil and mineral deposits.

“Xi Jinping has lost face here, and it will be difficult for China to do nothing,” said Bonnie S. Glaser, a senior adviser for Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “I expect a very tough reaction from China, since it has lost on almost every point. There is virtually nothing that it has won.”

The Philippines filed its case in 2013, after China seized a reef over which both countries claim sovereignty. There has been speculation that Beijing might respond to the decision by building an artificial island at the reef, Scarborough Shoal, a move that could set off a conflict with the Philippines and its treaty ally, the United States.

The State Department spokesman, John Kirby, said Washington expected China to comply with the ruling. “The world is watching to see if China is really the global power it professes itself to be and the responsible power that it professes itself to be,” he said.

The main issue before the panel was the legality of China’s claim to waters within a “nine-dash line” that appears on official Chinese maps and encircles as much as 90 percent of the South China Sea, an area the size of Mexico. The Philippines had asked the tribunal to find the claim to be in violation of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which both China and the Philippines have ratified.

In its decision, the tribunal said any historic rights to the sea that China had previously enjoyed “were extinguished” by the treaty, which lays out rules for drawing zones of control over the world’s oceans based on distances to coastlines. The panel added that while China had used islands in the sea in the past, it had never exercised exclusive authority over the waters.

The panel also concluded that several disputed rocks and reefs in the South China Sea were too small for China to claim control of economic activities in the waters around them. As a result, it found, China was engaged in unlawful behavior in Philippine waters, including activities that had aggravated the dispute.

The tribunal cited China’s construction of a large artificial island on an atoll known as Mischief Reef. China has built a military airstrip, naval berths and sports fields on the island, but the tribunal ruled that it was in Philippine waters.

The judges also said that Beijing had violated international law by causing “severe harm to the coral reef environment” and by failing to prevent Chinese fishermen from harvesting endangered sea turtles and other species “on a substantial scale.”

In an early indication of the regional response, Vietnam — which has fraternal Communist ties to China but also significant territorial disputes with it, including over oil exploration rights — quickly issued a statement endorsing the tribunal’s decision.

China has argued that the tribunal had no jurisdiction in the case. Because the sovereignty of reefs and islands in the sea is disputed, Beijing asserted, the tribunal could not decide on competing claims to the surrounding waters. The treaty covers only maritime disputes, not land disputes.

In a tough speech in Washington last week, a former senior Chinese official, Dai Bingguo, said that the findings would amount to no more than “waste paper” and that China would not back down from its activities in the South China Sea even in the face of a fleet of American aircraft carriers.

But with the geopolitical stakes high, Mr. Dai also counseled moderation, saying that the situation in the South China Sea “must cool down.”

The issue could have ramifications for domestic politics in China. Mr. Xi has made defense of maritime claims a central part of the governing Communist Party’s narrative that it has restored the nation to global greatness after long periods of humiliation by bigger powers. Any challenge to that narrative is seen in Beijing as a challenge to the party’s rule.

On Wednesday morning, an escalating propaganda campaign in China against the tribunal reached a new pitch, with all the major news outlets condemning the decision and trumpeting China’s refusal to be back down.

“We do not claim an inch of land that does not belong to us, but we won’t give up any patch that is ours,” said a front-page editorial in The People’s Daily, which ridiculed the tribunal as a “lackey of some outside forces” that would be remembered as a “laughingstock in human history.”

Some Chinese commentators have said in recent days that the leadership may respond with immediate military maneuvers in the South China Sea. “Whether it will be significant or large scale I cannot say,” said Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing.

China is hosting the Group of 20 summit meeting in September, a major international forum that it hopes will proceed without the distraction of conflict. But Mr. Shi said he was not sure the government had “that kind of patience” to wait until after the gathering before taking some sort of action.

In a surprising opinion article on the India Today website over the weekend, a professor of international relations at Fudan University in Shanghai, Shen Dingli, wrote that Beijing needed to “revise its stance” and “employ a more effective approach” that maintained China’s “long-held ‘smiling’ image.”

The new president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, has signaled that he will be more accommodating toward China than was his predecessor, Benigno S. Aquino III.

The case before the tribunal was filed at the initiative of Mr. Aquino, whose term ended June 30. Soon after the case was filed, China began building artificial islands in the Spratly archipelago, much of which is claimed by the Philippines, in a move that many saw as a demonstration of contempt for the international court system.

Experts in international law said that negotiations could be the most positive outcome of the case.

In 1986, some noted, the United States ignored a ruling from the International Court of Justice that declared its mining of the harbors of Nicaragua to be illegal. Washington had not ratified the Convention on the Law of the Sea, and it still has not.

But the ruling 30 years ago by the judges in The Hague emboldened congressional critics to cut funds for the Reagan administration’s campaign against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, and it galvanized countries in Central America to seek a settlement of the conflict.

China is not expected to vacate or dismantle the artificial islands it has built. That makes the legal arguments important, analysts said. “ “The tribunal rulings will move the goal posts towards the Philippines and the smaller countries,” said Markus Gehring, a lecturer in law at Cambridge University.

In Manila, the former foreign secretary, Albert F. del Rosario, who brought the case after years of failed negotiations with China, said the path was now open for a lasting settlement of disputes in the South China Sea.

“The award provides a basis to further talks and cooperation to encompass all parties, including China,” he said.




Follow Jane Perlez on Twitter @JanePerlez.

Yufan Huang contributed research from Beijing. Marlise Simons contributed reporting from Paris.

A version of this article appears in print on July 13, 2016, on page A3 of the New York edition with the headline: Panel Rejects China’s Claims in Sea Dispute. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/13/world/asia/south-china-sea-hague-ruling-philippines.html?emc=edit_ae_20160712&nl=todaysheadlines-asia&nlid=73600804&_r=0


Press release from arbitration panel

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2990864/Press-Release-on-South-China-Sea-Decision.pdf


My comment on line:

Attitudes in Beijing about the South China Sea are reminiscent of the long US perspective on the Caribbean as an American lake.

The Obama Administration seems finally to accept that Cuba has the right to determine its own political and economic system.

The only exception is the pretense that we have a legal right to maintain possession of the Guantanamo base, despite the coercive means that established this classic unequal treaty.  (The US refused to withdraw its occupation forces and allow Cuba to become independent without agreement to give us Guantanamo at a nominal rent.)

Maybe Washington and Beijing could agree to renounce their historic regional hegemonism.  All of their neighbors would be grateful for this act of statesmanship--and the role of the other superpower in bringing it about.

John McAuliff
Fund for Reconciliation  and Development


Among the over 200 comments:

The 9-dash map was only presented to the world in 2009 - until then kept under wraps.

Unilateral map drawing has no possible basis for sovereignty claim - if it were, any tin-pot dictator could draw any map he likes.

The ruling is 100% about maritime entitlements - which China was found to have none. The Tribunal does not decide if China should or should not have this or that rock.

Sixty years after Taiwan annexation, Kangxi's map of the island (1720) still showed ONLY the Western side as the Eastern side remained unknown / uncharted.

Emperor Wan-Li approved Matteo Ricci's 1602 world map where Paracels were left out [despite its presence on the gifted 1570 Ortelius Asia map]. Similarly, Kangxi approved of Ferdinand Verbiest's 1674 world map where Paracels were charted but remained UN-NAMED [despite the 1648 Blaeu source map had Paracels charted and named].

Both are consistent with the position that Wan-Li & Kangxi (and the Chinese Empire) were clueless about the SCS [Kangxi's 1720 Atlas did not even have the SCS notation anywhere].

Fabled myths of antiquity are just that.... myths.

China asked the Dutch to move to Taiwan in 1620s as it was considered to be "stateless" and "outside the realm".

CCP history books would have you believe otherwise.

Look up Cordier's Bibliotheca Sinica (1898) and Lowendahl's China Illustrata Nova (2008) with its combined bibliography of > 5,000 books on China and show us one book with China's maritime claim.

Yes, just one !


See comments on Asia Society blog

http://asiasociety.org/blog/asia/after-ruling-%E2%80%94-whats-next-south-china-sea?utm_source=Asia+Society&utm_campaign=9af38cc8f4-eNews_160712&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_de00ad8d9d-9af38cc8f4-168524193&mc_cid=9af38cc8f4&mc_eid=7388c3d724

Wednesday, July 6, 2016

Optimistic Assessment that China's Economic Interests are Primary

Beijing’s Master Plan for the South China Sea


China has far greater ambitions for the region than just reclaiming some tiny islands. 
By Feng Zhang

June 23, 2015

In late 2013, Beijing started taking a very different approach to sovereignty disputes in the South China Sea — although few outside China noticed the change. Instead of directly confronting the other regional claimant states, Beijing began the rapid consolidation of, and construction on, the maritime features already under its control. And it did so on a scale and pace befitting China’s impressive engineering prowess.

Much of the outside world only realized this approach in early 2015, after several high-profile U.S. think tanks published high-resolution satellite images showing the extraordinary progress of China’s island construction, including military facilities and runways, which could extend Beijing’s military reach over the contested waters. This worried Southeast Asian countries, particularly Vietnam and the Philippines, because their claims to parts of the South China Sea overlap with China’s, and because they fear Beijing’s island construction threatens their security. It worries Washington as well: In May, the U.S. government vowed to assert freedom of navigation by sending military assets to Chinese-controlled islands in the South China Sea. And in late May, in Singapore, U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter called for “an immediate and lasting halt to land reclamation by all claimants” — in other words, China.
  
Intriguingly, half a month later, Beijing indicated that it would soon conclude its land reclamation projects in the South China Sea. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs even held a special press conference to deliver that message.

So what happened? Is Beijing changing its strategy in the South China Sea or backing down because of pressure from Washington? Perhaps. A more accurate way of looking at the issue, however, is to see that Beijing believes it has achieved enough in this round of island construction. China, according to Carter, has reclaimed more than 2,000 acres over the last 18 months — a claim that Beijing has not publicly disputed. And the facilities Beijing will continue to build on the new land — including airstrips, ports, and lighthouses — will be sufficient for a wide range of civil and military purposes. (Indeed, Beijing is not denying that those facilities will have “necessary military defense” functions — although it is certainly not emphasizing that aspect of its island construction.)

Beijing’s South China Sea policy actually hasn’t changed much. Reclamation will stop for now, but construction of facilities on the reclaimed land will continue, and Beijing hasn’t changed its claims to the South China Sea.

Nevertheless, this special Ministry of Foreign Affairs announcement requires an explanation, for it is intended to send an important diplomatic signal. China has learned its lesson from negative regional responses to island building in the South China Sea. Not of the dangers of a military showdown with the United States in the area, which it considers a remote possibility, but on how negative regional reactions can harm its larger foreign-policy goals. Specifically, Beijing has learned how land reclamation on the current scale and pace is threatening the policy priority of building a maritime Silk Road through Southeast Asia.

Ever since President Xi Jinping articulated the goals of building a Silk Road economic belt through central Eurasia, and a maritime Silk Road through the South China Sea and Indian Ocean, in late 2013, the One Belt, One Road initiative has become something like a grand strategy — integrating the domestic needs of economic restructuring with the international ambitions of expanding China’s diplomatic and economic influence. OBOR encompasses 4.4 billion people, 64 countries, and a combined economic output of $21 trillion — roughly twice the annual gross domestic product of China, or 29 percent of global GDP. This is literally China’s economic diplomacy for half of the world, under one single policy framework. If OBOR is indeed China’s grand strategy — and if it’s really one that Xi takes to heart — then nothing internationally should stand in the way of its execution.

The problem with Beijing’s current South China Sea policy is that it increasingly conflicts with OBOR, because it is damaging China’s relationships with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), countries on which the success of the maritime Silk Road depends. As a result of Beijing’s 2012-2013 standoff with Manila over the contested Scarborough Shoal and Second Thomas Shoal, and the violent tensions provoked with Hanoi by placing an oil rig near the contested Paracel islands in May 2014, China’s relationships with the Philippines and Vietnam are at their lowest points in recent history. Now Beijing’s island construction is making these countries — and Southeast Asia as a whole — feel more threatened.

Yes, all 10 members of ASEAN have joined the Beijing-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, one of the financial arms of OBOR, thus signaling their desire to partake in its economic opportunities. But the persistence of South China Sea tensions and China’s growing military clout in the region will dispose them to view OBOR in geopolitical terms, not in terms of economic cooperation, which Beijing prefers.

Beijing is realizing that excessive and ongoing tensions in the South China Sea are detrimental to its larger foreign-policy interests. Given the greater ambitions of OBOR, the South China Sea project should not be allowed to hijack or distort the overall direction of Chinese foreign policy.

Beijing is also becoming increasing aware of another pressing need for its South China Sea policy: keeping the region relatively stable so as not to give other countries a pretext for creating troubles in China’s relationship with ASEAN countries. Beijing fears an anti-China alliance formed among the United States, ASEAN, and perhaps also Japan, Australia, and India, in a united opposition to its South China Sea policy. This would doom the maritime leg of OBOR, which must pass through the South China Sea and obtain support from key ASEAN countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. It would also be a huge setback to Chinese security interests in maritime Asia, making its policy options more constrained and costly.

It would be true strategic folly if unrestrained land reclamation serves no significant interests other than to drive ASEAN countries into the arms of the United States. The top priority of Beijing’s South China Sea policy now is to prevent such an anti-China alliance from forming and to support the grand strategy of OBOR in any way possible.

One should also not lose sight of how the June 16 press conference came just before the seventh U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, an annual series of top-level bilateral meetings, being held this year on June 23-24 in Washington, D.C. The meetings are also just three months before the biggest event of Sino-U.S. relations this year — Xi’s state visit to the United States in September. The announcement to conclude land reclamation was in part timed to create a more congenial environment for developing the China-U.S. relationship in the second half of this year. Make no mistake: Despite what China scholar David Lampton has called “a tipping point in U.S.-China relations,” Beijing still wants and values a stable relationship with Washington. Chinese officials are now doing everything possible to make Xi’s visit a success.

And it’s not only the Chinese taking steps to improve the relationship. On June 18, two days after the Chinese announcement, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Russel tried to tone down tensions in the South China Sea by saying that the United States is determined to avoid military confrontation with China (although he also made it clear that continued construction of facilities on the reclaimed islands will remain a U.S. concern). One feels that a rapprochement between China and the United States on the South China Sea is taking place.

So, although Beijing’s South China Sea policy hasn’t changed much in substance, it has sent a conciliatory and positive signal to the outside world, in effect saying that it will halt its land reclamation in the South China Sea and defuse tensions in the region. What Beijing is not publically saying — but which it sincerely hopes the outside world will understand — is that it expects greater cooperation with OBOR. In other words, the South China Sea reclamation project has ceased to be a core interest of Chinese foreign policy, if, indeed, it ever was.












China Threatens US on South China Sea




Beijing Takes its South China Sea PR Campaign to Washington

By Dan De Luce
July 5, 2016 - 5:07 pm
Dan.DeLuce
@dandeluce


Beijing Takes its South China Sea PR Campaign to Washington  

Facing a potentially damaging ruling from an international court in its dispute with the Philippines, China has cranked up a public relations offensive to defend its stance in the court of world opinion. The sledgehammer-subtle PR campaign came to Washington on Tuesday, with a former top Chinese official warning that Beijing will reject the tribunal’s authority and cautioning the United States to tread carefully in the contested waters.

Dai Bingguo, former Chinese state councilor, said the tribunal’s ruling on the South China Sea dispute, scheduled to be released next Tuesday, “amounts to nothing more than a piece of paper.”

Speaking at a conference at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Dai urged countries not to carry out the court’s decision and warned that his government would not tolerate any further “provocation” from the Philippines. “Otherwise, China would not sit idle,” Dai said.

The former senior diplomat, now chairman of Jinan University, accused the United States of raising tensions with its naval and air patrols in the region and allegedly encouraging Southeast Asian countries to take a more confrontational approach with Beijing.

“We in China would not be intimidated by the U.S. actions, not even if the U.S. sent all 10 aircraft carriers to the South China Sea,” he said. “The risk for the U.S. is that it may be dragged into trouble against its own will and pay an unexpectedly heavy price.”

The Chinese Foreign Ministry promptly posted the full text of Dai’s speech after he delivered it.

The speech, which repeated Beijing’s frequent talking points on the issue, was the latest salvo in China’s PR blitz on the South China Sea, where it has built up an array of artificial islands through vast dredging operations in recent years. Beijing claims that up to 60 countries have endorsed its view of the case before the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague. But the Wall Street Journal found the charm offensive has mostly fizzled.

Only eight countries have issued public statements backing up China on the issue, and a number of governments denied Beijing’s claims of support, the Journal reported. The countries backing China are not exactly maritime powers in Southeast Asia: Afghanistan, Gambia, Kenya, Niger, Sudan, Togo, Vanuatu, and Lesotho.

The United States and most governments in the region have called on both sides to abide by the court’s decision, but the tribunal has no way to enforce its writ.

The Philippines took its complaint to the Permanent Court of Arbitration in 2013 after a series of confrontations with China around the disputed Scarborough Shoal off its coast. The U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, which China has ratified, provides for the tribunal as a way of settling maritime disagreements. Manila, like other countries, has questioned China’s far-reaching claims to the South China Sea, contested its claims that various reefs, atolls, and rocks qualify as islands, and argued that Beijing’s tough tactics toward Philippine fishing boats and Coast Guard vessels violate international law.

 It’s unclear how China will react to the court’s decision when it comes, but Dai’s remarks in Washington will feed speculation that Beijing might decide to launch dredging work around Scarborough Shoal. Such a move would ramp up tensions and possibly trigger a confrontation with Manila, which could then turn to the United States for military assistance, experts say.

The newly elected president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, said earlier Tuesday that his country would be ready to hold talks with China and avoid conflict after The Hague court issues its verdict.

“When it’s favorable to us, let’s talk,” he said. “We are not prepared to go to war; ‘war’ is a dirty word.”

China, which claims most of the South China Sea, indicated it would be open to starting negotiations with Manila as long as the Philippines ignores the court ruling.

Along with its public relations efforts, China is flexing its naval power. On Tuesday it launched a week of military exercises around the disputed Paracel Islands in the South China Sea.

Photo credit: MIKHAIL JAPARIDZE/TASS via Getty Images


http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/07/05/beijing-takes-its-south-china-sea-pr-campaign-to-washington/