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By Tony Le
26 October 2008
Bangkok - Last week, the news out of China on the occasion of Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung’s visit to Beijing was all about friendship and cooperation between the two neighboring countries. Xinhua reported that in a joint statement the two countries aimed to seek a basic and lasting solution to the South China Sea territorial dispute that has been going on for decades.
Even at the same time that the website of Vietnam’s foreign ministry remains silent on the issue and the public is left in the dark on the content and the progress of the negotiation, Vietnamese concerned about China’s aggression in the region can only hope that when the so called basic and lasting solution is announced that Vietnamese will not respond with jaws dropped in disbelief and disappointment.
Up to the present date, bilateral negotiation between China and another party in the South China Sea dispute has been the only option that Beijing has accepted to for obvious reasons. In such type of negotiation, Beijing inevitably carries a huge advantage over its counterpart and will enable Beijing to obtain what it wants most easily.
What is perplexing about this joint statement between China and Vietnam is that the content of this statement comes out at the same time that China is reported to have intensified its acts of aggression in the South China Sea. The most notorious of such acts of aggression is China’s recent attempt to pressure ExxonMobil to cease collaborating with Vietnam in exploring oil in Vietnam’s own Exclusive Economic Zone as stipulated by the 1982 UN Law of the Sea, which China is one of the signatories.
China continues to retain its claim of nearly 80% of the South China Sea as its historic waters and has passed laws requiring all Chinese maps to include this depiction of China’s claim. What is outrageous is that no one knows what maritime law provides for this claim and China itself refuses to explain what coordinates these claims fall on. Widespread sentiment from many Chinese people is that China is intent on taking over the South China Sea as part of the plan to shed its shame and regain its once glorious position in the world that had been taken away by Western powers in the past.
Therefore, despite the friendly and uplifting rhetoric, anyone who takes the time to observe China’s pattern of behavior over the last several decades with regard to the South China Sea will know that words from China don’t often go with actions. Cooperation, from China’s perspective, means that the other party must behave in accordance with China’s plans or face potential consequences – militarily, economically, and whatever ways that China can think of to punish it for not submitting to China’s will.
Time and again, Vietnamese leaders have expressed that when one is a neighbor to a big power like China, one has to tread very gently. This is a very tricky balancing act; and in the eyes of many Vietnamese people their leaders have often been too submissive in the face of China’s unreasonable demands.
Vietnam’s disadvantage at the bargaining table is even more acute due to lack of unity in the ASEAN countries’ position. Oftentimes, rhetoric coming out of Vietnam, the Philippines, and other Southeast Asian countries involved in the dispute emphasize their individual claims in the South China Sea over and against China’s claims, but they do not take the next step of forming a united front in the face of China’s aggression. Incohesiveness and lack of concrete cooperation by the Southeast Asian countries allow for China to effectively use the “divide and conquer” strategy in the South China Sea. When it comes to the bargaining table with China, these individual countries probably do not fare much better than Vietnam.
With the present situation it is unlikely that any solution that comes out of the bilateral negotiation between Vietnam and China can favor the Vietnamese side. We can also be sure that China will do everything possible to ensure that the opposite is true.
However, one test of China’s sincerity in finding a real and lasting solution based on internationally accepted maritime law as it espouses is for China to officially get rid of the line that forms the shape of the cow tongue on the map of the South China Sea. This is obviously the first thing that needs to be done since China’s delineation is completely illegal and unprecedented. The fact that since this depiction was first introduced in 1947, China has never taken the time to define the coordinates speaks to the completely unreasonable nature of this claim. If China continues to use this line either in territorial claims or in map depictions in China, then the world can conclude that China’s words again prove disingenuous and the calls for cooperation are but hollow rhetoric.
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