Page 1 of
2 The
riddle of the Scarborough Shoals By Peter Lee
What's the standoff
between China and the Philippines over an atoll in
the South China Sea all about? Is it a matter of
seafood and sovereignty ... or gas fields and
gambling?
To an outside observer, the
antics of China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Japan,
Taiwan and Malaysia over conflicting territorial
claims smack of farce auditioning for tragedy, and
ridiculous claims abound.
Most notorious
is the infamous Chinese nine-dash line, a
scrotum-shaped outrage that extends from Hainan
Island to brush the shores of Vietnam, Malaysia
and the Philippines, and encompasses almost the
entire South China Sea.
Less well known,
perhaps because of Western sympathies
toward non-Chinese
claimants, is what might be termed the Vietnamese
flying rectangle. It uses a claim over the Paracel
Islands south of Hainan (which China seized in a
bloody and much-resented incident in 1974) to
project a claim through the center of the South
China Sea almost to the western shore of the
Philippines.
Beyond overlapping lines on
the map, the situation is compounded by the welter
of weather stations and lighthouses various
claimants have erected and defended on the various
forsaken rocks and atolls in the sea to strengthen
their sovereignty claims.
These
discontinuous and opportunistic claims make a
mockery of any attempt to divide the atolls into
neat, rational jurisdictions.
It would
seem the only way out of this mess would be joint
development through some regional mechanism.
So when China asserts a nine-dash line
claim far from its mainland and close to the shore
of some overmatched country like the Philippines
and repudiates any form of third-party mediation,
the Chinese action is understandably attributed to
some combination of arrogance, obtuseness and
appetite for aggression.
Reuters threw
another possibility in the mix: that the Chinese
government has lost its geopolitical marbles and
its South China Seas policy is simply a stewpot of
conflicting ad hoc initiatives.
As tension mounted at Scarborough
Shoal, the Brussels-based International Crisis
Group warned in a report late last month that
China's poorly coordinated and sometimes
competing civilian agencies were inflaming
frictions over disputed territory.
"Any
future solution to the South China Sea dispute
needs to address the problem of China's mix of
diverse actors and construct a coherent and
centralized maritime policy and law enforcement
strategy," it said. [1]
But a closer
look reveals that there is some genuine method to
the madness and the Chinese government has drawn
certain lessons from past maritime debacles, most
notably the Diaoyutai/Senkaku Islands crisis with
Japan.
In the matter of the Scarborough
Shoal mess, it should be admitted that the
Philippines started it.
In 2009, the
Philippine government passed the Philippine
Archipelagic Baseline Law asserting jurisdiction
over Scarborough Shoal (which it calls the Panatag
Shoal and China calls Huangyan Dao). The Chinese
ambassador promptly protested, and the Philippine
government declared it would work on the issue
with China under the guidelines of the Declaration
of the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea,
a standstill agreement between China and the
10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations
(ASEAN) calling for self-restraint and peaceful
resolution of disputes. [2]
No apparent
progress was made, and on April 11, 2012, the
Philippine navy stopped and boarded eight Chinese
fishing vessels in the shoals. In order to
demonstrate that the Chinese fishermen had not
been innocently deep-sea fishing in the area, the
navy took pictures of one of the crews standing on
a pile of giant clams presumably taken from the
shoal. The Philippine government made noises about
arresting the Chinese crew for poaching.
This scenario has a familiar ring to it,
if one remembers the Diaoyutai/Senkaku Islands
incident of 2010. It began with a similar
confrontation between Chinese fishing boats and
Japanese Coast Guard vessels. That situation
rapidly escalated thanks to the intemperance of
the Chinese captain, who collided with Japanese
Coast Guard vessels while trying to evade
boarding, and the political calculations of Seiji
Maehara, the ambitious Japanese home minister and
darling of the US State Department.
In the
Japanese case, the boat was seized and the crew
arrested, a trial of the obdurate Captain Zhan was
threatened and, when China predictably went
ballistic and choked off rare earth shipments,
Maehara jetted off to obtain the support of the US
government.
The rest is China-bashing
history as the Diaoyutai/Senkaku incident became
the centerpiece of argument that a strong ASEAN-US
alliance was necessary to forestall Chinese
bullying in the South China Sea.
History
did not repeat itself in the Scarborough Shoals
case.
First of all, two Chinese Coast
Guard vessels popped over the horizon and placed
themselves between the Philippine navy cutter and
the fishing boats, preventing a seizure of the
vessels and crews.
Secondly, when
President Benigno Aquino tried to pull a Maehara
and invoke US backup for the Philippines position,
he was met with an open rebuff in the most
unlikely of venues: the "2+2" meeting in
Washington between the Defense and Foreign
ministers of the US and the Philippines, a major
reboot of the fraught security relationship
between the two countries and an obvious venue for
some bracing freedom/alliance/strategic pivot
rhetoric.
However, as the Philippine Daily
Inquirer reported on May 2:
The United States says it will help
build the Philippines' sea patrol capability but
will not take sides in that nation's standoff
with China at a disputed shoal in the South
China Sea ... [US Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton] voiced concern about Scarborough Shoal,
repeating that Washington does not take sides on
competing sovereignty claims ...
[3]
Actually, this was also the United
States position on the Diaoyutai/Senkaku
confrontation. The Barack Obama administration had
already notified the Japanese government that it
would not explicitly include the Diaoyutai/Senkaku
islands in the scope of the US-Japan Security
Treaty.
The only difference was, the US
didn't explicitly state its position and let
Maehara, by then Japan's foreign secretary, spin
the situation to his advantage, something that
most media outlets overlooked in the furor but
Asia Times Online reported at the time:
After Maehara visited with Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton in New York, AFP
reported: "According to the Japanese minister,
Clinton said that the Senkakus ... are subject
to Article 5 of the bilateral security treaty,
which authorizes the US to protect Japan in the
event of an armed attack 'in the territories
under the administration of Japan'," the report
said.
Whatever was said in private,
publicly the State Department did not inject
itself in the controversy by explicitly
extending the US security umbrella over the
Senkakus. According to the AFP report, State
Department spokesperson Crowley limited himself
to the observation that the Senkaku issue was
"complicated". [4]
After the 2+2
confab, the Philippine Foreign Ministry tried to
tear a page from the Japanese playbook and
unilaterally claim US backup. However, lacking the
temerity to assert that the Mutual Defense Treaty
covered Scarborough Shoal issue (as Maehara had
done for Senkaku/Diaoyutai), the Department of
Foreign Affairs statement had little impact:
The United States has publicly
declared four times that it would honor the 1951
Mutual Defense Treaty that obliges American
troops to help defend the Philippines if it
comes under attack, the Philippine Department of
Foreign Affairs (DFA) said on Wednesday. [5]
In 2012, the US government apparently
decided not to accord the Philippines and Aquino
the same slack it gave Japan and Maehara in 2010.
This probably has less to do with
Clinton's timidity about pulling the tail of the
Chinese dragon than it does with the Philippines'
status as a Tier II Asian ally, a rung far below
the favored position of Japan.
Japan,
after all, is the primary host for America's
military facilities in the Pacific; the
constitution of the Philippines, on the other
hand, explicitly precludes the establishment of
foreign military bases inside the country.
More to the point, Japan, now actively
working to free itself from the straitjacket of
its peace constitution, is a military and economic
powerhouse with a tradition of anti-Chinese
aggression it has never quite repudiated, and the
capability, doctrine, and public support to serve
as the local surrogate for whatever contain-China
policy the US selects.
The Philippines, on
the other hand, is cruelly described as a military
doormat. It's also a doormat that probably reads
"Welcome China".
Over 20% of Filipinos are
of Chinese extraction or claim a partially Chinese
heritage; Filipino Chinese are also a major
commercial force within the country. Closer
commercial and investment ties with mainland China
are an obvious potential solution to the economic
woes of the Philippines.
The Philippines
is, therefore, a US ally of questionable
reliability and efficacy. In order to gain the
full backing of the United States it would
probably have to do a few things, like finding a
way to expand the US military presence beyond the
650 troops currently "rotating" through the
Philippines (and almost violating the Philippine
constitution) for anti-terrorism advisory duties;
buying a significant quantity of US armaments; and
showing suitable anti-Chinese bravado.
So
far, the Aquino government has come up short in
these three categories, for a variety of political
and economic reasons.
The Scarborough
Shoal affair, in particular, has been markedly
lacking in anti-Chinese catharsis.
In the
past four weeks, a variety of fishing and
enforcement vessels have wandered in and out of
the shoal as the foreign ministries of China and
the Philippines engaged in jaw-jaw amid the usual
jingoistic idiocy of cyber-attacks, half-hearted
demonstrations, eye-glazing parsing of legal and
historical claims to the atoll, and provocative
rhetoric in state-run or state-friendly media.
This week, both countries announced a
fishing ban covering the shoal, while insisting,
albeit unconvincingly, that their parallel actions
were nothing more than coincidental unilateral
moves to protect the region's precious marine
resources from over-fishing.
In practical
terms, the ban also represented a further mutual
de-escalation of the conflict, at least until it
erupts again.
This unproductive sound and
fury - with the unnerving possibility that a
regional conflict might break out over a coral
atoll filled with giant clams - would seem to
strengthen the case that bilateral negotiation of
these contentious issues is a dead end, and a
multilateral dogpile under the aegis of ASEAN and
the United Nations is needed.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
