Taiwan circling South China Sea
bait By Jens Kastner
TAIPEI - With mainland China and Taiwan
clinging to all but identical territorial claims,
Beijing has offered Taipei a chance to jointly
explore resource-rich waters in the South China
Sea at the expense of other claimants.
While economically the bait seems too good
to resist for Taiwan, an island barren not only of
natural gas and oil fields but also diplomatic
clout, its government under President Ma Ying-jeou
will be wary of touching this political hot
potato. BR> The term "energy security"
describes a concept that is outright exotic to the
Taiwanese. While the United States manages to
produce 70% of its own primary energy supply, and
China over 80%, only 0.6% of the petroleum,
natural gas and coal Taiwan uses is actually
pumped or dug up on the island or in its
surrounding waters.
Fuels that keep the
Taiwanese economy alive are shipped from
the Persian Gulf,
western Africa or mainland China, and if for
whatever reasons those supplies were to be choked
off or become enormously expensive, economic
activity on the island would quickly collapse.
Also, the development of nuclear power is a tricky
option as Taiwan is very earthquake-prone, and
renewable energy, electric vehicles and green
buildings do not promise to become a panacea any
time soon.
Beijing is now presenting a way
out of the precarious situation. It has invited
the Taiwanese to have a big share of the energy
cake believed to be at the doorsteps of both
sides.
"That mainland China and Taiwan
begin jointly exploiting the South China Sea is a
good idea," China's Taiwan Affairs Office
spokeswoman Fan Liqing recently told reporters in
Hong Kong. "China holds indisputable sovereignty
over the South China Sea and other near waters,
and both sides of the Taiwan Strait have the
shared responsibility to protect it."
Taiwan claims about 3.5 million square
kilometers of the South China Sea just as the the
mainland does. According to mainland estimates,
underneath that body of water, claimed wholly or
in part by mainland China, Taiwan, the
Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei, lie oil
and natural gas reserves good for more than 60
years of current mainland demand.
But
while Beijing has the economic might, diplomatic
clout and military power to make its voice heard
in the sovereignty disputes with South East Asia
nations, Taipei has neither.
Taiwan-controlled Taiping Island, or Itu
Aba, which is the largest of the potentially
oil-rich Nansha Islands group, or Spratlys, is too
far from Taiwan for Taipei to have a realistic
chance of protecting it against aggression. Even
more of a problem is Taiwan's diplomatic
isolation.
Taiwan's claims are based on
the United Nations Convention on the Law of the
Sea (UNCLOS), but Taiwan isn't a party to UNCLOS,
or indeed any other UN body or agreement.
As no one in the region recognizes
Taiwan's statehood, Taipei's claims are all too
easily laughed off by the 10-member Association of
Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), of which Vietnam
and the Philippines, the principle antagonists of
mainland China and Taiwan in the South China Sea
dispute, are members. In more concrete diplomatic
terms, Taiwan is excluded from participation in an
ASEAN-initiated multilateral mechanism to resolve
disputes and also from other bilateral ones.
That Beijing seeks to tie Taiwan ever
tighter is no secret. To meet its objective of
cross-strait unification, its strong position in
the South China Sea dispute comes is a handy tool
in combination with Taiwan's precarious energy
situation.
Since as early as in 1994,
China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC)
and Taiwan's state-owned oil refiner CPC
Corporation have been collaborating, and in the
beginning of the last decade, they conducted joint
surveys in the Tai-Chao basin, which is west of
the Taiwan Strait's mid-line - the mainland side.
In 2005, CNOOC proposed a similar
undertaking but this time in the east of the
Taiwan Strait's mid-line - which is the side under
Taiwanese control - but that was rejected by
pro-independence Chen Shui-bian, who in those days
had the say in Taipei. When Ma Ying-jeou, of the
Beijing-friendly Kuomintang (KMT), became
president in 2008, he lifted Chen's ban a month
after his inauguration, allowing joint research to
be done east of the Taiwan Strait's median line -
in Taiwanese waters.
According to
contested claims by Taiwanese academia, there is a
rare bi-partisan consensus between Taiwan's ruling
KMT and the opposition anti-unification Democratic
Progressive Party (DPP) that CNOOC and CPC develop
oil and gas ventures in the northern waters of the
South China Sea near the Taiwan-controlled Dongsha
Islands, or Pratas, where there are no claimants
other than China and Taiwan.
It has also
been suggested that with the help of CNOOC's first
deep-water drilling rig, which started operation
in early May, CNOOC and CPC could after a warm up
phase in the north shift exploration further
south, where Vietnam and the Philippines have
claims as well as mainland China and Taiwan.
The Vietnamese have become increasingly
brazen in those waters, claim lawmakers in Taipei.
They counted 42 Vietnamese intrusions within six
kilometers of Taiwan-controlled Taiping Island in
2010, 106 last year and 41 in the first four
months of this year. The Vietnamese even opened
fire earlier this year at the Taiwanese coast
guard stationed on the island, according to
Taiwanese pro-Beijing media, a claim Hanoi denies.
As yet another recent indicator that
Taiwan is beginning to view South East Asian
nations, particularly Vietnam, as the imaginary
enemy rather than mainland China, retired Admiral
Fei Hung-po, Taiwan's former deputy chief of
general staff, remarked in early June that unlike
the Taiwanese Navy, the mainland's People's
Liberation Army (PLA) would be capable of
guaranteeing Taiping's protection.
From
the day Taipei appreciates that the PLA Navy's
destroyers, amphibious landing ships and
helicopter-carriers can provide a protective hand
for Dongsha and Taiping, the argument for solid
cross-strait military cooperation is given
overwhelming power, according to one school of
thought.
Tsai Der-sheng, the head of
Taiwan's principle intelligence agency claims
Hanoi and Manila are already concerned about such
an outcome. The two governments have lately been
trying to persuade Taipei not to side with Beijing
in the South China Sea. There are also signs that
Washington is worried. US officials at the just
concluded annual Shangri-La Dialogue, an
unofficial security forum in Singapore bringing
together defense ministers and military chiefs of
Asia-Pacific powers, in private expressed a "high
degree of concern," according to a report by the
Taipei Times.
Taipei is likely to be
cautious before accepting the mainland offer.
Huang Kwei-Bo, a visiting fellow at the Brookings
Institution's Center for Northeast Asian Policy
Studies, was "very confident" that the Ma
administration "will carry on exerting a great
deal of caution and self-restraint to deal with
this issue." So far, Taiwan's attitude toward the
South China Sea territorial dispute has so far
been very reasonable, he said.
Steve
Tsang, director of the University of Nottingham's
China Policy Institute, said that if Beijing
should seek cooperation from the Ma administration
"it would be extremely awkward for Ma; it would be
political dynamite in Taiwan. If I were in Ma's
administration, I would do all I could to persuade
Beijing not to push for such a matter."
Tsang questioned the rationale of the
supposed CNOOC-CPC proposal to start cooperation
first in waters solely claimed by Beijing and
Taipei then move elsewhere at the expense of ASEAN
nations.
"Unless one of the states will
give a state-issued insurance, it is hard to see
any oil major agreeing to be a party to
prospecting where a serious sovereignty dispute
and the risk of the use of force exist," Tsang
said. The supposed strategy is something
nationalist elements in the mainland could spend
their days chatting about rather than it being
actual government policy in Beijing, he said.
As for Washington, "the USA will have an
interest to pre-empt major developments over
disputes of the islets unless they head in a
direction of multilateral international joint
efforts that will replace the sovereignty dispute
by multinational cooperations," Tsang said.
"For this reason, I cannot see Washington
welcoming the prospect of a joint PRC-ROC
[mainland-Taiwan] exploration that does not
involve the other claimants. I would be surprised
if Washington would not make its views understood
by Taipei, should there be any risk of its
position not being crystal clear."
Huang
at the Brookings Institution believes that the
mainland offer could be seen by the Taiwanese as
signifying a potential dead end to Taipei's
diplomatic ambitions in the region.
"Taiwan's incentive for such cooperation
can be diminished to a great extent if Beijing is
eagerly promoting it on the one hand, but on the
other is very reluctant to include Taiwan in major
regional mechanisms aimed at managing the South
China Sea issue," Huang said.
Jens
Kastner is a Taipei-based journalist.
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