Taiwan pours cement on maritime
dispute By Jens Kastner
TAIPEI - The administration of Taiwanese
President Ma Ying-jeou has been finding itself
under pressure lately to give up on its hallmark
low-key stance on sovereignty issues in disputed
waters. To appease those who want him to be more
aggressive, he reportedly plans to extend a runway
on Taiping, a Taiwan-controlled island in the
South China Sea. If true, the move isn't too bad
an example of political maneuvering.
With
its distance of about 500 kilometers to southern
Vietnam and 400km to the Philippine island of
Palawan, Taiping Island lies right in the middle
of the hotly disputed sea, which was recently
described by Taipei-based journalist J Michael
Cole a piece of "precious real estate" in Taiwan’s
hands. Occupied by the
Taiwanese coast guard, it
is the largest of the Spratly Islands (Nansha in
Chinese) and the only one that comes along with
fresh water.
The body of water Taiping
occupies is claimed fully by Beijing and Taipei
and partially by Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia and the
Philippines, and is believed to hold significant
reserves of oil and natural gas, and recently even
the magic term "rare earths" has begun popping up
in academic papers. But while whoever controls
Taiping might not only one day gain economic
advantages but also some strategic ones, Taiwan
can't capitalize on it for the time being.
Because of their international isolation,
the Taiwanese have little to say in bilateral and
multilateral dispute-solving mechanisms. To
exploit resources that might or might not be
there, they don't have the technical means
mainland China has, such as the brand-new floating
oil rig and the Jialong submersible, which made a
record 7,000-meter dive last month. And Taipei
hardly harbors ambitions to start a military
crusade against the South China Sea's other
claimants. As cooperation in disputed waters with
Beijing is still far too sensitive a topic to
touch for the Ma administration, more than
anything, the control of Taiping is merely a
burden to the Taiwanese taxpayer.
"It's
not especially strategically significant for
Taiwan, since Taiwan lacks the forces to do much
with it," James Holmes, an associate professor at
the US Naval War College, said in an interview
with Asia Times Online. "Keeping it away from
China might even give it negative value for the
Taiwanese."
While the possession of
Taiping Island seems a mixed blessing to Taiwan,
it is rather obvious that Beijing, which has been
making a lot of headlines recently with taking on
Manila and Hanoi in the South China Sea and Tokyo
in the East China Sea, would value the island more
significantly.
However, according to
Holmes, it is not so much the South China Sea
context in which Taiping would make for a splendid
platform for Beijing's military planners, as "any
spot in the South China Sea can be reached from
one or another of the coastal states' shores with
relative ease", but rather the "Malacca Dilemma".
The narrow strait separating Indonesia, Malaysia
and Singapore, all of which are considered
friendly to the US, must be sailed through by the
container ships carrying raw materials from Africa
and the Persian Gulf to feed the Chinese economy,
and likewise by vessels bringing Chinese goods to
the European and other markets, so that the
possibility of a US-imposed blockade of the
Malacca Strait is a real nightmare to Beijing.
"As I understand it, Taiping Island is big
enough to become a logistical hub; if China gained
control of it, that would get the Chinese military
about halfway to the Malacca Strait - no small
thing," Holmes said.
Beijing has long
urged the Taiwanese to "protect common ancestral
rights" jointly, and relatively recently it began
to offer also the joint exploitation of the South
China Sea's resources. Beijing likely regards the
Taiwanese coast guard on Taiping Island as a
useful place holder, and furthermore sees the
sovereignty disputes in both the South and East
China Seas as tools to make the Taiwanese no
longer regard the mainland as the enemy but
instead to take on the other claimants,
particularly Vietnam and Japan.
To
manipulate Taiwanese public opinion and political
decision-making, Beijing has been employing its
"United Front" apparatus, which relies on local
beneficiaries of Beijing's preferential economic
treatment to achieve its political means in
Taiwan. Thinly veiled examples of how this goes
appeared to have been the recent demand by Chiu
Yi, board director of Taiwan's state-run oil
company CPC Corp, that Taiwan and the mainland
should jointly exploit the sea environment around
Taiping Island. Chiu singled out Vietnam as the
"greatest threat".
Albert Wu, chairman of
the Council for Industrial and Commercial
Development, a group whose businesses' aggregated
output constitutes more than 48% of Taiwan's gross
domestic product, urged the Ma administration to
open Taiping Island to tourism, despite that there
arguably wouldn't be much money to be made, and
also an opinion poll jointly conducted by the
Chinese Communist Party's Global Times and
Taiwanese tycoon Tsai Eng-meng's China Times is to
be seen in this context.
That poll
surprised hugely with the finding that 51.1% of
the Taiwanese respondents were in favor of
cooperating with the mainland against Japan on the
Diaoyutai Islands (Senkaku in Japanese), a set of
Japan-controlled islands in the East China Sea
claimed also by Beijing and Taipei. A total of
41.2% of the Taiwanese even supported use of
force, at least according to the unholy
cross-strait media pair.
The fact that
certain Taiwanese lawmakers have begun pushing
hard for the militarization of Taiping Island
might also well go into the same direction. A
vocal group surrounding Kuomintang legislator Lin
Yu-fang has protested numerous times of Vietnamese
"incursions", and called for the deployment of
marines on Taiping, as well as that of mortars,
surface-to-air missiles, anti-aircraft guns, etc.
Non-government organizations too have
their prominent role to play in forcing the Ma
administration's hand: In early July, Taiwanese
activists belonging to the Baodiao (Defend the
Diaoyu Islands) movement sailed to the disputed
islands and engaged in a tense standoff with
Japanese patrol boats there, while waving not the
Taiwanese flag but that of mainland China.
As this incident played out under the
watchful eye of the Taiwanese coast guard, which,
after having received orders from the government's
highest echelons, has escorted the activists all
the way to the Diaoyutai, it somewhat made it look
as if Taipei indeed considers siding with Beijing
against Tokyo, which all but certainly was
precisely the outcome Beijing had envisaged in the
first place.
To all appearances, Taipei's
alleged plan to extend the runway on Taiping by
500 meters is a response to the pressure that has
been building up. Once the Chinese-language
Liberty Times broke the story, it was picked up by
foreign wire services and commentators all around
the South China Sea. That the reports have been
taken seriously by other claimants has become
somewhat evident, as Hanoi has since proactively
warned Taipei not to carry out the move.
The news on the extension fired up
speculations, most notably that the longer runway
is meant to facilitate the P-3C Orion maritime
patrol aircraft, which Taiwan will take into
service next year. The P-3Cs bring along
anti-submarine capabilities and could monitor most
of the South China Sea.
But pouring cement
to make a runway longer - while certain to produce
a fair amount of headlines - is not quite the same
thing as stationing marines and military-grade
weapons.
According to Steve Tsang,
director of the University of Nottingham's China
Policy Institute, extending the runway does not
imply that fixed-wing aircraft will be actually
based there. Also, he doesn't think the alleged
plans have to do with Taipei wishing to apply
leverage either by way of cross-strait relations
of those with the Association of Southeast Asian
Nations.
"I have no inside information on
why the runway is to be extended," Tsang said.
"But it can be a clever way to strike a balance
between meeting the pressure from those who want
to see Taiwan's government taking a more assertive
stance over the islets and the sensible policy of
not picking a fight with anyone."
Jens Kastner is a Taipei-based
journalist.
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