Page 1 of
2 China
makes a splash with coastguard
rules By Peter Lee
New
regulations for the Hainan Province Coast Guard -
summarized in People's Republic of China (PRC)
news agency reports on November 28 but as yet not
published in full - generated a spasm of anxiety
through the region and around the world.
Part of the anxiety was due to alarmist
reporting by some otherwise prestigious outlets -
more on that later - but the PRC government
deserves the lion’s share of the blame for its
sudden, incomplete, and ambiguous announcement.
If the PRC is going to succeed in its
objective of ordering affairs in the South China
Seas to its liking through bilateral negotiations
with a number of rightfully resentful and
suspicious states - chiefly Vietnam and the
Philippines - it will have to communicate its
tactical moves as
escalations and concessions carefully calibrated
to the demands of each local hot spot.
To
play the rogue dragon blundering through the
southern oceans simply reinforces the conviction
of China’s neighbors that better behavior and,
perhaps, better results can be obtained by the
solution that the PRC abhors: the aggrieved
nations clubbing together through the Association
of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and with the
support of the United States pursuing negotiations
in a multilateral forum.
Announcing the
new Hainan regulations through fragmentary reports
invited China’s South China Sea
adversaries/interlocutors to spin the news to suit
their priorities and preoccupations.
Judging from the agency reports, the meat
of the Hainan regulations was this:
Police in Hainan will be authorized
to board and search ships that illegally enter
the province's waters in 2013, the latest
Chinese effort to protect the South China Sea.
Under a set of regulation revisions the
Hainan People's Congress approved on Tuesday,
provincial border police are authorized to board
or seize foreign ships that illegally enter the
province's waters and order them to change
course or stop sailing.
The full texts
of the regulations, which take effect on Jan 1,
will soon be released to the public, said Huang
Shunxiang, director of the congress's press
office.
Activities such as entering the
island province's waters without permission,
damaging coastal defense facilities, and
engaging in publicity that threatens national
security are illegal.
If foreign ships
or crew members violate regulations, Hainan
police have the right to take over the ships or
their communications systems, under the revised
regulations. [1]
The next day, a
Reuters report from Jakarta interviewed Surin
Pitsawan, secretary-general of ASEAN, and came up
with: ASEAN chief voices alarm at China plan to
board ships in disputed waters. [2]
The
Reuters article occasioned a concerned post by
James Fallows at the Atlantic magazine's website:
"The Next Global Hot Spot to Worry About". [3]
Agence France-Presse's lede eschewed nuance and
accuracy to push the "PRC restricting freedom of
navigation" hot button:
China has granted its border patrol
police the right to board and turn away foreign
ships entering disputed waters in the South
China Sea... [4]
Then it was the turn
of the New York Times on December 1 to deliver an
anxiety upgrade: "Alarm as China Issues Rules for
Disputed Area". [5] Manila Times added a serving
of gasoline to the fire: "Chinese Police to Seize
Foreign Ships in Spratlys". [6] The Indian Express
evoked the Hainan regulations in its coverage:
"Ready to Protect Indian Interests in South China
Sea: Navy Chief". [7]
The reliably
unreliable Foreign Policy magazine website (which
recently elevated artist-provocateur-Twittermaster
Ai Weiwei to its list of 100 top world thinkers
while ignoring the determinedly thoughtful,
imprisoned, and Twitter-deprived Nobel laureate
Liu Xiaobo) outsourced its Hainan Coast Guard
coverage to an "It's the end of the world!"
commentary titled "Will China Go to War in 2013?"
from the conservative American Enterprise
Institute. It proposed the foreign policy
prescription:
Washington needs to make clear in
the strongest possible terms that freedom of
navigation won't be interfered with under any
circumstances, and that the US Navy will
forcibly prevent any ship from being boarded or
turned around by Chinese vessels. [8]
Thankfully, the Obama administration
did nothing of the sort. As reported by the New
York Times, it simply stated:
"All concerned parties should avoid
provocative unilateral actions that raise
tensions and undermine the prospects for a
diplomatic or other peaceful resolution."
This was probably in response to a
careful and informed reading of the news reports
concerning the new coastguard regulations, coupled
with the understanding that the Chinese
coastguard's area of responsibility is within the
PRC's 12-mile (19.3 kilometer) coastal waters
immediately contiguous to the various pesky
islands (the wide open spaces of the South China
Sea within the PRC's notorious nine-dash line fall
under the purview of the Maritime Surveillance
Force).
The target of the regulations is
not vessels exercising freedom of navigation to
transit China's claimed exclusive economic zone,
so the World War III hysterics of the American
Enterprise Institute were apparently misplaced.
M Taylor Fravel, a professor of political
science at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, contributed an analysis to The
Diplomat which concluded:
[T]he actions outlined above are all
concerned with Chinese territory or territorial
waters - not the much larger maritime areas that
press accounts have suggested. This is,
moreover, consistent with the duties of the
China's public security border defense units
that are the subject of the regulations. [9]
The PRC government belatedly got on
the case, clarifying that the Hainan coastguard
regulations had nothing to do with impairing the
free navigation of foreign vessels transiting the
South China Sea. On November 30, Xinhua reported
that the PRC Foreign Ministry had addressed the
anxiety over the coastguard's declaration of its
right to stop and board foreign vessels that
illegally enter its waters:
"China highly values free navigation
in the South China Sea," Hong said. "At present,
there are no problems in this regard." [10]
In this context, I would voice the
opinion that "the PRC threat to freedom of
navigation in the South China Sea" is a canard
that the United States happily encourages in order
to claim relevance in the otherwise remote reaches
of the Pacific Ocean. The majority of traffic
passing through the area is going to and from
China, and if the PRC wished to commit economic
suicide by shutting down shipping in these waters,
it could do so largely by closing its own ports.
Japan has exhaustively researched the strategic
vulnerabilities of the Malacca Strait/South China
Sea route and determined that they could be
bypassed at the significant but not fatal cost of
a 10% increase in shipping costs (super-large ore
carriers destined for Japan already avoid the
South China Sea and transit the Sunda Strait on
the east side of the island of Indonesia). I leave
it to experts in the field to determine whether
world peace - or even the access of Vietnam and
the Philippines to the international trade regime
- would be fatally compromised by the unlikely
event of absolute Chinese interdiction of
third-country marine traffic through its claimed
exclusive economic zone in the South China Sea.
The PRC recognizes freedom of navigation for
transiting vessels as an absolute red line that
should not be crossed (if there are any doubts, I
suggest that interested readers explore the PRC's
long-standing and vociferous opposition to the US
promotion of the Proliferation Security
Initiative, which is designed to allow transiting
vessels to be stopped and boarded by the naval
forces of do-gooder nations in search of nefarious
cargoes). In any case, if the PRC wishes to engage
in piracy of transiting ships and trigger a global
economic and security crisis, the heavy lifting
will not be done by the Hainan Coast Guard.
Fallows kindly posted some points I made
concerning the import of the new regulations,
which I reproduce here:
1. They are part of an
upgrade/clarification of coastguard regs
throughout China. Media reports show that, for
instance Hebei and Zhejianghave also issued new
regulations at the same time.
2. It
appears their target is nationalist
demonstrators from neighboring nations intent on
island-related mischief. The main purpose of the
new regs is to establish a clear public policy
allowing for the coastguard to take action
against people who try to land on the islands or
sail around the islands and [irritate] the PRC
(like the Taiwanese and Hong Kong demonstrators
did to Japan around the Senkakus). I'm assuming
that's the reason why the coastguard announced
it is not going to permit any "hooliganism"
inside China's claimed territorial waters (a
catch-all term for activity without a clearly
identified legitimate purpose, according to the
PRC and in this case probably includes spraying
coastguard vessels with fire hoses, hotdogging,
etc.).
3. So the new regs forbid
crossing borders or entering ports without
permission; illegal island landings; messing
with facilities on islands China claims;
propaganda that violates China's sovereignty or
national security. The regs are written not to
impinge on lawful freedom of transit. The
coastguard is only supposed to go after ships
that illegally "stop or drop anchor" while
transiting.
4. I think the reason why
the Hainan regulations were given such
prominence is because the PRC wanted to put the
Philippines and Vietnam on notice that sending
out nationalist armadas/landing parties to
contested islands would elicit an escalating
response from the Chinese. Going after
demonstrators in an organized, legalistic way
(instead of ad hoc reactive response) is a
relatively cheap and easy way for the PRC to
assert and demonstrate effective sovereignty of
the areas it claims. One could call this
escalation, and/or an attempt to set clear
ground rules to help avoid conflict.
5.
I see the intent of the regulations as written
is to promote the PRC's idea of routine, lawful
maritime enforcement. It will be interesting to
see how energetically this is spun as "PRC
violates freedom of navigation".
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