Map: Territorial Disputes in the Waters Near China

Map: Territorial Disputes in the Waters Near China

The episode between the Chinese and Vietnamese fishing vessels came after anti-Chinese riots in Vietnam resulted in the deaths of four Chinese workers and injuries to more than 100. China evacuated several thousand workers from Vietnam last week.

A report by Xinhua on Tuesday cited Cnooc as saying that the rig had finished its first phase of operation and would stay in the area until mid-August. The Vietnamese Fisheries Resources Surveillance Department said the rig was moved about a few hundred feet north on Sunday, but the significance of the move was not immediately clear.

In a signal of how China, under the leadership of President Xi Jinping, now views the South China Sea as a top foreign policy priority, the country’s vice foreign minister said Tuesday that the sea was central to China's very existence as a global economic power.

“Being the lifeline for China, the South China Sea is far more important to China than to other countries,” the minister, Liu Zhenmin, told reporters in Beijing.

China and Vietnam have enjoyed good relations between the Communist parties that run the two governments, and according to people close to the Vietnamese, the parking of the oil rig in disputed waters came as a surprise.

Since May 1, China has declined to hold substantive talks with Vietnam on the rig or the territorial claims in the South China Sea, a further indication of China’s resolve to make its claims unilaterally, Asian diplomats say. In response, Vietnam has threatened to take the matter to international arbitration, as the Philippines has already done.

The United States has urged restraint on both sides, and Adm. Samuel J. Locklear, the commander of the Pacific Fleet, warned last Friday that the proximity of the boats around the oil rig could lead to a collision.

It was initially impossible to determine whether the Chinese government controlled the Chinese fishing vessel involved in the clash, said Dennis J. Blasko, a former military attaché at the American embassy in Beijing. “We don’t know enough yet if this was coordinated or an individual action,” he said.

Many fishing boats are part of the Chinese militia, which are part of the Chinese armed forces, he said. “If the boat was part of the militia, it could have gotten an order fro the People’s Armed Forces Department,” he said.

The Chinese have publicly acknowledged that 80 percent of China’s fishing boats, including those operating out of Hainan, carry navigation equipment that is subsidized by the Chinese government.

The Beidou navigation satellite system, considered to be a Chinese version of GPS, allows the boats to send instant alarms and short messaging services, according to Qi Chengye, a manger of BDStar Navigation, which provides the Beidou system to Chinese vessels.

“The Chinese government is giving large subsidies to encourage fishermen to install BDS,” Mr. Qi said in an interview in Xinhua last year

NYT

U.S. Sway in Asia Is Imperiled as China Challenges Alliances

Photo

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel in Singapore on Friday. Credit Roslan Rahman/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

SINGAPORE — The Obama administration’s three-year-old plan to shift its foreign policy focus to Asia was supposed to shore up interests in a critical region, push new free trade pacts and re-establish United States influence as a balance to a growing China, after a decade of inattention.

But as Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel visited this city-state for a security conference with all of the interested parties on Friday, that much-vaunted Asia policy appeared to be turning into more of a neighborhood street fight, with the United States having to simultaneously choose sides and try to play the role of referee.

All around Asia, China is pushing and probing at America’s alliances, trying to loosen the bonds that have kept the countries close to Washington and allowed the United States to be the pre-eminent power in the region since World War II.

In just the past week, China traded punches with Vietnam and Japan. A Chinese fishing vessel rammed and sank a Vietnamese fishing boat on Monday near a Chinese deepwater oil rig that was placed in disputed waters off the coast of Vietnam. That confrontation followed a close encounter last Saturday in which two pairs of Chinese fighter jets flew close to Japanese surveillance and electronic intelligence planes, in disputed airspace claimed by both countries.

Map

Territorial Disputes in the Waters Near China

But taken together, those episodes form a pattern of escalating maritime and air tensions in the Pacific that have frustrated and worried American officials.

In his strongest words yet on the territorial disputes, Mr. Hagel on Saturday morning implicitly accused China of “intimidation and coercion” as he delivered his keynote address to the conference. China has called the South China Sea “a sea of peace, friendship and cooperation,” Mr. Hagel said. “But in recent months, China has undertaken destabilizing, unilateral actions asserting its claims in the South China Sea.”

China’s goal is to show Washington that if it maintains alliances in Asia, it risks a fight with Beijing, said Hugh White, a former senior Australian defense official who worked closely with Washington and is now professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University.

“China is deliberately doing these things to demonstrate the unsustainability of the American position of having a good relationship with China and maintaining its alliances in Asia, which constitute the leadership of the United States in Asia,” Mr. White said.

China is betting that America, tired and looking inward, will back off, he said, eroding its traditional place of influence in Asia and enhancing China’s power.

But even as Mr. Hagel and the United States have adopted a public posture that backs Japan — and, to a lesser extent, the Philippines, Vietnam and any other country that finds itself at odds with China — some administration officials have privately expressed frustration that the countries are all engaged in a game of chicken that could lead to war.

“None of those countries are helping matters,” a senior administration official said. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to talk candidly about American policy, said that the United States would publicly back Japan and that treaty obligations mean that if Japan and China go to war, the United States will almost certainly be dragged into it. But, he added, administration officials have privately prodded their Japanese counterparts to think carefully before acting, and to refrain from backing China into a corner.

“If these are kids in the schoolyard, they are running around with scissors,” said Vikram J. Singh, who until February was the United States deputy assistant secretary of defense for South and Southeast Asia and is now the vice president for national security at the Center for American Progress. “Wars start from small things, often by accident and miscalculation — like dangerous maneuvers by aircraft that result in a collision or aggressive moves that lead to an unexpected military response.”

Mr. Hagel, left, with the Australian and Japanese defense chiefs, David Johnston and Itsunori Onodera. Credit Pool photo by

Speaking at the opening session of the conference on Friday, Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, who has had a role in stirring tensions in the region by embracing a more assertive military stance, bypassed a question about whether he was willing to go to war with China over the disputed islands in the East China Sea, which Japan calls the Senkaku and China calls the Diaoyu. Instead, he said cryptically that it was “important that we all make efforts” so that certain “contingencies can be prevented.”

Mr. Hagel and the large American military contingent on hand, including Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Adm. Samuel J. Locklear III, the commander of the United States Pacific Command, spent their time shuttling from delegation to delegation to make sure those contingencies did not come up.

“Any good teacher knows that you want to get the kids to behave in the first place, rather than try to referee a dispute that breaks out,” said Andrew L. Oros, an associate professor of political science at Washington College in Chestertown, Md., and a specialist on East Asia.

But showing how deep some of the enmity runs, a Chinese officer in the audience took Mr. Abe to task for his visit last year to the Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japan’s war dead, including several war criminals who were executed after Japan’s defeat in World War II. The visit angered China and South Korea, which suffered under Japan’s empire-building efforts in the 20th century, and it annoyed the United States, which issued a statement calling the visit “an action that will exacerbate tensions with Japan’s neighbors.”

“Millions of people in China, Korea and many countries in this region have been killed by the Japanese Army,” the Chinese officer said, asking whether Mr. Abe planned to honor them. Mr. Abe spoke of the remorse that Japan felt after World War II. But he added that it was common for world leaders to honor those who fought for their country.

While much of the maritime and air disputes go back to ancient territorial claims, the Obama administration may have fanned the tensions with its shift toward Asia, some foreign policy experts said. Many Chinese believe that shift is intended to check China’s rise.

“For that reason, you cannot expect China to welcome the alliance system because it doesn’t serve China’s interest,” said Wu Xinbo, the director of the Center for American Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai.

“We need to innovate our security concepts, establish a new regional security cooperation architecture and jointly build a shared win-win road for Asian security,” Mr. Xi said at the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia, a group that includes China, Russia and Asian countries but not the United States, according to the state-run news agency Xinhua.

At another conference, in Beijing, Adm. Sun Jianguo, the deputy chief of the general staff of the People’s Liberation Army, expanded on Mr. Xi’s ideas, describing the American alliance system as an antiquated relic of the Cold War that should be replaced by an Asia-centric security architecture, participants said.

As word filtered through the region about Mr. Xi’s new concept — so far, only sketched in a bare-bones outline — it was referred to as “ ‘Asia for Asians,’ which means China decides as the biggest guy on the block,” said a senior Asian diplomat from a country allied with the United States, who declined to be named for fear of alienating China.