China-Vietnam Meeting Does Little to Ease Territorial Tensions

China-Vietnam Meeting Does Little to Ease Territorial Tensions

JUNE 18, 2014

HONG KONG — China and Vietnam exchanged sharp views Wednesday in their dispute over a Chinese oil rig deployed in contested waters in the South China Sea near Vietnam’s coast and appear to have made little headway in cooling tensions, according to a summary of a top-level meeting in Hanoi released by China’s Foreign Ministry.

China’s state councilor, Yang Jiechi, accused Vietnam, which has sent ships to the area, of conducting “unlawful interference” in the operations of the rig, and told Vietnam that China would “take all necessary measures to safeguard its national sovereignty,” the ministry said in the statement.

The uncompromising language was unusual for a diplomatic statement describing discussions between two Communist countries, and reflected China’s unyielding position since it sent the rig last month to a position 120 miles off the coast of Vietnam and close to the Paracel Islands, which both countries claim.

Mr. Yang, China’s most senior diplomat and a former foreign minister, met in Hanoi with Vietnam’s Foreign Minister, Pham Binh Minh, and then with Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung and the general secretary of the Communist Party, Nguyen Phu Trong.

During the meeting with Mr. Minh, the Chinese diplomat said that the Paracel Islands were “China’s inherent territory and that there is no dispute,” the foreign ministry said. Vietnam says the waters around the oil rig are its territory because they fall within its 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone.

To protect the rig, China has dispatched a large contingent of Coast Guard vessels that have established a perimeter. A smaller flotilla of Vietnamese Coast Guard and fishing boats try to penetrate the cordon, and the vessels from each side ram each other on a regular basis. The Chinese have used water cannons to keep the Vietnamese boats at bay.

Military ships from both sides are in the general area of the rig, according to American officials.

In a war over the Paracels in 1974, China seized control of the southern islands in the chain from South Vietnam.

To back up its claim to the Paracels, China recently released a 1958 letter from Pham Van Dong, then the prime minister of Vietnam,, to Premier Zhou Enlai of China. It said that Vietnam recognized China’s sovereignty over the islands. Vietnam has argued the letter has no validity because it was written under duress.

Vietnam made no official announcement immediately after Mr. Yang’s visit to Hanoi. But the Chinese foreign ministry noted in its statement that the Vietnamese foreign minister “elaborated on Vietnam’s position and views on maritime issues.”

The arrival of the rig so close to the Paracels has become a defining event in the mounting campaign by China to control the South China Sea, a vital waterway for international commerce.

In an effort to discourage China’s claims, Vietnam has threatened to launch an international lawsuit against Beijing. The Philippines, an ally of the United States, recently opened an arbitration case in the United Nations against China over competing claims in the South China Sea, an action that has infuriated the Chinese government.

Before the Hanoi meeting, the first at a senior level since May 2, experts had predicted both sides would stubbornly stick to their views.

“China and Vietnam have been working on their relationship for 4,000 years, and some days the work goes better than others,” said Brantly Womack, a professor of foreign affairs at the University of Virginia who has written extensively on the two countries.

Mr. Yang, in particular, is known as a fierce proponent of China’s rights to large parts of the South China Sea, and he has confronted American and Asian officials with his hard-line views on the subject.

He took exception in 2010 at a gathering of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Hanoi when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton raised the issue of freedom of navigation in the South China Sea and the need to resolve the various territorial disputes through mediation. In her new book, “Hard Choices,” Mrs. Clinton quotes him as telling delegates that “China is a big country, bigger than any other countries here.”

Mrs. Clinton noted in the book that Mr. Yang’s attitude of China’s superiority towards its Asian neighbors did not go down well.

NYT Analysts Say China May Try to Use Manmade Islands to Bolster Bid for Economic Development

June 19, 2014 9:09 am

China has been moving sand onto some reefs and rocks in the Spratly archipelago of the South China Sea to create islands that can support buildings, equipment and human habitation. The construction is stirring anxiety in the Philippines and Vietnam, which compete with China over territorial claims in the Spratly Islands, and raising alarms in the United States, which sees China’s actions in the South China Sea as destabilizing.

Analysts say China could try to assert that these new islands entitle the country to an exclusive economic zone that extends 200 miles from the islands’ shoreline. Such a zone is defined in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, to which China is a signatory.

But China might have a tough time convincing an international tribunal that its new islands can generate an exclusive economic zone. A clause under Article 60 of the convention says: “Artificial islands, installations and structures do not possess the status of islands. They have no territorial sea of their own, and their presence does not affect the delimitation of the territorial sea, the exclusive economic zone or the continental shelf.”

The language sounds definitive, though China could argue that its new islands are not entirely artificial, since there were reefs and rocks at the sites before the sand dredging and land reclamation began.

In article 21, the United Nations convention gives this definition for an island: “An island is a naturally formed area of land, surrounded by water, which is above water at high tide.”

Lawrence Juda, a professor of maritime affairs at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston, said in an email that “artificial islands, thus, do not qualify as ‘islands’ with the consequent legal rights of those that are naturally formed.”

If China were to use these new creations to try to claim an exclusive economic zone, “I do not think that this claim would be legitimate or recognized,” Mr. Juda said. “Moreover, such a claim would be unacceptable, not only to the Philippines, but also to important maritime states such as the United States. Acceptance of a Chinese claim to an E.E.Z. around an artificial island would set a terrible precedent and open a potential Pandora’s box to extensive national claims to ocean areas, spawning a wide variety of legal and political problems.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, China has been pushing back against an attempt by Japan, another territorial rival, to claim a continental shelf and exclusive economic zone around a tiny atoll in another body of water. The atoll, called Okinotorishima, sits in the Philippine Sea, east of the Philippines and Taiwan and west of Guam. Only two knobs are visible at high tide. As of 2012, Japan had spent $600 million to surround the atoll with a wall of concrete, according to a report by Foreign Policy. Fishery officials planted extra coral in the area to reinforce the appearance of an island.

Chinese officials have argued that Okinotorishima does not qualify as an island as defined by the United Nations convention and so cannot have a continental shelf or generate an exclusive economic zone. In April 2012, a United Nations commission made a partial ruling on the matter that left fundamental questions unanswered. A post on the blog of Herbert Smith Freehills, a global commercial law firm, said whether Okinotorishima officially qualifies as an island was “a distinction of considerable significance for international law of the sea purposes, as it may determine Japanese sovereignty claims over the surrounding continental shelf and its potentially vast natural resources.”

This March, Asahi Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper, reported that Japan was spending $780 million to build a port at the site. The newspaper reported: “Although the transport ministry’s stated goal is to extract seabed resources in the surrounding areas, observers say the harbor construction may be intended as a warning to China, which is looking for opportunities to weaken Japan’s control over the exclusive economic zone around the tropical islets.”

NYT