US-China tension over the South China Sea

Sayed Kamaluddin | Published: June 19, 2015 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2024 06:01:00

While quite a few regional wars are raging around the world, US Defence Secretary Ashton Carter is making a lot of noise in a bid to put the rising China in its 'proper place'. In fact, Mike Whitney, noted commentator of CounterPunch, last week accused him of "risking a war with China to defend freedom of navigation in the South China Sea."
China's decision to reclaim land around the disputed Spratly islands in the South China Sea has seemingly made the US administration very angry. Other regional claimants to the group of islands, including Philippines and Vietnam, also have registered their protest against the Chinese decision. Â
What makes it interesting is that Philippines and Vietnam are all engaged in the similar crime of "land reclamation activities" but Washington has remained totally unruffled. Here the question is: what is so unique about piling up of, say, couple of hundred yards of sand on reefs in the South China Sea to affect US national security?Â Â Â Â Â
Now, what is about defending freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, as Carter claims? There is no evidence that China has ever blocked shipping lanes or seized vessels sailing in international waters. On the contrary, according to agency reports, the US recently blocked an Iranian ship loaded with humanitarian relief - food, water and medical supplies - headed for the starving refugees in Yemen.
It needs mentioning here that the US is challenging China under the provisions of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. But Washington has stubbornly refused to ratify the convention.Â Â
Actually Carter's sabre-rattling was particularly noticed late in May while speaking in Honolulu, Hawaii, when he forcefully warned China demanding "an immediate and lasting halt to land reclamation" in the disputed islands. He said: "There should be no mistake: The United States will fly, sail and wherever international law allows, as we do all around the world" and the US, he added, intended to remain "the principal security power in the Asia-Pacific for decades to come."
This warmongering outburst of Carter came about exactly 10 days after US Secretary of State John Kerry's two-day trip to China to discuss with President Xi Jinping about Beijing's maritime ambitions in the South China Sea. Xi told Kerry that China's ties with the United States remain stable and that the two countries should handle disputes in a way that would not damage bilateral ties. This is certainly an effort by the Chinese President to defuse tension over the territorial dispute. Â
According reports from Beijing, Kerry's China trip in mid-May was intended to prepare for the annual US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue in the third week of June in Washington and Xi's scheduled visit to Washington later in September this year. Xi also told Kerry at the end of his Beijing trip: "I look forward to continuing to develop this relationship with President Obama and to bring China-US relations to a new height along a track of a new model of major country relationship."Â Â Â Â
INTERESTING INSIGHT: Meanwhile, noted American commentator and analyst George Friedman in his last week's commentary in the Geopolitical Weekly provided interesting insight to the China-US dispute. He wrote: "In spite of the U.S. rhetoric about a pivot to Asia, East Asia is not the United States' top priority in Asia. Washington's main concerns remain the Middle East and the borderland between Russia and the European Peninsula. Unless East Asia undergoes a fundamental redefinition, the United States has few interests that involve military interventionâ€¦. And China, for all its posturing, is more than content to not to have to face the United States at sea."
However, Friedman also points out that the United States has a queue of problems, and China, rhetoric aside, is not one of them. Whether it gets there will have less to do with what Beijing intends to do than Beijing losing power over parts of China. That would draw the United States in. This observation also throws some light on the hectic activities being carried out inside and outside China by multiple agencies supported by Washington to stoke dissent in China and foment trouble for Beijing.
This may refresh the readers' memory about a major incident a few years ago in Tibet when Beijing was more than busy organising to showcase its successes at the Beijing Olympic. The western mainstream media went all out and gleefully covered in details the mayhem in Tibet suggesting that all is not well in China. But that is another story and not quite connected to Carter's chest-thumping initiative which has exposed his insatiable appetite for confrontation to satisfy his inflated ego.
On June 10, at a meeting on Capitol Hill in Washington DC marking the 10th anniversary of the US-Congress's US-China Working Group, senior Chinese embassy official Wu Xi clearly spelled out Beijing's apparent determination to ignore any provocation to strain its ties with the US. Wu said: "Resorting to microphone diplomacy or pointing fingers at each other will not solve any problem."
China has already responded to cyber hacking allegations as irresponsible and claimed that it has the right to build artificial islands in contested territory.
Wu Xi said in Washington that individual issues should not be allowed to shadow the overall US-China relationship and that their common interests, including bilateral trade volume of $550 billion in 2014, far outweigh the differences between the two countries. "The right choice," she said, "is to recognise our differences, respect each other and engage in real dialogue.Â The choice we make today will decide the future of our two great nations, as well as the entire world."
At the Capitol Hill meeting on June 10, the Chinese representative has said that the two sides should use the annual meeting of the US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue from June 22-24 and the visit of a top Chinese military official to "articulate" the "deliverables" during Chinese President Xi Jinping's forthcoming September visit to Washington. Â
Wu Xi, the deputy chief of mission at the Chinese embassy in Washington, clearly articulated her government's reconciliatory view of the situation and said that she does not see any tensions between the two countries as they shared common interest in peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region and they always discussed differences.
Her punch line was: "We have no alternative but to succeed in the interest of our two nations and the world."Â The alternative is another disastrous war with catastrophic consequences for the mankind.
sayed.kamaluddin@gmail.com