At a time when countries all over the world should be working together to contain a virus that originated from China, which has already infected over 100 million people and impoverished millions more, here comes the Chinese government passing a law that will surely cause distrust and division.
China’s new Coast Guard Law, which was passed last Friday and takes effect February 1, authorizes its coast guard to fire on foreign vessels and destroy other countries’ structures on islands it claims. Going by its preposterous nine-dash line claim, this covers virtually everything in the South China Sea.
China’s claim over the strategically important waterway was invalidated by an international arbitration tribunal in 2016. Of course, the Chinese government refuses to recognize that ruling.
Foreign Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. said it right: “While enacting law is a sovereign prerogative, this one — given the area involved, or for that matter the open South China Sea — is a verbal threat of war to any country that defies the law.”
Failure to challenge the law “is submission to it,” Locsin said, as he filed a diplomatic protest against it.
China always reassures its neighbors of its peaceful intentions, but its aggressiveness in the South China Sea casts serious doubts about the sincerity of those intentions. If action speaks so much louder than words, then China’s peace offerings are always made with the benevolence of a bully.
Chinese vessels have been driving away Filipino fishermen in our own waters for years. This new China law only seeks to institutionalize the practice. Indeed, a China Coast Guard ship drove away a Filipino fishing boat in Pag-asa Island just last week.
But why is China head-butting with the Philippines and our South East Asian neighbors over sea issues, and having airspace incidents with Taiwan and Vietnam, at a time when the global death toll from the Wuhan coronavirus keeps rising and countries all over the world are scrambling to get their respective economies back on track?
The last thing countries need right now is another crisis, another conflict, especially one as superfluous as a maritime dispute over its preposterous nine-dash line claim. All countries certainly have enough on their plates already with this pandemic.
Could it be that China is well aware of other countries’ current pandemic preoccupations and that it is seizing this crisis as an opportunity to advance its own interests?
We’ve already heard our own senators warning the government that China might attempt to leverage its Covid-19 aid, in particular its vaccines supply, to secure concessions from the Philippines.
The government is trying hard not to be perceived as a wimp against China but it is clear that bilateral diplomatic niceties alone won’t do much to dissuade China’s hostile gestures.
The government must enlist stronger international and regional support through the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), first by putting this China Coast Guard Law and all Chinese incursions into our waters on the immediate agenda of the Asean Regional Forum (ARF), which is the region’s venue for political and security dialogues.
China is a member of the ARF, along with Japan, the United States and the European Union. China is also bound by the 2002 Asean-China Declaration of Parties in the South China Sea (DOC) that is supposed to prevent claimant countries from engaging in military activities that will affect peace and stability in the region. The Asean must “cry wolf” and tell the world that China is not abiding by the DOC as well as the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea (Unclos).
The government should also continue to file formal protests with the UN over China’s violation of Unclos.
This might give momentum to finally establishing a binding code of conduct under the DOC.
The Philippines should push for stronger political solidarity from the Asean on South China Sea issues. After all, four of the six countries involved in these disputes are Asean members, five if you include Indonesia, whose claimed exclusive economic zone (EEZ) boundary also overlaps with China’s nine-dash line.
If a bully is trying to take over your neighborhood, it’s just natural to seek the help of your neighbors to help contain that bully through some persuasive group action.
The Asean is a big market for China. Perhaps the latter cannot afford to fight with its customers. Perhaps pressure from a major trading partner, which the Asean most certainly is, would make China more reasonable, responsible and amenable to finding mutually acceptable solutions to disputes.
And if China fails to reciprocate Asean efforts, then we would have only exposed its blatant unwillingness to bargain in good faith and treat its neighbors with civility. We would have exposed it as the unreasonable, intimidating and controlling bully who refuses to sit down and talk sensibly with others.
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