Tensions in the South China Sea

TENSION in the South China Sea has now reached the point where references to tension have become an issue. “Someone has been exaggerating or even playing up the so-called tension in the South China Sea,” Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, said on August 9th. By “someone”, of course, he meant America. He was speaking in Naypyidaw, Myanmar’s capital, where the ten foreign ministers of ASEAN, the Association of South-East Asian Nations, were holding their annual meeting. So when they agreed on a communiqué referring to “increased tensions” in the sea, many scored it as a diplomatic victory for the United States.

American officials saw the inclusion of the phrase as a sign that ASEAN’s members were readier to present a united front against Chinese aggression towards rival claimants to territory in the sea. China’s “nine-dashed line”, its vague cartographic claim to most of the sea, encroaches on the claims of four ASEAN members. A State Department official cheered the group’s movement away from “diversionary issues” and “happy talk”. It was reasonable to conclude, he said, that “the Chinese are feeling the heat”. Reasonable, perhaps, but almost certainly inaccurate. If China is alarmed about the mounting regional antagonism stoked by its behaviour in the South China Sea, it is certainly not letting on.

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