Beijing Strenghtens Control Over The South China Sea As Vietnam Goes Soft

By Ralph Jennings

The South China Sea is officially contested by six governments. 

But China is taking control by neutralizing those rivals one by one. 

The last may have just fallen.
They all need fish, smell oil under the seabed or just like the extraterritorial control you get by staking a claim to the sea stretching from Taiwan to Singapore. 

Beijing had chafed with the other countries, all in Southeast Asia, since about 2010 by building artificial islands on 3,200 acres of landfill for military use, and passing vessels into contested waters. 

Vietnam got into a boat ramming clash that set off deadly anti-China riots in 2014. 

The Philippines took China to a world arbitration court and won a verdict against China’s historical claims in July.
But about half a year after that Permanent Court of Arbitration verdict from The Hague, instead of backing down, China is running out outspoken opponents. 

It had kept peace all along with Malaysia by offering it lucrative trade and investment deals. 

Taiwan avoids going up against China over the 3.5 million-square-km (1.4 million square-mile) sea partly because both use the same dynastic-era historic records to call it their own. 

China also claims Taiwan itself. 

The two have bigger problems to solve.
And under Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, China and the Philippines have shelved their friction over competing sea claims as Duterte diversifies foreign policy away from old ally the United States.
But the biggest fall of an enemy would be Vietnam and it may have just made friends with China. The country with a stridently anti-China population was known since the 1970s for clashing with Beijing as needed over the contested sea’s Paracel and Spratly island chains. 

But Chinese state media say China and Vietnam just issued a communique proposing negotiations on the maritime disputes and interim answers that will not compromise either side’s political position. The statement followed Vietnamese Communist Nguyen Phu Trong’s four-day visit last week to China, where he saw Xi Jinping and six other fellow Communist officials.
Vietnam might just be “hedging bets” because U.S. president Donald Trump’s America is hard to predict, says Sean King, senior vice president with the consultancy Park Strategies in New York. 

The United States previously has patrolled the sea with its own vessels and helped arm Vietnam as well as the Philippines. 

The statement pegged to Nguyen’s visit also just repeats points from a 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of the Parties in the South China Sea signed by countries throughout Southeast Asia, says Denny Roy, senior fellow at the U.S. think tank East-West Center. 

It’s hard to imagine Vietnam has cashed out.
Yet this agreement, like Beijing’s peace-building with Manila, points to a softening at least for now. It’s a new milestone in China’s effort to neutralize opponents around the South China Sea by working things out with them one by one rather than via a group of countries where it would be a weaker party. 

The arbitration court said China lacks rights to 95% of the sea despite what Beijing believes. 

China rejected the verdict but may have been privately goaded by it to step up bilateral talks. 

China of course is worth talking to if you’re a smaller country in need of a lift from the world’s second largest economy.
“A joint statement by China and one of the other claimants that sounds like a step toward peaceful resolution fits China’s post-Permanent Court of Arbitration damage-control agenda: to persuade the region that China is solving the problem China’s way, through bilateral negotiations,” Roy says.