China flexes its muscles in dispute with Vietnam

BEIJING: China's escalating dispute with Vietnam over contested waters in the South China Sea sent new shudders through Asia on Thursday as China demanded the withdrawal of Vietnamese ships near a giant Chinese drilling rig and for the first time acknowledged its vessels had blasted the Vietnamese flotilla with water cannons in recent days.

While China characterized the use of water cannons as a form of restraint, it punctuated the increasingly muscular stance by the Chinese toward a growing number of Asian neighbors who fear they are vulnerable to bullying by China and its increasingly powerful military. The latest back-and-forth in the dispute with Vietnam — the most serious in the South China Sea in years — sent the Vietnamese stock market plunging on Thursday and elicited concern from a top American diplomat who was visiting Hanoi.

Political and economic historians said the China-Vietnam tensions signaled a hardening position by the Chinese over what they regard as their "core interest" in claiming sovereignty over a vastly widened swath of coastal waters that stretch from the Philippines and Indonesia north to Japan. In Chinese parlance, they say, "core interest" means there is no room for compromise.

"I find it quite alarming, because it was not so many years ago that there was a relatively tranquil relationship between China and its neighbors," said Orville Schell, a China scholar who is the director of the Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York.

"Now we have a picture that's slowly pixelating, from Indonesia, to Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Japan, up the neighborhood," Schell said in a telephone interview. "We begin to get a picture of stress and strain. This is not exactly the peaceful rise of China that we were advertised."

While Schell said he did not necessarily foresee an armed conflict — a view echoed by others — he said the Chinese had "created a climate where it will be very hard for China to exist in this state of fraternal relations with its neighbors."

The tensions with Vietnam began last week when a state-owned Chinese energy company moved the drilling rig into position in waters that Vietnam claims, and intensified this week as ships sent by both countries faced off.

On Thursday, a Chinese foreign ministry official said that Vietnamese ships had rammed Chinese vessels as many as 171 times over four days. The announcement followed accusations by Vietnam on Wednesday that Chinese ships had rammed its vessels early this week.

The Chinese say Vietnam has dispatched 35 ships to the area, while the Vietnamese say China has deployed about 80 vessels.

The movement of the drilling rig, analysts said, was among the most assertive steps China has taken to solidify claims over both the South China Sea, one of the world's major trading routes, and the East China Sea.

In November, Beijing declared an air defense zone over a band of the East China Sea, including islands that both China and Japan claim, and demanded that other countries notify the Chinese authorities before their planes pass through the airspace. Although the United States military and Japanese aircraft flouted the demands, analysts have suggested the air defense zone helps China build a case for gaining control over the disputed islands, which Japan administers.

China also appears to have tightened its hold over a reef called Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea, which the Philippines claims.

The disputes have raised concerns in Washington, which has been trying to calibrate its response to the various territorial claims. The Obama administration has courted countries in Southeast Asia as a counterbalance to China's power, but it has also been trying not to antagonize the Chinese.

On Thursday, the American assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, Daniel R Russel, who was on a trip to Hanoi, said that the latest dispute had been a major topic of his discussions there.

"We oppose any act of intimidation by vessels, particularly in disputed areas," he said. The United States did not take a position on the competing claims of sovereignty, he added, but the disputes need to be "dealt with diplomatically and must be dealt with in accordance to international laws."

The conflicts center in part on a competition for natural resources, including what some believe are substantial deposits of oil and gas beneath the seabed. China has been particularly eager to find energy reserves to feed its growing industrial needs.

The oil rig in the South China Sea was stationed there by China National Offshore Oil Corporation, or Cnooc, 120 nautical miles off Vietnam.

Yi Xianliang, deputy director general of the Department of Boundary and Ocean Affairs of China's foreign ministry, who acknowledged Thursday that China had used water cannons, said, "They are the most gentle measure we can take when trying to keep the other side out."

But he added that China's oil drilling operations were legal because they were in "China's inherent territory."

China is prepared to negotiate with Vietnam to solve the dispute, Yi said, but first Vietnam must end its "disruption" and remove its vessels from the area near the rig. There have been 14 "rounds of communication" between the two sides in the past few days, Yi added.

In the past, Vietnam and China have resolved some disputes by holding talks, and Yi said that relations between the two countries had improved in recent years. But the latest conflict has unsettled Vietnam and contributed on Thursday to a 5.9 per cent drop in the country's key stock market index, its biggest one-day decline in 13 years.

The oil rig is about 17 nautical miles from disputed islands known in the West as the Paracels, in Vietnam as the Hoang Sa and in China as the Xisha. Dennis C. McCornac, a professor at Loyola University Maryland in Baltimore, said China's assertiveness was partly aimed at a domestic audience, and that Beijing's leaders were not interested in fighting with Vietnam.

"I think China and Vietnam have a lot of economic interests that are tied to each other," he said. "I can't see a war. That doesn't make sense for anyone."

NYT