China muted after Tillerson vows islands blockade
BEIJING: China offered a muted response Thursday after Donald Trump’s secretary of state pick Rex Tillerson warned the US would stop it from using its artificial islands in the South China Sea.
Tillerson’s comments, during his confirmation hearing in the US senate, are the latest salvo the Trump team has aimed at Beijing.
“We’re going to have to send China a clear signal that, first the island building stops, and second, your access to those islands is also not going to be allowed,” Tillerson told the panel.
Beijing has fuelled regional tensions by turning tiny, ecologically fragile reefs and islets in the strategically vital South China Sea into artificial islands hosting military facilities.
The former ExxonMobil chief said China’s building in the disputed waters and its declaration of an air defence identification zone over the Japanese-controlled Senkaku islands in the East China Sea were “illegal actions”.
“They are taking territory or control or declaring control of territories that are not rightfully China’s.”
Beijing asserts a claim to almost the whole of the South China Sea, based on a “nine-dash line” dating to 1940s-era maps.
An international tribunal - - whose jurisdiction Beijing rejected -- ruled last year that there was no legal basis to such claims.
Tillerson added that “building islands and then putting military assets on those islands is akin to Russia’s taking of Crimea.”
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang offered a measured response to the comments during a regular press briefing, saying that China has “the full right” to conduct activities in the region.
“The South China Sea situation has cooled down and we hope nonregional countries can respect the consensus that it is in the fundamental interest of the whole world,” he said.
Taken at face value Tillerson’s threat to deny access to China is not a “credible objective” for the US and may be “counterproductive”, Rory Medcalf, head of the National Security College at the Australian National University told AFP.
The US has military power in Asia but relatively few ships, he said, making a blockade unrealistic, and “it’s very difficult to imagine the means by which the United States could prevent China from accessing these artificial islands without provoking some kind of confrontation”.