Duterte poll changes Beijing’s plan for South China Sea
moment, the plans appear to be postponed.
More important for Beijing right now, Chinese analysts say, is friendship with Duterte and an effort to wean his country away from its treaty alliance with Washington. Transforming a shoal right under his nose would ruin any chance of that.
“It would be irrational to build it into a fortress now,” said Zhang Baohui, a professor of international relations at Lingnan Uni- versity in Hong Kong. “The government would like the Philippines to at least remain neutral in the rivalry between the United States and China. Now at least they have a chance.”
In July, an international tribunal in The Hague delivered a harsh rebuke to China’s activities in the South China Sea, including its construction of artificial islands in the Spratly archipelago, not far from the Philippines. But China has ignored the decision.
The Obama administration praised the ruling as legally bind- ing but refrained from trumpeting it. The reasoning was that little could be done, short of risking military confrontation, to stop the construction of facilities like hangars for fighter jets and buildings for radar and surfaceto-air missiles.
Three of seven artificial islands in the Spratlys are designed as military bases, the US military says. Among them, Subi Reef has a harbour bigger than Pearl Harbour, and another, Mischief Reef, has a land perimeter nearly the size of the District of Columbia’s, a submarine warfare officer in the US Navy, Thomas Shugart, said in a paper issued last week.
Together, the three islands could probably accommodate as many as 17,000 military personnel and support aircraft able to deter or counter a US military intervention, said Shugart, who is serving as a senior military fellow at the Center for a New American Security inWashington but writes as an independent analyst.
Anticipation regarding China’s plans for Scarborough has been building since March, when, at a meeting in Washington, President Barack Obama warned President Xi Jinping of China against taking action that could activate US treaty obligations to the Philippines, a senior State Department official said.
In the heated arena of South China Sea politics in China, the shoal – known as Huangyan Island – has become a touchstone for both hawks and more moderate voices.
Two fiery speeches at campuses in southern China in July by a popular current affairs television personality, Jin Canrong of Renmin University in Beijing, drew support from online chat forums. He said China would begin construction on Scarborough Shoal next year, and despite t he warnings from America, “the spirit of President Xi is, ‘We must do it’”.
Jin described piling sand on coral at Scarborough as an ambitious project that would take four years but said China needed to complete it to achieve de facto military control over the South China Sea.
The government’s enthusiasm for building on Scarborough Shoal was emboldened, he said, by the ease with which the three big artificial islands in the Spratlys were completed.
He quoted the commander of the Chinese navy, Admiral Wu Shengli, as saying in a speech to his naval colleagues, “We didn’t expect President Xi would give us such robust support, we didn’t expect our engineering capacity would be so strong, and we didn’t expect the Americans would be so slow to react.”
Still, Duterte’s openness to talking with China, and his cantankerous attitude toward the Americans, would probably delay the construction plans for Scarborough, Jin said.
A pause, he said, would allow for talks between China and Southeast Asian nations on a Code of Conduct to lay down rules of behavior in the South China Sea. Premier Li Keqiang of China called for the code’s completion at a recent summit meeting of Southeast Asian nations in Laos.
Discussions of the code, under which some neighbouring nations suspect China wants rules that would give it formal control of the South China Sea, have made little progress in nearly a decade, the diplomats involved say.