War of words in the Pacific

How China handles tiff with Philippines is a political test

MANILA, PHILIPPINES – There is a Ruritanian whiff to the war of words now raging between the Philippines and China over a couple of rock outcroppings in the western Pacific known to most seafarers as the Scarborough Shoal.

“China should be prepared to engage in a small-scale war at sea with the Philippines,” was how China’s Global Times tabloid put it this week.

“Once the war erupts, China must take resolute action to deliver a clear message to the outside world that it does not want a war, but definitely has no fear of it.”

“We will not be intimidated,” has been the official Filipino response.

However, its defence secretary, Voltaire Gazmin, encapsulated his country’s dilemma in a sentence, when he asked: “How can an ant bully an elephant?”

With gunboat diplomacy having been recently practised by paramilitary vessels from both countries, if diplomacy fails, this dispute could turn deadly at any time. At the very least, how China handles this row may provide an indication of how the ascendant superpower intends to behave toward its smaller neighbours.

Iran, North Korea and Pakistan and India, with their potential for nuclear mayhem, are deservedly considered the world’s major flashpoints. But aside from the Scarborough Shoal, there are two other flashpoints in the South China Sea, whose waters are of keen interest because they straddle the world’s busiest shipping lanes and are surrounded by rich fisheries, and oil and gas fields of untold wealth.

China, Taiwan and Vietnam claim the Paracel Islands, which China has occupied since a mini-war against Vietnam resulted in dozens of deaths in the 1970s.

The Spratlys, whose several hundred atolls collectively only amount to four square kilometres of dry land, are claimed by China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines – which all have armed forces there – and Brunei, which doesn’t.

The tiff on the boil right now over the Scarborough Shoal pits Asia’s Goliath, China, against its perennial weakling, the Philippines.

Five of the reefs – for that is what the Scarborough Shoal really is – are just a couple of metres above water at high tide. They lie about 200 kilometres west of the Philippine province of Zambales and about 800 kilometres east of the Chinese mainland.

The reefs appear on maps used by Imperial Spain, which ran the Philippines for nearly four centuries and were used by the U.S. and Philippine forces as a bombing range for years after the Second World War.

Panatag Shoal, as the Filipinos call the islets, also fall within the 300-kilometre exclusive economic zone claimed by Manila.

Beijing insists that the reefs, which it calls the Huangyan Islands, have been an integral part of China for eight centuries. Both countries claim the waters are traditional fishing grounds that they have harvested for centuries.

When sailors from a Philippine Coast Guard cutter boarded Chinese vessels they said were poaching fish around the shoal earlier this month, Manila demanded they leave. Beijing upped the ante by sending three surveillance ships, which seized control of the shoal.

Militarily incapable of countering such brinkmanship, the Philippines appealed to the U.S. for help.

The issue is certain to be raised when President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton meet their Filipino counterparts in Washington on Monday.

While it is highly unlikely the U.S. will intervene militarily, whether it intervenes diplomatically is not yet clear. With so many ships sailing these waters, what is obvious is that Washington does not want them to become a “Chinese lake.” It is one of many reasons Obama signalled last December that the U.S. would beef up its military presence in the western Pacific, a move that has triggered a vitriolic response from Beijing.

“The U.S. acts from narrow self-interest and promotes the ‘China threat’ in pursuit of hegemony and economic advantage,” the quasi-official China Daily said.”

Such disagreements will become regular features as a newly assertive Beijing and a long-assertive Washington sort out who is the master and commander of what in the Pacific.