Rocky reefs in South China Sea
The dispute over maritime claims in the South China Sea appears to be intensifying. This raises two questions: first, whether the tensions will erupt into armed conflict and, second, what role New Zealand should play.
A recent conference organised by the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam and attended by scholars and officials from two dozen states, including myself, sponsored by the Asia New Zealand Foundation, set out the issues and provided a basis for a cautious prediction.
Lying south of China and north of Indonesia, and bordered by Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei, the South China Sea conveys one-third of the value of the world’s maritime traffic, including oil and gas to Japan and South Korea.
It is recognised by the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) as an international waterway, with a common right of transit to be enjoyed by mariners of all nations. The Law of the Sea also assigns 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) resource rights to the bordering states.
Nevertheless, successive governments of China, both Nationalist (from 1932) and Communist (from 1949), have claimed the sea in its entirety. Their claims are based on an alleged history of exploration, fishing, and sporadic settlement, and also in the so-called ‘‘nine-dashed line’’ or ‘‘U-shaped line’’.
But the claimed maritime territory is not specified by geographic data points. It is only indicated on maps produced by the governments of China, and it seriously overlaps the EEZ claims by the five littoral states. Hence the dispute. Until 1982, when the Law of the Sea Convention was signed, the dispute was latent. It became manifest after preliminary exploration found evidence of hydrocarbons in the seabed, and demand for exclusive fishing rights arose as traditional grounds were depleted by unregulated exploitation of marine life.
The economic rise of China stimulated a nationalist resurgence which rejected the ‘‘Century of Humiliation’’ perpetrated by the Western imperial powers (and latterly by Japan). This entailed assertion of China’s more extensive historical borders, not only land borders with Russia, India, and Vietnam, but also maritime borders with Japan and five Southeast Asian states.
Starting around 2013, the government of China began sending dredges and construction teams south to build up selected reefs and shoals into concrete islets. These islets were then equipped with working and living structures flying the flag of China. Subsequently, Chinese surface warship and submarine support facilities, missile emplacements, and bomber landing strips and operations were detected on the islets.
The potential for armed conflict was foreshadowed by a naval battle with Vietnam in 1974 following China’s seizure of the Paracel Island group, and again in 1988 as China occupied Johnson Reef. The following decades saw China occupying other reefs, provoking confrontations by China’s coast guard vessels with those of Philippines and Vietnam.
he United States, New Zealand and most other Western governments have rejected China’s claims. They cite a ruling by the UN Arbitral Panel in 2016 that, under the Law of the Sea Convention, China has no valid historical claim to the disputed islets.
The US Navy is conducting explicit ‘‘Freedom of Navigation Patrols’’ by warships that deliberately transit through the 12-mile circles around the islets fortified by China. China’s islet garrison forces have reacted with not only angry radio warnings but also threatening overflights and dangerous warship manoeuvres, most recently in October, involving a near-collision induced by a Chinese destroyer PLAN Luyang with the USS Decatur, a US destroyer in transit.
Thus the potential for miscalculation, an exchange of fire, and an escalation of military conflict appears to be rising. In the context of the Trump Administration’s hard line on China in economic policy, could the South China Sea be a flashpoint that could ignite a US-China war?
This is predicted by some Americans such as Peter Navarro, author of an alarmist book,
and now a trade adviser to President Trump.
Nevertheless, at a South China Sea conference in Vietnam in November, courtesy prevailed in the formal presentations and in private discussions I had with other delegates, Chinese as well as Vietnamese and American. It became clear that other interests are mitigating the territorial dispute; these include in diplomacy, trade, investment, aid, tourism and management of joint maritime resource development zones with China.
My conclusions from the Vietnam conference are: China has now secured its physical presence in the South China Sea and no government is in a position to dislodge it. China has won this round. While diplomatic and legal protests will continue, all parties wish to avoid military confrontation. China can now shift its energies to extending its New Silk Road initiative to the south and west. All other protagonists in the South China Sea dispute, and New Zealand, will continue to interact pragmatically with China so as to advance their own interests.
So I’m cautiously optimistic that war in the South China Sea can be avoided. Throughout the existence of our world it has cycled through periods of global cooling and warming.
We all know that we are currently moving from an ice-age into a warming age, but what are the real contributing factors to the global acceleration towards the current warming cycle?
Many scientists think that the earth’s maximum human carrying capacity, based on the earth’s available resources, is between 9 and 10 billion.
One does not have to be a genius to recognise that the earth must have a limit to how many people can survive here. Common sense, tells us that.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs (1943) identifies our most basic human needs as, water, food, shelter and security.
In my view, of these, water is the most important and vulnerable resource and is the most threatened by the earth’s population explosion.
It took the earth, from the beings of the existence of mankind, to 200 years ago to reach less than one billion population.
However, between 1900 and 2000, the world population increased from 1.5 to 6.1 billion.
Currently the earth’s population is 7.2 billion, so what does that tell us?
At the UN’s annual climate change summit in Poland, Sir David Attenborough predicted ‘‘the collapse of our civilisation and the extinction of much of the natural world’’, and he is right, but not for the reasons that he claims. First of all this has happened during previous iceages, and will continue in its global warming and cooling cycle.
Even if there were no humans on this planet, the cycle will continue, but it is the human population explosion that is accelerating the process.
It is us humans and our activities on earth that are causing the acceleration of the cycle and no matter what we do it will continue to accelerate unless we stabilise the world’s population growth.
Historically nature has demonstrated how it protects the earth from population over-crowding, using fire, pestilences, disease, floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, and as we have become more sophisticated, super-bugs, new strains of disease, nerve-agents, radiation poisoning and nuclear weapons.
Clearly our only chance of survival is world population reduction, and if we cannot achieve that, then nature will do it for us. Medical information emerging suggests New Zealand is soon to be hit by a diabetic epidemic, which will cause individual stress, but above all place additional burden on an already stretched health dollar.
Now is the time to seek a solution. Prevention, rather drugs or costly treatment is the easiest cure.
The media, hospital boards, corporates, families and the educational system must unite to form a strategic plan to minimise the social and economic consequences of such a tsunami.