ASEAN states resist incursions

If China is to be accepted as part of the Asia-Pacific community, it would be unwise to ignore growing concerns among countries across the region over its expansionism in the South China Sea. ASEAN members such as Malaysia, Indonesia, The Philippines and Vietnam need co-operative working relationships with Beijing but as Amanda Hodge wrote on Wednesday, they are increasingly at loggerheads with China. Indonesia ended 2019 by summoning Beijing’s Jakarta ambassador to issue a demarche over a “violation of (its) sovereignty” by 60 Chinese fishing boats and coastguard ships in the Natuna Sea, at the southern end of the South China Sea.

Natuna is within the northern reaches of Indonesia’s 200-nautical mile exclusive economic zone, but it also falls within the Nine Dash Line map that China used unsuccessfully at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague to assert what it claimed were its territorial and resource rights to much of the South China Sea. In a landmark judgment in 2016, the court ruled unequivocally against Beijing’s Nine Dash Line map in an arbitration case brought under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. The court said China’s claims under the Nine Dash Line map were unlawful. Yet Beijing appears to have defied that ruling when it launched its Christmas Eve fishing incursion, forcing Indonesia to rush navy patrol boats to the area.

Malaysia has formally staked a claim with the UN Commission on the Limits of Continental Shelf to territory beyond its 200-nautical mile continental shelf and deep in the South China Sea. Its move also shows its disregard for China’s Nine Dash Line claims and is certain to anger Beijing. Vietnam, the current ASEAN chair, has flagged a challenge to Beijing’s claim to more than 90 per cent of its resource-rich waters, while The Philippines, having won its vital UN Convention on the Law of the Sea victory in 2016, is strongly defending its sovereignty.

Indonesia’s pushback against Chinese incursions into its waters is the strongest stand it has taken in years against Beijing’s regional bullying. Mounting anti-Chinese sentiment across Southeast Asia is also being driven domestically by rising identity politics in Malaysia and Indonesia, by Beijing’s self-serving Belt and Road Initiative, and its response to Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement. Sentiment in the region towards Beijing is clearly in the direction of resistance. China’s best course would be to play by the rules. As a signatory to the Convention on the Law of the Sea, it has a serious responsibility to adhere to it and not to ride roughshod over it.