South China Sea maritime border dispute to keep on boil

Beijing’s contested claims over the South China Sea look set to once again dominate regional relations in 2020.

A Vietnamese fishing boat near Indonesia's Natuna islands last year. Picture: AFP

Beijing’s contested claims over the South China Sea look set to once again dominate regional relations in 2020 with Malaysia formally staking claim to territory off its continental shelf, and Indonesia launching its strongest pushback in years to Chinese incursions in its waters.

Vietnam, chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations this year, has also flagged a challenge to Beijing’s claim to more than 90 per cent of the resource-rich, trading waters following a months-long naval standoff over the Vanguard Bank.

After a year in which ASEAN nations worked hard to downplay the issue, China’s aggressive expansionism through Southeast Asia came to a head in the last weeks of 2019.

Indonesia issued an angry demarche to Beijing this week, describing as a “violation of sovereignty” last week’s incursion of more than 60 fishing vessels and coastguard ships into its Natuna Sea, at the southern end of the South China Sea.

“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has summoned the Chinese ambassador to Jakarta and expressed their strong protest against the incident,” it said. “Indonesia’s EEZ is determined based on UNCLOS (the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea). China, as a party to UNCLOS, must respect it.”

The ministry reaffirmed Jakarta’s position that it had “no overlapping jurisdiction with China”, and that Jakarta would “never recognise China’s Nine Dash Line map”.

The Natuna Sea falls within the northern most reaches of Indonesia’s 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone, but also within China’s Nine Dash Line map, which asserts territorial and resource rights to much of the South China Sea, waters that host a third of the world’s shipping.

Indonesian naval commanders say the Chinese incursion began on December 19 and escalated on Christmas Eve, forcing the navy to deploy two patrol ships to an area bordering Vietnam’s EEZ, which China also claims. Days earlier, Malaysia submitted its extended continental shelf claims to the UN Division for Ocean Affairs and Law of the Sea.

Philippines-based South China Sea analyst Richard Heydarian says while Malaysia’s submission, which aims to push the limits of its sovereign rights beyond its own continental shelf and deep into the South China Sea, caught everyone off guard, it signals a growing regional pushback against China.

“The trajectory is clearly in the direction of resistance, if not confrontation, rather than acquiescence to China” as its neighbouring countries face more assertive domestic nationalism, Mr Heydarian told The Australian.

Anti-Chinese sentiment is mounting across Southeast Asia, fuelled domestically by rising identity politics in Malaysia and Indonesia but also by Beijing’s heavy handed approach to the South China Sea, the Belt and Road Initiative and Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement.

“On top of that, you’ve got the Xinjiang ethnic-cleansing issue (of China’s minority Uighur Muslim population),” he added.

“China can deal with all these issues in isolation but what it can’t control is how these issues will roll over each other and congeal into a countervailing force.”

China, which has long-opposed third-party arbitration over the South China Sea, has lashed out at Malaysia’s claim which it says “seriously infringes on China’s sovereignty and jurisdiction in the South China Sea”.

But it could face an even more serious challenge should Hanoi follow through its threat to take Beijing to UN arbitration, as Manila successfully did in 2016.

The 2016 landmark judgment punched holes in China’s Nine Dash Line map by ruling rocky outcrops claimed by Beijing could not be used as the basis of territorial claims, and that some of the waters it claimed were actually inside the Philippines EEZ and “not overlapped by any possible entitlement of China”.

The court also ruled Beijing violated Philippines’ sovereign rights by constructing artificial islands and interfering with its fishing and petroleum exploration — moves that have sparked protests and counterclaims by Brunei, Malaysia, Vietnam and Taiwan.