Vietnamnet.vn
Podcast
The East Sea disputes
It is very easy to go from order to disorder, when activities that are contrary to common rules appear. Disorder will lead to disturbance.
In national scale, the State and community are the two factors to keep order. When an individual violates the rules, the State punishes him by laws while the society deters him by morals. In international scale, it is more complicated.
In the first case, if the world is anarchical, when a super-state and a super-community do not exist, to ensure their security, countries have to solve disputes by power.
Power balance is the policy has been implemented for centuries in the world. Internal power balance is conducted through purchasing more weapons and enhancing defense capability. Internal power balance is carried out by setting up alliances. The thing that keeps the system stable is the balance of power, meaning no power to be dominant.
In the second case, power is part of the game but the dominance of a super-power plays a key role. Firstly, it is very difficult for other countries to narrow the gap of power with the super-power. Secondly, the super-power holds the leadership and bears full responsibility for “public goods”, which are necessary for promoting cooperation but are very expensive, for example the role of the US in rebuilding Europe by the Marshall plan; Germany and France in the plan to unite the Europe; or the US navy’s presence to ensure free navigation in Asia-Pacific. The order is maintained by the presence of “royalty”.
In the third case, the order is built based on law and standards. The law stipulates legal and illegal acts. Standards stipulate do and don’t acts. The United Nations (UN Charter, laws, executive bodies) and international opinion are the supreme justice and overall values.
With the power of balance, the existence of a superpower and official and semi-official legal mechanisms, it is a mixed painting for the East Sea and disputes there. This painting, however, is moving back to the history when power and self-deduction (instead of solving disputes by law and seeking agreement) are gradually gaining the upper hand.
Firstly, from the difference in the concept about the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of China, free navigation in the region is being defined in a different way.
According to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea 1982 (UNCLOS), coastal countries have absolute sovereignty in the inner sea and the territorial waters (12 nautical miles from the baseline) and enjoy economic rights including exploring, exploiting natural resources and catching fish, etc. in the EEZ (200 nautical miles from the baseline). Military, scientific research activities of foreign ships are not allowed in the territorial waters but allowed in the EEZ.
Meanwhile, China reasons that coastal countries not only have the economic rights in the EEZ but also the rights to conduct other scientific activities. It means that every research, measuring, hydrometeorological survey activities of other countries must be permitted by coastal countries.
The Impeccable ship incident in 2009 is an example for Beijing’s new deduction and behavior. Many Chinese ships surrounded the US Impeccable ship when this ship was performing surveillance 75 nautical miles from Hainan Island, out of China’s territorial waters but in China’s EEZ.
The US said that China violated international law and practice because Impeccable only performed surveillance and did not harm China’s economic interests. Beijing said that the US took advantage of the free navigation rights to spy, harming China’s national security.
This incident shows that under Beijing’s eyes, the rights of coastal countries in the EEZ should be upgraded to the rights in the territorial waters.
By regularizing through law (the act on exclusive economic right in the Code on Surveillance and Map 2002, that bans foreign ships to perform surveillance and measuring activities in the EEZ), and diplomatic pressure (Beijing called for the US to gradually reduce and finally end surveillance acts in its EEZ to avoid ‘marine conflicts’), China has recently institutionalized its EEZ into the exclusive military zone.
On one hand, it is the effort to gradually reduce the US’ influence in the East Sea. On the other hand, which is contrary to the first, the Beijing government allows it to have free navigation right in the EEZ of other countries.
Different from coastal countries which have similar argument, some signals show that China benefits this right based on the ground of battleship power. A recent article by Dana Dillon on Policy Review compared the East Sea conflict as the conflict between two world outlooks, the first is the world community through the “national sovereignty” prism, as regulated by the UN Charter and the UNCLOS and the second is China’s “centre-periphery” outlook with Beijing in the center and satellites around.
In that angle, China’s unilateral ban of fishing, arresting foreign fishermen, using patrol ships to supervise the sea is like the acts of an emperor who sees everything in this world as his assets and does not hesitate to use forces if his interests are harmed.
If this becomes the decisive policy, Beijing’s “new order” will seriously threaten the principle of sovereignty that regional countries consider as supreme rule, and contribute to realize the pessimistic forecast of the realism school which considers the future of Asia as the past of Europe, with wars and armed conflicts.
Nguyen Chinh Tam
The next story: New order for the East Sea: Power or institution?
.svg){kind=icon}
