MikeLigalig.com

By Rodger Baker and Zhixing Zhang

Over the past decade, the South China Sea has become one of the most volatile flashpoints in East Asia. China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan each assert sovereignty over part or all of the sea, and these overlapping claims have led to diplomatic and even military standoffs in recent years.

Because the sea hosts numerous island chains, is rich in mineral and energy resources and has nearly a third of the world's maritime shipping pass through its waters, its strategic value to these countries is obvious. For China, however, control over the South China Sea is more than just a practical matter and goes to the center of Beijing's foreign policy dilemma: how to assert its historic maritime claims while maintaining the non-confrontational foreign policy established by former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in 1980.

China staked its modern claim to control of the sea in the waning days of the Chinese Civil War. Since most of the other claimant countries were occupied with their own independence movements in the ensuing decades, China had to do little to secure this claim. However, with other countries building up their maritime forces, pursuing new relationships and taking a more active stance in exploring and patrolling the waters, and with the Chinese public hostile to any real or perceived territorial concessions on Beijing's part, Deng's quiet approach is no longer an option.

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He wants to deploy 5,000 fishing vessels with 100,000 fishermen armed and trained by the People’s Liberation Army. The militiamen supposedly would make up a force stronger than the combined navies “of all the countries in the South China Sea.” They would confront states that have territorial claims contrary to China’s, namely, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan. He said deploying that many fishing ships would be no problem, since Hainan alone has 23,000. By forming the fishermen into a maritime militia, he said the PLA-Navy could serve as rear echelon, not the front line and fall into the trap set by the US government.

Those are not the words of an official of a country that is striving peacefully to develop. Those are the words of a neighborhood gang boss threatening to let loose his armed goons to trespass and steal. China’s idea of economic growth is to grab adjacent seas to feed its population and fuel its industries, with no regard for neighbors’ legal rights. It flaunts military might to demand the neighbors’ consent.

China’s awesome war materiel notwithstanding, its army is not about to start conflict. It has had no recent experience in shooting, except at civilians at Tiananmen, Tibet and Xinjiang. And at unarmed Vietnamese sailors in the Paracels in the 1980s. To provoke war could backfire on the Communist Party. The PLA would be exposed all the more to be reporting so loyal to the party’s military commission, instead of to the people through the government’s defense ministry.

-more at Blocking P-Noy's convoy - and his daang matuwid,
GOTCHA By Jarius Bondoc (The Philippine Star), July 23, 2012

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