By All Means Necessary (23 page)

The South China Sea has already seen conflict over the various rocks and land features; indeed it was more intense in the 1980s and 1990s, when China clashed with both Vietnam and the Philippines. The first confrontation resulted in approximately eighty Vietnamese deaths; the second, in which China seized a feature known as Mischief Reef, led to a series of tit-for-tat responses that threatened to spiral out of control.
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As in the case of the East China Sea, tension in the South China Sea has been intensified by the combination of resource claims and accompanying disputes over control of critical waterways. In 2002, Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) members and China declared that, by signing a Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea, they would pledge to “reaffirm their respect for and commitment to the freedom of navigation in and overflight above the South China Sea…[and] undertake to resolve their territorial and jurisdictional disputes by peaceful means, without resorting to the threat or use of force.”
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But tensions in the South China Sea have risen in recent years, characterized by incidents involving “fishing vessels, oil exploration vessels, paramilitary maritime law enforcement vessels, naval ships, and military aircraft” among others.
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China has also taken steps to increase administrative control over various islands. It has installed an administrative center on Woody Island (which the Chinese call Yongxing Island) in the Paracel Islands and revitalized an aircraft landing strip. In July 2012,
Time
reported that China planned to station troops on Woody Island, a move described as an attempt to “extend Chinese administrative control over the resource-rich Paracel, Spratly and Macclesfield Bank
island groups…[which are] claimed by China and five neighboring countries and have been the source of increasing confrontations in the region.”
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Moreover, in early 2010, according to some press reports, Chinese officials began describing their territorial claims in the South China Sea as a “core interest.” The term was formally defined by State Councilor Dai Bingguo in 2009 at the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue: “For China, our concern is we must uphold our basic systems, our national security; and secondly, the sovereignty and territorial integrity; and thirdly, economic and social sustained development.”
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Over time, the number of core interests explicitly claimed by China has expanded. Originally, during the early 2000s, officials used the term to refer to Taiwan, when the territory's people appeared to be moving toward
de jure
independence. By 2006, it evolved to incorporate Tibet and Xinjiang, two regions in China with sizable and restive minority populations. In 2010, Dai reportedly told U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that the South China Sea was one of China's core interests. And in 2013, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs claimed that the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea were a core interest: “The Diaoyu Islands are about sovereignty and territorial integrity. Of course, it's China's core interest.”
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Before that statement, in December 2012, the provincial government in Hainan (which is in charge of administering the South China Sea) raised the stakes when it announced that China had the right to intercept ships going through the South China Sea, but “only if they were engaged in illegal activities (though these were not defined) and only if the ships were within the 12-nautical-mile zone surrounding islands that China claims.”
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The rule was based on China's territorial claims to certain islands in the region. Since it claims the Paracel and the Spratly islands (of which various islands are also currently occupied by a number of countries) as well as the Scarborough Reef, the twelve-nautical-mile zone “surrounding islands that China claims” would include maritime areas that important sea lanes traverse. Some naval experts have expressed worry that China might “enforce these new rules fully beyond the
12-nautical-mile zones.”
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This would run directly into longstanding U.S. commitments to keep such waters open to international commerce—including resources trade. Indeed, the problems could run deeper. The United States and China disagree over whether countries can regulate foreign military activities in their exclusive economic zones (EEZs), the swathes of ocean adjoining their borders where they have an exclusive right to economic activity. The United States says no, but China (along with a small minority of countries, among them nearby Malaysia and Vietnam) says yes.
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Chinese claims, if successful, could embolden Beijing to take steps with security ramifications that go well beyond disputes about undersea oil. Nearly 50 percent of global trade passes through the South China Sea on its way to markets.
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The majority of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean oil imports pass through the waters too, making free passage of commerce through the region essential to those countries' security.
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The East China Sea is similarly vital to Japan; as one analyst has written, “no sea lanes are more important [to Japan] than those that traverse the East China Sea.”
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Meanwhile, for China, the stretch of the East China Sea from Taiwan to the southern islands of Japan has become a leading focus of naval modernization efforts aimed at denying adversaries access in the event of an intense conflict.
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Many hope that international law will impose a resolution to the conflicts over resource ownership. This would, however, be a strong departure from historical precedent. (Moreover, even if international law were applied, it would not remove the potential for intense territorial conflict.) Despite the existence of extensive rules regarding the demarcation of EEZs in international waters, there is actually little experience with using international law to settle disputes over offshore oil and gas ownership.

For example, Qatar and Iran, though both parties to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), settled their dispute over the boundaries between their respective claims within the
massive Pars gas field through a bilateral agreement signed in 1969.
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Perhaps the greatest progress in dividing up resources has come among the states bordering the Caspian Sea. But even this has seen only mixed success, and pairs of countries have generally negotiated directly rather than working through international law.
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If the countries of the South and East China Seas regions somehow agreed to use UNCLOS to adjudicate boundaries, then a second challenge would arise: it is ambiguous. Japan and China, which have both ratified the UNCLOS, define their territorial claims in the East China Sea using UNCLOS measures but rely on different measures from the convention: in December 2012, China submitted a claim to the UN Commission on the Limits of Continental Shelf (a body established by UNCLOS) detailing how the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands are situated in the zone encompassed by China's continental shelf, which it asserts is a “natural prolongation of China's land territory.”
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In principle, a successful claim over the islands would allow China to establish zones of 200 nautical mile radius extending from every islet. Japan has similarly focused on the fact that the islands are within the “exclusive economic zone extending westward from its southern Kyushu and Ryukyu islands”—and could apply similar principles.
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If the commission agreed that the continental shelf expanse is part of an extension of China's land territory, this would give China a useful tool in arguing its claim over the islands. But even though the UN commission assesses “the scientific validity of claims, ” it does not have any authority to resolve disputes. Ultimate responsibility for territorial resolution falls back on China and Japan.
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Given the sometimes-contradictory claims to various South China Sea islands and maritime zones, it should not be surprising that, as in the East China Sea, delineating maritime boundaries in the South China Sea is complex—and also that UNCLOS does not offer much help. Some maritime divisions have been reasonably settled. For example, Thailand and Vietnam came to agreement in 1977 about the division between their EEZ and continental shelf boundary in the South China Sea/Gulf of Thailand area.
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Similarly, Indonesia and Vietnam agreed to a continental shelf boundary in
2003.
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But the South China Sea islands remain hotly contested, and even though the Philippines brought its territorial dispute with China before an arbitral tribunal under UNCLOS in January 2013, China has reportedly refused to accept international arbitration.
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UNCLOS, thus, does not figure as a significant tool to resolve the territorial claims.

Despite all the factors contributing to the potential for conflict—speculation regarding resource wealth and the strategic value of the regions in particular—most analysts still deem large-scale armed conflict unlikely. At a minimum, though, the coming years are unlikely to see any side stand down; and with various military forces operating in close quarters, the possibility of error, confusion, and crisis escalation will be ever-present. Moreover, attempts to resolve tensions that focus purely on commerce and law and ignore broader strategic realities may not result in stable outcomes (even if in theory some consider them ideal). The South and East China Seas are likely to remain a potential area of conflict, with energy prominent, for years to come.

In part because of the vulnerability of the sea lanes through which much of its natural resources flow, China has increasingly focused on boosting resource production in neighboring countries, and bolstering land-based links for resources trade. Central Asia is at the center of this effort. As with the South and East China Seas, though, there is far more than resource development in play.

Central Asia is rich in oil and gas. Kazakhstan alone holds about 2 percent of the world's proven oil reserves, equivalent to roughly six years of Chinese imports; unproven resources are likely much larger. Turkmenistan holds 11.7 percent of the world's proven gas reserves (or almost one-third of all of Europe and Eurasia's gas), equivalent to nearly twenty years of Chinese demand.
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In 2011, Kazakhstan produced 1.8 million barrels of oil a day, and Turkmenistan contributed another 200, 000. Turkmenistan and
Uzbekistan each produced 6 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day, while Kazakhstan added another 2 billion, collectively about a third of Chinese demand.
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But Central Asian energy has long been fraught with challenges. Central Asian countries lack independent access to international markets. The post-Soviet Central Asian states—Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan—stand out in this regard. When the Soviet Union collapsed, more than half a century of rule from Moscow left Central Asian oil and gas producers reliant on a pipeline network directed toward supplying the Russian industrial machine. This gave Moscow extraordinary power over the economic fate of resource-rich Central Asian nations, and hence immense political influence.

There are only two ways out of Central Asia that don't run through Russia. The first is to the west. Oil and gas can be piped under the Caspian Sea, then through some combination of Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, and Iran, and on through Turkey to the rest of the world; alternatively, it can be moved through Turkmenistan and Iran to world markets. The other option is to sell to China in the east.

In the 1990s, the United States became deeply involved in promoting the western option. Its central goal was to bolster the independence of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan as they emerged from Russia's shadow. Historian Daniel Yergin writes, “For the United States and Britain, the consolidation of the newly independent nations was part of the unfinished business of the post-Cold War and what was required for a new, more peaceful world order.”
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He also argues against claims that the U.S. motive was economic, a popular belief in Moscow at the time. (“Some Russians also believe, or at least half believed, that the United States had deliberately orchestrated the collapse of the Soviet Union, ” he writes, “for the specific purpose of getting its hands on Caspian oil.”)
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U.S. military experts have come to similar conclusions: “The
driving force behind U.S. policy, ” argued Stephen Blank, a professor at the U.S. Army War College, in 2007,

is anti-monopoly, while the driving force behind Moscow and Beijing's policies is quintessentially monopolistic in nature. This American policy of defending the independence, integrity, and security of these states extends the long-established vital geostrategic interest of the United States in forestalling the rise of any Eurasian empire in either continent that could challenge it.
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Few would debate that Russia has sought to keep Central Asian oil and gas under its own control. But the view from Beijing is considerably more complicated. Central Asia plays a special role in Chinese security and economic thinking. Chinese involvement in the region is best understood by looking at a full range of commercial, strategic, and domestic security concerns, rather than just at oil and gas. Doing so reveals that energy-related commerce is usually intertwined with security goals that go well beyond a desire for reliable oil and gas supplies.

Chinese relationships with Central Asian countries were focused on traditional security concerns long before China became dependent on resource imports. Long-standing concerns about its (and its neighbors') ethnic minority Uyghur population, along with unresolved territorial concerns, drove Beijing's regional policy during the 1990s.
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Beijing saw unrest by the Uyghur population in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region as a threat. Uyghurs had been seeking greater autonomy in China for decades. During the 1990s, though, neighboring countries with large Uyghur populations suddenly achieved independence. According to one source, Central Asia holds three hundred thousand Uyghurs, with more than two-thirds located in Kazakhstan.
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Beijing feared the potential for an “orange revolution” in China, and in particular that the new political openness in Central Asia could provide an outlet for Uyghur independence efforts that might spill across the border into Xinjiang.
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China took the prospect of violence seriously and has since 1998 deployed hundreds of thousands of troops in
the Xinjiang region.
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It has also cooperated with regional governments in efforts to “counteract terrorism, separatism and extremism, ” both bilaterally and multilaterally, first through the “Shanghai Five” and later through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which includes China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.
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