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Ely Ratner, the Pentagon’s assistant secretary for Indo-Pacific security affairs, says provocative engagement by China in the South China Sea “looks like a pattern, and a policy”. Photo: Centre for a New American Security

World United States & Canada

US officials call China’s actions in the South China Sea unsafe and increasing

Unlawful maritime provocations by Beijing are ‘growing by orders of magnitude’, says assistant defence secretary for Indo-Pacific security affairs
Analysts from Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines at forum state concerns about China’s efforts in region and welcome more of a US response

South China Sea

Robert Delaneyin WashingtonandMark Magnierin New York

Published: 7:00am, 27 Jul 2022

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US officials denounced Beijing on Tuesday for increasing confrontations with other countries in the South China Sea, actions that a State Department official said required “multilateral condemnation”.

“There is a clear and upwards trend of [People’s Republic of China] provocations against South China Sea claimants and other states lawfully operating in the region,” Jung Pak of the department’s bureau of East Asia and Pacific affairs, said in a forum hosted by Washington think tank Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

“Rallying multilateral condemnations of unlawful PRC maritime claims, enhancing Asean maritime domain awareness … sanctioning PRC entities that jeopardise peace and security and conducting regular multilateral military exercises have bolstered regional confidence in US resolve,” she added, using the acronym for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

Ely Ratner, assistant secretary of defence for Indo-Pacific security affairs, said in the event’s keynote address that the Pentagon was working to declassify its record of occurrences so the public could judge.

Jung Pak of the US State Department’s bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs speaks at a forum hosted by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington on Tuesday. Image: CSIS

“When you look at the data of unsafe PLA intercepts, it looks like this: it is an absolute ramp upwards starting about five years ago, and growing by orders of magnitude over the years to the extent now that looks like a pattern, and a policy, and not just a decision by an individual pilot.”

Asked about the remarks by Pak and Ratner, Chinese embassy spokesman Liu Pengyu said China and Asean members were “working actively to advance the consultations on a code of conduct in the South China Sea”.

“The US, as a non-regional country, has been ignoring the history and facts of the South China Sea issue and violated and distorted international law,” Liu said.

“It has broken its public commitment of taking no position on sovereignty claims in the South China Sea, and sought to drive a wedge between regional countries and undermine peace and stability in the region,” he added.

The latest comments on rising tension in the maritime region with overlapping claims of sovereignty follow a string of incidents and interceptions that have prompted the governments of the Philippines, Australia, and Malaysia to accuse China of overly assertive transgressions.

Analysts from Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines at the forum reiterated concerns about China’s efforts to control the South China Sea and welcomed more of a US response.

Nguyen Thi Lan Anh, director general of the East Sea Institute at the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam, which is affiliated with the country’s foreign ministry, said she hoped the US State Department would continue with a series of official “Limits in the Seas” reports, which examine the validity of maritime claims around the world.

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Referring to the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and a 2016 international ruling dismissing most of China’s claims in the South China Sea, the most recent report – the 150th in the series – declared the “historical rights” that China claims in the region a meaningless term.

“We do hope that after 150, we will have other analysis to continue with these objective contributions,” Nguyen said.

Citing “malicious” encounters between Vietnamese and Chinese vessels in the Vanguard Bank – the westernmost reef in the resource-rich Spratly Islands – Nguyen said China was likely to continue using “grey tactics” to assert sovereignty claims in the region that violate UNCLOS.

Beijing ‘needs at least 6 aircraft carriers to watch over South China Sea’

Yohanes Sulaiman, a security analyst and associate professor at Jenderal Achmad Yani University in Indonesia, noted that Indonesian President Joko Widodo had met earlier on Tuesday with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing – but that those discussions did not include any about China’s operations in the South China Sea.

Referring to these operations as “the elephant in the room” during the meeting, Sulaiman criticised Widodo and Indonesia’s military leaders for not responding to the provocation of Chinese survey ships spotted lingering last year in the North Natuna Sea, within Indonesia’s exclusive economic zone, at times flanked by Chinese coastguard vessels.

“It’s kind of striking because you have a high-level talk between presidents, but nobody’s talking about the South China Sea, and part of the main reason is the fact that Indonesia simply does not want to talk about it,” he said.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo (left) with Chinese President Xi Jinping before their meeting in Beijing on Tuesday. Photo: Indonesian Presidential Palace/AFP

Ratner said the Pentagon had trailed think tanks in releasing commercial satellite imagery and other tools to help smaller nations monitor Chinese incursions in their neighbourhood.

During joint maritime exercises in August and September, the Pentagon expected to demonstrate a new space-based tool that would give countries in Southeast Asia and the Pacific a greater ability to track Chinese movements, Ratner added.

The monitoring capability was part of an initiative US President Joe Biden announced in June, the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness.

“I think it’s an incredibly important initiative,” Ratner said, adding that financing and capacity building would be done in concert with India, Japan and Australia – US partners in the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue – to help allies and partners.

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“They may have a coastguard vessel or even an aerial surveillance plane,” Ratner said of smaller nations in the region, particularly in the South China Sea. “But they would have to patrol like a police car patrols a neighbourhood around looking for trouble, rather than getting very direct information that says there is an illegal fishing vessel or an illegal coastguard vessel in your water at this exact location.”

Conference participants noted that several US administrations had pledged to shift resources to the Indo-Pacific from the Middle East or other regions without managing to do this – and that US budgets still tend to prioritise other areas.

Ratner countered that the Biden administration’s shift was real, and some discretionary funding was starting to track newer priorities, but that it took time to alter decades of entrenched policy and bureaucracy.

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“I see that as my job day in and day out,” he said, given the “pacing challenge” that China represents. “This question of aligning resources to prioritisation is one that we just have to keep asking, keep asking, keep asking.”

“We’re turning the ship but, as it relates to the question, clearly have more work to do.”

Other US policies also came under some criticism at the CSIS event. Some analysts called on Washington to adopt a more consistent approach to its relations with countries in the region and pressed Washington to ratify UNCLOS.

China is getting ‘more coercive’ in its territorial claims: US defence chief

Several US administrations, including Biden’s, have supported ratification, but the move requires approval by Congress, which has been reluctant to do so.

Indonesia works with China “for economic gains, but we maintain relationships with the US for the security”, Sulaiman said.

“We’re also worried about the United States, because the feeling is that if we get too close … that basically the United States will also dominate the region. And that’s bad news for us, in part because of the long history” of US policy in Indonesia, he added.

Sulaiman cited Washington’s support in the 1960s for the downfall of Sukarno, Indonesia’s first president, who held staunchly anti-American views, and a US military embargo against Jakarta in response to the violence surrounding East Timor’s bid for independence from Indonesia in the late 1990s.

However, none of the panellists suggested that Washington should back down.

Neil Silva, a lecturer at the University of the Philippines Diliman, said he saw Manila’s alliances as the only way to get Beijing to abide by the 2016 United Nations ruling in favour of the Philippines.

The ruling is “only binding directly in the Philippines and China, however, it is also a source of international law … and also a source of interpretation of UNCLOS under the Vienna Convention.

“The means [of enforcement] is really our alliances and partnerships,” Silva said.