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Progress made in South China Sea dispute: Experts

Foreign policy experts agreed on Thursday that ASEAN’s active engagement with China over the South China Sea dispute could bring functional progress despite a resolution that would not be achieved in the near future

Dian Septiari (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Fri, April 13, 2018

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Progress made in South China Sea dispute: Experts

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oreign policy experts agreed on Thursday that ASEAN’s active engagement with China over the South China Sea dispute could bring functional progress despite a resolution that would not be achieved in the near future.

Ralf Emmers from the Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore said progress had been made, including the recently improved relationship between ASEAN and China, this despite it losing the South China Sea Arbitration to the Philippines.

He added that the 2017 Code of Conduct Framework had brought a new commitment to maritime security and freedom of navigation with a new clause on prevention of incidents at sea.

Emmers said one of the most likely scenarios was that all claimants “would continue with this model, hoping that the economic interdependence between China and Southeast Asian countries would convince claimants to move toward some kind of peace and stability on the ground”.

He added that the South China Sea had become a major geopolitical flash point because China could now project power deep into it through reclaimed land and a sustain military presence close to claimant countries.

“It triggered a response from the United States, and this is why the South China Sea has become less of a Southeast Asia issue, and more of a China-US issue. It’s a tragedy for ASEAN because it’s increasingly losing the narrative in the issue,” Emmers told a symposium held by the Center for Southeast Asian Studies in Jakarta on
Thursday.

He said Indonesia and ASEAN have actually been promoting preventive diplomacy over the last two decades through a series of unofficial workshops on the South China Sea since 1990, which was financed by Canada until 2000.

“You have a series of academic officials in their private capacity being able to come together and essentially put sovereignty
aside that avoids the question of sovereign jurisdiction, but focuses on confidence-building measures and functional maritime cooperation.”

Emmers said by setting aside sovereignty and boundary issues, parties could deal with functional issues that could be resolved through cooperation, such as protecting the marine environment, marine scientific research, improving navigational safety and search and rescue, as well as dealing with illegal activities at sea.

“It is easier to sell it to the Chinese now than it was a couple of years ago because most of the reclamation work has already been done. So China, to some extent, has now come back to the table.”

Meanwhile, the head of the Foreign Ministry’s Policy Analysis and Development Agency, Siswo Pramono, said the South China Sea region had become a center of China’s global economic strategy.

“With the ASEAN connectivity master plan that goes beyond ASEAN in the last two decades, ASEAN and China relations have turned into an economic interdependence,” he added. “Since interdependence in the region is big, your neighbor is your market and messing with your neighbor is messing with your market.”

Christopher Roberts, the executive director of the National Asian Studies Center at the University of Canberra, said in addition to the South China Sea’s estimated oil and gas reserves, the region was vital to ASEAN because it brought in annual shipping trade of US$5.3 billion, while its fish stock was the source of 25 percent of Southeast Asia’s protein needs.

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