BEIJING—At the heart of the U.S.-China tussle over militarization of the South China Sea is a long-running strategic contest that both sides have helped escalate for the better part of the past decade.
The accusations that flew after U.S. and Taiwanese officials said Beijing had placed surface-to-air missiles on a disputed island were familiar ones. Washington warned that China is militarizing the region, while Beijing said it’s simply maintaining its defense within sovereign territory.
“China has been deploying national-defense facilities on the Xisha Islands for decades,” said Hong Lei, a foreign ministry spokesman, Thursday at a news briefing, using the Chinese name for the Paracels island chain. “It is nothing new.”
The latest phase in the standoff has brewed since the early years of the Obama administration, when Washington’s push to shore up its influence in the Asia Pacific collided with a more muscular stance by Beijing to assert its interests.
In 2010, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told a regional gathering of foreign ministers that Washington was prepared to facilitate multilateral talks over territorial disputes in the South China Sea.
China, which advocates one-on-one talks between disputing parties, responded angrily.Yang Jiechi, who was foreign minister at the time, characterized Mrs. Clinton’s comments as an “attack on China.”
“China was caught off-guard by Clinton’s remarks and believed that the U.S. was trying to use the South China Sea disputes to gain the strategic initiative against them,” saidHuang Jing, an expert on U.S.-China relations at the National University of Singapore. “From then on, things got worse.”
Beijing’s distrust of the U.S. deepened when President Barack Obama in November 2011 announced a shift of military, economic and diplomatic resources toward Asia. Chinese commentators saw the U.S.’s “rebalancing” as a strategy to contain China’s rising clout, and on Thursday threw back militarization accusations at Washington.
“The United States, which has become fixated on the South China Sea since Washington announced a pivot to the Asia-Pacific, has been the primary source of destabilization in the area,” the Chinese state-run Xinhua News Agency said in a commentary.
But in the eyes of the U.S. and its Southeast Asian allies, China’s placement of advanced air-defense missiles on Woody Island is the latest in a series of provocative military deployments.
“If you deploy such kind of sophisticated armament that means your intention is to use it,” Vice Adm. Alexander Lopez, chief of the Philippines’ Armed Forces Western Command, told reporters Thursday. “If so, it really impacts on the security of the region.”
By themselves, the missiles pose little threat to the balance of power in the South China Sea. China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam and Malaysia have for decades stationed military hardware and personnel on the islands and reefs they control.
U.S. warships and surveillance aircraft alsopass through the area regularly. The Chinese military has at times intercepted these patrols, triggering a number of U.S. complaints over alarmingly close encounters in recent years.
“The difference is that China is strengthening their military presence at a much greater scale and speed, so the other countries are crying wolf,” said Mr. Huang, the Singapore-based academic.
Beijing’s increasing assertiveness over territorial disputes has prompted anxious Southeast Asian governments to embrace U.S. pledges of military and economic support. China, for its part, resents the perceived American meddling in its strategic backyard.
The temperature picked up in the past year, as the U.S. started criticizing Beijing over its building of artificial islands in the Spratlys chain, south of the Paracels.
Washington says Beijing is preparing the artificial islands for military use to bolster its maritime claims. China has defended its work as defensive and legitimate acts that uphold national sovereignty. During a visit to the U.S. in September, President Xi Jinping pledged not to militarize the manmade islands.
Even so, China is unlikely to stop adding military assets to the area. The Global Times, a nationalistic Communist Party-controlled tabloid, signaled a continuing arms build-up.
“Once the U.S. repeatedly sends warships to make provocations at Chinese islands and threatens the security of Chinese people and facilities on the islands, more military equipment should be deployed to counter U.S. provocations,” it said in a Thursday editorial.
Some Chinese observers echoed the sentiment on social media, including Ma Dingsheng, a commentator on military affairs at Hong Kong-based Phoenix Television.
The Americans said “the USS Curtis Wilbur didn’t encounter the Chinese navy” during its recent patrol near the Paracels, Mr. Ma wrote on his verified microblog. “Seems like the People’s Liberation Army must position antiship missiles in the South China Sea in order to effectively defend our territorial waters.” http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-china-trade-familiar-accusations-over-south-china-seas-1455806108
Comments are closed.