Troubled Waters: Where The US And China Could Clash In The South China Sea - Bloomberg

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Carrier Strike Group USS Theodore Roosevelt transits the South China Sea.

Source: Milmotion/Getty Images

December 17, 2020, 5:00 AM

Perhaps nowhere do the U.S. and Chinese militaries come closer to each other than in the South China Sea. And the brinkmanship in the waters could soon rise under President-elect Joe Biden.

As the world’s biggest economies spar on everything from trade to the coronavirus, fears have grown that a miscalculation between warships could spark a wider military confrontation. Although top defense officials from the U.S. and China have maintained communication even as broader relations have deteriorated, more fervent nationalism in both countries raises the political stakes of any crisis.

Fraught Passages

Source: U.S. Dept. of Defense

President Donald Trump’s administration has increased the number of “freedom of navigation operations”—known as FONOPs—in the South China Sea to challenge China’s sovereignty claims. The current round of maneuvers, which involve naval vessels sailing within territorial limits of land features claimed by China, reached a new high of 10 last year after a total of just five in the last two years of the Obama administration.

Biden looks set to maintain or even expand the number of FONOPs. Jake Sullivan, his pick for national security adviser, last year lamented the U.S.’s inability to stop China from militarizing artificial land features in the South China Sea, and called for the U.S. to focus more on freedom of navigation.

“We should be devoting more assets and resources to ensuring and reinforcing, and holding up alongside our partners, the freedom of navigation in the South China Sea,” Sullivan told ChinaTalk, a podcast hosted by Jordan Schneider, an adjunct fellow at the Washington-based Center for a New American Security. “That puts the shoe on the other foot. China then has to stop us, which they will not do.”

The U.S. has played a key role in maintaining security in Asian waters since World War II. Yet Beijing’s military buildup, combined with moves to fortify its hold on disputed territory in the South China Sea, has raised fears that it could look to deny the U.S. military access to waters off China’s coastline. In turn, the U.S. has increasingly sought to demonstrate the right to travel through what it considers international waters and airspace.

Near Misses

Sources: Maritime Awareness Project, Institute for China-America Studies, Bloomberg News, Reuters

That’s led to a handful of tense encounters. Back in 2001, a mid-air collision between a U.S. Navy reconnaissance plane and a Chinese fighter jet prompted an international incident, with the American crew held for 10 days on Hainan island. During a close call in 2018 between China’s Luyang destroyer and the USS Decatur, the Chinese warship warned the American vessel it would “suffer consequences” if it didn’t change course, according to the South China Morning Post.

“We certainly don’t want to go to war over some coral rocks, but then again we don’t want to let China change the rules with their presence,” said Joe Felter, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for South Asia, Southeast Asia and Oceania in the Trump administration. “They’re going to push it as far as they can.”

China claims more than 80% of the South China Sea, one of the world’s busiest shipping routes, based on a 1947 map showing vague markings that has since become known as the “nine-dash line.” The U.S. estimates that more than 30% of the global maritime crude oil trade passes through the waters.

China’s Claims

Source: Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative and The Center for Strategic and International Studies

Besides China, five other governments claim land in the South China Sea: Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Taiwan. Efforts to resolve the disputes have made little progress: Talks with Southeast Asian nations on a code of conduct in the waters have dragged on for about two decades.

Beijing has also rejected a dispute resolution mechanism under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, known as Unclos. In a case unilaterally brought by the Philippines, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled in 2016 that there was no legal basis for China to claim historic rights to resources in seas falling within the nine-dash line, and man-made structures don’t generate zones of sovereignty.

In a military fight, China could easily take the islands from its fellow claimants. The U.S. and Japan are the only countries that “stand a chance” against China while Southeast Asian nations can only hope to “inflict a bloody nose,” said Bill Hayton, associate fellow with the Asia-Pacific Program at Chatham House and author of “The South China Sea: The Struggle for Power in Asia.”

U.S. sailors conduct flight operations on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson. American Navy aircraft carrier strike groups regularly patrol regional waters, fueling tensions in the South China Sea.

Photographer: Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Matt Brown/U.S. Navy via Getty Images

“We’re getting to a kind of brinkmanship phase now,” he said. “The U.S. has an edge technologically, but the closer the Chinese come to thinking they can match the U.S. the closer we get to confrontation.”

Under the waters, lots of fishing and energy resources are at stake. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates the South China Sea holds about 190 trillion cubic feet of natural gas (about 30% of total proved reserves in the Asia-Pacific region) and 11 billion barrels of oil reserves (about 25% of the region’s total proved reserves), with more possibly awaiting discovery. The U.S. says those unexploited hydrocarbons could be worth $2.5 trillion.

Competing Interests

Source: Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative and The Center for Strategic and International Studies

Over the past few decades, Chinese vessels have clashed with those from other claimants—most notably Vietnam and the Philippines—to keep them from extracting those resources. China National Offshore Oil Corp., the nation’s main deepwater explorer, in 2012 invited foreign drillers to explore blocks off Vietnam that Hanoi’s leaders had already awarded to companies including Exxon Mobil Corp. and OAO Gazprom.

China has benefited from a lack of cohesion among Southeast Asian countries, allowing its strategy of seeking only bilateral negotiations with each claimant to pay off. While Vietnam has resisted talks with China, the Philippines reached a framework agreement with Beijing for joint exploration and lifted a moratorium on operations in disputed waters put in place prior to filing the arbitration case.

The U.S., meanwhile, has put CNOOC on a list of Chinese companies owned or controlled by China’s military, potentially subjecting it to sanctions that could disrupt its operations. In July, the Trump administration formally endorsed the 2016 arbitration ruling and vowed to resist Chinese “bullying.”

“The world will not allow Beijing to treat the South China Sea as its maritime empire,” Secretary of State Michael Pompeo said at the time. “America stands with our Southeast Asian allies and partners in protecting their sovereign rights to offshore resources, consistent with their rights and obligations under international law.”

A Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy fleet–including the aircraft carrier Liaoning, submarines, vessels and fighter jets–sails through the South China Sea in a review overseen by President Xi Jinping. The U.S. and China’s Asian neighbors have noted improvements in the PLA as Xi looks to build a world-class military.

Photographer: VCG/VCG via Getty Images

China has insisted its legal position is sound and rejected the Trump administration’s moves to punish it for activities in the South China Sea. In September, Foreign Minister Wang Yi said the U.S. was “becoming the biggest driver of militarization” in the waters.

“China hopes that countries outside the region, including the United States, will fully respect the wishes and expectations of countries in the region, instead of creating tension and seeking profit from it,” he told his counterparts from around the region at an annual gathering.

Still, those arguments aren’t likely to hold much water with the Biden administration. Many members of his national security team vividly recall Xi Jinping telling Barack Obama that China had no intention of militarizing land structures in the South China Sea when the two leaders met at the White House in 2015.

Since then, China has continued to militarize the disputed territory, saying the moves were necessary due to “rising military pressure from non-regional countries.” On seven reefs or rocks in the Spratly archipelago, China has constructed ports, lighthouses and runways while also installing military equipment such as missile batteries on some 3,200 acres (1,290 hectares) of reclaimed land.

Contested Features

Source: Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative and The Center for Strategic and International Studies

The U.S. State Department in September marked the five-year anniversary of Xi’s pledge to Obama with a statement titled “China’s Empty Promises in the South China Sea.” It said China had deployed anti-ship cruise missiles, expanded military radar and signals intelligence, and built runways and hangars for fighter jets.

The land features that Beijing built up can help it project power across the South China Sea, according to James Kraska, a professor of international maritime law at the Stockton Center for International Law at the U.S. Naval War College.

“The islands provide concentric circles for air cover for all of the South China Sea,” he said. “They were selected in order to build miniature bases.”

Beijing has faced U.S. criticism for its development of disputed land features in the South China Sea. Top: Fiery Cross Reef, claimed by multiple countries. Bottom left: Woody Island, known as Yongxing Island in China, has been under Beijing’s control since 1956. Bottom right: Hughes Reef, located in the Union Banks area in the Spratly chain. The U.S. has conducted numerous FONOPs nearby.

Photographer: DigitalGlobe/ScapeWare3d/DigitalGlobe

China further raised alarm bells in August, when it lobbed a volley of missiles into the South China Sea. The medium-range ballistic missiles, including one capable of being armed with a nuclear warhead, are key to Beijing’s strategy of deterring military action off its eastern coast by threatening to destroy aircraft carriers and bases—two key sources of American power projection.

Whether China would take action to stop a U.S. freedom of navigation operation remains unclear. In response to an April passage by the USS Barry near the Paracel Islands, a spokesman for the PLA’s Southern Theater Command said the warship had illegally entered the waters. The command deployed air and naval forces to monitor the ship and warned it to leave, according to the state-backed China Daily.

Biden may also try to get allies to join. A U.K. warship reportedly carried out a sail-by near the Paracel Islands in 2018, and French naval ships have patrolled in the South China Sea. A senior U.S. official said in July that the U.S. “would always like to see more like-minded countries participate” in the FONOPs program to build international consensus and pressure Beijing, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported.

While the interdependence between the U.S. and China gives a strong disincentive for either side to escalate any incident, that calculation changes the further they grow apart, said Andrew Chubb, a specialist on Chinese nationalism and territorial claims at Lancaster University.

“The probability of U.S.-China clashes has probably increased,” he said. “And at the same time, the level of danger of any clash increases—and is likely to increase further as the decoupling of the two economies proceeds.”

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Troubled Waters: Where The US And China Could Clash In The South China Sea - Bloomberg

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