ABSTRACT
The year 2009 appears to be a watershed, particularly in the maritime domain, in China’s relations with both the United States and Southeast Asia. During the previous year, the Chinese were found to have been secretly building a naval base on Hainan Island, capable of holding submarines and providing deep-water access to crucial sea-lanes in the South China Sea. The period also witnessed US military activities in China’s EEZ coming head-on with the USNS Impeccable incident in March 2009, in which this unarmed US Navy surveillance ship reported harassment by five Chinese vessels about 75 miles off the Hainan coast. One of the Chinese vessels reportedly tried to snag the Impeccable’s underwater sonars from beneath the ship. China accused the US of spying within its EEZ, which China claims as jurisdictional waters but which US considers to be international waters. Coincidentally, a few days after the Impeccable incident, the Philippines passed an amended Archipalegic Baselines Law, in part reiterating its sovereignty claims over the Kalayaan Islands and Scarborough Shoal. This move was preparatory to its filing of a continental shelf claim with the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS), which had 13 May 2009 as the submission date for claims from various claimant states. However, the Philippines did not file a continental shelf claim on its western seaboard facing the South China Sea. On 6 May, Vietnam and Malaysia submitted a joint continental shelf claim to the CLCS, including an area within China’s extensive nine-dashed line claim. China perceived all these three events (the Impeccable incident, the Philippine baselines law, and the Vietnam-Malaysia joint submission) as a serious infringement on its territorial sovereignty. These events merely heralded what was to become a continuing escalation of tensions between China and other regional countries, including the Philippines, over sovereignty, jurisdiction and resource exploitation in the South and East China Seas. Tempers flared when a Chinese vessel harassed a Philippinecommissioned survey ship near oil-rich Reed Bank in March 2011, leading
to a decision to halt Philippine exploration activity in the area. In April 2012, in response to Philippine attempts to apprehend Chinese fishermen in Scarborough Shoal, China stationed ships in the area, successfully established control over the shoal, and began preventing Filipino fishermen from accessing their traditional fishing grounds. As of July 2013, Chinese vessels continue to patrol Scarborough Shoal and have also surrounded Philippine-occupied Ayungin Shoal, with the PRC Foreign Ministry demanding that Philippine troops leave Ayungin. The United States government, meanwhile, at the time fresh from hosting informal discussions between President Obama and the recently anointed Chinese President Xi Jinping in California, has appeared keen to avoid direct confrontation with China on this issue. However, Washington tried to assure East Asian allies that the US pivot or rebalancing would redound to their security and stated that ‘the United States has a profound interest in the peaceful resolution of territorial disputes in the South and the East China seas. It’s essential that we uphold freedom of navigation and commerce.’1
