Recent months have witnessed an impressive Chinese diplomatic blitzkrieg, with President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang feverishly courting friends and foes alike, proposing ambitious trading agreements and acquiescing to various confidence building measures (CBMS) aimed at de-escalating geopolitical tensions in the region. But China’s intensifying legal battle with the Philippines has injected new uncertainties […]
SYDNEY — On two recent occasions, a pair of Sukhoi Su-30 fighters have taken off from their base near the old Indonesian trading port of Makassar and flown far across the Indonesian archipelago to intercept unidentified aircraft. One of the mystery planes, a light aircraft being ferried from Darwin in northern Australia to its new […]
China’s position paper published on December 7, 2014 is one of the rare documents in which Beijing officially expressed its opinions on the issues in the South China Sea as well as on the arbitration proceedings that the Philippines initiated at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in January 2013. It seems that the motivation was […]
Within China’s bureaucratic system, sometimes it is in an agency’s interest to compete with others, rather than coordinate, in order to advance its own bureaucratic power and receive more funding. Linda Jakobson’s recent Lowy Report, China’s Unpredictable Maritime Security Actors, highlights this phenomenon between maritime agencies. Such a bureaucratic shortfall could explain to some degree […]
China’s rejection of the international process represented by the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague is both a missed opportunity and a disappointing corollary to its intransigence on the South China Sea dispute. Beijing’s visceral opposition to third-party arbitration is based on the suspicion that the process is a means of exerting political pressure on […]
Last month, China showed its cooperative side to the international community. It struck an ambitious climate deal with the U.S. that President Xi Jinping announced alongside President Obama. It took a seat at the P5+1 talks in Vienna to negotiate a path forward for Iran’s nuclear program. And it responded to the United Nation’s call […]
Philippine troop and Chinese maritime police boat confrontation at Second Thomas Reef With China taking aggressive military actions to annex Philippine and Vietnamese territories in the South China Sea, both of these countries are building up the military capabilities, though nothing that their plan would have more than a small token resistance when facing the […]
BEIJING – China will set up an offshore observation network, including satellite and radar stations, to strengthen the country’s maritime power, the official China Daily reported on Friday, in a move that could exacerbate tensions in the region. Many of China’s neighbours, including Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam, have expressed concern at China’s military build-up […]
China’s government has ignored a deadline to outline its territorial claims in the South China Sea to an international court. The government had until yesterday to submit its case to a court of arbitration in The Hague in the Netherlands. The case was bought by the Philippines, but a foreign ministry spokesman in Beijing, Qin […]
It means a lot to the Philippines that Vietnam submitted a Position Paper to the Arbitral Tribunal of the United Nations that is handling the complaint filed by the Philippines against China on the conflict in the South China Sea. Probably so as not to further antagonize China, with whom the Philippines has rekindled relations […]