Hours after agreeing to a joint communique that referenced rising tensions in the South China Sea on Tuesday, ASEAN foreign ministers retracted their statement.
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It is likely that the statement drew private protest from Beijing; even while it did not mention China by name, it was unusual for ASEAN ministers to implicitly criticize Chinese behavior on Chinese soil.
China’s Global Times said the Western media was “crazy” thinking ASEAN would “slap China’s face” – a phrase used in some reports published on Tuesday, the Associated Press reports.
However, several hours after announcing the position, Malaysia claimed that ASEAN had retracted the statement, adding that “urgent amendments” would be made.
China said the media was hyping up the issue, and that the original statement was not an official ASEAN document.
Tensions are at an all-time high in the South China Sea, where a game of geopolitical chess is taking place between China, the US and other nations over territorial claims and military build-ups.
The Philippines, Taiwan, Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam have competing claims to parts of the sea, which is believed to harbour significant oil and gas deposits.
“The South China Sea arbitration unilaterally initiated by the Philippines is nothing but a political scheme for one party to insult the other and will be recorded as an infamous case in the history of worldwide law”, Vice Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin told a group of visiting reporters in Beijing earlier this month. In 2012, at their Cambodia summit, ASEAN foreign ministers, for the first time in their history, failed to issue a joint communique, after a highly publicized stand-off that year between the Philippines and China over Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea. But the South China Sea issue has revealed the shortcomings of this set-up, and fault lines in the organization.
The comments came as China tries to discredit a pending Hague tribunal ruling, brought against it by the Philippines, on its territorial claims in the South China Sea, where most recently it reclaimed over 3,200 acres of land in the Spratly Islands.
In a statement released late Tuesday, June 14, by Malaysia’s foreign ministry, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) warned that recent actions in the disputed waterway had “the potential to undermine peace”.
“Asean members are really concerned about the developments (in the South China Sea)”.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the establishment of the dialogue between China and the ASEAN.
Since 2009, China has become the world’s leading exporter, surpassing the USA in 2007 and Germany in 2009.
He said arbitration was among the legal and diplomatic processes promoting the rule of law in the region, and was fully consistent with the DOC and the region’s efforts to peacefully manage and resolve the disputes in accordance with the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.
It was decided that Asean would instead issue a joint statement on the outcome of the meeting.
China has been roundly criticised in the worldwide community for its strong-arm tactics in both the South China Sea and the East China Sea.
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“Indonesia expects the cooperation to create peace and prosperity”.
