Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop urged all South China Sea claimants to resolve their disputes peacefully, saying Australia would keep exercising its global rights to freedom of navigation and overflight, and support the right of others to do the same. “This will be our eyes and ears”, the retired general said.
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To further discuss the South China Sea arbitration results, CCTV America’s Elaine Reyes spoke with Brendan Mulvaney, senior non-resident fellow of Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China. Taiwan responded by sending a warship to the area.
If newly elected President Rodrigo Duterte leans toward a pro-Beijing line on the promise of economic assistance, it could undermine the bloc’s unity.
The whitepaper, released yesterday by China’s State Council Information Office, accused the Philippines of “having increasingly intensified its infringement of China’s maritime and interests”. China is also desperate to ensure the other countries involved in the dispute do not openly support the tribunal’s ruling. China also said it had completed four lighthouses on disputed reefs and was launching a fifth. Philippine House Rep Harry Roque, an International Law Expert has said that if China will keep forcing its dominance in the South China Sea, the Philippines can go for vote of the UN General Assembly for authorizing sanctions against Beijing -reports First Post.
On the award issued Tuesday by an arbitral tribunal in The Hague, Li said China has been very clear on its stance of not recognizing or accepting the award. The so-called nine-dash line that Beijing uses to claim most of the sea is based on a map issued in the late 1940s by China’s then-Nationalist government, which fled to Taiwan in 1949 after losing a civil war to Mao Zedong’s Communists.
On Tuesday, an worldwide tribunal in The Hague ruled that China has no historic rights to the area within its self-declared nine-dash line and that Taiwan has no right to Itu Aba, also called Taiping, the largest island in the Spratlys.
China has vowed to ignore the ruling.
China has rejected the ruling, saying it will not comply.
It also declared that China had acted unlawfully by violating the Philippines’ sovereign rights within its exclusive economic zone – waters extending 200 nautical miles from the Filipino coast.
“We have to be magnanimous in victory”, Foreign Secretary Perfecto Yasay told reporters in Manila on Wednesday.
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That statement had expressed alarm over Beijing’s activities in the South China Sea and the fiasco highlighted the bloc’s inability to maintain a united front against Chinese expansionism. Beijing is expected to lean heavily on the DOC to take forward its idea of one-to-one negotiations between the parties in dispute.
