“The others are not concerned with that dispute”, Yasay told reporters.
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Singh’s statement comes amid increasing bilateral tension between the two Asian superpowers.
Recently, after a meeting between Prime Minister Hun Sen and China’s Prime Minister Li Keqiang on the sidelines of the Asia-Europe Summit in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, Mr. Hun Sen said China would give nearly $600 million as grant aid to Cambodia for development between 2016 and 2018. The Philippines was forced to resort to global arbitration partly because it could not get any support from ASEAN in its dispute with China, which has used development aid and state-backed investments to divide the regional bloc. As early as in 2006, pursuant to Article 298 of UNCLOS, China excluded from the compulsory dispute settlement procedures of UNCLOS disputes concerning, among others, maritime delimitation, historic bays or titles, military and law enforcement activities.
But Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi said a joint communique about the situation in the South China Sea, which was published at the same time as the statement with China, portrayed unity within the region.
Wang told the Chinese media after the meetings in the Lao capital that most of the foreign ministers from 27 countries came to Vientiane with desire for cooperation.
It failed to mention a recent ruling by an worldwide arbitration panel in a dispute between the Philippines and China that said Beijing’s claims in the South China Sea were illegal and that the Philippines was justifiably the aggrieved party.
Later on Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry urged the divided nations to forge a consensus on how to address disputes in the South China Sea, appealing to them to embrace a rules-based global system to resolve those differences peacefully.
A senior U.S. government official said National Security Adviser Susan Rice told Chinese officials on Monday that countries should work to reduce tension in the South China Sea, but that the United States would continue to carry out military operations there that have angered Beijing.
China is now Vietnam’s largest trading partner and the Asian neighbors have since tried to mend ties by exchanging high-level visits although tensions remain over the islands.
Several ASEAN member nations, including Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines, had – independently – already expressed criticism toward China’s territorial claims over the majority (some 80 percent) of the South China Sea.
Beijing claims sovereignty over most of the South China Sea, through which more than $5 trillion of trade moves annually.
In a press conference after the meeting, Wang reiterated China’s rejection of the decision of The Hague court and accused the court of acting under the influence of foreign forces.
But ASEAN became divided because of China’s divide-and-rule diplomacy by winning support from Cambodia, and to some extent Laos, which resulted in the grouping issuing the bland joint statement.
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Dialogue partners of the ASEAN are China, the Republic of Korea, Canada, Japan, India, Australia, the United States, the EU, Russia and New Zealand.
