“The final decision of the arbitration, which will come out in the next few days, amounts to nothing more than a piece of paper”, said Dai Bingguo, former State Councilor of China, spoke in the opening ceremony, “China’s sovereignty over the South China Sea islands, as part of the post-war global order, is under protection by the UN Charter and other worldwide Laws”. That could remove any legal basis for China’s claims over nearly all of the South China Sea.
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Hu noted that the experts agreed on the following issues: First, the South China Sea arbitration is one-sided and the tribunal has no jurisdiction over territorial and maritime delimitation issues between China and the Philippines.
China said other ships will be prohibited from entering the area during the tests.
The Paracels are also claimed by Vietnam and Taiwan.
The seminar was co-organized by Wuhan University’s China Institute of Boundary and Ocean Studies and Leiden University’s Grotius Center for International Legal Studies, which attracted international maritime law experts from Asia, Africa, the USA and Europe.
After blaming Washington for rising tensions in the South China Sea, the newspaper declared that if the USA deployed “more military forces to the South China Sea, which are a direct threat to China’s national security, China’s military exercises could be regarded as a countermeasure”.
The area where China is conducting drills is near, but not in the center of, the high-traffic shipping lanes that carry some $5 trillion a year in trade through the area.
Increased presence of Chinese military activity in the East China Sea has raised concerns in Japan, which also vowed to support Southeast Asian countries such as Vietnam and the Philippines that have similar territorial claims in the South China Sea.
The Chinese government has said it will neither participate in the arbitration nor accept its ruling.
China strongly criticised Japan over a scramble of military aircraft from the two countries on Monday amid a dispute over islands in the East China Sea.
In his words, “The U.S. treats this region of the world very seriously, and we have very important national-security interests that we’re not going to step away from”.
A state-run Chinese newspaper warned Tuesday that Beijing should prepare for conflict in the contested waters of the South China Sea.
“It is likely that the reason for Beijing’s efforts to present its case to the public is defensive: it fears that ITLOS’s decision will go against it”, she said, referring to the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea, whose president picked the members of the Hague tribunal.
For more on the South China Sea drills and disputes, CCTV America’s Mike Walter spoke to Liu Zhiqin, senior fellow at Renmin University of China.
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Many analysts expect the tribunal to rule in the Philippines favor. “The risk for the U.S.is that it may be dragged into trouble against its own will and pay an unexpectedly heavy price”.
