At a joint press conference with Philippines’ Foreign Affairs Secretary Perfecto Yasay, Kerry said the USA encourages all parties, including the Chinese and the Philippines “to negotiate, to work through this diplomatically, bilaterally, multilaterally, [and] build up confidence building measures”. A meeting of foreign ministers in China in June ended in confusion after Malaysia released and then retracted a joint Asean statement that cited China for the first time over its behavior.
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“Vigorously, I pushed for the inclusion and mentioning of the arbitral award, it’s a diplomatic track that that we had to take”, said Yasay at a press briefing of the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) on Wednesday.
U.S. has said, it has no position in China’s disputes with Southeast Asian nations in the South China Sea. After ASEAN’s failure to rebuke China, those three countries issued a joint statement in Vientiane saying they strongly oppose “any coercive unilateral actions that could alter the status quo and increase tensions”. Yasay said the Philippines did not want to gloat over the win, or rock the boat with ASEAN.
“They have not taken any stand or side or partiality (on sea disputes)”.
Wading into the South China Sea dispute, US Secretary of State John Kerry has said he backs the resumptions of talks between China and the Philippines over the disputed region, as he met with his Filipino counterpart in Manila.
US Secretary of State John Kerry was talking to reporters ahead of a regional security conference in Laos capital Vientiane. China leveraged that by ensuring that Cambodia and Laos would not provide that consensus.
“It makes ASEAN more credible to the worldwide community and makes it more effective and relevant as a regional group”, he said.
Yasay also said he wanted China to take a position so that dialogue could happen but did not say whether the Philippines would insist that the arbitration ruling be discussed.
But Kerry said the United States saw an “opportunity” for claimants to peacefully resolve the row.
China, however, has branded the ruling as illegitimate and maintained that it has territorial rights over the maritime features.
The “legal basis” will now have to give way to the diplomatic process “that we have to pursue precisely for the peaceful resolution of these disputes”, he said.
On Sunday, Wang, the Chinese foreign minister, reiterated his government’s position that it will only accept bilateral negotiations with the Philippines. It did conclude that many of them are legally rocks, even if they’ve been built into islands, and therefore do not include the global rights to develop the surrounding waters.
“At this point, it (the ruling) is not a magic stick.it’s not a solution to everything, but rather it needs to be combined with other measures”, said Tran Viet Thai, deputy director of the Institute of Strategic Studies, a Vietnamese government think tank.
China is showing no signs of slowing down its efforts to exert control over the South China Sea.
But “we are not trying to create a confrontation”.
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The academics were responding to an worldwide tribunal’s ruling this month rejecting China’s claim to exclusive control of most of the South China Sea, which hosts more than $5 trillion in global trade each year.
