Hanoi has kept the threat of an international lawsuit and
stronger relations with Japan
and the US on the table
even after Beijing
removed its giant oil rig from Vietnamese waters last month.
On July 26, roughly ten days after
the rig was withdrawn, an international conference convened in Ho Chi Minh City, bringing together foreign and
Vietnamese legal experts to debate the practicality of an international
lawsuit against China.
The title of the event could not
have been more specific: “Legal issues regarding China’s
placement of the Haiyang Shiyou 981 oil rig in Vietnam’s Exclusive Economic Zone
and Continental Shelf.”
Despite the departure, conference
organizer Mai Hong Quy, rector of the HCMC University of Law, was not shy
about what would happen next.
“The recommendations of this
conference will be forwarded to Vietnamese and international agencies at the
soonest possible,” she said.
The drill
On July 15, the state-owned China
National Petroleum Corporation announced that the US$1-billion oil rig had
finished drilling near the Paracel (Hoang Sa) Islands,
which it seized by force in 1974. The rig was drawn back to Hainan Island, China's
southernmost province, after having successfully discovered “signs of oil and
gas,” the Chinese company said in a statement.
The rig sent Sino-Vietnamese ties
plummeting toward their lowest point in decades after its arrival in Vietnam’s 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic
zone in the East Sea, the Vietnamese term for the South
China Sea, on May 2.
In the ensuing days, China amassed
an aggressive fleet around the rig to chase off Vietnamese police boats.
The move, which many called an
“invasion,” triggered peaceful protests that erupted into violence in central
and southern Vietnam
two weeks later. The resulting riots left hundreds of foreign-owned factories
vandalized and three Chinese nationals dead.
At the height of the tension,
Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung made repeated public statements
about plans to take legal action against China to resolve the dispute. In
March, the Philippines
submitted a case to an arbitration tribunal at The Hague,
challenging China's claims
in the East Sea.
Although the crisis appears over for
the moment and PM Dung has demanded that China not repeat its actions,
most expect the oil rig to return, either later this year or next year,
prompting another standoff.
Given that, “it appears unlikely
that [Vietnam] shelved a
decision to take legal action against China,”
said Carl Thayer, a maritime analyst at University
of New South Wales in Australia.
What else is in the cards?
Analysts believe Vietnam
should not count on a case arbitrated by the UN tribunal as its only
defensive option.
Since 2007, China has excluded itself from the dispute
settlement mechanism outlined by the United Nations Convention on the Law of
the Sea (UNCLOS) to which Vietnam
and China
are signatories.
Beijing, which
wields veto power at the UN’s Security Council, has outlined its strategic
philosophy in maps that take in about 90 percent of the 3.5 million square
kilometer East Sea.
A slew of squabbles between China and ASEAN claimants in the East Sea
have virtually stalled negotiations on a formal code of conduct that has been
in the works for years.
Analysts say the prospect of a code
of conduct -- particularly a robust, binding one -- is rather dim. Beijing will likely
seek to maximize the extent to which it can control before it finally
ratifies the terms of the code, they say.
In recent months, China dispatched three more oil rigs across
the East Sea,
while cranking up a number of land reclamation projects on small islands in
the Spratly Islands.
Ahead of the ASEAN Regional Forum
meeting held this weekend in Myanmar,
a Chinese official has said the country will build whatever it wants on the
isles it controls the East
Sea.
The announcement was made after the
Philippines said it would, like the US, propose a freeze on all activity that
raises tensions in disputed waters at the regional meeting, where Southeast
Asian foreign ministers will hold security talks with their counterparts,
including representatives from the US and China.
In an explicit gesture to snub those
calls, China plans to
build lighthouses on five islands in the East Sea.
Reuters quoted Chinese media reports as saying Thursday. At least two of
the islands upon which China
said it will put up lighthouses appear to be in waters also claimed by Vietnam.
It is in that context that “what
seems to really matter to China
is international pressure. China is not going to suck up [to anyone],”
Baladas Ghoshal, an expert at the India-based the Institute of Peace and
Conflict Studies, told Thanh Nien News on the sidelines of the conference in
HCMC last month.
“So that’s why I say other methods
could be the best way to get China
to behave. You have to exhaust all methods and just cannot depend on one,” he
said.
Friend or foe?
Meanwhile, Vietnam has apparently welcomed efforts to
ramp up economic and strategic engagement from the US
and its treaty ally Japan,
which is itself embroiled in a dispute with China
over a series of uninhabited islands in the East China
Sea.
In the latest sign of such
reinforcement, Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida said during a visit to
Hanoi last week that Japan would give six used naval boats to Vietnam to boost its patrols and surveillance
capacity in the East
Sea. The donation,
worth an estimated 500 million Yen (US$4.86 million), will be accompanied by
training and equipment to help the coastguard and fisheries surveillance in
their efforts.
Japan's foreign
ministry also announced plans to reopen funding to new Official Development
Aid (ODA) projects in Vietnam
after a short-lived halt during a June investigation into bribery allegations
at the state-run Vietnam Railways.
Vietnamese President Truong Tan Sang
called on the US to lift a
ban on the sale and transfer of weapons to the country during his meeting
with former US President
Bill Clinton in Hanoi
last Friday. Several US
senators and the US
ambassador nominee to Vietnam
have thrown strong support behind this plan.
Before China
withdrew the oil rig, the US Senate issued a resolution which, among other
things, condemned China's
"unilateral actions" to change the status quo in disputed waters.
The US has been a vocal
critic of China’s behavior
at sea and reiterated its strategic “pivot” towards the Asia-Pacific, something
China
considers a clear threat.
Analysts say while the oil rig
crisis has prompted Vietnamese leaders to realize that the country needs to
become less economically dependent on China, “this does not imply a zero sum
game”, Dennis McCornac, a professor at Loyola University in Baltimore
(Maryland), told Thanh Nien News.
Analysts say Vietnam certainly needs to engage more with Japan in the
areas of technology and education, while maintaining cautious support for the
militarization strategies of Prime Minister Abe.
“Abe is quite the nationalist and is
prone to say and do things that irritate not only China,
but South Korea
as well,” McCornac said. “Given Japan's
history, it is not trusted by many countries in Asia.
Aligning too closely with Japan
could hurt Vietnam's
relations with other countries.”
Reuters reported Thursday that
over-dependence on trade with China
will be hotly debated at the highest levels of the Vietnamese Communist
Party.
Trade with China hit $50 billion last year and any
interruption could badly hurt Vietnam,
while inflicting little damage on China, the newswire said. Thirty
percent of Vietnam's
imports in 2013 were came from its neighbor, it said. Reuters estimated the
import's value at $37 billion-- or just one percent of Beijing's total exports.
The report suggested that the US-led
Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) deal that has been under negotiation since
2009 could prove a “game-changer”. China is not among the dozen
countries involved in talks to form a trade pact that would cover a third of
global trade.
But skeptics have warned Vietnam to
tread carefully on the TPP, which they describe as highly skewed in favor of
the larger economies. Vietnam
may not benefit to any great extent, they say.
“It would be foolish to think that Vietnam can ignore its close economic
relations with China and
rely on other countries instead,” said Bill Hayton, author of the forthcoming
book “South China Sea: the struggle for power in Asia”.
“It does so much trade with its big neighbor that it must seek to preserve
good economic relations while also defending its maritime claims,” he said.
Most analysts agree that the world
is not a very nice place and Vietnam
must fend for itself.
“Vietnam needs to defend itself,
but it cannot do that militarily. It needs to do so diplomatically,” McCornac
said.
“While most do not trust China, I don’t trust the US or Japan
to look after Vietnam’s
interest.”
By An
Dien, Thanh Nien News
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