Harsh words over the South China Sea
Posted: 09/08/2012 Filed under: Asia Pacific, Christian Le Miere, Defence | Tags: China, maritime disputes, Paracel Islands, Philippines, South China Sea, South China Sea disputes, Spratly Islands, Vietnam 4 Comments »
By Christian Le Miere, Research Fellow for Naval Forces and Maritime Security
The silly season is upon us, meaning that many media stories that aren’t about the London 2012 Olympics are tinged with flippancy. It’s tempting to chalk up a recent People’s Daily article to this tendency. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be what lay behind the piece, which in undiplomatic language suggested that the Chinese were ‘entirely entitled to shout at the United States, “Shut up”’.
The article was in fact a protest at a US Department of State statement the day before, and followed a busy month for observers of the South China Sea. That US statement criticised China’s creation in late July of a new prefecture-level city administration for all of the islands in the South China Sea. The city authority, based on Woody Island in the disputed Paracel Islands, is named Sansha and has all the trappings of any average Chinese city: a mayor, a municipal people’s congress and, somewhat more controversially, a military garrison.
More trouble brewing in Asian waters?
Posted: 24/04/2012 Filed under: Asia Pacific, Christian Le Miere, Defence, South Asia | Tags: China, gunboat diplomacy, maritime disputes, Naval Cooperation 2012, naval exercises, Philippines, Russia, Scarborough Shoal, South China Sea, South China Sea dispute, US, Vietnam Leave a comment »
By Christian Le Miere, Research Fellow for Naval Forces and Maritime Security
There surely can’t be anything aggressive about military exercises dubbed Naval Cooperation 2012, can there? And yet this month’s Sino-Russian exercises, involving a substantial fleet of Chinese vessels (five destroyers, five frigates, four Type 022 fast attack craft and two Song-class submarines), has highlighted the increasingly fractious relationships between naval powers in the region.
