VIETNAM TO SUE CHINA FOR CLAIMING 80% OF SOUTH CHINA SEA

After the Philippines won a favorable ruling vs Beijing in July 2016.

Buoyed by the growing international suspicions on China’s actual role in the spread of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic and also by the successful verdict rendered by the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in favor of the Philippines in July 2016, Vietnam is now poised to follow the same tack.

In his May 7, 2020 article for Asia Times, William Hutt said “Vietnam is believed to be inching towards filing an international arbitration case against China’s expansive claims in the South China Sea, a potential legal response to rising Chinese intimidation and harassment in the contested waterway.”

Lately, China’s warships have also shadowed a survey ship prospecting for oil in the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of Malaysia, but the US Navy sent the USS America, a helicopter carrier with F-35 Stealth jets and dozens of helicopters as well as battalions of US Marines, and backed up by at least four frigates and destroyers to also trail the Chinese flotilla that later on got support from Coast Guard ships and the maritime militia, and Vietnam also joined in before Australia also dispatched ships to monitor the Chinese vessels.

Last year, Indonesia also beefed up its Navy in the Natuna Islands after China insisted that its overblown claims of fishing rights extended up to Sabah, and presumably later on to the Sunda Strait and East Timor.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo said that if China persists in claiming 80 percent of the South China Sea, Indonesia might be forced to claim parts of China as well as the rulers of Sri-Vijayan Empire had tributaries in China.

Analysts monitoring the situation believe Hanoi could file such a petition, possibly similar to the one the Philippines filed and won against China at The Hague’s Permanent Court of Arbitration in July 2016.

The decision declared that China has “no historical rights” under its “nine-dash line” which actually the Kuomintang government of China drew up in 1947 to show the Chinese areas “surrounded by seas” and had nothing to do with the so-called historical rights.

China under Chairman Mao Zedong did not assert any right to parts of the Paracel Islands now under Vietnam’s occupation and in fact yielded some islets to Hanoi and concluded an accord to end Beijing’s sovereignty in those areas, much to the satisfaction of the late North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh.

With Mao dead and the Chinese leadership refusing to abide by his military dictum of maintaining a defensive military posture, Beijing has redrawn its maps and insisted that the “nine-dash-line” was genuine and that China, which was never a naval power, had sovereignty over a wide swath of the sea where $3-trillion in trade goods pass annually.

No such “nine-dash-line” is enshrined in Chinese history since the only time China thought about the South China Sea was in 1947, when the Kuomintang party still held power.

Despite the absence of an enforcement covering the decision of PCA in The Hague in July 2016, the verdict was still a big punch that landed right smack at Chinese President Xi Jinping’s kisser.

“There have been significantly more voices within the ruling elite in Hanoi calling for bringing China to court” since last year, Hutt quoted Alexander Vuving, professor at the Daniel K Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu, Hawaii, as saying.

If anything, the July 2016 PCA decision favoring the Philippines was a document respected by many nations but dismissed by China as a mere scrap of paper.

Derek Grossman, a senior defense analyst at RAND Corp., a Washington-based think tank, did not confirm the policy shift of Vietnam but noted from his sources in Hanoi that such a lawsuit is one proposal under “serious consideration.”

Hutt said a Vietnamese diplomatic source who spoke to Asia Times on the condition of anonymity said discussions on the filing of such a suit has become more “intense.”

During the annual South China Sea conference hosted last November by the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam, Deputy Foreign Minister Le Hoai Trung publicly raised the issue of an international case, the first time in nearly five years that the idea was broached.

“The UN Charter and UNCLOS 1982 have sufficient mechanisms for us to apply those measures,” Trung said at the time, referring to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS.)

Vietnam has been miffed by the Chinese Haiyang Dizhi 8 geological survey ship spent much of 2019 harassing a Vietnamese joint venture with a Russian firm exploring for energy in Vietnam’s EEZ.

On April 3, a Vietnamese fishing vessel was sunk by a Chinese coast guard ship near disputed waters in the Paracel Islands. Ten days later, the Chinese survey ship was redeployed to monitor Vietnam’s EEZ.

Later, China’s government announced the creation of new administrative areas in the Paracel and Spratly Islands, parts of which Vietnam also claims, and the Philippines lodged a diplomatic protest to condemn the move.

Vietnam’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Le Thi Thu Hang issued a statement slamming China’s action. “Vietnam demands that China respect Vietnam’s sovereignty and abolish its wrongful decisions,” it said.

Last August, Vietnam analyst Le Hong Hiep wrote in regional media that “diplomacy seems…to be the first and also the last line of defense for Vietnam against China’s assertiveness in the South China Sea.”

The suit that Vietnam contemplates could sway international opinion in its favor at a time when its people are united behind the leading Communist Party and China has been weakened by its behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic and its appalling actions in the Paracels and the Spratlys.

Bill Hayton, a South China Sea expert at the Chatham House think tank, told Reuters last November that the lawsuit is maybe “the only thing left for Vietnam.”

Honolulu-based analyst Vuving also told Asia Times opined that “Hanoi may think it has no other option but to sue China at an international court.”

“Whenever Beijing opposes Hanoi’s actions in the South China Sea, the Vietnamese government has basically two options: either publicly criticize China or attempt to solve tensions through communist party-to-party meetings with Beijing,” Hutt concluded.