Analysts in the South China Sea region say that since the beginning of this year, Canadian and Western European leaders have begun sending naval ships to the disputed South China Sea as a reaction to Beijing. They believe Beijing’s approach has gone too far and is worrying even the people of their countries.
French Defense Minister Florence Parly said in early February that France had sent an attack submarine to the South China Sea this month. And a British defense official said last month that Britain’s flagship aircraft carrier strike group was ready to enter the South China Sea.
In addition, a Royal Canadian Navy warship passed through the Taiwan Strait in January to join the Australian, Japanese and U.S. navies that are conducting military exercises in the nearby waters.
These Western countries do not have sovereignty over the 3.5 million square kilometer sea, and the South China Sea is a continent away from their own territorial waters. Scholars believe that these European and American countries want to support the U.S. in resisting the unilateral expansion of the Chinese Communist Party, whose actions are increasingly touching the interests of these former European colonies and unsettling the populations of Western countries.
I think there is a lot of consensus among France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and others that what they see in their observations of China is that [the Chinese Communist Party] is trying to modify the old order through power, not based on compliance with rules, and that will be the future of governance or management in the region,” said Stephen Nagy, senior associate professor at the Institute of Politics and International Studies at International Christian University in Tokyo. be the way this region is governed or managed in the future.”
The analysts add that the way the sea is managed violates the West’s former colonies, or their current economic interests in Asia, such as free access to busy maritime cargo lanes, and that the West is bound to resent it.
Britain, for example, is bound by the 1971 Five Power Defense Arrangements to defend its former protectorate, Malaysia. Malaysia continues to dispute the Chinese Communist Party’s claim to approximately 90 percent of the South China Sea, which extends from the south of Hong Kong to the island of Borneo.
Carl Thayer, a professor emeritus at the University of New South Wales in Australia, said in an emailed briefing Monday that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson would eventually want his country to play a greater role in Asia because of economic and trade ties around the South China Sea.
The former French colony of Vietnam disputes the Communist Party’s maritime claims, including the Xisha Islands, which are still controlled by the Communist Party today. France still maintains “cultural” and “economic” ties with their former Southeast Asian colony, Nagy said.
A Chinese survey ship entered the South China Sea in April 2020 and confronted Malaysian and Vietnamese vessels. All three countries are actively drilling for oil. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that the sea holds 11 billion barrels of oil and 190 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves.
In a Feb. 9 tweet, French Defense Minister Florence Parly said the submarines they sent sailed in the area further “enriched our knowledge of the area and confirmed that international law is the only rule in force, no matter which sea we sail in.”
She added: “This is ample proof that the French Navy, together with our strategic partners Australia, the United States and Japan, are capable of long-range and long-term deployments.”
Brunei, the Philippines and Taiwan also dispute parts of the South China Sea. Asian governments place great value on maritime access to South China Sea waters because of the sea’s rich fisheries resources and fossil fuel reserves under the sea. Over the past decade, the Chinese Communist Party has been at the forefront of island reclamation in the region for the construction of military facilities.
Western countries with no claim to the South China Sea have been sending ships through the waters since the 1970s when the sovereignty dispute first gained attention. The Chinese Communist Party still cites the remains of their historical activities in the South China Sea to support their sovereignty claims. However, the ruling of the International Court of Arbitration in The Hague back in 2016 has rejected such a basis for sovereignty claims.
Experts believe that countries such as Canada, Australia and Western European countries are also sending ships to show support to the United States. The U.S. is following a regular voyage in 2020. Destroyers were dispatched to the waters twice this month.
Huang Kui Bo, associate dean of the School of International Affairs at National Chengchi University in Taipei, Taiwan, believes that in the case of France, “they may have notified the U.S. side, which is tantamount to showing indirect support for the U.S. with the submarine passage under the sea.”
Nagy, a senior associate professor at the Institute of Political and International Studies at the International Christian University in Tokyo, said that people outside of Asia will support their countries’ missions in Asian waters due to the fact that they began to pay more attention to China as the source of COVID-19 last year. These people are beginning to notice the pressure that the Chinese Communist Party is exerting on India, Taiwan and the militarily weaker claimant countries around the South China Sea, Najib added.
Alan Chong, an associate professor at the Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, said Western leaders want to “have an impact” on China.
One way to have an impact is to ensure that the authorities in Beijing take European values seriously and maintain the principle of free and open passage in international waters,” Chong said.
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