Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announces additional U.S. actions on the South China Sea, including visa restrictions on executives of Chinese state-owned enterprises and Communist Party and military officials linked to maritime disputes, in a statement titled “Protecting and Sustaining a Free and Open South China Sea.
The following is a full translation of Pompeo’s statement.
Protecting and Maintaining a Free and Open South China Sea
The United States shares a profound interest in maintaining a free and open South China Sea with all law-abiding nations. All nations, regardless of military or economic power, should be free to enjoy the rights and freedoms guaranteed by international law, as reflected in the 1982 Convention on the Law of the Sea, without fear of coercion.
Today, the United States is taking additional action to defend those rights and freedoms. Pursuant to Section 212(a)(3)(C) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, the State Department imposes visa restrictions on individuals from the People’s Republic of China, including those responsible for or complicit in large-scale land reclamation, construction, or militarization of disputed remote islands in the South China Sea, or coercive actions by the People’s Republic of China against Southeast Asian claimants to deny countries access to maritime resources in the South China Sea. Executives of state-owned enterprises with officials of the Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army Navy. Immediate family members are also likely to be subject to these visa restrictions.
In addition, the Department of Commerce has included China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) on the Entity List in light of its role in the People’s Republic of China’s coercive actions against other claimants to the $2.5 trillion South China Sea oil and gas resources. The Chinese Communist Party has used CNOOC and other state-owned enterprises as weapons to try to enforce Beijing’s illegal “nine-dash line. CNOOC used its massive HD-981 exploration rig near the Paracel Islands in 2014 to try to intimidate Vietnam. CNOOC’s chief executive at the time boasted that the rig was a “mobile homeland.
Beijing continues to send fishing fleets and energy exploration vessels, escorted by the military, to operate in waters claimed by Southeast Asian countries and to harass claimant countries for oil and gas development in areas where Beijing has not been able to make a well-articulated and legally compliant maritime claim.
File photo: Chinese vessels guard near CNOOC’s HD-981 drilling rig in the South China Sea. (July 15, 2014)
On July 12, 2016, an arbitral tribunal issued a unanimous ruling in accordance with the 1982 Convention on the Law of the Sea, to which the People’s Republic of China is also a party, rejecting the PRC’s maritime claims in the South China Sea, saying they had no basis in international law. Last July, the United States aligned our position on the PRC’s maritime claims in the South China Sea with key elements of the tribunal’s ruling and again made clear our rejection of the PRC’s unlawful maritime claims in the South China Sea. An unprecedented number of countries have formally protested these claims at the United Nations, which we welcome.
The United States stands with Southeast Asian claimants who seek to defend their sovereignty and interests in accordance with international law. We will continue to act until Beijing stops its coercive behavior in the South China Sea.
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