Whale and Spratlys [-Whom will Hun Sen back? China his new benefactor, or Vietnam his former boss?]

Disputes in the South China Sea

Dec 13th 2007 | BEIJING
The Economist

Yet another cold-war revival

WITHOUT fanfare, China has created a colossal new city. It is called a city even though it barely has a population to speak of and consists mostly of water and desolate islands. It would be no more than a bizarre misnomer were it not that the affected area—a swathe of the South China Sea—has other claimants, too.

In recent years, China has become less strident in asserting its claims to sovereignty over islands in the South China Sea. In an effort to strengthen ties with wary South-East Asian neighbours, it has preferred to play down territorial disputes and stress the need for joint efforts to exploit the oilfields beneath the waves.

But wariness persists. Vietnam has been riled by what it says was a recent Chinese decision to upgrade the status of the organisation that China says is responsible for the archipelagoes of the Paracels and Spratlys as well as the submerged reefs of Macclesfield Bank (see map). The outfit in charge of these territories is located on Woody Island in the Paracels. Its jurisdiction is reportedly being relabelled as the “county-level city” of Sansha (an abbreviation of Xisha, Nansha and Zhongsha, China's names for the outcrops), part of Hainan province.

In deference to its neighbours' sensitivities, China has not publicly confirmed the action. But Vietnam made its point by tolerating rare demonstrations on December 9th outside China's embassy in Hanoi and its consulate in Ho Chi Minh City. The Chinese, having used similar tactics themselves during spats with other countries—notably Japan—would have got the message clearly enough.

Vietnam had already been piqued by China's staging of big military exercises in the South China Sea in November, close to the Paracels. China has controlled the islands since it drove out a South Vietnamese garrison in 1974. In the 1990s it extended the runway on Woody Island. In August China's state-run media said plans had been approved to develop group tourism on the archipelago. An official was quoted as saying this would be an important way of demonstrating sovereignty.

But neither China nor Vietnam wants to see their differences deteriorate, let alone to the level of 1979 when the countries fought a brief border war (occasional skirmishes continued into the 1980s, including one in the Spratlys in 1988). During a meeting in November in Singapore, China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao, told his Vietnamese counterpart that efforts to demarcate their land border should be speeded up. The new Sansha city embraces the Spratlys, where the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Taiwan also have claims. But these contenders have so far kept quiet.

Tensions between the claimants have eased since China signed an agreement with South-East Asian countries in 2002 to resolve their disputes in the South China Sea peacefully. In the past couple of years China, Vietnam and the Philippines have been conducting an unprecedented joint survey of the South China Sea to probe its oil and gas reserves. This, however, is the easy part. When they eventually determine how big the reserves are, they will have to decide how to share them.