China tells US not to incite in S China Sea
December 16, 2016, 10:11 am

Beijing claims 90 per cent of the South China Sea, a maritime region believed to hold a wealth of untapped oil and gas reserves [Xinhua]

Spokesperson Geng Shuang’s said that the US should respect the efforts of those party to the disputes to resolve the issues on their own.

Geng’s remarks came shortly after Admiral Harry Harris, head of the US Pacific Command, said that Washington is ready to take on China if it continues to lay claim to the South China Sea.

“We will not allow a shared domain to be closed down unilaterally no matter how many bases are built on artificial features in the South China Sea,” he said. “We will cooperate when we can but we will be ready to confront when we must,” Harris said during a visit to Australia on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop warned of militarization in the South China Sea after reports emerged that China was deploying weapons on islands in the maritime body.

But Geng defended the action say China was building defenses.

“If China’s building normal facilities and deploying necessary territorial defensive facilities on its own islands is considered militarization, then what is the sailing of fleets in the South China Sea?” he said.

Territorial claims

The South China Sea, which official Chinese data indicates is 3.55 million square kms, is one of the world’s most strategically important waterways and is exceedingly rich with minerals.

More than $5 trillion of world trade travels every year through the South China Sea.

China, which claims about 2 million square kms of the maritime territory, has always maintained that “the situation in the South China Sea is stable. China and the countries of the [ASEAN] have kept a good-neighborly relationship”.

But Vietnam and the Philippines dispute China’s claim over the maritime region.

In May, the International Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled that China’s historic claims to most of the South China Sea were invalid after the former Philippine government unilaterally called for international arbitration.

China called the ruling a farce and at the time President Xi Jinping said he would not accept any proposition or action based on the ruling issued unilaterally, and initiated by the former Philippine government.

But the new Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte changed course when he said he wanted to resolve the issue in a bilateral fashion with his Chinese counterparts. His visit to Beijing in October appeared to heal a rift that had emerged as a result of the Court’s ruling.

XI welcomed the Philippine initiative and said that both countries had emerged from a relationship of “winds and rains”.

In November, Malaysian leaders announced that they, too, would resort to bilateral talks with China to resolve the South China Sea dispute.

The BRICS Post with inputs from Agencies