Beijing attempted to quash any mention of the South China Sea dispute prior to Tuesday’s meeting in Kuala Lumpur of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
Beijing attempted to quash any mention of the South China Sea dispute prior to Tuesday’s meeting in Kuala Lumpur of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
Just when the memories of anti-Chinese protests and rioting have started to fade among the Vietnamese, the Chinese are stoking the fires again with another salami-slicing maneuver.
Last Friday, eight Indonesians were arrested by a Vietnamese coast guard patrol off the southern coast of Vietnam.
Here in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), the local government last week ordered its travel and tourism departments to draw up a feasibility study for tours to the Truong Sa (Spratly) islands, which Vietnam currently occupies.
On Saturday in Singapore, U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter addressed the attendants at the 14th Shangri-La Dialogue, a high-level security forum, asserting China’s recent land reclamation in the South China Sea was “out of step” with international norms, and adding his opposition to “any further militarization” in the region.
On Mischief Reef, in the South China Sea just off the coast of the Philippine island of Palawan, Chinese workers are busy dredging sand and creating an island on top of partially-submerged coral reefs.
Last Thursday, a Vietnamese wooden fishing boat returning to the central province of Quang Ngai was badly damaged following attacks from three Chinese vessels near the Paracel Islands, which the Vietnamese call the Hoang Sa.
Lately, it seems China’s aggressive foreign policy stance toward territorial disputes in the South China Sea is backfiring, especially in Vietnam. Last month, Vietnamese officials offered India two oil-exploration blocks in the disputed South China Sea waters, which Vietnam calls the East Sea, which drew strong condemnation from Beijing. In turn, India promised to sell […]
In a time of heightened tensions between Asian nations with claims to the waters of the East and South China Seas, the deployment of an offshore oil rig back in May by Beijing in disputed waters with Vietnam was not going to be an event without ramifications. The rig’s deployment by the Chinese National Offshore […]
Protest continued in Vietnam this past weekend as a 67-year-old Vietnamese woman burned herself to death at the front gate of Reunification Palace in Ho Chi Minh City on Friday morning. Vietnamese authorities believe the suicide was the result of personal troubles and anger, as they discovered a bag at the scene containing seven banners […]
This week, Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung oversaw the launch of the Vietnam Fisheries Resources Surveillance force, set up to ensure the enforcement of fishing laws in the East Sea, otherwise known as the South China Sea. As established under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, the force will assist deep-sea fishermen and […]
After Beijing unilaterally declared an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) in the East China Sea last month, to include the disputed Tokyo-controlled islands called Senkaku in Japanese and Diaoyu in Chinese, the reaction by regional neighbors and the U.S. was swift. But with each action, a subsequent and escalating reaction has been triggered. China’s […]
A quick glance at the above map is enough to boggle anyone’s senses, but these lines are likely to be heavily debated by officials from the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and China, following meetings over last weekend. Senior Asean officials and China yesterday agreed to speed up the process of finishing the […]
Nationalism is a beast the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) did not create, but has often tried harness to it’s benefit. Still, the use of this tool is tempered by the ever present Chinese fear of chaos (luàn:乱). A potential disaster scenario for the party is one in which it finds itself on the wrong side […]
I wrote before that – Future political integration is dependent on ASEAN resolving its many territorial disputes. There is still a high level of nationalism in the region; member-countries are suspicious of each other due to centuries of conflict, followed by colonial isolation. These disputes were recently surveyed on Capital Hill, by Richard P. Cronin, […]