Finally, a united stand. Meeting this week in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, foreign ministers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations approved a Code of Conduct to prevent armed clashes in the South China Sea. The ASEAN ministers also agreed to call for the settlement of maritime territorial disputes through international agreements, including the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
China, which is claiming nearly all of the South China Sea, still has to come on board. Beijing has opposed the discussion of the dispute at the ASEAN Regional Forum, which opens today also in Phnom Penh. The forum includes, among others, China and the United States, whose emerging rivalry in the region is being closely watched. Beijing also opposes multilateral discussions of overlapping territorial claims in the South China Sea, insisting instead on bilateral talks with the five other claimants including the Philippines.
With 10 of its neighbors thinking otherwise, however, Beijing may want to review its stand, especially in the light of its treatment of some of the other claimants. China, a member of the nuclear club and now the world’s second largest economy, has not hesitated to flex its military muscle in enforcing its claim on disputed areas in its surrounding waters. Its worst encounters in the past years have been with its closest neighbor Vietnam, whose coastline facing the South China Sea is much longer than that of China, but Hanoi is not laying claim to nearly the entire body of water.
Last week the incoming leader of China announced that there is nothing to fear about the country’s growing economic and military power. Chinese officials have emphasized that their country has prospered in the past three decades in an environment of regional peace and in the absence of a world war. Maintaining that environment and earning respect in the community of nations are better achieved through peaceful, friendly gestures, starting with neighbors.