IT IS not just towards Taiwan that China has been showing a friendlier face. Recent days have seen a flurry of high-level diplomacy that has helped calm some of its many other quarrels in Asia. China’s president, Xi Jinping, has paid a rare state visit to Vietnam, despite continuing tensions over competing claims in the South China Sea. And China has taken further steps to normalise relations with Japan, fraught for the past five years over disputed islands and a long-running row about Japan’s view of its own history.
The overture to Vietnam is perhaps the more surprising, given recent developments. Like other claimants in the region, notably the Philippines, Vietnam has been angered by the breakneck pace of Chinese land reclamation around rocks and reefs in the sea. When, late last month, America sent a naval destroyer close to one of those reefs to assert “freedom of navigation”, Vietnam did not publicly cheer, as the Philippines did. But it was undoubtedly pleased. China, for its part, fulminated against the American “threat”, and held live-fire military exercises in the sea. But its reaction, though shrill, was formulaic. It seems reluctant to provoke a showdown with the United States.
Nor, however, is China making any concessions. Along with the Philippines and Vietnam, it was among 18 countries attending a meeting of defence ministers in Kuala Lumpur this week. Unusually for an event organised by the Association of South-East Asian Nations, this wound up with no agreed joint statement. China objected to the inclusion of anything related to the South China Sea.
The dispute is causing China legal as well as diplomatic embarrassment. On October 29th the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled that it did have jurisdiction over a case filed by the Philippines under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). It accepted that the Philippines’ submission was not about sovereignty, but about the interpretation of the law. China has refused to take part or to recognise the court’s jurisdiction. It will consider whether China has illegally obstructed Philippine fishermen and broken obligations to protect the environment.
The court will also pass judgment on whether the features that China is building up—now, in effect, artificial islands—are entitled to the 12-nautical-mile territorial waters and 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zones (EEZ) that UNCLOS allows to habitable natural islands. The Philippines maintains that they are either uninhabitable rocks, which get no economic zones, or reefs submerged at high tide, with no territorial waters either. This was the point America wanted to make in sending the USS Lassen near one feature, Subi reef: it used to be a “low-tide elevation” and, whoever owns it, building around it does not alter its legal status.
Against this backdrop, Mr Xi’s visit may have been an effort to remind the region that it is an indispensable economic force as well as a rising military power. For Vietnam, as for many other Asian countries, China is the single largest trading partner. And China will have followed the debate in Vietnam ahead of a leadership transition at a Communist Party congress in early 2016. Some Vietnamese leaders want the country to tilt more decisively towards America. In recent years it has forged much closer ties and joined the American-led trade pact, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Others favour maintaining a balance, arguing that America is fickle, whereas China will always be next door.
The American friend
Japan’s territorial dispute with China, over the tiny uninhabited Senkaku or Diaoyu islands, has a different context—that of Japan’s security treaty with America. As China sees it, this has allowed Japan to risk China’s wrath, as when, in 2012, it nationalised three of the islands that had been privately owned. Since then bilateral relations have been dire. Japan has been engaged in equally bitter disputes with South Korea, over yet another rocky island, and over Japan’s 20th-century militarism.
So a trilateral summit in Seoul this week between China’s prime minister, Li Keqiang, his Japanese counterpart, Shinzo Abe, and South Korea’s president, Park Geun-hye, was a breakthrough. Their disagreements are substantial and heated, and the most important were dodged in the joint statement. Yet the three declared that co-operation had been “completely restored”, after a break since May 2012.
This will be welcomed by America; it has long cajoled Japan and South Korea, its two most important East Asian allies, to make it up, and watched with some alarm as South Korea has grown closer to China. But America will also be relieved that China and Japan seem to be edging away from confrontation. They agreed to resume talks between their ministers for trade, finance and foreign affairs, suspended since 2010. Both realise the risks of a flare-up in the East China Sea, so they are working to manage their rivalries instead. Incursions by Chinese vessels into the waters surrounding the Senkaku islands continue. But they are calibrated and orchestrated.
Undercurrents abound, however. China also appears to be slowly repairing ties with its old ally, North Korea: ties which, shrouded in secrecy and arcane rhetoric, have been strained since Kim Jong Un came to power four years ago. Last month China sent its first high-ranking official to the North since 2013 for the celebrations of the 70th birthday of the North Korean Worker’s Party. That is all to the good, if it helps China rein in its obstreperous neighbour. But the South’s present cordial relations with China have yet to be tested by a North Korean provocation as serious as its presumed torpedoing of one of the South’s warships in 2010; then, China’s equivocal response soured relations with the South.
Some think China has good reasons to want better relations across the region. Douglas Paal of the Carnegie Endowment, a Washington think-tank, says the recent diplomacy is part of China’s “counterbalance” to America’s rebalance in Asia. China has realised that it has been “scoring own-goals all over the region”; now it wants to tone down disputes. Worried about managing hostility on two fronts, it is trying to mend some fences. But China’s neighbours would like to see smiles from Mr Xi and Mr Li translated into a less assertive approach on the high seas.
This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline "Reef knots"
