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Explainer: South China Sea - Asia's most dangerous waters by sangit pambudi


Explainer: South China Sea - Asia's most dangerous waters
June 27, 2011|By Kevin Voigt and Natalie Robehmed, CNN



Picture by the Vietnam News Agency showing live fire drills June 14 on Phan Vinh Island in the disputed Spratly Island chain.
The South China Sea -- a 1.3 million square mile patch of the Pacific Ocean bracketed by China and several Southeast Asian nations -- is dotted with hundreds of largely uninhabited islands and coral atolls that are home to some of the world's most diverse marine life.
Also under its waves lie potentially huge reserves of natural gas and oil. A Chinese estimate suggests as much as 213 billion barrels of oil lie untapped in the South China Sea which, if true, would make it the largest oil reserve outside Saudi Arabia, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
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That prospect has cross-stitched the sea with competing claims from China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan. A recent spate of incidents between Chinese and Vietnamese vessels in the sea has fueled a growing rift between the communist neighbors, creating strange bedfellows as Hanoi embraces closer military ties with historic foes in Washington.
The South China Sea has now become a petri dish for swirling changes churning the geopolitical landscape, analysts say, as the rising power of China butts up against the established economic and military might of the U.S.
"How these disputes are resolved will tell us how politics in Asia is going to pl`y out in the next 20 to 30 years," said Mark Valencia, a fellow at the National Asia Research Program and expert on the South China Sea dispute. "This will be the blueprint."
Why is this happening now?
The competing stakes in the South China Sea are nothing new: territorial claims to the islands stretch back decades, even centuries, according to some of the nations vying in the sea grab.
The dispute took center stage earlier this month when defense officials from 28 Asia-Pacific nations gathered at the Shangri-La hotel in Singapore. China, for the first time, sent its top soldier to the annual meeting -- General Liang Guanglie -- who spoke at length about China's peace-loving nature and focus on cooperative development and security in the region.
His olive branch was met with skepticism, said Alan Dupont, a regional security analyst who was at the meeting. "It was a packed hall, and there were a lot of hostile questions directed to China from (participants from) Asia and the United States," said Dupont, director of the Centre for International Security Studies at the University of Sydney.
any questions seem to reflect a fear of growing Chinese assertiveness in the disputed waters. In late May, the Vietnamese Ministry of Defense reported that a Chinese patrol boat slashed a submerged cable of a oil and gas survey ship operated by PetroVietnam, the state energy firm. A similar incident happened on June 9 -- just four days after Liang's address -- when a Chinese patrol boat cut cables from a Vietnamese ship doing seismic surveys off its southern coast, Vietnam's Foreign Ministry reported. Beijing maintains that Vietnamese vessels have been illegally surveying in Chinese waters and harassing Chinese fishing boats.
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Vietnam is not the only nation skirmishing with Chinese patrol boats. The Philippines, on the western border of the South China Sea, also reported Chinese boats cutting cables of a survey ship and threatening to ram its boats in March, according to Manila's Foreign Ministry.
China claims both nations were exploring in disputed waters. China says it is not to blame. "If you want to know why there is tension in South China Sea, I think you have to go and ask the country or countries that have made all the provocations," Cui Lei, China's vice minister of the Foreign Ministry, told CNN in a rare interview last week
How much oil and gas is under the sea?
China claims there could be enough oil and gas to rival Saudi Arabia's reserves, but those claims have yet to be proven, according to a U.S. Energy Information Administration report. Still, there are enough proven wells in the South China Sea to tantalize the players, which explains why oil and gas survey vessels are at the heart of the recent incidents.
"I think the critical reason now in the increase in tension is the rising energy insecurity in the region, particularly in China," Dupont said.
The smaller nations in the region are feeling the pressure to stake their claims for oil and fishing rights, or risk losing them to a more assertive China, analysts say.
"There's a sense coastal states like Vietnam and the Philippines need to use the economic area more urgently, so they need to catch more fish now, they need to discover more oil now," said James Manicom, an expert on maritime disputes at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Canada.
Why do so many nations claim the waters?
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