Arbitration led to China’s building of the largest military complex in the SCS
First of two parts
TEN years on, the National Security Council still calls the 2016 arbitral ruling a triumph. Former magistrate Antonio Carpio, one of the suit’s architects, praised it as the “largest award of the global commons in the history of Unclos.” President Marcos, the other day, called the ruling “the great equalizer of all nations.”
The extreme adulation over a ruling most of the world, even the United Nations have ignored, and not a single provision of which has been enforced, is not just due to the fact that these officials obviously never read the 500-page ruling by an ad hoc panel and have been merely repeating the US propaganda line. Just as the Marcos dictatorship disguised his imposition of martial law as the birth of a “New Society,” these declarations of the ruling as a triumph have been a desperate attempt to conceal the incontrovertible fact that the arbitration suit was the biggest strategic error of the US — the brains behind it — in containing the rise of China in Southeast Asia and for the Philippines, to assert its claims in the Spratlys.
The suit handed China its single greatest strategic prize of this century — the historic triumph of building the largest, most heavily fortified military complex ever assembled in the Spratly Islands, on our own doorstep, using our own lawsuit as justification.
Myth
A bit of historical review is necessary to debunk this myth of a “victory.” In the 1970s, the Philippines and Vietnam rushed to occupy islands in the Spratly islands in the expectation — triggered by a misinterpretation which a United Nations agency concluded that vast oil deposits lay beneath that part of the South China Sea. China was late in this rush for black gold, as it had been economically and militarily deeply damaged by its 1966–1976 Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
With their naval forces, financed by US military aid for these two puppet nations, the Philippines, through the 1970s, occupied eight islands (one of which, Pag-Asa, was the second biggest in the group), while Vietnam (i.e., “South Vietnam”) got three islands and seven reefs.
China asserted its claims in the Spratlys only in the 1980s as it recovered from the destruction of the Cultural Revolution. However, it was left with “crumbs,” that is, six reefs barely out of water, which the Philippines and Vietnam deemed unnecessary or too costly to occupy.
Despite its claims over the entire Spratlys and the start of its rise as an economic and military superpower, China could do nothing to develop its claims, much less grab islands the Philippines and Vietnam occupied, as this would have bolstered US propaganda that it was an expansionist power, out to dominate the smaller and weaker nations in Southeast Asia.
Furthermore, to reduce the rising tensions among the claimant countries and prevent violent clashes in the South China Sea, China signed in November 2002 with Asean countries, including the Philippines and Vietnam, the “Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea.” Its most relevant provision was Article 5 by which the nations agree “to exercise self-restraint in the conduct of activities that would complicate or escalate disputes and affect peace and stability.” As a result of the DOC, for more than a decade, tensions subsided in the area, except for occasional disputes when China and the Philippines attempted to impose their fishing regulations in certain areas of the Spratlys.
Scarborough
This stability, though, was broken in 2012, when the Aquino government tried to arrest Chinese fishermen in Scarborough Shoal, leading to a standoff that lasted 10 weeks. Tricked by the US to leave the area, the Philippines effectively lost Scarborough because of the customary international law that a country can legally claim land another nation has abandoned, as long as it didn’t use force.
Prodded by the US, the Aquino government — fearful of being condemned by Filipinos as the regime which lost a piece of the country’s territory — officially in retaliation, filed the arbitration suit against China on Jan. 22, 2013. The US had a different intent: that an arbitration ruling it could influence would demonize China’s claims as baseless, and since it likely wouldn’t comply with it, Beijing would be seen as ignoring the international rule of law.
China treated the arbitration suit as a hostile act. Former magistrate Antonio Carpio, one of the brains of the suit, helped China in this framing, popularizing in so many media interviews that the suit was the Philippine version of “lawfare.” He was obviously ignorant of the fact that rather than merely meaning a legal suit, the term was coined not by international law experts but by Air Force Col. Charles J. Dunlap Jr. in 2001, defining it as the “use of law as a weapon of war.”
Beijing interpreted the filing of the suit as the Philippines’ rejection of the DOC, specifically its injunction banning claimant countries from escalating disputes in the Spratly, by its deployment of “lawfare.” China therefore felt that it was no longer bound by the DOC’s provisions.
Chinese leaders, I would think, were secretly ecstatic over the filing of the suit. For four decades, the most that China could do was build small facilities on the seven reefs barely out of water that it occupied. Without the constraints of the DOC, Beijing did what it wanted to do on its seven reefs — which was to transform them into islands it would convert into military facilities, which would be its southernmost bases.
Tectonic
The timeline of this tectonic change in the Spratly’s geopolitical situation shows exactly how fast that justification turned into machinery. The Philippines filed its case on Jan. 22, 2013. After the necessary detailed geological survey of the area and preparation of its vessels, large-scale dredging began at Johnson South, Cuarteron, Hughes and Gaven Reefs by September 2013 — barely eight months later.
The US strategists who got the Philippines to file the suit obviously underestimated China’s resources, capabilities and experience to undertake reclamation in an area considered treacherous to navigate because of uncharted corals and distant location, being 1,000 kilometers away from China’s southernmost large island. They also underestimated that China could raise a reported $100 billion to fund its reclamations.
The US seemed ignorant of the fact that China had been developing its dredging industry for more than four decades. This was because of the surge of its exports that resulted from its 1978–2000 economic reform era; China needed deeper and larger ports to accommodate ever-bigger container ships and bulk carriers. Rivers, estuaries and harbors had to be dredged continuously to maintain navigable channels. These required a huge fleet of dredgers that could do reclamation work swiftly. Chinese engineers studied imported German, Dutch and Belgian machines rather than merely operating them. In 2001, it launched its “Hundred Dredgers Program” to modernize China’s aging dredging fleet and improve maintenance of the country’s vast inland waterways and coastal ports.
By the 2000s, China had built not only a huge fleet of dredgers but among the biggest in the world to undertake reclamation. By 2010, China was the undisputed leader in dredging technology and capability. By the time the Philippines filed its case in January 2013, Beijing fortuitously possessed the exact dredging vessels that a reef-to-fortress campaign would require.
Reclamation
The US Congressional Research Service, quoting the Pentagon’s 2015 Asia-Pacific Maritime Security Strategy, reported that once reclamation began in December 2013, “China has now reclaimed 17 times more land in 20 months than the other claimants combined over the past 40 years, accounting for approximately 95 percent of all reclaimed land in the Spratly Islands,” and that “in anticipation of a final award from the arbitral tribunal, China in the first half of 2016 stepped up its criticism of the Philippines for bringing the case.”
The US, or any other country, could not stop China’s reclamation nor even file a diplomatic protest: China was undertaking reclamation on reefs that it had for decades considered part of its sovereign territory. Propaganda-wise, China could not be accused of aggression, as it was the Philippine suit which provoked it.
Legal scholar Tara Davenport reported that Chinese island-building specifically “escalated after the Philippines initiated arbitral proceedings in 2013” (Asian Journal of International Law). A Center for a New American Security review of the case reported that “many experts have speculated that Beijing executed its swift and systematic island-building campaign in 2014–2015 with the aim of completing these projects before a decision was rendered.”
By the end of 2015, China had reclaimed roughly 3,200 acres of new land across the Spratlys, against only about 50 acres built by every other claimant combined over decades. Fiery Cross, Subi and Mischief Reefs are full-fledged air and naval bases. Mischief Reef, just 38 kilometers from our Ayungin Shoal, has an 8,600-foot runway; Subi’s stretches nearly 10,000 feet — both able to handle any aircraft in China’s inventory, backed by hangars for roughly two dozen fighter jets, radar domes, and anti-aircraft emplacements on each. By December 2016, anti-aircraft guns and probable close-in weapons systems were on all seven Chinese-held features.
How can a strategic catastrophe be disseminated by our government as a victory? It is another testament to the Marxist insight: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” The framing of 2016 as a triumph of the “rules-based international order” is Washington’s preferred narrative to cover up its colossal error of provoking China with the arbitration suit, at the same time recasting an ongoing territorial dispute as a legally settled one. Our own political and media elite absorbed that framing wholesale, celebrating an American propaganda line.
Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao
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Arbitration led to China’s building of the largest military complex in the SCS
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