South China Sea

C. Raja Mohan Posted online: Wed Aug 04 2010, 02:48 hrs
http://www.indianexpress.com/story-print/655826/


China’s declaration last week claiming “indisputable sovereignty” over the South China Sea has set the stage for a tense power play in the waters that connect the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

After nearly three decades of lying low in order to improve its position in the western Pacific, Beijing has put its ties with the region at risk with a strong assertion of its territorial claims and flexing its newly powerful naval muscle.

As China’s anxious neighbours, especially in southeast Asia, turn to the United States for protection, the Obama administration has waded into the dispute by calling for an “international framework” to resolve the disputes.

Unsurprisingly, China says it is opposed to internationalisation of the contesting territorial claims in the South China and that it is prepared to negotiate bilaterally with all other states that have competing claims over South China Sea. The weak southeast Asian states, of course, have no reason to sit down alone and separately with China at the negotiating table.

After a year-and-a-half of attempting to accommodate a rising China, the Obama administration has finally decided to reclaim its role as the principal arbiter of regional security in the western Pacific. India, which has a big stake in protecting the sea lanes of communication all along the Asian littoral must prepare itself for a new dynamism in the region as it will be drawn willy-nilly into the new debate on the geopolitical future of the South China Sea.

Vietnam’s oil

India’s plans to acquire the troubled oil major British Petroleum’s off-shore assets in the South China Sea, apparently discussed during the recent visit of Petroleum Minister Murli Deora’s visit last month to Hanoi, are certain to put India in the crossfire between China and Vietnam. Last year, under Chinese pressure, BP announced that it will cease exploration in Vietnam’s Nam Con Son basin. If Hanoi does support the Indian bid, it might be based on the expectation that Delhi will not back off when confronted by Beijing.

Meanwhile the Indian Army Chief V.K. Singh’s visit to Hanoi, for the first time in 15 years, coincided with the gathering tension between Vietnam and China. For the moment, at least, it is not Delhi that worries Beijing, but Washington’s new bonhomie with Hanoi.

In an editorial last week, Beijing’s Global Times warned both Washington and Hanoi. “Pressure to maintain an influence and guard against a rising China, the West is eager to cosy up to Vietnam and other southeast Asian countries”. “Meanwhile”, the paper added, “the Western media likes to poison Sino-Vietnamese ties by painting China as ‘an elephant’ which can easily trample on the interest of Vietnam. Vietnam should also be careful about not becoming a chess piece for the US as it pursues a broader regional agenda.”

Cantonese protests

Language protests? In China? But don’t all Chinese people speak the same language? For most Indians, who learn to live in the Tower of Babel, reports from southern China of popular protests against the imposition of Mandarin certainly come as a surprise.

Unlike India where multiple tongues flourish and often feed into the linguistic divide, Communist China has consciously sought to promote national unity by replacing the diversity of hundreds of Chinese dialects with a standardised version of Mandarin. Clearly, it has not been easy to wipe out the Cantonese dialect spoken by nearly 70 million people in the booming provinces of southern China. The recent protests in Guangzhou (earlier known as Canton), the capital of Guangdong province, were triggered by reports that the government was planning to yank off all television programming in Cantonese.

There have been reports that companies were under pressure from the government to fine those who speak Cantonese at work. In the Guangdong province and the neighbouring Hong Kong, Cantonese is the vehicle for a vibrant popular culture. In a tribute to the strength of the Cantonese sentiment, the local government denied any plans to impose Mandarin on all TV programmes. The official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, People’s Daily, stepped in to call for a balance between promoting Mandarin and respecting local cultures.

The daily quoted a director of the local TV station as saying, “Guangzhou TV always sticks to dual language broadcasting. We serve two audiences who speak either Mandarin or Cantonese and do not intend to abandon either of them.” It is not a surprise that in southern China, the market tends to prevail over the overzealous nationalists.

raja.mohan@expressindia.com