Top diplomats from China and the 10 ASEAN countries agreed on Tuesday that the South China Sea issue should be handled properly, reaffirming the need to "jointly ensure peace and stability" in the area.
This is not true, especially since none of the statements issued by the Foreign Ministries of the three ASEAN countries had used the term "consensus" (or a term containing a similar meaning) with reference to the South China Sea disputes.
The Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said the meeting in Kunming was a closed-door affair and there was never a plan to issue a joint statement.
In a statement released late Tuesday by Malaysia's foreign ministry, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) warned that recent actions in the disputed waterway had "the potential to undermine peace".
"Clearly, China's purported efforts to divide and conquer the region and extract the South China Sea issue from the ASEAN-China agenda hasn't worked", said Richard Javad Heydarian, assistant professor in worldwide affairs and political science at Manila's De La Salle University.
China considers nearly all of the resource-rich South China Sea its territory, but Malaysia, the Philippines, Brunei, Vietnam and Taiwan also have overlapping claims. It has started building artificial islands for military objective boosting its claim over it.
Four of its members - Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam - are locked in the territorial disputes with China and Taiwan.
Even before a ruling, China may have lost by refusing to cooperate with a United Nations arbitration tribunal over its South China Sea claims.
The ministers said they "stressed the importance of maintaining peace, security, stability, safety, and freedom of navigation in and overflight above the South China Sea, in accordance with universally recognized principles of global law including the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea".
Malaysia went ahead to release it anyway, out of frustration over Chinese pressure on the grouping over the South China Sea disputes, according to an Asean official. They are seen as speaking for China over its insistence that territorial disputes be dealt with through bilateral talks between the nations involved rather than between China and ASEAN as a whole.
The meeting sent out a message - the South China Sea issue does not define the China-ASEAN relationship.
"As trade ties between China and Asean are growing rapidly, many Asean nations may choose [to avoid] further antagonising Beijing [or undermining] the bloc by making public their disagreements", he said. However, spokesperson Arrmanatha Nasir said it was supposed to be a mere media guideline, not a statement to be issued to the media.
China's stance on the sea is "in line with worldwide law", its top diplomat Yang Jiechi said last month, insisting his country's position "will not change".
"ASEAN and China must find ways to keep their good relations amid this issue", she says, adding that the ten-country organization has already initiated a code of conduct which is believed to create a conducive situation among the claimants and restrain them from possible moves that may stall initiative to negotiate. It was not clear whether an amended statement would be issued, although individual members such as Singapore had issued their own mentioning concerns about the South China Sea.
"We emphasized the importance of non-militarization and self-restraint in the conduct of all activities, including land reclamation, which may raise tensions in the South China Sea", it said.
"But this is not a problem between China and Asean and should not affect the cooperation between China and Asean", he said.
Source: Jakarta, Manila agree with aborted Asean statement over South China Sea
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