Chinese general reiterates principle for solving island disputes

Island or maritime demarcation disputes should be solved through coordination and negotiations between directly involved parties on the basis of respecting historical facts and international law, a Chinese general said on Sunday.

China’s sovereignty, sovereign rights and jurisdiction in the South China Sea were established through the long process of historical development, said Wang Guanzhong, deputy chief of general staff of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), at the 13th Shangri-La Dialogue.

It can be traced back to over 2,000 years ago, or the Han Dynasty, when China started discovering and gradually maturing its administration over the South China Sea, especially the Nansha Islands and related sea area, Wang said.

The Xisha Islands and the Nansha Islands, both in the South China Sea, were occupied by Japan during World War II, and returned to China in 1946 under the Cairo Declaration and the Potsdam Proclamation.

After the return of these islands to China, the Chinese government in 1948 mapped out the nine-dash line, which is clearly marked in historical documents and world maps drawn by different countries, the general said.

China’s neighboring countries never raised doubts about China’s sovereignty, sovereign rights and jurisdiction over the Nasha Islands, the Xisha Islands and the related sea area until the 1970s when rich oil resources were discovered in the South China Sea, he said.

China, as a signatory country to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), respects the convention which took effect in 1994. However, Wang said, China’s sovereignty, sovereign rights and jurisdiction over the South China Sea islands and islets as well as related sea waters came into being over the past 2,000 years.

The UNCLOS, which took effect in 1994, cannot re-demarcate sovereignty, sovereign rights and jurisdiction that came into being over such a prolonged period of time in history, while recognizing countries’ historical rights over seas and islands and islets, Wang said.

The UNCLOS is inapplicable to the adjustment of ownership of sea islands and islets, he said. The law governing the sea is an enormous and comprehensive law system, not merely a single UNCLOS.

Meanwhile, the adjustment is also not merely subject to a single international law of sea — there is an enormous international law system which includes the international law of sea, he said. Thus, only using the UNCLOS to argue is not workable, he said.

China has signed the UNCLOS and respects it, but the United States has not signed the convention because it feels many provisions of the convention are against it, he said.

Wang noted China’s stance in this regard is coherent and clear, that is, China advocates solving the disputes over islands and maritime demarcation through direct consultations and talks with the directly-involved parties.

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Rapid-fire questions turn up heat on Hagel

War of words highlights tensions between China, US and Japan

When Yao Yunzhu took the floor to reply to Pentagon chief Chuck Hagel’s speech on Saturday at an Asia-Pacific security forum, reporters relished the sense of déjà vu.

They wondered how the major general would question Hagel at the forum for the second year running.

The director of the Center for China-America Defense Relations at the PLA’s Academy of Military Science did not disappoint, rapidly firing off four questions in fluent English and ignoring two attempts by the moderator to cut her off.

Yao, 60, said she was dissatisfied over not receiving direct or sufficient answers from Hagel and not being given the chance to challenge his “wrong answers”.

“During his speech, Hagel portrayed China as breaking the rules of the international community,” Yao said.

“But you tell me which specific law China violated when it established an air defense identification zone in the East China Sea and which international laws the United States consulted when establishing its own ADIZ,” she added as the three-day Shangri-La Dialogue ended in Singapore on Sunday.

The war of words between Yao and Hagel served as a sideshow amid tensions between China, the US and Japan at the forum over the situation in the East and South China seas.

The US and Japan felt perfectly at home when making blunt or veiled accusations against China, accusing it of “destabilizing” the two seas.

She said the South China Sea had not been a problem until recently when countries in the region had accelerated attempts to draw maritime baselines and to enlarge atolls to allow them to claim a 200-nautical mile exclusive economic zone around them.

Territorial claims by others only arose when rich oil and natural gas deposits were found and viewed by countries in the region as a potentially cheaper source of energy than that from the Middle East, Yao said.

The US Energy Information Administration estimates that the South China Sea contains about 11 billion barrels of oil and 190 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in proven and probable reserves.

Yao said another source of tension stemmed from the US accusing China of endangering freedom of maritime navigation and flights over the two seas whenever China opposed US military surveillance.

“This saw the US and some Southeast Asian countries finding a shared interest in jointly working against China,” she said. “As a response to the increasing pressure, China has to stop setting the issue aside, as it used to do.”

Yao called for a regional security framework that was more inclusive for China given that “such a big country does not want to challenge the leading role of the US but still needs to have its voice heard”.

The alliance system with the US at its center was dominating the Asia-Pacific security framework, while Washington had not been clear enough about Beijing’s role, she said.

Yao said she had prepared a question about Sino-US military cooperation for Hagel, but changed her mind after his remarks about China.

By ZHAO SHENGNAN in Singapore (China Daily)

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China Military Official Blasts U.S. ‘Hegemony’ at Shangri-La Conference

China asserted a bold vision of itself as the pre-eminent power in East Asia, sparring with the U.S. at a meeting of the world’s top defense officials and inflaming tensions with its less-powerful neighbors.

Beijing’s stepped-up rhetoric illustrated its view that U.S. power in the region is waning even as China’s more-aggressive approach appears to be bringing other nations together to counter its growing military and economic sway.

At the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore over the weekend, a top Chinese military official issued an unusually robust riposte to U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who criticized China’s “destabilizing, unilateral actions” in the South China Sea, including deploying an oil-drilling platform in disputed waters, among other moves.

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Rise in Chinese Factory Activity Helps Lift Asian Stocks

Encouraging China factory data helped lift Asian equities and commodities on Monday, with the Nikkei 225-stock average in Japan rising 2.1 percent.

China continues to show signs of an economic revival as its factory activity expanded in May at the fastest pace in five months, raising some hopes that Beijing’s targeted measures to bolster growth are having an impact.

China’s official purchasing managers’ index, geared toward large, state-owned companies, rose to 50.8 in May, from 50.4 in April, the National Bureau of Statistics said Sunday, beating market expectations of 50.6. Figures above 50 indicate expansion.

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China disrupts Google services ahead of Tiananmen anniversary

Google services are being disrupted in China ahead of this week’s 25th anniversary of the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, a censorship watchdog said on Monday.

GreatFire.org said in a blog post that the government appeared to have begun targeting Google Inc’s main search engine and Gmail, among many other services, since at least last week, making them inaccessible to many users in China.

It added that the last time it monitored such a block was in 2012, when it only lasted 12 hours.

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Australia Calls China’s Actions in South China Sea ‘Unhelpful’

China’s actions asserting its claims in the South China Sea are “unhelpful,” Australian Defence Minister David Johnston said at a security forum, echoing his U.S. counterpart who called China a destabilizing factor.

“They’ve been certainly unhelpful, and if they’re unhelpful they must be destabilizing,” Johnston, 58, said yesterday in an interview at the Shangri-La security forum in Singapore. “The unilateral action of the declaration of boundaries is completely unhelpful and takes us in the wrong direction.”

Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s government is seeking to build out Australia’s defense capacity at a time of rising assertiveness by China in the region. Abbott must balance his nation’s interests between the U.S. — a strategic ally that has Marines based in the northern Australia city of Darwin — and top trading partner China, which it criticized last year for proclaiming an air defense identification zone over islands in the East China Sea claimed by both China and Japan.

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China’s Solar Panel Production Comes at a Dirty Cost

Although China may be a cheaper place than Europe for producing solar panels, the savings come at a higher cost to the environment, a new study says.

Weaker environmental standards and the more highly polluting sources of energy used by Chinese manufacturers are the reasons for the discrepancy, according to research by Northwestern University and the United States Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory.

Researchers from the Illinois-based institutions looked at the carbon footprint and energy usage of making solar panels.

Their analysis tallied the costs at every step of production, including the mining of raw materials, transportation and the factory’s power supply.

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