Faced with a Chinese government increasingly intent on testing U.S. strength and capabilities, the United States unveiled a new policy that rejected China's claims to sovereignty over the whole South China Sea. It rebuffed Chinese demands that the U.S. military end its longtime policy of conducting military exercises in the Yellow Sea. And it is putting new pressure on Beijing not to increase its energy investments in Iran as Western firms leave.
Yang Jiechi, China's minister of foreign affairs, issued a highly unusual statement Monday July 26 charging that the United States was ganging up with other countries against China.
U.S. officials explained the moves as part of a broader strategy to acknowledge China's emergence as a world power but to also lay down markers when China's behavior infringes on U.S. interests. So at the same time that the administration has welcomed China into the Group of 20 major economies, held the biggest meeting ever between U.S. and Chinese officials, and backed China's push to increase its influence in the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, it is also seeking to limit what it thinks are China's expansionist impulses.
The decision to confront China on the South China Sea dates back several months, after administration officials noticed that the sea -- an international waterway through which more than 50 percent of the world's merchant fleet tonnage passes each year -- had crept into the standard diplomatic pitter-patter about China's "core interests." In March, Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs Cui Tiankai told two senior U.S. officials that China now views its claims to the 1.3 million-square-mile sea
The U.S. response was unveiled July 23 in Hanoi when 12 nations -- Vietnam as the first and the United States as the last -- raised the issue of the South China Sea at an annual security forum of the Association of South East Asian Nations. Calling freedom of navigation on the sea a U.S. "national interest," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton offered to facilitate moves to create a code of conduct in the region. And then she said: "Legitimate claims to maritime space in the South China Sea should be derived solely from legitimate claims to land features." Translated, it meant that China's claims to the whole sea were "invalid."
On Monday, Yang issued a statement on the Foreign Ministry's Web site saying that there was no need to internationalize the issue, that China was still intent on solving all of the disputes bilaterally and that China's view represented the interests of "fellow Asians."
"After the meeting, about a dozen Asian delegates expressed their congratulations to the Chinese side," the statement said, despite what many in the meeting thought were clear indications that most of the participants supported the U.S. view.
The Obama administration has also pushed back on statements, particularly from China's People's Liberation Army, over planned military exercises in the Yellow Sea -- thousands of miles to the north.
But then China inserted itself into the debate, claiming that any military exercise in the Yellow Sea would be seen as threatening to Beijing -- something that struck U.S. officials as unnecessarily complicating what was supposed to be a simple message of U.S.-South Korean solidarity in the face of an attack by Pyongyang.
In an attempt to cool China's ire, the administration conducted its first exercise this week with the USS George Washington in the Sea of Japan (also known to Koreans as the East Sea) farther from China's coast. But partly because China made an issue of it, a second exercise is also being planned -- in the Yellow Sea. U.S. officials also predicted that the George Washington will soon be back in the region this time in the Yellow Sea. (Source: John Pomfret, Washington Post, Jul 30, 2010).